Wow What a Zinger
Steve Guest is the Rapid Response Director for the Republican Party. In general his job is to monitor the media and respond to attacks from the Democrats. This sounds like a useful position in a political campaign, a job for somebody smart who can think fast and go for the jugular.
Today he really flung a beanball zinger at those Democrat libtards. As you know, the Washington Redskins are finally going to change their name. Today was the day they announced the change, though they do not have a new name selected yet. It's a controversy that has dragged on for years. "Redskins" is a slur, and hopefully nobody today would choose a name like that for their team, but back in 1933 it was the best they could come up with, I guess. Everybody knows the story, I'm sure it is expensive to change all your merch but you can't fight it forever.
OK, so GOP attack dog Steve Guest found a picture of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at a Redskins game. His kid was even wearing a wool cap that said "Redskins" on it. Ha -- this is a good chance to show what a bigot and hypocrite this lib is! Guest loaded up a piercing verbal barb and posted the incriminating photograph of Joe and his son at a football game. Man, it made young Joe Biden look bad:
It is not known if the boy in this picture, apparently from the 1970s, is Hunter or Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer at age 46 on May 30, 2015. At any rate, as Molly Jong-Fast tweeted, "He was hoping to troll Biden but it reminded many of us about how Joe raised his young children after his wife died in a car accident."
The tweet has been deleted. I see that Guest has posted some new stuff maligning Hunter Biden, who may be the evil demonic beast pictured in the insensitive wool cap. All right man, good luck with that.
Today he really flung a beanball zinger at those Democrat libtards. As you know, the Washington Redskins are finally going to change their name. Today was the day they announced the change, though they do not have a new name selected yet. It's a controversy that has dragged on for years. "Redskins" is a slur, and hopefully nobody today would choose a name like that for their team, but back in 1933 it was the best they could come up with, I guess. Everybody knows the story, I'm sure it is expensive to change all your merch but you can't fight it forever.
OK, so GOP attack dog Steve Guest found a picture of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden at a Redskins game. His kid was even wearing a wool cap that said "Redskins" on it. Ha -- this is a good chance to show what a bigot and hypocrite this lib is! Guest loaded up a piercing verbal barb and posted the incriminating photograph of Joe and his son at a football game. Man, it made young Joe Biden look bad:
It is not known if the boy in this picture, apparently from the 1970s, is Hunter or Beau Biden, who died of brain cancer at age 46 on May 30, 2015. At any rate, as Molly Jong-Fast tweeted, "He was hoping to troll Biden but it reminded many of us about how Joe raised his young children after his wife died in a car accident."
The tweet has been deleted. I see that Guest has posted some new stuff maligning Hunter Biden, who may be the evil demonic beast pictured in the insensitive wool cap. All right man, good luck with that.
posted by JimK at 7:18 PM
202 Comments:
We're not supposed to notice the exponential growth of COVID-19 in the states.
Of course we know who to thank for the US's abysmal initial response to the pandemic, Mr. "One day, like a miracle, it will disappear."
White House: Trump Still Has “Absolute Immunity”
Raw Story reports:
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany on Thursday said that President Donald Trump continues to believe that he has “absolute immunity” from prosecution despite a Supreme Court ruling that said otherwise.
At a White House briefing, McEnany argued that a high court ruling which gives prosecutors the right to subpoena Trump’s financial records is actually a “win for the president.”
“The president was making general point about deference and on the principal of absolute immunity,” she explained. “He believes there should have been more deference [to him by the court].”
Though she says SCOTUS ruling is a “big win” for the president, McEnany says Pres Trump feels that the Court should have done more to uphold his argument about “absolute immunity” for investigations of a sitting President. But he accepts decision “as the law of the land.”
— Mark Knoller (@markknoller) July 9, 2020
Kayleigh McEnany cited Hamilton to defend Trump’s claim of absolute immunity that SCOTUS rejected
It’s selective quoting.
In Federalist 65, Hamilton says the president is “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.”
The President is not above the law.
— Ahmed Baba (@AhmedBaba_) July 9, 2020
Guess what? If the Supreme Court says you don’t have “Absolute Immunity”, you don’t.https://t.co/ab6HJq7TFL
— Tea Pain (@TeaPainUSA) July 9, 2020
Biden: Trump Has Picked A Side And It’s “White Power”
Politico reports:
Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden said President Trump has “picked a side” after Trump retweeted and praised a video that included a demonstrator shouting “white power.”
“Thank you to the great people of The Villages,” Trump said in a post retweeting the video. “The Radical Left Do Nothing Democrats will Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot. See you soon!!!” The tweet was deleted several hours later.
White House spokesperson Judd Deere said in a statement that the president “did not hear the one statement made on the video.” “What he did see was tremendous enthusiasm from his many supporters,” he added.
Today the President shared a video of people shouting “white power” and said they were “great.” Just like he did after Charlottesville.
We’re in a battle for the soul of the nation — and the President has picked a side. But make no mistake: it’s a battle we will win.
Politico: GOP Senators Face Fundraising Emergency
Politico reports:
Last month, the National Republican Senatorial Committee prepared a slideshow for Senate chiefs of staff full of bleak numbers about the party’s failure to compete with Democrats on digital fundraising.
For anyone not getting the message, the final slide hammered home the possible end result: a freight train bearing down on a man standing on the tracks.
The slideshow, obtained by POLITICO, painted a grim picture of the GOP’s long-running problem. Republican senators and challengers lagged behind Democrats by a collective $30 million in the first quarter of 2020, a deficit stemming from Democrats’ superior online fundraising machine.
Remember...
While Trump was eliminating the Pandemic Response Team, Republicans let him.
While Trump was lying about the risks of COVID-19, Republicans supported him.
While Trump continued to target Obamacare during the pandemic, Republicans helped him.
Trump didn't kill Americans by himself, Republicans killed Americans too.
""Redskins" is a slur,"
really?
can you explain how?
last poll taken, over 90% of the supposed victims of this slur don't agree with you
as matter of fact, out west, high schools with majority Native Americans student bodies often use this name
it's just like Norwegians aren't offended by the Vikings and Irishmen aren't bent outta shape by the Fighting Irish leprechaun and Turks have no trouble with the Trojans
offending rich white college students at elitist schools doesn't make something a "slur"
listening to a sports talk show this afternoon
"oh yeah, Snyder will have to ban people from wearing their old Redskin jerseys. if he agree it's offensive, how can we allow offensive shirts in the stadium?"
uh, clueless...
Snyder never agreed the name was offensive
he was blackmailed and coerced into changing it
just like like all people soon will under the totalitarian politically correct regime
Remember..
Andrew Cuomo was responsible for more COVID deaths than anyone other than the Communist Chinese Party
"Of course we know who to thank for the US's abysmal initial response to the pandemic,"
let's see
initially, I remember the CDC releasing information about the first cases and where they probably got it.
I remember when the first case appeared in MC, it was traced to where they got it and followed up with everyone the people had been in contact with, even publishing what events the people went to
I remember the President stopping flights from China
I remember ramping up production of ventilators because the "expert' claimed there would be a shortage
Trump may not have been perfect but the real problem was the local government in hotspots like NYC
in retrospect, Trump should have banned flights from Europe and banned people from leaving the NYC metro area but, notably, no Democrats suggested that and they would have opposed it, just like they opposed the China ban
"Of course we know who to thank for the US's abysmal initial response to the pandemic"
what's been abysmal is the divisiveness displayed by Dems in this time of crisis
"Andrew Cuomo was responsible for more COVID deaths than anyone other than the Communist Chinese Party"
How interesting.
So you believe the elected leader of a state is "responsible" for COVID deaths in that state.
So you must also believe President Trump is responsible for the COVID deaths in the USA.
Perhaps you finally see the light of what a dismal excuse for a PUSA you voted for.
"How interesting"
isn't that interesting?
Cuomo made a decision that killed thousands of elderly citizens
Trump didn't
it's just fascinating!
"Biden is doing almost as well as Hillary was at this point in 2016"
Oh Biden's doing much better.
Like Hilary, Joe Biden will win the popular vote.
Joe will also win the election.
Rump had better allow for the peaceful transfer of power just as Obama did for him and retire to his Golden Tower in NYC in Governor Cuomo's state or the GOP will be held accountable by voters for what ensues.
Meanwhile:
"Florida shatters US record for new single-day Covid-19 cases
The Florida Department of Health has reported at least 15,299 new Covid-19 cases, the highest number of new cases in a single day by any state since the coronavirus pandemic began [including New York State].
The record-setting number from Saturday was reported by the state Sunday morning.
But it's not just the number of new cases that's concerning. The test positivity rate -- which can indicate how rampantly the virus is spreading -- reached 19.6% as of Sunday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University..."
I believe there is a GOP governor in FL but you're OK with its record breaking, right?
We get it. It's all politics for you.
Well here's some interesting facts for you to digest:
GOP-led FL's positivity rate for COVID is nearly 20% while Cuomo-led NY's positivity rate hovers betw 1 and 2%.
Come on, let's go to Miami Beach and celebrate our freedom to be stupid and get COVID!
"Like Hilary, Joe Biden will win the popular vote."
unlikely, blacks don't like him and Dems can't win without them
you think Kanye is a nut?
he'll help by drawing young black votes away from Biden
"Rump had better allow for the peaceful transfer of power just as Obama did for him and retire to his Golden Tower in NYC in Governor Cuomo's state or the GOP will be held accountable by voters for what ensues."
you mean like when Obama spied on Trump's transition team and started a Russian hoax that wasted three years?
e may be brought to justice!
"The Florida Department of Health has reported at least 15,299 new Covid-19 cases, the highest number of new cases in a single day by any state since the coronavirus pandemic began [including New York State]."
cases are meaningless
the Florida death rate rounds to zero compared to NY
"I believe there is a GOP governor in FL but you're OK with its record breaking, right?"
yeah, Santis protected his state's elders, Cuomo killed his
Every American, young and old who has died of COVID 19 has Rump's belief in miracles to thank for that.
"Poll: Americans trust Dr. Fauci over Trump on coronavirus.
More than two-thirds trust Fauci over one-quarter who say the same for President Donald Trump."
So Rump's WH put out a campaign type smear of Dr. Fauci.
Sad.
The good news is Dr. Fauci will continue to do his job continue to inform us how to stay as safe as possible.
Rump won't.
All Rump cares about are his ratings, not American citizens.
"you think Kanye is a nut?"
I think he's at LEAST as stable as the very stable genius in the White House.
"he'll help by drawing young black votes away from Biden"
It's too late for him to even get on the ballot in some states, in others he has to collect thousands of signatures before the deadline hits in August.
It is unlikely he'll be a factor in most states.
Don't forget, he was good buddies with the Rumpster - and they speak the same word salad language. He'll be pulling Rump votes too.
If this picture of Joe Biden with his son at a Redskins game shows anything, it shows that Joe has lived through unbearable tragedy and emerged with a decency and grace that Donald Trump can’t even begin to understand.
Bari Weiss is leaving the NY Times because the hostile workplace was totalitarian
the intolerance of anything even the slightest centrist made her literally afraid to show up for work at times
one of the head gays in America, Andrew Sullivan is leaving New York magazine for the same reason
it's the same thing was the point of the letter signed by a hundred thinkers and writers, including JK Rowling
Kanye West and Chance the Rapper have made the same point
the gay agenda always overplays its hand and the backlash against totalitarianism has begun!
That's what you said in 2016.
You are still waiting for your miracle.
you think it will be a miracle?
it's already happening
California is one state that is managing the epidemic relatively well. They have a plan, they have a governor who is taking active leadership, they have kept the numbers down, especially in the Northern part of the state. The people worked together, followed the protocols; looking good.
Yesterday, 20% of cases worldwide were in three US states: California, Texas, Florida
California was the first state to lockdown everything and they were one of the last to semi-open
there is no evidence at all that supports lockdowns work unless they are draconianally enforced like China
Dear A.G.,
It is with sadness that I write to tell you that I am resigning from The New York Times.
I joined the paper with gratitude and optimism three years ago. I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in your pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of The Times as their home. The reason for this effort was clear: The paper’s failure to anticipate the outcome of the 2016 election meant that it didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers. Dean Baquet and others have admitted as much on various occasions. The priority in Opinion was to help redress that critical shortcoming.
I was honored to be part of that effort, led by James Bennet. I am proud of my work as a writer and as an editor. Among those I helped bring to our pages: the Venezuelan dissident Wuilly Arteaga; the Iranian chess champion Dorsa Derakhshani; and the Hong Kong Christian democrat Derek Lam. Also: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Masih Alinejad, Zaina Arafat, Elna Baker, Rachael Denhollander, Matti Friedman, Nick Gillespie, Heather Heying, Randall Kennedy, Julius Krein, Monica Lewinsky, Glenn Loury, Jesse Singal, Ali Soufan, Chloe Valdary, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Wesley Yang, and many others.
But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.
My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.
There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.
I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.
Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.
What rules that remain at The Times are applied with extreme selectivity. If a person’s ideology is in keeping with the new orthodoxy, they and their work remain unscrutinized. Everyone else lives in fear of the digital thunderdome. Online venom is excused so long as it is directed at the proper targets.
Op-eds that would have easily been published just two years ago would now get an editor or a writer in serious trouble, if not fired. If a piece is perceived as likely to inspire backlash internally or on social media, the editor or writer avoids pitching it. If she feels strongly enough to suggest it, she is quickly steered to safer ground. And if, every now and then, she succeeds in getting a piece published that does not explicitly promote progressive causes, it happens only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.
It took the paper two days and two jobs to say that the Tom Cotton op-ed “fell short of our standards.” We attached an editor’s note on a travel story about Jaffa shortly after it was published because it “failed to touch on important aspects of Jaffa’s makeup and its history.” But there is still none appended to Cheryl Strayed’s fawning interview with the writer Alice Walker, a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.
The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.
Even now, I am confident that most people at The Times do not hold these views. Yet they are cowed by those who do. Why? Perhaps because they believe the ultimate goal is righteous. Perhaps because they believe that they will be granted protection if they nod along as the coin of our realm—language—is degraded in service to an ever-shifting laundry list of right causes. Perhaps because there are millions of unemployed people in this country and they feel lucky to have a job in a contracting industry.
Or perhaps it is because they know that, nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back. Too wise to post on Slack, they write to me privately about the “new McCarthyism” that has taken root at the paper of record.
All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.
For these young writers and editors, there is one consolation. As places like The Times and other once-great journalistic institutions betray their standards and lose sight of their principles, Americans still hunger for news that is accurate, opinions that are vital, and debate that is sincere. I hear from these people every day. “An independent press is not a liberal ideal or a progressive ideal or a democratic ideal. It’s an American ideal,” you said a few years ago. I couldn’t agree more. America is a great country that deserves a great newspaper.
None of this means that some of the most talented journalists in the world don’t still labor for this newspaper. They do, which is what makes the illiberal environment especially heartbreaking. I will be, as ever, a dedicated reader of their work. But I can no longer do the work that you brought me here to do—the work that Adolph Ochs described in that famous 1896 statement: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance, and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.”
Ochs’s idea is one of the best I’ve encountered. And I’ve always comforted myself with the notion that the best ideas win out. But ideas cannot win on their own. They need a voice. They need a hearing. Above all, they must be backed by people willing to live by them.
Sincerely,
Bari
GREAT NEWS!
The Dems are losing a Senate seat in the fall!
Alabama GOP voters turned aside Jeff Sessions’ Senate comeback bid Tuesday night, instead choosing Tommy Tuberville, who had the backing of President Donald Trump, over the former attorney general and longtime senator.
Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach, had a more than 20 percentage point lead over Sessions when The Associated Press called Tuesday's Alabama Senate primary runoff. President Donald Trump endorsed Tuberville four months ago and repeatedly bashed Sessions, hoping to scuttle the return of a close ally turned presidential punching bag
Tuberville finished first in the March 3 primary and mostly ducked Sessions in the runoff, which was rescheduled from late March because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Tuberville will now face Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, who is the most vulnerable senator on the ballot this fall. Jones narrowly won a 2017 special election and is laughably seeking a full term in the deep-red state.
For many who fell ill with the coronavirus in the early days of the pandemic in the United States, there were hopes of a silver lining: Perhaps, they'd be protected against future infections.
But emerging evidence, along with anecdotal reports, are calling that hoped-for lasting protection into question.
"Most everyone I know in the scientific community has been raising that question since the beginning," Dr. Michael Saag, associate dean for global health at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, said.
The body's immune system is designed to fight infections by producing antibodies to viruses. It's been suspected that people who have had the virus, and therefore developed COVID-19 antibodies, have some level of protection from a second infection. But it's never been clear how long that immunity lasts.
Sherry Wellman, 56, of Youngstown, Ohio, and her doctors had assumed it would last longer than two months.
After an initial positive test for the virus in March, two additional COVID-19 tests in April were negative. It was welcome news to Wellman, whose job as a nurse required her to have two negative tests before returning to work.
But a month later, she had to go to the hospital for chest pains, and was tested again.
The physicians "ended up testing me for COVID just for the heck of it," Wellman said. "Sure enough, it came back positive. They were stunned."
"The nightmare of this is based on how much we don't know," Saag said. "COVID is brand new. We're discovering as we go." A growing pool of data, he said, suggests COVID-19 antibodies wane about 60 to 90 days after infection.
"That's certainly consistent with other coronaviruses," Derek Cummings, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Florida, said. Other coronaviruses include the viruses that cause SARS and MERS, as well as several that cause common colds.
But because coronavirus infections can often occur without symptoms, "it really takes careful follow-up of individuals to detect that second infection," Cummings said.
There are three possible explanations for Wellman's second round of positive COVID-19 results. Either her negative tests were faulty; the virus remained hidden in her system undetectable by tests before flaring up again; or she really was infected a second time.
Shelby Hedgecock, 29, a wellness coach in Los Angeles, has had a similar experience: positive COVID-19 tests in April, followed by two negative tests in May, and then another positive test.
The thought of a secondary COVID-19 infection is devastating to Hedgecock, whose illness has resulted in weeks of intense headaches, body aches, shortness of breath, fatigue and a racing heartbeat....
..."I cannot get this again," she said. "I'm absolutely terrified."
Dr. Daniel Kuritzkes, head of the division of infectious diseases at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, said it's too soon and there's not enough data yet to know if reinfections are happening. Inconsistent testing in the United States, combined with the fact that some patients can test positive for the coronavirus up to two months after the initial infection, make it difficult to track whether the secondary positive results are lingering infections or new ones altogether.
If, indeed, people can become infected with COVID-19 twice within a period of weeks or months, it poses two major stumbling blocks in getting the pandemic under control.
The first would be the concept of herd immunity. "Just throw it out the window," Saag said. "Because not enough people could sustain an immune response that would protect against reinfection long enough for the virus to extinguish."
The second involves vaccine development. If natural infection cannot provide lasting protection against the virus, experts said, a vaccine produced in the lab may not either.
"Will people need vaccine boosters to maintain a protective level of immunity in the population? How frequent might that be?" Kuritzkes said. These are "important issues that we'll have to keep in mind as we move forward with vaccine trials," he said.
But antibodies may not be the only keys in finding an effective COVID-19 vaccine. B cells and T cells may also be essential.
B cells are cells that have been tipped off previously to invading viruses, and are constantly patrolling the body looking for them. When they detect a virus known to be potentially harmful, they start cranking out antibodies to that virus in an effort to stop it.
Also important are T cells, which do one of two things: either they find viruses and tattle on them — telling B cells to produce antibodies — or they take matters into their own hands, killing the virus.
Experts say any effective vaccine for COVID-19 may need to harness the power of all three immune system components: antibodies, B cells and T cells.
"That coordination is really important," said Dr. Buddy Creech, an infectious disease expert and the director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville.
"Some of the vaccine technologies that we're using really do seem, at least in the laboratory and in animals, to do a good job of calling into action those different parts simultaneously," Creech said. He and his team at Vanderbilt are involved in ongoing COVID-19 vaccine research.
For Saag and Creech, the ramifications of waning immunity are personal. Both previously became severely ill with COVID-19.
Creech's entire family was infected early in the pandemic, giving them a "sense of relief that we were protected for a period of time," Creech said. Now, "we realize that we don't have that same degree of safety."
Saag continues to wear personal protective equipment while treating patients. "I don't know that I'm protected against infection," Saag said. "It's been a concern from the get-go."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=f2z-ahJ4uws&feature=emb_logo
So much for the RumpU Medical School student who claimed otherwise about COVID19 antibodies.
Summary of Recent Changes
Revisions were made on June 25, 2020 to reflect available data as of May 29, 2020. We are learning more about COVID-19 every day, and as new information becomes available, CDC will update the information below.
People of any age with certain underlying medical conditions are at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19:
People of any age with the following conditions are at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19:
Chronic kidney disease
COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease)
Immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from solid organ transplant
Obesity (body mass index [BMI] of 30 or higher)
Serious heart conditions, such as heart failure, coronary artery disease, or cardiomyopathies
Sickle cell disease
Type 2 diabetes mellitus
Children who are medically complex, who have neurologic, genetic, metabolic conditions, or who have congenital heart disease are at higher risk for severe illness from COVID-19 than other children.
COVID-19 is a new disease. Currently there are limited data and information about the impact of underlying medical conditions and whether they increase the risk for severe illness from COVID-19. Based on what we know at this time, people with the following conditions might be at an increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19:
Asthma (moderate-to-severe)
Cerebrovascular disease (affects blood vessels and blood supply to the brain)
Cystic fibrosis
Hypertension or high blood pressure
Immunocompromised state (weakened immune system) from blood or bone marrow transplant, immune deficiencies, HIV, use of corticosteroids, or use of other immune weakening medicines
Neurologic conditions, such as dementia
Liver disease
Pregnancy
Pulmonary fibrosis (having damaged or scarred lung tissues)
Smoking
Thalassemia (a type of blood disorder)
Type 1 diabetes mellitus
Want to see the evidence behind these lists?
The list of underlying conditions is meant to inform clinicians to help them provide the best care possible for patients, and to inform individuals as to what their level of risk may be so they can make individual decisions about illness prevention. We are learning more about COVID-19 every day. This list is a living document that may be updated at any time, subject to potentially rapid change as the science evolves.
Reduce your risk of getting COVID-19
It is especially important for people at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19, and those who live with them, to protect themselves from getting COVID-19.
The best way to protect yourself and to help reduce the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19 is to:
Limit your interactions with other people as much as possible.
Take precautions to prevent getting COVID-19 when you do interact with others.
If you start feeling sick and think you may have COVID-19, get in touch with your healthcare provider within 24 hours...
"People of any age with certain underlying medical conditions are at increased risk for severe illness from COVID-19"
nothing new
this always been understood to be the case
Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage is a brilliant exploration of the steep rise of transgender identity among adolescent girls, and the damage it is doing.
Gender dysphoria, the acute discomfort in one’s biological sex, was, until about five years ago, extremely rare.
It was diagnosed in less than 0.01 per cent of the population.
But for many of us who have conducted academic research or written about gender dysphoria — and its previous incarnation, gender-identity disorder — we have noted the huge increase in the numbers of those identifying as transgender over the past decade.
In particular, there has been a huge increase among teenage girls and female university students, most notably in the US, the UK and Scandinavia.
Transgenderism is certainly no longer the preserve of adult males, as it once had been.
However, it is clear from the introduction to Irreversible Damage that critiquing trans ideology is a risky business.
The threat of censorship is omnipresent.
Just last month, Shrier’s publisher, Regnery, was told by Amazon that it would not run any sponsored ads for Irreversible Damage.
Amazon explained that it ‘contains elements that may not be appropriate for all audiences, which may include ad copy/book content that infers or claims to diagnose, treat, or question sexual orientation’.
Amazon stated this even though Irreversible Damage does not question sexual orientation.
Still, at least it remains for sale on Amazon.
Trans activists have also predictably attacked Shrier.
But in many ways, the pushback to Irreversible Damage is a testament to the strength of its research and the power of its case.
Indeed, Shrier conducted almost 200 interviews and spoke to over four-dozen families of adolescents, as well as many doctors, psychologists and researchers.
The chapter ‘Girls’ is a case in point.
It presents a mixture of personal stories against a broader statistical analysis, in order to illustrate just how much time adolescents today are spending online, instead of socialising with their peers.
It also looks at the ways kids now relate to each other through the tick-box categories of hardship.
Recording her observations at a young people’s weekend retreat, she noted how the youngsters would introduce themselves via approved identity categories: ‘I’m transgender, and I go by they/them’; ‘I’m depressed’; ‘I’m gay’.
She suggests that too many young people, seeking security in a label, are now missing out on crucial aspects of socialisation:
‘Many of the adolescent girls who adopt a transgender identity have never had a single sexual or romantic experience.’
Situating the narratives of her young subjects within a larger social and medical context, Shrier looks at why many girls, often from the point they start menstruating onwards, start to feel alienated from their own bodies, despite never having experienced any previous discomfort in their biological sex.
The first key factor for Shrier is the role of trans narratives propagated within schools.
‘Gender affirmation’ is rife within public schools across the US, she writes.
She goes on to show how classrooms are being colonised by therapists eager to push children towards a pathway of lifelong medicalisation.
Part of the problem, suggests Shrier, is cultural.
We can no longer stomach the thought of our children being unhappy.
Instead, this unhappiness must be treated.
‘Between the battalions of therapists’, she writes, ‘the upper middle class has made a habit of extirpating anxiety, depression, and even the occasional disappointment wherever they find them’.
She adds: ‘Perhaps we’ve trained adolescents to regard happiness as a natural and constantly accessible state.’
And if that means affirming young people’s chosen gender identity, and endorsing transitioning, so be it.
The second key factor is the rise of online trans-influencer culture.
In some ways, this has been the engine driving the transgender narrative over the past decade.
It hooks into contemporary youngsters’ need to establish a social identity and have it affirmed.
Indeed, such is the power of online trans influencers that it is surely no coincidence that, as Shrier puts it, ‘over 65 per cent of teens had increased their social-media use and time spent online immediately prior to their announcement of transgender identity’.
Shrier looks, for example, at online trans guru, Ty Turner.
He suggests that if you merely think you are trans, then you are.
This shows how quickly typical teenage self-questioning has been transformed into the expectation of immediate affirmation.
This cycle of endless self-identification and affirmation leads at points to incoherence.
‘Chase Ross told me he currently identifies as “60 per cent male” and the rest, “squiggle”‘, writes Shrier. ‘Confused? That may be the point.’
Shrier also criticises the common and coercive trans-culture tropes that appear online, including: ‘If your parents loved you, they would support your trans identity’, and, ‘If you’re not supported in your trans identity, you’ll probably kill yourself’.
She even uncovers online trans influencers showing kids how to convince doctors they’re trans in order to receive prescriptions for hormone-blockers or hormones.
The damage all this does to young girls’ bodies is terrifying.
What’s more, the medical world offers no resistance.
When Shrier asks Randi Kaufman, a gender therapist, about those parents who just can’t understand the discourse of gender identity, Kaufman responds: ‘I tell them that we can’t change the mind and so we have to change the body.’
Echoing the online trope, Kaufman says that if parents don’t support their trans kids, they may ‘try to commit suicide’.
Irreversible Damage is a must-read book.
It portrays a generation of girls being exploited by a cultural contagion that too few adults are willing to question.
It is an exhaustive and balanced investigation into what amounts, for girls, to rebranded sexism.
A sexism that tells girls today that if they don’t like being female, don’t speak out or work for change; instead, become life-long medical patients.
March 31, 2020
“During Tuesday's White House press briefing, President Trump said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is "a great governor" who "knows exactly what he's doing" in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Vice President Mike Pence added to the DeSantis accolades, saying the Republican governor has "been taking decisive steps from early on."
But according to public health experts, thousands of heath care workers and a pending lawsuit, DeSantis' leadership has been woefully inadequate.”
FLASH FORWARD TO July 12, 2020 (“last Sunday”)
Last Sunday, Germany (population 80.2 million) had 159 new cases of covid-19; Florida (population 21.5 million) had 15,300.
What New York Times contributing editor and writer Bari Weiss recently called the “civil war” within the Times has just claimed another victim: Bari Weiss.
In a scathing open letter to publisher A. G. Sulzberger that instantly went viral on Twitter and other social media, Weiss asserted that she was resigning to protest the paper’s failure to defend her against internal and external bullying; senior editors’ abandonment of the paper’s ostensible commitment to publishing news and opinion that stray from an ideological orthodoxy; and the capitulation of many Times reporters and senior editors to the prevailing intolerance of far-Left mobs on Twitter, which she called the paper’s “ultimate editor.”
Weiss was apparently stripped of her role as editor, and not immediately offered another position; the implication that she was no longer welcome was clear. “The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people,” she wrote. “Nowadays, standing up for principle at the paper does not win plaudits. It puts a target on your back.”
Weiss did not respond to a request for comment. But friends and supporters said Tuesday that her decision was prompted in part by events surrounding the forced resignation last month of opinion editor James Bennet, to whom she reported during her three years at the Times. Bennet left the paper, and his deputy James Dao was demoted, after Times staffers revolted against their decision to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton arguing for deploying the military into U.S. cities to quell riots, if local law enforcement was unable to restore order. Many staffers protested the paper’s decision to give Cotton the powerful platform of the Times’s opinion page.
Some reporters argued that the conservative senator’s claims were contradicted by the paper’s own coverage, and that publishing the essay had endangered blacks, including minority reporters at the paper. Other Times staffers criticized Weiss’s characterization of the debate over Bennet’s publication of the Cotton op-ed as a “civil war” inside the Times between “the (mostly young) wokes” and “(mostly 40+) liberals,” reflecting a broader culture war throughout the country. Several staffers attacked her for having betrayed the paper by publicly describing its internal feuds.
In the aftermath of the Cotton episode, Weiss and many others quietly opposed the paper’s new “red flag” system, which effectively enables even junior editors to “stop or delay the publication of an article containing a controversial view or position,” as one senior editor characterized it.
Weiss has been a lightning rod ever since arriving from the Wall Street Journal, along with her friend, former colleague, and fellow columnist Bret Stephens, who declined to comment today on her resignation. Soon after joining the Times, she wrote a piece about a figure skater of Asian-American descent who was the first American woman to land a triple axel at the Olympics. She was attacked on Twitter after posting a story on the achievement, tweeting the line from the Hamilton musical “Immigrants get the job done”—but the skater was not an immigrant herself, merely the child of immigrants. Twitter exploded, accusing Weiss of “othering” an Asian-American woman.
At the Times, Weiss described herself as a centrist liberal concerned that far-Left critiques stifled free speech. She frequently wrote about anti-Semitism and the Women’s March and warned of the dangers of overly zealous proponents of #MeToo culture in a controversial column about comic Aziz Ansari, which inspired a skit on Saturday Night Live. One friend said that many of Weiss’s Times colleagues resented her because they envied her success. “She was a mid-level editor who made a splash and whose essays became the basis of Saturday Night Live skits,” the friend and former colleague said, asking not to be named.
In her letter, Weiss wrote that she had joined the paper to help publish “voices that would not otherwise appear in the paper of record, such as first-time writers, centrists, conservatives and others who would not naturally think of the Times as their home.” She had been hired, she wrote, after the paper failed to anticipate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory because it “didn’t have a firm grasp of the country it covers.” But after three years at the paper, she wrote in her open letter, Weiss had concluded, “with sadness,” that she could no longer perform this mission at the nation’s ostensible paper of record, given the bullying that she had experienced within the newsroom and the almost daily attacks on her, often from Times colleagues, on social media. She deplored the paper’s unwillingness to defend her or act to stop the online intimidation. “They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,’” she wrote.
Her criticism of Sulzberger rang true to several Times veterans, who note that he has been accused before of yielding to disgruntled liberal staff members. A publisher said to have intervened often in the paper’s news decisions, Sulzberger initially defended James Bennet and the decision to publish the Cotton op-ed, for instance. But faced with a staff revolt, he criticized the essay and the paper’s publication of it, saying that the editorial process had been too “rushed” and that the essay “did not meet our standards.”
Weiss’s departure was quickly hailed by her many critics within and outside of the paper on social media, among them Glenn Greenwald, who has called her a “hypocrite” for her alleged efforts to suppress Arab professors while in college, and for her defense of Israel and some of its controversial policies as a newspaper writer. But her stinging letter rang true to many others, among them former presidential aspirant Andrew Yang and talk-show host Bill Maher. “As a longtime reader who has in recent years read the paper with increasing dismay over just the reasons outlined here, I hope this letter finds receptive ears at the paper. But for the reasons outlined here, I doubt it,” Maher wrote on Twitter.
Her resignation was also lamented by such leading right-of-center thinkers as Glenn Loury. “What a shame—for the country, and on the Times,” wrote Loury, an economics professor at Brown University, in an email. Calling Weiss “courageous,” he added that while the climate she described at the paper was “no surprise,” that it had “driven her to this point is, indeed, shocking.” He also noted that Weiss was one of the few Times writers to sign the controversial “Harpers letter,” which he speculated might have been “the last straw” for the paper.
That letter, signed by over 150 academics, writers, and other intellectuals and artists, decried the “rising illiberalism” resulting not only from President Trump and his followers’ provocations, but also from what signatories called the growing “dogma and coercion” of those who oppose Trump. The rise of online mobs to suppress controversial views with which they disagree, said the letter, has become “a potent and possibly destructive force.” The signers deplored what they described as American liberals’ growing “intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
Only one prominent Times reporter was quick to leap to Weiss’s defense. “It’s one thing that many of our readers and staff disagree with @bariweiss’ views—fine,” tweeted Rukmini Callimachi, an award-winning foreign correspondent and reporter. “But the fact that she has been openly bullied, not just on social media, but in internal slack channels is not okay.”
In a statement, acting editorial page editor Kathleen Kingbury said that the paper appreciated “the many contributions that Bari made to Times Opinion.” A Times spokesperson said that Sulzberger was not planning to issue a public response to Weiss’s letter. But given the evidently censorious climate at the paper of record these days, silence should not surprise us.
The leaders of a California evangelical megachurch are under fire for bungling the church’s response to a youth ministry volunteer’s confession that he was attracted to minors.
The Menlo Church volunteer in question first told Senior Pastor John Ortberg about his feelings two years ago, though congregants weren’t officially notified about the situation until January. That the volunteer was the pastor’s younger son, John “Johnny” Ortberg III, was kept secret until a whistleblower leaked the news late last month.
The younger Ortberg denies acting inappropriately towards children and to date, no one has come forward with allegations claiming otherwise. But the revelation of his identity has heightened scrutiny of the church’s response and raised questions about whether John Ortberg ― who allowed his son to continue volunteering with children for over a year after hearing about the disordered attractions ― should remain the church’s senior pastor.
The church’s board acknowledged this week that its handling of the matter has caused “pain and distrust” in the community, and pledged to do better.
As of Tuesday, John Ortberg remained Menlo Church’s senior pastor.
Current and former members of Menlo Church are upset by how the board ― and John Ortberg in particular ― handled the situation, claiming that leaders prioritized maintaining Ortberg’s reputation over building a culture that is safe for children and welcoming to any survivors of sexual abuse. Some members have also been upset over how the board’s chairwoman attempted to discredit the whistleblower, Daniel Lavery, a trans writer and Ortberg’s estranged son, who has broken from his family’s conservative evangelical faith.
Tiger Bachler, an Atherton resident who attended Menlo Church for over 20 years, said that by keeping his son’s attraction to minors a secret for months, John Ortberg and his wife demonstrated that their priorities were skewed.
“It was more important to them to protect their reputation rather than think about the risk to the kids of the church,” said Bachler, who stopped attending services regularly about five years ago but still considers Menlo to be her home church.
Bachler said she doesn’t understand how the church can continue having Ortberg as its senior pastor.
“Given his responsibility as a pastor, the children of the church are the most vulnerable part of his flock and he did not stand up for them,” Bachler said. “He did not protect them.”
A Quiet Investigation
Concerned about John Ortberg’s silence and his brother’s unsupervised access to children for years, Lavery told Menlo Church leaders about the situation in November.
The church is governed by a board comprised of nine elected elders, as well as its senior pastor. After Lavery’s report, the board quickly removed Johnny Ortberg from volunteer opportunities and placed John Ortberg on personal leave. Congregants weren’t given an official explanation for the pastor’s absence at the time. The board said it also informed the church’s denomination, ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians.
ong medical patients.
Back in May, TTF said
California is one state that is managing the epidemic relatively well. They have a plan, they have a governor who is taking active leadership, they have kept the numbers down, especially in the Northern part of the state. The people worked together, followed the protocols; looking good.
TTF's main fan, Bad Randy Rah-Rah jumped in to cheerlead
flash to July 14:
Yesterday, 20% of cases worldwide were in three US states: California, Texas, Florida
California was the first state to lockdown everything and they were one of the last to semi-open
Meanwhile, Andrew Cuomo has been popping up on the media talking about the great job he did
he even made a poster with himself, his daughters, and his dogs pulling down the curve
even Monica Lewinsky's old boyfriend, Jake Tapper couldn't stomach this abomination
NY has the highest death total and death rate of any state and I extremely unlikely any state can catch up
worse, Cuomo's cute little politically correct rule for nursing homes made him personally responsible for thousands of deaths
Tapper went ballistic on Cuomo's arse
I voted for President Donald Trump in 2016. I thought he would shake up Washington and help fix the system that so many of us across the country know is broken. I thought people on both sides of the political aisle could benefit from his presidency.
I was hesitant, as there were aspects of his rhetoric and behavior on the campaign trail that I found objectionable. But I thought that his policies and judicial nominations would ultimately reflect my values, at least more than Hillary Clinton's would, so I chose to look past his faults. I hoped that once in office he would rise to the occasion and become more presidential. But that didn't happen.
I won't, under any circumstances, vote for Trump again. After more than three years under his administration, our country is more divided and isolated than at any time in my memory. He's supported some causes that I support, but overwhelmingly he's proven himself a cruel, dishonest and self-serving man who lacks concern for the U.S. Constitution. Because of his character he is unwilling to humble himself enough to learn and grow. His presidency doesn't reflect my values and I don't want four more years of it.
That's why I started writing letters to my senators—Chuck Grassley and Joni Ernst—to express my outrage at the Republican Party's unwavering support for Trump. They don't question him and they make excuses for him. Instead of holding him accountable, they enable him to act like a dictator.
As an evangelical Christian, I'm called to try and protect and preserve life, to treat my neighbor as I would like to be treated and to serve those in need. Despite the continued support of evangelicals for Trump, it's been refreshing to see other members of the faith community speak out and reject the cynical arrangement some have chosen to make with Trump. Namely, when Christianity Today took a bold stand in an editorial before Christmas calling for Trump to be removed from office, and they were shamed for it.
As a voter in Iowa, I have the option to participate in the many political activities around the state's caucuses this year, the first contest of the 2020 election. As the 2019 campaign season picked up, and Democratic presidential candidates spent more and more time in Iowa, I knew I wanted to be more engaged and seek out candidates who speak to voters of faith like myself. I knew I wanted to do something that would make a difference, not something that would simply cause my many friends and family who continue to support Trump to double-down.
learned about Vote Common Good, an organization that is mobilizing voters of faith against Trump and training candidates how to engage religious voters more effectively, when I read an op-ed in The Hill written by VCG's Executive Director Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor from Minneapolis. Doug and VCG came to Iowa at the start of January to host a candidates forum in Des Moines and launch their 50-state bus tour. I decided to go, not thinking much of it but curious enough to check the event out.
What I saw gave me renewed hope and solidified my resolve to help defeat Trump this year. Doug and VCG are doing the hard work of organizing voters, meeting them where they stand and challenging them to put the common good ahead of political parties this year. They didn't ask for people to vote for a certain candidate or change party registration—just that we consider voting for a Democrat this year. As a lifelong Republican, but one who refuses to vote for Trump again, I found that message reassuring.
It's a message that I think will resonate with other evangelical voters, and I hope it will give them the comfort they need as they grapple with the difficulty of admitting they don't have to vote for Trump again. Evangelicals don't have to change who they are, they just need to reaffirm who they are by voting for someone who truly reflects Christian values.
Meghan McCain is taking a dim view of Donald Trump’s performance on the campaign trail.
In fact, “The View” co-host thinks it might be time to pull the plug on his reelection campaign for good.
On Wednesday’s show, the panel griped about what Joy Behar called the president’s “incompetence and ludicrous remarks” on Tuesday when he responded to a question about police officers shooting Black Americans by sneering that white people get shot, too.
McCain, the show’s resident Republican, was frustrated by the president’s insistence on making “stupid, undisciplined comments that become hot topics on shows like this.”
McCain warned the Trump campaign that if the president can’t change his tone, he might as well just quit.
“I’m at the point where, if he and his team just can’t in any way bring out any kind of cohesive message, maybe you should just wrap it up,” she said. “Because there’s some interesting things to say about China right now and talking about ... white people getting shot right now is not only tone-deaf, but ... I just don’t understand.”
McCain said that she is only asking the president to do what “any other Republican candidate would have done ... very well. But we have someone who can’t even discipline themselves in three seconds, and then it’s just frustrating to watch. It’s why electing a complete outsider with no political experience in this swamp will probably end up making him a one-term president.”
President Trump announced Wednesday night that he is replacing campaign manager Brad Parscale with longtime political aide Bill Stepien as national and swing state polls show him falling further behind presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the presidential race amid a spreading pandemic that has devastated the economy.
The president wrote on social media that Parscale “who has been with me for a long time,” will stay as a senior adviser focusing on digital and data strategies. Parscale has been marginalized in the campaign for several weeks, officials said, with Trump angry about a botched rally in Oklahoma, where far fewer people attended than expected, and his lagging poll numbers.
Parscale did not respond to a request for comment.
"Evangelicals don't have to change who they are, they just need to reaffirm who they are by voting for someone who truly reflects Christian values."
Sandy, if you are a Christian believer, you should stop trying to create a government that "reflects Christian values." Jesus, whose teaching Christianity is based on, preached that church and state are separate. Vote for whatever candidate you feel will allow the mission of the church to move forward with the least hindrance from the government.
"Meghan McCain is taking a dim view of Donald Trump’s performance on the campaign trail."
Trump and her father had some history so she's not exactly impartial.
"On Wednesday’s show, the panel griped about what Joy Behar called the president’s “incompetence and ludicrous remarks” on Tuesday when he responded to a question about police officers shooting Black Americans by sneering that white people get shot, too."
actually, white people do get shot by police too
I doubt anyone sneered other than that disgusting waste of space that calls herself "joy Behar"
"McCain warned the Trump campaign that if the president can’t change his tone, he might as well just quit."
dream on, Meghan
you wanted that in 2016 too
"“I’m at the point where, if he and his team just can’t in any way bring out any kind of cohesive message, maybe you should just wrap it up,” she said."
well, if a major player like Meghan McCain is at the point...
that oughta scare the hell outta Trump
hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wants to take federal funds away from any police department that has violated the civil rights of the citizens they serve. The Minneapolis City Council agreed with calls from Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) to disband the city’s police department and unanimously passed a resolution to replace the police with a “community-led public safety system.” Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti seeks to cut $150 million from the police budget. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he would slash the city’s police department budget too.
Despite all these actions, some leftists are engaging in word gymnastics by stating that “defund” really means reform. Yet, in a New York Times op-ed titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” Mariame Kaba — an activist and an anti-crime organizer — clarified for Americans what “Defund the Police” means.
Kaba writes, “We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.” She criticized a police reform bill put forth by Democrats as something that was tried and failed in the past. She concluded the police couldn’t be reformed because they are always racist, violent, and “don’t catch the bad guys.”
She states, “The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers in half” as an immediate step. But don’t confuse that with her ultimate goal: “We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.”
Without the police, what should the community do to protect themselves against criminals? Kaba suggested using “community care workers” to address mental health issues and “restorative-justice models” instead of “throwing people in prison.”
Thanks to Kaba’s clarification, it seems even many of the leftist readers of The New York Times reject the call to “defund the police” once they grasp its true meaning. One comment at NYTimes.com that accrued more than 2,600 “likes” said: “This is a fantasy. You can fund all the social programs you want, you won’t eliminate crime or disorder. I appreciate law and order.”
Another one with more than 1,300 “likes” wrote: “This is a non-starter for me. Serious reform is needed. But you might as well call for abolishing hospitals or grocery stores.” A man who says he lived in the Bronx during the 1970s exclaimed he knew from firsthand experience that abolishing police is “a terrible idea.”
These readers who disagree with Kaba are not in the minority. An ABC News/Ipsos poll finds 64 percent of Americans oppose the “defund the police” movement and reject many of its goals, such as reallocating police department funding to mental health, housing, and education programs. Even 43 percent of Democrats oppose both defunding the police and reallocating funding to other causes. The poll reveals that the majority of Americans do believe that police keep them safe and a society without police is unthinkable and dangerous.
The recent weeks of unrest across America have only served to reinforce the idea that policing is needed to maintain law and order. Americans saw that when police pull back, a movement that started with a legitimate grievance was quickly hijacked by criminals who are bent on destroying the communities and livelihoods of black and Caucasian Americans alike.
Burning down black-owned businesses, looting Louis Vuitton stores, and killing black police officers had nothing to do with finding justice for George Floyd. The combination of the pandemic, the riots, and now the calls for defunding the police have convinced many Americans that they need to become gun owners so they can protect themselves, their families, and their communities.
USA Today reports that Americans are loading up on guns and ammo in the wake of the riots. Firearm sales went up 78 percent in the last week of May, compared to the same time in 2019. The online ammunition website Ammo.com saw a 602 percent increase in revenue since the pandemic.
The International Firearm Specialist Academy website saw a 50 percent rise in first-time gun owners taking online training classes. The FBI reported more than 3 million background checks in May, the highest for on record for that month. Gun and ammo manufacturers and retail shops expect sales to remain strong in June too.
Gun restriction has long been a top issue in the Democratic Party’s platform. During the Democrat presidential primary race, all candidates advocated for strict gun laws including universal background checks and the banning of assault weapons. The recent surge of firearm sales presents Democrats a dilemma: they can’t call for defunding the police and gun control at the same time. Democrats have to choose one.
If they keep supporting the “defund the police” movement, Democrats will lose on the gun control issue because when Americans hear “defunding the police,” they hear government giving up enforcing laws and protecting law-abiding citizens. They envision a lawless world where no one will help them when criminals rob their houses or attempt to rape women.
Americans don’t need any data (although there is plenty) to tell them that when police retreat, crime spikes. As long as there is a persistent call for defunding the police, Americans will take matters into their own hands by becoming gun owners and Democrats will fail to win hearts and minds on the gun control issue.
The “Defund the Police” movement has not only turned more Americans into gun owners and supporters for the Second Amendment, but may prove to be a boon for President Trump’s reelection campaign. Since downtown Oakland saw some of the worst riots and looting in the nation, I recently checked in with a friend who lives there to make sure she and her family are safe.
Like me, she’s an immigrant from China and experienced Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution” when growing up. Unlike me, she has supported Democrats for years. She loathes everything Trump stands for, from his immigration rhetoric to positions on foreign policy. For the sake of our friendship, we typically avoid discussing domestic politics as well.
This time, however, she went straight to domestic politics. She told me she and her family were safe but the riots and looting in downtown Oakland were terrifying. She was heartbroken to see so many immigrant-owned “mom and pop” stores ransacked or even burned to the ground.
She conveyed that while she wanted to see justice for Floyd, night after night of destruction and lawlessness were just “too much.” They reminded her of China’s “Cultural Revolution” from 1966-1976. She told me: “I didn’t come all this way to America to re-live a ‘Cultural Revolution’ in 2020.” Then she said something I would never have thought she’d say before: “Trump is right. We need law and order.”
She’s not the only longtime Democrat who is deeply troubled by the call to get rid of the police. Bill Maher, the host of “Real Time,” also blasted Democrats for their call to “defend the police.” “That’s so ‘Democrats’ for you,” said Maher, “You know, they must have meetings to be this f—ing stupid about politics. ‘Hey guys, we’re making some headway here, how could we turn this into something that makes people have to vote for Trump?’”
There is probably a silent majority of level-headed Americans, who, like my friend, are sick to their stomach to see the injustice and brutality that Floyd suffered. They demand justice for Floyd and serious reform for our nation’s police force.
What’s equally important to this silent majority, however, is that they don’t want to continue to experience constant chaos, lawlessness, and destruction. Many probably are troubled by some of the president’s tweets and disagree with him on a number of issues. But if the choice this November is between “Defund the Police” and “Law and Order,” many will hold their nose and vote for Trump.
You and Rump hope!!
But that isn't the choice voters will face in November.
The voters will choose between a competent statesman who has long served this nation, who is also a loving and honest family man versus a thrice married, pussy grabbing, self-serving, dictator loving idiot in the White House who can not stop himself from lying through his teeth.
https://twitter.com/RVAT2020/status/1283505490639691784
"Sandy, if you are a Christian believer, you should stop trying to create a government that "reflects Christian values." Jesus, whose teaching Christianity is based on, preached that church and state are separate. Vote for whatever candidate you feel will allow the mission of the church to move forward with the least hindrance from the government."
Indeed, that separation of Church and State now is why we have gay marriage. We certainly want to keep it that way.
"But that isn't the choice voters will face in November.
The voters will choose between a competent statesman"
Biden has never run anything other than campaigns
and, despite several presidential runs, has never won
"who has long served this nation,"
you mean like when he wrote a crime bill sentencing millions of black men to lifetime imprisonment?
America has never elected someone who spent so much time as a legislator without any executive experience
not even close
"who is also a loving and honest family man"
most people are dedicated to their families
most don't go so far as enabling corruption and influence-peddling among their kids
remember when Beau died and Hunter started dating his sister-in-law?
it's a sick family
"versus a thrice married, pussy grabbing,"
Biden has faced numerous allegations of touchy feely with females and a rape allegation
"self-serving,"
Biden is no different
"dictator loving"
Trump made clear what his approach to foreign policy would be before he was elected
buttering them up why staying tough on substance is not a bad strategy
"idiot in the White House who can not stop himself from lying through his teeth."
you really going to hold that Biden doesn't lie?
"Indeed, that separation of Church and State now is why we have gay marriage. We certainly want to keep it that way."
gay "marriage" has historically not been recognized by any society, regardless of religious beliefs, even in atheist regimes
it's a riot to hear liberals tell evangelicals not to vote for Trump because he isn't a Christian
Trey Gowdy hasn’t lost a step.
The former Republican representative from South Carolina isn’t in the public eye nearly as much as he was when he was in Congress, but he still has no problem demonstrating why he earned the nickname “The Bulldog” during his years as a federal prosecutor.
In an interview on Wednesday, Gowdy showed that his political wits hadn’t slowed down at all — especially when it came to the kind of nonsense being spewed this week by the best known progressive in the House.
Gowdy was asked about Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent statements that blamed New York City’s skyrocketing violent crime this summer on unemployment.
Hungry men and women are just trying to feed their children, shoplifting loaves of bread, Ocasio-Cortez claimed in a video that circulated on social media Sunday.
“Maybe this has to do with the fact that people aren’t paying their rent and are scared to pay their rent and so they go out and they need to feed their child & they don’t have money so … they feel like they either need to shoplift some bread or go hungry that night,” Ocasio-Cortez said.
Maybe. And maybe the New York Democrat just watched “Les Misérables” on Blu-Ray (or read the book?).
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Anyone who’s even half paid attention to the kinds of crime that have alarmed the country this year — especially in blood-soaked New York City lately — knows good and well shoplifting isn’t high on anyone’s list.
And Gowdy’s apparently been paying attention.
The kind of murderous crime that’s been taking place in New York, like the shooting death of a 1-year-old Sunday, isn’t the work of some modern Jean Valjeans trying to fill empty bellies.
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Check out his interview here.
RELATED: Watch Sen. Tim Scott, Trey Gowdy Rip Into 'Defund Police' Push: 'Dumbest Idea I Have Ever Heard'
“God forbid my two decades in a courtroom compare with her experience as a bartender,” Gowdy said, setting the stage for a takedown.
“Was the 1-year-old killed in New York because that child was holding a loaf of bread? I mean, poor people are no more likely to cause you harm than rich people are,” he said.
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“That is not the line of demarcation. It is not whether or not you are rich or poor; it is whether you are law-abiding or not law-abiding.
“So, the spike in murder cases, the spike in auto theft, the spike in burglaries: What in the hell does that have to do with being hungry?”
Gowdy then pulled out the weapon of logic — the one thing liberals fear more than anything.
“Go check the criminal histories of the people committing these murders. See how many of them are committing their first criminal offense since the pandemic started and see how many of them are career offenders, where this is just the culmination of a lifetime of crime that resulted in murder,” Gowdy said. “I’ll bet you they are not first-time offenders.”
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Smith played a clip showing New York’s liberal Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo appearing to mock Ocasio-Cortez’s claim about rent payments by noting that New York isn’t allowing renter evictions during the coronavirus crisis.
“He’s the Democratic governor of New York, and he’s clearly taking issue with her stance on that,” Smith said.
“Anyone that believes in logic will take issue with her stance,” Gowdy said.
There were plenty of social media supporters who agreed.
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There’s no way of knowing, of course, whether Ocasio-Cortez believes her own spiel about poor people being driven to crime by sheer hunger.
However, as Gowdy pointed out, logic dictates that normal, sane people don’t buy it for a second.
The crimes that have frightened and infuriated the country have been the mass lootings that followed the “mostly peaceful protests” ostensibly surrounding the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May (but really just an excuse for lawlessness).
The crimes that have plagued New York City recently are the shootings that gave the city its bloodiest June since 1996.
These are not Victor Hugo’s poor crying out against an oppressive system. They’re criminals committing crimes of opportunity amid the semi-spontaneous chaos of riot conditions, or the more systemic chaos of a city no longer willing to police itself.
Either way, AOC’s analysis is as flawed as her socialist politics.
And Trey Gowdy wasn’t shy about calling her out on it
"The voters will choose between a competent statesman..."
This fall voters will choose between a man who was half the executive team that brought us out of the economic dumpster fire that Bush left us, and a colostomy bag with a comb-over.
It's not difficult decision.
Trump’s overall approval ratings (36 percent in the most recent Quinnipiac poll; 42 percent in the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll) and his rating for handling the pandemic (35 percent and 37 percent in those two polls respectively) have tanked because he is not handling the virus at all. Whatever belated action is taken to address the full-blown crisis is happening at the state level(even Alabama put in place a statewide mask requirement). Trump, by contrast, is arguably making it harder to tell how bad the virus is, ordering information on cases to go to his highly politicized Health and Human Services Department rather than the respected Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The June 28 email to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was ominous: A senior adviser to a top Health and Human Services Department official accused the CDC of “undermining the President” by putting out a report about the potential risks of the coronavirus to pregnant women.
The adviser, Paul Alexander, criticized the agency’s methods and said its warning to pregnant women “reads in a way to frighten women . . . as if the President and his administration can’t fix this and it is getting worse.”
As the country enters a frightening phase of the pandemic with new daily cases surpassing 57,000 on Thursday, the CDC, the nation’s top public health agency, is coming under intense pressure from President Trump and his allies, who are downplaying the dangers in a bid to revive the economy ahead of the Nov. 3 presidential election. In a White House guided by the president’s instincts, rather than by evidence-based policy, the CDC finds itself forced constantly to backtrack or sidelined from pivotal decisions.
"it's a riot to hear liberals tell evangelicals not to vote for Trump because he isn't a Christian"
Indeed, you would have thought by now that liberals would have learned that appealing to Christians' sense of morality is farcical act of futility... especially since it was they who put him into office in the first place, and his strongest base of support is still white Evangelicals.
You'd have just as much luck appealing to Rump's morality.
At this point, they are the same.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) signed an executive order Wednesday night explicitly banning cities from enacting their own mask mandates, even as the state experiences a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and other Republican governors are turning to mask orders to try to quell the surge.
Kemp’s order voids existing mask mandates in more than a dozen cities or counties, while also extending other coronavirus social-distancing restrictions statewide.
The governor had previously tried to ban cities and counties from passing any coronavirus restrictions that went further than Georgia’s guidelines. But many cities, including Atlanta, defied him by passing mask mandates anyway, arguing it was essential to flatten the curve. Kemp’s new order “strongly encourages” masks.
Local officials who had issued mask mandates as hospitals filled up were outraged Wednesday night as Kemp overrode their judgment. The order came on the same day Georgia recorded its second-highest number of coronavirus cases since the start of the pandemic, logging 3,871 cases and 37 deaths.
“It is officially official. Governor Kemp does not give a damn about us,” Savannah Mayor Van Johnson (D), who was the first local official to issue a mask mandate, wrote on Twitter. “Every man and woman for himself/herself. Ignore the science and survive the best you can. In #Savannah, we will continue to keep the faith and follow the science. Masks will continue to be available!”
Kemp’s order comes as other Republican governors have recently abandoned their previous opposition to mask mandates in the interest of public health.
Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey (R) was among them on Wednesday, saying that while she wished people didn’t “have to be ordered to do what is in your own best interest,” she felt a mask order could not wait any longer.
“We’re almost to the point where our hospital ICUs are overwhelmed,” Ivey said at a news conference. “Folks, the numbers just do not lie.”
BUT RUMP SURE DOES !
"This fall voters will choose between a man who was half the executive team that brought us out of the economic dumpster fire that Bush left us, and a colostomy bag with a comb-over.
It's not difficult decision."
voters have already made it clear they trust Trump more on economics
Dems are making the same mistake they made in 2016
lining up with the elitist class that wants to abolish police departments and wipe out the memory of the founding fathers
the choice is this:
Trump's working class vs Biden's smirking class
it's deja vu all over again
VOTE
YOUR LIFE
DEPENDS ON IT
“We’ve been all over the map in Texas, nobody knows what the hell is going on. We have a Lt. Gov. who decided he doesn’t want to listen to Fauci and those people anymore”
Gregg Popovich shared some thoughts about state and federal leadership on coronavirus
“The bubble is not Florida,” Popovich said. “The bubble is one of the safest places you can be. Especially compared to outside the bubble in Arizona or Texas or Florida.
“We’ve been all over the map in Texas. Nobody knows what the hell’s going on.”
‘They’re all cowards’
He then criticized Abbott and Patrick for basing their actions on politics and aligning with President Donald Trump rather than making sound decisions based on the guidance of experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the nation’s leading voice on the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We have a lieutenant governor who decided he doesn’t want to listen to Fauci and those people any more,” Popovich continued. “That makes a lot of sense. How safe can that be? The messaging is ridiculous.
“The governor goes back and forth based on whether he has to satisfy Trump or listen to the numbers — politics show maybe he better do this because the virus has done that. But no overall policy, no principle. It’s all about politics. It’s all about what’s good for them. And ‘them’ means Trump. Because they’re all cowards and they’re all afraid.”
COVID-19 numbers in Texas, Florida
Florida shattered the record for new daily COVID-19 cases in any state on Sunday with more than 15,000 reported cases. On Tuesday, it set a new state high with 132 deaths attributed to the virus. The coronavirus death toll in the state is now at 4,409. Florida’s outbreak has spiked in the aftermath of Gov. Ron DeSantis pushing for businesses to reopen in May.
Texas is experiencing a similar crisis after state leadership pushed for an aggressive reopening campaign. The state recorded 10,000 new daily cases for the first time last week and hit the threshold again on Tuesday with 10,745 new cases. Houston’s hospitals are at capacity.
As of Tuesday, the tally of confirmed cases in Texas reached 275,058. That number, of course, doesn’t include people who have the disease but have not been tested.
So for those reasons and the safety protocols implemented inside the NBA bubble, the 71-year-old Popovich feels safer at Disney World.
Gregg, don't be a moron
the surge in cases has nothing to do with reopening
Florida and Texas opened two and a half months ago
why is there a sudden surge now?
California locked down first and waited longest to reopen
why is it out of control there?
the virus won't be under control until people start wearing masks and stop going to BLM rallies
depending on the state and their situation, it might be a good idea to require masks in indoor settings, except when at rest in a location distanced by six feet
that's all Fauci is suggesting
no one is ignoring him, although he did significantly mislead the public a few times
"it's deja vu all over again"
Keep praying for that.
Last time there weren't several Republican PAC putting up millions of dollars in ads and new YouTube channels telling Republican voters why it's so important not to vote for Rump, and instead vote for the Democratic nominee, instead of a third party.
And of course, there weren't 140,000 dead people due in large part to Rump's denial and inaction.
It really puts the four dead in Benghazi and Hillary's e-mails into perspective. There are people kicking themselves for falling for that propaganda.
There should be some hearings on why Rump ignored all the intelligence reports indicating how bad the virus was, an instead got duped by an authoritarian Chinese guy.
"Last time there weren't several Republican PAC putting up millions of dollars in ads and new YouTube channels telling Republican voters why it's so important not to vote for Rump, and instead vote for the Democratic nominee, instead of a third party."
all the same deep state players were working against him
he had offended the entitled class the and they were using the intelligence apparatus of our country to defeat him
in the end, democracy triumphed, as it will now
"And of course, there weren't 140,000 dead people due in large part to Rump's denial and inaction."
that's just propaganda
there was nothing suggested by anyone that he didn't do
"It really puts the four dead in Benghazi and Hillary's e-mails into perspective. There are people kicking themselves for falling for that propaganda."
both were scandals
"There should be some hearings on why Rump ignored all the intelligence reports indicating how bad the virus was, an instead got duped by an authoritarian Chinese guy."
there are intelligence reports that say just about everything
problem is they cry wolf too much to take seriously
Trump's "expert", Anthony Fauci, was saying there was no big problem back in early February
Trump did more than anyone else was advocating
"Trump did more than anyone else was advocating"
Rage tweets and inventing nicknames for everyone on his enemies list don't count.
Kanye West Is Officially on the Ballot in Oklahoma
"Trump did more than anyone else was advocating"
You are so full of bull-oney.
Trump announced that “drive-thru” testing centers would be set up in parking lots at CVS, Target, Walmart and Walgreens stores.
This, he hopes, will resolve a spectacularly awful time lag in testing kits being made available. America has been put to shame by South Korea.
The wartime president Harry Truman used to keep a sign on his desk that said: “The buck stops here.” Trump, however, seems eager to wash his hands of the matter, if not actually wash his hands. “Yeah, no, I don’t take responsibility at all, because we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules, regulations, and specifications from a different time,” he said. “It wasn’t meant for this kind of an event with the kind of numbers that we’re talking about.”
Then Yamiche Alcindor of PBS asked why, in 2018, Trump had dissolved the White House’s National Security Council directorate for global health security and biodefense.
Like a schoolboy caught red-handed, he blustered: “Well, I just think it’s a nasty question because what we’ve done is – and Tony has said numerous times that we’ve saved thousands of lives because of the quick closing. And when you say ‘me’, I didn’t do it. We have a group of people I could – ”
Alcindor followed up. Trump rambled: “It’s the – it’s the administration. Perhaps they do that. You know, people let people go. You used to be with a different newspaper than you are now. You know, things like that happen.”
It is not the first time he has resorted to the word “nasty” when asked a tough question by a woman of color.
The buck stops here.
the previous comment is about as lame an attempt as one could come up with to justify blaming Trump for this pandemic
testing earlier on wouldn't have changed much
the lag between infection and symptom onset is too long to make contact tracing feasible
the US has now tested more people than any country in the world and it's not even close
as for committees, Trump had a team of exerts advising him form the beginning
please show us a proposal or suggestion by any Democrat in February that would have changed anything
actually, let's see what Biden suggested, other than open borders
U.S. sets single-day record with more than 70,000 new coronavirus cases
Rump thinks wearing a mask in public makes him look weak.
I think Rump not wearing a mask in public makes him look stupid.
Biden wears masks in public.
It's called leading by example in our united efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Biden didn't move the Democratic convention to a place where he intended to ignore social distancing guidelines, but Rump moved the Repugnican convention for exactly that purpose.
Rump is willing to risk the health of his supporters with the spread of COVID-19 to satisfy his ego.
"U.S. sets single-day record with more than 70,000 new coronavirus cases"
irrelevant
people in low mortality categories are choosing to congregate and not wear masks
and antibody tests, which may indicate past infection, are conflated with new cases
and the US is testing more than other countries - a lot more, so more asymptomatic cases are detected
when the national death rate sets records, that would be a concern
"Rump thinks wearing a mask in public makes him look weak.
I think Rump not wearing a mask in public makes him look stupid.
Biden wears masks in public."
there is no rational basis for wearing a mask outside unless you're within six feet of someone
"It's called leading by example in our united efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19."
in America, we get information and make our own decisions
I'm not looking for some figurehead to pattern my behavior after
"Biden didn't move the Democratic convention to a place where he intended to ignore social distancing guidelines, but Rump moved the Repugnican convention for exactly that purpose."
the Democrap convention will be crap
maybe he'll do his speech from his basement
"Rump is willing to risk the health of his supporters with the spread of COVID-19 to satisfy his ego."
they can make that determination for themselves
"the previous comment is about as lame an attempt as one could come up with to justify blaming Trump for this pandemic
testing earlier on wouldn't have changed much"
Cherry-picking' again. Rump disastrously "dissolved the White House’s National Security Council directorate for global health security and biodefense" in 2018 because Obama created it so naturally Rump had to destroy it ... just before the COVID-19 pandemic.
And in the face of the exponential growth of illness here in the states, Rump wants to destroy the Obama/Biden Affordable Care Act, leaving Americans without insurance coverage.
Biden supports Americans, the National Security Council directorate for global health security and biodefense, and the Affordable Care Act to provide health insurance for Americans while Rump praises dictators' toughness and acts like Putin's man doing Putin's bidding against Americans.
Sad.
"they can make that determination for themselves"
Indeed.
You won't hear me complaining about fewer Republican voters in November.
"Kanye West Is Officially on the Ballot in Oklahoma"
Fantastic!
A deep red state that democrats haven't counted in their column since... forever?
So who is going to win OK?
Rump?
Kanye?
Go West young man!
I'm rooting for Kanye.
It may be premature (as well as unoriginal), but I believe, in one of the Democrats’ former favorite phrases, that “the walls are closing in” on Joe Biden. The Rasmussen poll—one of the only regular polls consistently accurate in 2016 and one that tends to lead fluctuations in the current polling—has recorded a six-point gain for President Trump in the past 10 days.
Aggregators that issue averages of a group of polls cannot be relied upon because most polls, like most of the media, start from the conclusion they desire and reason backward. Almost all of these polls are of echelons of the population and not of likely voters, and there is always a reticence among pro-Trump respondents.
The Democrats and their media toadies have used polls for the last two months to create the illusion of an inevitable Biden victory on November 3. CNN’s aptly named Don Lemon, that pillar of impartiality, tells us Trump’s “number’s up.” The political analysis operation FiveThirtyEight breathlessly advised last week that Biden was on the verge of opening up a “landslide” lead. These are standard partisan political tactics. The fact that Trump is now returning upwards in key polls illustrates again that no matter what is thrown at him he is practically indestructible.
This indestructibility rests partly on his record in office and partly on what appears to be an almost impenetrable resistance to the pressure of events.
It is an important figment of the Democratic script that Trump completely botched the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and has the blood of 135,000 coronavirus fatalities on his hands. In fact, he followed for a time his instinct to downplay it, recognized when the near unanimity of scientific opinion required him to change course, and allowed the chief scientists to devise a lockdown system which the Democrats enthusiastically endorsed as likely to produce an economic depression that they could blame on Trump and use to win the election after all.
Trump inherited a public health disaster response system from the Obama Administration that was completely inadequate for any serious crisis, and when he acted preemptively in closing direct air traffic from China on January 31, Biden accused him of “xenophobia and hysteria.” Trump mobilized a national effort to produce necessary medical supplies that was astonishingly successful and demonstrated his executive talents. When the momentum of the virus slowed, Trump sponsored a national economic reopening which has produced impressive reductions of unemployment, and he has placed the Democrats on the horns of a dilemma over school reopening.
About 75 percent of the population wants to reopen the schools. But the Democrats are pushing for continued school closure, their party dominated by teachers’ unions that have reduced American state school systems to little more than daycare centers. Unionized school employees are now addicted to their paid shutdown holidays.. Assuming the fatality rates from the coronavirus do not significantly increase, Trump is almost certain to win this argument.
Now that the riots have almost stopped, the public can consider how the unjust killing by white policemen of an African-American in Minneapolis on May 25 led so suddenly to the destruction of statues of Columbus, U.S. Grant, Frederick Douglass, and almost of Abraham Lincoln, as well as to the defacing of monuments to American World War II dead. As the dust settles on this ghastly episode, the country will have to reflect on the hopeless Democratic municipal satrapies—headed by such allegories of the insolent corruption of incumbency as Mayors Bill de Blasio (New York), Lori Lightfoot (Chicago), Eric Garcetti (Los Angeles), and Muriel Bowser (Washington, D.C.). As these reduce police budgets and truckle to African-American radicals like those leading Black Lives Matter (BLM), who are riddled with anti-white racists and Marxist guerrillas and thugs, will their constituencies see the connections between these policies and events? Even with the incessant Democratic media effort to terrify the entire population out of its wits over the COVID-19 pandemic, it will no longer be possible to represent Trump as President Chaos.
Since 80 percent of COVID-19 fatalities are in the 20 percent of people above the age of 70 and therapeutic treatments are steadily becoming more efficient and available, it should be possible to cap COVID-related fatalities well below their present level—which already is approximately 70 percent below the high when the national shutdown was imposed.
From his great address at Mount Rushmore, Trump has played the traditional winning hand of leaders facing the attempted atomization of their voters into a swath of aroused grievance-groups. He raises and honors the flag of an imperfect but ever-improving America, of a great and benign nation. He calls for national unity against an internal enemy of racists, arsonists, and vandals who are propping up the Democrats, who are otherwise engaged in trying to maintain panic over COVID-19 and to perpetuate an economic recession and a national school holiday.
BLM and Antifa can riot and pillage and desecrate American history, but the people can’t go to school, houses of worship, or public entertainments. The inert, contemptible Democratic big-city mayors are sitting ducks for Trumpian abuse.
Who has the winning hand, again?
Fear alone, however, does not explain what’s going on with Republicans. Not every state is Alabama, where Trump will win in November no matter what. Trump has been sagging even in reliably red states, such as Georgia and Texas—a Democratic Presidential candidate has not won the latter state since Carter, in 1976—where surveys now show Biden more or less even with Trump. The Dallas Morning News wrote the other day that “Trump represents a bigger threat to fellow Republicans than any GOP nominee in forty-four years.” As coronavirus cases spike in Texas, the crucial suburban voters in Dallas and Houston, who have long been the G.O.P.’s bedrock in the state, appear to be souring on the President. Yet Senator John Cornyn, a mild-mannered Republican-establishment type never previously seen as a Trumpite, has chosen to respond to his increasingly uphill reëlection challenge in Texas by becoming one of the President’s more ardent public defenders. He’s tweeting more. He’s trolling. He told Texans to go out and drink some Corona beer and not to panic about the disease. Democrats are now calling him Mini-Don. There are plenty of other Republican officeholders like him.
The best, or at least most vivid, explanation for this phenomenon that I’ve seen is a recent piece in Rolling Stone by the Republican strategist Tim Miller, an adviser to Jeb Bush’s doomed 2016 Presidential campaign who became a fervent Never Trumper. Miller asked nine G.O.P.-consultant friends who are still welcome in the Party why the “dumpster fire” that is the Trump 2020 campaign has not caused their Republican candidates to abandon the President. “There are two options, you can be on this hell ship, or you can be in the water drowning,” one told Miller. Miller’s report from the U.S.S. Hellship suggests that the trapped sailors are well aware of how badly Trump is faring but are unable to bail out—especially in competitive elections, where the Party can ill afford to lose any Republican votes. In rural Texas, one of Miller’s informants pointed out, “Trump gets like Saddam Hussein level numbers here.” Cornyn desperately needs those Trump superfans in order to win statewide. Loyalty to Trump among such voters now outweighs any policy position, which means that catering to them requires Cornyn to strike a hard pro-Trump line, even if it further alienates the suburban moderates now wavering on the President. “No dissent is tolerated,” a consultant in another state told Miller. And, besides, another strategist told him, the election is all about Trump—there’s no use pretending otherwise. Their observations are strikingly similar to a conversation that I had last month with a veteran Republican pollster, whose clients are running in competitive states. I asked him whether, given the bad and worsening poll numbers, we might soon see his candidates running away from the President. “I don’t think so,” he said, citing the Trump Twitter curse. “He stirs up his base all the time, so you can’t take a position to reach out to the independents who have trouble with his persona, because the Republican Trump base will turn on you in a second.” And so the Hellship sails on.
There are many other factors, of course, ranging from the fight that has already begun for control over the post-Trump Republican Party to the default partisanship that makes Republicans believe that sticking with Trump, no matter how disastrous his decisions may be or how distasteful they find his fulminations, is better than the Democratic alternative.
There are many other factors, of course, ranging from the fight that has already begun for control over the post-Trump Republican Party to the default partisanship that makes Republicans believe that sticking with Trump, no matter how disastrous his decisions may be or how distasteful they find his fulminations, is better than the Democratic alternative.
Another factor to consider is the spectre of 2016. There are many politicians who remain convinced that, with Trump having pulled off a historic upset once before, he can somehow make the improbable happen again, polls be damned. The President is clearly in this camp, but so are a number of Democrats scarred by the false confidence of four years ago. “I don’t believe these numbers,” Debbie Dingell, a representative from the swing state of Michigan, told an online Democratic event recently, after yet another set of polls came out showing Biden well ahead in her must-win state. Dingell, who has taken to calling herself Debbie Downer, comes by her skepticism legitimately, having warned the Hillary Clinton campaign, unsuccessfully, that it was in trouble in Michigan in 2016, despite polls that showed Clinton comfortably ahead. A new Monmouth University survey suggests that, in Pennsylvania, there are many people who agree with Dingell. Although the poll showed Biden leading Trump by thirteen points in the state—which, like Michigan, is another Democratic electoral must-win—fifty-seven per cent of voters said that they believed there was a hidden pro-Trump vote that was not turning up in the surveys. “The specter of a secret Trump vote looms large in 2020,” the survey’s director, Patrick Murray, concluded.
Perhaps it is fitting that the fate of President Trump, a Presidential liar for the ages, should come down to the question of whether large numbers of Americans are lying to pollsters about their support for him. Either way, there is a lesson here. Imagine if Republicans lose this fall because they would not, or could not, believe that their fellow-citizens might actually be telling the truth?
As the general election unofficially kicks off, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is being aided by an unusual array of groups for a presidential election. What makes them an oddity is that they are Republican. A growing number of GOP organizations are moving forward with strategic efforts to unseat a commander-in-chief of their own party — and turn the White House over to a Democrat.
Appalled by Donald Trump's presidency, they are spending millions on television ads and digital campaigns and weighing ground efforts in an election year that has seen a global pandemic and major economic crisis following the impeachment trial of the president earlier this year.
"We haven't really ever seen anything like this before in a general election," said Mitchell West, of Kantar/Campaign Media Analysis Group. "In primaries, there's always one Republican group that supports one specific Republican candidate and will obviously bash some others, but in terms of a general election, usually you don't see anything like this."
From April through June, The Lincoln Project raised more than $16.8 million, rivaling several prominent Democratic PACs after raising less than $2 million in the first quarter of 2020. The Lincoln Project, whose founders include George Conway, a prominent Trump critic who is married to White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, views this president as an existential threat to the nation, a "clear and present danger to the Constitution and our Republic."
The Lincoln Project's recent financial filing shows donations flooded in from all over the country. According to the group, the average contribution was around $56.
Its first anti-Trump ad aired in March, but it was the "Mourning in America" ad in early May that really launched the group, attacking Mr. Trump's handling of the economy and coronavirus. The spot was a twist on President Reagan's 1984 reelection campaign ad and attracted the attention of the president when it appeared on Fox News. Mr. Trump blasted the group on Twitter, inadvertently helping the Lincoln Project raise about $2 million in 24 hours.
"He saw the ad, it did what we wanted it to do, and we have been the beneficiaries organizationally of his inability or unwillingness to not respond to things that we know are his weak points," said The Lincoln Project co-founder Reed Galen. The group has since churned out videos on the coronavirus response, Confederate flags, reported bounties on U.S troops and more. "That's the advantage of being independent of everybody… we say we think this going to move, this is going to hit, and we go do it."
According to Kantar/CMAG, The Lincoln Project has spent nearly $4 million on advertising since March. Now as the general election nears, the group plans to take the fight directly into battleground states to target "soft Republican" and conservative-leaning independent voters. While it plans to continue with targeted advertising, the group also has a rapidly growing army of volunteers including some 3,000 in Michigan.
"I think we will be contacting voters directly," Galen told CBS News. "I think the effectiveness of our messaging creates a potent combination to get in front of these voters who you can convince to make sure they get out and vote for Joe Biden, and if they're not going to vote for Joe Biden, then leave Donald Trump blank."
At the same time, Republican Voters against Trump is also going after similar voters, but with a slightly different approach, one that seeks to make Republican voters comfortable with the idea of not supporting their party's incumbent nominee, even if they voted for him in 2016.
"I've been a Republican for more than 30 years in western North Carolina, and I find myself for the first time in many years not able to vote for a Republican," said Steve in one video on the project's website. The project has been compiling hundreds of testimonials from GOP voters in all fifty states.
"I voted for Donald Trump four years ago because I didn't trust Hillary. That was a mistake," said Craig from Colorado in another video. While some voters focus on what's made them turn their backs on Mr. Trump, other voters talk about why they'll be voting for Biden.
"What people were most persuaded by was real stories from real people, so basically we decided to build a project around that for 2020," said Republican Voters against Trump founder Sarah Longwell. The initiative, which is a project of Defending Democracy Together – the organization founded by conservatives including Bill Kristol – is now using the videos in its $10 million campaign to digitally target voters in five states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Arizona. Testimonials have also been used as TV ads.
But while a series of recent polls have shown Biden with at least a slight edge, these groups are aware that the president retains a strong base of unshakable Republican support. According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, Mr. Trump would have the support of 84% of Republicans.
Where Anti-Trump Republicans see an opening is in the three states won by the president in 2016 by the slimmest of margins over Hillary Clinton. The presumptive Democratic nominee helps . According to Longwell, early focus groups viewed far left Bernie Sanders as a "nonstarter," but Biden is "not nearly as big a lift for a lot of these right-leaning independents." He puts the crucial suburbs into play.
"A lot of the women who would consider themselves Republican or right-leaning, who voted for Mitt Romney, who voted for John McCain — those are the people who are moving out of the party fastest, or moving away from Donald Trump the fastest," said Longwell.
That's what some former George W. Bush administration officials also believe. At the beginning of July, they launched 43 Alumni for Joe Biden PAC. The galvanizing moment for the PAC founders was the attack on protesters in Lafayette Park in June.
"Our goal is to really give those folks who either still identify themselves as Republicans or those who have left the party or view that the party has left them permission to vote for Joe Biden, given the circumstances the country is in right now and needing to move in a new direction," said John Farner.
The PAC aims to be a grassroots volunteer-based effort that uses the substantial Bush alumni network to engage Republicans and independents who have traditionally voted for Republicans. Those signing up to get involved online are asked how they would like to help — on fundraising, field operations or online. The PAC expects to have a strong digital push as well as a get-out-the-vote effort, depending on what the coronavirus landscape looks like in the fall.
"There are a lot of people who have never voted for a Democrat for president before," said Kristopher Purcell. "We feel we can talk to those voters very well."
TRUMP: “Because they want to defund the police and BIden wants to defund the police.”
WALLACE: “Sir, he does not.”
TRUMP: “Look, he signed a charter with Bernie Sanders ...”
WALLACE: “And he said nothing about defunding the police.”
TRUMP: “Oh, really? It says ‘abolish,’ it says … Let’s go. Get me the charter, please.”
WALLACE (back in the studio): [Laughs] “So that led to a very interesting exchange where he had his staff go out and get the highlights from that 100-page compact that the Biden team and the … Sanders team had signed, and he went through it and he found a lot of things that he objected to that Biden has agreed to, but he couldn’t find any indication, because there isn’t any, that Joe Biden has sought to defund and abolish the police.”
Lately, pollsters and pundits have been nervously pondering the following question: “If Trump is behind in the polls, why do most voters say, in the same surveys, that he will win the upcoming election?” As Harry Enten recently noted at CNN, “An average of recent polls finds that a majority of voters (about 55%) believe that Trump will defeat Biden in the election. Trump’s edge on this question has remained fairly consistent over time.” This is far more than mere statistical curiosity by number nerds. Several peer-reviewed studies have shown that surveys of voter expectations are far more predictive of election outcomes than polls of voter intentions.
Voter expectations concerning who would win a given election were consistently more predictive than surveys using only conventional polling questions.
The polls that appear to portend a one-term presidency for Trump actually predict that the president will trounce Biden badly this November.
According to studies conducted by researchers in the United States and in Europe, any pollster attempting to divine the outcome of an election should pay far less attention to what survey respondents say about the candidate they plan to vote for than the candidate they actually believe is going to win. Professor Andreas Graefe of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LSU Munich), proclaims these citizen forecasts, as they are sometimes categorized, “the most accurate method that we have to predict election outcomes.” Dr. Graefe elaborates on this assertion at considerable length in Public Opinion Quarterly under the title “Accuracy of Vote Expectation Surveys in Forecasting”:
Across the last 100 days prior to the seven elections from 1988 to 2012, vote expectation surveys provided more accurate forecasts of election winners and vote shares than four established methods (vote intention polls, prediction markets, quantitative models, and expert judgment). Gains in accuracy were particularly large compared to polls. On average, the error of expectation-based vote-share forecasts was 51 percent lower than the error of polls published the same day.
Vote expectation surveys have been with us since the 1930s, just as long as scientific polling, but have never been used very widely as a tool for predicting election outcomes. As Professor Graefe puts it, “Only recently have researchers begun to specifically study vote expectation surveys as a method for forecasting elections.” Among the researchers who have examined the voter expectation data in recent years are Justin Wolfers of the University of Michigan Department of Economics and David Rothschild of the Microsoft Research and Applied Statistics Center. They published their findings at the Brookings Institution website under the title “Forecasting Elections: Voter Intentions versus Expectations.”
Wolfers and Rothschild, like Professor Graefe, found that voter expectations concerning who would win a given election were consistently more predictive than surveys using only conventional polling questions such as, “If the election were held today, who would you vote for?” They compared the predictive efficacy of these voter preference surveys to those that also asked questions about voter expectations, such as, “Regardless of who you plan to vote for, who do you think will win the upcoming election?” The answers to the latter queries proved significantly more useful in producing accurate election forecasts than polls that focused primarily on questions involving voter intentions:
Our primary dataset consists of all the state-level electoral presidential college races from 1952 to 2008, where both the intention and expectation question are asked. In the 77 cases in which the intention and expectation question predict different candidates, the expectation question picks the winner 60 times, while the intention question only picked the winner 17 times. That is, 78% of the time that these two approaches disagree, the expectation data was correct.
This brings us back to those pundits and pollsters we saw frowning over statistics showing that poll respondents frequently give two different answers when asked whom they will vote for and whom they expect to win. Politico recently reported, “When pollsters ask Americans who they think will win the election — not who they are voting for themselves — Trump performs relatively well.” Even in surveys like the new Economist/YouGov poll that shows Trump down 49-40 nationally, only 39 percent of registered voters say Biden will beat him. In Pennsylvania, the new Monmouth poll shows Biden trouncing Trump. Yet, when asked who will win, the voters say the election is a toss-up.
This is what renders conventional election surveys so unreliable. It is what caused Gallup, the organization that invented “scientific polling” in 1936 when George Gallup and his team predicted the reelection of Franklin Roosevelt, to stop participating in presidential horserace polling and predicting the ultimate winner of the elections after 2012. Other pollsters have been less sagacious, which resulted in the 2016 debacle. Their 2020 projections are almost certainly yet another sloppy pig’s breakfast. Consequently, most voters don’t believe the polls, and that includes the disloyal opposition. As Tim Young writes in the Washington Times, Democrats don’t even believe these polls:
If Democrats believed the polls, you wouldn’t see The New York Times demanding real-time leftist fact checkers and Mr. Trump’s tax returns in order for the former vice president to show up for a debate. Surely, he would be able to show up and dominate Mr. Trump in a debate — after all, Americans in every poll dislike the president.… If Democrats believed the polls, why were there protests blocking the road to Mr. Trump’s 4th of July celebration and speech at Mount Rushmore?
This is why few election polls include the dangerous question, “Who do you think will win the upcoming election?” The pollsters know about the research discussed above, they are familiar with the predictive nature of voter expectation surveys, and they know that including such a deadly query will produce accurate results that will enrage their paymasters. They remember what happened to Nate Silver when he dared to suggest that Trump had a chance of defeating Hillary Clinton in 2016. The pollsters and the pundits who write about their findings don’t want to be canceled for telling the truth, that a number of polls contain what Professor Graefe calls citizen forecasts indicating Trump is going to win
"As Harry Enten recently noted at CNN, “An average of recent polls finds that a majority of voters (about 55%) believe that Trump will defeat Biden in the election."
That remark was based on two polls:
1: Fox news poll in February, which also also show Bernie knocking Biden out of the top spot:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-sanders-knocks-biden-out-of-first-majority-thinks-trump-wins
and
2: A Sept. 2019 Marist poll:
http://maristpoll.marist.edu/npr-pbs-newshour-marist-poll-results-analysis-8/#sthash.P7nnjwsO.FEEyUnpv.dpbs
Both of these were before Rump turned the US into the biggest Coronavirus failure on the planet - foreign nations are now restricting travelers from the US because Rump has made us into one of those "s41thole countries" he likes to deride.
"Across the last 100 days prior to the seven elections from 1988 to 2012, vote expectation surveys provided more accurate forecasts of election winners and vote shares than four established methods"
Conveniently, 2016 was left out of the dataset, because most people thought Hillary would win, and you wouldn't want to include data that countered your narrative, and proved your supposition wasn't always right.
Digging further:
"Our primary dataset consists of all the state-level electoral presidential college races from 1952 to 2008, where both the intention and expectation question are asked. In the 77 cases in which the intention and expectation question predict different candidates, the expectation question picks the winner 60 times, while the intention question only picked the winner 17 times. That is, 78% of the time that these two approaches disagree, the expectation data was correct."
So, if you exclude 2016, the expectation is wrong 22% of the time. If you include 2016, that error rate increases.
But I can see was desperate Trumpians would post this stuff - polls are showing their cult leader could very well lose - "bigly."
270towin.com is currently showing Biden winning the Jul 17th Consensus electoral college map 278 to 169, so even if all 91 tossups are given to Trump, he still loses.
WASHINGTON — If you’re Joe Biden and the Democrats, it seems like the polling couldn’t get any better right now — over the weekend, a Rasmussen poll found Biden up 3 points among 1500 LIKELY voters.
But the race is going to tighten, as Democratic data scientist David Schor warned in a recent interview, and Biden still has some work to do with Black and younger voters.
Especially when it comes to motivating them to vote in November.
According to our NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll we released last week only 74 percent of African-Americans said they had a high level of interest in the upcoming election.
That’s lower than on the eve of the 2008, and 2012 elections, the last tie Democrats won.
What’s more, Biden’s favorable/unfavorable rating among Black voters stands at 48 percent positive, 19 percent negative (+29) — hardly great with this steadfast Democratic voting bloc.
And that brings us to voters 18 to 34: 56 percent of them have high interest in the election, which is about equal to where it was it was in Oct. 2016 (54 percent).
Biden’s fav/unfav rating with these youngest voters also is abysmal — 26 percent positive, 44 percent negative (-18).
Bottom line: Biden still has to improve with these voters when it comes to election interest and likeability.
And that’s why he keeps telling everyone his VP pick list has a lot of African American women on it.
"I am not committed to naming any but the people I've named, and among them, there are four black women," Biden told MSNBC Monday.
Presumptive Democrat 2020 nominee Joe Biden tweeted Friday it’s “just plain dangerous” for American children to return to school this fall, a statement that goes against the “science” as explained by a number of physicians.
A strange thing is happening in the debate about how to reopen America’s 100,000-or-so schools in the fall. As the political debate is just heating up, the medical and scientific debate is essentially ending.
You would not know it watching the news coverage in the mainstream media, and certainly not by following the hysteria and fear-mongering on social media. But reopening the schools is the uncontroversial, data-based scientific consensus among the world’s medical and public health community.
This week, the director of the Centers for Disease Control said that “having the schools actually closed is a greater health threat to the children than having them open.” Last month, a New York Times survey of more than 500 epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists found that more than 70 percent of them would send their children to school, day care, or camp immediately or later in the summer.
The American Academy of Pediatrics agrees. Infectious diseases specialists Dr. William V. Raszka and Dr. Benjamin Lee just co-authored a review of all the most recent studies and data worldwide for the AAP’s official journal, Pediatrics, and it’s worth sharing their conclusion in full:
Almost 6 months into the pandemic, accumulating evidence and collective experience argue that children, particularly school-aged children, are far less important drivers of SARS-CoV-2 transmission than adults. Therefore, serious consideration should be paid toward strategies that allow schools to remain open, even during periods of COVID-19 spread. In doing so, we could minimize the potentially profound adverse social, developmental, and health costs that our children will continue to suffer until an effective treatment or vaccine can be developed and distributed or, failing that, until we reach herd immunity.
“The data are striking,” Raszka said in an interview about the study. “The key takeaway is that children are not driving the pandemic. After six months, we have a wealth of accumulating data showing that children are less likely to become infected and seem less infectious.”
Dr. Daniel Halperin, a public health professor at the University of North Carolina, told The Atlantic last month: “It’s logical that schools should open in the fall and summer camps, if it’s still possible, should open… I’m worried about my daughter driving, but I wouldn’t keep her home because there’s a one-out-of-a-million chance that she’s gonna die in a car accident.”
The last point is crucial. Life is full of serious risks for children, but COVID-19 is not one of them.
For instance, the CDC reported that 620 Americans younger than 25 died from flu and pneumonia in 2018, the most recent year of data available. To date, COVID has taken the lives of 30 children aged 1 to 14, and 149 aged 15 to 24. This means, based on the most current data, children are more than three times more likely to die of the flu or pneumonia than from COVID.
Or compare CDC’s data on youth deaths from other causes in 2018:
21,643 Americans under 25 years old died from suicide (more than 120 times more deadly than COVID),
15,864 youth died from unintentional injury (88 times more deadly than COVID), and
5,518 youth died from homicide (30 times more deadly than COVID).
The evidence is overwhelming: seniors, especially those with prior health conditions, are vulnerable to COVID in ways that children are not.
Meanwhile, there are enormous costs to keeping kids out of their classrooms. Distance learning is not the same as classroom instruction, with many children likely to fall behind academically, which could change the course of their lives. Social isolation is already an epidemic in its own right; school closures only exacerbate it.
There is no scientific or medical reason not to take all this into consideration when making policy choices. Many families can’t afford private schools or home-schooling, and shutdowns close private schools even when parents would rather they were open. Politicians and teachers unions, on the other hand, keep collecting their salaries from taxes no matter whether schools open or close.
Children’s lives have ground to a halt. Think back to your middle school years. Try to imagine a life with no sports, no summer camps, no church youth group, no birthday parties, no trips to the beach or the amusement park. No seeing your friends, grandparents or cousins. No recess football or playground hopscotch. No school plays, dances, or holiday socials. No having that unexpected teacher see something unique in you and inspire you to dream.
Too many people have convinced themselves school re-opening is a partisan issue. It’s not. In March, we didn’t know the risks, so we closed the schools. Six months later, the medical community has gathered the evidence and given us the all-clear.
Keeping schools closed isn’t cautious or prudent. It’s needlessly putting our children in danger.
President Trump said Democrats were intentionally keeping schools and public spaces closed during the coronavirus to prevent him from campaigning in person.
Is Joe Biden senile?
Trumo says "I don't want to say that. I'd say he's not competent to be president. To be president, you have to be sharp and tough and so many other things. He doesn't even come out of his basement. Joe doesn't know he's alive, OK? He doesn't know he's alive. Do the American people want that, number one. Number two, I built the greatest economy ever built anywhere in the world; not only of this country, anywhere in the world. Until we got hit with the China virus.
We got hit with the virus, shouldn't have happened, and we had to close up, we saved millions of lives. Now we've opened it up, got to go back to school. We're open. We've got to do things. We had the best job numbers we've ever had last month. We should have good ones coming up in two weeks. Look, I built the greatest economy in history, I'm now doing it again. You see the numbers; the numbers are through the roof.
The Democrats are purposely keeping their schools closed, keeping their states closed. I called Michigan, I want to have a big rally in Michigan. Do you know we're not allowed to have a rally in Michigan? Do you know we're not allowed to have a rally in Minnesota? Do you know we're not allowed to have a rally in Nevada? We're not allowed to have rallies."
"Is Joe Biden senile?"
You should really be asking that of the dude who recommended injecting disinfectant into your bodies to get rid of CV-19.
"He doesn't even come out of his basement."
He doesn't need to. Rump is doing everything he can to un-elect himself this fall. Did you see Rump's Chris Wallace interview? The man has no idea what's going on. He just keeps digging himself deeper.
Despite what The New York Times and Washington Post were loudly reporting in early 2017, the FBI had failed to find any evidence of Trump-Russia “collusion” — and indeed had found that the central source of those claims was a joke.
This is a key takeaway from the Justice Department’s latest release of documents from the FBI’s investigation.
One shocker is the summary of the long FBI interview that January with the “Primary Subsource” for the infamous Steele dossier — indeed, about the only source.
The FBI had learned that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had paid for British ex-spy Christopher Steele to produce dirt on Donald Trump, and the resulting dossier was pretty much the entire basis for any investigation (barring gossip about a drunken conversation with an on-paper-only Trump adviser).
And now Steele’s “factual” source admitted, essentially, to simply repackaging rumors — some of them from Internet “research.”
Yet the nation’s two most prestigious papers were reporting that the FBI was finding a treasure trove of scandal.
Such as a Feb. 14, 2017, Times piece declaring, “Phone records and intercepted calls show that members of Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and other Trump associates had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”
Ha! A memo from Trump-hating (now ex-) FBI man Peter Strzok shows that story was garbage: “We have not seen evidence of any individuals affiliated with the Trump team in contact with” intelligence officials.
The story also said top FBI officials trusted Steele, when they’d learned he was full of it.
Eager to smear the new president, the Times and Washington Post colleagues were repackaging lies from their anonymous sources.
Their front-page news was worse than fake — it was the exact opposite of the truth.
"You should really be asking that of the dude who recommended injecting disinfectant into your bodies to get rid of CV-19."
Does anyone really think Trump is senile?
What everyone needs to ask, and Biden will be asked, is why he has taken repeated cognitive capability tests.
"He doesn't need to."
Actually, someone who wants to be considered for the presidency does, in fact, need to leave the basement.
"Rump is doing everything he can to un-elect himself this fall."
Barack Obama said in 2016 that Trump will never be President.
Poor Barry, you can't say he didn't try.
Trump is currently painting Biden into a corner.
The latest is on the issue of opening schools.
If kids are still sitting home in November, with no rational medical reason, everyone will say Trump had more common sense than Biden.
"Did you see Rump's Chris Wallace interview? The man has no idea what's going on. He just keeps digging himself deeper."
Oh, I saw it. The media has focused their echo chamber on the fact that Trump said Biden wants to defund the police. Wallace, who thinks an interview is a debate, kept insisting Biden has said he doesn't want to defund the police.
But that's just rhetoric. Biden has said repeatedly in recent weeks that he favors reallocating police funds to mental health and social workers. That's what most people mean when they say "defund" the police.
"But that's just rhetoric. Biden has said repeatedly in recent weeks that he favors reallocating police funds to mental health and social workers. That's what most people mean when they say "defund" the police."
And yet you were the same one posting about what "defund the police" REALLY means as part of the right-wing attack on the policies - remember this from above?:
"Despite all these actions, some leftists are engaging in word gymnastics by stating that “defund” really means reform. Yet, in a New York Times op-ed titled “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police,” Mariame Kaba — an activist and an anti-crime organizer — clarified for Americans what “Defund the Police” means.
Kaba writes, “We don’t want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.” She criticized a police reform bill put forth by Democrats as something that was tried and failed in the past. She concluded the police couldn’t be reformed because they are always racist, violent, and “don’t catch the bad guys.”
We know what Rump meant, and why and how he was trying to use it to attack Biden. That's part of the Republican platform these days. Biden however, was smart enough not to put that in his platform - not that Rump would actually read it. Somehow that hardly sounds like the work of someone who is "senile."
"Actually, someone who wants to be considered for the presidency does, in fact, need to leave the basement."
Congratulations on finding the period key! But given that Biden keeps going up in the polls, it's hard to complain about what he's doing. As long as he keeps going up, he should do more of it.
The Rumpster keeps doing stupid stuff - like saying he won't commit to accepting the election results... all the while ranting about voter fraud. He's laying the rhetorical groundwork for keeping himself in office after he loses the election. And people can see how devoted his Cult of Personality is - they will support him. And elected Republican officials are too scared to disagree with him.
Most Americans abhor those kind of totalitarian inclinations. Which is probably why you didn't even mention it in regards to Wallace's interview.
If we want to keep our Democracy, American voters need to give Biden a landslide victory. Even Republicans have started to realize this, and they won't be staying home when it comes time to vote.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1285363642930798596.html
a little trip down memory lane showing how the media and Dems tried to mislead Americans about why they lost the 2016 election
they don't believe in Democracy and were trying to overthrow the judgment of the electorate
"And yet you were the same one posting about what "defund the police" REALLY means as part of the right-wing attack on the policies - remember this from above?:"
yes, I do remember that post
the commenter said "some leftists"
but Dem city councils all over America are voting to reallocate police funding to social and mental professional workers and calling it "defund the police"
"We know what Rump meant,"
yes, all people who have a puerile sense of humor about human anatomy south of one's navel are very good at deducing unspoken meaning
sure, everyone knows that
"Biden however, was smart enough"
you don't hear many saying he's smart enough
certainly hasn't been smart enough to win his four other tries at a presidential candidacy
"given that Biden keeps going up in the polls, it's hard to complain about what he's doing. As long as he keeps going up, he should do more of it."
don't know what polls you read but Biden is not going up in the polls
his support is less than it was last October
check it out:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html
as was discussed above, the expectation of the public is more important than voter preference when predicting a winner
which is why Dems, in very election, try to create an myth that their lead is invincible and resistance is futile
and their media supporters never poll the expectations
"he won't commit to accepting the election results..."
Al Gore went around for years telling everyone "hi, I used to be the next President of the United States"
Hillary and her slobbering TTF minions regularly refuse to accept the 2016 election
if Dems lose in November, the challenges of the elections will run right through Inauguration Day
"all the while ranting about voter fraud."
mail voting is an obvious way for Dems, who always say they didn't really lose, to rationalize cheating get revenge
the reason Obama thought it was OK to use Nixonian IRS abuse against the Tea Party in 2012 was Dem rage about Citizens United
they couldn't accept the Supreme Court ruling
"totalitarian inclinations"
the left's cancel culture is classic totalitarianism
"they won't be staying home when it comes time to vote."
oh, I can tell you who will
people who generally support Dems but just can't get jazzed about Biden!!
Due to popular demand, the Virtual Mock Trial returns for two encore presentations this weekend. Don’t miss your chance to watch the event hailed by MD Theatre Guide as "an hour of delicious fun that weds law and theatre seamlessly."
Judge Merrick B. Garland presides over the Supreme Court of Athens as prominent law professionals explore the link between classical theatre and modern-day law as they argue who has to pay to refund tickets for a canceled performance of Pyramus and Thisbe from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The Virtual Mock Trial is moderated by stage and screen star Tracie Thoms (STC's Oedipus Plays, Broadway's Falsettos, The Devil Wears Prada). Plus, you will still be able to chat live with other viewers and act as jury to vote in the trial.
The two encore presentations are Friday, July 24 at 8:00 p.m. and Saturday, July 25 at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are free for current students and summer law associates. Click below to order, or call the Box Office at 202.547.1122.
George Will plans to break the habit of a lifetime for the 2020 election.
The longtime conservative commentator said Monday he’ll cast his vote for presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden in order to help defeat President Donald Trump at the ballot box.
It will likely be the first time that he has ever voted for a Democrat, Will told USA Today’s Susan Page during a conversation for The Aspen Institute.
“I’m a big believer in parties, in party strength and party tickets. Not this year,” said Will, who quit the GOP in June 2016 in protest of Trump’s then-imminent nomination as the Republican presidential candidate.
Will, a vocal and frequent critic of Trump and his administration, also predicted a “decisive victory” for Biden. He anticipated that proceedings would be wrapped up by 11 p.m. EST on election night, with Biden winning several swing states.
“I think that’s important because the president has already announced he might not accept the outcome. ... Therefore, it’s wise to have a tsunami of popular votes,” said Will, calling his forecast “risky but fun.”
"George Will plans to break the habit of a lifetime for the 2020 election"
not actually news
this pompous RINO has never been much of a Republican
for example, he has always opposed any tax cuts
"for example, he has always opposed any tax cuts"
Until there's a balanced budget, tax cuts will just continue to grow the national debt. Republicans are blissfully unaware that this might even be a problem.
Unless this is reversed, it will eventually lead to a debt crisis, inflicting major damage on our economy.
This is something real conservatives used to be concerned about.
Not so much though since they've been drinking all the orange Kool-Aid.
I can't blame George for disowning a party that has become so fiscally irresponsible. History is full of nations that spent themselves into disaster. A real conservative would make sure that didn't happen.
It’s my America-versary, the day my mother and I arrived in the United States. I was just 1 year old, and America was deep in her 1970s blues.
Every July 20, we celebrate. It’s up there with birthdays and anniversaries for our family.
It’s the day we became free.
My father had been granted permission to leave the Soviet Union first and had arrived in Brooklyn the previous summer. Nineteen seventy-seven was a particularly tough time for New York and the nation. It would be two more years before President Jimmy Carter would deliver his infamous “malaise” speech, but the crisis was in full view when my father landed at JFK Airport.
A few days after his arrival, the 1977 blackout happened. The lights went out in New York and, with them, the sense of basic security. Riots raged; fires and looting were widespread. It wouldn’t have been crazy for a new immigrant to wonder if he had made a mistake.
When my mother and I arrived (a year later), the country was in disarray. The overwhelming feeling was that America’s best days were behind her.
Then things began to turn around. It wasn’t easy, but America achieved a remarkable upward climb. President Ronald Reagan was elected on a message of hope. He created favorable conditions at the federal level, and the American people did the rest.
It would be 13 more years before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Thanks to his policies, Gotham became the safest big city in the country and an urban model for the rest of the world.
Perhaps these astonishing successes lulled many into believing that no work was required to maintain our security and prosperity. We are just beginning to pay the price for such complacency.
Believing in America, and that the core of our country is good and sound, shouldn’t be tied to any president or political party. Yet the hard left continually pushes the line that America is hopeless and terrible. The Democratic Party too often follows along. It isn’t good for any of us when half the country’s population thinks we suck.
In January 2012, I attended an event held by WNYC New York Public Radio. It was very likely that I was the only conservative in the room. The WNYC host, Brian Lehrer, asked a room full of New York liberals — people who should have been thrilled by President Barack Obama’s first term — who was optimistic about the future of America.
I was one of only two people to raise their hands.
Last year, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggested that America offered most citizens little more than “garbage,” owing to inequality and other social ills. Normally, when someone insults America, I bristle, my nostrils flair, and I’m ready to defend my country. But this time, I smiled. It was funny.
Here was a member of Congress, supremely privileged and supremely unaware of how lucky she was to have been born American. Her rage and fury, her provincial mindset, are products of her ignorance. She doesn’t know what people around the world live through. She doesn’t know garbage.
Bless her heart!
Yet America-hating has real consequences. There is a movement now to erase America’s imperfect history. Every day brings a new online hot take about how we should get rid of our National Anthem or remove Thomas Jefferson’s statue from New York’s City Hall.
We should resist this movement. Our collective history matters, and it shouldn’t be discarded.
There’s irony in the fact that the party which considers itself “pro-immigrant” is also the one that wants to destroy our country’s rich and complicated heritage. If Democrats believe immigrants come to America to be anything but American, they are kidding themselves. My family and millions of others came here longing to be free, to say what we want, to worship how we want and to raise American children who will know nothing but freedom.
On the day my mother and I became citizens and said the Pledge of Allegiance in a room full of new Americans, there were few dry eyes in the house. Don’t end our patriotic displays because an influential fringe has decided they are somehow evil.
We are in a difficult moment in our nation’s history. But if an immigrant family — arriving in a new country in the tumultuous late 1970s — could believe in the goodness of America and have hope for a better day, so could we all. America’s best days are ahead, if we remember what made us great in the first place.
America's mortality rate from COVID is not the world's worst, but it's not great either
but it's a big country and our high rate is driven by the dismal performance of blue state governors, led by the worst governor in America, Mario Cuomo's son, Andrew
here's a chart with the mortality rate for each state
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/country/united-states/
as you can see, almost three months after red states began to open up, the top five worst states are in New England
the top ten then has four more liberal bastions: DC, Maryland, Illinois, Michigan
Arkansas, a state that never closed anything is in 37th place
there will be big political implications in November
I wonder what everyone will do on November 4th, when the pandemic ends...
"Until there's a balanced budget, tax cuts will just continue to grow the national debt. Republicans are blissfully unaware that this might even be a problem.
Unless this is reversed, it will eventually lead to a debt crisis, inflicting major damage on our economy."
you are apparently blissfully unaware that the budget is spending
doing less of it will will balance the budget
only spend what you have
it's like magic!
problem with trying to plug the budget with taxes is the government takes over the economy and economic decisions become inefficient because political factors dominate
"This is something real conservatives used to be concerned about."
economic theory has become much more sophisticated since Nelson Rockefeller was seen as a typical Republican
nowadays, the rich fatcats gravitate to the Democratic Party
we still are wondering what Hillary said in that speech to the bankers!
she had the richest men in the country (Buffet, Bezos and Gates) behind her and still lost!
"Not so much though since they've been drinking all the orange Kool-Aid."
actually, knowledge of the stimulus powers of tax cuts preceded Trump
JFK, Reagan, George W all created miracles with the trick
"I can't blame George for disowning a party that has become so fiscally irresponsible. History is full of nations that spent themselves into disaster. A real conservative would make sure that didn't happen."
see, you inadvertently confirmed I was right
history shows nations spend themselves into disaster
no nation failed because it didn't tax people enough
Last month, a book was published, called “Apocalypse Never,” which debunks popular environmental myths. Among them: that humans are causing a sixth mass extinction and that climate change is making natural disasters worse.
CNN’s top climate reporter compared it to an advertisement for cigarettes. An environmental journalist with nearly half a million followers on Twitter accused it of promoting “white supremacy.”
The writer hardly a climate denier. In fact, he has been a climate activist for 20 years and an environmental activist for more than 30. Governments, including the US Congress, regularly ask him to offer testimony as an energy expert. And this year, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asked him to serve as an expert reviewer of its next major report.
He decided to speak out last year, after it became clear that alarmism was harming mental health. A major survey of 30,000 people around the world found that nearly half believed climate change would make humanity extinct. Mental-health professionals now routinely find themselves addressing adolescent anxiety over climate. In January, pollsters found that one in five UK children reported having nightmares about it.
And yet the IPCC doesn’t predict billions or even millions of deaths from climate change. That’s in part because economic development and preparedness mitigate natural disasters, diseases and other environmental impacts of climate change. And scientists expect our ability to mitigate harms to expand and improve long into the future.
There has been a 92 percent decline in the per-decade death toll from natural disasters since its peak in the 1920s. In that decade, 5.4 million people died from natural disasters. In the 2010s, just 0.4 million did. The decline occurred during a period when the global population nearly quadrupled and temperatures rose more than 1 degree centigrade over pre-industrial levels.
Would deaths have been even lower had temperatures not risen that 1 degree? Maybe, but we will never know. Huge reductions in deaths outweighed any increase in deaths from more forceful disasters. Could future temperature increases reverse the trend of declining mortality?
Perhaps, but the IPCC doesn’t predict that happening. That’s partly because — again — we are so much better at protecting people from natural disasters, climate-fueled or not.
Climate alarmists steadfastly ignore our capacity to adapt. To take just one example, France in 2006 had 4,000 fewer deaths from a heat wave than anticipated thanks to improved health care, an early-warning system and greater public consciousness in response to a deadly heat wave three years earlier.
Even poor, climate-vulnerable nations like Bangladesh saw deaths decline massively thanks to low-cost weather surveillance and warning systems and storm shelters.
As a sizzling July continues, here’s what to know about climate change and weather
Some have said that climate change will make epidemics like COVID-19 more frequent or more severe, but the main factors behind the novel-coronavirus pandemic had nothing to do with climate and everything to do with the failure of the Chinese regime to protect public health.
It’s why the IPCC names “poverty alleviation, public health interventions such as the provision of water and sanitation and early-warning and response system for disasters and epidemics” — not emissions reductions — as the keys to lowering disease risk in the future.
So why do some alarmists claim that climate change is making disasters worse? In part, it’s so they can use the world’s most visual and dramatic events, from Hurricane Sandy to California’s forest fires, to make the issue more salient with voters.
If it were acknowledged that Hurricane Sandy’s damage owed overwhelmingly to New York failure to modernize its flood-control systems or that California’s forest fires were due to the buildup of wood fuel after decades of fire suppression, alarmist journalists, scientists and activists would be deprived of the visually powerful events and “news hooks” they need to scare people, raise money and advocate climate policies.
Climate alarmism isn’t just about money. It’s also about power. Elites have used climate alarmism to justify efforts to control food and energy policies in their home nations and around the world for more than three decades.
In just the last decade, climate alarmists have successfully redirected funding from the World Bank and similar institutions away from economic development and toward charitable endeavors, such as solar panels for villagers, which can’t power growth.
Contrary to the claims of CNN’s top environment reporter, using energy that emits carbon dioxide isn’t like smoking cigarettes. People need to consume significant amounts of energy in order to enjoy decent standards of living. Nobody needs to smoke cigarettes.
In the end, climate alarmism is powerful because it has emerged as the alternative religion for supposedly secular people, providing many of the same psychological benefits as traditional faith.
Climate alarmism gives them a purpose: to save the world from climate change. It offers them a story that casts them as heroes. And it provides a way for them to find meaning in their lives — while retaining the illusion that they are people of science and reason, not superstition and fantasy.
There is nothing wrong with religious faith and often a great deal right about it. Religions have long provided people with the meaning, purpose and consolations they need to weather life’s many challenges. Religions can be a guide to positive, pro-social and ethical behavior.
The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly destructive. It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper spiritual needs.
Happily, real-world events, starting with the coronavirus pandemic, are undermining the notion that climate change is an “emergency” or “crisis.” After all, it was a disease that brought civilization to a halt, not climate-fueled natural disasters. And while COVID-19 has killed more than half a million people and counting, alarmist scientists struggle to explain how climate change will make diseases and disasters worse.
Meanwhile, emissions are declining in much of the world. In Europe, emissions in 2018 were 23 percent below 1990 levels. In the United States, emissions fell 15 percent from 2005 to 2016. And emissions are likely to peak and start to decline in developing nations, including China and India, within the next decade.
As a result, most experts believe that global temperatures are unlikely to rise more than 3 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. No amount of warming is ideal, since it will change conditions for both people and wildlife. But 3 degrees isn’t catastrophic for, much less an existential threat to, human societies and economies.
For pointing out these basic facts, the author of Apocalypse Never has been smeared, bizarrely, as a racist. Yet readers will discover that, far from being a defense of white supremacy, “Apocalypse Never” exposes European and North American environmentalists for promoting discriminatory anti-development policies toward poor African, Asian and Latin-American nations.
The activists and their media allies censor news articles. But eventually, the public will get to review the evidence and realize that the censors are wrong.
Hopefully, after the public reckoning, everyone, particularly anxious adolescents, will go from seeing climate change as the end of the world to viewing it as a highly manageable problem.
in the US, Arkansas locked down nothing and has a better death rate than 36 other states
in Europe, Sweden did nothing and has a slightly better death rate than England, Italy, and Spain, all of which had a strict lockdown
there is just no evidence that lockdowns are effective in lowering the death rate
https://www.outkick.com/sweden-had-a-far-better-covid-outcome-than-new-york-and-did-nothing/
The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, or MoCA, test discussed by President Trump and Chris Wallace is ‘not an IQ test,’ Dr. Ziad Nasreddine tells MarketWatch
The doctor who developed a widely used test that screens for early signs of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease says that cognition is “a pertinent question” during a presidential election with presumptive candidates over age 70. Problem is, both sides of the political divide are interpreting this test incorrectly.
Dr. Ziad Nasreddine in 1996 developed and copyrighted the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) test, which is a 10-minute examination usually performed with pen and paper that measures the strengths of different areas of the brain related to cognitive domains, such as short-term memory, spatial awareness and executive functioning. (Remote testing, including via an app on the Apple US:AAPL iPad, has been expanded during the pandemic.)
And he tells MarketWatch that the MoCA Clinic & Institute has been inundated with calls and emails over the past week or so, ever since President Donald Trump bragged in a phone interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity several days ago that he had recently “aced” a cognitive test at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Trump also said that medical staff were “very surprised” by how well he did. “They said, ‘That’s an unbelievable thing. Rarely does anybody do what you just did.’ ”
While the White House did not release any details of this most recent test, the president did take the MoCA exam in 2018, when he was said to have gotten a perfect score of 30, which has put this particular test in the spotlight. What’s more, during a second Fox News interview aired on Sunday, Chris Wallace told the president that the MoCA is “not the hardest test” and even posted graphics of one of the questions, which asked the test taker to identify drawings of animals. Trump responded by challenging his presumptive Democratic rival Joe Biden to “take a test right now.” What’s more, Trump said that the test questions get harder and that the MoCA exam question that Wallace shared was a “misrepresentation.”
And during yet a third Fox interview on Wednesday, he described the test (which sounds like the MoCA) in more detail -- particularly a memory question that asks to recall five words.
“It’s, like, you’ll go: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV. So they’ll say, ‘Could you repeat that?’ So I said, ‘Yeah. So it’s: Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV,’” he said.
But as many doctors and armchair critics have been quick to argue on Twitter US:TWTR and Facebook US:FB, the MoCA exam should not be difficult for someone who is not cognitively impaired.
“This is not an IQ test or the level of how a person is extremely skilled or not,” Nasreddine agreed in a call with MarketWatch. “The test is supposed to help physicians detect early signs of Alzheimer’s, and it became very popular because it was a short test, and very sensitive for early impairment.”
Nasreddine explained that each question is related to a different part of the brain. He declined to share a sample test page, as he and his peers are growing increasingly concerned that the test might not be as accurate anymore, because too many elements have been shared online. This allows people to potentially practice the questions to perform better on the exam. In fact, MoCA expressly notes on its website that “it is prohibited to publish the MoCA test and/or instructions and/or a link leading to these in newspaper and magazine articles (including electronic articles).”...
...Sweden never imposed a total shutdown of nonessential businesses. It closed universities and banned gatherings of more than 50 people, including sports events, and discouraged domestic travel. But most bars, restaurants, schools, salons, and stores were allowed to remain open, with largely voluntary social distancing. “If Spain and Italy got hit by an early Covid-19 tsunami,” said Peter Kasson of the University of Virginia School of Medicine and Sweden’s Uppsala University, “Sweden said, ‘let’s go swimming.’”
Many of its citizens, however, didn’t jump into the deep end. For one thing, “a lot of Swedes went well beyond the official recommendations for social distancing, individually taking the kinds of actions that in other countries were mandated,” said Kasson, co-author of a recent study of Sweden’s strategy. “A lot of people self-isolated at home, and companies promoted working from home even though it wasn’t mandated. That shows that individual decisions that reduce [viral transmission] can have a substantial effect on national outcomes.”
Among those individual decisions: 58% of Swedes didn’t meet friends, and 74% stayed home during their spare time, researchers reported in May.
Sweden also issued its distancing recommendations early. Imposing less restrictive policies right away can be more effective at slowing transmission and preventing cases than stricter measures later in an outbreak.
In contrast, if Swedes had done everything they were allowed to do (especially since face coverings were never required nationally), such as shop and socialize at the same levels they had pre-pandemic, “it would likely have led to runaway infection,” Kasson said. But “Sweden is a place with a very strong embrace of government authority.” When that authority said keep gatherings small, Swedes “took individual actions that went beyond the mandated measures,” he said.
Sweden is 18th in the world in Covid-19 cases per million people, with 7,524 as of Tuesday. That’s better than the U.S. (10,626), but much worse than European countries that imposed shutdowns. Sweden is seventh in deaths per million people (with 549; the U.S. is ninth, with 419), though the U.K., Spain, and Italy are worse, possibly because of older populations, denser cities, and more imported cases early on. But a death rate nearly 12 times Norway’s is hardly reason for celebration. (In fairness, however, there is evidence that one reason for Sweden’s high death toll is that when elderly people contracted Covid-19, they did not receive aggressive treatment, Kasson found; if they had, about one-third might have survived.)
Because factors that kept Sweden’s numbers from being even more dire are largely absent in much of the U.S., there is growing concern that this country will blow past Sweden’s death rate and exceed its case rate even further.
Some states, especially in the South, began easing restrictions in late April. But many people seemed to take “bars and restaurants can reopen with capacity limits” as “back to normal!” An entrenched culture of “don’t tell me what to do” just about ensured the opposite of Swedes’ placing greater restrictions on themselves than the government did. And that’s what happened.
In early-reopening Tennessee, 20- and 30-somethings packed Nashville clubs, skin-to-skin with scores of strangers (and few face coverings). That pattern repeated from pool parties at Lake of the Ozarks to bar openings, such as one in Michigan blamed for more than 100 cases.
Call it “individualism, cultural libertarianism, atomism, selfishness, lack of social trust, suspicion of authority,” The Week columnist Damon Linker wrote, “it amounts to a refusal on the part of lots of Americans to think in terms of … what’s best for the community, of the common or public good. Each of us thinks we know what’s best for ourselves. We resent being told what to do.”...
Monthly Anomalies of Global Average Surface Temperature in June (1891 - 2020, preliminary value)
The monthly anomaly of the global average surface temperature in June 2020 (i.e. the average of the near-surface air temperature over land and the SST) was +0.41°C above the 1981-2010 average (+0.76°C above the 20th century average), and was the 2nd warmest since 1891. On a longer time scale, global average surface temperatures have risen at a rate of about 0.73°C per century.
Five Warmest Years (Anomalies)
1st. 2019(+0.45°C), 2nd. 2020,2016,2015(+0.41°C), 5th. 2017(+0.36°C)
"IF GLOBAL WARMING THREATENS LIFE ON THE PLANET WHY DO DEMS OPPOSE NUCLEAR ENERGY..."
This Democrat supports using the power of the sun.
Suggested reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_and_incidents
"... AND FRACKING?!?"
Fracking hurts the environment.
More suggested reading:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_hydraulic_fracturing_in_the_United_States
EPA's Study of Hydraulic Fracturing for Oil and Gas and Its Potential Impact on Drinking Water Resources
Dads With Leaf Blowers Join Wall Of Moms In Portland Protests
The Portland dads are bringing leaf blowers to the protest to combat the tear gas set forth by police
For nearly two months, the people of Portland, Oregon have been taking to the streets to call for police reform and to protest police brutality against the Black community. Recently, a group of local moms gathered to form a wall between protesters and the federal agents who were dispatched to Portland to terrorize the city under the guise of “ending the protests.” Now Portland dads are joining the moms in the streets, complete with leaf blowers, to call for an end against police-sanctioned violence and murder against Black people.
Why leaf blowers? Because the militarized police force that has overrun Portland is weaponizing tear gas against protestors, and these dads are using their favorite power tool to blow the dangerous substance away from the crowd — which in recent days, has grown massive.
Many photos and videos with the dads — marked by their orange shirts — are making their way to Twitter and other social media outlets. Some photos show dads holding signs that say, “FATHERS AGAINST FASCISM” and referring to themselves as the “PDX Dad Pod.”
The official PDX Dad Pod Twitter account shared a call for dads on yesterday, telling them where they can buy their own leaf blower and where to join the march. “Come stand up for your town, your neighbors, your kids. Look for the other orange shirts, use the buddy system. And remember, safety first.”
“For the 1st time last night the Portland Dad Brigade came out to protest. Everyone in orange is a Dad,” Twitter user Joshua Potash wrote. “Moms around the country are organizing local Walls of Moms. Dads around the country, we need you too.”
Like many cities across the country, Portland’s protests began after the murder of George Floyd. They’ve continued for over 50 days and have been peaceful — on the part of those protesting. Seeing the unrest in the city, Trump claimed he was ready to “dominate” it. Recently, federal agents were given orders to combat the protests by clashing with civilians and shooting tear gas directly at them. They even gassed the Wall of Moms over the weekend, as seen in this disturbing Instagram video.
According to Newsweek report, the Wall of Moms organization is a “PDX-based network of women and non-binary mother-identifying folks dedicated to supporting the current civil rights movement to end police brutality by defending and supporting BLM protesters on the front line and online.”
And now PDX dads are joining together with PDX moms in a powerful display of solidarity against racial injustice. In another video, captured by Twitter user and journalist Marissa J. Lang, a Portland dad uses his leaf blower to alleviate the gas from above the crowd.
Another video shows the size of the crowd that assembled Monday night. “Out here with the moms and dads of Portland manifesting dissent against racist police and federal boots on our streets,” Twitter user Alexander Reid Ross shared.
A Portland protester named Doug Smith tells Truthout.org that the use of leaf blowers to counteract chemical agents could be more effective if enough people show up with them.
“Honestly, I think you’d need scores of leaf blowers with a phalanx of dads holding their ground under pretty perfect conditions to use them effectively in the dispersal of chemical agents,” he said. “But they are an iconic symbol of a tool dads use to clean up messes.”
DICTATOR RUMP APPARENTLY DOES NOT BELIEVE IN FREEDOM OF SPEECH, PEACEFUL ASSEMBLY, AND STATES RIGHTS
"The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own consciences.”— C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)
Serious issues are implicating personal liberty and public safety in Portland, Ore. The police are not enforcing local and state laws. They are refraining from doing so because they have been so instructed by elected public officials.
The Supreme Court has ruled that state and local elected officials — not police — are empowered to determine the depth and breadth of law enforcement. And the court has also ruled that the police have no legal obligation to protect lives and property.
Stated differently, the police cannot be sued for their willful failures. The remedy for those failures — according to the court — is to elect different officials who will deploy police assets differently. Yet, the police have a moral obligation to protect lives and property. For what other purpose have we hired and empowered them?
All persons have a natural right to protect their lives and property, especially when the government fails to do so. If its failures are systemic and repeated, it is the duty of the people to alter or abolish the government. We know this from the Declaration of Independence.
Portland has been the center of anti-police demonstrations this summer. The neighborhood around the state Capitol has endured nearly two months of nighttime demonstrations. Most of these are peaceful; some are destructive.
Last weekend, with no notice or local consent, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security sent teams of agents — untrained in crowd control and wearing military fatigues — onto Portland’s streets. Their uniforms bore no governmental, administrative or personal names, just the word “Police” on masking tape. They descended upon the city in unmarked SUVs and began grabbing people indiscriminately off the streets, without regard to the person’s lawful presence or personal behavior.
According to the account of one victim, he was walking peacefully in the downtown area, observing the chaos, when five masked men in fatigues exited an unmarked SUV, grabbed him and pulled him into the car. They tied his hands with plastic behind his back. They pulled his cap over his face. They kept him for two hours and then released him. They filed no charges against him.
They had no basis for this kidnapping.
It was a kidnapping, not an arrest. An arrest is a lawful restraint by a legitimate government authority pursuant to a warrant issued by a judge specifically naming the person to be arrested, or pursuant to probable cause of crime personally observed by the arresting officers. Neither of these was the case in Portland.
And some victims were even less fortunate than those kidnapped. They were assaulted with pepper spray and hit with nonlethal exploding bullets that stun, hurt and disorient. The bullets can harm the eyes, heart and liver. I saw a video of a young man riding a bicycle away from the chaos. Yet, he was attacked by five of these feds.
An Annapolis graduate and Navy veteran asked a small group of the feds by what constitutional authority they were present in Portland. They responded by pepper-spraying his face and beating his hand with a baton, shattering numerous bones in his hand.
Portland is in America, right? What’s going on here?...
...This is how totalitarianism begins
On Monday, DHS acknowledged that these thugs are its police and said their behavior somehow will bring stability to downtown Portland. The phrase that Acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf used — mimicking his boss— was “law and order.”
But there is nothing lawful or orderly about what these agents did. Their activities in Portland are unlawful, unconstitutional and harmful.
They are unlawful because federal agents are selectively arresting folks and not even pretending to be enforcing local and state laws. Under federal law, the feds may not deploy police or military domestically unless the state Legislature or the state governor requests it. Neither has done so for Portland.
The feds’ activities are unconstitutional because they are using government force to arrest people without probable cause or arrest warrants. We know there is no legal basis for these “arrests,” as they have not charged anyone.
Moreover, this is so harmful and terrifying — being kidnapped, handcuffed, blindfolded, not spoken to and then released, all for no stated reason — it will chill others from public dissent.
The First Amendment to the Constitution requires the government to protect speech, not assault those who exercise it. If these indiscriminate beatings and kidnappings are intended to deter folks from publicly dissenting, it is profoundly unconstitutional, counterproductive and will be costly to the federal government.
Under the Constitution, the ability to regulate for health and safety belongs to the states and local governments. The feds simply do not have the lawful authority to fill in gaps in local law enforcement, no matter how offended they may be.
This is how totalitarianism begins. The feds claim that federal property needs protection and the folks assigned to do so need help. When help arrives, it does so by surprise, under cover of darkness and shielded by anonymity. Then, the reinforcements beat and arrest and harm protestors because their bosses in Washington do not approve of the protestors’ message.
Public dissent against the government is a core personal freedom. It is as American as apple pie. It was integral to the creation of our republic. Government repression of dissent is totalitarian. It is as un-American as the governments against which we fought world wars to preserve our core freedoms.
July 8, 2020 The US reaches 3 million coronavirus cases. Here's what happened in the days leading up to it
July 23, 2020 US surpasses 4 million reported coronavirus cases as hospitalizations near record
"California is one state that is managing the epidemic relatively well. They have a plan, they have a governor who is taking active leadership, they have kept the numbers down, especially in the Northern part of the state. The people worked together, followed the protocols; looking good."
The state was the first to issue a stay-at-home order, helping to control an early outbreak. It has now surpassed New York for the most known cases of the virus.
California’s caseload is exploding, with rising deaths and hospitalizations. As quickly as things had opened up, they have shut down again.
California is now experiencing a sense of déjà vu, with coronavirus deaths rising and hospitalizations at a level similar to the spring peak.
California is now in the unwelcome position of having found itself at the center of the pandemic twice over.
California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order this spring, helping to control an early outbreak. But after a reopening, cases surged, leading to a new statewide mask mandate and the closure of bars and indoor dining again. With more than 420,000 known cases, California has surpassed New York to have the most recorded cases of any state, and it set a single-day record on Wednesday with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.
And as California struggles once again to contain the virus, the multitude of challenges have collided in every corner of the state.
Gov. Gavin Newsom is wrestling with how to convey a consistent message, while dealing with local officials who have resisted both new shutdowns and enforcing a mandatory mask order. Rural, conservative areas of the state remain relatively unscathed with low case counts, while cases in highly Democratic Los Angeles are skyrocketing. The city’s mayor, Eric M. Garcetti, has warned that a new stay-at-home order could come down in the coming days.
Can Canadians be trusted to choose a leader for their own country?
Trudeau is as corrupt as Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden combined.
But Americans are smart enough not to elect such people!
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, is embroiled in another controversy of his own making that’s inflicting political damage on him and his administration.
The Canadian leader is struggling to contain the rapid spread of a firestorm sparked by his plan to award a sole-source contract to a powerful charity and fueled by revelations that members of his family have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in speaking fees by the organization over the past half decade.
Trudeau’s trouble began building momentum a few weeks ago after his government announced the deal to pay WE Charity up to C$43 million to administer a C$912-million student grant program as part of Canada’s Covid-19 response. The group works on international development projects and classroom programs, mostly in the U.S. and Canada, that teach youth about civic engagement.
The public and parliamentary reaction in Canada to the news and further revelations of speaking fees and travel expenses paid to family members of Trudeau and Finance Minister Bill Morneau has been swift and harsh.
Polls suggest the still-emerging controversy around WE Charity has already chewed away at Trudeau’s approval ratings, which saw a lift after the start of the pandemic. Rivals have demanded Morneau’s resignation and the fallout risks nudging opponents closer to defeating Trudeau’s minority Liberal government, triggering another election. Canada's ethics commissioner has launched investigations into Trudeau and Morneau.
Trudeau has had numerous scandals, including images of him wearing brownface 20 years ago that surfaced during last year's election campaign.
The ethics commissioner found last year that Trudeau broke conflict-of-interest law after the prime minister and his staff repeatedly urged his former attorney general to reach a plea-bargain deal with the SNC-Lavalin engineering firm, which faced corruption charges.
Trudeau also made an embarrassing 2018 trip to India when he disgraced Canada by appearing in stereotyped Indian garb, insulting his hosts!
In late 2018, the ethics commissioner also concluded Trudeau violated violated ethics law over two all-expenses-paid family trips at the Aga Khan's residence in the Bahamas.
Weeks after the April contract announcement, the public learned how WE Charity had paid Trudeau’s mother and brother more than C$300,000 in speaking fees. His wife, Sophie, had been working for WE as an ambassador and Trudeau himself has spoken at their events.
Maybe the US should help Canada reform its corrupt political system.
That's what Biden was supposed to do for Ukraine!
No, it will not be like a miracle, Donnie.
Stop lying to us, Donnie.
Trump is the king of lies
TTF Troll -- explain to us why Rump supporters want to harm Dr. Fauci and his family.
Do they think killing the messenger will be that miracle Donnie lies to us about?
It won't.
Birx calls Florida, Texas and California 'three New Yorks' as outbreaks surge
White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx called the outbreak “very serious” and “very real.”
Several months after New York state was the epicenter of the nation’s coronavirus outbreak, White House coronavirus task force coordinator Deborah Birx said the country is now dealing with “three New Yorks” as cases surge in Texas, Florida and California.
“I just want to make it clear to the American public, what we have right now are essentially three New Yorks with these three major states,” Birx told NBC’s “Today” show.
“We’re really having to respond as an American people, and that’s why you hear us calling for masks and increased social distancing to really stop the spread of this epidemic,” Birx said.
The three states combined tallied more than 500 deaths Thursday, and Florida and Texas hit record highs for the weekly average of single-day deaths. California earlier this week surpassed New York as the state with the most reported coronavirus cases.
New York has confirmed 414,000 coronavirus cases and still leads the country with more than 32,000 coronavirus-related deaths. During the peak of its outbreak, the state had several days when it recorded more than 500 deaths. New York’s daily number of COVID-19 cases and deaths has since fallen dramatically.
When asked about her response to people who still doubt how threatening the coronavirus is and dismiss the crisis as overblown, Birx described the outbreak as “very serious and very real,” calling on Americans to act responsibly.
“It’s hard for people to understand how deeply you have to clamp down," Birx said. "We have to change our behavior now before this virus completely moves back up through the north."
Her comments come one day after the U.S. topped 4 million confirmed cases with more than 144,000 deaths since the pandemic began. The number of daily COVID-19 related deaths also surpassed 1,000 for the third consecutive day Thursday.
On Wednesday, President Trump acknowledged that the outbreak in the U.S. may “get worse before it gets better,” and asked all Americans to wear face coverings to help slow the spread of COVID-19.
FINALLY!!
RUMP SAID THE RIGHT THING. --- WEAR A FACE COVERING
TOO BAD HE CAN'T TAKE RESPONSIBILITY AND ADMIT HE LIED TO US
IT'S NOT A HOAX, WHICH IS ONE OF MANY RUMP LIES:
“when we get into April, in the warmer weather—that has a very negative effect on that, and that type of a virus.”
“It’s going to disappear. One day it’s like a miracle—it will disappear.”
If the economic shutdown continues, deaths by suicide “definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about” for COVID-19 deaths.
“Coronavirus numbers are looking MUCH better, going down almost everywhere,” and cases are “coming way down.”
The pandemic is “fading away. It’s going to fade away.”
The pandemic is “getting under control.”
“99%” of COVID-19 cases are “totally harmless.”
Referring to criticism of his administration’s response, Trump tweeted: “Compare that to the Obama/Sleepy Joe disaster known as H1N1 Swine Flu. Poor marks ... didn’t have a clue!”
LIAR!
In 2009, the CDC quickly flagged the new flu strain in California and began releasing antiflu drugs from the national stockpile two weeks later. A vaccine was available in six months.
People Who Are Less Religious Are More Accepting of Gayness, Report Finds
There’s been a remarkable shift, globally, over the past two decades when it comes to acceptance of gayness. Even in countries like Kenya, where being gay was once so taboo that support for gay people was virtually non-existent, support is now in the double digits.
That’s according to a new report from the Pew Research Center, based on the Spring 2019 Global Attitudes Survey.
In the United States, 72% of people now say being gay should be accepted, compared to 49% in 2007, which is a huge improvement (though we still lag behind other wealthier countries).
But let’s just look at how religion plays into this.
It’s no surprise that the more religious people are, the more bigoted they are. This survey didn’t break down the results by denomination, though it did ask people if religion was “important” to them. Among those in the U.S. who said religion was “very important” to them, only 57% said gayness should be accepted by society. Among those who don’t care much about religion? The number jumps to 86%.
That difference ranks among the highest in the world. (In Israel, the numbers are 22% and 62%, respectively.)
While we don’t get the denomination breakdown, the analysis does include this passage pointing out that non-religious Americans are far more accepting of gay people than Christians.
… those who are religiously unaffiliated, sometimes called religious “nones,” (that is, those who identify as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular”) tend to be more accepting of gayness. Though the opinions of religiously unaffiliated people can vary widely, in virtually every country surveyed with a sufficient number of unaffiliated respondents, “nones” are more accepting of gayness than the affiliated.
The more our nation moves away from organized religion — thanks, Donald Trump! — the more welcoming we will be to LGBTQ people. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when faith-based hatred isn’t standing in the way.
"should be accepted"
such a vague statement makes the survey meaningless
what does "accepted" mean?
"accept" what- hmosexuality or homosexuals?
"But let’s just look at how religion plays into this."
conflating all religions together makes this poll meaningless
indeed. it's bigotry
"It’s no surprise that the more religious people are, the more bigoted they are."
only if you define sexual morality as bigotry
"While we don’t get the denomination breakdown, the analysis does include this passage pointing out that non-religious Americans are far more accepting of gay people than Christians."
what else were they accepting of?
adultery? promiscuity? polygamy?
so 72% of all people say "Gayness" should be accepted while 57% of people who say religion is very important to them agree
not much of a gap and would indicate people answering meant different things
not a well-designed poll
not a well-thought out poll
big news story today is that Florida has surpassed NY is number of cases but is behind California
moving from third to second is a big story, why?
it's because the focus of the media is to attack Trump
Florida has more people than NY so it would make sense they have had more cases
but NY has had 35K deaths and Florida has had 5K
even though Florida has more people, more elderly people, more cases
DeSantis is protecting his constituents, and Cuomo didn't
why isn't the story how much better Ron DeSantis has handled Florida's surge than how Cuomo handled his?
the answer is: DeSantis won a surprise election victory after being endorsed by Trump and Cuomo is from a Dem fat-cat family
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/country/united-states/
there's your total deaths per million
nine of top ten are blue states
The mysterious “Primary Subsource” that Christopher Steele has long hidden behind to defend his discredited Trump-Russia dossier is a former Brookings Institution analyst -- Igor “Iggy” Danchenko, a Russian national whose past includes criminal convictions and other personal baggage ignored by the FBI in vetting him and the information he fed to Steele, according to congressional sources and records obtained by RealClearInvestigations. Agents continued to use the dossier as grounds to investigate President Trump and put his advisers under counter-espionage surveillance.
The 42-year-old Danchenko, who was hired by Steele in 2016 to deploy a network of sources to dig up dirt on Trump and Russia for the Hillary Clinton campaign, was arrested, jailed and convicted years earlier on multiple public drunkenness and disorderly conduct charges in the Washington area and ordered to undergo substance-abuse and mental-health counseling, according to criminal records.
In an odd twist, a 2013 federal case against Danchenko was prosecuted by then-U.S Attorney Rod Rosenstein, who ended up signing one of the FBI’s dossier-based wiretap warrants as deputy attorney general in 2017.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's spending proposals are nearing $10 trillion, even as U.S. debt continues to rise amid new coronavirus spending.
In the past month alone, Biden has proposed nearly $3.48 trillion in new taxes and spending.
Biden's new childcare and eldercare proposal released Tuesday calls for $775 billion in taxes and new government spending.
The Biden campaign's energy plan released last week will cost taxpayers $2 trillion. "Biden will make a $2 trillion accelerated investment, with a plan to deploy those resources over his first term, setting us on an irreversible course to meet the ambitious climate progress that science demands," stated the Biden campaign's website.
During a speech in Pennsylvania earlier this month, Biden also promised a $700-billion "buy American" manufacturing plan.
Adding the $3.48 trillion in spending proposed in the past month to the more than $6 trillion Biden had already proposed, brings Biden's total proposed costs to almost $10 trillion.
An analysis by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that Biden’s healthcare plan has a gross cost of $2.25 trillion and would add a net $800 billion after offsets to deficits over ten years.
Biden has vowed to raise taxes by $4 trillion, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. Biden’s proposed $4 trillion in new taxes more than doubles the $1.4 trillion that Hillary Clinton proposed in 2016, according to a 2016 analysis by the Tax Policy Center, which is a joint venture of the left-leaning Urban Institute and Brookings Institution.
According to Treasury Department data, the debt held by the public is $20.6 trillion and the total outstanding national debt is more than $26.5 trillion. In 2019, the U.S. gross domestic product, the total size of the economy, was about $21.4 trillion.
The Biden campaign did not respond to request for comment from Just the News.
"Joe Biden is doubling down again on his 'plan' to hike taxes and massively increase the size of government," the Trump campaign said in a statement issued attacking Biden's childcare and eldercare spending plan. "Biden has drastically underreported the true costs of his plans ... Instead of pro-job and pro-growth policies, Biden is turning to an old friend — tax hikes and big government."
The response — which DeSantis boasted weeks ago was among the best in the nation — has quickly sunk Florida into a deadly morass. Nearly 5,800 Floridians have now died of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus — more deaths than were suffered in combat by Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq after 2001. One out of every 52 Floridians has been infected with the virus. The state’s intensive care units are being pushed to the brink, with some over capacity. Florida’s unemployment system is overwhelmed, and its tourism industry is a shambles.
DeSantis began the year as a popular governor, well-positioned to help his close ally President Trump win this crucial state in November's election. DeSantis is now suffering from sagging approval ratings. Trump is polling behind Democrat Joe Biden in recent polls of Florida voters. And both men, after weeks of pushing for a splashy Republican convention in Jacksonville, succumbed to the reality of the public health risks Thursday when Trump called off the event.
Trump asked DeSantis in a phone call in May whether he would require masks for the convention and whether the virus would be a problem, according to a person with knowledge of the conversation. DeSantis said he would not require masks and the virus would not be a major problem in August in Florida.
Our country is suffering through major, major problems. We’ve got more than 100,000 people dead from COVID-19, unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression, and protests and civil unrest in cities and towns across the country. We’re appropriately adding trillions of dollars to our national debt to try to forestall an economic meltdown. Let’s just hope that further federal aid goes to those who really need it. And doesn’t go to those who don’t.
“The situation is desperate,” said Dr. Jose Vasquez, the health officer for Starr County, Texas on the US-Mexico border. At the only hospital in the county, over 50% of patients are testing positive for the COVID-19 virus — 40 new coronavirus cases were reported Thursday. Starr County Memorial Hospital in Rio Grande City made plans to set up a committee to decide which patients to send home to die. The hospital will ration its resources to patients with the best chances of surviving (CNN):
The hospital quickly filled the eight beds in its Covid-19 unit, so it expanded to 17 and then 29 beds, Vasquez said. About 33 medical workers, including medical practitioners and lab technicians, were deployed by the state to assist the hospital.
“Unfortunately, Starr County Memorial Hospital has limited resources and our doctors are going to have to decide who receives treatment, and who is sent home to die by their loved ones,” Starr County Judge Eloy Vera wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday. “This is what we did not want our community to experience.”
That was before Hurricane Hanna hit the Texas coast Saturday as a Category 1 storm with maximum winds of 90 miles per hour.
The pandemic had Texas hospitals hitting capacity 10 days ago. In Houston, Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and the Rio Grande Valley.
Social gatherings are to blame, Starr officials said. “We are seeing the results of socialization during the 4th of July, vacations, and other social opportunities,” Judge Elroy Vera wrote July 23 on the county’s Facebook page. The county issued a shelter-in-place order and a mandatory curfew a day later.
The Guardian adds:
“I have been a nurse for almost 30 years and I had never seen a time like this in our community,” said Corando Rios, a nurse at Starr County Memorial Hospital’s Covid-19 unit. He tested positive for coronavirus a few days ago and is recovering at home in quarantine.
“We are not ICU [intensive care unit] capable, but we are doing ICU work. We now have a state emergency response team of nurses, medics, respiratory therapists, and nurse assistants, and last week two doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists came from the US Navy,” added Rios. “We are doing the best we can with the resources available.”
Alternate facts meet alternate state
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued his quarantine order after nearly half of other states. He refused in April to allow Texas cities to enforce penalties for citizens not wearing masks. He let his quarantine order lapse on May 1 (the second state after Georgia). He downplayed rising hospitalizations in mid-June, reassuring Texans that the state had “abundant hospital capacity.”
Now, with a hurricane emergency on top of the medical one requiring “death panels” in one county, Abbott has issued disaster declarations in 32 counties in Hanna’s path and has set up an Alternate State Operations Center in North Austin, the Statesman reports:
“As people are doing everything possible to protect their lives and loved ones from the storm … I strongly urge you to remember to do everything you can to protect your lives and loved ones from the transmission of COVID-19,” Abbott said during the Saturday news conference. “Do not, in haste, take action that could cause you, a family member or loved one to lose their life in the coming weeks to COVID-19 by disregarding all of these practices that we’ve become accustomed to … such as wearing a face mask.”
One in every 50 people in the region is already infected. A baby boy under 6 months old tested positive for COVID-19 on Friday in Nueces County. He died shortly after.
Republicans screamed that passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would bring “death panels” to America. President Obama’s “socialist” health care would be a “government takeover” of U.S. medicine leading to rationed care. They have worked for years to kill the system that, whatever its flaws, is keeping many Americans alive. They are in court trying to kill it even now
"The response — which DeSantis boasted weeks ago was among the best in the nation — has quickly sunk Florida into a deadly morass"
and by quick, we're talking four months
and the deaths per million, over those quick four months, are much better than most blue states
"Nearly 5,800 Floridians have now died of covid-19, the disease caused by the virus — more deaths than were suffered in combat by Americans in Afghanistan or Iraq after 2001."
just think, six times more have died in NY
truth is, not many Americans died in Afghanistan or Iraq after 2001 compared with most wars
"One out of every 52 Floridians has been infected with the virus."
probably it's much higher, both in Florida and the rest of America, the infection rate is irrelevant
"The state’s intensive care units are being pushed to the brink, with some over capacity."
please, the same was said in NYC in April, but it never became a problem
"Our country is suffering through major, major problems. We’ve got more than 100,000 people dead from COVID-19,"
here's a list of what states those deaths occurred in:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/country/united-states/
do a tally
you'll find 76% happened in blue states
"unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression,"
well, if the rest of America had followed the example of Arkansas, which has had about 400 deaths, the economy woud be string
"and protests and civil unrest in cities"
exaggerated, and whipped up by the media
"Let’s just hope that further federal aid goes to those who really need it."
it has so far
blue states that overtax their citizens already don't need it
they need to fix their budgets
"Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) issued his quarantine order after nearly half of other states. He refused in April to allow Texas cities to enforce penalties for citizens not wearing masks. He let his quarantine order lapse on May 1 (the second state after Georgia)."
that's fascinating but he did very well in April and May and June
right now, his policies are similar to other states
the rising cases now are mainly among the young and is caused by socialization that could only be combatted by martial law
deaths are not at a level to justify that
"I strongly urge you to remember to do everything you can to protect your lives and loved ones from the transmission of COVID-19,” Abbott said during the Saturday news conference. “Do not, in haste, take action that could cause you, a family member or loved one to lose their life in the coming weeks to COVID-19 by disregarding all of these practices that we’ve become accustomed to … such as wearing a face mask.”
an example of red state leadership that has worked well
"Republicans screamed that passage of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would bring “death panels” to America. President Obama’s “socialist” health care would be a “government takeover” of U.S. medicine leading to rationed care. They have worked for years to kill the system that, whatever its flaws, is keeping many Americans alive. They are in court trying to kill it even now"
OBAMACARE ISN'T SAVING ANY LIVES
POOR PEOPLE CAN'T AFFORD THE HIGH DEDUCTIBLES AND ONLY USE THE INSURANCE WHEN THEY GET A CATASTROPHIC ILLNESS
BUT THEY ALWAYS RECEIVED MEDICAL CARE IN SUCH CASES BEFORE OBAMACARE ANYWAY!
Let's recap the past several weeks: Against the warnings of experts, states mostly led by Republicans begin to reopen. As covid-19 cases start to surge, Republicans resisted reversing course, likely prompting another round of closings and possibly prolonging the associated depression. Now Americans who will face more time out of work thanks to those mistakes are also facing more time without government relief because that same party can’t get its act together. It would be almost funny, if it weren’t so sad.
BUT THEY ALWAYS RECEIVED MEDICAL CARE IN SUCH CASES BEFORE OBAMACARE ANYWAY!
And how many go bankrupt over their medical bills?
Wiki reports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bankruptcy_in_the_United_States#Personal_bankruptcy
"...Although the individual causes of bankruptcy are complex and multifaceted, the majority of personal bankruptcies involve substantial medical bills.[52][53] Personal bankruptcies are typically filed under Chapter 7 or Chapter 13. Personal Chapter 11 bankruptcies are relatively rare. The American Journal of Medicine says over 3 out of 5 personal bankruptcies are due to medical debt.[54]
There were 175,146 individual bankruptcies filed in the United States during the first quarter of 2020. Some 66.5 percent were directly tied to medical issues. Critical illness insurance Association report June 2, 2020..."
Wiki also reports:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_insurance_coverage_in_the_United_States
"...the number of uninsured fell between 2013-2016 due to expanded Medicaid eligibility and health insurance exchanges established due to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as the "ACA" or "Obamacare". According to the United States Census Bureau, in 2012 there were 45.6 million people in the US (14.8% of the under-65 population) who were without health insurance. Following the implementation of major ACA provisions in 2013, this figure fell by 18.3 million or 40%, to 27.3 million by 2016 or 8.6% of the under-65 population.[7][1]
However, the improvement in coverage began to reverse under President Trump. The Census Bureau reported that the number of uninsured persons rose from 27.3 million in 2016 to 28.0 million in 2017 and 28.6 million in 2018. The uninsured rate rose from 8.6% in 2016 to 8.9% in 2018.[7] The 2017 increase was the first increase in the number and rate of uninsured since 2010. Further, the Commonwealth Fund estimated in May 2018 that the number of uninsured increased by 4 million from early 2016 to early 2018. The rate of those uninsured increased from 12.7% in 2016 to 15.5% under their methodology. The impact was greater among lower-income adults, who had a higher uninsured rate than higher-income adults. Regionally, the South and West had higher uninsured rates than the North and East. [8] CBO forecast in May 2019 that 6 million more would be without health insurance in 2021 under Trump's policies (33 million), relative to continuation of Obama policies (27 million).[9]
The causes of this rate of uninsurance remain a matter of political debate. In 2018, states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA had an uninsured rate that averaged 8%, about half the rate of those states that did not (15%).[10] Nearly half those without insurance cite its cost as the primary factor. Rising insurance costs have contributed to a trend in which fewer employers are offering health insurance, and many employers are managing costs by requiring higher employee contributions. Many of the uninsured are the working poor or are unemployed.[11]..."
"and the deaths per million, over those quick four months, are much better than most blue states"
How misinformed are you?
Warning, facts ahead:
Florida’s total number of reported coronavirus cases has surpassed that of New York, an early epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.
As of Sunday morning, Florida has at least 423,847 reported cases, while there are more than 416,000 reported cases in New York.
It was a little startling to hear President Trump announce that he would throw out the first ball at a New York Yankees game next month — now that the delayed and shortened Major League Baseball season is underway — since has refused to do this since he became president. But since Dr. Anthony Fauci was getting so much good press in anticipation of his season-opening foray to the mound in Washington, Trump was clearly jealous, and no doubt pleased to learn there would be no crowd in Yankee Stadium to boo him. But then Fauci got ribbed mercilessly in the press for his wild pitch, and Trump was perhaps reminded that he might not be able to do much better. So over the weekend he announced to the nation that he was just too busy.
Our very busy president played golf on Saturday, and spent most of Sunday retweeting images of his paramilitary raid on Portland, rando sh**posters and conspiracy theories. He even retweeted a whiny lament about the greatness of hydroxychloroquine, a golden oldie at this point. So I'm sure the country feels much relieved by Trump's "new tone" that the media keeps going on about, and no doubt the catastrophic collapse of his already tepid poll numbers will reverse itself immediately.
Meanwhile COVID-19 continues to ravage the nation and no matter how hard new campaign manager Bill Stepien and the rest of his team try to get him to take it seriously, Trump is simply unable to do it. He reluctantly had to cancel his convention extravaganza in Jacksonville — which had been moved from Charlotte at his insistence — mainly because even Republican diehards didn't want to travel into the epicenter of America's massive surge in cases.
Trump's fatuous spin that this was another of his "strong" decisions to keep the country safe at all costs fell flat since there are endless clips of him expressing disdain for anyone who thought that staging a crowded political convention in the middle of a raging pandemic might not be a great idea. He has never demonstrated interest in keeping the country safe from this pandemic. He just wants to keep "his numbers" down, and that's not the same thing.
This news had to hit Ron DeSantis, Florida's Republican governor, especially hard. He had lobbied hard for the convention when Trump had his temper tantrum last month over North Carolina's refusal to guarantee that his fans would be able to attend speeches in the indoor event center without wearing masks or practicing social distancing. DeSantis was more than happy to guarantee the Trumpers a good time without all those unpleasant COVID guidelines. But even then the clock was ticking on Florida's exploding caseload.
If you want to see the perfect realization of the Trump administration's pandemic policy, look to Florida. It is certainly true that the virus has surged in a number of other states, including Texas, Arizona and California. The first two, like Florida, were driven to open too rapidly by Republican governors, while California's surge seems to be linked to general overconfidence — people failed to observe safe guidelines once the lockdown orders were lifted. Florida isn't alone in this surge and it won't be the last state to experience one.
But only in Florida did the governor appear on TV and have a full-blown Trumpian whine-fest in May because he wasn't getting enough credit for keeping cases lower in Florida than New York:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=Qm6yjTrGkLc&feature=emb_logo
DeSantis spoke too soon and opened his state much too fast. Florida is now the one of the global epicenters of this virus and it's not getting better anytime soon. Every day since July 10 the state has averaged more than 10,000 new cases per day. According to the New York Times, the state has had 423,800 cases and 5,854 deaths from the virus so far...
...DeSantis bears the brunt of the blame for all of this. His main concern from the beginning was to reopen for business at all costs — in the apparent conviction that people would forget about the virus as soon as they could go back to the malls — and the results are there for all to see. Throughout the crisis he has been belligerent, stubborn, unsympathetic, cavalier and self-centered. He issues orders but refuses to offer state support to make them work. He is, in short, exactly like Trump.
The Washington Post published an in-depth look at the DeSantis administration's response to the pandemic, and it's devastating. Just as Trump refuses to listen to experts, Desantis shoved aside his scientists and stopped public health briefings altogether. He refutes the models if they don't suit his purpose and spins the data to sound better than it is. Some of the state's top experts have left in the middle of the crisis.
"As the virus spread out of control in Florida, decision-making became increasingly shaped by politics and divorced from scientific evidence, according to interviews with 64 current and former state and administration officials, health administrators, epidemiologists, political operatives and hospital executives. The crisis in Florida, these observers say, has revealed the shortcomings of a response built on shifting metrics, influenced by a small group of advisers and tethered at every stage to the Trump administration, which has no unified plan for addressing the national health emergency but has pushed for states to reopen."
When DeSantis insisted on reopening Florida's economy early, Trump cheered him on. In fact, the Post reports that Trump gleefully told advisers that Florida's supposed success gave other states the validation to open prematurely as well. DeSantis returned the favor by backing Trump's play all the way, refusing to enact measures like mask-wearing that might have helped mitigate the surge. The Post reports that Trump administration officials "regularly sent reports and clips of DeSantis bragging about Florida not having cases early in the outbreak, to argue that many states were overreacting and, at times, that seasonal heat could cure the virus."
Like his hero and mentor, DeSantis can't find time to talk to his experts but does have time to talk to Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, which he has done numerous times as the virus has exploded in his state.
DeSantis was a backbench congressman who won the 2018 gubernatorial election largely because of Trump's endorsement and he's been a loyal henchman from the beginning. It was assumed all along that he could help deliver Florida to Trump this November and that his future might well include an address on Pennsylvania Avenue. (Yes, he is that ambitious.)
But lashing himself to the Trump Train was a risky move from the outset, and it doesn't look like it's paying off. The latest Quinnipiac poll has Biden leading Trump by 13 points in the Sunshine State, 51% to 38%. DeSantis isn't doing any better. In April, 50% of Florida voters approved of his handling of the pandemic. That's now down to 38%, the same number who back Trump's re-election.
Florida elected a mini-Trump in 2018 and got a Trump mega-disaster in 2020. Now the whole country is paying the price.
"How misinformed are you?
Warning, facts ahead:
Florida’s total number of reported coronavirus cases has surpassed that of New York, an early epicenter of the pandemic in the United States.
As of Sunday morning, Florida has at least 423,847 reported cases, while there are more than 416,000 reported cases in New York."
I'm not misinformed at all
and I don't think you are either
you're a liar
no one disputes that Florida's total cases exceed those of NY (although not big blue, California, who was the mostest with the closes)
but Florida has more people than NY, more elderly as well, and they have a death rate that is 1/6 of New York
that's a fact that proves DeSantis has done something right and Andrew Cuomo as done something wrong
until you admit that basic fact, which is indisputable, there is no point discussing this further
you're a liar
To the chagrin of Dems, the spike in cases in three red states is slowing while blue state of California continues to pulse with virus!
For the first time since June 12, the rate of growth in average daily new Covid-19 cases fell across the U.S. on Sunday compared with a week ago.
Nationally, there were an average of 65,809 daily cases new cases on Sunday, a 1.6% decrease from the previous week, based on a seven-day moving average.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Monday that officials are starting to see a leveling-off of cases in hard-hit states due to people "stepping up the plate."
Coronavirus outbreaks in Arizona, Florida and Texas appear to be slowing down as more people practice social distancing.
On Sunday, Arizona reported a 13% drop in the seven-day average of new Covid-19 cases, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The state has also begun to see signs that its Covid-19 hospitalizations may be slowing down, according to data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer group founded by journalists from The Atlantic magazine.
As of Sunday, coronavirus hospitalizations also fell by about 14% from the previous week.
Cases in Texas have fallen almost 19% over the previous week, according to the CNBC analysis.
Florida has begun seeing its curve flatten since reaching a record-high average of daily new cases of 11,870 on July 17, according to data from Johns Hopkins. On Sunday, the state had an 8% decrease compared with a week ago.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Monday, "It's due to the fact that people are actually wearing masks. They're wearing their masks. They're social distancing. They're engaging in good personal hygiene."
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner, also said Monday that hot spot states in the Sunbelt region of the U.S. are starting to plateau, it looks like Arizona, Texas and probably Florida at the very least are starting to hit a plateau," he said on "Squawk Box." "Arizona looks like they're starting to come down the epidemic curve."
However, Gottlieb cautioned that "even as these states come down, blue states look like they are heating up and so they'll start to offset the gains we are making in the Sunbelt."
Coronavirus outbreaks in Arizona, Florida and Texas appear to be slowing down as more people practice social distancing and states halt reopening plans.
On Sunday, Arizona reported a 13% drop in the seven-day average of new Covid-19 cases, logging 2,627 newly diagnosed cases over the previous 24 hours, down from 3,022 the previous week, according to a CNBC analysis of data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The state has also begun to see signs that its Covid-19 hospitalizations may be slowing down, according to data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer group founded by journalists from The Atlantic magazine. As of Sunday, coronavirus hospitalizations also fell by about 14% from the previous week to a seven-day average of 2,919.
Cases in Texas have fallen almost 19% over the previous week, hitting roughly 8,404 daily new cases based on a seven-day moving average on Sunday, according to the CNBC analysis. Its peak in average daily new cases was 10,572 on July 20. CNBC uses a seven-day average to calculate Covid-19 trends because it smooths out inconsistencies and gaps in state data.
Although Texas is showing signs that its number of new infections is starting to slow, it hit a record high in average hospitalizations of 10,840 Covid-19 patients on Sunday. The same day, the state also broke a grim record of average daily new deaths of 152.
Florida has just begun seeing its curve start to flatten since reaching a record-high average of daily new cases of 11,870 on July 17, according to data from Johns Hopkins. On Sunday, the state had 10,544 average new cases, which is an 8% decrease compared with a week ago.
However, the state is still reporting growth in hospitalizations and fatalities as the virus continues to hit densely populated cities in southern Florida.
U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said Monday that officials are starting to see a leveling-off of cases in hard-hit states due to people “stepping up to the plate.”
“It’s due to the fact that people are actually wearing masks. They’re wearing their masks. They’re social distancing. They’re engaging in good personal hygiene,” Azar said on “Fox and Friends.”
Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, also said Monday that hot-spot states in the Sunbelt region of the U.S. are starting to plateau in the number of new Covid-19 cases.
“On the whole, it looks like Arizona, Texas and probably Florida at the very least are starting to hit a plateau,” he said on “Squawk Box.” “Arizona looks like they’re starting to come down the epidemic curve slowly. I think these are going to be extended plateaus. I think we’re going to hang out at the level of infection that we’re at right now.”
However, Gottlieb cautioned that “even as these states come down, other states look like they are heating up, and so they’ll start to offset the gains we are making in the Sunbelt.”
For the first time since June 12, the rate of growth in average daily new Covid-19 cases fell across the U.S. on Sunday compared with a week ago. Nationally, there were an average of 65,809 daily new cases on Sunday, a 1.6% decrease from the previous week, based on a seven-day moving average.
While the number of new coronavirus cases across the U.S. has been on the decline for the past few days, it does not paint an accurate picture of the rate of infection. Weekend reporting from states tends to be delayed as some counties only release their numbers on weekdays.
Gottlieb also said that some states have not been reporting their numbers reliably since the Department of Health and Human Services instructed all hospitals to stop reporting their data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s long-standing National Healthcare Safety Network. Instead, hospitals now have to report to HHS through a new portal that went live a week ago.
Today Senate Republicans finally unveiled their $1 trillion coronavirus relief bill package
The GOP legislation contains a number of provisions not directly related to the coronavirus, including $1.8 billion for construction of a new FBI headquarters in Washington. President Trump has taken a personal interest in this project, but White House officials have not stipulated why they believe the language needed to be inserted in the coronavirus bill. Critics have alleged Trump is trying to keep the FBI building at its current location, which is diagonal from a Trump hotel property in downtown D.C.
The Trump administration previously squashed a plan to relocate the FBI building to the suburbs, which could leave the lot near the Trump hotel open for development.
“That’s a good question,” said Senate Appropriations Chairman Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), when asked what the FBI project had to do with the coronavirus. He said the administration had sought its inclusion.
"Fillinbg in the blanks said..."
thanks for the long version
so enlightening
LOL!
no matter how you spin it, the facts remain
the surge in the three red states, Texas Florida Arizona, is starting to ease without the death rate that NY NJ CN MA had during their surge
again we see that blue state governors have governed over 76% of COVID deaths
here's the current numbers:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/country/united-states/
do the tally yourself
"The GOP legislation contains a number of provisions not directly related to the coronavirus,"
so did the Dem version
"including $1.8 billion for construction of a new FBI headquarters in Washington."
the current HQ is a minimalist eyesore that no one likes
why not provide the jobs from the project now since it was long ago decided it would be replaced?
the government already owns the land and there are plenty of other hotels within a few blocks that already compete with the Trump hotel
"again we see that blue state governors have governed over 76% of COVID deaths"
And twitiot Rump governs over all of them while he shares FB-deleted content of false coronavirus claims.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/07/28/trump-coronavirus-misinformation-twitter/?hpid=hp_morning-mix-8-12-rr1_mm-trump%3Ahomepage%2Fstory-ans
U.S. ambassador told others Trump asked him to try to get British Open moved to his golf course
The U.S. ambassador in London told associates in February 2018 that he had been asked by President Donald Trump to see if he could arrange for the British Open golf tournament to be held at the Trump Turnberry resort in Scotland, according to a person familiar with the matter.
After returning from a trip to Washington, Ambassador Robert Wood Johnson told a top diplomat on two occasions that Trump had made the request, the person familiar with the matter said.
The deputy chief of mission, Lewis Lukens, strongly advised against approaching British authorities on the matter, arguing that it would be unethical.
Johnson mentioned Trump’s interest in hosting the tournament during a meeting with David Mundell, the secretary of state for Scotland, though the ambassador’s comments may have stopped short of an official request, according to U.S. Embassy personnel at the time.
Trump at a press conference Wednesday said that he “never spoke to Woody Johnson about that, about Turnberry” but noted that the golf course there is ”one of the best in the world.”
Ralph Reed: We Must Re-Elect Trump to Ensure Christian Supremacy in Politics
During an “Evangelicals for Trump” rally on Thursday in Alpharetta, Georgia, right-wing activist and former head of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed said that Donald Trump needed to be re-elected in order to preserve Christian supremacy.
… we got a big job to do in the next 100 days. Let’s go out and do it — not just to re-elect him, but to glorify God and make sure Christians are the head and not the tail, and the top and not the bottom, of our political system.
That’s an incredible statement to make considering there’s been literally no times when Christians were at the bottom of any power structure in U.S. society, much less government. (Imagine if a Muslim speaker said this about Islam.)
Notice, too, that Reed isn’t talking about preserving religious freedom for everyone. He doesn’t give a damn about other people. It’s only about making sure Christians — and, honestly, just right-wing evangelicals since the rest of them are heretics — get to control as much of our society as possible.
We’re currently living through four years of white evangelical rule. Our society is a sadder, poorer, more dangerous place by any standard you choose. And even if Trump loses, remember that the Democrat here is a devout Catholic who’s never been shy about bringing up his faith. It doesn’t matter to these people.
They won’t rest until we’re living in an evangelical Christian theocracy.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said ""again we see that blue state governors have governed over 76% of COVID deaths"
That's why there needs to be national leadership, to do the things states can't do on their own, like national testing, tracing, and the supply of personal protective equipment.
If Blue states weren't doing the job it was up to Trump to do it for them, just like its up to Trump to do the job red states are currently not up to.
Trump could have made a mandatory national mask requirement. Instead he discouraged the use of masks until people in red states started dying and suddenly he's telling people masks are a good idea.
A good president is a president of all the people, not just those who voted for him. Trump only helps people in red states and does his best to harm those who didn't vote for him.
Trump is the president of white people in red states.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the surge in the three red states, Texas Florida Arizona, is starting to ease without the death rate that NY NJ CN MA had during their surge".
That's a lie. The death rate is as high now as its ever been.
Hemant Mehta said "It’s no surprise that the more religious people are, the more bigoted they are."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "only if you define sexual morality as bigotry"
Your "sexual morality" IS bigotry.
People have a right to any kind of sex they want as long as they aren't hurting others - opposing that is bigotry.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman support a bible that says sexual morality is executing a woman who's been raped because no one heard her scream.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman support a bible that says sexual morality is letting a man who rapes a woman get away with it by forcing her to marry him.
There is no sexual morality in the bible.
"And twitiot Rump governs over all of them while he shares FB-deleted content of false coronavirus claims."
actually, the health issues in specific areas are local concerns
Trump's CDC has issued guidelines
he doesn't have enforcement powers
considering the fit you've pitched when he deploys the National Guard to stop riots, your statement is quite hypocritical
stopping the virus isn't rocket science
wear masks and avoid crowded indoor spaces
"U.S. ambassador told others Trump asked him to try to get British Open moved to his golf course"
so what?
we have a pandemic, a recession, and riots in the streets
and this is you focus?
tells us all we need to know
"During an “Evangelicals for Trump” rally on Thursday in Alpharetta, Georgia, right-wing activist and former head of the Christian Coalition Ralph Reed said that Donald Trump needed to be re-elected in order to preserve Christian supremacy.
… we got a big job to do in the next 100 days. Let’s go out and do it — not just to re-elect him, but to glorify God and make sure Christians are the head and not the tail, and the top and not the bottom, of our political system."
every group has the right to pursue their agenda
I don't notice any TTF hesitancy to do so
"Imagine if a Muslim speaker said this about Islam."
no imagination required
it happens in every predominantly Muslim country in the world
"Notice, too, that Reed isn’t talking about preserving religious freedom for everyone. He doesn’t give a damn about other people. It’s only about making sure Christians — and, honestly, just right-wing evangelicals since the rest of them are heretics — get to control as much of our society as possible."
you really have no idea what you're talking about. freedom of conscience is a key principle of evangelical theology
"We’re currently living through four years of white evangelical rule.Our society is a sadder, poorer, more dangerous place by any standard you choose."
really?
please give us a example of this "white evangelical rule"
oh, and show where Reed mentioned race
there are plenty of black Christians with similar views as Reed
I can't believe Randy has been let out of the nuthouse so soon
"That's why there needs to be national leadership, to do the things states can't do on their own, like national testing, tracing, and the supply of personal protective equipment.
If Blue states weren't doing the job it was up to Trump to do it for them, just like its up to Trump to do the job red states are currently not up to."
makes no sense
we have no national police to enforce any rules
"Trump could have made a mandatory national mask requirement."
no, he couldn't
we have no national police to enforce any rules
"Trump is the president of white people in red states."
accusations of racism is the last refuge to which the scoundrel clings
Trump has done more for minorities in four years than Dems have done in sixty years of rule over inner cities
"That's a lie. The death rate is as high now as its ever been.
"
the death rate from COVID this year is much lower in red states and that will remain the case for the entire year
there is no chance anyone will catch up with NY-NJ-CN-MA
they took the cake on inept pandemic management
The heat this month has kept coming and coming and now has set a record for its persistence. On Tuesday, Washington, D.C., notched its 26th day hitting at least 90 degrees, topping the previous record for the most such days in a month.
All but two days this July have seen 90-degree temperatures, and we’re likely to add a couple more before the month ends.
The 90-degree milestone is just one of a number of impressive heat records that have been tested or smashed in recent weeks.
The 90-degree days have mounted over the course of three heat waves this month (defined as at least three consecutive days hitting 90 or higher). This first heat wave, which began in late June, lasted 20 days, the second-longest on record. The second heat wave spanned July 17 to 23, while we began yet another Saturday.
================================
“Maybe this goes away with heat and light. It seems like that’s the case,” said the twitiot Rump --
NOPE!
WRONG AGAIN, DUMB DON
USA
4,280,135 TOTAL CASES
CDC | Updated: Jul 28 2020 2:46PM
USA
147,672 TOTAL DEATHS
CDC | Updated: Jul 28 2020 2:46PM
Casualties as of 26 July 2019:
58,318 KIA or non-combat deaths (including the missing and deaths in captivity)[67]
153,303 WIA (excluding 150,332 persons not requiring hospital care)[68]
1,587 MIA (originally 2,646)[69]
766–778 POW (652–662 freed/escaped*,[70][71] 114–116 died in captivity)[70][72]
Note: *One escapee died of wounds sustained during his rescue 15 days later.[73]
The total number of American personnel who were KIA or died non-hostile deaths, were enlisted personnel with a casualty number of 50,441. The total number of officer casualties, commissioned and warrant, are 7,877.
Chicken shit bone spurs avoided serving in Vietnam 5 times.
"NOPE!
WRONG AGAIN, DUMB DON"
the funny thing is that he was repeating what the "experts" said
expertise and credentials have taken a big hit this year
"USA
147,672 TOTAL DEATHS
CDC | Updated: Jul 28 2020 2:46PM"
blue states in USA
112,231 TOTAL DEATHS
red states in USA
35,441 TOTAL DEATHS
COMPARE COVID-19 blue and red state Casualties to Vietnam Casualties: United States armed forces
58,318 TOTAL DEATHS IN VIETNAM
Wow!
twice as many died in red states of COVID than in the Vietnam War
and Andrew Cuomo is making posters about what a great job he did!
With the GOP's Southern strategy of aggressively reopening red states now proving to be public disaster as daily confirmed Covid-19 cases skyrocket into the tens of thousands in states like Florida, Texas, and Arizona, Trump supporters have shifted from gloating about beating the virus, to refusing to help combat it. Staging public tempter tantrums over wearing masks, Trump's deplorables are keeping America down and wrecking the economy in the process.
“Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said he believes the pandemic could be brought under control over the next four to eight weeks if “we could get everybody to wear a mask right now,”” the Wall Street Journal reported.
Yet Trump's deplorables wage an ugly war on common sense:
•A man in Royal Palm Beach, Florida got into a dispute over refusing to wear mask inside a local WalMart. He quickly pointed a gun at a fellow shopper and threatened to kill him. The man was soon arrested.
•"Are you intending to shoot me over a mask?" a Florida store owner asked a customer after he flashed a gun in his waistband when asked to wear a mask inside the woman's shop.
• An Oklahoma woman protesting a store’s mask policy began throwing shoe boxes at a saleswoman.
• A Louisana man hit a police officer with his vehicle, twice, after the man was told to leave a Walmart when he refused to wear a face covering. (“You can’t make me wear a f**king mask.”)
• A Costco shopper staged a sit-down protest when an employee politely informed her that store policy requires all shoppers to cover their face. "I am an American,” the woman angrily responded. “I have constitutional rights," which has nothing to do with a private business mandating coverings for shoppers.
• In Colorado, a local county public health chief has needed a police escort home each night because of the violent, disturbing threats she was receiving while trying to keep her community safe from the pandemic. “References to Nazism. Calling me Mrs. Hitler,” Joni Reynolds said, recounting the hate emails. “Calling me vile names — curse words. Threatening harm to me, my family, my home."
Agitators clearly get their cues from Republicans and from Fox News. Georgia's Republican governor, Brian Kemp, recently barred local governments from requiring mask use. In Kentucky, Gov. Mike Parson stunned observers when recently insisted, "These kids have got to get back to school. And if they do get COVID-19, which they will — and they will when they go to school — they’re not going to the hospitals." He stressed, "They’re going to go home and they’re going to get over it.”
In Texas, Betsy Price, Fort Worth's Republican mayor, claims the pandemic was "an unknown for everyone," which made it impossible to prepare for. "The virus has been a big surprise."
As for Fox News, the lying remains incessant:
"Fox News repeated coronavirus misinformation 253 times in its weekday coverage from July 6 through 10, including claims that undermined scientific research about the pandemic, eroded trust in public health experts and policy recommendations, called for reopening schools and businesses without regard to public health precautions, and politicized the country’s response to the virus."
The American right wing has created the most politicized and partisan pandemic the world has ever seen. And that's deplorable.
(Reuters) - A half-dozen U.S. states in the South and West reported one-day records for coronavirus deaths on Tuesday and cases in Texas passed the 400,000 mark as California health officials said Latinos made up more than half its cases.
Arkansas, California, Florida, Montana, Oregon and Texas each reported record spikes in fatalities.
In the United States more than 1,300 lives were lost nation wide on Tuesday, the biggest one-day increase since May, according to a Reuters tally.
California health officials said Latinos, who make up just over a third of the most populous U.S. state, account for 56% of COVID-19 infections and 46% of deaths. Cases are soaring in the Central Valley agricultural region, with its heavily Latino population, overwhelming hospitals. The state on Tuesday reported 171 deaths.
Florida saw 191 coronavirus deaths in the prior 24 hours, the state health department said.
Texas added more than 6,000 new cases on Monday, pushing its total to 401,477, according to a Reuters tally. Only three other states - California, Florida and New York - have more than 400,000 total cases. The four are the most populous U.S. states.
California and Texas both reported decreases in overall hospitalizations as Dr. Anthony Fauci, a top U.S. infectious diseases expert, saw signs the surge could be peaking in the South and West while other areas were on the cusp of new outbreaks.
Fauci said early indications showed the percentage of positive coronavirus tests rising in Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee and Kentucky.
The rise in U.S. deaths and infections has dampened early hopes the country was past the worst of an economic crisis that has decimated businesses and put millions of Americans out of work.
The trend has fueled a bitter debate over the reopening of schools in the coming weeks. President Donald Trump and members of his administration have pushed for students to return to class, while some teachers and local officials have called for online learning.
"We will fight on all fronts for the safety of students and their educators," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said during the union's virtual convention on Tuesday. "It's the 11th hour; we need the resources now."
The Texas Education Agency, the state's overseer of public education, said it would deny funding to schools that delay in-person classes because of orders by local health authorities related to the pandemic.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued guidance that health authorities cannot impose "blanket" school closures for coronavirus prevention. Any such decision is up to school officials, he said.
Local health leaders in the biggest metropolitan areas in Texas, including Houston and Dallas, have recently ordered the postponement of in-person classes...
With an umbrella in his left hand and a hammer in his right, the man in black lobbed his weapon so nonchalantly into an auto parts shop’s windows that it surprised many others in Minneapolis marching nearby in a May 27 protest over George Floyd’s death.
Soon after his abrupt attack, the mostly calm demonstration near a police precinct erupted into looting and arson — the first fire in a series of riots that eventually caused $500 million in damage and left two people dead, the Associated Press reported.
For weeks afterward, activists and Internet commenters homed in on a viral video of the figure nicknamed “Umbrella Man,” speculating that his intent was actually to turn the peaceful protests destructive.
On Tuesday, Minneapolis police confirmed those suspicions, identifying him as an affiliate of a white supremacist group that allegedly sought to “incite violence,” according to a search warrant affidavit filed in the Hennepin County District Court. The Star Tribune first reported of the warrant. The 32-year-old man has not been charged.
The Minneapolis Police Department declined to comment on the case, citing the active investigation.
The news comes amid rising fears of right-wing agitators purposefully stoking violence at protests. Last month, federal prosecutors charged supporters of the right-wing “Boogaloo Boys” movement for incidents including killing of a security officer at a federal courthouse and plotting firebombs and explosives at a government building and peaceful protests — all with the aim of stoking racial conflict.
Theories that white supremacist groups may have been involved in the “Umbrella Man” case arose soon after video of him vandalizing the business began circulating widely on social media. Many falsely identified the man as a St. Paul police officer, causing the department to release surveillance footage showing the officer during the time of the protest.
Much of the suspicion around “Umbrella Man” came from his clandestine get-up — all black including a gas mask that covered most of his face — and his reaction to protesters confronting his vandalism. As he made is way along the building, breaking the glass one pane at a time, an African American man in a pink T-shirt and white shorts approached him, seemingly insisting he stop. But “Umbrella Man” pushed forward until more onlookers neared. He eventually turned around and went behind the building, but many in the crowd followed him, one even yelling out to ask if he was a cop.
Not long after he shattered the windows of the AutoZone and ran away, people started looting the store and eventually set it on fire.
Erika I. Christensen, a Minneapolis police arson investigator who wrote the affidavit, now alleges that his “sole aim” was to provoke discord.
“Until the actions of the person your affiant has been calling ‘Umbrella Man,’ the protests had been relatively peaceful,” she said. “The actions of this person created an atmosphere of hostility and tension.”
The destruction quickly spread. The following morning, the Minneapolis Fire Department said they had responded to roughly 30 fires. One man was shot and killed in a pawnshop, while a second man was found dead and burned in another pawnshop.
“This was the first fire that set off a string of fires and looting throughout the precinct and the rest of the city,” Christensen said.
It took months for Minneapolis police to identify the man. Christensen wrote in her affidavit that she spent “innumerable hours” scrolling through social media apps like TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube.
The break finally came last week, when a tip came in naming “Umbrella Man” and revealed he is a member of the Hells Angels, a motorcycle gang made up of mostly white men who ride Harley-Davidson bikes. Christensen soon discovered that “Umbrella Man” is also a “known associate” of the Aryan Cowboys, a white supremacist prison gang based mainly out of Minnesota and Kentucky....
"Arkansas, California, Florida, Montana, Oregon and Texas each reported record spikes in fatalities."
this statement by the alarmist media is a joke
Arkansas has under 500 deaths this year from COVID
Oregon has about 300
Montana under 60
numerous things caused more deaths in all three places
as for CA, TX, FL
the spike IN CASES was caused when young people began to ignore the warnings to distance
why did they change their attitude?
because they saw the same local officials that implored them to stay safe, encourage millions to take to the streets to protest and attend THREE large public funerals
nonetheless, it's nothing that couldn't be remedied by everyone putting on a mask in situations where they can't physically distance themselves from others
perhaps local officials can find some way to restore the trust they squandered
best of all, replace them in November
"because they saw the same local officials that implored them to stay safe, encourage millions to take to the streets to protest and attend THREE large public funerals"
And they saw Rump couldn't even halfway fill a stadium in Oklahoma, probably because he wanted attendees to sign away their right to sue if they became ill from attending.
Get real.
How blind are you?
"And they saw Rump couldn't even halfway fill a stadium in Oklahoma, probably because he wanted attendees to sign away their right to sue if they became ill from attending.
Get real.
How blind are you?"
your comment makes no sense in the context of the conversation
btw, progressive groups made reservations and didn't show up, which is why the stadium was half filled
the surge in FL, CA, TX began when young people observed that the same people who had urged them to stay home encouraged them to protest and attend the large public funerals
youth respond that way to hypocrisy
Come November, half of America will be delighted by the election results, and half will be dismayed.
But unless the Electoral College ends in a tie, no one should be surprised by the outcome.
That's because this election is likely to be close, and it's fully plausible either candidate could win.
Pollsters are consistently telling us Democratic nominee Joe Biden is far ahead.
I'm not looking to pick a fight, as their sample sizes are much larger than mine.
That said, as a focus group moderator, I'm hearing strong support for President Donald Trump from a critical sliver of the electorate.
For reference, focus groups are early-detection systems of shifting public opinion. Before something important appears in polling, it often bubbles up first in focus group conversations.
And, each month for the past 17 months, I've had a unique window into the Americans largely responsible for giving the president his slim Electoral College victory: so-called "Obama-Trump" swing voters across the upper Midwest.
Our Swing Voter Project has uncovered that many of these people, who live in places such as Canton, Ohio; Davenport, Iowa; Erie, Pennsylvania; and Macomb County, Michigan, prefer Trump over Biden. In fact, 22 of 33 respondents in these four most recent locations feel this way.
And over the first year of the project, from March 2019 through February 2020, more than two-thirds of the "Obama-Trump" voters said they would take Trump over Obama in a hypothetical match-up.
They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around economically.
They feel Covid-19 was not Trump's fault, and he's doing the best he can to contain it.
They conflate the Black Lives Matter protesters with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail shops.
They don't want historic monuments torn down.
And they dismiss defunding the police as ridiculous.
These voters tell me they want America finally to be put first; they oppose immigration and trade policies they say give benefits to foreigners at their expense.
And they want a non-politician who relentlessly fights back, after witnessing too many office holders fold in the face of special interests.
These voters may sound like typical Fox News watchers, but, significantly, the overwhelming majority are not.
Many are, instead, people who get their news disproportionately from local television, regional websites and Facebook. Compared to the kinds of people who seek out news from national cable channels, many swing voters reside in a national politics desert.
In short, while America's political media generate a pipeline's worth of information daily, these swing voters consume merely a trickle.
Consider this: Over the past several months, most of my "Obama-Trump" voters couldn't name a single thing Biden had said or done regarding the pandemic.
In bellwether Macomb County, on July 21, none of the nine voters I interviewed could name a single thing Biden had achieved in nearly 50 years in national politics.
Worse for the former vice president, several told me Biden would be a "puppet" of others if he were elected.
That's because many are convinced he has "dementia," and they mocked him after seeing videos of his misstatements online
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltmlvk9GAto&feature=emb_logo
Tuberville spent at least some of his time in the District at the Trump International Hotel, according to a photo posted to Facebook by Arkansas Rep. Bruce Westerman (R) showing the two men in the hotel lobby. In the photo, neither man is wearing a mask.
Alabama is among the states identified by D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser as a coronavirus hotspot, and any visitors from there are expected to self-quarantine for 14 days. Alabama’s coronavirus cases are surging, with more than 25 percent of the state’s cases being confirmed in the last two weeks.
After Tuberville’s win last week, Heather Kendrick, president of D.C.-based GOP fundraising operation High Cotton Consulting, emailed contacts offering an in-person meeting with the candidate while he was in town from early afternoon Tuesday through Thursday.
============
Areas ="...the White House task force calls "red zones," [are] states with more than 100 new cases per 100,000 people, in the past week. Those states now include Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Wisconsin, according to a task force report...
Herman Cain, the former pizza chain executive who sought the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, has died weeks after testing positive for the coronavirus, according to an announcement made Thursday on his website.
“You’re never ready for the kind of news we are grappling with this morning,” Dan Calabrese, the editor for Cain’s website, wrote in a statement. “Herman Cain — our boss, our friend, like a father to so many of us — has passed away.”
While it is unclear where Cain contracted the disease, he was among the several thousand people who attended a Trump campaign rally in Tulsa on June 20, most of whom did not wear masks. Cain, who co-chaired Black Voices for Trump, was pictured maskless and not socially distancing at the event.
... you can't delay sending your kids back to school, but delaying the election sounds like a good idea to him.
After spending months downplaying the severity of the pandemic, Rump is now laying the groundwork for using it as an excuse for delaying it - if he can:
An influential conservative law professor who supported President Donald Trump in 2016 and spoke out against his impeachment said Thursday that the president’s latest tweet about delaying the election is grounds for his removal.
Steven Calabresi, a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, wrote in a New York Times opinion article that Trump “should be removed unless he relents” on his suggestion to delay the November election, when Trump is expected to face Democrat Joe Biden at the polls.
“Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist,” Calabresi wrote. “But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.”
In the Thursday morning tweet, Trump again baselessly claimed that mail-in voting is a vehicle for voter fraud. “Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” he questioned in the tweet.
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???
8:46 AM · Jul 30, 2020
Trump has been laying the groundwork for this for months amid his poor polling numbers, insisting throughout his reelection campaign that voting by mail isn’t secure despite evidence to the contrary. In 46 states, both Democratic and Republican strongholds, at least some access to mail-in voting is offered. Some states have recently taken steps to make the process even more widely available, given the COVID-19 risk presented by voting in person.
Calabresi noted that Election Day proceeded on schedule during the depths of the Civil War, the Great Depression and World War II. It shouldn’t be postponed now because of Trump’s fears, he said.
″[W]e certainly should not even consider canceling this fall’s election because of the president’s concern about mail-in voting, which is likely to increase because of fears about Covid-19,” he wrote. “It is up to each of the 50 states whether to allow universal mail-in voting and Article II of the Constitution explicitly gives the states total power over the selection of presidential electors.”
Calabresi also called for any lawmakers who support Trump’s fight to delay the election to “never be elected to Congress again.”
The Federalist Society leader joins former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in condemning Trump’s recent actions. The highly respected Marine general, who resigned from Trump’s administration in 2018, said last month he was “angry and appalled” by the president’s use of force against anti-racism protestors.
The Federalist Society, an influential national organization of conservative lawyers, has played a powerful role during the Trump administration in the selection of judicial appointees, including for the Supreme Court.
"In the Thursday morning tweet, Trump again baselessly claimed that mail-in voting is a vehicle for voter fraud."
mail-in voting dramatically increases the chance of fraud
it's so obvious, there's little need to discuss
it's easy to do and there's virtually no chance of being caught
“Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???” he questioned in the tweet."
Democrap and the mainstream media aka the Dem PR division are acting like Trump ordered the shutdown of the election
by putting a question mark, he clearly acknowledges that such a thing would not be his decision alone to make
you all are in for a big surprise in November!
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "mail-in voting dramatically increases the chance of fraud it's so obvious, there's little need to discuss".
And yet somehow you have no evidence of voter fraud and virtually no one has been convicted of it - it doesn't exist.
Several states have been doing all mail in voting for decades without a hitch.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Democrap and the mainstream media aka the Dem PR division are acting like Trump ordered the shutdown of the election"
He's floating the idea to see what reaction he gets. If his poll numbers continue to be disastrous it would be in character for him the shutdown of the election - "I have total authority."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "you all are in for a big surprise in November!"
Right, just like you were going to enjoy the 16 years of the Romney/Ryan presidencies and President Huckabee. You don't base your claims on reality, "Republicans win" is your default assertion every election.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "by putting a question mark, he clearly acknowledges that [delaying the election] such a thing would not be his decision alone to make"
By law and constitution he has NO PART in this decision and you're trying to give him one- it is up to Congress alone! Again you and Trump keep trying to take more power at every opportunity on the way to dictatorship.
Federalist Society: Impeach Trump For Delay Tweet
Federalist Society co-founder Steven Calabrisi writes:
I have voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980, including voting for Donald Trump in 2016. I wrote op-eds and a law review article protesting what I believe was an unconstitutional investigation by Robert Mueller. I also wrote an op-ed opposing President Trump’s impeachment.
But I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election.
Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Trump is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are clearly open to delaying the election and effectively making Trump dictator.
That they don't at once disavow Trump's suggestion shows they don't support democracy.
Anything to attack the gays, even if it ends up hurting themselves as well.
That's a mental illness folks. Wyatt and Regina's obsession with gays and transwomen is a mental illness.
This spring, a team working under the president's son-in-law produced a plan for an aggressive, coordinated national COVID-19 response that could have brought the pandemic under control. So why did the White House spike it in favor of a shambolic 50-state response?
Well duh, it was because the virus had hit blue states hardest, so a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically to Rump and his thugs. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.
In other words, the Rube Goldberg system that has allowed the virus to surge all over the country resulting in millions of cases and more than 150,000 deaths was understood months ago to be unworkable. But people close to the president of the United States believed that the virus would be confined to states that don’t vote Republican, so letting those people get sick and die was smart politics.
I wish I could say that this is too awful to be believed, but let’s recall that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell clearly stated that he didn’t want to enact a “blue-state bailout” to ease the economic pain of states hit hard by the coronavirus. So this line of thinking wasn’t confined to the White House.
Obviously, these people have since gotten schooled as to the reality that the virus isn’t confined to blue states or big cities, and it’s now hitting their own voters hard. Indeed, as the Washington Post reported, that’s what persuaded Trump to start talking about the crisis again after many weeks of pretending it wasn’t happening.
But Trump’s commentary about the pandemic is making things worse, as always. He erroneously insists that kids are immune, that most of the country is doing great and that a vaccine will be available any day now. (In an extremely optimistic projection, there could be a vaccine in place by January, although there’s no guarantee it will be universally available or effective.) The testing system the Trumpers thought wouldn’t hurt “their people” is once again failing miserably as people have to wait for weeks to get results, and the nationwide surge is so widespread that contact tracing is almost useless anyway. Most of this is happening in red states that followed Trump over the cliff like a bunch of lemmings back in the spring when he told them the virus was going away and it was safe to reopen damn near everything.
Trump and Kushner could have come out of this looking like heroes — which would obviously have benefited the president’s odds of re-election — but they decided to play vindictive, divisive politics instead. But who knows? Maybe Trump will get lucky and that miracle cure will arrive any day. Maybe, as he’s been saying from the beginning, this virus will just disappear overnight. That’s really all there is to Trumpian politics at this point: punishing their enemies and magical thinking.
Excellent analysis, good anonymous!
Thanks, Priya, and welcome back.
Great video here: Republicans need to wake up
"mail-in voting dramatically increases the chance of fraud"
Look who is lying again!
As more and more states move to mail-in ballots as the safest way to vote during a pandemic, Trump has mobilized the Republican Party to fight them and the Republican National Committee filed suit in California last week. He has made two accusations about mail-in ballots; the first is that they favor Democrats and the second is that they make it easier to cheat. Neither one is supported by the facts. There is no evidence to suggest a systematic bias towards one party or another from mail-in ballots. Nor is there any evidence that there is widespread fraud in the use of mail-in ballots.
This is not the first time that President Trump has been obsessed with vote fraud. After he won the 2016 election he declared, without any proof, that millions of undocumented immigrants voted illegally and that without them he would have won the popular vote as well as the electoral college vote.
He was so enamored of this explanation for why he lost the popular vote that he even convened a task force to look at voter fraud—a task force that found so little fraud it was disbanded the next year without even issuing a report.
The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, has been studying voter fraud for years in order to provide support for more restrictive voting laws such as voter ID. The most recent report has an attention-grabbing headline: “Database Swells to 1,285 Proven Cases of Voter Fraud in America.” They admit that the report isn’t comprehensive because it doesn’t capture cases that aren’t investigated or prosecuted. Yet, on the basis of that report they argue that there is serious voter fraud in America.
Heritage makes their full database available, so we were able to look into the cases of voter fraud that they claim represent rampant illegal activity. We began with the five states that have already used universal vote-by-mail systems and thus have one or more elections under their belt. Then we looked at the way Heritage categorizes cases of voter fraud. Most of their categories, such as false voter registration or ballot petition fraud, can occur regardless of whether a state has implemented vote-by-mail. However, we might expect that duplicate voting and fraudulent use of an absentee ballot—both of which typically involve one person voting their own ballot and someone else’s ballot as well—would be easier in vote-by-mail states than in states where the voter would have to physically travel between precincts or from one county to another...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/02/low-rates-of-fraud-in-vote-by-mail-states-show-the-benefits-outweigh-the-risks/
The above chart refutes the contention that mail-in ballot systems are rife with fraud in several ways. First, note the small number of voter fraud cases overall. Next, note that a subset of those cases involve types of fraud to which mail-in ballot systems would be especially susceptible. Next, look at the time periods covered by these data. In Oregon, the first state to adopt a universal vote-by-mail system, the Heritage researchers had to cover a period of 19 years in order to find 15 cases of voter fraud! Less than one case a year hardly qualifies as rampant voter fraud.
But perhaps the most revealing column is the one listing the number of fraudulent votes attempted by mail. Republicans would have you believe that vote fraud is widespread enough to affect elections. But the fraud uncovered by the Heritage study is inconsequential...
IT WAS a slip of the tongue, but Republican Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy’s (Calif.) reference to fellow Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert as “Congressman Covid” could not have been more apt. No one puts a better face on the heedlessness and ignorance that have helped fuel the spread of the deadly coronavirus than the Texas congressman who has made it a political badge of honor not to wear a mask. That he tested positive for covid-19 seems to have made no impact on him as he continues the nonsense that puts others at risk and has made the United States a hot spot of the pandemic.
Mr. Gohmert, who was scheduled to fly to Texas on Wednesday morning on Air Force One with President Trump, tested positive for the coronavirus in a pre-screen at the White House. The conservative congressman has relished his disdain for the advice of public health experts; he has been seen walking the halls of the Capitol without a mask and not practicing social distancing. Even after learning he was infected, he insisted on returning to the Capitol; after Politico broke the news of the test results, he told his aides in person that he had tested positive. He appeared in a video smiling, smugly referring to covid-19 as the “Wuhan virus” and absurdly blaming his diagnosis on his recent use of a mask. He has not experienced any symptoms — which we hope continues to be the case — but that’s of little comfort to those who came into contact with him. There’s mounting evidence that people without symptoms or with mild symptoms help spread the virus.
Understandably, many of those who work at the Capitol were far less cavalier than Mr. Gohmert about his diagnosis. There were renewed questions about working conditions on the Hill, where lawmakers each week go back and forth between Washington and their home states, some of which (like Texas) are seeing dramatic spikes of the virus, without getting tested. Politico reported about the fury — from legislative aides, chiefs of staff, press assistants, career workers, and maintenance men and women — about the patchwork of rules, lax enforcement and bosses who turn a blind eye to their welfare, even mocking those who wear masks.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced a new rule requiring all lawmakers to wear a mask while appearing on the House floor and is considering other measures. Mr. McCarthy and others pressed Ms. Pelosi to take the White House up on its offer of rapid testing for lawmakers. Now that he’s so passionate about the need for a testing regimen in Congress, maybe Mr. McCarthy and his fellow Republicans will do more to deliver testing for the nation, which needs it just as much.
June 11, 2020:
Fox News: Trump administration opposes $600 unemployment benefits extension
Today:
AOL news: White House signals support for $600 jobless benefit
... White House on Thursday offered a short-term extension of the $600 weekly unemployment benefit, but Democrats rejected it, saying it needs to be part of a far more sweeping bill that would deliver aid to state and local governments, help for the poor and funding for schools and colleges to address the pandemic. Without action, the unemployment benefit runs out Friday.
"Clearly they did not understand the gravity of the situation,” Pelosi said. She said a short-term extension only makes sense if the two sides are close to a deal.
“Why don't we just get the job done,” she said.
Then Pelosi offered a tutorial on negotiating.
“There are two things to remember. One is the person you’re negotiating with has to want something” for the American people, Pelosi said. “And they have to know you will walk” if you don't get a good enough agreement.
Republicans in the Senate had been fighting to trim back the $600 jobless benefit in the next coronavirus package, but their resolve weakened with the looming expiration of the popular benefit — and as Trump undercut their position by signaling he wants to keep the full $600 benefit for now.
“We want a temporary extension of enhanced unemployment benefits," Trump said at the White House on Thursday. “This will provide a critical bridge for Americans who lost their jobs to the pandemic through no fault of their own.”
The sides agreed to talk again Friday and into the weekend. There continues to be agreement among Washington's top power players that Congress must pass further relief in the coming days and weeks.
“Do we want to continue to come to an agreement? Absolutely," said top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer. “But it’s got to meet the gravity of the problem.”...
NO MIRACLES YET
Florida [where the Governor vowed to keep his state open and to open schools in the fall] reports record increase in COVID-19 deaths for fourth day in a row
(Reuters) - Florida reported a record increase in new COVID-19 deaths for a fourth day in a row on Friday, with 257 fatalities in the last 24 hours, according to the state health department.
In numerical terms, the loss of life is roughly equivalent to the number of passengers on a single-aisle airplane.
Florida also reported 9,007 new cases, bringing its total infections to over 470,000, the second highest in the country behind California. Florida's total death toll rose to nearly 7,000, the eighth highest in the nation, according to a Reuters tally.
Florida is among at least 18 states that saw cases more than double in July.
Florida had over 311,000 new cases in July, more than triple the 96,000 new cases it reported in June. The state also recorded over 3,400 deaths in July compared with about 1,000 the prior month.
Florida reported record one-day increases in cases three times during the month, with the highest on July 12, at 15,300 new cases in a single day.
Nationally, deaths are rising at their fastest rate since early June and one person in the United States died about every minute from COVID-19 on Wednesday as the national death toll surpassed 150,000, the highest in the world.
COVID-19 deaths have risen for three weeks in a row while the number of new cases week-over-week recently fell for the first time since June.
New Jersey is new hot spot
https://6abc.com/covid-hot-spots-coronavirus-new-jersey-camden-county-mercer/6342476/
The United States recorded more than 1.9 million new coronavirus infections in July, more than double any monthly total.
And Rump played golf yesterday.
Republicans don’t seem to grasp cause and effect
Jennifer Rubin, Columnist
August 2, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. EDT
President Trump’s critics have a remarkable capacity to predict the future. Consider all the things Trump’s fiercest critics, both Democrats and Never Trumpers, called in advance:
If Trump goads governors into reopening their states early and sneer at mask-wearing, thousands will die.
If Trump fears he will lose the election, he will try to delegitimize the election.
If Trump stops inciting violent clashes with federal forces, unrest will die down.
If the virus runs rampant, the economy cannot recover.
If you go to a crowded Trump rally where masks are not worn, you risk illness or death.
If Trump sides with white nationalists and not Black Lives Matter, he will be at odds with with most Americans.
If Trump disdains scientific expertise, he will make a fool of himself embracing quack remedies and charlatans.
It is not that Trump critics have a crystal ball. If you understand cause and effect, embrace science and exercise common sense, you too can anticipate a good deal. If you do not disregard every public poll showing you doing poorly, you might have a better sense of where Americans actually stand on issues. (It would help if you got out of the right-wing media playback loop.) Trump, however, is unable to do these things and flails away, making matters worse for himself and the country.
We might try a different approach that would allow Trump also to “predict” the future. Here it goes:
If you invest in absentee voting and give the U.S. Postal Service adequate funds, you will help avoid, as Trump put it on Friday, the “greatest election disaster in history.”
If you call out Russian President Vladimir Putin for targeting U.S. troops and impose harsh sanctions when he does, he (and other aggressors) will be more likely to stop than if you never bring it up.
If you want Americans to survive financially and pay their bills at a time of astronomically high unemployment, boost their unemployment insurance, expand food stamps and give state and local governments money to stop massive layoffs of public employees.
This is not rocket science. At some point it becomes obvious that Trump does not want to do these things. He does not want to add credibility to an election he is increasingly likely to lose. He does not want to confront Putin even if U.S. troops’ lives are at stake. And he does not want to help working people because it will not impress his donors and will not keep him in good stead with the extreme base. (On this last one, it is also possible he and millionaire Cabinet members simply have no clue about the concerns facing unemployed Americans, who are not lazy but rather unable to find jobs.)
Republicans in 2016 missed the easiest cause and effect out there: If you elect a narcissistic, ignorant, corrupt and cruel president, disaster will ensue. We now are paying the price.
And that was WITH the $600/week COVID unemployment money.
In three months we'll see how much more it will drop without it.
Since 1980, he hasn't been wrong -- Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Rump.
Watch him make his 2020 prediction here:
https://digbysblog.net/2020/08/the-electoral-soothsayer/
or here:
https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007227782/2020-election-prediction-allan-lichtman.html?src=vidm
uh, assuming this guy's formula is right, things don't appear to be a lock for Biden, who gets 7 of 13 factors
factors can change
further, there is so much unprecedented about this year, that even the factors are questionable
for example, he says "social unrest" favors the challenger but with Dems supporting defund the police while murder rates have soared since the protests, who will Americans support?
and this guy hedges by saying "unless Trump cheats"
he was actually wrong in 2000, at which point he changed his method
Biden right now has about the same lead in the polls that Hillary had at this point
but that lead has fallen about half in the last week, with no clear event to precipitate it
this guy is right that the polls are meaningless
but they are the only thing that indicate a Biden victory right now
Italy reported 190 new Covid cases on Tuesday. The US had 51,185.
"he was actually wrong in 2000, at which point he changed his method"
So stick with your guy, Rasmussen, who in 2018 predicted that Republicans would win the generic ballot by 1 percentage point while the actual election results had Democrats winning by nearly 9 percentage points. This error of nearly 10 percentage points was the largest polling error out of major firms who polled the national generic ballot. Rasmussen pushed back against critics after their widely derided miss, claiming that "the midterm result was relatively poor for Democrats compared to other midterms" despite the Democrats having scored a historic margin in the popular vote. Rasmussen has not articulated any significant changes to their methodology after their significant miss in 2018.
"So stick with your guy, Rasmussen"
not my guy
but you falsely claimed your guy hasn't been wrong since 1980
All the major health and mental health organizations agree that gay marriage is good for gas and good for society
Wyatt and Regina hate freedom. People have a moral right to do whatever they want as long as they are not hurting others.
Wyatt and Regina's war on gays is harming their position in life as well, young people are turning their backs on church's like Wyatt and Regina's because they're anti-lgbt. Being fiercely anti-gay has lead them to support Trump who will lower the wealth of all Americans except his key supporters who will loot the nation, just like happens in Russia. Wyatt and Regina's obsession is harming them, that is the definition of a mental illness.
I wonder if, and how often, Anthony Kennedy's son is implicated in Trump's crimes? The person who ran the bank's real estate division at the time Trump was finding it super easy, barely an inconvenience to take out huge loans when all other banks turned him away... And, suspiciously, also at the time Russia was laundering money through clients in the New York area.
It would add context to Anthony Kennedy's suspicious resignation from the Supreme Court.
Good anonymous said "So stick with your guy, Rasmussen"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "not my guy".
Yeah, right, just like when you claimed not to know Theresa Rickman and claimed you weren't on her team.
Rasmussen most certainly is your guy, throughout the 2008 and 2012 elections you'd point to one of their outlier polls and announce "Obama's poll numbers are in free fall! McCain/Romney is going to win in a landslide!"
New York’s coronavirus infection rate fell below 1% as the state continues to stave off a second wave of the deadly respiratory illness.
The pandemic is exploding in red states with hospitals filling up throughout the south. In some red states the infection rate is as high as 20%!
Red states need to follow New York's lead to get their pandemics under control - follow health authorities guidelines on reopening, masks, and social distancing. We don't need more people dying from Trump's advice to swallow or inject bleach to prevent Covid.
A thousand people are dying a day and Trump could have prevented it buy putting in place a national testing and tracing program, which his administration planned to do until they realized that at that time it was mostly people in blue states dying. Trump is the president of only white people in red states.
Political psychologists tell us that approximately 1/3 of the population has what they call an anti-democratic or authoritarian personality. [Wyatt and Regina Hardiman, for example]
(Info is from from Ngo, and Sanders, “The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale” and Karen Stenner and Jon Haidt’s paper, “Authoritarianism is not a Momentary Madness but an Eternal Dynamic within Liberal Democracies,” which Karen Stenner has made available free on her website, here. )
The work on the anti-democratic personality began after the rise of fascism in the 1930s. I won’t go into the details about this personality type. “Anti-democratic personality” and “authoritarian disposition,” are descriptive. More info is available in the cited articles.
That 1/3 percentage reappears through history. Huey Long and Joseph McCarthy had 30-35 approval. The Nazis came to power with 33% approval.
Trump’s support hovers at about 40%, which is higher than the 1/3 we might expect. The reason given for the higher-than-should-be number is usually the polarization or hyper-partisanship in the US. It seems to me hyper-partisanship is not the cause. It’s a description of the effect. The cause is the rise of a well-oiled and well-funding right-wing propaganda network which increases what should be 1/3 to 40%.
There’s a theory afloat that the Republican elected leadership backs Trump because they’re being blackmailed. I suggest that they support Trump because they like what he stands for. There can also be kompromat, but the kompromat would be their willingness to work with and for Russia, which happens because they prefer a Putin-style oligarchy to what American democracy is becoming.
The “blackmailed” theory gives the GOP leadership too much credit, and assumes that without blackmail material, they’d abandon Trump. In fact, the GOP-Russia love affair has been evident for some time.
Remember when Sen. Rand Paul went to Moscow to “open lines of communication“? And Guiliani attended a pro-Russian conference? Katie Hopkins, with Ann Coulter sitting near her, says “Putin rocks.” She praises Russia as being “untouched by the myth of multiculturalism and deranged diversity.”
Putin’s regime, remember, is built on homophobia and fear of those who are different.
Remember Paul Hassen, the guy who planned to mass murder liberals? I was struck by a phrase on page 3 of the Motion for his Pre-Trial Detention. Hassen talked of “Looking to Russia with hopeful eyes.” What’s with the hopeful eyes?
They see Russia as the savior of the white Christian race. They see Trump as the savior of white Christian America.
The demographics of the GOP are also shrinking. The Fox viewership is aging. So Trump is popular with a minority party. He’s decided to double down on his base and run for reelection as a George Wallace.
Licthman wasn't wrong in 2000.
He picked Bush to win and Bush won.
You do remember President George W. Bush don't you? The guy that lead us into recession.
I am looking forward to Rump'a "Brooks Brother Revolt" when he loses, aren't you?
Nothing could be more on-brand for the Republican Party than destroyi9ng a valuable government service just to prevent people from using it to vote against them.
#USPostalService
“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” So asked Joseph Welch, the attorney who stood up to the bullying by Sen. Joe McCarthy (R-Wis.) during a 1954 Senate hearing. And once he said it, the nightmare that was McCarthyism was over.
Who will be the Joseph Welch who wakes us up from this new wave of reverse McCarthyism? Today, you are blacklisted if you don’t support a far-left agenda.
It’s time that a Democrat crossed the invisible picket line to condemn both the “cancel culture” and the mindless violence in our cities. It’s time that a Democrat stood up for the First Amendment in this country and the need for an open political debate. And it is time that a Democrat exploded the nonsense that what is going on in Portland and Seattle is just protest and not destructive anti-police, anti-American violence that needs to be stopped, not coddled.
Unfortunately, today’s Joe Biden is not that Democrat. He is too concerned with courting left-wing voters to call out these destructive currents in America. Biden is signing pacts with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). He could be courageous and stand up for the country he is seeking to lead, and he could outline a program for ending the Black-on-Black crime that kills thousands of African American kids every year. He proudly supported the Clinton anti-crime bill, back in the day when he was for law and order in this country. Back then he believed in the effectiveness of tough measures to reduce crime and to save lives by taking violent criminals off the streets. Today, he is MIA when it comes to stopping the waves of violence sweeping our cities. Why has he not called out Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler for the outrageous position that it is the defenders of federal property who are to blame?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is not that Democrat, either. She is busy describing federal agents defending a courthouse as “stormtroopers” and is concerned about the constitutional rights of those committing violent acts. Polls show that 80 percent of Americans think things are out of control, and a majority of Americans want to see those who commit acts of violence prosecuted. There is a national consensus that violence is rising as a result of the protests that are undermining the rule of law in the country.
And Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), fresh from his impeachment run, is certainly not going to condemn violence that he dismissed as a “myth.” He has perpetuated support for attacks on federal property, and it is those attacks that endanger federal law enforcement officials who are simply trying to do their jobs. Is it not clear that the government puts up a fence and that the violent offenders try to tear down the fence and launch fireworks and deploy destructive lasers against federal officers?
It is no different when it comes to the cancel culture. Not a single major Democrat has stood up and roundly condemned the idea that people should be fired or lose their tenure just for questioning the Black Lives Matter organization, despite making clear that they are not questioning racial justice and equality. In the rush to take advantage of every action that hurts Trump, these Democrats make the mistake that the views of the elite left are similar to the members of their own party.
So far, the person who came closest to speaking out, and who is not a Republican or a conservative, is journalist Bari Weiss. She effectively exposed and denounced the culture at the New York Times as being far removed from a tolerant, open environment envisioned by the protections of the First Amendment. Instead, the journalists at the Times turned being even a moderate into something uncomfortable, let alone someone who supports the state of Israel. She called out the “bullying” she endured, being called a “Nazi” and a “racist,” and called out the newspaper’s unlawful discrimination and hostile environment. The cancel culture continues unabated, however; Weiss quit her job, having had enough of the abuse.
Even as a political strategy, this silence by Democrats on these issues is a huge tactical mistake, creating the potential of a backlash for so clearly trying to deny obvious reality. Joining together with Republicans against violence and in defense of the First Amendment is a far smarter position, because these radicals who are fomenting violence won’t really be supporting any party. These are not election issues — they are basic American issues, and Attorney General William Barr was entirely right in his testimony last week before Congress that one of our political parties should never turn a blind eye toward violence against our nation. It has been this way for more than 200 years, since the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791-1794 -- because destruction of federal property, like our courthouses, is not an action against one party but an action against all parties.
Andrew Stein is the former Democratic president of the New York City Council and founder and chairman of “Democrats for Trump.”
Most of the mainstream media say the same thing when it comes to voter fraud -- it’s too rare to be consequential. In endlessly repeating this line, the media is now doing more than just slinging mud at President Trump. Dismissing any concerns about the integrity of America’s electoral process is a danger to our system of democracy.
CNN, it should come as no surprise, is parroting this narrative with even more certitude than its media counterparts. On Tuesday, I was a guest on Brianna Keilar’s CNN show. I discussed our campaign’s concerns with a new law in Nevada that would open up the potential for voting fraud on a scale rarely seen before in this country.
In 72 hours, Nevada Democrats rushed a fundamental change to the state’s election system in an eleventh-hour bid to change the rules to favor a Democrat victory in November. In the dead of night and less than 100 days from the election, Nevada Democrat Gov. Steve Sisolak signed into law a universal vote-by-mail system that would send a ballot to every address on Nevada’s voter rolls --requested or not -- and whether the voter was still alive or not.
Furthermore, the law includes a provision that ballots received in the three days after the election would be counted, even if that ballot is not postmarked to prove the vote was cast before Nov. 3.
Imagine a scenario where Nevadan Democrats wake up on Nov. 4 to learn that President Trump won their state. Conceivably, they could collect ballots for Joe Biden and mail them the day after the election and, if they are received within the next three days, they would be counted.
Any reasonable person realizes how such a system exposes the election to massive voter fraud. CNN doesn’t see it that way. It’s important to call them out -- especially when it concerns something as crucial and important as the integrity of our election system.
The day after my segment, Keilar doubled down on her ignorance of the new law and did a “fact check” on the Trump campaign’s legitimate and valid concerns. During Keilar’s fact-checking segment, she claimed that ballots will only be counted “as long as they are postmarked by dates of election.”
This is factually wrong. The Nevada law states that ballots will be mailed to addresses on the voter rolls along with a pre-paid return envelope. United States Postal Service regulations note that pre-paid envelopes are not required to be postmarked, meaning that if Nevadans mail their ballot back in the pre-paid envelope they received, that envelope may not feature the date the ballot was sent back. And, if that undated ballot is received up to three days after the election, it will still be counted. It is this provision of Nevada’s law that allows votes to be cast after Election Day has ended.
Keilar then claimed that “many states do this.” But Nevada is going to count ballots received up to three days after Election Day even if they are not dated. Again, this would allow people to cast votes after the election.
Keilar went on to claim that, in a universal vote-by-mail system, only “active voters” would be included. The term “active voter” just refers to individuals who are included on a states’ voter rolls, which are notoriously out-of-date and inaccurate. They are often not updated to reflect if someone has moved — including out of the state — or if someone has died.
For example, Los Angeles County voter rolls included 112% of the entire population — meaning, there were more people on the voter rolls than actually live in the county. Keilar also asserted that real-life examples of voter fraud aren’t anything to worry about.
I have dealt with, and socialized with, mainstream journalists in Washington, D.C., for my entire career. Sometimes we agree, often we don’t. But I respect the work the best of them do, and the critical role a free press plays in society. But this episode at CNN was beyond the pale.
In truth, the collapse of a fair and spirited journalistic exchange may be as dangerous to democracy as the promotion of unfettered electoral fraud
President Trump called recent remarks Joe Biden made about diversity of thought within the African American community "insulting."
"Joe Biden, this morning, totally disparaged and insulted the black community. What he said is incredible. And I don’t know what’s going on with him, but it was a very insulting statement he made," Trump told reporters on the White House Lawn. "I guess you’ll figure that out. You’ll see it in a little while. But it was a great insult to the black community."
During an interview recorded from what appears to be his basement on Tuesday and published on Thursday, Biden praised the Latino American community for what he characterized as a more open-minded approach to politics than members of the black community.
“Unlike the African American community, with notable exceptions, the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community with incredibly different attitudes about different things," Biden said. "You go to Florida, you find a very different attitude about immigration in certain places than you do when you're in Arizona."
Trump 2020 senior adviser Katrina Pierson joined Trump in condemning Biden's remarks, labeling them as "condescending."
“The condescending white liberal racism that oozes out of Joe Biden is disgusting. We already know that he thinks ‘you ain’t Black’ if you’re not voting for him. And we know that when a Black journalist asks him a tough question, he brings up cocaine use and says ‘are you a junkie?’ Now he arrogantly tells a group of Black reporters that ‘you all know’ that Black people think alike," she said in a statement.
"There’s a reason Joe Biden can’t count on the support of Black voters and it’s because of his plantation owner mentality. President Trump has a true record of helping Black Americans, with unprecedented economic opportunity, record funding for HBCUs, criminal justice reform, and support for school choice. Joe Biden would rather we all just shut up, get in line, and know our place,” Pierson added.
Former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday then-FBI Director James Comey went “rogue” when probing then-incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn in January 2017 – but anyone who relies on the evening newscasts of NBC, CBS or ABC may have missed it.
ABC’s “World News Tonight,” NBC’s “Nightly News” and “CBS Evening News” all skipped the story, according to the Media Research Center.
MRC news analyst Nicholas Fondacaro, who monitors broadcast news coverage, called it “another example of the broadcast networks covering up the degree of corruption in the Russia investigation,” as Yates told the committee she was upset upon learning Comey interviewed Flynn without her authorization.
“Instead of reporting on Yates’s shocking testimony, all three networks boasted how former Vice President Joe Biden decided to give his convention speech from the safety of his basement in Delaware,” Fondacaro wrot
Comey also went rogue in October 2016
"Oct. 28, 2016 at 8:41 p.m. EDT
On Friday, FBI Director James B. Comey sent a letter to Congress saying the bureau is investigating additional emails that appear relevant to the Hillary Clinton email case. Soon after, he sent a note to his employees explaining his decision. Comey has been blasted by Democrats and some former Justice Department officials who say that his decision to notify Congress of this development less than two weeks before Election Day was inappropriate and unwarranted."
Everybody carried this story
"President Trump called recent remarks Joe Biden made about diversity of thought within the African American community "insulting.""
Even before President Trump admonished his top coronavirus adviser for saying the country was entering a "new phase" of widespread infection, patients at Mississippi's only Level 1 trauma hospital were already on a wait for ICU beds.
“Our ICUs have been full for weeks,” LouAnn Woodward, a vice chancellor at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, said Thursday. “It’s a very acute issue we’re facing here.”
Mississippi, now experiencing the country’s highest rate of positive tests, is emblematic of the pandemic’s new reality. The virus is no longer principally an urban problem: It is present throughout every state, and those infected often don’t know it, leading to what top public health officials call “inherent community spread.”
This has proved true for Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R), who learned he had the novel coronavirus when he tested positive Thursday morning in advance of a planned meeting with Trump. Trump went ahead with his visit to a Whirlpool plant; DeWine, the second governor known to have contracted the virus, went into self-isolation. Later Thursday, DeWine tweeted that a subsequent test had come back negative.
The situation in Mississippi is unfolding as well in other largely rural parts of the country, including in Alabama and California’s Central Valley, places where so much viral material is circulating that when people get infected, many are unsure when or how it happened — so the outbreaks cannot be easily traced and contained.
State health officials in Alabama, for instance, say they are starting to see the impact of a mask mandate imposed two weeks ago. But some worry the dramatic spread might be attributable to people giving up on testing, as results can take days or weeks to come back.
“My fear is if we don’t see some decline in hospital caseloads, we’re going to be really, really challenged when we’re faced with increased caseloads due to schools reopening,” said Don Williamson, president of the Alabama Hospital Association. “I hope I’m wrong but I don’t know of any biological reason I’ll be wrong.”
School openings in Alabama are a local decision, but public health officials offer guidance in part based on the risk in that county. As of Thursday, 44 of the state’s 67 counties are considered “high risk” or “very high risk.”..
In an implicit rejection of the assessment given earlier this week by Deborah Birx, the physician overseeing the White House coronavirus response, the president said the current approach of protecting vulnerable populations is working.
Our strategy shelters those at highest risks while allowing those at lower risk to get safely back to work and school,” Trump said. “Instead of a never-ending blanket lockdown, causing severe, long-term public health consequences, we’ve targeted and looked at data-driven approaches.”
Birx on Sunday urged Americans to take extreme health precautions as infections and deaths rise sharply nationwide, telling CNN, “I want to be very clear: What we’re seeing today is different from March and April,” while noting that cases are increasing in rural and urban areas. “It is extraordinarily widespread.”
Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, backed her up on Monday, as Trump tweeted his disdain.
KEEP LYING TO US RUMP AND WE'LL KEEP DYING FOR YOU
A New York State Supreme Court justice on Thursday denied a motion by President Trump asserting absolute immunity in a defamation lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll.
The ruling allows the case to go forward without waiting for a decision from an appeals court on a separate similar suit.
Carroll, a longtime advice columnist, claimed in her 2019 book “What Do We Need Men For?” that Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.
Carroll filed the defamation lawsuit in November after the president denied the allegations, saying he’s never met her, despite there being photos of them together.
Trump’s attorneys argued that Carroll’s lawsuit should be paused until a decision is made in a similar suit brought by former “Apprentice” contestant Summer Zervos, who also alleges Trump sexually assaulted her.
Judge Verna L. Saunders ruled Thursday that Carroll’s lawsuit can move forward before a state appellate court makes a decision on Zervos’s case, where a judge will decide whether state courts should defer litigation involving a sitting president until after he stepped down.
Carroll’s lawyers argued that Trump and his legal team are actively engaged in litigation related to his campaign.
“We are now eager to move forward with discovery so that we can prove that Donald Trump defamed E. Jean Carroll when he lied about her in connection with her brave decision to tell the truth about the fact that Donald Trump had sexually assaulted her,” Carroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, said in a statement according to The Washington Post.
Saunders cited a recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the president does not have immunity from local law enforcement and congressional investigators.
The decision opens the door for Carroll’s attorneys to collect DNA samples from the president, which they hope to compare to genetic material on the dress she said she wore during the incident. Trump's team can also move forward with seeking depositions with Carroll and other possible witnesses.
Despite desperate Democratic mayors and governors attempts to shut down America again, and sabotage the economy, unemployment continued to fall in July.
The U.S. economy added 1.8 million jobs in July even as a wave of new coronavirus cases forced most states to pause or reverse their reopenings.
The unemployment rate fell to 10.2%, down from 11.1% in June.
“We have seen that the overall U.S. economy has turned a corner, and that the solid job gains announced today will be sustained," said Tony Bedikian, managing director of Citizens Bank.
Estimates before the report varied widely amid escalating fears that a flare-up in COVID-19 cases across the country and a fresh round of business closures would derail the job market's early recovery from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Last week, the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits fell to 1.18 million, the lowest level since the pandemic started in mid-March. The figure indicates there's still some driving power behind the job market's turnaround.
Leisure and hospitality once again accounted for the bulk of jobs created last month, with 592,000 new positions added. About 504,800 of those were in food and drinking establishments — one of the industries hit hardest by the pandemic as states ordered restaurants and bars to close and directed Americans to stay at home.
Government jobs grew by 301,000, retail saw a gain of 258,300 and manufacturing payrolls increased by 26,000. Education and health services added 215,000 workers.
Nope no miracle.
The virus is still growing and Rump still cannot think big enough to help us.
We now have approximately 160,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 with more dying every day.
June 30, 2020 we had just under 120,000 dead Americans from COVID-19.
Donald Trump’s corruption is showing again. While other states will have to pay 25% of the cost of National Guard deployments helping them with coronavirus response, Trump made a special exception for just two states: Florida and Texas.
Trump isn’t even trying to pretend there’s a reason Florida and Texas deserve help 48 other states aren’t getting. The White House explained his decision was because their governors made “special, direct cases to the President.” In other words, because they’re big states with Republican governors and a lot of Electoral College votes and they sucked up to him.
The National Governors Association said that governors across the country had asked both Trump and Mike Pence to continue fully funding the National Guard coronavirus efforts, but Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott apparently did something special.
“It will cost states millions (we don't have a more precise number) to come up with their 25 percent match, during a time when state budgets already are under unprecedented strain,” a National Governors Association spokesperson told CNN. And during a time when Republicans are opposing aid to state and local governments as part of the next coronavirus stimulus, despite the threat to millions of jobs without that funding.
The only thing that’s surprising here is that Trump didn’t just preemptively grant exceptions to every state that both has a Republican governor and November polling that worries him.
I am a special education teacher and lifelong Republican who reluctantly voted for Donald Trump in 2016 as the less bad of two bad choices. When the pandemic hit, the incompetence of the man for whom I had voted and the complicity of everyone around him forced me to admit that I could no longer maintain any kind of self-respect as a Republican. So even though I had voted Republican in every presidential election since 1976, I changed my voter registration to independent and I will be voting for Joe Biden in November.
Nevertheless, I am still haunted because, deep down, I fear that with the 2016 vote I may have signed my own death warrant.
I live and teach in a small Oklahoma town. It’s not far from the site of President Trump’s Tulsa campaign rally on June 20 that appears, as common sense would have predicted, to be a superspreader event. About two weeks after the rally, Tulsa County reported a record high number of cases. I am over 60, with two autoimmune diseases. This outbreak has me worried as it is. Now, with the prospect of schools reopening in a few short weeks, I am terrified.
And I am not the only one. One young teacher I know has chronic kidney problems and is at high risk for complications if she contracts COVID-19. She can’t quit her only source of income. Taking a cue from our governor, who hosted Trump’s rally and has now tested positive for COVID-19 himself, her school district has announced that wearing a mask will be optional, though the state is considering requiring it.
Her only choice right now, she told me, is to increase her life insurance and hope for the best. That is not a choice. That is our government failing us.
Our country has long devalued and underpaid teachers, refusing to adequately fund the public schools that support our democracy. At the same time, teachers routinely have to use their own money to buy classroom supplies. Now the government is turning to us to risk our health or possibly our lives during a pandemic. My school district has no mask mandate and two nurses for more than 2,400 students in five school buildings. How is that going to work?
Officials from the president down to the local school board are kicking this can down the road, pretending it will all be OK. Teachers know it won’t. For Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who have little to no experience in our public schools, to preach to career educators about the benefits of children being in school is not only unnecessary but downright insulting. Of course our kids need to be in school! And teachers want to be there with them. For most of us, it is not only a profession but a calling. However, it needs to be done safely. With the status quo as it is, that cannot be done in most of the country. And we need to stop pretending that it can.
This virus, if anything, has proved to be predictable. Scientists and medical experts warned that opening states too quickly could result in more cases and more deaths. It already has. We now have a coronavirus outbreak raging across much of the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued specific principles for safely reopening schools. But the administration criticized the CDC guidance as impractical or too expensive. So, just like in Texas, Arizona and Florida, I fear this virus will break out in my town and then in my school.
I hear proponents of opening schools suggesting that children are less likely to contract or die from COVID-19. That’s all well and good until you or your child is the one who ends up on the wrong side of that statistic. What about the millions of grandparents raising their young grandchildren? Are we willing to take the chance of any of those kids bringing home a deadly virus to possibly the one stable loving adult in their lives?
Teaching is a calling, and Oklahoma teachers are as tough as they come. Some have sheltered their students as a tornado ripped the school building from over their heads. Most of us would do anything to help our students succeed. Now the man I gambled on to be president is asking us to risk our health and our very lives. The odds are most definitely not in our favor.
Pompeo Warned Russia About Bounties On US Troops, Trump Refuses To Do So
The New York Times reports:
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has warned Russia’s foreign minister against Moscow paying bounties to Taliban-linked militants and other Afghan fighters for killing American service members, U.S. officials said.
Mr. Pompeo’s warning is the first known rebuke from a senior American official to Russia over the bounties program, and it runs counter to President Trump’s insistence that the intelligence from U.S. government agencies over the matter is a “hoax.” The action indicates that Mr. Pompeo, who previously served as Mr. Trump’s C.I.A. director, believes the intelligence warranted a stern message.
Mr. Pompeo delivered the warning in a call on July 13 with the minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, choosing to do so during a conversation that, officially, was about an unrelated topic — the possibility of a meeting of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the U.S. officials said in the past week.
Read the full article.
"Glad that @SecPompeo warned Lavrov, but this further debunks Trump/ the WH’s nonsense claim that Trump wasn’t briefed bc it was not fully verified intelligence.
This isn’t a hoax. Trump choosing to wear blindfolds and earmuffs just empowers Putin." — Sam Vinograd (@sam_vinograd) August 7, 2020
"Why are we reading leaks about @SecPompeo warning Russians against paying bounties to kill US troops? Because Pompeo knows @realDonaldTrump is traitorous for calling it a hoax & Pompeo doesn’t want to go down with the ship. But he’s too spineless to confront @POTUS publicly." - Ted Lieu
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Anonymous trangenderism is sexist and anti-woman: a gangrene on society"
What they mean by that is that they want to kill transwomen like me even though we harm no one. That's what you do with a gangrene, you kill it. Its straight out of the Nazi propaganda playbook, they want to do to us what the Nazis did to the Jews.
Transpeople are part of the natural healthy mosaic of an ethical society.
Wyatt and Regina want to deny women like me the right to live as we choose even though they can't point to a single person harmed by me living as a woman and society treating me as a woman. Wyatt and Regina hate freedom just like they oppose democracy. Christianity has made them evil.
If we want to have the best society possible society's highest priority has to be maximizing the happiness for all in an equal and fair way. Its destructive to put your religion ahead of that.
Aug 6 (Reuters) - The last fully intact ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has collapsed, losing more than 40% of its area in just two days at the end of July, researchers said on Thursday.
The Milne Ice Shelf is at the fringe of Ellesmere Island, in the sparsely populated northern Canadian territory of Nunavut.
“Above normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for ice shelf break up,” the Canadian Ice Service said on Twitter when it announced the loss on Sunday.
“Entire cities are that size. These are big pieces of ice,“ said Luke Copland, a glaciologist at the University of Ottawa who was part of the research team studying the Milne Ice Shelf.
The shelf’s area shrank by about 80 square kilometers. By comparison, the island of Manhattan in New York covers roughly 60 square kilometers.
“This was the largest remaining intact ice shelf, and it’s disintegrated, basically,” Copland said.
The Arctic has been warming at twice the global rate for the last 30 years, due to a process known as Arctic amplification. But this year, temperatures in the polar region have been intense. The polar sea ice hit its lowest extent for July in 40 years. Record heat and wildfires have scorched Siberian Russia.
Summer in the Canadian Arctic this year in particular has been 5 degrees Celsius above the 30-year average, Copland said.
That has threatened smaller ice caps, which can melt quickly because they do not have the bulk that larger glaciers have to stay cold. As a glacier disappears, more bedrock is exposed, which then heats up and accelerates the melting process.
“The very small ones, we’re losing them dramatically,” he said, citing researchers’ reviews of satellite imagery. “You feel like you’re on a sinking island chasing these features, and these are large features. It’s not as if it’s a little tiny patch of ice you find in your garden.”
The ice shelf collapse on Ellesmere Island also meant the loss of the northern hemisphere’s last known epishelf lake, a geographic feature in which a body of freshwater is dammed by the ice shelf and floats atop ocean water.
"If we want to have the best society possible society's highest priority has to be maximizing the happiness for all in an equal and fair way. Its destructive to put your religion ahead of that."
Two weeks ago, William Evanina, director of the United States National Counterintelligence and Security Center, published a somewhat vague warning about various forms of foreign interference in the upcoming election. Today he followed up with a more direct and incriminating one, specifically warning that Russia is working to help reelect Donald Trump. Even more important is what this warning unmistakably implies: that Trump and his Republican allies in Congress are actively cooperating with Russia’s campaign.
Trump obviously tends to respond with rage at the suggestion that Russia wants him to win, let alone that he is accepting the assistance. So Evanina’s summary delicately surrounds the revelations about Trump and Moscow with superficially balancing material. The report highlights three countries that want to influence the election: Russia, China, and Iran. The report notes that the latter two want Trump to lose, while Russia wants him to win.
This seems intended to let Republicans claim that there is foreign interference on both sides. And it’s true, as far as it goes.
But the comparisons end there. What is China doing to defeat Trump? Its government has “grown increasingly critical of the current Administration’s COVID-19 response, closure of China’s Houston Consulate, and actions on other issues.” And Iran’s efforts “probably will focus on on-line influence, such as spreading disinformation on social media and recirculating anti-U.S. content.”
In others words, Iran and China are undermining Trump by criticizing him in public remarks, possibly including some mean tweets.
Russia’s efforts to help Trump include all that. In addition, the statement notes, “pro-Russia Ukrainian parliamentarian Andriy Derkach is spreading claims about corruption — including through publicizing leaked phone calls — to undermine former Vice President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party.”
Derkach and his Russian allies despise Biden, who spearheaded the administration’s efforts to reform Ukraine, reign in its oligarchs, and diminish Russian influence. They have attempted to depict Biden’s reform efforts as a corrupt plot to enrich his son, Hunter.
Derkach has been working openly with Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. None of this is a secret. Here are the two of them meeting in Kiev in December:
https://twitter.com/DrDenaGrayson/status/1202638358549344258?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1202640432376766465%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fnymag.com%2Fintelligencer%2F2020%2F08%2Frussia-ukraine-trump-biden-intelligence-foreign-interference-election.html
Giuliani told the Washington Post earlier this summer that Derkach “doesn’t seem pro-Russian to me.” In case that ruse was fooling anybody, U.S. intelligence has now officially described Derkach as an organ of Russian political interference...
Continues at
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/08/russia-ukraine-trump-biden-intelligence-foreign-interference-election.html
Nationwide, daily deaths surpassed 1,000 for the fourth day in a row Friday, with 1,316 fatalities reported. States also reported a combined 60,674 confirmed cases, marking the first time in a week that daily nationwide infections have exceeded 60,000.
Total U.S. cases are likely to surpass 5 million this weekend.
New Jersey has reported 15,860 coronavirus deaths so far, third highest of any state.
And yet Rump ignored coronavirus guidelines at his NJ golf club Friday night and called going maskless a "peaceful protest."
here are the reasons why the virus has spread so widely in America:
1. Anthony Fauci lied to Americans back in March and told them wearing masks was ineffective. Had he not done that, masks would have been the strategy to stopping the spread back when people were still taking expert advice seriously, and would have slowed its spread dramatically.
2. Trump should have restricted movement of people out of New York when it was the hottest of spots. Europe travel should have been banned sooner
3. Local governments hypocritically allowed massive protests and funerals for BLM while contending similar gatherings for anything else were dangerous. At this point, Americans lost confidence in the health pronouncements of local and state officials and lost the commitment to physical distancing
If the wearing of masks and physical distancing were observed, the whole thing could be over in weeks.
The media needs to drop their political games and get this message out
This is what Trump said exactly:
“If I’m victorious on November 3rd, I plan to forgive these taxes and make permanent cuts to the payroll tax. I’m going to make them all permanent … In other words, I’ll extend beyond the end of the year and terminate the tax.”
This means he’s terminating the funding stream for Social Security and Medicare.
Hey, all you seniors who love Donald Trump. Not only does he consider you all expendable (practically dead already) to the economy with COVID-19, he’s intent upon ending Social Security and Medicare.
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