VOTE
The intensity of the craziness is increasing. The president is using the White House and "his" generals and federal officials as props for political events. He is spreading the virus, going insane, saying things, cheering on the lawless militias and encouraging waves of police violence.
The election is going on now and, as a minority, the Republicans are doing all they can to disrupt it. Of course they would like to discourage Democrats from voting and show vote-counts that give them a win in the electoral college, but they can also try to win by creating chaos and doubt in the voting process and then tossing it to the Supreme Court, which by then should be packed with a nice secure 6-3 conservative majority. Or perhaps Trump will simply declare a "continuation," as he has suggested, and try to stay in the White House illegitimately. It is that crazy. We just don't know. No other President has ever even threatened such a thing, and nobody knows what would happen if he tried to go through with it.
There is one way out of this darkness and that is a Biden landslide. Yesterday in Georgia, Republican voter suppression led to people standing in line for early voting for eleven hours. That is discouraging and I am sure it worked, I'm sure a lot of people decided not to endure it. But thousands did. By the way, you will read about how "inspiring" the voters are who stayed in line and what a great day that was for democracy but I don't buy it. Yes I agree those people are inspiring, but it is a terrible day when the election is so corrupted that it makes the citizens stay home and not participate in the one moment when a democracy counts on them.
In Maryland we have early voting and we have vote-by-mail. You know the administration is trying to cripple the Postal Service, so I myself am hesitant to put my ballot into a mailbox, but you can take them to secure drop box locations near your home. Note that at least in California the Republicans have been putting out fake dropboxes, so check the list that is sent with your ballot or, if you're in Montgomery County, check this site: DROP BOX LOCATIONS to be sure you are going to a valid place.
The Republicans are set to lose pretty badly now, but they are in control at the federal level, so you can expect some heavy-handed tricks in the days to come. The country is more polarized than it has ever been, the President and his hierarchy are cranking up the volume, and we just don't know what lawlessness they are capable of.
If Trump will want to challenge vote-counts, saying mail-in votes don't count, or that the polling places were corrupt, or whatever, then a Biden landslide can't really be challenged. You can't have a Brooks Brothers riot unless the counts are close. You can't send it to th Supreme Court unless it's close. It is clear now that the majority of the country wants Trump's insanity to end, and it is also clear that he will do anything to stay in office, where he can avoid his financial liabilities and criminal prosecution.
So it is more important than ever to VOTE. Make sure your family members and neighbors vote. That is the fundamental activity that defines democracy and if we have another Trump administration it could be the last time he opportunity is offered to you.
posted by JimK at 9:54 AM
210 Comments:
"which by then should be packed with a nice secure 6-3 conservative majority"
that's not "packing", a term every kid in high school learned when studying the FDR era
why do liberals think they can't win without redefining words?
"There is one way out of this darkness and that is a Biden landslide."
you're right about that but it would have been more likely on election night if Dems hadn't pushed all this mail voting
ironically, that's what gives the GOP hope - that they can throw out votes on technicalities
just like TTF did years ago to stop a referendum on gay rights
"the Republicans have been putting out fake dropboxes,"
courts have ruled Dems can collect ballots and deliver them
why can't repubs?
"the President and his hierarchy are cranking up the volume, and we just don't know what lawlessness they are capable of."
or how much verbal suasion they can apply
a Biden administration will be a nightmare
"It is clear now that the majority of the country wants Trump's insanity to end,"
not really
"and it is also clear that he will do anything to stay in office, where he can avoid his financial liabilities and criminal prosecution."
this is noting to worry about
the military won't let him stay if he loses the election
"So it is more important than ever to VOTE. Make sure your family members and neighbors vote. That is the fundamental activity that defines democracy"
actually, we should make a choice if there are reasonable options
but we have a right to express our disagreement but not voting for anyone
"and if we have another Trump administration it could be the last time he opportunity is offered to you."
drop the fantasies
Nothing has any right to use a pregnant person's body, even for survival, without her consent. Period. End of story. Even if it were somehow true that a zygote or embryo or fetus were magically a "person" comparable to a living, breathing, thinking, feeling, actual baby or child or adult, that would actually be irrelevant.
Again: nothing has any right to use a pregnant person's body, even for survival, without her consent.
There is nothing that Trump could do that Wyatt and Regina Hardiman and their church wouldn't defend. He certainly could shoot some innocent person on fifth avenue and not lose any of their support.
Conservatives like them are living in a dysfunctional relationship with their leadership and it diminishes everyone's life. Wyatt and Regina are "zealots" in this relationship, defending and justifying everything the abusive leader/god does.
Commanded To Love
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u91ctugBCsg&feature=youtu.be
"you're right about that but it would have been more likely on election night if Dems hadn't pushed all this mail voting
ironically, that's what gives the GOP hope - that they can throw out votes on technicalities"
Both republicans and democrats have used mail-in voting for years without problems. It's only a problem now because Hair Rump is desperately trying to undermine public confidence in it, and most repubs are playing along.
Five states – Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington – conduct what are commonly referred to as all-mail elections. In these states, voting is conducted primarily, although not necessarily exclusively, by mail.
What's really ironic is Rump himself has been trying to vote by mail illegally:
President Trump originally tried to register to vote in Florida while claiming his “legal residence” was in another part of the country — Washington, D.C. — according to Florida elections records.
The September 2019 registration application listed Trump’s legal residence as 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, the location of the White House. That created a potential problem for Trump: Florida law requires voters to be legal residents of the state. A month later, Trump resubmitted his application to use a Florida address and in March he voted by mail in Florida’s Republican primary.
The revisions complicate Trump’s own record as a voter at a time when the president has made unsubstantiated claims of widespread fraud in mail-in balloting.
Trump’s original voter-registration application, which was obtained by The Washington Post via a public records request, was filed during a time when the president was making a highly publicized move to change his permanent residence from his Manhattan penthouse to Mar-a-Lago, his private club in Palm Beach, Fla.
The voter application is dated Sept. 27, 2019 — the same day that Trump made the domicile change. On one of his forms that day he was telling Florida officials that his “legal residence” was Washington, D.C., and on another he was saying he was a “bona fide resident” of Palm Beach.
Florida voter-registration applicants are warned on registration forms that they may be subject to fines and even prison time if they do not provide truthful information.
On Thursday, an elections fraud complaint was filed with the Florida Department of State against Trump by Jim Watson, a semiretired truck driver from Boynton Beach, Fla. In the complaint, Watson asserts that Trump is prohibited from using Mar-a-Lago as his legal residence because it is a private club.
“This is in a recorded agreement, a covenant running with the land to the benefit of all Florida and Palm Beach County residents,” the complaint states.
Noting that Trump now uses Mar-a-Lago as his legal residence for his voter registration, the complaint says that “the Mar a Lago [sic] Club is not a property where anyone can legally reside.”
A letter accompanying the complaint asks that it be forwarded to the state attorney in Palm Beach County.
The complaint raises the stakes in an ongoing battle over Trump’s residency, shifting it squarely into the realm of Florida authorities, who will be faced with handling the politically charged matter.
There has been at least one recent instance in Florida in which a public official faced legal consequences for registering to vote at an address that was not her legal residence. Last year, the city manager of Deltona, Fl., entered into an agreement with the local state’s attorney’s office to pay more than $5,000 in fees and reimbursements for the state’s investigation to avoid being prosecuted on criminal charges in a voter-registration case. She had registered to vote using the address of Deltona’s City Hall, rather than her home address, and had cast ballots in elections using that registration.
If Marriage Equality is Overturned by SCOTUS, Interracial Marriages May Be Next
Last week, the Supreme Court chose not to take up a case brought to them by former Rowan County (Kentucky) Clerk Kim Davis, the anti-gay government official who wouldn’t issue same-sex marriage licenses even though that was her job. But that wasn’t the big news.
The headlines focused on how two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, issued a statement saying that, while they agreed it was the right move not to hear this particular case, they believed the Obergefell ruling that legalized marriage equality nationwide needed to be overturned.
That was especially disturbing because Chief Justice John Roberts dissented in Obergefell, two new justices have been appointed to the court by Donald Trump, and another vehemently anti-LGBTQ judge will likely join them within weeks. There’s a very strong chance that, like abortion rights, marriage equality will soon be overturned.
Because this is obviously a matter centered around religion and “religious freedom” (i.e. faith-based bigotry), the leaders of the Congressional Freethought Caucus have issued a statement denouncing that possibility.
Representatives Jared Huffman and Jamie Raskin sent this along in an email:
"Suggesting reversal of this landmark ruling is a dramatic attack on the LGBTQ+ community that turns religious liberty into a weapon against other people’s fundamental rights. Religious freedom isn’t the right to compel the government to deny the equal rights of other citizens. But, as members of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, we see right-wing forces on the Court and in Congress trying to twist religious free exercise into a bizarre new right to make the state discriminate against disfavored groups.
Any government that can turn the clock back to discriminate against same-sex couples can also turn it back to discriminate against interracial and interfaith couples. Nothing could be more deeply at odds with our principles of constitutional freedom and equality for all Americans.".
I said "To have the best possible world everyone's highest priority has to be maximizing the happiness for all in an equal and fair way."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "after you've gone to re-education camp and received a round of electro-shock therapy, you'll be very happy you'll be glad to wear your new MAGA hat!"
You paint quite a contrast between my morality and yours', one I'm happy people can see. And yet you claim to be morally superior to harmless lgbt people like me.
Wyatt and Regina are trying to gas light people into believing its not unconstitutional do deny gays and lesbians the right to marry.
Gay marriage bans are unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment's equal protection under the law clause - if heterosexuals can marry, so can gays, equality under the constitution demands it.
Wyatt and Regina will disingenuously assert "gays have the same right to marry someone of the opposite sex as everyone else". That's the same argument racists used to argue that blacks couldn't marry whites - "every one has the same right to marry someone of their own race". The United States Supreme Court rejected that argument against interracial marriage in Loving vs Virginia.
The reason why the bigote3d argument fails is that the Bill of Rights applies to individuals, not groups. Therefore, if John has a right to marry Alice then Debby must have the same right as him to marry Alice. Anything else is just straightforward sex discrimination (as the supreme court recently ruled on the 1964 Civil Rights Act). Judge Alito even suggested that in his questions to the opening arguments in the 2015 ruling that established there is a constitutional requirement that gays have the same right to marry someone of their choosing that heterosexuals do. Alito asked of the defendants (paraphrasing) "If John can marry Alice, why can't Debby marry Alice? How is this not a case of straightforward unconstitutional discrimination based on sex?".
Alito would go on to reject his one iron clad reasoning and rule for the policy outcome he wanted rather than what the constitution requires. This is the hypocrisy of conservative justices.
"Any government that can turn the clock back to discriminate against same-sex couples can also turn it back to discriminate against interracial and interfaith couples. Nothing could be more deeply at odds with our principles of constitutional freedom and equality for all Americans."
well any government COULD do it
but there is no commonality between the two
Amy CB will be the final nail in the coffin of gay marriage
but she has a multi-racial family, indicating she is not opposed to such a thing, nor are 99% of Americans
on of the most obnoxious and despicable tactics of homosexuals is to link racial identity with sexual perversion
"That was especially disturbing because Chief Justice John Roberts dissented in Obergefell, two new justices have been appointed to the court by Donald Trump, and another vehemently anti-LGBTQ judge will likely join them within weeks. There’s a very strong chance that, like abortion rights, marriage equality will soon be overturned."
whadda ya mean, very strong chance?
it's over
legalized abortion and gay "marriage" will be left to the discretion of state law
"And yet you claim to be morally superior to harmless lgbt people like me."
you'll have to show where I've ever claimed to be morally superior to anyone
everyone is going to be very kind by sending gays to re-education camps to teach them to be happy wearing their new MAGA hats!!!!!!!
I said "And yet you claim to be morally superior to harmless lgbt people like me."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "you'll have to show where I've ever claimed to be morally superior to anyone".
You make that claim every time you talk about "biblical sexual morality" and claim gayness is a sin. Do you want to now deny you consider gayness a wrongdoing?
I didn't think so.
If you and I are otherwise equal in our morality and I'm gay and you're not, by your "logic" that gayness is a sin it necessarily means you consider yourself morally superior to me, whether you say it in those exact words or not.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "everyone is going to be very kind by sending gays to re-education camps to teach them to be happy wearing their new MAGA hats!!!!!!!"
Wyatt and Regina will claim that's a "joke" but psychologists will tell you when people "joke" about harm coming to others its a true expression of their real desires. Make no mistake about it, they really do want to send innocent lgbt people to concentration camps just like the Nazis did.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman are deeply desirous of punishing those who dare to live in ways they don't approve of even though no one is harmed. Decades of psychological research show conservatives have a greater tendency hate freedom and to abuse others than liberals:
The Authoritarians
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "on of the most obnoxious and despicable tactics of h&sexuals is to link racial identity with sexual perversion".
There's nothing perverted about that which does not harm others. Skin colour and sexual orientation are exactly alike in that they are both harmless characteristics its immoral to discriminate against.
You two are grotesquely immoral, but what can you expect when you follow a religion whose foundational belief is the greatest injustice conceivable by man - infinite punishment for finite crime.
I said "Republicans promised they wouldn't fill a vacant supreme court seat in the last year of Trump's presidency. This corruption is destroying America and will make everyone's lives worse."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "corruption? the American people elected them and the SCOTUS was a big issue in their campaigns"
Of course its corruption, they blocked Obama's nominee with the justification that a vacant supreme court seat shouldn't be filled in the last year the presidency. Now they're reneging on their promise. Corrupt is all you can call that.
Millions more people voted for Democrats for Congress and the presidency than voted for Republicans. The American people did not elect Republicans, a corrupt system did.
"everyone is going to be very kind by sending gays to re-education camps to teach them to be happy wearing their new MAGA hats!!!!!!!"
Re-education camps are a favorite tool of some totalitarian regimes. The rest just murder the people they don't like.
Good to know which side you're on.
A recent study assessed that had we exercised our pandemic mitigation plans (which have existed since 2005), as other wealthy countries did, nearly 9 million more Americans would be employed, and over 100,000 would still be alive. We could have saved half of the Americans who have died so far.
Your government is supposed to perform some basic functions; keeping you and your family safe is primary among them. In 2016, I voted for President Trump. But when someone asked me if I could vote for him again, after he time and again refused to keep Americans safe — how could I say anything but no? How could anyone?
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (AP) — Members of anti-government paramilitary groups discussed kidnapping Virginia’s governor during a June meeting in Ohio, an FBI agent testified Tuesday during a court hearing for a group of men accused of plotting to kidnap Michigan’s governor.
Special Agent Richard Trask also revealed new details about investigators’ use of confidential informants, undercover agents and encrypted communication to arrest and charge six men last week in the plot aimed at Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.
Tuesday’s hearing was to review investigators’ evidence against Adam Fox, Ty Garbin, Kaleb Franks, Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta and to determine if they should be detained before trial. The men are all from Michigan.
A sixth man, Barry Croft, was being held in Delaware.
The FBI discovered the June 6 meeting in Dublin, Ohio, during an investigation of various anti-government groups, leading to the months-long case in Michigan that relied on confidential sources, undercover agents and clandestine recordings to foil the alleged kidnapping conspiracy.
It was not immediately clear whether talk of targeting Virginia’s Democratic governor went beyond the June meeting, and nothing from a criminal complaint or from Trask’s testimony Tuesday indicated that anyone had been charged with plotting against Northam. Trask said members of anti-government groups from “four or five” states attended that meeting, and the complaint noted that Croft and Fox were among the roughly 15 people who were there.
“They discussed possible targets, taking a sitting governor, specifically issues with the governor of Michigan and Virginia based on the lockdown orders,” Trask said. He said the people at the meeting were unhappy with the governors’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic.
The FBI alerted key members of Northam’s security team throughout the course of its investigation, but neither the governor nor members of his staff were informed, as per security protocols for highly-classified information, said Northam’s spokeswoman, Alena Yarmosky. She said the governor and his family were never believed to be in imminent danger, and that there have been enhanced security measures in place for them for quite a while.
“Here’s the reality: President Trump called upon his supporters to “LIBERATE VIRGINIA” in April — just like Michigan. In fact, the President regularly encourages violence against those who disagree with him. The rhetoric coming out of this White House has serious and potentially deadly consequences. It must stop,” Yarmosky said in a news release.
GOP Now Claiming Supreme Court Won't Agree With GOP Lawsuit To Strike Down Obamacare
Republicans voted 70 times to strike down Obamacare. As we speak they are in court now arguing to strike down the law and its protections for those with preexisting health conditions. Now the duplicitous bunch are trying to tell us there is no concern that Amy Barrett and the Supreme Court will strike it down, despite her comments that it should have been struck down by the court in the past.
Obamacare has never been more popular with 62% of Americans in favour of the law.
Trump promised to only nominate supreme court justices who would strike down the law and his choice for the court has said it should be killed. 20 million Americans will lose health care and 160 million Americans with preexisting conditions will no longer have access to health care at the same cost as everyone else.
Barr’s “Unmasking” Probe Collapses In Pile Of Nothing
The federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr to review whether Obama-era officials improperly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding any substantive wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the matter.
The revelation that U.S. Attorney John Bash, who left the department last week, had concluded his review without criminal charges or any public report will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department.
Legal analysts feared Bash’s review was yet another attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to target political opponents of the president. Even if it ultimately produced no results of consequence, legal analysts said, it allowed Trump and other conservatives to say Obama-era officials were under scrutiny, as long as the case stayed active.
The federal prosecutor appointed by Attorney General William P. Barr to review whether Obama-era officials improperly requested the identities of individuals whose names were redacted in intelligence documents has completed his work without finding any substantive wrongdoing, according to people familiar with the matter.
The revelation that U.S. Attorney John Bash, who left the department last week, had concluded his review without criminal charges or any public report will rankle President Trump at a moment when he is particularly upset at the Justice Department. The department has so far declined to release the results of Bash’s work, though people familiar with his findings say they would likely disappoint conservatives who have tried to paint the “unmasking” of names — a common practice in government to help understand classified documents — as a political conspiracy.
The president in recent days has pressed federal law enforcement to move against his political adversaries and complained that a different prosecutor tapped by Barr to investigate the FBI’s 2016 investigation of his campaign will not be issuing any public findings before the election.
Legal analysts feared Bash’s review was yet another attempt by Trump’s Justice Department to target political opponents of the president. Even if it ultimately produced no results of consequence, legal analysts said, it allowed Trump and other conservatives to say Obama-era officials were under scrutiny, as long as the case stayed active.
The department — both under Barr and Trump’s previous attorney general, Jeff Sessions — has repeatedly turned to U.S. attorneys across the country to investigate matters of Republican concern, distressing current and former Justice Department officials, who fear department leaders are repeatedly caving to Trump’s pressure to benefit his allies and target those he perceives as political enemies.
Kerri Kupec, the Justice Department’s top spokeswoman, had first revealed Bash’s review in May, after Republican senators made public a declassified list of U.S. officials, including former vice president Joe Biden, who made requests that would ultimately reveal the name of Trump adviser Michael Flynn in intelligence documents in late 2016 and early 2017.
"The need for international solidarity and multilateral cooperation is more conspicuous than ever. The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize for 2020 to the World Food Programme (WFP) for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict.
The World Food Programme is the world’s largest humanitarian organisation addressing hunger and promoting food security. In 2019, the WFP provided assistance to close to 100 million people in 88 countries who are victims of acute food insecurity and hunger. In 2015, eradicating hunger was adopted as one of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The WFP is the UN’s primary instrument for realising this goal. In recent years, the situation has taken a negative turn. In 2019, 135 million people suffered from acute hunger, the highest number in many years. Most of the increase was caused by war and armed conflict.
The coronavirus pandemic has contributed to a strong upsurge in the number of victims of hunger in the world. In countries such as Yemen, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, South Sudan and Burkina Faso, the combination of violent conflict and the pandemic has led to a dramatic rise in the number of people living on the brink of starvation. In the face of the pandemic, the World Food Programme has demonstrated an impressive ability to intensify its efforts. As the organisation itself has stated, “Until the day we have a medical vaccine, food is the best vaccine against chaos.”
The world is in danger of experiencing a hunger crisis of inconceivable proportions if the World Food Programme and other food assistance organisations do not receive the financial support they have requested.
The link between hunger and armed conflict is a vicious circle: war and conflict can cause food insecurity and hunger, just as hunger and food insecurity can cause latent conflicts to flare up and trigger the use of violence. We will never achieve the goal of zero hunger unless we also put an end to war and armed conflict.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to emphasise that providing assistance to increase food security not only prevents hunger, but can also help to improve prospects for stability and peace. The World Food Programme has taken the lead in combining humanitarian work with peace efforts through pioneering projects in South America, Africa and Asia.
The World Food Programme was an active participant in the diplomatic process that culminated in May 2018 in the UN Security Council’s unanimous adoption of Resolution 2417, which for the first time explicitly addressed the link between conflict and hunger. The Security Council also underscored UN Member States’ obligation to help ensure that food assistance reaches those in need, and condemned the use of starvation as a method of warfare.
With this year’s award, the Norwegian Nobel Committee wishes to turn the eyes of the world towards the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger. The World Food Programme plays a key role in multilateral cooperation on making food security an instrument of peace, and has made a strong contribution towards mobilising UN Member States to combat the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict. The organisation contributes daily to advancing the fraternity of nations referred to in Alfred Nobel’s will. As the UN’s largest specialised agency, the World Food Programme is a modern version of the peace congresses that the Nobel Peace Prize is intended to promote.
The work of the World Food Programme to the benefit of humankind is an endeavour that all the nations of the world should be able to endorse and support.
Hunter Biden was Chairman of the World Food Program USA from 2013 – 2019.
While rump’s sons were slaughtering endangered species and stealing from charities, Joe Biden’s son was working to feed the hungry.
"you consider yourself morally superior to me, whether you say it in those exact words or not"
in other words, no I didn't say that
everyone in the nuthouse thinks that "they all think they're better than me"
it's classic paranoid narcissism
always obsessed with what everyone thinks of them
and always sure they know what everyone's thinking
"psychologists will tell you when people "joke" about harm coming to others its a true expression of their real desires"
can you show us which "psychologists" think this?
or is it something they think "whether they say it in those exact words or not"?
hahahahahahahaha!!!!!!
"Make no mistake about it, they really do want to send innocent lgbt people to concentration camps just like the Nazis did."
you mean like Stalin and Mao did?
"Decades of psychological research show conservatives have a greater tendency hate freedom and to abuse others than liberals:"
can you show us which research says this?
or is it something the researchers think "whether they say it in those exact words or not"?
"There's nothing perverted about that which does not harm others."
uh, how would you define perversion?
"Skin colour and sexual orientation are exactly alike in that they are both harmless characteristics its immoral to discriminate against."
"sexual orientation" is a propaganda term for sexual preference
which is perverted if not for the opposite gender
"Republicans promised they wouldn't fill a vacant supreme court seat in the last year of Trump's presidency. This corruption is destroying America and will make everyone's lives worse."
corruption? the American people elected them and the SCOTUS was a big issue in their campaigns
that's the polar opposite of corruption
it's called keeping your promises
you won't ever catch Biden doing that!!!!!!!!!
"Millions more people voted for Democrats for Congress and the presidency than voted for Republicans. The American people did not elect Republicans, a corrupt system did."
America was designed to be anti-majoritarian
that system protects the rights of minorities
"Re-education camps are a favorite tool of some totalitarian regimes. The rest just murder the people they don't like."
these re-education camps are just going to help everyone be happy!!!!!
"A recent study assessed that had we exercised our pandemic mitigation plans (which have existed since 2005), as other wealthy countries did, nearly 9 million more Americans would be employed, and over 100,000 would still be alive. We could have saved half of the Americans who have died so far."
what a crock of crap!
the WHO now says that lockdowns should only be done as a last resort
"Your government is supposed to perform some basic functions; keeping you and your family safe is primary among them. In 2016, I voted for President Trump. But when someone asked me if I could vote for him again, after he time and again refused to keep Americans safe — how could I say anything but no? How could anyone?"
the local government is in charge of local health
the blue state corridor from Philly to Boston is where most deaths happened
"It was not immediately clear"
whenever you red this phrase, a liberal is trying to deceive you
"Republicans voted 70 times to strike down Obamacare. As we speak they are in court now arguing to strike down the law and its protections for those with preexisting health conditions. Now the duplicitous bunch are trying to tell us there is no concern that Amy Barrett and the Supreme Court will strike it down, despite her comments that it should have been struck down by the court in the past."
Amy will only strike it down if it's unconstitutional
"Obamacare has never been more popular with 62% of Americans in favour of the law."
the SCOTUS is not a polling organization
"Trump promised to only nominate supreme court justices who would strike down the law and his choice for the court has said it should be killed. 20 million Americans will lose health care and 160 million Americans with preexisting conditions will no longer have access to health care at the same cost as everyone else."
oh well
no one can afford the deductibles and co-pays anyway
"Hunter Biden was Chairman of the World Food Program USA from 2013 – 2019.
While rump’s sons were slaughtering endangered species and stealing from charities, Joe Biden’s son was working to feed the hungry."
in the last debate, bIden said "like in so many families, my son is a drug addict
strangely, he didn't bring this up
how much did Hunter get paid?
I said "you consider yourself morally superior to me, whether you say it in those exact words or not"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "in other words, no I didn't say that".
You did. Every time you say gayness is a sin you're claiming your morally superior to gays.
I said "Decades of psychological research show conservatives have a greater tendency hate freedom and to abuse others than liberals:"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "can you show us which research says this?"
I've posted it dozens of times, read it this time:
The Authoritarians
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view
I said "Skin colour and sexual orientation are exactly alike in that they are both harmless characteristics its immoral to discriminate against."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "sexual orientation" is a propaganda term for sexual preference".
Nonsense. People don't choose who they are attracted to.
Wyat/Regina/bad anonymous said "which is perverted if not for the opposite gender"
That which does not harm others is not a perversion. Your war on harmless lgbt people is a perversion.
I said "Republicans promised they wouldn't fill a vacant supreme court seat in the last year of Trump's presidency. This corruption is destroying America and will make everyone's lives worse."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "corruption? the American people elected them and the SCOTUS was a big issue in their campaigns that's the polar opposite of corruption it's called keeping your promises"
They justified blocking Obama's nominee based on their promise that they would let the public have a say in Trump's last year. They broke that promise, that's corruption. People voted based on that broken promise to so you've got no excuse there - Republicans are corrupt.
I said "Millions more people voted for Democrats for Congress and the presidency than voted for Republicans. The American people did not elect Republicans, a corrupt system did."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "America was designed to be anti-majoritarian that system protects the rights of minorities"
You're a minority in the same way the ruling white party in Apartheid South Africa was a minority. You are using your undeserved monopoly on power to attack the rights of minorities.
I posted "A recent study assessed that had we exercised our pandemic mitigation plans (which have existed since 2005), as other wealthy countries did, nearly 9 million more Americans would be employed, and over 100,000 would still be alive. We could have saved half of the Americans who have died so far."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "what a crock of crap! the WHO now says that lockdowns should only be done as a last resort".
Over 200,000 Americans needlessly dead and infections spiraling out of control its time for a last resort.
Masks and social distancing help but Trump and the Republicans mock that and have announced their new policy is to encourage everyone to get infected which would mean hundreds of thousands more die needlessly.
Elizabeth Neumann said "Your government is supposed to perform some basic functions; keeping you and your family safe is primary among them. In 2016, I voted for President Trump. But when someone asked me if I could vote for him again, after he time and again refused to keep Americans safe — how could I say anything but no? How could anyone?"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the local government is in charge of local health the blue state corridor from Philly to Boston is where most deaths happened"
Quite simply that's a lie by your own figures you recently posted saying 1/3 of the deaths were there. Americans are dying needlessly, when the states fail its up to the federal government to step in with leadership and protect the public. Trump didn't do that. Now he wants to infect the entire population which would result in millions of deaths.
I said "Republicans voted 70 times to strike down Obamacare. As we speak they are in court now arguing to strike down the law and its protections for those with preexisting health conditions. Now the duplicitous bunch are trying to tell us there is no concern that Amy Barrett and the Supreme Court will strike it down, despite her comments that it should have been struck down by the court in the past."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Amy will only strike it down if it's unconstitutional".
No, as I posted earlier, research shows conservative justices don't rule based on the constitution, they rule based on their preferred policy positions. Your response was "that's a good idea!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" and now you expect us to believe you care about the constitution? Neither does Amy Barrett and she will ignore the law to rule in anti-gay, anti-woman, sexist ways that give christians the right to harm innocent lgbt people.
I said"Obamacare has never been more popular with 62% of Americans in favour of the law."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the SCOTUS is not a polling organization".
I never said it was, moron. Republicans went to court to get rid of Obamacare and now that its hugely popular and they are putting an anti-Obamacare judge on the Supreme Court they're trying to tell us not to worry the court won't strike it down. They're trying to deceive the public again like they did when they promised not to fill an open supreme court seat in Trump's last year.
I posted"Trump promised to only nominate supreme court justices who would strike down the law and his choice for the court has said it should be killed. 20 million Americans will lose health care and 160 million Americans with preexisting conditions will no longer have access to health care at the same cost as everyone else."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "oh well no one can afford the deductibles and co-pays anyway".
The deductibles and copays are trivial compared to no being able to afford health care when insurance companies can deny them coverage for preexisting conditions.
The number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States is the inability to pay medical bills. With its protections for those with preexisting health conditions Obamacare is a major benefit in preventing bankruptcy.
"You did. Every time you say gayness is a sin you're claiming your morally superior to gays."
first of all, I don't recall saying that here
second of all, even if that were said, it doesn't mean it's the only vice that exists
third of all, your rationale would imply that anyone who is not amoral thinks they are morally superior
"I've posted it dozens of times, read it this time:
The Authoritarians
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view"
oh, this opinion piece by a lonely loser who has to give it away because no publication will print it
it would never pass peer review
"Nonsense. People don't choose who they are attracted to."
that's like saying they don't choose what they choose
"That which does not harm others is not a perversion. Your war on harmless lgbt people is a perversion."
you are simply playing Orwellian games
your real argument is that there is nothing wring with perversion
"They justified blocking Obama's nominee based on their promise that they would let the public have a say in Trump's last year. They broke that promise, that's corruption. People voted based on that broken promise to so you've got no excuse there - Republicans are corrupt."
actually, Trump never said he would not nominate a judge in the final year of his presidency
Lindsay Graham did but he doesn't nominate judges
in 2016, the President and the Senate were diametrically opposed as what type of judge to put on the court
it was deemed better to let the voters choose
and, boy o boy, did they choose
now, the President and the Senate agree that abortion and gay marriage are not constitutional rights
might as well put on a judge that will decide the election disputes in Trump's favor and rule Obamacare
the American people chose to have a President and Senate in agreement
there's no stalemate to break!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Over 200,000 Americans needlessly dead and infections spiraling out of control its time for a last resort."
it's now recognized that there are more effective ways to fight the virus than lockdowns
places that didn't lockdown have done better than places that did
"Trump and the Republicans have announced their new policy is to encourage everyone to get infected which would mean hundreds of thousands more die needlessly."
Randy this is a lie just like the ones that you told and were so embarrassed about when you were caught a couple of months ago
Trump made no such announcement
you are lying and need to apologize
"Americans are dying needlessly, when the states fail its up to the federal government to step in with leadership and protect the public. Trump didn't do that."
Trump has no power to overrule state governments
btw, we just had two prominent men who both are in the vulnerable category get COVID and survive
highlighting the fact that COVID is not that dangerous unless you are elderly and already pretty sick
such people can be protected in less costly ways than shutting down the economy
"No, as I posted earlier, research shows conservative justices don't rule based on the constitution, they rule based on their preferred policy positions."
that's not research
that's opinion seeking it's own justification
it's a well-know phenomenon that preconceived notions skew "research"
"Neither does Amy Barrett and she will ignore the law to rule in anti-gay, anti-woman, sexist ways that give christians the right to harm innocent lgbt people."
gays will not be harmed be not getting special preferences or living with a correct definition of marriage
"Republicans went to court to get rid of Obamacare and now that its hugely popular and they are putting an anti-Obamacare judge on the Supreme Court they're trying to tell us not to worry the court won't strike it down. They're trying to deceive the public again like they did when they promised not to fill an open supreme court seat in Trump's last year."
they didn't not to worry the court won't strike it down
they said they won't strike it down unless it's unconstitutional
to be clear, it's unconstitutional and will be struck down
soon after the election
but Amy will allow Dems to make their arguments to keep Obamacare
then, her and Brett and Neil and Samuel and Clarence will get together and have a good laugh
and issue their opinion
"The deductibles and copays are trivial compared to no being able to afford health care when insurance companies can deny them coverage for preexisting conditions."
they aren't trivial when most of those on Obamacare can't pay them
"The number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States is the inability to pay medical bills. With its protections for those with preexisting health conditions Obamacare is a major benefit in preventing bankruptcy."
if they declare bankruptcy, their debts are eliminated
we got it covered
ROME (AP) — Europe’s second wave of coronavirus infections has struck well before flu season even started, with intensive care wards filling up again and bars shutting down. Making matters worse, authorities say, is a widespread case of “COVID-fatigue.”
Record high daily infections in several eastern European countries and sharp rebounds in the hard-hit west have made clear that Europe never really crushed the COVID-19 curve as hoped, after springtime lockdowns.
Spain this week declared a state of emergency for Madrid amid increasing tensions between local and national authorities over virus containment measures. Germany offered up soldiers to help with contact tracing in newly flaring hotspots. Italy mandated masks outdoors and warned that for the first time since the country became the European epicenter of the pandemic, the health system was facing “significant critical issues” as hospitals fill up.
The Czech Republic’s “Farewell Covid” party in June, when thousands of Prague residents dined outdoors at a 500-meter (yard) long table across the Charles Bridge to celebrate their victory over the virus, seems painfully naive now that the country has the highest per-capita infection rate on the continent, at 398 per 100,000 residents.
“I have to say clearly that the situation is not good,” the Czech interior minister, Jan Hamacek, acknowledged this week.
Epidemiologists and residents alike are pointing the finger at governments for having failed to seize on the summertime lull in cases to prepare adequately for the expected autumn onslaught, with testing and ICU staffing still critically short. In Rome this week, people waited in line for 8-10 hours to get tested, while front-line medics from Kiev to Paris found themselves once again pulling long, short-staffed shifts in overcrowded wards.
“When the state of alarm was abandoned, it was time to invest in prevention, but that hasn’t been done,” lamented Margarita del Val, viral immunology expert with the Severo Ochoa Molecular Biology Center, part of Spain’s top research body, CSIC.
“We are in the fall wave without having resolved the summer wave,” she told an online forum this week.
Tensions are rising in cities where new restrictions have been re-imposed, with hundreds of Romanian hospitality workers protesting this week after Bucharest once again shut down the capital’s indoor restaurants, theaters and dance venues.
As infections rise in many European countries, some — including Belgium, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Spain and France — are diagnosing more new cases every day per capita than the United States, according to the seven-day rolling averages of data kept by Johns Hopkins University. On Friday, France, with a population of about 70 million, reported a record 20,300 new infections.
Experts say Europe’s high infection rate is due in large part to expanded testing that is turning up far more asymptomatic positives than during the first wave, when only the sick could get a test.
But the trend is nevertheless alarming, given the flu season hasn’t even begun, schools are open for in-person learning and the cold weather hasn’t yet driven Europeans indoors, where infection can spread more easily.
“We’re seeing 98,000 cases reported in the last 24 hours. That’s a new regional record. That’s very alarming,” said Robb Butler, executive director of the WHO’s Europe regional office. While part of that is due to increased testing, “It’s also worrisome in terms of virus resurgence.”
It’s also worrisome given many countries still lack the testing, tracing and treating capacity to deal with a second wave of pandemic when the first wave never really ended, said Dr. Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“They should have been using the time to put in place really robust ‘find, test, trace, isolate’ support systems. Not everybody did,” McKee said. “Had they done that, then they could have identified outbreaks as they were emerging and really gone for the sources.”..
U.S. coronavirus cases are rising again, driven by rapid transmission in Midwestern states and sparking fears that a forewarned wave of infections this fall and winter has begun.
For almost a month, new U.S. cases have been trending upward. Since Saturday, more than 20 states have hit a new high in their seven-day average of case counts, and more than half of those states set records again on Tuesday, according to data tracked by The Washington Post.
The rising numbers are especially concerning because they set the stage for an even greater surge this winter when the virus will be helped by drier conditions and people spending more time indoors. The upward trend comes before the increased mingling of people expected to arrive with Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
The virus has become especially rampant in Midwestern states after dominating U.S. coastal and urban areas in the spring, according to data tracked by The Washington Post.
It is unclear what factors are driving the recent increase — whether it is the long-feared winter effect already taking place or the resumption of business and schools, or simply fatigue and people letting down their guard on social distancing efforts.
Because of day-to-day fluctuations in the reporting of cases, experts often look at the seven-day average of case counts to accurately spot trends.
In 40 states, cases are higher when compared with the week before.
Indiana, Minnesota and North Dakota have set a new average high for cases each of the past eight days. More than a dozen other states have set new average highs in recent days.
“A lot of the places being hit are Midwest states that were spared in the beginning,” said William Hanage, a Harvard University infectious-diseases researcher. “That’s of particular concern because a lot of these smaller regions don’t have the ICU beds and capacity that the urban centers had.”
Even D.C. and some Northeastern states — including Connecticut, New Jersey and New York — are beginning to see case counts creep back up.
Hospitalizations for covid-19, the illness caused by the virus, have also begun rising in almost a dozen states — including Ohio and Pennsylvania — raising the specter that increasing death counts will soon follow.
On Tuesday, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) warned in a tweet: “In all likelihood, things will get worse before they get better. This virus is sneaky and cunning and won’t give up. It has a mind of its own.”
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Monday he hopes the numbers “jolt the American public into a realization that we really can’t let this happen, because it’s on a trajectory of getting worse and worse.” In a CNN interview, he called the rising numbers “the worst possible thing that could happen as we get into the cooler months.”
At least 215,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19, according to an analysis by The Post.
One prominent model — by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — forecasts that U.S. deaths could rise to more than 394,000 by Feb. 1.
The U.S. trajectory highlights the urgent need for action by federal and state leaders as well as everyday Americans before transmission grows out of control, experts said.
Many experts, including Fauci, have emphasized that such actions do not have to be as drastic as the shutdowns of the spring. Public health experts say that if Americans adopted even the simplest measures discussed for months, it could make a big difference. That includes universal mask-wearing, physical distancing, avoiding crowds and hand-washing...
...“The earlier you do it the better, because it requires less time and less severe interventions,” Hanage said. “The later you wait, the more difficult it becomes because of the exponential growth of the virus.”
Other countries have recorded alarming increases in recent weeks, including Britain, France, Germany and Italy. European leaders have told their residents to brace themselves, warning of a “decisive moment” and “perilous turning point.”
The warnings have come in sharp contrast with the stance of President Trump, who has continued to play down the severity of the U.S. outbreak, which has been the worst in the world by many measures.
In recent weeks, U.S. public health experts have grown concerned that a sense of fatalism and resignation about the virus is setting in among the American public.
“My biggest concern is around the continued vigilance that prevention requires — the distancing, masking, avoidance of crowded indoor areas, etc. The fatigue factor sets in,” said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University.
The intensifying politicization of public health efforts amid the election has not helped, Popescu said.
“Political leaders pushing that we’ve controlled the outbreak encourages people to relax their prevention efforts,” Popescu said.
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
Slightly more than half of voters still say they are more likely to vote against President Trump, a finding that hasn’t changed in a year of regular surveying.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters are more likely to vote for Trump in the 2020 presidential election. Fifty-two percent (52%) are more likely not to. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
The survey of 1,000 Likely Voters was conducted October 8 and 11, 2020 by Rasmussen Reports. The margin of sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. Field work for all Rasmussen Reports surveys is conducted by Pulse Opinion Research, LLC. See methodology.
I said "They justified blocking Obama's nominee based on their promise that they would let the public have a say in Trump's last year. They broke that promise, that's corruption. People voted based on that broken promise to so you've got no excuse there - Republicans are corrupt."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "actually, Trump never said he would not nominate a judge in the final year of his presidency Lindsay Graham did but he doesn't nominate judges".
Senate leader Mitch McConnell said that along with Richard Burr, Tom Cotton, and every senate Republican that was asked about it. This was the Republican promise and they broke it.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous aid "in 2016, the President and the Senate were diametrically opposed as what type of judge to put on the court"
Utter nonsense. They were in complete agreement, the wanted an anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-health care judge and that's what they go.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said it was deemed better to let the voters choose and, boy o boy, did they choose".
They deemed it better to let the voters choose and now when the shoe is on the other foot they don't want to let the voters choose - that's corruption.
Millions more voted for Democrats than Republicans, the voters didn't choose a Trump presidency or Senate, a corrupt system did.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "might as well put on a judge that will decide the election disputes in Trump's favor and rule Obamacare".
So, ignore the constitution and rule of law and rule based on the outcomes they prefer - gotchya. Thanks for admitting corruption is central to your ideology.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Dems are going to be as sad as Eeyore in November"
With Biden having an average 10 point lead Republicans can't win without cheating...a lot.
I said "Over 200,000 Americans needlessly dead and infections spiraling out of control its time for a last resort."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "it's now recognized that there are more effective ways to fight the virus than lockdowns places that didn't lockdown have done better than places that did".
All lies. New York has it under control with their lockdown and coronavirus is exploding in red states that refused to lock down.
I said "Trump and the Republicans have announced their new policy is to encourage everyone to get infected which would mean hundreds of thousands more die needlessly."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "this a lie just like the ones that you told and were so embarrassed about when you were caught a couple of months ago.
I told the truth then and now, you're lying. Trump asked about letting Covid wash over the country in April and now is doing nothing to prevent that from happening. He is holding rally and event one after another with no masks or social distancing and regularly mocks those that do. He said getting Covid was "a blessing from God" and white house staffers now say "everyone is going to get this so there is no point in masks or social distancing".
I said "Americans are dying needlessly, when the states fail its up to the federal government to step in with leadership and protect the public. Trump didn't do that."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Trump has no power to overrule state governments".
How stupid are you? Of course Trump could implement a national mask mandate and national testing and tracking. He refuses to do so because he doesn't care about hundreds of thousands of Americans dying.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "btw, we just had two prominent men who both are in the vulnerable category get COVID and survive".
So what? Over 200,000 have died, this is a serious problem. You conservatives went ballistic over 4 Americans dying in Benghazi now you hypocrites are saying 200,000 lives don't matter.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "such people can be protected in less costly ways than shutting down the economy".
Trump and Republicans aren't implementing any possible ways to protect people, they're just letting them die. Countries that shut down early like South Korea and New Zealand have practically no covid problem at all. New York has covid under control because they shut down. Covid is exploding in red states that refused to shut down.
I said "No, as I posted earlier, research shows conservative justices don't rule based on the constitution, they rule based on their preferred policy positions."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "that's not research that's opinion seeking it's own justification it's a well-know phenomenon that preconceived notions skew "research"".
And yet somehow you can't name a single thing wrong with the research....riiiiiight. You previously said it was a great idea if justices don't rule based on the constitution and rule based on their previous policy positions.
I said "Neither does Amy Barrett [care about the constitution] and she will ignore the law to rule in anti-gay, anti-woman, sexist ways that give christians the right to harm innocent lgbt people."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "gays will not be harmed be not getting special preferences or living with a correct definition of marriage"
Having the same right to marry as everyone else is not a "special preference", its equality. There are 1400 rights and benefits to marriage, gays most certainly are harmed by being denied them.
I said "Republicans went to court to get rid of Obamacare and now that its hugely popular and they are putting an anti-Obamacare judge on the Supreme Court they're trying to tell us not to worry the court won't strike it down. They're trying to deceive the public again like they did when they promised not to fill an open supreme court seat in Trump's last year."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "they didn't not to worry the court won't strike it down".
Wyatt and Regina can't even make comprehensible statments.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "they said they won't strike it down unless it's unconstitutional"
The research shows they will. Conservative justices don't rule based on the constitution, they rule based on their own policy preferences.
I said "The deductibles and copays are trivial compared to no being able to afford health care when insurance companies can deny them coverage for preexisting conditions."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous "they aren't trivial when most of those on Obamacare can't pay them".
Who says most on Obamacare can't pay them? They certainly can't pay for health care when they're denied insurance because they have a preexisting condition.
I said "The number one cause of bankruptcy in the United States is the inability to pay medical bills. With its protections for those with preexisting health conditions Obamacare is a major benefit in preventing bankruptcy."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "if they declare bankruptcy, their debts are eliminated we got it covered"
Wyatt/Regina thinks bankruptcy is a good thing and no one gets stuck with the bill afterwards. They're not too bright.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Wyatt/Regina/Bad anonymous said "Trangenderism is sexist and anti-woman: a gangrene on society"
Nonsense. I challenge you to show me who has been hurt by me living as a woman and society treating me as a woman.
I said "You did. Every time you say gayness is a sin you're claiming your morally superior to gays."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "first of all, I don't recall saying that here".
Oh give me a break! You've said that over and over. So typical of you to lie like this.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "second of all, even if that were said, it doesn't mean it's the only vice that exists third of all, your rationale would imply that anyone who is not amoral thinks they are morally superior".
No one knows what that gibberish is supposed to mean, but the fact remains, everytime you say gayness is a sin you are claiming moral superiority.
I said "Decades of psychological research show conservatives have a greater tendency hate freedom and to abuse others than liberals:"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "can you show us which research says this?"
I said "I've posted it dozens of times, read it this time:
The Authoritarians
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxxylK6fR81rckQxWi1hVFFRUDg/view"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "oh, this opinion piece by a lonely loser who has to give it away because no publication will print it it would never pass peer review".
The book is based on dozens of peer reviewed studies over the decades. The author has published a number of books on this topic including one just out about the fascism of Republicans and Trump. He made the online book I linked to free to maximize the number of people who have access to it - some people do things to better the world rather than make money, but of course that's beyond the comprehension of conservatives like you.
I said "Nonsense. People don't choose who they are attracted to."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said " that's like saying they don't choose what they choose"
Ah, the "begging the question" logical fallacy, lol!. People don't choose who they are attracted to.
I said "That which does not harm others is not a perversion. Your war on harmless lgbt people is a perversion."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "you are simply playing Orwellian games your real argument is that there is nothing wring with perversion".
That which does not harm others is not a perversion. Case closed.
let's reopen the case
"an aberrant sexual practice or interest especially when habitual"
Merriam Webster definition of perversion
nothing is said about "harm"
Randy often says he is morally superior because he wants to "maximize everyone's happiness"
and, yet, he opposes re-education camps to teach homosexuals and other assorted liberals how to be happy with life
if properly trained, and treated for mental illness with things like electroshock therapy, these people will happily march down the street in their new MAGA hats
that would maximize their happiness
drop the hypocrisy, Randy!!!!!!!!!!!
I said "Trump and the Republicans have announced their new policy is to encourage everyone to get infected which would mean hundreds of thousands more die needlessly."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "this a lie just like the ones that you told and were so embarrassed about when you were caught a couple of months ago.
As I posted earlier, its Wyatt and Regina who are lying. Trump originally floated this idea in April and now The White House is embracing a 'herd immunity' strategy that would allow COVID-19 to spread freely and is widely disputed by scientists
As you can see, when Wyatt and Regina claim I "was caught in a lie and was so embarrassed" its they who are lying.
They came, they questioned and they got nothing. It’s almost enough to make you feel sorry for Democrats. Almost.
With a history of vicious misbehavior and the political calendar limiting their ability to smear Amy Coney Barrett, Dems on the Senate Judiciary Committee were reduced to being annoying nags and finger-wagging scolds.
They were never going to vote for any Supreme Court nominee of President Trump’s to replace the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but they don’t even have the option of giving Barrett the Brett Kavanaugh 2.0 treatment.
Another character-assassination attempt of the kind visited on Kavanaugh two years ago — now Justice Kavanaugh — would have been risky business so close to the election, so it was politics, not decency, that stayed their bloody hands.
Make no mistake, though, if they could have, the Dems would have trashed Barrett as too religious and too conservative and done everything they could short of setting the building on fire to stop her from joining the high court before the election.
As it was, they spent their time during the first day of questioning largely trying to trip her up and get her to make statements they could use as campaign fodder against Trump and the GOP. Their fallback position was to lay the groundwork for getting Barrett to recuse herself in important upcoming cases, especially the challenge to ObamaCare the court is scheduled to hear beginning Nov. 10.
They also fumed and sputtered about the possibility that the court might be called on to make key ballot rulings after the election and hoped she would not participate. No luck. They all struck out.
Their basic problem is that Barrett came across as an appealing Superwoman. Flanked by her husband, six of their seven children and her six siblings, she was flawless in answering those questions she could and in politely sidestepping the traps.
Speaking without a single note or any reference books, she exhibited a laser-like memory of things she wrote and said as a professor at Notre Dame law school and, for the last three years, as a judge on a federal Court of Appeals.
At one point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who infamously said to Barrett three years ago that the “dogma lives loudly in you,” grew frustrated at getting nowhere and switched topics by saying, “OK, let me try something else.”
While Barrett was generally engaging and pleasant, she was almost robotic in responding to even clever attempts to get her to hint how she might rule on specific cases or issues. Repeating a famous line that Ginsburg used at her confirmation in 1993, Barrett repeated: “No hints, no previews, no forecasts.”
The lack of theatrical accusations didn’t make for great television, but the hearing was educational as only Supreme Court confirmation hearings can be. Repeated references to the Constitution, discussion of legal landmarks and constant reminders that the court and the entire judiciary were designed to be different from the executive and legislative branches amount to a teaching moment for anyone who cares to learn.
That is especially valuable since high schools and colleges apparently no longer teach civics or a positive view of what made America unique in the history of mankind.
In that context, the separation-of-powers discussion is crucial because it is one of the defining differences of the two main political parties. Dems have used the courts as a kind of super legislature to win rulings on measures they can’t get through Congress and statehouses. Republicans generally want judges to stay in their lane and not be activists who stick their fingers in the air to see which way the political winds are blowing.
The best illustration was the way Dems badgered Barrett to preserve ObamaCare. Showing blown-up pictures of people in their states with health-care issues and reading personal stories often made the confirmation hearing seem like a bill mark-up session.
Yet the most refreshing part of the day was to better understand who Amy Coney Barrett is and why so many of her students and professional colleagues rave about her intellect and her kindness and why Trump picked her. One insight came when Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois asked whether she had watched the George Floyd video.
She said she had, with some of her children, including daughter Vivian, one of the two black Haitians she and her husband adopted. “We wept together,” Barrett said, adding that racism is “abhorrent.”
Her performance vindicated a comment made Monday by the woman who introduced her. Patricia O’Hara, a former colleague and dean at Notre Dame law school, described Barrett as a woman “who leads an integrated life of mind, heart and soul.”
Yet politics has become such vicious blood sport that Barrett said her family had discussed whether she should accept Trump’s nomination.
“We knew our lives would be combed over for any negative details,” she said. “We knew our faith would be caricatured. We knew our family would be attacked.”
Asked why she decided to accept and go through what she called the “excruciating process,” she answered:
“I should serve my country. And my family’s all in on that because they share my belief in the rule of law.”
We live in a time of upheaval, but America is beyond lucky that such extraordinary people still answer the call to public service.
"Asked why she decided to accept and go through what she called the “excruciating process,” she answered:
“I should serve my country. And my family’s all in on that because they share my belief in the rule of law.”
She said being a judge is a "means to an end" and that end is to "bring about the kingdom of god". That violates the First Amendment's separation of church and state. She most certainly does not believe in the rule of law.
Delusional Wyatt/Regina claim the courts aren't bound by the constitution or the First Amendment - they most certainly are.
Barrett has completely disqualified herself by stating she will violate the constitution in her rulings by making christians legally superior to all others in the law.
Religious freedom isn’t the right to compel the government to deny the equal rights of other citizens.
Right-wing forces on the Court and in Congress are trying to twist religious free exercise into a bizarre new right to make the state discriminate against disfavoured groups.
That's really all christianity stands for these days. It has nothing to do with morality, its first and foremost about harming innocent lgbt people. No wonder young people are leaving the church in droves.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "let's reopen the case "[especially (wyatt and Regina left that word out to deceive)]an aberrant sexual practice or interest especially when habitual" Merriam Webster definition of perversion nothing is said about "harm".
But it does. Merriam Webster defines aberrant as "straying from the right or normal way". And none of the examples they give of using perversion in a sentence refer to sexual practice.
The right, or moral way is that which does not harm others. The American Psychiatric Association says gayness is a normal, natural and health variant of human sexuality. By Wyatt/Regina's laughably loose definition being left handed is a perversion because a minority of people are that way.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Priya often says she is morally superior because she wants to "maximize everyone's happiness"
.
Let's get it straight. I don't say "I am morally superior.", I say "I am morally superior to you.". Which admittedly isn't saying much.
The ideology of maximizing everyone's happiness is obviously morally superior to the christian philosophy of eternal punishment for finite crimes.
Christian dogma says if Hitler accepted Jesus as his savior before he died he went to heaven and a Jew who spent her life helping others goes to hell.
That's one messed up religion!
The idea that there is any valid moral guidance in christianity or Islam is preposterous. They're based on a foundation of the most grotesque injustice imaginable.
And christians Wyatt and Regina claim they are morally superior to harmless lgbt people - give me a break!
That's the kind of christian dogma that will be determining Amy Barrett's rulings on the Supreme court, not the Constitution.
Scary isn't it?
when you see Randy make multiple comments in one day and then delete them, you know a trip to the funny farm is not far off
"Barrett has completely disqualified herself by stating she will violate the constitution in her rulings by making christians legally superior to all others in the law."
fortunately, Randy doesn't have a vote in the body that the Constitution says should make this decision
hope he gets into the funny farm soon before the surge of cases from Democrats who have nervous breakdowns when Trump wins
Amy Barrett was asked if she thought voter intimidation was illegal (it is) - she said she didn't know!
Trump said he wants her on the court to decide in his favor when he disputes the election in the courts. Her hedging on whether or not voter intimidation is illegal suggests she is going to rule for Trump regardless of the Truth.
Remember:
Republicans promised in 2016 they wouldn't fill a Supreme Court vacancy if it came up in the last year of Trump's term. That's what Senate leader Mitch McConnell said - "The people should have a say in who gets to pick who fills this seat". Republicans broke that promise, a promise people based their votes upon.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the surge of cases from Democrats who have nervous breakdowns when Trump wins"
You sound confident Trump can break the law enough to steal the election. With him behind by an average of 10 points, Biden leading in 11 out of 12 swing states it seems a tad unlikely to me.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "when you see Randy make multiple comments in one day and then delete them, you know a trip to the funny farm is not far off"
Its probably been 15 years or more since I took a trip to the funny farm, so don't hold your breath.
For a year and a half you said didn't respond to my comments because doing so would send me to the funny farm.
I gather by your earlier multiple responses to my comments today you no longer believe you can make me crazy by "effective argumentation"
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
"With him behind by an average of 10 points, Biden leading in 11 out of 12 swing states it seems a tad unlikely to me."
most of those polls involve registered voters, not likely voters
further, national polls are skewed by huge Dem majorities in large urban areas
and then further, Biden is behind where Hillary was at this point in most swing states
and further still, new voter registrations among repubs are ahead of Dems in both Florida and Pennsylvania
finally, Dems are so heavily invested in mail voting that when they get thrown out by Amy and her five friends, the GOP will benefit
15 years, huh?
impressive
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The first day of questioning in the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court confirmation hearings was one for the books. The ritual of strong ideological jurists pretending to have never given a thought to the issues of the day is not unprecedented, but the context for it this time around should be unheard of. We are only three weeks away from a national referendum on the president and his party which, in any functioning democracy, would require that decisions about lifetime appointments be postponed until that referendum is decided.
But we don’t live in a functioning democracy at the moment, so we are unable to stop a power-mad Republican party from ramming through this appointment despite the fact that the president himself has said publicly that he wants the seat filled in order to ensure a majority will rule in his favor when election disputes go before the court. He and his party have already put such a plan in motion by foreshadowing their intention to contest any outcome not in their favor.
That is the context in which our latest Supreme Court justice will be confirmed on a party line vote. The legitimacy of the appointment and the authority of the court will forever be corrupted by such a raw partisan power play. Any person of real integrity, particularly one who will be serving in a position for which personal honor and superior judgment are paramount job requirements, would refuse to be seated under such tainted circumstances.
Coney Barrett is clearly not such a person, and her answers on the first day of questioning make it clear that she is as unconcerned with her reputation as the Republicans who plan to install her no matter the cost to the stability of our institutions are with their own.
She is obviously a right wing extremist. But she also refused to say that the president is unable to single-handedly delay an election and she won’t commit to recusal on cases about the election even though the conflict of interest and appearance of bias is so obvious a child could see it. She couldn’t even say that a president must commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
Sadly, the appointment cannot be stopped. And it is the second time in the last four years that Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his accomplices have seized a seat on the court without any regard as to whether the majority of the country sees it as legitimate. It’s as if they prefer that the people who don’t vote for them see that they are impotent to stop them. That’s a demonstration of pure power. And they have made the bet that the other side does not have the will to fight back.
But they may have finally gone too far. It’s not just the court. The entire GOP establishment collaborating with Donald Trump for the past four years on myriad assaults on our democracy has raised awareness that the Republican establishment is no longer a political faction but has instead devolved into an elevated version of an organized crime family. Their cynical use of Trump for their own purposes without regard to the carnage and destruction he has brought upon this nation (including tens of thousands of preventable deaths) has exposed their so-called ideology as nothing more than a mercenary will to power.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/opinion/biden-trump-presidential-election.html?action=clichttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/opinion/biden-trump-presidential-election.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepagek&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
little piece in the NY Times today about why Biden is nowhere close to having this election wrapped up?
"The first day of questioning in the Amy Coney Barrett Supreme Court confirmation hearings was one for the books."
true, the court will be set for 40 years
"The ritual of strong ideological jurists pretending to have never given a thought to the issues of the day is not unprecedented, but the context for it this time around should be unheard of."
considering the rulings of the SCOTUS over the last two years, you comment is laughable
"We are only three weeks away from a national referendum on the president and his party which, in any functioning democracy, would require that decisions about lifetime appointments be postponed until that referendum is decided."
our government functions every year, not 3 out of 4
"But we don’t live in a functioning democracy at the moment,"
just watch hearings showing our democracy functioning very well
"so we are unable to stop a power-mad Republican party from ramming through this appointment"
that's because the president was elected for four years
if you can convince the people to give Biden the WH and Dems the Senate, you'll have two years
Obama didn't have eight years because his performance led the American people to take the Senate for Dems
this is a functioning democracy!!!!!!
"despite the fact that the president himself has said publicly that he wants the seat filled in order to ensure a majority will rule in his favor when election disputes go before the court."
he can say anything he wants
she has a lifetime appointment so her independence is beyond dispute
Trump has no power over her
but if the Dems lose because she rules against them on an election issue, that will be a lesson learned for them
"He and his party have already put such a plan in motion by foreshadowing their intention to contest any outcome not in their favor."
the Dems were behind the expanded period of mailing and elections which would be the basis of any contested outcome
"That is the context in which our latest Supreme Court justice will be confirmed on a party line vote."
we can't halt all progress any time Dems pitch a fit
"The legitimacy of the appointment and the authority of the court will forever be corrupted by such a raw partisan power play."
this is just whining by Dems
this is the same procedure that has been followed countless times before
he reason it is partisan is because the Dems made it so in the Bork nomination
On Tuesday, writing for The Washington Post, conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin tore into the incompetence of GOP efforts to secure a second term for President Donald Trump — saying that the campaign was practically “doing Joe Biden’s work for him.”
“Trump gave up on negotiating a second covid-19 stimulus plan (then reversed course, but too late, it appears). As a result, he is not doing the one thing that could demonstrate that he cares about the lives of Americans and takes the pandemic seriously,” wrote Rubin. “Trump also decided to try to ram through a Supreme Court justice at the last moment, thinking it would be a boost for his base. There is no sign it has done anything more to pump up his base (which gets narrower by the day), but it is underscoring Biden’s criticisms that Republicans are too willing to abuse power.”
“As for the debate, Trump tried to bully his way through with disastrous results,” wrote Rubin. “He then deprived himself of an opportunity to replace that debacle with a less terrible performance this week. By the time we get to Oct. 22 for what should have been the third debate, even more people will have voted, and the image of Trump as a bullying, know-nothing president will be even more firmly entrenched.”
Recent polls have shown Biden surging even more than he was in the summer, pulling numbers on par with Barack Obama’s 2008 landslide. A lead that large would put several key Senate Republicans at risk, including in Iowa, North Carolina, and Arizona. It also means House Republicans are unlikely to reclaim red territory they lost in 2018 and could even lose more seats.
“Future political scientists and campaign operatives may study this campaign for years to come as an example of how to turn a losing campaign into a party-killing, landslide defeat,” concluded Rubin.
On Tuesday, the Pittsburgh City Paper reported that a local letter carrier raided by special agents for hoarding mail in trash bags is affiliated with the QAnon conspiracy theory movement.
“Yesterday, the Baldwin home of Sean Troesch was raided by special agents from the United States Postal Service, who confiscated eight large garbage bags of suspected undelivered mail, according to KDKA,” reported Ryan Deto. “KDKA also reported that the post office said this latest haul didn’t contain any discarded mail-in ballots, but neighbors told the station trash bags ‘have been put outside Troesch’s house almost every Sunday night for Monday morning pickup.'”
“According to screenshots of a Facebook page apparently belonging to Troesch, the mail carrier has been trafficking in conspiracy theories related to QAnon for at least the last several months,” said the report. “QAnon is a baseless pro-Trump conspiracy theory that falsely believes elites and Democrats are running an underground child prostitution ring and eating babies. Belief in this conspiracy theory has been growing over the years, and many QAnon supporters have been seen at Trump rallies.”
The president has repeatedly claimed with no basis that mail-in ballots are fraudulent and need to be challenged.
"Any person of real integrity, particularly one who will be serving in a position for which personal honor and superior judgment are paramount job requirements, would refuse to be seated under such tainted circumstances."
nothing tainted about it at all
Dems are just pitching a fit because they lost
the GOP's long range plan to end judicial activism and replace it with originalism, thus saving the Constitution, has succeeded
and Dems Lost
"Coney Barrett is clearly not such a person, and her answers on the first day of questioning make it clear that she is as unconcerned with her reputation as the Republicans who plan to install her no matter the cost to the stability of our institutions are with their own."
our institutions are democratic
and since the hearings began, the percentage of people who want the next President to appoint the next SCOTUS justice have dropped
sorry, you lose
"She is obviously a right wing extremist."
to a group that considers Susan Collins a right-wing extremist, I guess so
"But she also refused to say that the president is unable to single-handedly delay an election and she won’t commit to recusal on cases about the election even though the conflict of interest and appearance of bias is so obvious a child could see it. She couldn’t even say that a president must commit to a peaceful transfer of power."
she wasn't there to give political opinions
she explained her judicial philosophy and explained to Dems what they were doing wrong
she doesn't have to worry about making them mad
they have no power to stop her and they would if they could
joyously, the appointment cannot be stopped.
"And it is the second time in the last four years that Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and his accomplices have seized a seat on the court without any regard as to whether the majority of the country sees it as legitimate."
as of this morning, the country is evenly split
that's down 10 points since the hearings started
the more they see of Amy, pro-life mother of a multi-racial family, the more they like her!!!!!!!!
"It’s as if they prefer that the people who don’t vote for them see that they are impotent to stop them."
it's kind of like that, isn't it?
hahahahahahaha!!!!!!
"That’s a demonstration of pure power."
you mean like when Nancy Pelosi refuses to go along with the 1.8 trillion dollar package that Trump wants to give relief to the American people?
if Harry Reid hadn't nuked the filibuster, Dems might have more power
as it is, they can just whine while life goes on without their input
"And they have made the bet that the other side does not have the will to fight back."
they are trying everything they can
they haven't lost the will
they are just powerless because Americans don't trust them with power!!!!!!!!!
"But they may have finally gone too far. It’s not just the court. The entire GOP establishment collaborating with Donald Trump for the past four years on myriad assaults on our democracy has raised awareness that the Republican establishment is no longer a political faction but has instead devolved into an elevated version of an organized crime family."
what to share of their myriad assaults on our democracy?
did they make up a Russian hoax to try to overturn the results of the 2016 election?
now, that's an assault on democracy!!!!!!!!!!
"tens of thousands of preventable deaths"
preventable, you say?
tell us how Joe and Kamala would have prevented them
my opinion is we'd up to a million deaths under them
Joe Biden repeatedly has denied knowing anything about son Hunter’s lucrative work on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
“Hunter Biden is a private citizen and a lawyer. The former vice president does not endorse any particular company and has no involvement with this company,” a spokeswoman for Joe Biden said in a December 2015 statement to the New York Times.
Biden has stonewalled on the topic ever since.
“I’ve never discussed my business or their business, my sons’ or daughter’s. And I’ve never discussed them because they know where I have to do my job and that’s it, and they have to make their own judgments,” he told the “CBS Evening News” last October.
And yet, an email obtained by The Post shows a senior Burisma executive thanking Hunter for the opportunity to meet Joe Biden just 12 months after Hunter joined the Burisma board at a reported salary of up to $50,000 a month.
“Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” wrote top Burisma executive Vadym Pozharskyi in the April 17, 2015, email.
So, far from having “no involvement” with Burisma, Joe Biden met with one of the company’s most senior operatives — at his son’s behest — while serving as vice president.
Less than eight months after that meeting, Joe flew to Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, in December 2015, and strong-armed the Ukrainian government into firing its top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma for alleged corruption.
We know about Joe Biden’s role in ousting Shokin because he boasted about it in a 2018 speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. There, he disclosed that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees for Ukraine unless Shokin was sacked.
I said "With him behind by an average of 10 points, Biden leading in 11 out of 12 swing states it seems a tad unlikely to me."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "most of those polls involve registered voters, not likely voters".
Irrelevant with margins this large.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous siad "further, national polls are skewed by huge Dem majorities in large urban areas".
There's no evidence that is or has ever been the case.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "and then further, Biden is behind where Hillary was at this point in most swing states".
That's just a bald faced lie. Biden is far ahead of where Hillary was in swing states as well as in the national polls.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "and further still, new voter registrations among repubs are ahead of Dems in both Florida and Pennsylvania"
Sure, just like Biden is behind where Hillary was in the swing states, lol!
Good anonymous said"so we are unable to stop a power-mad Republican party from ramming through this appointment"
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "that's because the president was elected for four years".
That's what Democrats said in 2016. Republicans said they were wrong and the public should get to choose who chooses the the supreme court appointee. Republicans promised they follow their own rule in 2020 but they broke their promise like the corrupt people they are.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "finally, Dems are so heavily invested in mail voting that when they get thrown out by Amy and her five friends, the GOP will benefit".
Yes, we know Amy Barrett is part of the coup to overthrow American democracy.
Good anonymous said "We are only three weeks away from a national referendum on the president and his party which, in any functioning democracy, would require that decisions about lifetime appointments be postponed until that referendum is decided."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "our government functions every year, not 3 out of 4"
That's what Democrats said in 2016 about confirming Merrick Garland to the supreme court. Republicans opposed the government working every year then, they said it should only work 3 out of 4 years. Republicans say one thing and do another. Republicans are corrupt.
Good anonymous said "But we don’t live in a functioning democracy at the moment, so we are unable to stop a power-mad Republican party from ramming through this appointment despite the fact that the president himself has said publicly that he wants the seat filled in order to ensure a majority will rule in his favor when election disputes go before the court. "
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "he can say anything he wants she has a lifetime appointment so her independence is beyond dispute Trump has no power over her".
She and Trump share an anti-gay anti-woman ideology her bias is beyond dispute, they're after the same dictatorial control of a minority over the majority.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "but if the Dems lose because she rules against them on an election issue, that will be a lesson learned for them"
The lesson learned is that Republicans are corrupt and can never be trusted to keep their word.
Good anonymous said "He and his party have already put such a plan in motion by foreshadowing their intention to contest any outcome not in their favor."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the Dems were behind the expanded period of mailing and elections which would be the basis of any contested outcome".
Mail in voting is perfectly legal and proper. Trying to prevent that is anti-democratic, that's what dictators do to thwart the will of the majority
Good anonymous said "That is the context in which our latest Supreme Court justice will be confirmed on a party line vote."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "we can't halt all progress any time Dems pitch a fit"
Destroying the rule of law is not progress, its an attack on democracy. You are correct that only Democrats are concerned about that.
Good anonymous said "The legitimacy of the appointment and the authority of the court will forever be corrupted by such a raw partisan power play."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "this is just whining by Dems this is the same procedure that has been followed countless times before."
NO, it isn't the same procedure. In 2016 Republicans said the voters must decide who gets to choose the next supreme court justice. They promised they would abide by that rule in 2020 and now they are reneging on their word. This Republican corruption is destroying the nation for the petty purpose of harming innocent lgbt people and women.
Good anonymous said "Any person of real integrity, particularly one who will be serving in a position for which personal honor and superior judgment are paramount job requirements, would refuse to be seated under such tainted circumstances."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "nothing tainted about it at all".
Its tainted by Republicans breaking their 2016 promise not to confirm a supreme court justice in 2020.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "the GOP's long range plan to end judicial activism and replace it with originalism, thus saving the Constitution, has succeeded".
Their plan to violate the constitution, destroy the rule of law and allow a minority to dominate and abuse the majority is what you mean. Republican justices don't rule based on any known theory of legal reasoning, they ignore the constitution to rule for their own Republican policy preferences.
"Coney Barrett is clearly not such a person, and her answers on the first day of questioning make it clear that she is as unconcerned with her reputation as the Republicans who plan to install her no matter the cost to the stability of our institutions are with their own."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "our institutions are democratic"
Not since Trump took power. He's fired all the top government people and put his own puppets in place, like he's doing with Amy Barrett.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "and since the hearings began, the percentage of people who want the next President to appoint the next SCOTUS justice have dropped sorry, you lose"
When I brought up that 2/3 of the public wanted then next presdient to appoint the next Supreme Court Jusitce you said "the public doesn't get a say". Funny how your rules change whenever its convenient for you.
Good anonymous said "She is obviously a right wing extremist."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "to a group that considers Susan Collins a right-wing extremist, I guess so"
Susan Collins suports Roe V Wade, Susan Collins condemned Trump trying to bribe Ukraine to open a fake investigation into Joe Biden. Susan Collins isn't trying to force everyone to live according to iron fist christianity.
Good anonymous said "But she also refused to say that the president is unable to single-handedly delay an election and she won’t commit to recusal on cases about the election even though the conflict of interest and appearance of bias is so obvious a child could see it. She couldn’t even say that a president must commit to a peaceful transfer of power."
Wyatt/Regina said "she wasn't there to give political opinions"
These aren't matters of "political opinion", they are a matter of the rule of law. If she isn't going to respond what the eff is the purpose of these hearings? She's hiding all her right wing extremism.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "she doesn't have to worry about making them mad they have no power to stop her and they would if they could"
Its irrelevant that she doesn't have to worry about making them mad, the problem is her unconstitutional positions on the law. She wants to establish a christian theocracy and is on Trump's side on this.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "joyously, the appointment cannot be stopped."
Just like Biden winning the presidency can't be stopped - exactly the same odds.
Good anonymous said "And they have made the bet that the other side does not have the will to fight back."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "they are trying everything they can they haven't lost the will they are just powerless because Americans don't trust them with power!!!!!!!!!".
Almost every election millions more Americans vote for Democrats for Congress and president than vote for Republicans. Americans trust Democrats with power and prefer Democrats in power. The corrupt senate and presidential election system has 1/3 of the country dominating and abusing the majority year after year. The founding fathers never wanted that.
Good anonymous said "But they may have finally gone too far. It’s not just the court. The entire GOP establishment collaborating with Donald Trump for the past four years on myriad assaults on our democracy has raised awareness that the Republican establishment is no longer a political faction but has instead devolved into an elevated version of an organized crime family."
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "what to share of their myriad assaults on our democracy?".
Voter suppression, Trump refusing to provide any information whatsoever to Congress so it can carry out it over site roll, Trump bribing Ukraine to start a fake Biden investigation, Trump attacking the post office to make it unable to deliver mail in ballots....
Good anonymous said "Their cynical use of Trump for their own purposes without regard to the carnage and destruction he has brought upon this nation (including tens of thousands of preventable deaths) has exposed their so-called ideology as nothing more than a mercenary will to power.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "preventable, you say? tell us how Joe and Kamala would have prevented them my opinion is we'd up to a million deaths under them"
Your opinion is always Democrats are an absolute disaster and Republicans are absolutely perfect, it never changes regardless of how radically opposed to reality it is.
Joe and Kamala wouldn't have ignored the warnings from 2019 and on and would have prepared then instead of lying to the public and saying Covid wasn't a problem. They wouldn't have let people die in blue states that were the epicentre of the epidemic like Trump did because they don't vote for him. They would have had a national testing and tracing strategy from day one. They would have not destroyed the Obama epidemic plan and preparations. They would not have discouraged the use of masks and social distancing....I could go on all day.
"Irrelevant with margins this large."
what's relevant is that the margin is not as large as it seems and when you consider the other factors I mentioned, the race is pretty close
"There's no evidence that is or has ever been the case."
actually, the polls show this clearly
it's not a debatable point
"That's just a bald faced lie. Biden is far ahead of where Hillary was in swing states as well as in the national polls."
no, you're wrong
here's the numbers:
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/trump-vs-biden-top-battleground-states-2020-vs-2016/
"Sure, just like Biden is behind where Hillary was in the swing states, lol!"
making a sarcastic comment doesn't prove anything
new GOP registrations in FLA and PA are way ahead of the Dem ones
"That's what Democrats said in 2016. Republicans said they were wrong and the public should get to choose who chooses the the supreme court appointee."
that was the only option because the public had elected a GOP Senate and a Dem President, creating a stalemate that could only be broken by the next election
the voters chose to not elect Garland and their verdict stands for four years, not three
"Republicans promised they follow their own rule in 2020 but they broke their promise like the corrupt people they are."
the situation is different, the public hasn't elected a divided government
there is no stalemate and the gay agenda can be dismantled
right after the ACA is repealed in November
only weeks away!!!!
"Yes, we know Amy Barrett is part of the coup to overthrow American democracy."
after this, voters will come a voting booth on a single election day and cast their ballot
Democracy will be restored to what it has always been
"She and Trump share an anti-gay anti-woman ideology her bias is beyond dispute, they're after the same dictatorial control of a minority over the majority."
gays will be much happier in their traditional situation
to say Amy is "anti-woman" is ridiculous
obviously the type of mumbled ranting you'd hear in any funny farm
you know I mean, Randy!!!!!
"The lesson learned is that Republicans are corrupt and can never be trusted to keep their word."
the lesson learned is when you try to tamper with elections, as Dems have, you lose
cheaters never prosper
"Mail in voting is perfectly legal and proper. Trying to prevent that is anti-democratic, that's what dictators do to thwart the will of the majority"
mail voting on this scale is unprecedented
Randy is repeating a lie he can't back up
no dictator ever tried to prevent mail voting
"Destroying the rule of law is not progress, its an attack on democracy. You are correct that only Democrats are concerned about that."
the confirmation of Amy is being done by the letter of the law
Dems want violate that law by saying some other rule should apply
"NO, it isn't the same procedure. In 2016 Republicans said the voters must decide who gets to choose the next supreme court justice. They promised they would abide by that rule in 2020 and now they are reneging on their word."
that was a different Senate
we've had a new Senate elected since
and the situation was different
back then, the Dems had the presidency so the voters had to decide to reject Garland
no problem now
no need to invoke any extra-legal rules
"This Republican corruption is destroying the nation for the petty purpose of harming innocent lgbt people and women."
no one is going to harm innocent lgbt people
those gays who voted GOP will be very happy!!!!!!
and the protection of women will extend to their pre-birth period
"Its tainted by Republicans breaking their 2016 promise not to confirm a supreme court justice in 2020."
it was no promise to Dems, it was a statement of fact
Dems had nothing to offer in return for any supposed deal
the GOP didn't need to make a deal, Americans had given them the power to reject Garland in 2016
"Their plan to violate the constitution, destroy the rule of law"
you have yet to show how the Constitution was violated or any law broken
neither the Constitution nor any law says Dems must get to replace anti-constitutional judges like RBG with more like her
"Not since Trump took power. He's fired all the top government people and put his own puppets in place, like he's doing with Amy Barrett."
that's how our democracy works
we elect a President and he puts his own people in place
anything else would break his promise to the American people
he's done just what he said he would
"Susan Collins suports Roe V Wade, Susan Collins condemned Trump trying to bribe Ukraine to open a fake investigation into Joe Biden. Susan Collins isn't trying to force everyone to live according to iron fist christianity."
funny then that rich Dem fat cats from across the country are pouring money into her district to get her out of the Senate
"These aren't matters of "political opinion", they are a matter of the rule of law. If she isn't going to respond what the eff is the purpose of these hearings?"
the purpose is to consider her qualifications and judicial philosophy
check-check
her confirmation is a fore-gone conclusion
"She's hiding all her right wing extremism."
oh, she's been very forthright in describing her philosophy of originalism and has acknowledged that she is pro-life
she just won't opine on specific cases
if there are challenges to the conduct of the election, she can't be tied up with statements made in a hearing that would require her recusal
she is needed to install Trump as President if the Dems cheat
"Its irrelevant that she doesn't have to worry about making them mad, the problem is her unconstitutional positions on the law. She wants to establish a christian theocracy and is on Trump's side on this."
she's only one of nine
she'll need four others to establish a christian theocracy
all of whom were approved by a representative chosen by the people of a land that is wiser than Canada
"Just like Biden winning the presidency can't be stopped - exactly the same odds."
we'll see
if he wins, you guys can pick a SCOTUS when Breyer leaves
but the six conservatives on the court can't be stopped
"The founding fathers never wanted that."
they are smiling in their graves that someone will go to the Supreme Court and defend the Constitution they wrote
"Voter suppression,"
yeah, like asking for ID
LOL!
"Trump refusing to provide any information whatsoever to Congress so it can carry out it over site roll,"
what the "over site roll"? a new lawn game?
"Trump bribing Ukraine to start a fake Biden investigation,"
if they did, why was there no investigation?
"Trump attacking the post office to make it unable to deliver mail in ballots...."
voting should take place in person to prevent fraud!!!!!!!!!!!
"Joe and Kamala wouldn't have ignored the warnings from 2019 and on and would have prepared then instead of lying to the public and saying Covid wasn't a problem. They wouldn't have let people die in blue states that were the epicentre of the epidemic like Trump did because they don't vote for him. They would have had a national testing and tracing strategy from day one. They would have not destroyed the Obama epidemic plan and preparations. They would not have discouraged the use of masks and social distancing....I could go on all day."
Joe was part of the Obama administration that couldn't stop the swine flu from infecting 60 million Americans
why do you thin he'd have different results with COVID?
btw, another problem with the polls is that it is established that people who vote for Trump don't tell that to pollsters
"people who vote for Trump don't tell that to pollsters"
Of course they don't.
Rumpettes are all liars and con men just like Rump has been his entire life.
They include Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Rick Gates and more.
LANSING — Michigan is looking less competitive by the day, and there’s a growing likelihood of Joe Biden blowing out Donald Trump here come November 3.
All three Rust Belt states that Trump improbably won in 2016 — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — are problematic for the president this year. But Michigan is where things look bleakest.
His support has diminished among the white working-class. Black turnout appears certain to rebound after a dismal showing in 2016. New laws that allow for early voting and no-excuse-absentee balloting are expected to push voter participation to historic levels, with Democrats the expected beneficiary of low-propensity Michiganders flooding the ballot box.
But the simplest explanation for the president’s trouble here is that he’s continuing to hemorrhage support from white, college-educated women in the suburbs of Detroit.
It’s hard to overstate just how badly Trump is performing with this crucial demographic. Over the past several weeks, a raft of internal polls have produced numbers that political professionals here are struggling to comprehend. In Oakland County, the second-biggest voting area in the state, Gongwer reported that Democratic polling shows Biden leading Trump by 27 points; Republicans pushed back with a survey showing Trump down only 18 points. (For reference, Trump lost Oakland County by 8 points in 2016.)
Elissa Slotkin, the freshman House Democrat who represents northern Oakland County — and whose district stretches west through the affluent suburbs of Livingston County — is witnessing the same phenomenon. Having flipped a longtime Republican district in 2018, she was supposed to be one of the most endangered incumbents in the country. Instead, she’s cruising toward reelection.
Why? According to her campaign’s most recent internal poll, she’s an eye-popping 35 points above water, in terms of net favorability, with college-educated white women. This came as a shock to Slotkin, a veteran national security official, who was worried that Trump’s law-and-order message was going to scare women away from voting for Democrats this fall. But what her polling revealed — consistent with surveys done elsewhere in the state — is that Trump’s messaging has backfired.
“Honestly, all the moms I know, we are really nervous about our kids, what kind of future they’re going to have. And Trump is the one making us nervous,” Jessica Morschakov, a 38-year-old ballet studio owner, told me in the wealthy, ultra-conservative township of Brighton. “He’s just so angry all the time. I really believe that he brings out the worst in people, the worst in situations.”
It’s this sentiment, from this voting demographic, that’s echoing all across Michigan — especially in its rich white suburbs. Even voters who describe themselves as single-issue, pro-life Republicans, such as Karen Kudla, have said they’ve given up on Trump. “I cannot in good conscience vote to keep this man in the White House,” Kudla told me in Lake Orion.
What does this all mean?
It’s actually pretty simple. The thinking among Republicans has always been that if Trump can keep his losses in Oakland County to single digits again, it will be proof that he’s holding his own with suburban women around the state, and therefore he will remain competitive. If, on the other hand, that margin balloons closer to 15 points or more, the president is doomed.
RCP: Michigan Trump vs. Biden - Biden +7.2
One week after refusing to participate in the officially sanctioned presidential debate, an unprecedented move in modern American politics, NBC News has rewarded Trump by clearing its Thursday primetime schedule to air a last-minute town hall with the previously Covid-19-infected president. As Trump stumbles to the end of his re-election campaign and denounces the press at every turn, the brazen move by NBC highlights the dysfunctional and abusive relationship that has defined the Trump presidency.
He's spent four years maligning the free press as "enemies of the people," while corporate media outlets have granted him unheard of access. No president has been given as much free TV airtime as Trump — it’s not even close. Every briefing and virtually every utterance has been carried live and in full.
Not only did NBC scramble to clear its primetime schedule for the wildly unpopular president, but it made sure the Trump town hall is running at the exact same time, 8 p.m., as the previously-scheduled Biden town hall Thursday night on ABC. That ensures voters trying to assess the candidates have to pick between the two events in real time. The move clearly indicates the NBC forum has nothing to do with the public interest during the election season.
"If Trump insisted on being opposite Biden at 8 pm and NBC gave him that time slot, then that's scandalous," Merrill Brown told me. The former Director of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University, Brown was MSNBC.com's first editor-in-chief. "If it was their decision, then they have ignored their civic responsibilities. Why not 7 or 10 pm ET? Offering it at 10 would have served the entire country well by making it available at 7 PT. Why not Friday?"
Lots of people will see this move as an attempted money grab by the network. But if NBC thinks catering to Trump is going to produce blockbuster ratings, the network is bound to be disappointed. There's a good chance Biden will draw more viewers for his town hall Thursday night. Debunking the media myth about how Trump remains some sort of Must See TV president and that he's a cultural phenomenon — a Reality TV star! — whose every word Americans hang on, ratings have consistently shown that most of the country tuned Trump out long ago.
Both Biden and Trump have already had primetime, network TV town halls this campaign, and Biden drew a much larger audience. Because of his raging narcissism and his manic, daily desire to be in front of a television camera, Trump remains wildly overexposed, which means there's no reason to tune in to hear what he's saying since he's been saying the same thing over and over for months. That's why Trump's convention acceptance speech this summer was the lowest-rated one in TV history.
Keep in mind, the reason NBC can sponsor Trump Thursday night is because Trump chickened blew up Thursday's debate with Biden. Once the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that one-on-one would be a virtual event, in the wake of Trump's Covid-19 infection, he refused to show up. This was after he creating a morose spectacle at the first debate, turning the once-serious event into a sewer of insults, interruptions and hectoring. Bullying not only Biden but also moderator Chris Wallace, Trump turned the forum into a circus, shredding yet another tradition of civic discourse in this country.
In response, the Commission was moving to have candidates' microphones muted for the second and third debate as a way to contain Trump's endless outbursts. So he walked away. Against that backdrop, NBC News executives scramble for a way to make sure they can plug Trump into its primetime lineup? They make sure to find airtime for the candidate who categorically refused to participate in the Commission's second debate and who still hasn’t told reporters when he last tested negative for the coronavirus?
By the way, Trump is still a congenital liar and NBC will prove to be powerless to stop the torrent of misinformation that he spews at the town hall. That's what happened when ABC News last month hosted a Trump forum — he lied without pause and the moderator only occasionally tried to stop him. Appearing on ABC, Trump lied about Obamacare, Covid-19, Seattle protests, and banning travel from China.
Is Trump going to use the NBC town hall event to attack Kamala Harris a "communist" "monster" and rage about how Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama need to be "indicted," the way he did during a Fox Business interview last week? Is NBC simply crossing its fingers, hoping that Trump doesn't act like a madman for 90 minutes? Or maybe the network doesn't care.
Trump's still a bully too, who has done incalculably damage to the Fourth Estate in America, with his constant attacks and denigration of the free press. In March, Trump viciously attacked NBC News reporter Peter Alexander, castigating him as "terrible reporter" during a live, televised press briefing. "And the same with NBC and Comcast. I don't call it Comcast. I call it 'Con-Cast.'"
In that context, it's stunning that a major news outlet would rip up its nighttime schedule at a moment's notice to make a special arrangement for Trump, giving him a national platform to lie relentlessly and to likely undermine news gathering in this country, all because he refused to show up at the second debate.
sounds like the previous commenter is pretty scared that Trump will have higher ratings than Biden tonight
that won't look good
Joe Biden's presidential campaign said Thursday that vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris will suspend campaign events until, at least, Monday after her communications director and a flight crew member tested positive for coronavirus. Biden and Harris spent several hours campaigning together in Arizona.
Harris had been scheduled to travel Thursday to North Carolina for events encouraging voters to cast early ballots.
Harris and Biden spent several hours together through multiple campaign stops, private meetings and a joint appearance in front of reporters at an airport. They were masked at all times in public. Biden has not been tested since Tuesday.
In 1980, during his presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan asked Americans, “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”
The question has since become a key barometer that presidential candidates ask Americans to consider as they mull whom to vote for in the quadrennial battle for the White House.
And for decades, the Gallup polling organization has been asking people that very question. Just three weeks before the election — and with one pollster saying Biden has an 86% chance of winning on Nov. 3 — Gallup’s latest finding were quite surprising.
In a survey taken Sept. 14-28, the polling organization asked more than 1,000 Americans “to compare your situation today with what it was four years ago. Are you better off than you were four years ago or not?”
A whopping 56% said they are better off. Just under a third (32%) said they were not.
It’s important to point out that the poll came long after lockdowns over the pandemic crashed the economy, leaving millions without jobs and plunging the economy into recession.
Even more important is a comparison with previous presidents who were seeking re-election. In December 2012, shortly after President Barack Obama was re-elected, Gallup found 45% felt that they were better off than four years ago. Just before President George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004, Gallup found that 47% said they were better off. And before Reagan won re-election in a 49-state landslide in 1984, 44% said they were better off.
It’s worth noting President George H.W. Bush’s re-election bid in 1992. Then, just 38% of Americans told Gallup they were better off than four years before
"A whopping 56% said they are better off. Just under a third (32%) said they were not."
It is an incredibly damning indictment of Яump personally that, in a country where a majority of the people believe they are better off than they were four years ago, the incumbent President is currently losing badly in his bid for a second term.
Most Americans don't like bullies or pussy grabbers or people who use weapons of war against peaceful protesters or constant interrupters like they saw at the first debate or racists who believe "there are good people on both sides" in Charlottesville, one side of which included torch-bearing white males who chanted "JEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US!"
Especially women.
New Poll: Suburban Women Will Not Vote For Trump
Trump is struggling to win over women voters. It may be too late.
‘It’s a big, big swing’: Trump loses ground with white voters
Pollsters: Trump and GOP are losing young, female voters permanently
Trump Faces Challenges Even in Red States, Poll Shows, as Women Favor Biden
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump is running out of time to recover from a series of self-inflicted setbacks that have rattled his base of support and triggered alarm among Republicans who fear the White House is on the verge of being lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
The one-two punch of Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis and his widely panned debate performance also has Republicans worried they could lose control of the Senate. With just over three weeks until Election Day, Senate races in some reliably red states, including South Carolina and Kansas, are competitive, aided by a surge in Democratic fundraising that has put both the Republican Party and Trump’s own campaign at an unexpected financial disadvantage.
The president will aim for a reset this week, hoping an aggressive travel schedule and Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings will energize his most loyal supporters and shift attention away from a virus that has killed more than 214,000 Americans on his watch.
Optimists in the president’s inner circle point to his unique ability to command attention and to his 2016 campaign, which also seemed destined for defeat before a late shift. But that comeback was aided by outside forces against an unpopular opponent. This year’s campaign, other Republicans worry, may instead resemble 1980 or 2008: a close race until, at the end, it decidedly wasn’t.
“It’s not good for my side,” said veteran GOP pollster Whit Ayres. “Pretty obviously, in many ways down-ballot Republicans are in the boat with Donald Trump. That’s good for Republicans in deep-red states, but more problematic for those in swing states.”
Asked for any bright spots for the Republican field, Ayres said, “I’m wracking my brain and just struggling.”
This account of Trump’s reelection effort was compiled from interviews with nearly two dozen White House and campaign officials and Republicans close to the West Wing, many of whom were not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations. It describes how a race that has generally been stable for months has endured a series of historic jolts.
Republicans began sensing warning signs last month.
The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg animated conservatives but also electrified Democrats, driving a tsunami of cash toward Biden and down-ballot Democrats. Trump’s heavily derided debate performance only exacerbated the problem, as even his own supporters found him rude as he so frequently interrupted Biden.
Reviewing data afterward, campaign aides worried as they started to see Trump’s support begin to slip. They saw the president’s coronavirus diagnosis as only compounding the problem, particularly with seniors...
“He’s in trouble, there’s no question. By every traditional measuring stick, this looks like a Biden landslide,” said Ari Fleischer, former press secretary for President George W. Bush. “It’s hard to predict what will happen in Congress, but anytime there is a large-scale victory, it has the potential to create tides to sweep people out.”...
The Trump campaign has spent more than $1.5 million in the District of Columbia market — one of the most liberal in the country but home to the president’s obsessive cable-watching habits — since the end of April. That’s more than he has spent in Virginia and New Hampshire and has contributed to the erosion of Trump’s once-massive cash advantage to Biden....
Still, Trump is flailing for a final message, turning a spate of recent interviews into tirades about the 2016 election and pushing his attorney general to investigate his political opponents. Newt Gingrich, who believes Trump will win again, warned the president to stop fighting the last war.
“He hasn’t quite adjusted to the fact that Biden is not Hillary and he has not adjusted that he has been around for five years and not being a fresh face,” the Republican former House speaker said. “The things that worked against Hillary haven’t worked against Biden.”...
Nancy Pelosi continues to block unemployment extension to those impacted by Dem lockdowns
Keep lying, it's all you have.
McConnell shoots down $1.8 trillion coronavirus deal, breaking with Trump
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday shot down the prospect of a coronavirus deal totaling between $1.8 trillion and $2.2 trillion — the goalposts of the current talks between Democrats and the White House.
McConnell's comments, made to reporters in Kentucky, underscore the divisions between President Trump and Senate Republicans on a fifth coronavirus package, with the GOP leader preparing to force a vote on a $500 billion bill next week.
“I don’t think so. That’s where the administration is willing to go. My members think half a trillion dollars, highly targeted, is the best way to go," McConnell said, asked about the prospect of a deal totally between $1.8 trillion and $2.2 trillion.
McConnell added that while a reporter was correct that there are negotiations ongoing between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the White House about the higher price range, "that's not what I'm going to put on the floor."
At his rally Tuesday in Johnstown, Pa., President Trump briefly veered off script to beseech one particular — and pivotal — slice of the electorate.
“Suburban women, will you please like me?” Trump asked. “Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood [dog whistle], OK?”
The president’s tone was lightly mocking, although his reference to saving their “neighborhood” (from low-income housing and the people it would bring) continued his barely disguised appeal to prejudice.
The electoral concerns that provoked Trump’s plea, however, are very real. It’s no secret that the president has struggled with college-educated white women (often referred to as “suburban women,” the successors to “soccer moms”). According to exit polls, he lost them by 7 percentage points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, four years after Republican Mitt Romney won them by 6; in 2018, they broke for Democrats by 20 points, flipping the U.S. House of Representatives.
Yet now, in the homestretch of the 2020 campaign, Trump not only appears to be performing even worse than before among college-educated white women, he’s also doing worse among white voters in general.
By partnering with YouGov to track the views of 13 key demographic groups (including suburban voters, Latino voters and white seniors) across nine important metrics (such as vote intention, Trump approval and the direction of the country), Yahoo News has identified several weak spots for the president among the white voters on whom he has pinned his hopes of reelection.
Since the first general election debate (Sept. 29), Trump’s hospitalization for COVID-19 (Oct. 3), his subsequent release (Oct. 6) and his return to the campaign trail (Oct. 12), the president’s support among college-educated white women has fallen to 34 percent while Joe Biden’s has risen to 55 percent. As a result, Biden’s lead among these voters has grown to 21 points — triple Clinton’s 2016 margin.
If Biden’s advantage here were to hold through Election Day, Trump would need to compensate by performing better than he did in 2016 with other white voters. (At the moment, his support among Black voters [7 percent] and Latino voters [28 percent] matches his 2016 numbers [8 percent and 28 percent, respectively].)
But again, Trump is currently faring worse with other white voters, not better.
The one bright spot for Trump is white women without college degrees, who have at least trended in his direction during the past three weeks. On Sept. 25, the president led Biden by 15 points (50 percent to 35 percent) with these voters; today, he leads by 16 (53 percent to 37 percent).
The problem for Trump, however, is that these gains don’t even return him to his 2016 baseline. That year, he won non-college-educated white women by 27 points (61 percent to 34 percent).
White men, meanwhile, seem to be trending away from Trump.
College-educated white men have bounced around the most from week to week, shifting from +6 points for Trump on Sept. 25 to +2 points for Trump on Oct. 3 to +3 points for Trump on Oct. 11. Regardless, even a narrow victory with this group would be disastrous for the president. In 2016, he won them by 14 points (53 percent to 39 percent).
White men without college degrees have been less volatile. On Sept. 25, they favored Trump 59 percent to 29 percent; today, they favor him 54 percent to 32 percent. But in 2016, Trump trounced Clinton with this demographic by nearly 50 points (71 percent to 23 percent). The fact that he’s currently leading Biden by just 22 — a lead that’s shrinking each week — is not a good sign.
To turn things around by Election Day, Trump needs to increase his support among non-college-educated white women and massively improve his numbers with the rest of the white electorate. No wonder he begged “suburban women” in Pennsylvania to “like” him earlier this week. He’s running out of time..
"It is an incredibly damning indictment of Яump personally that, in a country where a majority of the people believe they are better off than they were four years ago, the incumbent President is currently losing badly in his bid for a second term."
or, maybe, just like four years ago, the pollsters are missing something
we'll know soon enough but people who think they are better off than under the last President, never before have voted out the current one
"Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Thursday shot down the prospect of a coronavirus deal totaling between $1.8 trillion and $2.2 trillion — the goalposts of the current talks between Democrats and the White House."
McConnell will fold when the White House and Pelosi reach agreement
Joe Biden came into Thursday night’s town hall, which was originally supposed to be a debate, stung by new allegations of influence-peddling involving his son Hunter. The question on everyone’s mind going in was whether he would be allowed to answer any question harder than chocolate or tapioca? With social media strangling the Hunter story from the New York Post, the nation’s oldest continuous daily newspaper, and Twitter going dark after criticism, it was up to old media, ABC News, to act responsibly and ask the question.
Joe appeared with Greek heartthrob George Stephanopoulos. They started off with a question from a Democrat who was dismayed by Trump’s response to COVID-19. What would Biden have done differently? Now listen, carefully. He wanted more access to China; so did Trump. After that? Biden wrote a USA op-ed. But he can point to nothing he would have done substantively differently from Trump’s response. Nothing. This is important. According to Democrats, Trump killed 200,000 people, but they can’t say what they would have done differently.
Biden’s big plan going forward seems to be a mix of big signs about masks in stores, ventilation systems, and bearing the example of wearing a mask. On vaccines, Biden referred to the body of scientists, whatever that means, and said that if they said it was OK, he would take it. But he reminded us that Trump lies and we should be careful.
Joe Biden insisted that as president he would spend a lot of time telling governors, mayors, and maybe even city councilmen, “Wear a mask!” “Mandate masks!” He then suggested that kids are in danger. Joe was waving his mask around the whole time, but he wasn’t providing a lot of evidence.
Lucky Joe just happened to have some kind of card in his pocket when he was asked by a Trump supporter about eliminating middle-class tax cuts Trump provided. Joe kept referring to the card — not without difficulty — but didn’t really answer the question. And heartthrob George, instead of pressing Biden on taking away middle-class tax cuts, asked if it’s really fair to tax the rich. He didn’t just put the ball on the tee, he grabbed Biden by the hips and said, “swing.”
A young, progressive, black voter asked if Biden would change the racist systems in America. Biden talked about funding, funding for education. He did not address the fact that some of our best-funded schools are some of our worst, especially in vulnerable communities. It was a saccharine repetition of generations of failure.
Biden insisted in regard to his support of the 1994 crime bill that he does not think drug addicts should go to jail. He thinks they should go into mandatory rehab — presumably in Ukraine on business travel. There were promises of talking to black and brown people. Biden also said police should “shoot them in the leg,” instead of shooting to kill in self-defense. He is very cavalier about the lives of law enforcement officers.
Biden was very gently asked if the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court justice would open the door to establishing “guardrails” to protect the judicial system. Yeah, that was the question on whether he would pack the Supreme Court. No question, no answer — exactly what ABC News intended. Biden defended his position by referring to arguments between scholars. When pressed, Biden said he wants a slow debate process in the Senate or else he will consider packing the court.
Shockingly, we got a question from a disaffected Republican who doesn’t like Trump. Thank God ABC News found one of these 57 people or so who exist in the world. The question was how will Biden be more civil? It was a trash bag of nonsense that had no place in a serious town hall. It was the breadcrumbs in a very disappointing meatball.
What didn’t come up was Hunter Biden. What didn’t come up was credible claims from the New York Post, the oldest daily newspaper in America, showing that the former vice president met with a Ukrainian businessman connected to his son. The biggest story in America right now was just ignored. That tells us pretty much everything.
This was really sad. It was sad in the way that old baseball players used to suit up and do old-timers games. This was an old-timer game. Biden put on his uniform and took batting practice, and he didn’t take it all that well. Biden was a back-up in the Obama administration, and making him the starter isn’t looking like a great bet.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/coronavirus/country/united-states/
with the second wave surging across Europe causing countries to shut it all down and cases beginning to rise, let's check out the report card
the top four states in deaths per million and 7 of the top 10 are blue states using the Biden plan
Trump voters are better off than four years ago
Biden voters want to return to the misery of the Obama era
btw, Biden admitted last night that sponsoring the 1994 crime bill was a BIIIG mistake
he also had no idea how he would deal with COVID any differently other than talk about masks a lot
also, he says if the Senate doesn't slow down the Amy CB confirmation, he would support court-packing
good for the voters to know
btw, no question was asked about the lies he told about helping Hunter
or what service Hunter provided in exchange for the millions he made from governments hostile to the US
"we'll know soon enough but people who think they are better off than under the last President, never before have voted out the current one"
We never had a pussy grabbing, science disrespecting, QAnon-liking liar who only cares about stuffing his pockets with tax-payer money run for reelection before either.
"no question was asked about the lies he told about helping Hunter "
Because no voters care about Hunter -- he's not running for office. He's a recovering addict, which is a lot more than we can say for Rump and his addiction to lying day after day.
"Biden admitted last night that sponsoring the 1994 crime bill was a BIIIG mistake"
It takes BIG man to admit a mistake. Biden not only admitted making a mistake, he also discussed how to improve things instead of lying he didn't make any mistakes like Rump does.
"Fox's Chris Wallace then pressed Trump on his own mistakes, to which the President responded, "I guess everyone makes mistakes," and went on to add that he would "be right eventually" on the pandemic.
When Wallace asked if his errors discredited him, the President said he didn't think so because he has "been right probably more than anybody else."
Ahem, Mr. Thinks He's Probably Right More Than Anybody Else:
Probably been right??
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/were-watching-trumps-7th-bankruptcy-unfold-171903858.html
Repeated bankruptcies are not right.
Repeated bankrumptcies are a sign of lousy leadership.
"he also had no idea how he would deal with COVID any differently other than talk about masks a lot"
Biden talked about not panicking and lying to the American people about the pandemic we face like Rump did at the very beginning.
Biden also talked about not waiting months like Rump did before using presidential power to have industries manufacture PPEs for first responders to the pandemic. See https://www.usfa.fema.gov/operations/infograms/091020.html
"the top four states in deaths per million and 7 of the top 10 are blue states using the Biden plan"
No states are using a "Biden plan" at the moment.
We are all stuck with Rump's plan which was to deny there was a problem and that a miracle would magically make COVID disappear.
Rump also insults our leading medical professionals as he continues to lie to us, the American people.
When was his last negative test before becoming ill? He still can't give an answer. See: https://people.com/politics/savannah-guthrie-presses-donald-trump-on-coronavirus-diagnosis/
"Here Are the States Where COVID-19 Is Increasing
The October surge of new COVID-19 cases appears to be heating up as businesses reopen and people gather at political rallies and other places.
The New York Times reports the daily average of new COVID-19 cases in the United States this past week topped 53,000, a 23 percent increase from the average 2 weeks ago.
That includes the 59,751 new cases reported on Wednesday.
In addition, 21 states have reached their highest 7-day averages for new cases since the pandemic began.
The Times states that the higher numbers are being driven by a surge in parts of the Upper Midwest and Rocky Mountain region.
In addition, Reuters reports an 11 percent increase in new COVID-19 cases this past week, with the Midwest recording rising caseloads as well as high positivity rates.
Reuters notes that Midwestern states recorded 22,000 new cases on Wednesday, breaking the record of 20,000 set last Friday...."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin cited progress Thursday in their ongoing coronavirus-relief negotiations less than three weeks before the November elections, though the Democratic leader raised concerns about whether any big spending package could pass Congress given fierce resistance in the GOP-controlled Senate.
Pelosi and Mnuchin have been discussing a new spending deal between $1.8 trillion and $2.2 trillion, although President Trump has said he would support even more.
The rapidly developing changes came late Thursday after a nearly 90-minute conversation between the two negotiators. They both cited progress in resolving one of Pelosi’s top demands, for a national strategic testing plan to better detect the coronavirus. Mnuchin told her that the White House would accept the Democrats’ proposal with some “minor” modifications, according to Pelosi’s spokesman — confirming comments Mnuchin himself had made earlier in the day.
However, opposition from Senate Republicans emerged Thursday as a formidable obstacle to any deal passing Congress before Election Day.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Senate Republicans had already made known their discomfort with any big new spending plan. McConnell next week plans to put a roughly $500 billion package on the Senate floor, close to a quarter the size of the package Mnuchin and Pelosi are working on. The Senate GOP leader spent much of Thursday doubling down on his opposition, publicly denouncing the White House deal taking shape and swatting away Trump’s directive to “Go big or go home!!!”
“He is willing to go higher than my members are," McConnell said of Trump while speaking at a medical center in Princeton, Ky., Thursday afternoon. McConnell said he didn’t think Pelosi and Mnuchin would reach a deal, anyway. And at an earlier event the majority leader all but ruled out a vote on a large-scale relief bill.
“You’re correct we’re in discussions with the secretary of the Treasury and the speaker about a higher amount," McConnell told a reporter. “That’s not what I’m going to put on the floor.”
The drastically divergent views come as the economy is showing new signs of strain and the coronavirus is beginning to spread rapidly again through numerous corners of the United States. Pelosi raised the issue of McConnell’s opposition in her call with Mnuchin, according to her spokesman, Drew Hammill. “The Secretary indicated that the President would weigh in with Leader McConnell should an agreement be reached,” Hammill wrote on Twitter.
However Trump’s erratic approach to the negotiations makes it uncertain whether he can or would exert the necessary political pressure to move Senate Republicans to take a vote many of them do not want to take, especially at a moment when the president is down in polls and some Republicans have begun to distance themselves from him.
BIDEN/HARRIS 2020
"We never had a pussy grabbing, science disrespecting, QAnon-liking liar who only cares about stuffing his pockets with tax-payer money run for reelection before either."
oh, we've had plenty of Presidents you could make such charges about
JFK was clearly a player and we don't even need to discuss Hillary's hubby
"Because no voters care about Hunter -- he's not running for office. He's a recovering addict, which is a lot more than we can say for Rump and his addiction to lying day after day."
except it's clear he sold influence and the question is whether Joe delivered
it looks like he did and should be discussed
in 1972, the public overlooked Watergate, even though it was known
73 and 74 were lost years
that's the last thing we need now
"It takes BIG man to admit a mistake. Biden not only admitted making a mistake, he also discussed how to improve things instead of lying he didn't make any mistakes like Rump does."
instead of discussing how to improve things, trump actually did improve things
he was Senator for 47 years and VP for 8
and he did nothing
"Biden talked about not panicking and lying to the American people about the pandemic we face like Rump did at the very beginning.
Biden also talked about not waiting months like Rump did before using presidential power to have industries manufacture PPEs for first responders to the pandemic. See https://www.usfa.fema.gov/operations/infograms/091020.html"
he didn't say what he would do differently moving forward
"We are all stuck with Rump's plan which was to deny there was a problem and that a miracle would magically make COVID disappear."
Trump closed borders, devised lockdown plans, mobilized an industrial effort to produce ventilators and rationed the existing ones successfully, tested more people than any other country in the world, encouraged the development of therapeutics that saved his life and will save others, and providing funding to produce millions of doses of unproven vaccines so that when one is found to work, it will be available immediately
"When was his last negative test before becoming ill? He still can't give an answer."
irrelevant to voters
"Reuters notes that Midwestern states recorded 22,000 new cases on Wednesday, breaking the record of 20,000 set last Friday....""
the virus first attacked the Northeast blue states, then the South, now Midwest
the area that was least successful in dealing with it is the Northeast blue states
the four highest states in deaths per million are Northeast blue states
Four years ago at this time — the middle of October 2016, just weeks from Election Day — Dems were taking considerable comfort in reading the polls.
A Monmouth University survey taken Oct. 14-16 had Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton 12 percentage points ahead of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, 53% to 41%. Polls from CBS News and NBC/Wall Street Journal also were showing Clinton with a double digit national lead.
Yes, the race for president isn’t a national election but a group of state-by-state, winner-take-all contests for votes in the Electoral College. But even that was looking pretty solid for Clinton.
RCP averages at the time had Clinton leading in most of the key battlegrounds. In Florida she was up by 3.8 percentage points over Trump. In Michigan she was up 10.7 points. In North Carolina she was up by 3 points. In Pennsylvania she was up 8.3 points. In Wisconsin she was up 6.7 points. She was even leading in Ohio by 1.5 percentage points.
Clinton ended up losing them all — Trump beat her in Florida by 1.2 percentage points, in Michigan by 0.2 points, in North Carolina by 3.6 points, in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by 0.7 points and in Ohio by 8.1 points — so, although she prevailed in the national popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, she got thumped in the Electoral College and Trump won the White House.
So Dems should be taking little comfort now in the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showing Democrat Joe Biden with an 11 percentage point lead over Trump, the FiveThirtyEight poll of polls posted midday on Thursday showing Biden up by an average of 10.4 points or Thursday’s RCP national average, using a slightly different set of polls, showing Biden with a 9.2-point lead.
In the key battleground states, RCP averages now show Biden up by 2.7 points over Trump in Florida, up by 7.2 points in Michigan, up by 3.3 points in North Carolina, up by 7 points in Pennsylvania, up by 6.3 points in Wisconsin and up by 0.6 points in Ohio.
We’ve seen this horror movie before.
Biden’s average polling lead today is smaller than Clinton’s was at a similar point in 2016 in Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Ohio.
And remember, 56% of Americans think they are better of now than four years ago.
Study Finds COVID Spikes Worse In Red Counties
The Washington Post reports:
A long-feared autumnal rise of infections and serious illnesses has in recent weeks been strikingly pronounced in Republican-leaning counties, according to a new analysis of health data from Harvard University researchers.
The research, which has not been peer-reviewed, shows that “red” counties with the most intense leanings toward Republicans have had the largest recent increases in cases, while “blue” counties that lean Democratic have tended recently to be flat.
The Harvard professors suspect that the Republican-leaning communities have been less inclined to follow public health guidance, including recommendations about mask-wearing and social distancing. The collision of the pandemic with election-year politics has had ripple effects that have undermined the collective response to this health crisis.
Wyatt and Regina Hardiman keep telling us the Coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. is the fault of liberals when of course the truth is its largely Republicans who are responsible for the explosion in cases and deaths.
"he didn't say what he would do differently moving forward"
Yes he did.
Look it up yourself.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/read-full-transcript-joe-bidens-abc-news-town/story?id=73643517
It was the first question, answered in multiple parts with additional questions posed by George Stephanopolis.
Joe Biden's town hall on ABC averaged 13.9 million viewers on Thursday night, easily surpassing the Nielsen ratings for President Trump's town hall on NBC. That alone was a result virtually no one in the TV business expected. And that's not even the most surprising part.
The Trump town hall was simulcast by two of NBC's cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, but even when those channels are included in the total, Biden -- on only one network -- still prevailed.
The Trump town hall averaged 10.6 million viewers on the NBC broadcast network. On MSNBC, Trump reached 1.74 million viewers, and on CNBC, about 671,000 viewers. So Trump's gross audience across the three channels was 13 million, about one million fewer than Biden's audience on ABC alone.
Staffers at ABC News privately admitted to their surprise when the preliminary ratings came in on Friday.
The Nielsen ratings only measure viewership on TV sets. Both town halls were also live-streamed to phones, computers and other devices.
In the run-up to Thursday night, the Biden campaign embraced the popular ratings narrative and predicted that Trump would outrate Biden. Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller said "we're gonna have a much bigger audience than Joe."
Trump has been a Nielsen connoisseur for decades. While hosting "The Apprentice" on NBC, he paid close attention to the performance of his show and routinely exaggerated its success. He has continued to fixate on TV ratings during his years in the White House and has frequently congratulated Fox News for its ratings victories.
But when the TV ratings have disappointed him, he has also shifted to other metrics; when Biden had a bigger TV audience for his convention, Trump complained that "Online Streaming Numbers" weren't being counted in the totals.
There is no industry standard to measure all the various ways the town halls were streamed, both live and on-demand. In any event, that would be like trying to combine apples and oranges. In the apples to apples match-up between the two candidates, Biden had the better night.
While surprising to many media and political observers, Biden's ratings strength has been palpable for months.
When Trump participated in a town hall on ABC last month, the event averaged 3.8 million viewers.
When Biden held a town hall on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC last week, it averaged 6.7 million viewers.
Caroline Giuliani, the daughter of President Donald Trump's personal attorney and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, is urging Americans to "end this nightmare" by voting for Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris.
In a piece for Vanity Fair published Thursday, she called on voters to end Trump's "reign of terror" and "elect a compassionate and decent president."
"I may not be able to change my father's mind, but together, we can vote this toxic administration out of office," Giuliani, who has publicly supported Democratic candidates in past presidential elections, wrote.
On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that the White House was warned that Rudy Giuliani "was being used to feed Russian misinformation" to the President.
"If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president's personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with 'yes-men' and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power," Caroline Giuliani wrote. "We've seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren't convicted, anyway)."
She accused Trump "and his enablers" of using the presidency to "stoke the injustice that already permeated our society," slammed his policies rolling back protections for the LGBTQ community, and criticized his handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Giuliani praised Biden for picking Harris as his running mate and argued that the former vice president would be capable of bipartisanship and incorporating progressive views. She also touted Biden's proposals to combat climate change and warned that "it is clear that our planet cannot survive four more years of this administration's environmental assault."
"In Joe Biden, we'll have a leader who prioritizes common ground and civility over alienation, bullying, and scorched-earth tactics," she wrote.
She admitted that Biden was not her first choice for president during the primaries, but she added: "I know what is at stake, and Joe Biden will be everyone's president if elected."
Last night when Savannah Guthrie asked the president to disavow the QAnon conspiracy theory as “completely not true,” Trump replied, “I know nothing about it. I do know they are very much against pedophilia. They fight it very hard, but I know nothing about it.”
A QAnon supporter on 8kun, another fringe site, approved, “I thought he had the perfect answer.”
Another 8kun users said of Trump’s response, “masterfully done by POTUS."
Trump’s comments — and the reaction generated by them — echoed his call for the Proud Boys, another far-right group, to “Stand back and stand by” in last month’s presidential debate. The line, which Trump later sought to distance himself from, set off celebrations across social media from supporters of the all-male fringe group that often engages in street violence.
"keep telling us the Coronavirus epidemic in the U.S. is the fault of liberals when of course the truth is its largely Republicans who are responsible for the explosion in cases and deaths."
Randy, no one has said the epidemic, which is actually a pandemic, is the fault of liberals
what has been noted, and is beyond dispute, is that blue states have handled the pandemic dismally - and caused deaths with their negligence
"Biden's Nielsen ratings were higher than Rump's last night said...
Joe Biden's town hall on ABC averaged 13.9 million viewers on Thursday night, easily surpassing the Nielsen ratings for President Trump's town hall on NBC. That alone was a result virtually no one in the TV business expected. And that's not even the most surprising part.
The Trump town hall was simulcast by two of NBC's cable channels, MSNBC and CNBC, but even when those channels are included in the total, Biden -- on only one network -- still prevailed.
The Trump town hall averaged 10.6 million viewers on the NBC broadcast network. On MSNBC, Trump reached 1.74 million viewers, and on CNBC, about 671,000 viewers. So Trump's gross audience across the three channels was 13 million, about one million fewer than Biden's audience on ABC alone.
Staffers at ABC News privately admitted to their surprise when the preliminary ratings came in on Friday."
not that big a discrepancy but makes sense considering that Trump is available to the media all the time and is known well
even after he has been Senator for 47 years and VP for 8, people don't know him
and his basement campaign hasn't done much to change that
btw, what services did Hunter Biden provide the enemies of America that they paid him millions for?
George Stephacrapolous displayed no curiousity about the scandal!!!!!!
"While surprising to many media and political observers, Biden's ratings strength has been palpable for months."
thanks for the laugh
"Trump is available to the media all the time and is known well" as a fat, liar, spoiled, liar, thrice married, liar, pussy grabber, liar, tax-dodger, liar, failed business man, liar, dictator lover and wannabe who has allowed the US to be the country with 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's coronavirus cases and there is nothing funny about it.
Though cases had been on a downward trajectory after the widespread lockdowns in March and April, the virus spread rapidly throughout the summer — especially in regions of the country that were early to reopen, including the South and West. Now, with the arrival of fall and students across the country returning to school, we are beginning to see another surge in cases. Over the past week, the country has reported an average of 44,280 new cases per day, a 6-percent increase from the average just two weeks earlier. On October 9, six states — Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia — reported record single-day increases in their case counts. And as the U.S. counted more than 50,000 new cases for the third consecutive day (for the first time since August), the UN announced a new daily high of 350,000 infections reported worldwide.
Cases are surging in the Upper Midwest and the West, and we’re seeing many spikes linked to outbreaks at universities that have reopened. In recent months, younger people have accounted for a greater share of infections; a new study released by the CDC found that more Americans ages 20–29 are testing positive than any other age group. Across the country, the largest outbreaks have been in nursing homes, correctional facilities, and meat-processing plants. Additionally, federal data shows that Black and Latino people in the U.S. have been three times as likely to contract the virus as white people and that they have been nearly twice as likely to die from it. Children of color have also been infected at higher rates and have been hospitalized from the virus at five to eight times the rate of white children.
President Trump has repeatedly downplayed the seriousness of the current outbreaks and told his supporters at a rally in Ohio in September that the virus “affects virtually nobody.” He has previously falsely claimed that “99 percent” of cases are “totally harmless” — despite the fact that he told journalist Bob Woodward in early February that he knew the virus was airborne and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” Speaking at a town hall event in mid-September, Trump denied that he had ever minimized the threat, though he proceeded to insist yet again that the virus will “disappear” and claimed that a vaccine could be ready in “several weeks,” despite the fact that his advisers have said that this time frame is extremely unlikely. On September 13, Trump held another indoor rally in Nevada, where thousands of maskless supporters gathered in defiance of the state’s social-distancing mandates, which forbid indoor gatherings of 50 people or more.
In early October, however, the president’s words caught up with him: On October 1, Trump confirmed that Hope Hicks, a top aide who accompanied him to the first presidential debate aboard Air Force One, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Within hours, he and Melania had tested positive, too. The president’s treatment involved several different drugs, some of them experimental; some of them recommended only for the most serious COVID-19 cases. Although he reportedly worried he “could be one of the diers,” Trump was back to holding large public events one week later, standing on a White House terrace and repeating his claim that coronavirus is “disappearing” for a crowd gathered on the South Lawn. Still, infections within the president’s orbit continued to climb, thanks in part to an apparent superspreader event he recently held in the Rose Garden.
"Trump is available to the media all the time and is known well"
yes, he is
he makes himself available on a virtually unlimited basis
Biden has, cowardly, not been available and has used the coronavirus as an excuse
he wouldn't give an interview to Dem mouthpiece, the NY Times
America likes brave, strong leaders
the guy they saw in a dark dungeon on Thursday night, having a slumber party with George Stephanopoulos and a handful of his most loyal supporters in not that guy
not one question was asked about the story of the week: what his son did in exchange for the millions he was paid by hostile governments while Joe was VP
"as a fat"
juvenile remark typical of TTF
"liar"
all politicians are liars
Trump's "lies" are that he is the "best", typical harmless NY real estate hyperbole
other politicians lie about what they will do in office
Trump did exactly what he promised
right now, Biden is lying in ways that are consequential
he is either lying by trying to make the left think he supports their radical proposals or lying to make independent voters think he doesn't
hard to pin down which because he has made himself generally inaccessible
but deep state actors love him because they know he will put their interests above the American people's interests
"spoiled,"
by who?
"thrice married,"
what's that to you?
"pussy grabber,"
JFK and Hillary's hubby were both known for the same although they were smart enough not to tell a lying entertainment reporter about it in private
Biden has a long history of putting his hands all over any females who makes the mistake of standing too close to him
"tax-dodger,"
he hasn't broken any tax laws
"failed business man,"
he seems to have amassed a pretty impressive portfolio of properties
Joe Biden's lead over Donald Trump has narrowed as Republican voters decide to stick with the president and the Democrat's support has fallen below 50%, today's IBD/TIPP 2020 election poll update finds.
The latest IBD/TIPP Trump vs. Biden poll update shows the Democratic challenger leading the Republican incumbent by 5.2 points, 48.7%-43.5%, in a four-way presidential poll of likely voters. Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen has the support of 2.5%, and Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins 1.2%.
Since the IBD/TIPP 2020 Presidential Election Tracking Poll launched on Monday, Oct. 12, Biden's support has dipped from 51.9% to 48.7% in a four-way race. Trump reached a new high-water mark Friday with 43.5% support, after slipping as low as 42.3%.
Support for third-party and other candidates has climbed, as has the share of undecided voters. Meanwhile, more voters are declining to say whom they support.
Biden is having only a slightly easier time corralling Democrats than Donald Trump is having in nailing down GOP votes. Biden leads 94%-4% among Democrats. Trump leads 92%-5% among Republicans.
In 2016, almost all presidential election polls pointed to a Hillary Clinton victory over Donald Trump. The IBD/TIPP Poll was one of only two election polls credited with predicting President Trump's 2016 victory. TIPP, IBD's polling partner, succeeded in picking up on the greater enthusiasm among Republicans for their candidate.
Now that Biden's support has fallen below 50% and more GOP voters are sticking with Trump, the president has a fighting chance. The Oct. 22 debate, a coronavirus resurgence as well as progress toward a medical breakthrough, the Supreme Court nomination fight and the fate of fiscal stimulus negotiations could all shape the Trump vs. Biden race's final weeks. The unprecedented level of mail-in voting, which brings the potential for disqualified ballots, is a wild card.
"has allowed the US to be the country with 4% of the world's population and 25% of the world's coronavirus cases"
the US has done 123 million tests
the closest in the Western democracies is the UK with 28 million
it's likely other places have many undetected cases
deaths per million in the US puts us at 8th, better than Spain but not much different than the UK
if not for the horrible mismanagement in the NY and rest of the Northeast by blue state governors in the early stages, our stats would be much better on the death rate
"Though cases had been on a downward trajectory after the widespread lockdowns in March and April, the virus spread rapidly throughout the summer — especially in regions of the country that were early to reopen,"
right now, cases are on the rise in places which were not easy to reopen
lockdowns are the lazy solution
the WHO recently advised against blanket shutdowns noting that many will die over the next year from a doubling of the poverty because of the lockdowns
ways can be found to keep everything open using practical health protocols
which is what Trump said from the beginning
Americans were lied to about shutdowns in the beginning, being told they were temporary measures to flatten the curve
Dems liked lockdowns because they desperately wanted the economy to fail as Trump's very successful economy was he his biggest asset
"On October 9, six states — Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia — reported record single-day increases in their case counts."
when you hear BS like this, remember that most of these states had low case counts to begin with
Montana and North Dakota could have a "record" that is insignificant
"Cases are surging in the Upper Midwest and the West, and we’re seeing many spikes linked to outbreaks at universities that have reopened. In recent months, younger people have accounted for a greater share of infections; a new study released by the CDC found that more Americans ages 20–29 are testing positive than any other age group."
not a major concern since the death rate in this population rounds to zero
"Across the country, the largest outbreaks have been in nursing homes, correctional facilities, and meat-processing plants."
I assume this is a historical comment since it contradicts your immediately previous statement
"he told journalist Bob Woodward in early February that he knew the virus was airborne and “more deadly than even your strenuous flus.”"
Fauci has explained this. At the time he thought the coronavirus would be bad but that they could handle it. Trump only repeated what Fauci told him
"In early October, however, the president’s words caught up with him: On October 1, Trump confirmed that Hope Hicks, a top aide who accompanied him to the first presidential debate aboard Air Force One, had tested positive for the coronavirus. Within hours, he and Melania had tested positive, too."
REALLY?
thanks for letting us know!!!!!!!!!!
"The president’s treatment involved several different drugs, some of them experimental; some of them recommended only for the most serious COVID-19 cases."
considering he was obese and in his mid 70s, and recovered in less than a week, maybe it's time to fast track his treatment regimen to the general population
Cherry picking polls again huh?
Does doing that help you sleep at night?
Biden's RCP National Average is 51.3% over Rump's 42.3% and as Rasmussen reminds us "Biden has now been at 50% or higher for the past three weeks" while Rump has been below 50%.
"Cherry picking polls again huh?"
no, I used the latest poll to come out, which also is one of the few to poll likely voters
"Does doing that help you sleep at night?"
I sleep fine. I don't place all my hopes, or any, really, on the government
Biden's election would exacerbate division in America
but, I'll live
"Biden's RCP National Average is 51.3% over Rump's 42.3% and as Rasmussen reminds us "Biden has now been at 50% or higher for the past three weeks" while Rump has been below 50%."
we are in the stage of the election where the GOP always, mysteriously, starts doing much better, almost if the polls were fixed
so, averages of the last few weeks are meaningless
unless you like the results and you want to cherry-pick
the "averages" also include polls with all registered voters, or all eligible voters
right now, the GOP is registering new voters in record numbers
whether you want to believe it or not, this race is close
and Trump has demonstrated skill at closing out
meanwhile, Biden has run for President several times before and been rejected
you and Hillary should kick back in a hotel suite with a little chablis and await the victory party
remember to wear your purple pant suit
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"Biden's election would exacerbate division in America"
Only between the most lunatic extreme fringiest right wingers, and well, the rest of America. But don't worry, they're "fine people" (cough, cough).
"and Trump has demonstrated skill at closing out"
Businesses. You forgot "businesses" at the end of that sentence, as in "Trump has demonstrated skill at closing out businesses as he has bankrupted 6 of his properties in 18 years."
Trump was quoted by Newsweek in 2011 saying, "I do play with the bankruptcy laws—they're very good for me."
"meanwhile, Biden has run for President several times before and been rejected"
Meanwhile, Rump was rejected by the majority of voters the last time around, he has done nothing to grow his base, and his actions as we get closer to November seem designed to piss even more people off, if not kill them outright by spreading COVID-19 to his brainwashed masses at his mostly maskless rallys.
At this point one might wonder if Rump could be defeated by a 35 year old, American born pubic louse.
Miles Taylor, the chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security until 2019, has accused President Donald Trump of “helping to crowdsource domestic terrorism” with his refusal to denounce the conspiracy theory QAnon.
Taylor on Friday told CNN’s Chris Cuomo that the president ― who declined to condemn QAnon during his NBC town hall Thursday ― was well aware of how easy it was “for this rhetoric to jump the tracks to violence” because DHS had repeatedly conveyed the danger to the White House during Taylor’s two-and-a-half years in the Trump administration.
“This isn’t the Donald Trump presidency anymore,” said Taylor. “It has become the Alex Jones Infowars presidency,” referencing the far-right conspiracy theorist who last year lost a legal battle after claiming the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre was a hoax.
Taylor later explained why Trump’s promotion of baseless conspiracy theories like QAnon ― which centers on the idea that the president is secretly working to stop a pedophile ring of high-ranking Democrats and celebrities ― was “the thing we feared so much.”
“Because our adversaries, it was their wildest dream that the president of the United States would embrace these conspiracy theories,” Taylor explained. “Because they knew it would divide Americans, it would damage our democracy and it would weaken the United States on the world stage.”
This Democrat who one time sent a $25 check to John McCain during the South Carolina primary back in 2000 has gotten **three** GOP requests for money today, proving how desperate they are!!
Two from RUMP:
Friend,
We just went over the list of supporters who helped us CRUSH our FINAL FEC Deadline goal before the Election, and we noticed that YOUR NAME was MISSING from the donor list.
FEC DEADLINE DONOR FILE
SUPPORTER: [my email address]
FEC DONATION: $0
You have always been a steadfast supporter of President Trump and Vice President Pence, so we were surprised to see that you neglected to help us reach our goal...
The future of our Nation is at stake. This Election will decide whether we SAVE the American Dream, or whether we allow a socialist agenda to DEMOLISH our cherished destiny.
President Trump really needs you to step up. He knows that YOU want to WIN just as much as we do, which is why for the NEXT HOUR all gifts will receive an 800%-MATCHING CHECK!
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And one from Ted Cruz!
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Boy are they barking up the wrong tree! LOLOLOLOL
Thanks for the laughs!
WASHINGTON – Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican who has ramped up his criticism of President Donald Trump's election strategy in recent days, brushed aside a fiery tweet Saturday in which the president described him as "stupid and obnoxious."
"Ben said the same thing to Nebraskans that he has repeatedly said to the president directly," James Wegmann, a Sasse spokesmansaid of the senator's increasingly public criticism of the president. "Ben is focused on defending the Republican Senate majority, and he's not going to waste a single minute on tweets."
The public back and forth between Sasse, an occasional critic of the president, and Trump comes as Republicans are working overtime to try to keep control of the Senate and as the White House is counting on GOP votes to confirm Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court and approve an economic stimulus, should a proposal materialize.
Republicans are also concerned Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's lead in national and battleground state polling could be a drag on Senate races Republicans will need to win to retain control of the chamber, including in Georgia and Arizona.
Sasse drew the president's ire by telling constituents during a recent call that Trump "kisses dictators' butts" and has "flirted with white supremacists." Sasse's office confirmed the authenticity of a recording, first reported by the Washington Examiner.
Sasse's earlier criticism of Trump's refusal to denounce the conspiracy theory group QAnon came up during Thursday's NBC town hall – leading to one of the most newsworthy exchanges in that event. Trump was asked by NBC moderator Savannah Guthrie to disavow the group, in one of the more viral moments of the evening.
A core tenet of QAnon is the false belief that Trump was elected to root out a secret child-sex trafficking ring run by Democratic politicians and celebrities.
"I don’t get that, you’re the president. You’re not like, someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever," Guthrie said.
"No, no, no," Trump said, explaining one of his tweets that gave oxygen to the group. "That was a retweet, and I do a lot of retweets."
Trump weighed back into a fight with Sasse on Saturday morning in a series of tweets, describing him as the "least effective" of the Republican caucus and a person who "truly doesn’t have what it takes to be great."
"Little Ben is a liability to the Republican Party, and an embarrassment to the Great State of Nebraska," Trump wrote. "Other than that, he’s just a wonderful guy!"
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Does he really think this will help him win the women's vote?
Detroit News: President Trump prompts anti-Whitmer chants of 'lock her up'
"Muskegon — President Donald Trump tried to tie Democratic rival Joe Biden to the radical left of his party and told his supporters to "watch those ballots"during a Saturday rally attended by thousands of people outside an airport hangar in Muskegon.
The Republican president also insisted that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer needs to relax more COVID-19 restrictions, even though the Michigan Supreme Court already invalidated her emergency executive orders because the 1945 law she relied on was unconstitutional. She has since had her state Department of Health and Human Services issue new epidemic orders to wear masks and limit the capacities of businesses.
“You’ve got to get your governor to open up her state." Trump said to cheering. "And get your schools open. … The schools have to be open.”
Michigan's schools have been given the option of holding in-person classes or holding courses online. Many larger school districts have chosen to go with online courses, while others have done in-person classes or a mixture of online or in-person classes.
In response to Trump's statement, the crowd started chanting about the first-term Democratic governor: "Lock her up, lock her up, lock her up."..."
OOPS!
Gotta wonder if QAnon-ers noticed JFK Jr didn't show up as Rump's 2020 running mate yesterday, October 17, 2020, as prophesied.
...Back home [after a long ride back from Sturgis, S.D., Kenny] Cervantes took Tylenol for his throat and went to bed early. But he woke up the next morning coughing so hard he struggled to catch his breath. Over the next few days, the pain in his chest made him fear that his heart might stop, and a test later confirmed he had the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19. He was admitted to the hospital 11 days later, on Aug. 27. Soon, his girlfriend and his sister were sick, and Cervantes was going over everything he did and every place he visited in Sturgis, wondering where the virus had found him.
Within weeks of the gathering, the Dakotas, along with Wyoming, Minnesota and Montana, were leading the nation in new coronavirus infections per capita. The surge was especially pronounced in North and South Dakota, where cases and hospitalization rates continued their juggernaut rise into October. Experts say they will never be able to determine how many of those cases originated at the 10-day rally, given the failure of state and local health officials to identify and monitor attendees returning home, or to trace chains of transmission after people got sick. Some, however, believe the nearly 500,000-person gathering played a role in the outbreak now consuming the Upper Midwest.
More than 330 coronavirus cases and one death were directly linked to the rally as of mid-September, according to a Washington Post survey of health departments in 23 states that provided information. But experts say that tally represents just the tip of the iceberg, since contact tracing often doesn’t capture the source of an infection, and asymptomatic spread goes unnoticed.
In many ways, Sturgis is an object lesson in the patchwork U.S. response to a virus that has proved remarkably adept at exploiting such gaps to become resurgent. While some states and localities banned even relatively small groups of people, others, like South Dakota, imposed no restrictions — in this case allowing the largest gathering of people in the United States and perhaps anywhere in the world amid the pandemic and creating huge vulnerabilities as tens of thousands of attendees traveled back home to every state in the nation.
Many went unmasked to an event public health officials pleaded with them to skip, putting themselves and others at risk, because they were skeptical about the risks, or felt the entreaties infringed on their personal liberties. Rallygoers jammed bars, restaurants, tattoo parlors and concert venues; South Dakota officials later identified four such businesses as sites of potential exposure after learning that infected people had visited them.
Despite the concerns expressed by health experts ahead of the event, efforts to urge returnees to self-quarantine lacked enforcement clout and were largely unsuccessful, and the work by state and local officials to identify chains of transmission and stop them was inconsistent and uncoordinated....
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer demanded an end to President Donald Trump inciting violence against her after she accused him of doing it yet again at his latest rally in her state on Saturday.
Whitmer, the target of an alleged kidnapping plot by Trump-supporting militia members, called out the president after he attacked her at the rally in Muskegon, working the crowd into a frenzy and triggering a chant of “Lock her up.”
“You gotta get your governor to open up your state,” Trump told the crowd. “And get your schools open, get your schools open. The schools have to be open, right?” added Trump, whose own son Baron attends a school that will not fully open through the fall.
When the crowd started chanting “Lock her up,” with absolutely no justification, Trump smiled and repeated the phrase. Then he chillingly added: “Lock ’em all up.”
Governor Gretchen Whitmer
@GovWhitmer
This is exactly the rhetoric that has put me, my family, and other government officials’ lives in danger while we try to save the lives of our fellow Americans. It needs to stop.
Quote Tweet
Acyn Torabi
@Acyn
The President mentions the Governor of Michigan, the crowd chants lock her up, and the President says lock them all up
6:14 PM · Oct 17, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
https://twitter.com/GovWhitmer/status/1317589850527322112
It’s tempting to use the analogy of rats fleeing a sinking ship to describe the growing number of Republican elected officials starting to speak out against Donald Trump. But that's really not fair to rats, who tend not to be complicit in driving ships to the bottom of the sea.
After a 19 year old pregnant prison inmate was repeatedly raped by a prison guard, Amy Barrett ruled that the county responsible for the prison could not be held liable because the sexual assaults fell outside of the guard's official duties.
If Marriage Equality is Overturned by SCOTUS, Interracial Marriages May Be Next
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "[Amy Barrett] has a multi-racial family, indicating she is not opposed to such a thing, nor are 99% of Americans"
That's like saying because she's a woman she won't rule in an anti-woman way - she most certainly will, striking down Roe V Wade, ruling against the free availability of birth control and striking down any equality legislation.
Make no mistake about it, Amy Barrett will rule against black people as its part of her ultra conservative white evangelical ideology.
Wyatt/Regina said 99% of Americans are okay with interracial marriage so even though they could rule in favour of bans on interracial marriage they won't. As we've seen with Republican promises not to fill a vacant supreme court seat in the last year of a presidency, you can't trust Republicans not to do something when they have the power to do it.
Far from 99% of Americans being okay with interracial marriage (as though rights should be determined by the popularity of a minority group) Trump's core group of supporters (30% of the population) are deeply racist and Trump is encouraging that racism. Trump recently bragged about how he killed fair housing legislation to keep poor (black) people out of the suburbs. Trump has sided with the police and vigilantes who've killed black people. Research shows that conservatives more so than liberals have a tendency to see the world in us vs them terms and want to punish people who aren't like them.
So, don't take seriously any promises from bigots like Waytt and Regina Hardiman that they won't go after interracial marriage once they allow gay marriage bans back on the books. Republicans have shown time and again any promises made will be broken at the first opportunity.
I said "Research shows that conservatives more so than liberals have a tendency to see the world in us vs them terms and want to punish people who aren't like them" and forgot to include the link.
The Authoritarians
Contrary to Wyatt/Regina's childish kneejerk lie that that "this wouldn't pass peer review", it is a summary of decades of peer reviewed research and is the overwhelming consensus of historians and psychologists who've studied fascist regimes like the Trump administration.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign manager warned against trusting inflated national polling numbers released this week, which showed Biden in a double-digit lead over incumbent candidate President Trump.
“Please take the fact that we are not ahead by double digits,” Jen O’Malley said Friday, according to a New York Times reporter. “Those are inflated national public polling numbers.”
"That's like saying because she's a woman she won't rule in an anti-woman way "
actually, that's not true, Sir Jackass
she chose to have a multi-racial family
that says something
Remember January? I know it feels like several lifetimes ago, the before times of life as we used to know it. But think back to the biggest story of those chilly days. It wasn’t the Chinese virus slowly spreading to our shores or the Democratic presidential primary. No, it was the impeachment of the president of the United States. This week’s bombshell New York Post story on Hunter Biden now shows what many of us suspected: The impeachment was a ridiculous sham.
The basis for the impeachment, for those whose recollections are understandably shaky, was that President Trump pressured the president of Ukraine to launch investigations into the energy company Burisma for the purely political purpose of hurting Joe Biden. Central to that allegation was the argument that Trump and the United States had no legitimate interest in seeing Burisma investigated. If the trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop are accurate, and they have not been disputed, then this argument falls to pieces.
Pam Bondi, working for the Trump defense team, said this back during the national ordeal about the Democratic House managers’ constant attempts to call allegations against the Bidens “baseless”:
In their trial memorandum, the House managers describe this as baseless. Now, why did they say that? Why did they invoke Biden or Burisma over 400 times? The reason they needed to do that is because they’re here saying that the president must be impeached and removed from office for raising a concern. And that’s why we have to talk about this today. They say ‘sham.’ They say ‘baseless.’ They say this because if it’s OK for someone to say, ‘Hey, you know what? Maybe there’s something here worth raising,’ then their case crumbles.
And here we are. If these emails are accurate, then it is as clear as is the summer sun that Hunter Biden was absolutely selling access to his father and the Obama administration in exchange for his lavish salary. This was literally at the heart of the Trump defense, and it really is a silver bullet. What reasonable person would even suggest that the president of the United States may not push allies to investigate legitimate corruption involving the executive branch of the federal government?
House Republicans this week sent requests for information to the FBI to see if they were in possession of these emails at the time of impeachment. It is an important question that the American people deserve an answer to. To borrow a phrase from another show-stopping trial of the century, if the email’s legit, you must acquit. As far as I know, there is no way to reverse an impeachment, but if there were one, now would be the time.
Remember, “Impeachment is forever”? It was the big catchphrase right before “Don’t touch your face” shot up to No. 1. When was the last time you even heard a Democrat say the word impeachment? If this black mark on Trump’s presidency is so very damning, then why isn’t the Biden campaign making a big deal about it? Or frankly, talking about it at all? The reason, of course, is that even back in January, Democrats were concerned that should Biden win the nomination, some of these chickens could come home to roost. Now they have, and my goodness, they are laying some heavy eggs.
What Trump must make clear in the final weeks of the election is that not only was his impeachment a giant lie, a despicable ploy by desperate Democrats, but it was also a massive cover-up on behalf of Joe Biden. It is time for what we naively thought would be the biggest story of 2020, namely impeachment, to make its way back into this election — not as Democrats intended as a negative for Trump, but as his ultimate vindication against charges we now know to be baseless, crude, and deeply cynical.
Criminal Threat Arrest
The Wichita Police Department (WPD) has arrested 59-year-old Meredith Dowty of Wichita on a charge of criminal threat.
Today, WPD officials were alerted to threatening statements directed toward city of Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple.
Officers and investigators immediately began investigating the threatening statements, leading to the arrest of Dowty this afternoon.
The investigation is ongoing, and it will be presented to the Sedgwick County District Attorney’s Office.
The case number is 20C064597.
When Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple was told about the series of text messages sent to another city official last week, the Democrat said he noticed that the man, frustrated by the city’s mask mandate to help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, had spelled out a graphic, specific threat to kidnap and kill him.
“He said he was going to kidnap me and slash my throat and he needed my address because I needed to see the hangman — me and everyone who, something about tyranny,” Whipple told the Wichita Eagle. The mayor indicated to the New York Times that the man also wanted to turn him into fertilizer.
The Wichita Police Department confirmed that Meredith Dowty, 59, was arrested Friday night on a charge of criminal threat for allegedly sending the frightening texts directed at Whipple...
The arrest in Kansas’s largest city follows a disturbing trend of alleged abduction plots involving elected officials nationwide. Federal and state officials revealed this month that they had thwarted an alleged plot by 13 people to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). Last week, an FBI agent said that some of those charged in the plan to kidnap Whitmer had also discussed “taking” Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D).
Whipple, 38, told the Eagle that the order appeared to enrage Dowty, a retired firefighter who pointed to “masks and tyranny” as a source of his anger. Dowty was allegedly upset at Whipple over what the mayor described as “not being able to see his mother because of covid restrictions on elderly homes.” In Sedgwick County, which includes Wichita, there have been nearly 10,000 cases and 121 deaths, according to county data.
Police said they were alerted to the threatening statements Friday and arrested Dowty hours later. The mayor was read the texts by a detective who had been tipped off about the messages, which were “sent to someone else who knew this person, but also knew me,” Whipple told CNN.
“Obviously, the person was very angry, but also very detailed in what it sounded like they wanted to do. They wanted the address, my address,” he said to CNN. “And also, this threat was more specific about kidnapping me and cutting my throat. Those were what was read to me. They were graphic.”
Since July, Wichita has enforced an ordinance requiring people to wear masks in public. Even though the mandate was extended last month, some in Wichita strongly questioned the need to wear masks in public. At a Sept. 8 City Council meeting, more than 100 people spoke for close to seven hours in opposition to the mandate. Many said they believed that the order is a violation of their religious beliefs or constitutional rights, the Eagle reported.
Kansas has had nearly 70,000 coronavirus cases and 859 deaths as of early Monday. Research has shown, and public health experts have emphasized, that mask usage can help reduce transmission of the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease covid-19.
The State Department says it has about 450 pages of records showing government spending at President Trump’s properties. But this week, it signaled that it plans to release only two of those pages before the November election — leaving voters in the dark about the full scope of taxpayer payments to the president’s company.
The State Department announced the decision to release just the two pages late Thursday in an email to The Post, which had filed a public-records lawsuit earlier this year, seeking any records showing State Department payments to Trump properties.
The State Department pays for hotel rooms and other expenses when foreign leaders visit Trump properties, and when federal employees, such as Secret Service agents, follow Trump and his family to the president’s overseas clubs. But it’s impossible to tell how much the department has spent in total, because it has released detailed records for only the first few months of Trump’s presidency.
The Post’s lawsuit asked for a fuller accounting, requesting records of those payments over several years of Trump’s term.
In response, the State Department had said in a legal filing it would try to release up to 300 pages of the remaining records on Thursday. Instead, it sent the two pages — the receipts of a single hotel bill from Trump’s Irish golf course, involving security for Trump’s daughter-in-law and campaign adviser Lara Trump.
The department declined to comment about its decision. The White House also declined to comment. Under the schedule previously set in court filings, the State Department does not plan to release more records until mid-November.
Also this week, the General Services Administration — responding to a Post public-records request about its own business relationship with Trump’s company — released 26 pages of internal documents with only 10 words total. The rest was redacted.
These actions come after a year in which The Post has sought to answer a question: How much taxpayer money has been paid to President Trump’s company since he took office?
The federal government has declined to answer. Instead, The Post has sought to compile its own accounting, using public records requests and a lawsuit to obtain one receipt at a time.
So far, The Post has found more than $1.2 million in taxpayer payments to Trump’s company. But the data is still incomplete because some federal agencies have not yet provided years worth of their own spending data.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, federal agencies are supposed to respond to requests in 20 business days and deliver any relevant documents promptly thereafter. But in many cases, according to federal data, requests go unfulfilled for months or years.
In cases involving federal payments to Trump’s businesses, those delays can defeat the purpose of the law — by keeping information about the president hidden until after voters have chosen whether to reelect him...
“When they go low, we go high,” then-First Lady Michelle Obama said during the 2016 campaign.
Well, in 2020, the Trump campaign is hellbent on going even lower than ever before.
They went so low last week that their October Surprise against Joe Biden crashed!
Trump had promised federal charges against Obama-era officials for purportedly conducting a “coup” that undermined his presidency from the start by illegally probing Russia’s ties to Trump’s 2016 campaign.
The president wanted to see President Obama, Biden and Hillary Clinton in handcuffs.
But Attorney General Bill Barr announced that John Durham, the prosecutor looking at the case, will not finish his work before the election.
Trump’s October Surprise was grounded. He got nothing.
Then, Trump’s second attempt at an October Surprise also failed to take flight.
This time another U.S. Attorney, John Bash, totally pulled the plug on a separate probe into the “unmasking” of Americans caught on phone taps talking with Russians, in this case Trump campaign officials.
“The greatest political scam, hoax in the history of our country,” Trump announced, implying that those involved deserved 50-year jail sentences.
Bash sent no-one to jail — zero.
Again, Trump got nothing — no visions of Democrats in handcuffs to rev up the faithful at campaign rallies.
He is not happy with the attorney general.
“Unless Bill Barr indicts these people for crimes…To be honest, Bill Barr is going to go down as either the greatest attorney general in the history of the country or he’s going to go down as, you know, a very sad situation,” Trump said on Fox Business Network before Barr disappointed him.
Pay close attention to that quote.
Trump said out loud he is willing to go so low as to ask his attorney general to indict political opponents without any basis, weeks before the election.
Faced with collapsing poll numbers, Trump is open to using federal law enforcement to divert attention from his divisive talk and his failed handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
And he is still going at it, trying to go lower than low...
...In the tradition of crime families, he turned to old friends to get the job done.
Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon alerted the New York Post to emails suggesting that Trump’s opponent in the November election, Joe Biden, possibly met a top executive at a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, at the request of his son, Hunter Biden, who was on the firm’s board.
Bannon, who was indicted on federal fraud charges in August, contacted the paper about the emails, which were supposedly found on a hard drive left in a Delaware computer repair shop. Giuliani, the former New York mayor who also is under investigation, then gave a copy of the hard drive to the New York paper.
The story took flight on pro-Trump websites, especially after Facebook and Twitter declined to let their platforms be used to circulate the potentially explosive but unverified information.
Mainstream newspapers and computer security professionals pointed out that Giuliani refused to produce the actual emails, and there is no evidence that the then-Vice President ever met with the man.
The Washington Post reported the next day that national security officials at the White House were warned last year that “Giuliani was being used to feed Russian misinformation to the president.”
The New York Times noted that American intelligence officials “had picked up chatter that stolen Burisma emails would be leaked in the form of an ‘October surprise.’”
So, a third attempt by Trump to launch an October Surprise remained grounded.
A fourth effort involved pressuring Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe.
Ratcliffe declassified intelligence from the time of the 2016 campaign, including reports that Hillary Clinton’s campaign wanted to call attention to Russia’s ties to the Trump campaign.
This is the same reporting that the Senate Intelligence Committee, with a Republican majority, long ago discarded as unimportant.
Why? The committee heard from every U.S. intelligence agency that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump and damage Clinton.
But Trump later tweeted that he authorized, “the total Declassification of any & all documents pertaining to the greatest political CRIME in American history, the Russia Hoax.”
And Ratcliffe ended up in a mud fight that damaged his reputation.
Former Acting CIA Director Mike Morrell and former Undersecretary of Defense Mike Vickers called Ratcliffe’s actions “the most blatant and egregious politicization of intelligence that we, two career intelligence officers, have ever seen,” in a Washington Post op-ed calling for Ratcliffe to resign.
Trump’s political rhetoric has long been divorced from reality, much less a coherent strategy to win reelection.
But at best his repeated attempts to ignite an October Surprise seem to rely on grievances from the 2016 race — most of all, the same old attacks on Hillary Clinton.
Trump is now a desperate man clinging to power to stave off the humiliation of a defeat on Election Day.
He can try again to pressure Barr on indicting his political opponents on bogus charges.
But for now, Trump’s attempts to patch together another October Surprise are too low, even for Barr.
Now that is saying something.
Right-wing authoritarians aren't very funny: RWA, personality, and creative humor production
Abstract:
Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) has well-known links with humor appreciation, such as enjoying jokes that target deviant groups, but less is known about RWA and creative humor production—coming up with funny ideas oneself. A sample of 186 young adults completed a measure of RWA, the HEXACO-100, and 3 humor production tasks that involved writing funny cartoon captions, creating humorous definitions for quirky concepts, and completing joke stems with punchlines. The humor responses were scored by 8 raters and analyzed with many-facet Rasch models. Latent variable models found that RWA had a large, significant effect on humor production (β = −0.47 [−0.65, −0.30], p < .001): responses created by people high in RWA were rated as much less funny. RWA's negative effect on humor was smaller but still significant (β = −0.25 [−0.49, −0.01], p = .044) after controlling for Openness to Experience (β = 0.39 [0.20, 0.59], p < .001) and Conscientiousness (β = −0.21 [−0.41, −0.02], p = .029). Taken together, the findings suggest that people high in RWA just aren't very funny.
Highlights:
Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) was associated with humor production;
People low in RWA created funnier jokes, based on raters' scores.
Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness did not account for this effect.
Overall, people high in RWA appear to be much less funny.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886920306127?via%3Dihub
And you know what that means!!!
Even Rump knows what that means!!!
Rump says higher voting levels would hurt Republicans.
Joe Biden’s mental frailty, his position on packing the Supreme Court, and his son Hunter’s emails are so bad, he and his campaign believe he is better off hiding from the public than going out and campaigning during the final two weeks of the election.
First, though, let’s talk about how outrageous it is for Biden to be so smug and secure in his victory, so smug and secure the national media will campaign on his behalf, that he thinks he can sit it out, hug the ball, run out the clock, while President Donald Trump is out there doing two and three events a day — while being president.
Never before in all 54 years have I seen anything like this. Okay, nothing about how corrupt and evil the national political media are in any way surprises me. Nothing. The media have embraced political terrorism… Not a surprise. The media are basically running Joe Biden’s campaign against Trump… Not a surprise.
No joke — if we find out the media have hired assassins to take out their political opponents, that would not surprise in the least. Same with Big Tech.
So the media’s behavior does not surprise me. But Biden almost entirely removing himself from the campaign trail for days and days and days this close to an election… Amazing. Who would have ever thought the 2020 Democrat nominee would make Hillary Clinton look like a workhorse.
Biden thinks he can win this thing with TV ads and media coverage only… I mean, on top of making almost no campaign appearances, he has almost no ground game. No one’s knocking on doors for Joe.
But we all know the main reasons why Biden is hiding…
First off, Biden’s scared of being asked questions about his obvious desire to pack the Supreme Court with additional justices — which would mean the end of democracy. That’s not hyperbole. If you appoint a bunch of unelected Democrats to the Supreme Court with lifetime tenure, that’s the end of democracy — that’s turning the court over to an unaccountable legislature.
You see, if you intend to pack the court, it is better off to remain in hiding than to admit that.
Then there’s his son Hunter’s emails.
Joe Biden has not disputed those are indeed Hunter’s emails.
Hunter Biden as not disputed those are his emails.
The Biden campaign has not disputed those are Hunter’s emails.
And those emails are beyond damning. If they are indeed Hunter’s emails (and I believe they are), they expose Biden as a traitor and something akin to a mafia godfather using his crime family to enrich himself.
So, if the emails are real, Joe Biden is better off hiding than going out and campaigning.
There’s also the dementia. Hey, the national media have been diagnosing Trump with all kinds of ailments without examining him, so I’m just going to go ahead and tell you I believe Slow Joe is suffering from dementia, that he is sun-downing, that he is in no shape to be president, and both he and his campaign know it.
When you have dementia, you are better off hiding than campaigning.
Yep, I think we all know why Joe Biden is hiding out with only two weeks to Election Day.
Director Of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox Business on Monday morning that Hunter Biden’s laptop and emails are not part of a Russian disinformation campaign.
"It’s funny that some of the people that complained the most about intelligence being politicized are the ones politicizing intelligence and unfortunately in this case, it is Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who as you pointed out on Friday said that the intelligence community believes that Hunter Biden’s laptop and e-mails on it are part of some Russian disinformation campaign," he said.
"Let me be clear, the intelligence community doesn’t believe that because there is no intelligence that supports and we shared no intelligence with chairman Schiff or any other member of Congress that Hunter Biden’s laptop is part of some Russian disinformation campaign. It’s simply not true."
"Hunter Biden’s laptop is not part of some Russian disinformation campaign and I think it’s clear the American people know that," he said
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani reportedly tried pushing his Hunter Biden smear story to reporters at Fox News — but even they felt it was too sketchy to run.
Mediaite reports that Giuliani approached Fox’s news division with a scoop about emails purportedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop, but decided not to run with it “unless or until the sourcing and veracity of the emails could be properly vetted.”
In fact, two sources tell Mediaite that “the lack of authentication of Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop, combined with established concerns about Giuliani as a reliable source and his desire for unvetted publication, led the network’s news division to pass.”
Giuliani subsequently took the story to the New York Post, which did publish stories on the emails. The former New York mayor openly admitted recently that he went to the Post because he knew they would not try to vet the story before running with it.
An internal Fox News memo leaked earlier this year warned that Giuliani has a “high susceptibility to disinformation” being spread about the Biden’s by Kremlin-linked operatives.
Leaked report shows Fox News staffers ‘understand the threat’ Sean Hannity poses
In a tweet this Thursday, a former Fox News employee posted an internal document from the network that came from the so-called “Brain Room” at Fox. The document was titled “Ukraine, Disinformation, & the Trump Administration,” with the subtitle, “A Full Timeline of Events.”
Here’s the front page of the internal Fox News Trump-Ukraine timeline. I’ll start tweeting some of the highlights shortly. pic.twitter.com/HWGX5sZUh8
— Marcus J. DiPaola (@marcusdipaola) February 6, 2020
“The Brain Room report bears the name of Bryan Murphy, a senior political affairs specialist at Fox News,” writes the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple. “It also bears this withering assessment of John Solomon, former opinion contributor for the Hill who is responsible for setting in motion faulty story lines regarding Ukraine: ‘John Solomon played an indispensable role in the collection and domestic publication of elements of this disinformation campaign.’ Another part of the document provides this assessment of Solomon: ‘Focus on stories from disinformation campaign, non-disclosure of conflicts, use of unreliable sources, publishing false and misleading stories, misrepresentation of sources, and opaque coordination with involved parties.'”
Not only does the document slam one of the network’s own contributors, it cites a statistic that Solomon “published 45 columns aimed at discrediting the Russia investigation, 12 of which focused primarily on Ukraine” — a statistic that came from one Fox News’ most prolific critics: Media Matters.
“It’s a stunning juxtaposition — one that speaks to the integrity of the Brain Room report,” Wemple writes. “Other faces of the Ukraine issue that surface in the report include Giuliani, the ringleader of Trump’s effort to secure an announcement by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of an investigation into the Bidens, who is described as having: ‘High susceptibility to disinformation” from key Ukrainian actors, according to the document.'”
Then there was this interesting portion of the document, which highlighted Fox News host Sean Hannity’s penchant for misleading his viewers:
The Hill’s editor-in-chief sent out a memo to staff stating that “effective immediately” John Solomon would no longer publish stories under the banner of news but instead would be an “opinion contributor.” (218) Solomon said that the choice to have his writing classified as opinion was his. During his TV appearances, Hannity has often continued to announce Solomon as an “investigative reporter” at The Hill.
According to Wemple, it’s evidence that folks working for Fox News understand the threat Hannity “poses to any news organization.”
"Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani reportedly tried pushing his Hunter Biden smear story to reporters at Fox News — but even they felt it was too sketchy to run."
sketchy?
the whole story does seem a little unlikely except that neither Joe nor his campaign spokesmen nor Hunter has denied that the emails are real
what is also unlikely is that Joe, as he has claimed, never knew Hunter was being paid millions by governments hostile to the US while Joe was VP
what services did Hunter provide that he was paid so much for?
Hunter's a great guy, btw
as soon as his brother died, he started sleeping with his brother's widow
Four days ago, the New York Post published a bombshell report raising serious new questions about presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter's relationship with Ukranian energy company Burisma.
The story, which made startling and apparently damning reading was based on a cache of emails and photos allegedly retrieved from Hunter Biden's laptop that he had left at a Delaware computer store.
I have no idea if the report is entirely true, partly true, or completely untrue.
I do know that the response from Joe Biden so far has done nothing to make me think it's false.
Crucially, there has been no denial of the fact that these emails are genuine.
And if they are, then they raise important questions.
The potentially most explosive part of the story is a 2015 email supposedly sent by a top Burisma adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking Hunter for giving him the chance to meet his dad Joe while he was Vice-President.
'Dear Hunter,' the alleged email reads, 'thank you for inviting me to DC and giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent some time together. It's really an honor and pleasure.'
The story, which made startling and apparently damning reading was based on a cache of emails and photos allegedly retrieved from Hunter Biden's laptop that he had left at a Delaware computer store. In one, Hunter lies in a bath with a cigarette in his mouth , and in another he appears to be asleep with a glass pipe in his mouth.
The potentially most explosive part of the story is a 2015 email supposedly sent by a top Burisma adviser, Vadym Pozharskyi, thanking Hunter for giving him the chance to meet his dad Joe while he was Vice-President
This is significant because Joe Biden has always vehemently denied ever even speaking to his son about 'his overseas business dealings.'
Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates responded to the Post allegation by saying: 'We have reviewed Joe Biden's official schedules from the time and no meeting, as alleged by the New York Post, ever took place.'
I'm not a lawyer, but this sounds to me like a very narrow form of wording designed to allow some wriggle room should proof of such a meeting emerge.
In another email to Hunter Biden sent by a business consultant in 2017, reference is made to 'the big guy' who would receive 10% of equity from a deal with a Chinese equity firm.
Others on the email chain have told Fox News that 'the big guy' is Joe Biden.
Again, I don't know if this is true.
But the Biden's camp statement was also very revealing for what it didn't say: i.e. that the emails are fake, or that 'the big guy' isn't Joe Biden.
Without any such denials, we're inevitably led to the conclusion that they may be real, and if they're real, then how does Joe Biden explain them without confirming he has misled the American people about his involvement with Hunter's inarguably dodgy dealings with foreign national firms in Ukraine and China?
How the New York Post came to acquire this dynamite material from Hunter Biden's hard drive is a typically ugly pre-election October Surprise hot mess involving those perennial Trump rogues Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon.
Their motivation is obvious: to damage Joe Biden in the same way the Hillary Clinton email scandal damaged her in October 2016.
But their dirty tricks op doesn't mean there is no merit to the story.
A tainted source doesn't mean the allegation shouldn't be properly investigated.
Yet the response to it from liberal-dominated mainstream and social media firms has been staggering, terrifying and disgraceful.
Just hours after the Post story appeared, Facebook announced it would be limiting its spread on the social media platform while it used independent fact-checkers to verify the paper's allegations.
Even more extraordinarily, Twitter than summarily banned anyone from posting a link to the story, including the New York Post itself.
By taking these unprecedented actions, the tech firms were effectively abandoning any pretence at protecting free speech or the First Amendment.
When Trump, as he surely will, starts beating Biden over the head with the allegations in the final debate on Thursday, will the NBC moderator hold the former Vice President to an answer or will she let him off the hook?
It's hard to imagine a more clear, direct confirmation of the Republicans' ongoing suspicions that liberal-run social media firms deliberately operate a pro-Democrat agenda.
They were soon joined by the mainstream media who seem way more interested in knocking down the story and unmasking a conspiracy to smear Biden than investigating whether it's true.
As President Trump was being torched by Savanna Guthrie on NBC about everything from white supremacy to his coronavirus testing record, Biden appeared in an ABC townhall hosted by George Stephanopoulos, ex-aide to Democratic President Bill Clinton, and wasn't asked a single question about the biggest current story surrounding his candidacy.
Isn't that quite extraordinary?
Can you imagine if the Post report had been about Donald Trump Jr?
Do you think his father might just have been asked about it, probably repeatedly?
But ABC's refusal to even mention it in the town hall is indicative of a strange reluctance by most of America's mainstream media to 'go there'.
They believe Joe Biden's denials of any wrongdoing by him or his son, simply because he's told them there was no wrongdoing.
They've even bought into the narrative that even if Hunter did do something wrong, it's explained by his drug problems – as if that makes any difference.
The Washington Post's David Ignatius wrote: 'The story of Hunter Biden's involvement with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma isn't a scandal about his father, as the Trump campaign claims, but part of a personal tragedy for the vice president's son, compounded by this week's dissemination of what looks like disinformation about Joe Biden's role.'
To which my response is: how do you know? What steps has your paper taken to establish if what the Post reported is actually true?
CNN's Brian Stelter called it a 'manufactured scandal' intended to feed 'whataboutism' to distract attention from Trump's catastrophic campaign.
But I very much doubt he'd be saying that if this was Donald Trump Jr at the centre of the Burisma story.
The New York Times today focuses not on the allegations but on apparent unrest among New York Post staffers about the decision to publish it.
Again, I don't know if this is true, but even it is, shouldn't a supposed 'paper of record' like the Times at least put some of its army of reporters onto the actual allegations published in the Post and see if they stand up?
The real scandal here may well turn out to be how these allegations, published on the front page of a major US newspaper, have been censored and suppressed by a media intent on getting Trump out of office.
Joe Biden wants to be President of the United States and the polls suggest he is now in a very commanding position to achieve that ambition.
He has positioned himself as the good-guy candidate to repair America from the Trump presidency, a man who will restore trust, truth and transparency to the White House.
But his behavior over this Burisma business continues to be anything but transparent.
There has been no denial that the emails exchanged with Hunter (pictured) are genuine, and they raise legitimate questions of probity and honesty that anyone who wants to be President should answer. The longer Biden doesn't answer them properly, the more people will think there may a fire raging beneath all the smoke
When he was directly, and politely, asked about the Post story by CBS News reporter Bo Erickson, Biden snapped back in a nasty and personal way, saying: 'I knew you'd ask it. I have no response. It's another smear campaign. Right up your alley, those are the kinds of questions you always ask.'
It seemed an oddly angry and defensive response for someone who insists he has nothing to hide.
Like I said at the start of this column, I don't know if the Post story is true.
But I do know there has been no denial that the emails are genuine, and they raise legitimate questions of probity and honesty that anyone who wants to be President should answer.
The longer Biden doesn't answer them properly, the more people will think there may a fire raging beneath all the smoke.
US mainstream and social media companies have reacted to this story in an outrageously partisan and deeply sinister manner that is diametrically opposed to how they would have reacted if the name 'Biden' was swapped for 'Trump.'
Shame on all of them.
And when Trump, as he surely will, starts beating Biden over the head with the allegations in the final debate on Thursday, will the NBC moderator hold the former Vice President to an answer or will she let him off the hook?
Because so far the way Joe Biden's reacted to it smacks of someone with something to hide.
And this issue is not going to just disappear if he wins the presidency.
The Republicans will use it as a stick to constantly beat him with just as they used Whitewater against the Clintons, and just as the Democrats themselves used alleged Russian collusion against Trump.
Sooner or later, the truth will out.
Time to stop throwing tantrums Joe - and start talking.
And time, America's media, to start doing your job.
With only two weeks left until Election Day, Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump has widened to 11 percentage points — Biden’s biggest margin among likely voters in any Yahoo News/YouGov poll to date.
The survey, which was conducted from Oct. 16 to 18, shows that a majority of likely voters (51 percent) now say they are voting for the Democratic nominee, while just 40 percent say they are voting for Trump. Biden’s lead, which is identical among registered voters, has grown by 3 points since last week’s Yahoo News/YouGov poll.
The president has struggled to rebound over the past three weeks from a widely panned first debate performance and a COVID-19 outbreak that sent him to the hospital and sickened others in and around the White House. Yet the main reason Trump appears to have fallen even further behind Biden in recent days is that coronavirus cases are peaking just as the campaign is coming to a close. On Friday, new daily cases cleared 70,000 nationwide for the first time since July; hospitalizations are increasing in 39 states, and are at or near their all-time peak in 16 states.
Trump vented his frustration with the coronavirus on a campaign call Monday, saying, “People are tired of COVID. I have these huge rallies. People are saying, ‘Whatever. Just leave us alone.’ They’re tired of it. People are tired of hearing [Anthony] Fauci and all these idiots.”
Tired or not, Americans have growing concerns about Trump’s leadership amid a resurgent pandemic — and those concerns appear to be dimming his hopes of a comeback. Nearly two-thirds of registered voters (63 percent) now say the “number of cases is increasing,” up sharply from 57 percent last week and 48 percent the week before that. A full 60 percent think the pandemic will get worse this fall; only 15 percent think it will get better.
As a result, Biden’s existing advantage over Trump on the question of who would do a better job handling COVID-19 — the top issue of 2020 — has nearly tripled from 7 points two weeks ago (45 percent to 38 percent) to 19 points today (52 percent to 33 percent). Sixty-three percent say Trump has not been wearing a mask or social distancing appropriately; 60 percent say he has not followed the advice of medical experts closely enough; and 59 percent say he has underestimated the risks of COVID-19 — something that just 8 percent of registered voters say about Biden.
In dealing with the pandemic, a majority (54 percent) say the former vice president has behaved appropriately.
Key demographic groups are moving away from Trump in response. Right now, the president is losing independents, 39 percent to 37 percent; he won them by 4 points in 2016. He is losing suburban voters by 14 points (50 percent to 36 percent); he also won them by 4 points in 2016. Trump’s current leads among white voters (7 points) and seniors (3 points) are less than half of what they were four years ago (20 points and 7 points, respectively). Nine percent of 2016 Trump voters now say they are voting for Biden; just 4 percent of 2016 Hillary Clinton voters say they are voting for Trump.
eanwhile, the president is running out of time to resurrect his reelection bid. Just 5 percent of likely voters remain undecided, and a mere 3 percent say there is still “a chance I will change my mind” in the next two weeks. Even worse for Trump is that his supporters appear far more open to flipping than Biden’s, with just 1 percent of Biden voters saying they could still change their minds versus 7 percent of Trump voters...
WASHINGTON — Republican senators are increasingly voicing fears that President Donald Trump could lose the election. Some are openly fretting that he’ll turn the party's candidates into electoral roadkill, and are distancing themselves from him to an unusual extent.
A weekend of agonizing from Republicans did not yield any perceivable course correction from Trump as he continued his inflammatory rhetoric on the campaign trail, and directed some of his fire right back at anxious GOP senators on Twitter.
Pointed warnings of electoral defeat have come in recent days from Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. All are former critics turned allies who reliably vote with the president.
“I’m worried that if President Trump loses — as looks likely — that he’s going to take the Senate down with him,” Sasse said in a conference call with constituents, according to audio first reported on Thursday by the Washington Examiner. “I’m now looking at the possibility of a Republican bloodbath in the Senate.”
The elevated fears come as Democrat Joe Biden leads Trump by more than 9 points in the NBC News national polling average, and as some forecasters say Democrats are likely to secure control of Congress. The grim GOP outlook follows Trump’s widely criticized debate showing, hospitalization for Covid and a failure to secure an economic stimulus package.
“I hope that they're having a moment of moral clarity. I think they're realizing that the Trump show is almost over,” said Olivia Troye, a former homeland security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence who served on the White House Coronavirus Task Force. “They have ridden the Trump wave long enough. But I think it's no longer helpful to do that for them.”
Troye, a longtime Republican, says she plans to vote for Biden and Democrats down the ballot this fall. “There needs to be a significant change,” she said, and insisted that Sasse represents the misgivings of many party elites who are afraid to speak up.
At the Supreme Court hearing for Amy Coney Barrett last Thursday, Graham, the Judiciary Chairman and a Trump golfing partner who is in a close re-election battle, told Democrats, “Y’all have a good chance of winning the White House.”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, a former Trump rival and now a staunch ally, said recently on CNBC that if Americans are angry and depressed, “we could lose the White House and both houses of Congress," and the 2020 election “could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions.”...
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who trails his Democratic opponent Cal Cunningham in a competitive race, is openly contemplating Trump’s defeat and orienting his messaging around it...
The fears were compounded on Friday when Trump tore into Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, a 24-year GOP incumbent fighting for her political life, for opposing a Supreme Court nomination this close to an election. “Well, she didn’t support Healthcare or my opening up 5000 square miles of Ocean to Maine, so why should this be any different,” he tweeted. “Not worth the work!”
To some GOP operatives, the tweet was a slapdash rant that further jeopardized a potentially pivotal Senate seat, as Collins has no path if Trump supporters don’t vote for her...
ExxonMobil wants to get the record straight: The oil producer did not bribe President Trump with campaign donations.
The energy giant offered a clarification Monday evening after Trump described a detailed — but strictly theoretical — fundraising call involving the company’s chief executive at a rally in Prescott, Ariz., earlier in the day.
“We are aware of the President’s statement regarding a hypothetical call with our CEO,” the company wrote on Twitter, “and just so we’re all clear, it never happened.”
Trump first invoked the company’s name onstage while claiming he could raise more money than Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, who in recent months has gained a significant cash lead over the president.
“I call the head of Exxon. I don’t know, you know, ‘How are you doing? How’s energy coming? When are you doing the exploration? Oh, you need a couple of permits?'" Trump told supporters. “I say, ‘You know, I’d love [for] you to send me $25 million for the campaign.’ ‘Absolutely sir, why didn’t you ask? Would you like some more?’”
Trump went on about how he could be the greatest fundraiser in U.S. history. Yet the fastest way to do so — offering favors to friends on Wall Street and in corporate headquarters across the country — would compromise his own job in the White House, he acknowledged.
It is also illegal: Under federal law, soliciting these kinds of donations in exchange for specific policy outcomes is enough to land someone in prison.
This particular scenario is only the latest example of Trump’s jumbled, sometimes joking rally dialect. Yet after the rally, some following along online did not understand exactly where Trump was going with talk of a hypothetical bribery call. Had the president just laid out a textbook case of corruption?
Then, ExxonMobil stepped in with its unusual response to the president, denying Trump had offered to greenlight permits in exchange for millions of dollars in campaign contributions.
There is certainly no shortage of history between the president and the company, one of the world’s largest oil producers. Months after Trump picked chief executive Rex Tillerson as his first secretary of state, his administration praised a chemical and natural-gas expansion from the company, apparently copying part of an ExxonMobil news release nearly verbatim to do so.
Now, just two weeks ahead of Election Day, Trump has money on the mind. Going into September, Biden gained a $141 million cash lead over Trump for the first time in the campaign, a stunning reversal aided by a mix of big-ticket fundraising events and big news, including the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The same appears to be true in many down-ballot races, including in the hotly contested battle in Arizona for the Senate seat currently held by Sen. Martha McSally (R), who accompanied Trump to his events there on Monday. Her opponent, former astronaut Mark Kelly (D), is one of three Democratic candidates challenging Senate incumbents who have smashed fundraising records in the third quarter of 2020.
But it's all he's got....
"Over 50 former intelligence officials said emails alleged to have been found on a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden show signs of a Russian disinformation operation.
Several of the signers have endorsed Democratic nominee Joe Biden, according to Politico, which first reported the letter. The letter states that its signers do not have new information about the emails and their authenticity.
“We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement — just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case,” the letter, released Monday, states.
If we are right, this is Russia trying to influence how Americans vote in this election, and we believe strongly that Americans need to be aware of this,” the signers added.
The letter is signed by both former Trump administration and former Obama administration officials, including former CIA directors John Brennan, who served under Obama and has battled with President Trump, and Leon Panetta, who also served under Obama.
Former National Counterterrorism Center acting director Russ Travers, who served under Trump, and former National Security Agency general counsel Glenn Gerstell, who served in that roll from 2015 to 2020 under Obama and Trump.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said Monday the DNI’s office does not consider the contents of the laptop “part of some Russian disinformation campaign,” but the FBI is reportedly investigating the possibility.
While the New York Post has stood by its initial reporting of the emails, a New York Times story published Sunday said several Post reporters were concerned about the accuracy of the story and did not want their bylines on it.
Giuliani suggested he took the material to the Post because other outlets wanted to verify its authenticity..."
And of course, verification is not important to lying GOPers
IBD/TIPP was one of only two polls that predicted the 2016 outcome correctly. They are more accurate because they poll LIKELY voters. Here's what they are finding, wo weeks to the day before the election:
Today's Trump vs. Biden poll finds that the race between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden has suddenly gotten much tighter. IBD/TIPP's latest 2020 presidential poll update shows that Republicans are rallying around Trump, Biden is leaking Democratic support, and the gap among independents has narrowed.
The latest IBD/TIPP Trump vs. Biden poll update shows the Democratic challenger leading the Republican incumbent by 2.3 points, 48.1%-45.8%, in a four-way presidential poll of likely voters. Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen has the support of 3%, and Green Party candidate Howie Hawkins 0.9%.
Since the IBD/TIPP 2020 Presidential Election Tracking Poll launched on Monday, Oct. 12, Biden's support has slipped 3.8 points, from 51.9% to a new low-water mark of 48.1%. Trump poll numbers have gone the other way, rising 2.4 points to his new high-water mark of 45.8%. Biden's lead peaked at 8.6 points in the Oct. 13 presidential poll.
Biden's narrower support reflects Trump's gain, more third-party support and more voters who are undecided or decline to say whom they support.
Stuart Stevens, a top GOP strategist in the 2012 election, on Monday rued the “complete collapse” of the Republican Party during the presidency of Donald Trump.
And Stevens suggested to CNN’s Jake Tapper the only way forward for the party was to “burn it down and start over.”
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen in American politics a complete collapse of a party as the way the Republican Party has collapsed,” Stevens told Tapper on “The Lead.”
“If somebody held a gun to my head and said, ‘Tell me what it is to be a conservative and a Republican and an American today,’ I’d just say, ‘Shoot me, I have no idea,’” he continued. “There’s no coherent theory of government. There’s no moral center to it.”
Stevens ― who before the 2016 election warned Trump was “dangerous” and “someone who would embarrass America” ― lamented the Republican politicians who criticized Trump before his election victory, but failed to stand up to him.
He likened the descent of the GOP to “the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union, where what the party said it was for and what it was for was just so disparate it collapsed.”
“If somebody held a gun to my head and said, ‘Tell me what it is to be a conservative and a Republican and an American today,’ I’d just say, ‘Shoot me, I have no idea,’”
sorry, Stu
I know the deep state you were part of no longer has any influence
to clear up the confusion: the GOP currently stands for low taxes, low regulation, providing opportunities and school choice to minorities, an originalist court system, reducing armed conflict and promoting peace overseas
Documents appear to show Hunter Biden's signature on a receipt for $85 at a Delaware computer shop where he dropped off laptops that included details of his international business deals.
Last week a New York Post report revealed that Hunter Biden’s laptop was abandoned at the computer shop in April 2019 for months and was found to contain e-mails that purportedly implicate Joe Biden in his son's international business dealings during his time as Vice President.
The laptop's hard drive was later obtained by the FBI and Donald Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who shared its contents with the Post.
A receipt from The Mac Shop in Wilmington, Delaware, appears to show Hunter Biden’s signature signing off for repair work on three MacBook Pro laptops for $85.
Joe Biden and his son Hunter are facing renewed scrutiny related to Hunter's business dealings overseas after his abandoned laptop was found to hold e-mails that allegedly show Joe Biden was in on Hunter's deals. Joe Biden's campaign has denied any wrongdoing
The paperwork also notes Biden’s name in the 'bill to' section.
Other obtained documents include FBI paper work that reveals the bureau’s interactions with the shop owner John Paul Mac Isaac, who reported the laptop’s contents to authorities.
That document shows that Isaac received a subpoena to testify before the US District Court in Delaware on December 9, 2019.
One page appears to show the serial number for a laptop and hard drive that were seized.
The FBI and Delaware’s US Attorney’s office have declined to publicly comment on the incident
"just think: if RBG had resigned un Obama's sixth year, a young liberal could have replaced her."
There's nothing in Moscow Mitch's behavior to show that he would have held a hearing then either. If he can delay a hearing for 9 months, why not 18, or 36 even? He didn't appear to be paying any political price for his delay at all. He was simultaneously holding back scores of federal bench seats for years. In true Republican form, when it looked like he couldn't win those assignments through the normal voting process, he just stopped all the voting. It's good to be king.
His desperate urges to move on a SCOTUS assignment while Americans are voting at the sunset of Rump's presidency indicates how fearful he is of losing the Whitehouse and possibly even the Senate.
"There's nothing in Moscow Mitch's behavior to show that he would have held a hearing then either."
you know as well as i that wouldn't happen
not to mention, if she had resigned in 2013, when she turned 80, that would have been appropriate
and the Dems controlled the Senate at that point
idea for you: if Biden wins and Dems take the Senate, get Breyer to resign
he's 82
nominate that old laughing stock, Merrick Garland!
"not to mention, if she had resigned in 2013, when she turned 80, that would have been appropriate"
Well, it is called a "lifetime appointment," and many have previously served until their deaths. In fact, 44.5% of all justices have died in office and 47.3% have retired from office. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3000028/
"and the Dems controlled the Senate at that point"
They did. Looking forward to that again.
The underlying premise of you statement ignores the fact that presidents have been able to get their candidates through the Senate no matter who was controlling the Senate for decades. There was no need to worry about the SML not even holding hearings on a candidate until a right-wing authoritarian like Mitch came around. Somehow, the prospect of only having 8 SC justices at court during an election year was not a problem for them then. Now it's a top priority to get 9 - just in case Rump's losing gets called into question, they need to make sure the deck is stacked in their favor.
Obviously going forward, Senate control that will have to be taken into account in a way that it never was before.
Republicans, and their leaders Rump and McConnell have shown America they are ready to ditch the great American democracy, and go all-in on single party rule like Russia and China.
Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, has spelled out exactly why he’s turning his back on the GOP and voting for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
In an op-ed for NBC News published Tuesday, Steele acknowledged that he disagrees with Biden “on many issues and policies, sometimes vigorously.”
“But this election is not about those issues or policies,” he wrote. “Rather, it is about the course of a nation and the character of her people reflected in the leader they choose. I am asking my fellow Americans to consider what is in your best interests, and not Donald Trump’s.”
Steele, who has been a fierce critic of Trump throughout his administration, accused the president of exacerbating division, seeking the favor of dictators and embracing outdated economic principles.
“Trump has posited a single purpose for the GOP — the celebration of him,” he added, lamenting how the Republican Party had “given up its voice on things that mattered and instead bent the arc of the party towards the baser motives of one man, who is neither a Republican nor a conservative.”
Steele ended the editorial with the words of Martin Luther King Jr., writing, “A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”
“Character matters. Our vote matters. The leader we choose matters,” Steele concluded. “I cannot be silent, and I hope neither can you because we know a vote for Joe Biden is what is best for our country — because America matters.”
Michael Steele's voting PSA via The Lincoln Project:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uJ9p6-Ubec
"America... or Trump.
I choose America."
"Well, it is called a "lifetime appointment,""
I was just pointing out what she would have done if she cared more for her principles than being the center of attention
"They did. Looking forward to that again."
it's likely you'll squander the opportunity again
and just as likely Dems will lose seats in 2022
if you win, you'll have two years
see what you can come up with
"The underlying premise of you statement ignores the fact that presidents have been able to get their candidates through the Senate no matter who was controlling the Senate for decades."
yes, until Dems decided to make it political with Robert Bork
"There was no need to worry about the SML not even holding hearings on a candidate until a right-wing authoritarian like Mitch came around. Somehow, the prospect of only having 8 SC justices at court during an election year was not a problem for them then. Now it's a top priority to get 9 - just in case Rump's losing gets called into question, they need to make sure the deck is stacked in their favor."
it's so interesting how Dems say Repubs are hypocrites for taking a different position than in 2016
but Dems seem to have changed positions as well
Dems and Repubs made no deal in 2016, so Repubs aren't bound by anything
Dems have whined about Garland's treatment for years but they have made clear they'd like to do the same to Barrett
only difference: Dems are eternal losers
"Obviously going forward, Senate control that will have to be taken into account in a way that it never was before."
it didn't start with McConnell
he simply played the game begun by Dems
and won
"Republicans, and their leaders Rump and McConnell have shown America they are ready to ditch the great American democracy, and go all-in on single party rule like Russia and China."
the great American democracy elected Trump and a GOP Senate majority
you are the one that wants to ditch democracy
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President's Club members are essential to another landslide VICTORY in November, and I need YOU on the team. I'm going to display the names of EVERY member LIVE during the FINAL Presidential Debate against Joe Biden, and I want YOU to be a part of it.
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Me! A lifelong registered Democrat! LMAO
"yes, until Dems decided to make it political with Robert Bork"
You brought him up before.
I will reiterate that Bork was entirely unqualified to be an SC justice.
He fired Prosecutor Cox under Nixon's direction while Cox was investigating Nixon. Nixon later resigned for his crimes and Ford pardoned him.
America is supposed to be a nation of laws subject to checks and balances, and politicians are supposed to be servants to the people, not a collection of corrupt rich guys covering up for each other.
Bork was so tainted by the Nixon scandal he should have never been nominated for the seat. That was Republican's fault for nominating someone so unqualified, not Democrats for rightfully rejecting him. It's not like there weren't other, more suitable candidates.
"he simply played the game begun by Dems
and won"
And there is the problem. You guys keep thinking this is a game, "winner take all," and "by any means necessary" you find justifiable.
It's not a game. This is a democracy we're trying to preserve here.
Stop trying to destroy it.
"the great American democracy elected Trump and a GOP Senate majority"
No, the Electoral College system, originally designed to get slave states to join the union, (and give them more voting power in spite of their smaller numbers) installed him in opposition to the will of the majority of the voters.
As for the GOP Senate "majority," that is a fluke of the Electoral College system as well.
The Republican “majority” in the current Senate represents 15 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.” The Republican “majority” in the Senate that confirmed Gorsuch and Kavanaugh represented almost 40 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.” The Republican “majority” that refused to hold a confirmation hearing on Chief Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court represented 20 million fewer people than the Democratic “minority.”
Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are the only members of the Supreme Court in U.S. history who were nominated by the loser of the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the nation.
What Republicans have going here is a tyranny of the minority. They've taken advantage of the rules designed to favor slave states and run with it. No wonder so many right-wingers are so nonchalant about guys marching with tiki lamps and Nazi regalia.
"You brought him up before.
I will reiterate that Bork was entirely unqualified to be an SC justice."
that's completely false
"He fired Prosecutor Cox under Nixon's direction while Cox was investigating Nixon. Nixon later resigned for his crimes and Ford pardoned him."
Nixon was the chief executive
at that time, the special prosecutor was an employee of the executive branch
Bork had the law right
"America is supposed to be a nation of laws subject to checks and balances,"
and it is
the Attorney General doesn't check the President
the courts and the legislature do
go on Amazon and order "American Government for Dummies"
"and politicians are supposed to be servants to the people, not a collection of corrupt rich guys covering up for each other."
elected officials are servants to the people
appointed employees serve at the pleasure of the elected officials
you're missing a link
go on Amazon and order "American Government for Dummies"
"Bork was so tainted by the Nixon scandal he should have never been nominated for the seat. That was Republican's fault for nominating someone so unqualified, not Democrats for rightfully rejecting him. It's not like there weren't other, more suitable candidates."
Bork was brilliant and was not involved in the Watergate scandal
"And there is the problem. You guys keep thinking this is a game, "winner take all," and "by any means necessary" you find justifiable.
It's not a game. This is a democracy we're trying to preserve here."
no, it's not a game
the Constitution is under attack from liberal activists
"No, the Electoral College system, originally designed to get slave states to join the union, (and give them more voting power in spite of their smaller numbers) installed him in opposition to the will of the majority of the voters."
stop drinking so much Kool-Aid
the electoral college insures that all segments of America have influence
if it weren't for it, NY would dump it's toxic waste in Wyoming
even under the Electoral College, the most populous state have the most power
it only levels the playing field for the minority slightly
"As for the GOP Senate "majority," that is a fluke of the Electoral College system as well."
no fluke, it was designed to make sure all decisions have broad, not just provincial support
"Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are the only members of the Supreme Court in U.S. history who were nominated by the loser of the popular vote"
no popular vote was held so there was none to lose
go on Amazon and order "American Government for Dummies"
50 Cent, Ice Cube are urging black men to stop Biden and elect Trump
Rap icon 50 Cent, also known as Fif, announced he is endorsing President Trump in the upcoming 2020 election after a look at Joe Biden’s tax plan. The Grammy award-winning musician shared a photo on Instagram of the top tax rates by state under the new Biden tax plan.
The rapper, who lives in New York, where the top tax bracket will be 62 percent under a Biden presidency, wrote in his caption: “👀WHAT THE F**K! (VOTE ForTRUMP) IM OUT, 🏃♂️💨F**K NEW YORK The KNICKS never win anyway. 🤷🏽♂️I don’t care Trump doesn’t like black people 62% are you out of ya fucking mind. 😤”
Fif has said many times that Trump has the “attitude of a rapper.” What is a rapper attitude? Fif explained in 2018 when he went on Conan O’Brian’s late-night talk show.
It appears that Fif has decided to vote with his wallet in the 2020 election. It shouldn’t be all that surprising since Fif has a compelling rags-to-riches story, working hard for every cent (pun intended).
After an early life of crime, drugs, and violence in Queens, New York, he turned to rap and rocketed to stardom with the album “Get Rich or Die Tryin’” in 2003. Since then, he has made investments, been featured in ad campaigns, become an actor, and currently has a $30 million net worth.
Whether Fif’s endorsement has prompted leftist and woke media mob to viciously condemn the influential rapper for expressing his political point of view.
Maybe their anger stems from the fact that they know Biden needs to resist losing black voters. Trump has worried many Democrats with his direct appeal to black voters through historic criminal justice reform, school choice promotion, and his “Black Voices for Trump” movement.
Fif isn’t the only rapper to endorse President Trump. Kanye West endorsed Trump in 2018. Currently, West is running for president, so it’s unclear if his endorsement still stands. However, like Fif, Kanye was also subjected to constant harassment for his affinity for Trump and his policies.
Just this week, Kanye’s wife, Kim Kardashian, told Netflix host David Letterman that she was told working with Donald Trump and his administration on criminal justice reform would destroy her career and reputation in Hollywood.
Another rapper/actor, “Ice Cube,” also received backlash for joining with President Trump to create a “Platinum Plan” for black Americans that includes creating neighborhoods with high policing standards and replacing failing schools with full school choice. Black influencers like these who make the taboo decision to align themselves with Trump are experiencing the social abuse that many black conservatives face everyday for daring to go against the grain.
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"Bork was brilliant and was not involved in the Watergate scandal"
The two guys above him in the chain of command resigned when Nixon asked them to do the same thing. If Bork wasn't willing to resign, he should have at least refused to do Nixon's dirty work like his previous bosses.
It doesn't take brilliance to figure that out, just a working conscience.
"the Attorney General doesn't check the President"
Well, I wasn't talking about William Barr specifically - he's a sycophant. He's still supposed to uphold the law, not make up excuses for a president to do whatever he wants.
"no fluke, it was designed to make sure all decisions have broad, not just provincial support"
By definition, any weighting that provides an advantage for a minority can be used further the power of the minority without broad support. That's how the votes of 77,000 people in 3 states cancelled the votes of 2,868,686 citizens spread out over the other 47 states. The votes in those 3 states were weighted as 37 times more important than the votes of all those other people. That's simply not broad support; its provincial at best.
"The two guys above him in the chain of command resigned when Nixon asked them to do the same thing. If Bork wasn't willing to resign, he should have at least refused to do Nixon's dirty work like his previous bosses."
actually, after he carried out Nixon's lawful order, Bork was planning on resigning but those two guys you refer to asked him not to, for the good of the DOJ
"It doesn't take brilliance to figure that out, just a working conscience."
ah, conscience
could I ask who was the victim of Watergate?
"Well, I wasn't talking about William Barr specifically - he's a sycophant."
no, you were discussing Robert Bork and his actions as acting Attorney General
you were suggesting he should have been a "check and balance"
that's an ignorant comment
go on Amazon and order "American Government for Dummies"
"He's still supposed to uphold the law,"
which is what Bork did
"not make up excuses for a president to do whatever he wants."
Barr didn't do that
"no fluke, it was designed to make sure all decisions have broad, not just provincial support"
By definition, any weighting that provides an advantage for a minority can be used further the power of the minority without broad support. That's how the votes of 77,000 people in 3 states cancelled the votes of 2,868,686 citizens spread out over the other 47 states."
if you want to play that game, the fact of the matter is that if you took California away, Trump won the combined votes of the other 49 states
a democracy requires the leader to have broad-based support not just a provincial base
and, again, we didn't hold a popular vote
if we had, Trump may well have gotten more votes than Hillary
people would have had a different perspective when deciding whether to vote
As November 3 approaches, many prognosticators are trying to convince Americans that former Vice President Joe Biden is a lock to win the presidency. Of course, they said the same about Hillary Clinton's chances in 2016 and it didn’t come to pass. Just as in 2016, there are tea leaves, if you will, indicating that President Trump will win again.
Here are ten of those tea leaves:
1. Pennsylvania Voter Registration
The Democrats voter registration advantage over the Republicans has narrowed by 200,000 since 2016.
No one can logically say that improves the Democrats' chances to win Pennsylvania in 2020.
2. Florida, too.
The Democrats voter registration advantage over the Republicans has narrowed by 650,000 since 2008.
Obviously, the movement towards Republicans bodes well for the president.
3. Latinos for Trump.
Trump could well receive a historic level of support from Latino Voters in 2020. In Florida, a NBC/Marist poll had Trump leading among Latinos 50% to 46% over Biden.
After the first debate between Biden and Trump, a Telemundo poll showed Trump winning the debate overwhelmingly 66% to 34%. The fact that Telemundo viewers decisively picked Trump as the winner, along with polls like those cited above in Florida, portend Trump getting the highest ever Latino support of any Republican presidential candidate.
4. African Americans For Trump.
In September, according to polling done by Rasmussen, Trump’s approval rating among African Americans reached 45%. If Trump received just 16% of the Black vote this November, that would all but secure states like Michigan for Trump.
5. Biden the Tax Increaser.
Candidates who promise tax increases, or have a history of supporting tax increases, tend to lose versus those pushing for tax cuts.
President Jimmy Carter lost to challenger Ronald Reagan, Walter Mondale lost to President Reagan, Michael Dukakis lost to George H.W. Bush 41 and then 41 lost his reelection after his tax increase became a reality. George W. Bush beat Al Gore and then John Kerry.
Barack Obama promised to reduce taxes and he beat John McCain who was not a tax cutter. Obviously, President Trump offered tax cuts while running against, and beating, Hillary Clinton.
Joe Biden, on the other hand, is pushing for the largest tax increase in history.
Advantage Trump.
6. Enthusiasm Matters.
As the New York Post has reported, “just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trump’s base.”
That is a 20 point gap. In 2016, Trump had only a 13 point gap over Hillary. That increase of 7% bodes well for Trump, not Biden.
7. Early Voting in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio.
However, in the key battleground states of Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin the early voting indicates that “registered Republicans are returning ballots at about the same rate as registered Democrats.”
8. American Voters Are More Satisfied in 2020 than they were in 2016.
A new Gallup poll shows that 56% of Americans say they are better off now than they were four years ago. That could well be the telling in this case given that just four years ago marked the end of the Biden vice presidency. Why would voters return to Biden if they are happier now than when he was in office?
9. Party Identification.
According to Gallup, by the end of September, when the polling firm asked voters this question, “In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?” the answer came back as follows: 28% said Republican, 27% said Democrat and 42% said independent.
That is meaningful because many of the polls giving Biden the lead appear to be sampling more Democrats than Republicans – sometimes by a wide margin. Also, in 2016, Gallup had Democrats up 32% to 27% but, as we know, Trump still won.
10. Voters Think Trump Will Win.
In the Trump era, there has been a lot of talk about whether Trump supporters feel free to tell pollsters that they are supporting the president's reelection. Some experts point to polls asking voters who they believe will win the election to be a truer indication of candidate support.
Once again this bodes well for President Trump as a “Gallup poll shows only 40% of Americans think Biden will win the election; 56% predict a Trump victory.”
Republicans have been working the door-to-door ground game in important states whereas Democrats have only just started to do so.
All of this indicates that President Trump may well surprise his doubters on November 3rd and win again
An altered photo of rappers Ice Cube and 50 Cent in hats that appear to show support for President Donald Trump circulated widely on social media Tuesday, fueled in part by a tweet by Eric Trump.
“Two great, courageous Americans,” Trump’s son tweeted. He removed the tweet with a photo of the two rappers in hats saying “Trump 2020” after being called out by Ice Cube on Twitter.
In the original photo, both entertainers were wearing baseball caps with sports logos. Ice Cube’s hat says “Big3,” a reference to a 3-on-3 basketball league he co-founded, and 50 Cent wears one with the New York Yankees logo. Ice Cube shared the original photo on his Twitter account on July 6 to send a birthday message to 50 Cent.
“Happy birthday to the homie @50cent,” he tweeted with the photo.
The manipulated image was shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook since it began gaining attention on Monday.
“This is the start of a really bad week for the Democrats…,” one Twitter user said on a post with the altered photo that had more than 8,000 shares Monday.
Ice Cube, whose real name is O’Shea Jackson, has come under fire for appearing to work with the Trump administration on his “Contract with Black Americans,” which calls for a new dynamic for how our country is run to address racial issues. In a recent interview with CNN, he said both the Trump campaign and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s campaign reached out to him about his contract.
“One campaign said ‘we love what you have but let’s really dig into it after the election,’ and one campaign said we love what you have, ’do you mind talking to us about it and that’s what I did,” he said on CNN. “The Trump campaign came to me and asked me to explain to them some of the Contract with Black America.”
Ice Cube clarified that he has not endorsed either campaign.
“Whoever is in power I am going to work with,” he said on CNN.
On Monday, 50 Cent, whose real name is Curtis James Jackson III, took to Instagram to say “Vote for Trump.”
The rappers had not responded to requests for comment at the time of publication.
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Elliott Broidy Pleads Guilty in Foreign Lobbying Case
A former fund-raiser for President Trump admitted to a role in a covert campaign to influence the administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests.
WASHINGTON — Elliott Broidy, a former top fund-raiser for President Trump, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to conspiring to violate foreign lobbying laws as part of a covert campaign to influence the administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests.
Mr. Broidy, 63, agreed to forfeit $6.6 million to the federal government and to cooperate with prosecutors on a range of potential investigations related to his fellow conspirators and others.
The charge is a felony that could carry a prison sentence of up to five years, but his cooperation is likely to result in a lesser sentence. His sentencing hearing is scheduled for Feb. 12.
Mr. Broidy’s guilty plea relates to his arrangement with the fugitive Malaysian financier Jho Low, who was not identified by name in court filings or during the hearing on Tuesday.
.
.
.
Trump Records Shed New Light on Chinese Business Pursuits
As he raises questions about his opponent’s standing with China, President Trump’s taxes reveal details about his own activities there, including a previously unknown bank account.
President Trump and his allies have tried to paint the Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., as soft on China, in part by pointing to his son’s business dealings there.
Senate Republicans produced a report asserting, among other things, that Mr. Biden’s son Hunter “opened a bank account” with a Chinese businessman, part of what it said were his numerous connections to “foreign nationals and foreign governments across the globe.”
But Mr. Trump’s own business history is filled with overseas financial deals, and some have involved the Chinese state. He spent a decade unsuccessfully pursuing projects in China, operating an office there during his first run for president and forging a partnership with a major government-controlled company.
And it turns out that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where Mr. Trump maintains a bank account, according to an analysis of the president’s tax records, which were obtained by The New York Times. The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear.
The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015.
The tax records do not include details on how much money may have passed through the overseas accounts, though the Internal Revenue Service does require filers to report the portion of their income derived from other countries.
Vote for Trump or else!
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To: [REDACTED]
REDACTED. We are in possession of all your information (email, address, telephone...everything). You are currently registered as a Democrat and we know this because we have gained access into the entire voting infrastructure. You will vote for Tump on Election Day or we will come after you. Change your party affiliation to Republican to let us know you received our message and will comply. We will know which candidate you voted for. I would take this seriously if I were you.
This email, with personal information redacted, was provided Tuesday to The Gainesville Sun of the USA TODAY Network by a voter in Alachua County, Florida.
"if you want to play that game, the fact of the matter is that if you took California away, Trump won the combined votes of the other 49 states"
California happens to be the most populous state in the country, and the 5 largest GDP on the planet by itself.
Conservatives always like to throw California under a bus, but the fact of the matter is red states would be getting a lot less federal dollars if CA left the union.
What we should be doing is splitting CA up into several smaller states to give their voters some equal representation in the electoral college system.
"and, again, we didn't hold a popular vote"
You keep repeating that line as if playing your little semantic game holds some kind of relevance.
Every 4 years all 50 states hold a popular vote and the winner of that vote typically determines who their electoral college reps will vote for. That is called "the popular vote." This is not something new and people have been calling it "the popular vote," to distinguish it from the "electoral college vote" for decades. It gets discussed every single election cycle.
How can you not know this? Are you a Russian troll?
"Here are ten of those tea leaves:"
Why don't you tell us about McCain and Romney's "inevitable wins" again. Great memories.
GOP pollster Frank Luntz said President Donald Trump and his team are emphasizing all the wrong issues ahead of the Nov. 3 election, calling the political campaign the worst he’s ever seen.
According to The Hill, Luntz slammed Trump and his advisers at a briefing for the British strategic advising company Global Counsel on Tuesday.
“I’ve never seen a campaign more miscalibrated than the Trump campaign. Frankly, his staff ought to be brought up on charges of political malpractice,” Luntz said, according to the outlet.
“It is the worst campaign I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been watching them since 1980. They’re on the wrong issues. They’re on the wrong message. They’ve got their heads up their asses,” he added. “Your damn job is to get your candidate to talk about things that are relevant to the people you need to reach. And if you can’t do your damn job then get out.”
Luntz said that “nobody cares about Hunter Biden,” the son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and a favored target of right-wing media attacks. With weeks before Election Day, the Trump camp has seized aggressively on a dubious story published by the New York Post that alleges the Bidens were involved in high-level political corruption.
That allegation is based on the contents of a laptop hard drive purportedly left at a repair shop in Delaware by Hunter Biden and obtained by Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani. Other media outlets have been unable to verify critical elements of the story, and former intelligence officials have said it has the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign intended to influence the upcoming election. The FBI is said to be investigating if that’s the case.
Luntz said the Trump campaign was focusing on this story when polls indicate Americans are more concerned about the COVID-19 pandemic and the economy.
"California happens to be the most populous state in the country, and the 5 largest GDP on the planet by itself.
Conservatives always like to throw California under a bus, but the fact of the matter is red states would be getting a lot less federal dollars if CA left the union."
I only mentioned California because you were playing games saying what the results would be if you pulled certain states out.
"What we should be doing is splitting CA up into several smaller states to give their voters some equal representation in the electoral college system."
Several Presidents have come from California. Right now, the third in line to be President is from California. They have adequate representation.
"You keep repeating that line as if playing your little semantic game holds some kind of relevance."
it's not semantics
despite the inconvenience to Dem propaganda, there is no national popular vote
adding the results of 50 popular votes isn't the equivalent because in lopsided states, such as California and NY, untold numbers may not bother to vote, thinking their votes are irrelevant
this is especially true in California, which has a system where many positions have two Dems running against each other
"Why don't you tell us about McCain and Romney's "inevitable wins" again. Great memories."
Sure, after you tell us how sure you were Hillary ad it all wrapped up in 2016
those ten points are all facts that make a Biden victory far from inevitable
but, please, ignore them
Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents and made it plain that openly gay and lesbian teachers weren’t welcome in the classroom.
The policies that discriminated against LGBTQ people and their children were in place for years at Trinity Schools Inc., both before Barrett joined the board in 2015 and during the time she served.
The three schools, in Indiana, Minnesota and Virginia, are affiliated with People of Praise, a charismatic Christian group which Barrett and her husband have been longtime members of. At least three of the couple’s seven children have attended the Trinity School at Greenlawn, in South Bend, Indiana.
The AP spoke with more than two dozen people who attended or worked at Trinity Schools, or former members of People of Praise. They said the community’s teachings have been consistent for decades: Homosexuality is an abomination against God, sex should occur only within marriage and marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
Interviewees told the AP that Trinity’s leadership communicated anti-LGBTQ policies and positions in meetings, one-on-one conversations, enrollment agreements, employment agreements, handbooks and written policies — including those in place when Barrett was an active member of the board.
“Trinity Schools does not unlawfully discriminate with respect to race, color, gender, national origin, age, disability, or other legally protected classifications under applicable law, with respect to the administration of its programs,” said Jon Balsbaugh, president of Trinity Schools Inc., which runs the three campuses, in an email.
The actions are legal, experts said. Scholars said the school's and organization's teachings on homosexuality and treatment of LGBTQ people are harsher than those of the mainstream Catholic church.
Barrett’s views on whether LGBTQ people should have the same constitutional rights as other Americans became a focus last week in her Senate confirmation hearing. But her longtime membership in People of Praise and her leadership position at Trinity Schools were not discussed, even though most of the people the AP spoke with said her deep and decades-long involvement in the community signals she would be hostile to gay rights if confirmed.
Suzanne B. Goldberg, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies sexuality and gender law, said private schools have wide legal latitude to set admissions criteria. And, she said, Trinity probably isn’t covered by recent Supreme Court rulings outlawing employment discrimination against LGBTQ people because of its affiliation with a religious community.
"despite the inconvenience to Dem propaganda, there is no national popular vote"
And yet somehow, everyone but you understands what is meant when people mention "the popular vote." You can even find them talking about it on Fox news. What is your hang-up? What is it that you don't think people know or understand? 5th graders learn about this stuff and figure it out.
"adding the results of 50 popular votes isn't the equivalent because in lopsided states, such as California and NY, untold numbers may not bother to vote, thinking their votes are irrelevant"
The same can be said of liberals in red states, who think their votes are unimportant. Texas has been red for decades, surely discouraging many liberals from voting. This year however, Rump's incompetence may have put it into play. Suddenly votes for Biden there are more important.
With a national popular vote, EVERYONE'S vote in every state would count equally - it wouldn't matter if they lived in California or Texas - their vote would be every bit as important as votes from Montana and Vermont - which currently are weighted more than votes from either of the two most populous states. It wouldn't just be swing states that were in play then.
But that would encourage more people to come out and vote, and that's the last thing Republicans want.
If the Supreme Court had decided Al Gore had won in 2000, and Hillary had won the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote, Republicans would be applying "2nd Amendment Solutions" to discard the electoral college system. They were planning on kidnapping a Democratic governor for telling them to wear masks and following science.
The Republican executive of a company that manufactures medical masks said Tuesday that he will vote for Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, due to President Donald Trump’s “politicized” response to the coronavirus crisis.
Mike Bowen ― executive vice president of Texas-based Prestige Ameritech, the largest producer of N95 masks and respirators in the U.S. ― said in a statement that Trump’s handling of the pandemic has “greatly increased death and suffering in America.”
“President Trump downplayed the virus, missed opportunities, and wasted precious time,” Bowen said in his statement. “He has also politicized the wearing of masks. ... The man has politicized a life-saving medical device and has teased people for wearing it!”
“Mr. Trump is a self-proclaimed ‘genius’ who prefers his own magical thinking to the advice of experts and scientists,” Bowen continued, adding: “The next time that there is a scientifically minded Republican presidential candidate, I will vote for her or him. This time, however, there is only one scientifically minded person in the race. That person is Joe Biden.”
Bowen, who describes himself as a lifelong Republican, testified before Congress in May that the country’s dependence on foreign masks had been a national security risk for several years.
During that same hearing, Dr. Rick Bright, the former director of the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), testified that Bowen had warned federal officials as early as January that the country faced a mask shortage.
Bright served as director of BARDA for nearly four years until, in his words, he was ousted in April for objecting to pressure from Trump administration officials who wanted the agency to invest in unproven COVID-19 drugs and vaccines.
“I’ll never forget the emails I received from Mike Bowen indicating that our mask supply, our N95 respirator supply, was completely decimated,” Bright testified. “And he said, ‘We’re in deep shit. The world is. And we need to act.’ ... We were already behind the ball.”
Bowen appears in the newly released documentary “Totally Under Control,” which examines the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic.
“Around 2005, all of the major mask makers left the country,” Bowen says in the film. “It put the U.S. mask supply in the hands of foreign control and could be subject to diversion during the pandemic. And that’s what I’ve been warning about for years.”
He added: “I voted for Donald Trump. I thought, you know, if I contact enough people in the administration somebody ― one of these people ― is going to look at this and say, ‘Hey, this is a problem. Maybe we ought to call this guy.’ And no, I couldn’t get any ― I didn’t get any response there.”
As of Wednesday, the U.S. continued to lead the world in confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths. Nationwide, there have been more than 8.2 million cases and at least 221,000 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The Senate will vote Monday on confirming President Trump's nominee, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court.
"With regard to the Supreme Court justice ... we'll be voting to confirm justice-to-be Barrett next Monday," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said during a weekly press conference, confirming the timing of a final vote on her nomination.
"I think that will be another signature accomplishment in our effort to put on the courts, the federal courts, men and women that believe in the quaint notion that maybe the job of a judge is to actually follow the law," McConnell added.
The so-called mainstream polls of the swing states show the race narrowing. If the trend continues at the current rate, President Trump could poll even in two weeks—in addition to the “other” polls that show him near there already.
So Trump’s mission at the final debate on Thursday is to continue to accelerate his momentum, not to take risks to melt down Joe Biden with verbal fireworks.
Every 10 days, the campaign starts anew. Trump’s rallies are back. He miraculously beat COVID-19 in near record time. Judge Amy Coney Barret proved stellar. If most voters poll they are better off than four years ago, and they think Trump will win, it’s increasingly difficult to believe the disconnect that they are intent on voting against someone who will win and would likely continue to make things better for them.
No one has quite figured out how to calibrate the data on early voting, the Republican surge in swing state registrations, and the effect of the nation’s biggest campuses, mostly in the swing states, being either closed down or at least not fully open on Election Day.
Biden is inert. He’s running a virtual campaign in fear of the virus, of questions about Hunter Biden, and of his suspected intention to pack the court or stop fracking—of most anything.
Trump took risks along with 100 million Americans who feed, fuel and make things for Americans: you can no more run a campaign from the basement than you could a presidency—or country.
The latest new debate rules—that silence a candidate’s microphone to ensure his rival can offer two minutes of opening remarks without interruption, at the beginning of each 15-minute segment of the debate—could ironically prove to Trump’s advantage.
Often when Biden speaks for longer than 90 seconds without interruption he tends either to say the most astounding things—or nothing much at all.
Interrupting Biden to correct the record can mimic the style of his obsequious media interviewers—who so often offer him pause-time to regroup, or to reply in sound bites, or to be rescued from struggling with his own half-thoughts on grounds that he was “interrupted,” rather than allowed to sputter along with “you know, you know the thing.”
In any debate, when one candidate has a more imposing physical presence and a greater ability to discuss issues, it makes little sense to interrupt and thereby lend sympathy to the flailing and the frail.
The nonstop advice that Trump is receiving, often from the very swing voters he needs to win over, is sound—be aggressive in pressing Biden for answers without being interruptive or rude; smile and relax; don’t grimace, eye roll or scowl. Trump knows what he must do because he did it well enough in the town hall, and saw Vice President Pence do it effectively against Kamala Harris—firmly demonstrate to the American people that Biden cannot honestly answer questions because to do so for him would either offend the Left or the majority of the American people.
Pope Francis expressed support for same-sex civil unions in remarks made in a documentary that premiered on Wednesday, a significant break from his predecessors that staked out new ground for the church in its recognition of gay people.
The remarks, coming from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, had the potential to shift debates about the legal status of same-sex couples in nations around the globe and unsettle bishops worried that the unions threaten marriage.
“What we have to create is a civil union law. That way they are legally covered,” Francis said, reiterating his view that gay people are children of God. “I stood up for that.”
Many gay Catholics and their allies outside the church welcomed the pope’s remarks, even as they said they understood Francis’s opposition to gay marriage within the church remained absolute.
His conservative critics within the church hierarchy, and especially in the conservative wing of the church in the United States, who have for years accused him of diluting church doctrine, saw the remarks as a contradiction of church teaching.
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The White House is considering slashing millions of dollars for coronavirus relief, HIV treatment, screenings for newborns and other programs in Democratic-led cities that President Donald Trump has deemed “anarchist jurisdictions,” according to documents obtained by POLITICO.
New York, Portland, Ore., Washington, D.C., and Seattle could lose funding for a wide swath of programs that serve their poorest, sickest residents after the president moved last month to restrict funding, escalating his political battle against liberal cities he’s sought to use as a campaign foil.
The Department of Health and Human Services has identified federal grants covering those services, which are among the nearly 200 health programs that could be in line for cuts as part of a sweeping government-wide directive the administration is advancing during the final weeks of the presidential campaign and amid an intensifying pandemic Trump has downplayed.
Trump in a Sept. 2 order called on federal agencies to curtail funding to jurisdictions that “disempower” police departments and promote “lawlessness.” The memo argued that the cities haven’t done enough to quash riots stemming from this summer’s protests over systemic racism and police violence.
The HHS list offers the most detailed picture yet of the administration’s efforts to quickly comply with the Trump directive and the potentially large cuts facing these cities even as the pandemic strains local budgets. It isn’t immediately clear what criteria the budget office will use to evaluate the grants — or how or when cuts may be made.
But while the White House pores over existing funds, at least one department has already moved to implement Trump’s directive for new funding. The Department of Transportation earlier this month said Trump’s “anarchy” memo would factor into the department’s review of applications for a new $10 million grant program supporting Covid-19 safety measures.
“My Administration will do everything in its power to prevent weak mayors and lawless cities from taking Federal dollars while they let anarchists harm people, burn buildings, and ruin lives and businesses,” Trump tweeted shortly after releasing the Sept. 2 defunding memo.
"Radio spots are airing throughout Mexico and Central America. Court-appointed researchers are motorbiking through rural hillside communities in Guatemala and showing up at courthouses in Honduras to conduct public record searches.
Their efforts are part of a wide-ranging campaign to track down parents separated from their children at the U.S. border beginning in 2017 under the Trump administration’s most controversial immigration policy. It is now clear that the parents of 545 of the migrant children still have not been found, according to court documents filed this week in a case challenging the practice.
About 60 of the children were under the age of 5 when they were separated, the documents show."
This is the administration that’s being hugely supported by a conspiracy cult that believes Donald Trump is working on a secret plan to end child trafficking.
» An estimated 5.4 million workers are becoming uninsured because of job losses they experienced from February to May of this year.
» These estimated increases in the number of uninsured adults would be 39% higher than any annual increase ever recorded. The highest previous increase took place over the one-year period from 2008 to 2009, when 3.9 million nonelderly adults became uninsured.
» Nearly half (46%) of the increases in the uninsured resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and economic crash have occurred in five states: California, Texas, Florida, New York, and North Carolina.
» In eight states 20% or more of adults are now uninsured: Texas, where nearly three in ten adults under age 65 are uninsured (29%); Florida (25%); Oklahoma (24%); Georgia (23%); Mississippi (22%); Nevada (21%); North Carolina (20%); and South Carolina (20%).
» Five states have experienced increases in the number of uninsured adults that exceed 40%: Massachusetts, where the number nearly doubled, rising by 93%; Hawaii (72%); Rhode Island (55%); Michigan (46%); and New Hampshire (43%).
A Maryland man is facing a federal charge for allegedly threatening Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, authorities announced Wednesday.
James Dale Reed, 42, of Frederick, Maryland, admitted to authorities that he made the threats in a handwritten letter he left at the doorstep of a home in the city on October 4, according to the criminal complaint, which included a photograph of the letter.
"This is a warning to anyone reading this letter if you are a Biden/Harris supporter you will be targeted. We have a list of homes and addresses by your election signs. We are the ones with those scary guns, We are the ones your children have nightmares about," the letter read in part. Reed went on to allegedly describe in graphic detail violent threats against Biden and Harris, including a threat of sexual violence aimed at the senator from California.
Authorities said a Ring door camera at the home had caught Reed on camera, and a citizen tip led them to focus on him. After initially denying to investigators that he had written the threatening letter, Reed later admitted to it on October 15.
The complaint says Reed told investigators that he had written the letter "because he was upset at the political situation." He then drove to the street the house is on and "took the letter to the first house he saw with multiple Democratic political signs." Reed told investigators he did not know the residents of the home and that he had not "surveilled it previously."
The complaint also said Reed "is known to the (United States Secret Service) for making a threatening statement against a person under USSS protection in 2014" but did not provide additional details about that threat.
The federal charge carries a penalty of up to five years in prison if convicted. Reed, who is in state custody, also faces two misdemeanor state charges, threatening mass violence and voter intimidation.
"We take these types of threats extremely seriously," US Attorney for the District of Maryland Robert Hur said in a statement. "Conduct like this that threatens major candidates and fellow citizens only undermines our democracy and the principles upon which America was founded."
One of the many nerve-wracking questions Americans facing with the 2020 presidential election is whether all the bizarre conspiracy theories that have sprung up in the last few years will outlast the Trump administration. Are we in for a prolonged period of this level of lunacy in our politics?
Maybe. There are a bunch of QAnon-curious Republican candidates who apparently believe that the Democratic Party is led by satanic, flesh-eating pedophiles and that John F. Kennedy Jr. (who isn't actually dead) will be reappearing any day now to help Donald Trump save the children and put the country back on the right track. Let's just say it's not beyond the realm of possibility that there will be a Q Caucus in the next congress.
Philip Bump of the Washington Post reported on Tuesday that a recent Yahoo/YouGov poll showed that while a minority of GOP voters say they believe in QAnon, 50% of Republicans (fifty percent! That's half of them!) claim to believe that high-level Democrats are involved in child sex-trafficking rings, and more than 50% believe that Donald Trump is working behind the scenes to dismantle them. This idea goes back to 2016 and Pizzagate, so it's possible that many of these Republicans don't even know they're spouting QAnon conspiracy theories. But what's the difference? Clearly tens of millions of Republicans have, as Joe Biden said on the stump the other day, "gone 'round the bend."
This really shouldn't surprise us. Facebook has been the vehicle for spreading this and many other ridiculous conspiracy theories about COVID and antifa and Black Lives Matter and much else during the Trump years. These viral lies are not confined to weird corners of the internet or Alex Jones and Infowars anymore.
I can't hazard a guess as to what happens if the supposed savior of the children is defeated and has to leave the White House. Will the conspiracy theory just die out, as the rest of the country averts its eyes from the people who were big believers and try to forget that they lost their faculties during the Trump years? That's probably the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario involves QAnon adherents deciding they need to take matters into their own hands.
The fever may break once the chaos agent is out of the White House. As Bump pointed out in that Washington Post article, part of the reason some people gravitate to these elaborate conspiracies is because they need to feel that someone, somewhere, is pulling the strings because otherwise everything feels out of control. Perversely, if Trump loses, these people may actually calm down. Even if they don't, what's left of the GOP establishment is likely to distance itself as much as possible from the kookier conspiracists. It's bad for business.
But that doesn't mean that they're going to give up conspiracy theories and pseudo-scandal-mongering altogether. It is, after all, one of their favorite political weapons. Many of us recall (or have read about) the endless Whitewater investigations into the Southern-gothic arcana of Arkansas politics, when Republican congressmen shot watermelons in their backyards and the Beltway media trekked across the country, reporting back as if they were on the first manned mission to Mars. It went on for years, cost a lot of money and destroyed quite a few Arkansans, but never found any wrongdoing by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
And let's not forget the more recent Benghazi crusade, which current House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced was conducted entirely for partisan political purposes and which led to the equally vacuous "Clinton email scandal." There are many more where that came from, which often telegraphed openly as partisan attacks, but which the media gobbles up like baby birds being fed worms by their mother.
The Hunter Biden "scandal" has all the hallmarks of one of those patented GOP mudslinging operations. It's not as wild as a pedophile ring in a pizza parlor, but it's got lots of hurtful personal slander and ugly calumny to keep the folks entertained. That it has a Russia-Ukraine element makes it especially fun for those who want payback for Donald Trump being exposed as the most useful of idiots in the past four years.
The "scandal" itself is actually nothing more than an example of the very common (and admittedly skeevy) business practice of hiring the family members of important people for the purpose of obtaining favors, gaining access or simply being viewed in a favorable light. Hunter Biden clearly made a mistake in joining the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian gas company, while his father was vice president. The apparent conflict of interest was obvious to literally everyone. But Republican charges that Joe Biden granted a favor to Burisma by having the Ukrainian government fire a prosecutor that was investigating the company are flat-out provably false. It's true that Biden (along with virtually the entire Western alliance) pressured the Kyiv government to fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor in question. But one of the reasons was because Shokin wasn't investigating Burisma. There was no favor done on Hunter Biden's behalf. If anything, it was the opposite.
If the Democrats manage to gain a majority in the Senate and hold on to the House, the GOP will be deprived of its ability to run this new crusade through Congress with multiple investigations, as they did with Benghazi. But unless something unusual happens, such as Rudy Giuliani being indicted as a foreign agent (which is not outside the realm of possibility), Republicans will keep this one going by whatever means they can fine and hope that a big backlash, along the lines of the Tea Party wave of 2010, carries them back into the majority in the 2022 midterms. If that happens, get ready for the circus to come to town.
If Joe Biden is elected president two weeks from now, the QAnon insanity could end up as just another hallucinogenic flashback of the increasingly surreal Trump era. Hunter Biden and Burisma, unfortunately, will be with us for a while.
"Hunter Biden and Burisma, unfortunately, will be with us for a while."
America needs to know what services Hunter provided for the millions he received.
A new photograph has emerged of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden posing with Hunter Biden and Kenes Rakishev, a Kazakh oligarch who reportedly worked with the former veep’s scandal-scarred son.
The snap, first published by a Kazakhstani anti-corruption website in 2019, follows last week’s bombshell Post exposés detailing Hunter Biden’s overseas business dealings and a report claiming Rakishev paid the Biden scion as a go-between to broker US investments.
In the undated photo, shared by the Kazhakhstani Initiative on Asset Recovery, the former vice president can be seen smiling with Kazakhstan’s former prime minister Karim Massimov and his son, who is flanked by Rakishev.
"And yet somehow, everyone but you understands what is meant when people mention "the popular vote.""
I know exactly what you mean
but adding up 50 popular votes doesn't translate into a big unified national popular vote
I've explained why
unless potential voters know there is a national popular vote going on, there isn't
"The same can be said of liberals in red states, who think their votes are unimportant."
yes, it could
but I'm not saying Trump won a national popular vote
I'm saying one didn't happen
"With a national popular vote, EVERYONE'S vote in every state would count equally"
yes, it would
but not everyone's interest would be considered
the Founding Fathers had a certain genius that continues to amaze
Jill Biden’s ex-husband has accused the potential first lady of having an affair with Joe Biden and says they lied about how they met in the 1970s, according to a bombshell new report.
Bill Stevenson on Monday accused the presumptive Democratic nominee of being a home-wrecker and says the feel-good story of how Joe and Jill met on a blind date is completely made up, the Daily Mail reported.
“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” said Stevenson, now 72, who is working on a book that includes the lurid claim. “But facts are facts and what happened, happened.”
Stevenson and his then-wife grew close to Biden in 1972 while working on his first campaign to represent Delaware in the US Senate.
That same year, tragedy struck when Biden’s first wife, Neilia, and infant daughter were killed in a car crash.
Stevenson said he first suspected an affair in 1974, when his wife passed on meeting an up-and-coming rock star who was set to play at his Delaware club.
“I know exactly when it was,” he told the Daily Mail. “Bruce Springsteen was going to play at The Stone Balloon and I had to go to Northern New Jersey to pay him in advance.
“’I asked Jill to go with me and she said no — she had things to do, she had to look after Joe’s kids, Beau and Hunter. It was kind of a big deal to go meet Springsteen,” he continued. “I had no idea she and Joe were that kind of friendly.
“Then one of her best friends told me she thought Joe and Jill were getting a little too close. I was surprised that she came to me.”
A couple months later, Stevenson got all the evidence he needed when he was told that his wife had been in a fender-bender in her car — while Biden was behind the wheel.
“I was at work and a guy came in and asked, ‘Do you own a brown Corvette?’” Stevenson recalled. “He said back in May it had crunched his bumper and they told him to get an estimate and he never heard back from them.
“I said, ‘Wait a minute. Who is they?’ And he said, ‘Funnily enough, Senator Biden was driving.’”
“I considered Joe a friend. I’m not surprised he fell in love with Jill. Everyone who meets Jill falls in love with her immediately. It’s hard not to,” Stevenson said.
The Bidens, who have been married since 1977, have publicly said they met on a blind date in 1975 — after Joe became a widower and Jill’s first marriage had broken up.
The Biden campaign declined comment.
https://twitter.com/ArunChaud/status/1318873947224625153
See Joe's compassion for yourselves as he comforts the son of a teacher killed at Parkland High School.
Health experts recommend wearing masks in public and keeping your distance from others in most cases, but whether you should do both could depend on the situation.
“There’s no invisible force field at 6 feet,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious disease expert at George Mason University.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says spread of the virus beyond 6 feet is uncommon but more likely in poorly ventilated spaces. Some health experts say the virus can spread more easily than the agency indicates, and suggest wearing masks even in prolonged outdoor gatherings when people are more than 6 feet apart.
Other factors could also influence whether it’s best to keep your distance while also wearing a mask. When people raise their voices or pant — such as when they sing, shout or exercise — they can expel more respiratory droplets or aerosols, and send them traveling farther through the air. The longer you’re in a situation with potential for exposure to the virus, the greater your risk of infection.
“The reason this stuff is so confusing is people want clear answers, and there’s not a straightforward answer,” said Lisa M. Lee, a public health expert at Virginia Tech.
Since no protective measure is entirely effective, Lee suggests layering safeguards like masks, social distancing and hand washing.
“And your mask is your basic layer,” she said.
Getting in the habit of wearing a mask anytime you leave the house also eliminates having to decide when you should, said Bob Bednarczyk, an expert in infectious diseases at Emory University.
“It’s one less thing to worry about,” he said.
___
The AP is answering your questions about the coronavirus in this series. Submit them at: FactCheck@AP.org.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The majority of U.S. registered voters, 56%, believe President Donald Trump does not deserve to be reelected, while 43% say he does. Voters are even less likely to think "most members of Congress" deserve reelection (29%), although six in 10 say their own House member does.
These data are from a Sept. 30-Oct. 15, 2020, Gallup poll.
The percentage of voters who say Trump deserves reelection to a second term is down seven percentage points from Gallup's previous measure in January -- a much different time in Trump's presidency, when confidence in the U.S. economy was high, the Senate was preparing to vote to keep Trump in office during his impeachment trial, and only a few cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed in the U.S.
The percentage of voters who currently say Trump deserves to be reelected matches his latest overall job approval rating from the same poll. Gallup's previous measures of Trump's reelection deservedness were each within three points of his approval rating, and the significance to reelection is clear. As Gallup reported in May: "Historically, all incumbents with an approval rating of 50% or higher have won reelection, and presidents with approval ratings much lower than 50% have lost."
As would be expected, nearly all Republicans (93%) say the president deserves to be reelected, while few Democrats (3%) agree. Among independents, 36% say Trump deserves reelection and 61% say he does not.
Today's RCP average of polls shows Biden +7.5%. (Biden 50.6, Rump 43.1)
A man who describes himself as a former business partner of Hunter Biden says he heard him and his father, Joe Biden, discuss his dealings with a mysterious Chinese energy firm in 2017 and that the former vice president was due to receive a share of the profits.
Tony Bobulinski issued a statement on Wednesday saying that he personally witnessed Biden discuss business deals with his son, Hunter, contradicting claims by the former vice president.
'I've seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business.
'I've seen firsthand that that's not true, because it wasn't just Hunter's business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.'
Bobulinski claimed that the Chinese were pursuing the deal as a 'political or influence investment' and that Hunter Biden was 'using the company as his personal piggy bank by just taking money out of it as soon as it came from the Chinese.'
He said in his statement that he 'took steps to prevent that from happening.'
Bobulinski named the company as Sinohawk Holdings. That company was set up secretively in Delaware in 2017, never filed any annual reports, and was cancelled by the Delaware regulator in June 2020 for failing to pay its tax assessment to the state. Nobody is named on the company's documents.
Bobulinski also said in his statement that he was one of the recipients of the email from one of Hunter Biden's business partners which involved a deal with a Chinese energy firm in May 2017 which promised a 10 per cent cut for a person known as 'the big guy.'
Bobulinski claimed in his statement that 'the big guy' is Joe Biden.
Outraised in the closing months by Democratic challenger Joe Biden, President Donald Trump is holding yet another high-dollar fundraiser, this one just hours before Thursday night’s final debate in Nashville, Tennessee, with ticket prices as high as $250,000 per couple.
Presidential candidates ― particularly incumbents, who have the prestige of the White House behind them ― generally do not spend valuable time raising money in a campaign’s final days. Trump, who held a $12 million fundraiser in Newport Beach, California, on Sunday that also brought in $8 million for allied super PACs, is proving to be the exception.
“Why are we doing a fucking fundraiser in Nashville?” wondered one top Republican close to the White House who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It just seems late for doing that. ... I guess they must need the money.”
.
.
.
Oh hell yes they do. They are so desperate they are still sending this lifelong registered Democrat 5 money begs per day, the whole damn family. Well not Barron, yet.
.
.
.
And the RCP Average moves again.
It's now Biden + 7.7.
Biden 50.7. Rump 43.0
I choose The Love.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday refused to comment on accusations that Democratic Presidential nominee Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, may have been engaged in a pay-for-play scheme with foreign oligarchs in Ukraine and China.
“I’m not answering those questions,” Pelosi responded to reporters.
Pelosi said questions were limited to negotiations to secure a bipartisan deal on a new round of coronavirus aid.
“We’re talking about the coronavirus,” Pelosi said. “I don’t have all day for questions. That’s what we are talking about now.”
Pelosi does not typically limit subject matter at her press conferences.
Her press conference came hours after Tony Bobulinski, listed as one of the recipients of an email detailing an apparent business deal between a Chinese company and Hunter Biden, said that the message is "genuine" and that “the big guy” mentioned is a reference to Hunter’s father.
The email he was referring to is from James Gilliar, a member of the J2CR international consulting firm, to Hunter Biden and others, dated May 13, 2017, and it discusses “expectations” of a as-of-yet-unclear deal while claiming that “we have discussed and agreed the following renumeration packages.” As well as discussing Hunter, it asks about “10 held by H for the big guy".
Joe Biden has not directly denied the legitimacy of emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptops, which are now in possession of The FBI and reportedly the subject of a money laundering investigation.
The emails were first obtained and reported on by the New York Post which broke a story last week suggesting Hunter Biden and other members, including Joe Biden, were poised to profit from a deal with a Chinese energy company.
The emails also suggested Hunter Biden would connect his father with Ukraine energy officials, who were paying Hunter Biden a hefty monthly salary.
Bobulinski made his claim in a statement to Fox News.
Conservative publishers are flooding the country with free right-wing propaganda paid for by Republicans.
Google finds over 200 million hits for "Fox News Effect"
The U.S. has already hit 89% of total 2016 early voting
At least 42.1 million have voted nationwide, and there are still 12 days until Election Day
Early-voting counts suggest a record level of civic participation before Election Day. The tens of millions of ballots already cast show highly enthusiastic voters are making sure their votes are counted amid a pandemic.
Voters are also taking advantage of in-person early voting, with a record-breaking number showing up on the first day of early voting in some states. This is Virginia’s first election with early voting, a change made after Democrats assumed control of the state House and Senate last fall. A handful of states expanded early voting in response to the pandemic, including Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott (R) extended it by a week.
This year’s general election follows high turnout in the primaries, including in battlegrounds such as Wisconsin, despite many races being held after the presidential candidates were decided and during the pandemic. And it comes two years after 2018 shattered turnout records for a midterm.
We have sky-high unemployment with no stimulus bill likely to get a vote before the election.
There remains no cohesive national plan for testing, tracing and social distancing enforcement.
We have more than 220,000 dead citizens from COVID.
Rump still has no health-care plan and he admitted he want the Supreme Court to end Obamacare.
Rump never passed an infrastructure bill.
Rump's immigration “policy” resulted in thousands of children being separated from their parents and left 545 of them permanently orphaned.
Rump wastes time hollering about indecipherable conspiracy plots; whining that CBS’s Lesley Stahl was mean to him; joining supporters in a “lock her up” chant against popular Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D); and trying to minimize a pandemic that has killed more than 220,000 Americans.
Rump and his advisers have floated firing FBI Director Christopher A. Wray and Bill Barr’s fate is also in the balance because John Durham and John Bash have come up empty.
Rump has said out loud he is willing to go so low as to ask his attorney general to indict political opponents without any basis, weeks before the election.
And Rump's bank accounts in China, like his tax forms, remain hidden from voters.
Rudy Giuliani claimed:
"The Borat video is a complete fabrication. I was tucking in my shirt after taking off the recording equipment.
At no time before, during, or after the interview was I ever inappropriate. If Sacha Baron Cohen implies otherwise he is a stone-cold liar."
But Rudy has not explained why he followed Bakalova into the bedroom, patted her waist, asked for her personal information or lay down on his back.
Friend,
Are you ready for tonight?
Polls suggested I WON BIG at the last debate against Sleepy Joe, and TONIGHT, I’m going to do it AGAIN.
Despite the Debate Commission’s best efforts to protect Biden by changing tonight’s debate topic from foreign policy, I am going to make sure he answers for his corrupt dealings with CHINA. He is totally compromised, and the American People deserve to know the TRUTH.
The FINAL debate tonight is critical to the future of our Nation, and I want to do something HUGE to send a clear message to the Fake News media. With your help, we’ll show them that the SILENT MAJORITY is BIGGER and STRONGER than ever before.
I want TODAY to be our best fundraising day EVER!
I know this is a big goal, but I know we can do it. It’s going to take EVERY Patriot stepping up if we’re going to CRUSH the competition, and I need to know that I can count on you, Friend.
Until 11:59 PM TONIGHT, ALL gifts will be 800%-MATCHED!
Please contribute $45 IMMEDIATELY to have your contribution 800%-MATCHED so we can CRUSH our goal. >>
Your Gift Will Be 800%-Matched
CONTRIBUTE $250 = $2250
Your Gift Will Be 800%-Matched
CONTRIBUTE $100 = $900
Your Gift Will Be 800%-Matched
CONTRIBUTE $50 = $450
Your Gift Will Be 800%-Matched
CONTRIBUTE $45 = $405
Your Gift Will Be 800%-Matched
CONTRIBUTE ANY AMOUNT
Before I walk out on that stage in front of the world, my team is handing me a list of supporters who choose to step up at this critical time. Will I see your name?
Please contribute $45 RIGHT NOW to get on the list of supporters I see and your gift will be 800%-MATCHED.
Thank you,
President Donald J. Trump Signature Headshot
Donald J. Trump
President of the United States
CONTRIBUTE $45 = $405
"Bobulinski made his claim in a statement to Fox News."
obviously, the Biden PR team aka the MSM, is going to cover up the Big Guy
"Conservative publishers are flooding the country with free right-wing propaganda paid for by Republicans."
is it free or paid for? c'mon, man. lay off the sauce when posting
"Google finds over 200 million hits for "Fox News Effect""
69 million for Biden corrupt
FOX is apparently more interesting
if Biden was influence peddling, and it looks he was, he needs to resign from the race and let Kamala take it from here
https://www.wsj.com/articles/now-corruption-story-is-about-joe-not-hunter-11603392288
the country can't make the same mistake it did in 1972, electing Nixon when Watergate was already known
73-74 were dark years
"Big turnout means Democrats win"
not necessarily
Republicans have done better at voter registrations
and a lot of Dems are too stupid to fill out the mail-in ballots correctly
Amy CB will disqualify those votes so fast your head will spin!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"We have sky-high unemployment with no stimulus bill likely to get a vote before the election."
Pelosi won't pass one unless it bails out her home state of California from decades of debt!!!!!!!!!!!!
"There remains no cohesive national plan for testing, tracing and social distancing enforcement."
social distancing enforcement? thanks for reminding us, Gestapo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"We have more than 220,000 dead citizens from COVID."
thanks to Andrew Cuomo and Anthony Fauci
"Rump still has no health-care plan and he admitted he want the Supreme Court to end Obamacare."
the Repubs passed on in 2017
the Dems blocked
just like the GOP passed a 500 billion stimulus bill this week
but, the Dems blocked
"whining that CBS’s Lesley Stahl was mean to him"
actually, he was whining that Lesley was not mean to Joe Biden
"And Rump's bank accounts in China, like his tax forms, remain hidden from voters."
so do yours
"but adding up 50 popular votes doesn't translate into a big unified national popular vote
I've explained why"
Yet adding up the state's 50 popular vote totals is precisely what people have been referring to as "the popular vote" for decades. Why you insist on playing your little semantic games is beyond me, but so is the rest of your misanthropic behavior.
"With a national popular vote, EVERYONE'S vote in every state would count equally"
yes, it would
but not everyone's interest would be considered"
Obviously, if everyone's vote is counted equally, at some level, so are there interests. Not perfectly of course, but it isn't considered perfectly now, so that's not a reason to stop it.
"the Founding Fathers had a certain genius that continues to amaze"
The electoral college system was put into place so that the votes of white slave owners in the south wouldn't be overpowered by white non-slave owners in the north. It got the south to join the union. Most people wouldn't call this genius however, and a number of folks consider slavery and its accommodation America's "original sin."
Standard civics-class accounts of the Electoral College rarely mention the real demon dooming direct national election in 1787 and 1803: slavery.
At the Philadelphia convention, the visionary Pennsylvanian James Wilson proposed direct national election of the president. But the savvy Virginian James Madison responded that such a system would prove unacceptable to the South: “The right of suffrage was much more diffusive [i.e., extensive] in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes.” In other words, in a direct election system, the North would outnumber the South, whose many slaves (more than half a million in all) of course could not vote. But the Electoral College—a prototype of which Madison proposed in this same speech—instead let each southern state count its slaves, albeit with a two-fifths discount, in computing its share of the overall count.
Virginia emerged as the big winner—the California of the Founding era—with 12 out of a total of 91 electoral votes allocated by the Philadelphia Constitution, more than a quarter of the 46 needed to win an election in the first round. After the 1800 census, Wilson’s free state of Pennsylvania had 10% more free persons than Virginia, but got 20% fewer electoral votes. Perversely, the more slaves Virginia (or any other slave state) bought or bred, the more electoral votes it would receive. Were a slave state to free any blacks who then moved North, the state could actually lose electoral votes.
If the system’s pro-slavery tilt was not overwhelmingly obvious when the Constitution was ratified, it quickly became so. For 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years, a white slaveholding Virginian occupied the presidency.
Southerner Thomas Jefferson, for example, won the election of 1800-01 against Northerner John Adams in a race where the slavery-skew of the electoral college was the decisive margin of victory: without the extra electoral college votes generated by slavery, the mostly southern states that supported Jefferson would not have sufficed to give him a majority. As pointed observers remarked at the time, Thomas Jefferson metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.
Modern Republicans have taken advantage of the skewed electoral college system, and it should be no surprise that a large part of its base resides in the ex slave states, where they continue to suppress the votes of black people.
The power of rich white landowners was reinforced in 2016 with Rump's selection by the EC. The Confederacy would be so proud.
President Donald Trump has a colorful imagination when it comes to the fictitious specter of “voter fraud.”
Although actual cases of people impersonating a registered voter in order to artificially alter vote totals are infinitesimally rare, Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that mail-in voting, which states have made more available this election cycle due to COVID-19, is a magnet for “fraud.”
But to the extent that “voter fraud” is a problem this year, Trump might want to take a closer look at his own supporters.
Robert R. Lynn, a registered Republican and Trump supporter in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, was arrested on Wednesday for allegedly requesting an absentee ballot for his mother, who died in 2015.
Lynn, 67, is a resident of Luzerne County, a largely white, working-class, political bellwether that Barack Obama won twice, but which swung hard for Trump in 2016. Lynn is being charged with voter fraud and forgery for faking his deceased mother’s signature on the absentee ballot request form.
County prosecutors have told local news outlets that it is the first case of alleged voter fraud in the county in three decades. County election authorities flagged the ballot request as suspicious in September, triggering the investigation that led to Lynn’s arrest. Lynn allegedly first denied the allegations to detectives, before admitting to the deed.
Lynn is due in court for a hearing on Nov. 5 ― two days after the election. The Republican, who posted $10,000 in bail, could face up to five years in prison and $25,000 in fines.
Lynn’s Facebook posts show that he is a fan of Trump’s and a bitter critic of Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden.
In one January message, Lynn shared a homemade image of Trump’s campaign logo with the words, “Finally someone with balls.”
In July, Lynn shared a conservative meme about someone who agreed to their neighbor’s request to take down their Trump flag only to replace the flag with dozens of Trump yard signs instead.
Trump’s crusade against the phantom voter fraud phenomenon has on at least one occasion led him to encourage his supporters to test the system’s safeguards by engaging in the practice themselves. At a rally in North Carolina in September, he told supporters to mail in their ballots and then vote in person, “and if the system is as good as they say it is then obviously they won’t be able to vote” in person.
The Voter Project, a group working to expose Republican voter suppression efforts and dispel myths about voter fraud, blamed Trump for effectively encouraging voter fraud among his own supporters.
“Donald Trump has tried to spread chaos and disinformation about voter fraud for years and he’s never come up with any evidence,” Voter Project spokesperson Mike Mikus said in a statement. “A byproduct of his misinformation is that nearly every instance of voter fraud in recent years has been Trump’s own supporters because they believe his incessant lying.”
Biden +7.9
Biden 50.7% Rump 42.8%
Biggest Rump lie last night:
"Trump: ....We have the best testing in the world by far. That's why we have so many cases."
Truth:
"Covid-19 hospitalizations increased in 38 states over the past week and are rising so quickly that many facilities in the West and Midwest are already overwhelmed."
Testing doesn't cause hospitalizations; illness causes them.
Irrelevant TTFer in Chief said...
"Covid-19 hospitalizations increased in 38 states over the past week and are rising so quickly that many facilities in the West and Midwest are already overwhelmed.
Testing doesn't cause hospitalizations; illness causes them."
and, yes, with the amount of testing we've done, it's likely our numbers are inflated with symptomless cases that would never be known in other countries
doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out
but it's rare for a TTFer to have an IQ above 70
mortality from COVID is down significantly
Trump gave billions for research, despite the lie that he's done nothing
therapeutics are cutting deaths
this morning's Post says the Trump's Warp Speed vaccine program should report results with the next few weeks
but the propaganda rag doesn't give Trump credit
"Yet adding up the state's 50 popular vote totals is precisely what people have been referring to as "the popular vote" for decades."
they mean a national poll but assume he fifty polls are the same
they aren't
doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out
but it's rare for a TTFer to have an IQ above 70
"Why you insist on playing your little semantic games is beyond me,"
just giving you the benefit of the doubt that you might realize how wrong you are
why, is beyond me as well
you're clearly an ignorant moron
"Obviously, if everyone's vote is counted equally, at some level, so are there interests."
well, the interests of Wyoming are very different from, say, New Jersey
but under a national popular vote they'd never be considered
we're better than a tyranny of resentful over-populated states
"we're better than a tyranny of resentful over-populated states"
I see you prefer the tyranny of resentful, under-educated, under-populated states over the over-populated ones.
How is that better, actually?
"well, the interests of Wyoming are very different from, say, New Jersey"
Wyoming and New Jersey are political districts defined by lines drawn on a map.
They have no interests. It is people within those boundaries that have interests. The interests of the people in those states can be the same or different from each other. The people can identify and respond to those differences far better than any line drawn on a map. We don't need to cling to a voting system born out of slave-state compromises.
"they mean a national poll but assume he [sic] fifty polls are the same
they aren't
doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out
but it's rare for a TTFer to have an IQ above 70"
"The popular vote" refers to the combined voting results of all 50 states, not some poll. It has been called that for decades. That's how we know Hillary won "the popular vote" in 2016. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure that out, moron.
Amy Barrett Once Ruled That a Cop Wasn't Responsible for a Black Teenager's Death Because Breathing Isn't a Constitutional Right
This woman is so evil she pretends the ninth amendment does not exist. Obviously breathing and gay marriage are rights retained by the people even though they are not enumerated in the bill of rights.
30% of the population that is wildly out of touch with what the American people want are dominating the population to force them to live under minority control. 70% of Americans now oppose gay marriage bans.
Amy Barrett is a sick and perverted woman.
""The popular vote" refers to the combined voting results of all 50 states, not some poll. It has been called that for decades."
no, there are countries that have national popular votes
the US isn't one of them
we have fifty different popular state votes
if you think the combined fifty popular state votes are identical to what the results of a national popular vote would be, you're stupider than the average TTFer
"Priya Lynn said..."
poor Randy!
he doesn't know it's all over
Amy will make decisions about gays can and cannot do now
"This woman is so evil she pretends the ninth amendment does not exist. Obviously breathing and gay marriage are rights retained by the people even though they are not enumerated in the bill of rights."
poor Randy!
he actually thinks he can fool people into thinking gay "marriage" is just like breathing
don't worry, Randy
you'll learn to live without it!!!!!!!!!!
"30% of the population that is wildly out of touch with what the American people want are dominating the population to force them to live under minority control. 70% of Americans now oppose gay marriage bans."
that 30% rules because they are smarter!!!!!!!!!!!!
they won fair and square by using their powerful and overwhelming thinking ability
"Amy Barrett is a sick and perverted woman."
look at Randy attack women!!!!!!!!
odd that a TTFer would call anyone else sick and perverted
they loooove the Orwellian technique
"Amy will make decisions about gays can and cannot do now"
that's right!
and it's a lifetime appointment
and Amy is very, very young!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Key Points
Nationally, several surveillance indicators of COVID-19 related activity are showing increases in SARS-CoV-2 virus circulation and related illnesses.
-The percentage of specimens testing positive for SARS-CoV-2, the percentages of visits to EDs or outpatient providers for ILI and CLI, and COVID-19-associated hospitalization rates have increased or remained stable in recent weeks. Hospitalization data for the most recent weeks may change as additional data are reported.
-The percentage of deaths due to PIC have been declining since late July; however, in mid-September the percentage leveled off. Data for the most recent weeks currently show a decline, but that is likely to change as additional death certificates are processed.
At least one indicator used to monitor COVID-19 activity is increasing in eight of the ten HHS regions, and many regions are reporting increases in multiple indicators.
-The percentages of specimens testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 increased in eight regions.
-The percentages of visits for ILI, CLI or both increased in three regions.
-For some indicators and regions, the increases have been small but consistent from week to week over the last several weeks, while other indicators have increased more rapidly in some regions.
The overall cumulative COVID-19-associated hospitalization rate through the week ending October 17, 2020 was 193.7 hospitalizations per 100,000 population.
-Since the week ending September 26 (MMWR week 39), weekly hospitalization rates have increased for all age groups combined, driven primarily by an increase in rates among adults aged 50 years and older. Data for the most recent weeks may change as additional admissions occurring during those weeks are reported.
-The age-adjusted hospitalization rate for Hispanic or Latino persons was approximately 4.5 times that of non-Hispanic White persons. Age-adjusted hospitalization rates for non-Hispanic American Indian or Alaska Native persons and non-Hispanic Black persons were approximately 4.4 and 4.3 times those of non-Hispanic White persons, respectively.
These surveillance systems aim to provide the most complete data available. Estimates from previous weeks are subject to change as data are updated with the most complete data available.
U.S. Virologic Surveillance
Based on data reported to CDC by public health laboratories and a subset of clinical and commercial laboratories in the United States, 64,364,628 specimens were tested for SARS-CoV-2 using a molecular assay since March 1, 2020. The percentages of specimens testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 each week, based on week of specimen collection, are summarized below.
Nationally, during week 42, 2,284,045 specimens were tested for SARS-CoV-2 for diagnostic purposes and 144,789 (6.3%) were positive. This is an increase compared with week 41, during which 5.6% of specimens tested were positive. The percentages of specimens testing positive increased among all age groups.
The national increase in percent positivity was driven primarily by increases in Regions 4 (Southeast), 5 (Midwest), 6 (South Central), 7 (Central) and 8 (Mountain); this increase was reported among all age groups in these regions. Smaller increases were reported in Regions 1 (New England), 2 (New Jersey, New York and Puerto Rico), and 9 (South/West Coast). The highest percentages of specimens testing positive for SARS-CoV-2 were seen in Regions 4 (Southeast, 7.3%), 5 (Midwest, 8.7%), 6 (South Central, 9.8%), 7 (Central, 11.1%) and 8 (Mountain, 9.3%), the same regions reporting the largest increases in percentages of specimens testing positive during week 42 compared with week 41.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html
"Within two weeks" seems to be Rump's favorite lie about his "health care plan"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4STwwbRRURI&feature=emb_logo
Biden + 8.1
Rump 42.7% Biden 50.8%
https://trumpcovidplan.com
Correction: A previous version of this story provided cumulative coronavirus case numbers for the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. It has been updated to reflect only the numbers in the two weeks after President Donald Trump's rally.
As President Donald Trump jetted across the country holding campaign rallies during the past two months, he didn’t just defy state orders and federal health guidelines. He left a trail of coronavirus outbreaks in his wake.
The president has participated in nearly three dozen rallies since mid-August, all but two at airport hangars. A USA TODAY analysis shows COVID-19 cases grew at a faster rate than before after at least five of those rallies in the following counties: Blue Earth, Minnesota; Lackawanna, Pennsylvania; Marathon, Wisconsin; Dauphin, Pennsylvania; and Beltrami, Minnesota.
Together, those counties saw 1,500 more new cases in the two weeks following Trump’s rallies than the two weeks before – 9,647 cases, up from 8,069.
Public health officials additionally have linked 16 cases, including two hospitalizations, with the rally in Beltrami County, Minnesota, and one case with the rally in Marathon County, Wisconsin. Outside of the counties identified by USA TODAY with a greater case increase after rallies, officials identified four cases linked to Trump rallies.
Although there’s no way to determine definitively if cases originated at Trump’s rallies, public health experts say the gatherings fly in the face of all recommendations to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
USA TODAY reviewed coronavirus case counts in the counties where Trump attended rallies starting from mid-August through mid-October. The news organization examined the rate of increase in virus cases for the two weeks before and after campaign events. For rallies occurring within the past two weeks, not enough time has passed to draw conclusions.
The earliest post-rally spikes occurred even as the nation’s overall case counts were in decline from a peak in mid-July. When U.S. cases started climbing in mid-September, Trump did not alter his campaign schedule but continued holding an average of four rallies a week.
He stopped first in Minnesota, where Blue Earth County’s coronavirus growth rate was 15% before Trump’s rally, but grew to 25% afterward. Three days later, he was in Lackawanna County, Pennsylvania, where the coronavirus growth rate jumped from less than 3% before his visit to more than 7% afterward.
Even in states where cases were already rising, the spikes in at least four counties that hosted Trump rallies far surpassed their state’s overall growth rates.
In two counties, it was more than double: Marathon County’s case count surged by 67% after Trump’s visit compared to Wisconsin’s overall growth rate of 29% during the same time. In Beltrami County, Minnesota, it swelled by 35% compared to the state’s 14%...
The GOP claims Hunter Biden tried to scare up business in China and kicked up ten percent of his profits to his father. Republicans have seized on emails between Hunter Biden and Tony Bobulinski, a new character they have introduced late into the drama. The main problem with this charge is that Joe Biden has published years of tax returns, and they do not include income from China.
Rump hides his tax forms.
We should all see Rump's tax forms to check for income from his trademarks in China.
And don't forget Ivanka makes money from her trademarks in China too.
AP News: China grants 18 trademarks in 2 months to Trump, daughter
Trump Team Mired In Paranoia And Blaming
Politico reports:
President Donald Trump’s top advisers have plunged into a bitter round of finger-pointing and blame-shifting ahead of an increasingly likely defeat. Accusations are flying in all directions and about all manner of topics — from allegedly questionable spending decisions by former campaign manager Brad Parscale, to how White House chief of staff Mark Meadows handled Trump’s hospitalization for Covid-19, to skepticism that TV ads have broken through.
Interviews with nearly a dozen Trump aides, campaign advisers and Republican officials also surfaced accusations that the president didn’t take fundraising seriously enough and that the campaign undermined its effort to win over seniors by casting Democrat Joe Biden as senile. Finger-pointing is a common feature of campaigns that think they’re losing, but it’s happening at an uncommon level in this campaign.
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "The 30% rule because they're smarter".
No, they rule because they the system is biased in their favour, they have gas lighted Americans for several decades and destroyed the rule of law.
White evangelical christians are corrupt:
The Authoritarians
I posted Amy Barrett Once Ruled That a Cop Wasn't Responsible for a Black Teenager's Death Because Breathing Isn't a Constitutional Right
Amy Barrett is a sick and perverted woman".
Wyatt/Regina/bad anonymous said "Look at Priya attack women!!!!"
You can see the fundamental dishonesty of Wyatt and Regina Hardiman here, falsely claiming that me condemning one particularly vile woman is an attack on all women.
This sort of dishonesty is typical of all their arguments for a theocratic dictatorship.
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