"Trump said to pick Amy Coney Barrett for Court, New York Times reports" by Peter Baker The New York Times, September 25, 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump has selected Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the favorite candidate of conservatives, to succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and will try to force Senate confirmation before Election Day in a move that would significantly alter the ideological makeup of the Supreme Court for years.
Trump plans to announce Saturday that Barrett is his choice, according to people close to the process who asked not to be identified disclosing the decision in advance. The president met with Barrett at the White House this week and came away impressed with a jurist that leading conservatives told him would be a female Antonin Scalia, referring to the justice who died in 2016 and for whom Barrett clerked.
As they often do, aides cautioned that Trump sometimes upends his own plans, but he is not known to have interviewed any other candidates for the post.
The president’s political advisers hope the selection will energize his conservative political base in the thick of an election campaign in which he has for months been trailing former vice president Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, but it could also rouse liberal voters afraid that her confirmation could spell the end of Roe v. Wade, the decision legalizing abortion, as well as other rulings popular with the political left and center.
In picking Barrett, a conservative and a hero to the antiabortion movement, Trump could hardly have found a more polar opposite to Ginsburg, a pioneering champion of women’s rights and leader of the liberal wing of the court. The appointment would shift the center of gravity on the bench considerably to the right, giving conservatives six of the nine seats and potentially insulating them even against defections by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who on a handful of occasions has sided with liberal justices.
That's because Roberts is compromised.
Trump made clear this week that he wanted to rush his nominee through the Senate by Election Day to ensure that he would have a decisive fifth justice on his side in case any disputes from the vote reached the high court, as he expected to happen. The president has repeatedly made baseless claims that the Democrats are trying to steal the election and appears poised to challenge any result of the balloting that does not declare him the winner.
Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has enough votes to push through Barrett’s nomination if he can make the tight time frame work. If confirmed, Barrett would become the 115th justice in the nation’s history and the fifth woman to serve on the Supreme Court. At 48, she would be the youngest member of the current court as well its sixth Catholic. And she would become Trump’s third appointee on the court, more than any other president has installed in a first term since Richard M. Nixon had four, joining Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Barrett graduated from Notre Dame Law School and later joined the faculty. She clerked for Scalia and shares his constitutional views. She is described as a textualist who interprets the law based on its plain words rather than seeking to understand the legislative purpose and an originalist who applies the Constitution as it was understood by those who drafted and ratified it.
Barrett and her husband, Jesse Barrett, a former federal prosecutor, are reported to be members of a small and relatively obscure Christian group called the People of Praise. The group grew out of the Catholic charismatic renewal movement that began in the late 1960s and adopted Pentecostal practices like speaking in tongues, belief in prophecy, and divine healing. The couple have seven children, all under 20, including two adopted from Haiti and a young son with Down syndrome.
During her 2017 confirmation hearing, she affirmed that she would keep her personal views separate from her duties as a judge. As a law professor, Barrett was a member of Faculty for Life, an antiabortion group, and wrote skeptically about precedent in Supreme Court rulings, which both sides in the abortion debate took to mean she would be open to revisiting Roe v. Wade. She criticized Chief Justice Roberts for his opinion preserving Obama’s Affordable Care Act, saying he went beyond the plausible meaning of the law.
A majority of Americans oppose efforts by Trump to fill the vacancy before the election, with most supporters of Biden saying the issue has raised the stakes of the election, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Friday. The poll, conducted Monday to Thursday, found 38 percent of Americans say the replacement for Ginsburg should be nominated by Trump and confirmed by the current Senate, while 57 percent say it should be left to the winner of the presidential election and a Senate vote next year.....
--more--"
She is going to hide behind Pence’s skirt as the nomination makes the case for swiftly securing abortion access in Massachusetts and is a reminder (from an anti-Asian racist) that every vote counts.
"Another conservative justice on the Supreme Court could mean big changes for abortion and affirmative action cases" by Liz Goodwin Globe Staff, September 23, 2020
WASHINGTON — This past summer, the fate of abortion rights in the country hung by a thread.
The Supreme Court, which saw its socially moderate swing vote Anthony Kennedy retire in 2018, appeared poised to uphold a Louisiana law that sharply curtailed access to abortions — a decision that would likely set off a cascade of similar laws across the country.
Instead, conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who had voted in favor of allowing a similar measure in Texas just four years earlier, changed his mind. He joined the court’s four liberals to strike down the Louisiana law, citing the earlier precedent and giving abortion rights' activists a surprising victory — and temporary relief.
That relief has turned to dread among liberals, now that President Trump, aided by a Senate Republican majority that has reversed its earlier position on election-year nominees, seems all but certain to replace one of those liberals, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, with a conservative stalwart he plans to announce on Saturday.
If confirmed, that replacement would give conservatives a rock solid 6-3 advantage on a Supreme Court that already leaned sharply to the right, with the potential to reshape abortion rights, affirmative action, policing, and many other crucial issues over the coming decades while erecting a judicial barrier to attempts by future Democratic administrations to enact bold liberal policies.
The court-packing plan is an electoral nightmare and Trump's secret weapon.
An enhanced conservative majority also would mean an end to the temporary role Roberts took on this past year as a sometimes swing vote preventing aggressive moves that might make the public see the court as overtly political, such as ending the deferred action program for young immigrants or chipping away at Roe v. Wade.
“If President Trump succeeds in replacing Justice Ginsburg, it would be the most consequential and transformative appointment in the history of the court,” said Jonathan Turley, a conservative legal scholar at George Washington University Law School. “There are a very significant number of cases that are dangling by a 5-4 majority.”
The most noteworthy of those cases: Roe v. Wade.
Federal appellate Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who is at the top of Trump’s short list for the vacancy, has already indicated she disagrees with the foundations of the Roe decision, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s vote in favor of Louisiana’s restrictive law has shown he is not likely to be a swing vote on abortion matters, unlike Kennedy, whose seat he filled as Trump’s second court nominee.
“Nothing of significance would be left of Roe v. Wade, whether they expressly overturn it or crush it in two or three blows — it would be gone,” said Laurence Tribe, a liberal constitutional law scholar at Harvard Law School.
Another legal issue that has long been targeted by some conservatives may also be in jeopardy — affirmative action. In 2016, the court narrowly decided to allow the University of Texas to continue to use race as part of its admissions process, with Kennedy as the swing vote. Roberts opposed the decision.
“One big limitation of federal power could be with respect to affirmative action,” predicted Richard Friedman, an expert on Supreme Court history at the University of Michigan. “That’s an area where the chief justice has been vigorously against.” Such a decision might cut back more on the use of race as a factor in college admissions, or bar it altogether.
A 6-3 conservative court also would likely reaffirm the right of the state to use the death penalty despite objections that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, Turley predicted, and back law enforcement in disputes over whether police shootings amount to unreasonable search and seizures.
The court is already very conservative on matters of gun rights and campaign finance, as evidenced in the Citizens United decision striking down a campaign finance law as a violation of free speech. A sixth conservative vote would solidify that conservative drift, but may not tilt the outcome from the previous court.
Some progressives predict the emboldened 6-3 Supreme Court would take an aggressive posture against any future Democratic administrations, striking down social welfare programs or larger attempts to combat climate change as governmental overreach. That would mimic the Supreme Court of the 1930s, which frequently butted heads with President Franklin D. Roosevelt over his bid to set a minimum wage and other New Deal-era economic reforms.
“It would be the most right wing court in the history of the republic,” Tribe said. “Far more conservative even than the court that Roosevelt confronted when he came into power.”
Looks like hyperbole to me considering our history.
Democratic lawmakers have seized that argument, painting Trump’s appointment as a mortal threat to the Affordable Care Act, which faces a court challenge this fall that will be heard a week after the presidential election. Trump’s nominee could be confirmed and seated in time to hear the case.
The only thing that is life or death right now is the COVID needle covering the Great Re$et. Everything else is secondary.
“The Republicans hope they can get in one more justice, which might permit them to do something they can’t do through Congress, and that is take away health care for tens of millions of people,” Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said on Tuesday, but some legal scholars said they believe it’s unlikely that the future court would take the aggressive posture of the 1930s, which is sometimes referred to as the Lochner era, by repeatedly striking down federal laws passed by Democratic Congresses.
“I don’t see them going back to the Lochner world,” said Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago. “That’s been discredited.”
Stone added that the court would still be the most conservative one since the 1930s, even if they take a less confrontational posture than that court did.
Not in all history, though.
There’s also a chance that the Affordable Care Act would survive, at least this time around, even if facing six conservative justices.
With Roberts no longer able to join four liberals and swing decisions, Democrats must now hope that Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch — Trump’s first court nominee — may become the new swing votes in high profile cases compared with justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who have a longer track record of conservative rulings. It’s a sign of the entirely new context the court is entering.
“We are confronting a world where Gorsuch and Kavanaugh will look like moderates,” Tribe said.....
--more--"
Thus, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg becomes first woman and Jewish-American to lie in state at US Capitol and Harvard Law School honors her in a virtual event the question remains: What would RBG tell your kids’ teacher about the infection of ethnic supremacy?
Also see:
Crowd jeers as Trump pays respects at court to Ginsburg
The Prez is wearing a goddamn mask!
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
On to the election:
"Trump campaign says it built a turnout machine in N.H. for November. Democrats are skeptical" by Victoria McGrane Globe Staff, September 24, 2020
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — Despite the activity, Democrats and other observers are skeptical that the Trump campaign has built the daunting turnout machine it claims, or that there are enough voters willing to back the president to flip the state in November.
“Their campaign is a hot mess,” New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley said at a news conference.
President Trump certainly faces headwinds in New Hampshire, where the few polls done in recent months show Democratic standard-bearer Joe Biden leading.
To be sure, Biden hasn’t been in New Hampshire since he fled the state — skipping his own primary night party — hours before the votes were even counted in the Feb. 11 primary. Some Democrats around the country have raised concerns that Biden isn’t holding enough events in key battleground states, including New Hampshire, and while neither Biden nor his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, have come to New Hampshire in the runup to Nov. 3, the campaign has had its own stream of surrogate activity. Much has been virtual, but Biden’s wife, Jill, and Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, visited the state for several in-person events earlier this month.
As for ground game, the Biden campaign said it has had over 5,200 New Hampshire volunteers participate in virtual events, phone and text banks, trainings, and other events since June. Among other outreach efforts, the campaign is focusing on women — a group Trump is particularly weak with — holding regular engagement events and women-to-women phone bank sessions.
Then #MeToo is dead.
Meanwhile, Trump skeptics point to signs that his operation isn’t the well-oiled “Death Star” it claims to be.
“We could do better, but I don’t see much from Trump. I think it’s talk,” said Billy Shaheen, husband of the senator and one of the state’s Democratic National Committee members. He expressed confidence that the Biden campaign will step up in the coming weeks.
While plenty of Democrats and other political observers doubt the strength of the Trump operation in the state, Mike Dennehy, a longtime GOP consultant in New Hampshire, said he’s been impressed.
They are in for a rude surprise this November.
He said the Trump campaign is “constantly” recruiting volunteers and working from a voter-targeting plan that is very detailed, down to specific neighborhoods and demographic information about individual voters.
That’s a big change from 2016, when Trump’s campaign strategy relied entirely on big rallies, noted Dennehy, who oversaw the late John McCain’s New Hampshire primary wins in 2000 and 2008 and worked for Rick Perry during the 2016 primary.
"If I hadn’t seen this with my own eyes, I would never have believed it.”
--more--"
Related:
"President Trump is on the defensive in three red states he carried in 2016, narrowly trailing Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Iowa and battling to stay ahead of him in Georgia and Texas, as Mr. Trump continues to face a wall of opposition from women that has also endangered his party’s control of the Senate, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. Trump’s vulnerability even in conservative-leaning states underscores just how precarious his political position is, less than six weeks before Election Day. A yawning gender gap in Georgia, Iowa and Texas is working in Mr. Biden’s favor, with the former vice president making inroads into conservative territory with strong support from women. In Iowa, where Mr. Biden is ahead of Mr. Trump, 45 percent to 42 percent, he is up among women by 14 percentage points. Men favor Mr. Trump by eight points. In Georgia, where the two candidates are tied at 45 percent, Mr. Biden leads among women by 10 points. Mr. Trump is ahead with men by a similar margin of 11 percentage points. Mr. Trump’s large advantage among men in Texas is enough to give him a small advantage there, 46 percent to 43 percent. Trump’s tenuous hold on some of the largest red states in the country has presented Mr. Biden with unexpected political opportunities and stirred debate among Democrats about how aggressively to contest states far outside the traditional presidential battleground. Mr. Biden has made efforts so far in a few states that voted emphatically for Mr. Trump four years ago, including Georgia and Iowa, but he has resisted pressure to compete for Texas, a huge and complicated state that Democrats believe is unlikely to furnish the decisive 270th Electoral College vote, but the presence of competitive Senate races in many of those states has been a powerful enticement to Democrats....."
Trump is gaining and the New York Times says he's on the defensive as the polls tighten on the eve of the first presidential debate.
If only the Democrats could unearth another whistleblower:
"President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security denied allegations Wednesday that he molded intelligence reports to suit the administration, telling a Senate committee that a recent whistleblower’s report is “patently false.” Acting Department of Homeland Security Chad Wolf, testifying in a wide-ranging Senate confirmation hearing, also rejected a separate allegation that he held back an intelligence report on Russian disinformation that targeted former Vice President Joe Biden. Both issues emerged early in the hearing as the Senate considers a nominee who has been accused of politicizing the third largest department in the federal government and has faced criticism over its handling of civil unrest, COVID-19 and immigration......"
They should be held liable and the court may need to intervene if you want to go by the book set out by Congre$$:
Eric Trump must testify in NY probe before election
Republican inquiry finds no evidence of wrongdoing by Biden
The New York says the "highly politicized inquiry had the appearance of a conflict of interest but no evidence was discovered and the result delivered Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations against Biden six weeks before Election Day, allegations that echo a Russian disinformation campaign and have been pushed by Trump and his allies" in what is a classic case of projection as they try to compare Trump to Nixon while protecting this generation's equivalent:
"In Politically Charged Inquiry, Durham Sought Details About Scrutiny of Clintons" by Adam Goldman, William K. Rashbaum and Nicole Hong, New York Times, Sept. 24, 2020
WASHINGTON — From the beginning, John H. Durham’s inquiry into the Russia investigation has been politically charged. President Trump promoted it as certain to uncover a “deep state” plot against him, Attorney General William P. Barr rebuked the investigators under scrutiny, and he and Mr. Durham publicly second-guessed an independent inspector general and traveled the globe to chase down conspiracy theories.
It turns out that Mr. Durham also focused attention on certain political enemies of Mr. Trump: the Clintons.
Mr. Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut assigned by Mr. Barr to review the Russia inquiry, has sought documents and interviews about how federal law enforcement officials handled an investigation around the same time into allegations of political corruption at the Clinton Foundation, according to people familiar with the matter.
Where there any justice, they both would be rotting in jail cells.
Mr. Durham’s team members have suggested to others that they are comparing the two investigations as well as examining whether investigators in the Russia inquiry flouted laws or policies. It was not clear whether Mr. Durham’s investigators were similarly looking for violations in the Clinton Foundation investigation, nor whether the comparison would be included or play a major role in the outcome of Mr. Durham’s inquiry.
Also see:
"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi abruptly shifted course Thursday and moved to assemble a new coronavirus relief bill to form the basis for renewed talks with the White House, amid mounting pressure from moderates in her caucus and increasingly alarming economic news. News of Pelosi’s push briefly lifted the Dow Jones industrial average. “I think we’re headed towards a resurgence of the virus in the fall, and until we defeat the virus, you’re not going to have a full economic recovery,” House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard E. Neal (D-Mass.) told reporters. Additionally, there are mounting signs that the economy could stall once more after a brief rebound in the summer. Airlines are threatening to lay off thousands of workers after Oct. 1, when payroll protections included in the Cares Act expire. The window for action is narrow, however, and it is unclear how quickly a bipartisan deal could be reached — if one is possible at all....."
It looks like the Democrats are coming around to the fact they they blew it! They overplayed their hand as they play up a second wave that is nothing but scare tactics unless they planning the deliberate release of a lethal pathogen or turning on the 5G because otherwise the lie will not hold.
The aid will arrive too late anyway:
"Many American workers applying for unemployment benefits after being thrown out of a job by the coronavirus face a new complication: States’ efforts to prevent fraud have delayed or disrupted their payments. California has said it will stop processing new applications for two weeks as it seeks to reduce backlogs and stop phony claims. Pennsylvania has found that up to 10,000 inmates improperly applied for aid. The biggest threat is posed by sophisticated international fraud rings that often use stolen identities to apply for benefits, filling out the forms with a wealth of accurate information that enables their applications to “sail through the system,” said Michele Evermore, an expert on jobless aid at the National Employment Law Project. The bogus applications have combined with large backlogs and miscounts to make unemployment benefit data, a key economic indicator, a less-reliable measure of the nation’s job market. On Thursday, the Labor Department said the number of people applying for unemployment rose slightly last week to 870,000, a historically high figure that shows the outbreak is still forcing many companies to cut jobs, six months into the crisis that has killed more than 200,000 people in the U.S....."
Good thing the fires near LA have stopped spreading as the president rushes vaccine approval before Election Day to build trust, take the edge off, and honor the victims of the coronavirus as America is heading toward an autocracy.
So after slowing down the vote count and ending it early, Trump will decline to transfer power and will take the oath in a secret ceremony before being taken to the hospital and being declared dead.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
That is when the military will be called in:
"Military leaders fret about being drawn into Nov. election" by Jennifer Steinhauer and Helene Cooper New York Times, September 25, 2020
WASHINGTON — Senior Pentagon leaders have a lot to worry about: Afghanistan, Russia, Iraq, Syria, Iran, China, Somalia, the Korean peninsula, but chief among those concerns is whether their commander in chief might order US troops into any chaos around the coming elections.
President Trump gave officials no solace Wednesday when he again refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power no matter who wins the election. On Thursday, he doubled down by saying he was not sure the election could be “honest.” His hedging, along with his expressed desire in June to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to send active-duty troops onto American streets to quell protests over the killing of George Floyd, has caused deep anxiety among senior military and Defense Department leaders, who insist they will do all they can to keep the armed forces out of the elections.
“I believe deeply in the principle of an apolitical US military,” said General Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in written answers to questions from House lawmakers released last month. “In the event of a dispute over some aspect of the elections, by law, US courts and the US Congress are required to resolve any disputes, not the US military. I foresee no role for the US armed forces in this process,” but that has not stopped an intensifying debate in the military about its role should a disputed election lead to civil unrest.
On Aug. 11, John Nagl and Paul Yingling, both retired Army officers and Iraq War veterans, published an open letter to Milley on the website Defense One. “In a few months' time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your constitutional oath,” they wrote. “If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.”
Pentagon officials swiftly said such an outcome was preposterous. Under no circumstances, they said, would the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff send Navy SEALs or Marines to haul Trump out of the White House. If necessary, such a task, Defense Department officials said, would fall to US Marshals or the Secret Service. The military, by law, the officials said, takes a vow to the Constitution, not to the president, and that vow means that the commander in chief of the military is whoever is sworn in at 12:01 p.m. on Inauguration Day, but senior leaders at the Pentagon, speaking on the condition of anonymity, acknowledged that they were talking among themselves about what to do if Trump, who will still be president from Election Day to Inauguration Day, invokes the Insurrection Act and tries to send troops into the streets, as he threatened to do during the protests against police brutality and systemic racism. Both Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper opposed the move then, and Trump backed down.
Several Pentagon officials said there could be resignations among many of Trump’s senior generals, starting at the top with Milley, should troops be ordered into the streets at the time of the election.
Inside the Pentagon, whose leaders are well-known for making plans, Defense Department officials said there had been no preparations for military force during the elections.
The Air Force chief of staff, General Charles Q. Brown, the officials said, would also be unlikely to salute and carry out those orders. In the days after the killing of Floyd in police custody, Brown released an extraordinary video in which he spoke in starkly personal terms about his experience as a Black man in America, his unequal treatment in the armed forces, and the protests that gripped the country.
“I’m thinking about protests in my country ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, the equality expressed in our Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that I have sworn my adult life to support and defend,” Brown said. “I’m thinking about a history of racial issues and my own experiences that didn’t always sing of liberty and equality.”
Protests and occasional violent confrontations, including one in Portland, Ore., last month that turned deadly and one in Louisville this week after a grand jury in Kentucky declined to charge any officers in the killing of Breonna Taylor, have continued to roil the country and are further increasing concerns at the Pentagon.
“The main fear is that Portland is off-Broadway and that Broadway would be something here,” said Derek Chollet, who was an assistant secretary of defense under former president Barack Obama. “The idea is that you are going to have a lot of kindling out there and Trump is doing nothing to keep that from getting more flammable.”
--more--"
Biden says ‘he’ll leave’ as the Hill reports that 40 groups have called on a House panel to investigate Pentagon's use of coronavirus funds in the $ecret war.
"At UN, China, Russia, and US butt heads over pandemic responses; The clash was one of the few real-time exchanges among top officials at this year’s COVID-distanced UN General Assembly meeting" by Edith Lederer The Associated Press, September 24, 2020
UNITED NATIONS — The United States butted heads with China and Russia at the United Nations on Thursday over responsibility for the pandemic that has interrupted the world, trading allegations about who mishandled and politicized the virus in one of the few real-time exchanges among top officials at this year’s COVID-distanced UN General Assembly meeting.
The remarks at the UN Security Council’s ministerial meeting on the assembly’s sidelines came just after UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres decried the lack of international cooperation in tackling the still “out-of-control” coronavirus.
Screw him.
The sharp exchanges, at the end of a virtual meeting on “Post COVID-19 Global Governance,” reflected the deep divisions among the three veto-wielding council members that have escalated since the virus first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan in January. They also crackled with an energy and action that the prerecorded set pieces of leader speeches at the virtual meeting have thus far lacked.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking first, stressed the importance of UN-centered multilateralism and alluded to countries — including the United States — opting out of making a COVID-19 vaccine a global public good available to people everywhere.
“In such a challenging moment, major countries are even more duty-bound to put the future of humankind first, discard Cold War mentality and ideological bias and come together in the spirit of partnership to tide over the difficulties,” Wang said, and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said the pandemic and its “common misfortune did not iron out interstate differences, but to the contrary deepened them. In a whole number of countries there is a temptation to look abroad for those who are responsible for their own internal problems,” he said, “and we see attempts on the part of individual countries to use the current situation in order to move forward their narrow interests of the moment in order to settle the score with the undesirable governments or geopolitical competitors.”
All that was too much for the United States’ UN ambassador, Kelly Craft, who opened her remarks late in the meeting with a blunt rejoinder. “Shame on each of you. I am astonished and disgusted by the content of today’s discussion,” Craft said. She said some representatives were “squandering this opportunity for political purposes. President Trump has made it very clear: We will do whatever is right, even if it’s unpopular, because, let me tell you what, this is not a popularity contest,” Craft said.
She quoted Trump’s speech Tuesday to the virtual opening of the General Assembly’s leaders meeting in which he said that to chart a better future, “we must hold accountable the nation which unleashed this plague onto the world: China. The Chinese Communist Party’s decision to hide the origins of this virus, minimize its danger, and suppress scientific cooperation transformed a local epidemic into a global pandemic,” Craft said, adding that these actions “prove that not all member states are equally committed to public health, transparency, and their international obligations,” but she ended her remarks saying one lesson from the pandemic is the need for “unity, not division,” and calling for council members “to work together in transparency and in good faith.”
Chinese UN Ambassador Zhang Jun asked for the floor at the end of the meeting and delivered a lengthy retort, saying “China resolutely opposes and rejects the baseless accusations by the United States. Abusing the platform of the UN and its Security Council, the US has been spreading political virus and disinformation, and creating confrontation and division. The US should understand that its failure in handling COVID-19 is totally its fault,” Zhang said.
Russia’s UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia expressed regret that Craft used Thursday’s meeting “to make unfounded accusations” against one council member and quoted Lavrov saying the crisis has shown the need for “the interdependence, interconnectedness of all states without exception in all walks of life. It’s hard to disagree with that, but unfortunately, the crux of her statement, its form, and its tone, do not correspond to that appeal at all,” he said, responding to Craft’s call for unity
The United Nations chief said in opening the Security Council meeting that the world failed to cooperate in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic. Guterres said that if the world responds to even more catastrophic challenges with the same disunity and disarray, “I fear the worst.” He said the international community’s failure “was the result of a lack of global preparedness, cooperation, unity, and solidarity.”
Guterres pointed to the nearly 1 million people around the world that the coronavirus has killed, the more than 30 million who have been infected. He said the global response is more and more fragmented, and “as countries go in different directions, the virus goes in every direction.”
What is needed more, Guterres said, is a cooperation that not only involves nations but includes global and regional organizations, international financial institutions, trade alliances, and others including the business community, civil society, cities and regions, academia, and young people.
Lavrov also praised the World Health Organization for acting professionally and providing “effective preventive steps” to minimize the pandemic’s effect. President Trump pulled out of the WHO, accusing the UN agency of being under Chinese influence.....
So much for all the hot air. They are all in this together.
--more--"
The next flash point appeared to be North Korea, but that was quickly snuffed so maybe an invasion of Cuba instead?
I hope the troops are up for it:
"Massachusetts representatives recount dismaying Fort Hood visit" by Gal Tziperman Lotan Globe Staff, September 23, 2020
Walking the path where Fort Hood Pfc. Vanessa Guillén took her final steps was a chilling experience for US Representatives Stephen F. Lynch, Ayanna Pressley, and Katherine Clark.
The three Massachusetts congresspeople, part of a delegation that traveled to Fort Hood last week, spoke about what they called deplorable conditions for service members and their families in a press call Wednesday: soldiers afraid to report their experiences with sexual assault; dismally low morale; an environment in which suicides are often disregarded or treated as a nuisance; a military spouse who found black mold in her baby’s crib mattress and car seat.
The US Army post in Killeen, Texas, has been under scrutiny following the deaths of 28 people, five of which were ruled homicides. The rest were accidents, suicides, deaths related to illness, or cases still under investigation. Sergeant Elder N. Fernandes of Brockton disappeared Aug. 17 after reporting that he had experienced sexual assault, and was found dead 11 days later about 25 miles away from the base. A preliminary autopsy found he had died by suicide.
“We need to address the toxic culture of fear, intimidation, harassment, and indifference, not only on this post but within our military hierarchy. Women and men in every single workplace, and certainly these patriots who are serving our country, must be treated with dignity and respect,” Clark said. “One of the phrases that stuck with me was a soldier who said suicides are treated as an inconvenience. This indifference not only compounds the trauma, but it adds to the stigma and reluctance to seek help.”
Messages to Fort Hood officials were not returned Wednesday.
Pressley said she was shocked to see how service members and their families were living, conditions she likened to what she has seen in neglected public housing: black mold, roaches, rodents, asbestos, and water damage.
They didn't divert any coronavirus money to improve the barracks?
The representatives advocated for the I Am Vanessa Guillén act, a bill named for a 20-year-old soldier found dead in April after telling her family a sergeant on the base was sexually harassing her. The bill would change the way sexual assaults in the military are investigated, taking the case away from a soldier’s chain of command.....
--more--"
Fort Hood is notorious for a base shooting years ago, and has the reputation for being a base heavily devoted to mind-control programs, so I expect the pre$$ and the politicians to put a hood over that as well.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
NEXT DAY UPDATES:
Trump announces Amy Coney Barrett as nominee to Supreme Court
It's all about the Catholic vote according to the analysis.
Collins faces toughest challenge
Better get up there and cast a ballot.
Echoes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on her old Cambridge street
They have found memories of her appointer.
Expect liberal rulings from the ‘most conservative’ court
With Roe v. Wade, much more than abortion is at stake. The 1973 ruling has supported an expansive view of privacy rights, from the bedroom to our personal data, that now might be called into question and lead to calamities:
Trump might try to steal the election
Trump campaign sues to block mail-in ballot rule changes
Many still cherish the post office
Federal prosecutor in Massachusetts criticizes Barr in letter
That's where they drew the line.
