"Inside Trump’s failure: the rush to abandon leadership role on the virus" by Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland and Eric Lipton New York Times, July 18, 2020
WASHINGTON — Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic, and political disaster.
They saw their immediate role as practical problem-solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing, but their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once what many consider a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country.
Did he have a choice?
They shutdown against his will and told him he has no business in the race riots or school reopening.
What could he really do?
Were it Obama, the pre$$ would praising what happened as tremendous success.
Over a critical period beginning in mid-April, President Trump and his team convinced themselves that the outbreak was fading, that they had given state governments all the resources they needed to contain its remaining “embers,” and that it was time to ease up on the lockdown.
In doing so, he was ignoring warnings that the numbers would continue to drop only if social distancing was kept in place, rushing instead to restart the economy.
For scientific affirmation, they turned to Dr. Deborah Birx, the sole public health professional in Meadows’s group. A highly regarded infectious diseases expert, she was a constant source of upbeat news for the president and his aides, walking the halls with charts emphasizing that outbreaks were gradually easing.
On April 11, she told the coronavirus task force in the Situation Room that the nation was in good shape.
A sharp pivot soon followed, with consequences that continue to plague the country today.
This is the second or third day they are emphasizing the plague-like quality of COVID when it is nothing of the sort; however, that doesn't mean the more lethal bioweapon scheduled to be released soon along with other things won't make the fall and winter seem that way.
Even as experts warned that the pandemic was far from under control, Trump went, in a matter of days, from proclaiming that he alone had the authority to decide when the economy would reopen to pushing that responsibility onto the states. The government issued detailed reopening guidelines, but almost immediately, Trump began criticizing Democratic governors who did not “liberate” their states.
Trump’s bet that the crisis would fade away was wrong, but the approach he embraced was not just a misjudgment. Instead, it was a deliberate strategy he would stick to as evidence mounted that the virus would continue to infect and kill large numbers of Americans.
Yeah, and they were caught inflating figures and positive test rates in Florida to exponential degrees. This whole f**king thing has been a fraudulent distortion or outright f**king lie from the start.
He and his top aides would openly disdain much of the scientific research into the disease and the advice of experts on how to contain it, seek to muzzle Dr. Anthony Fauci and other authoritative voices, and continue to distort reality even as it became clear that Trump’s hopes for a rapid rebound in the economy and his electoral prospects were not materializing.
That's what is in-between the pages of the Bo$ton Globe every day. The pre$$ proves it is psychopathic by projecting its illness on others.
Now interviews with more than two dozen officials inside the administration and in the states, and a review of e-mails and documents, reveal previously unreported details about how the White House put the nation on its current course during a fateful period this spring.
■ Birx was more central than publicly known to the judgment inside the West Wing that the virus was on a downward path. Her model-based assessment failed to account for a vital variable: how Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.
■ The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests, but more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting the president’s push to crank up the economy. The result was to intensify Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing, a vivid example of how he often waged war with science and his own administration’s experts and stated policies.
If Trump says that, he is excoriated.
■ Trump’s bizarre public statements, his refusal to wear a mask, and his pressure on states to get their economies going again left governors and other state officials scrambling to deal with a leadership vacuum.
It is not bizarre at all; in fact, it's the right thing to do because the masks do nothing but harm you. That is how we know public officials don't really care about our health, they just want us to slave up.
■ Not until early June did White House officials even begin to recognize that their assumptions about the course of the pandemic had proved wrong. Even now there are internal divisions over how far to go in having officials publicly acknowledge the reality of the situation.
My interpretation thus far is they are scapegoating Birx. She is being sidelined as Trump’s choice has consequences as it appears that Fauci has prevailed inside the bowels of evil.
Despite the outside warnings and evidence by early May that new infections remained higher than anticipated, Birx regularly delivered what the new team was hoping for. By early June, it was clear that the White House had gotten it wrong.
Digging into new data from Birx, they concluded the virus was in fact spreading with invisible ferocity during the weeks in May when states were opening up with Trump’s encouragement and many were all but declaring victory.
There they go again, distorting reality.
The pre$$ is the real evil in our nation.
With the benefit of hindsight, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, acknowledged in a conversation with the Journal of the American Medical Association that administration officials severely underestimated infections in April and May.....
He is the evil puke who tipped the hand regarding the coming horror.
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He is also the one calling for a $weeping public relations campaign to encourage everyone to get jabbed with the poi$on they are developing:
"Mistrust of a coronavirus vaccine could imperil widespread immunity" by Jan Hoffman New York Times, July 18, 2020
Almost daily, President Trump and leaders worldwide say they are racing to develop a coronavirus vaccine, in perhaps the most urgent mission in the history of medical science, but the repeated assurances of near-miraculous speed are exacerbating a problem that has largely been overlooked and one that public health experts say must be addressed now: persuading people to actually get the shot.
A growing number of polls find so many people saying they would not get a coronavirus vaccine that its potential to shut down the pandemic could be in jeopardy. Distrust of it is particularly pronounced in Black communities, which have been disproportionately devastated by the virus, but even many staunch supporters of immunization say they are wary of this vaccine.
Perhaps there is hope for us yet.
“The bottom line is I have absolutely no faith in the FDA and in the Trump administration,” said Joanne Barnes, a retired fourth-grade teacher from Fairbanks, Alaska, who said she was otherwise always scrupulously up-to-date on getting her shots, including those for shingles, flu, and pneumonia. “I just feel like there’s a rush to get a vaccine out, so I’m very hesitant.”
Mistrust of vaccines has been on the rise in the US in recent years, a sentiment that resists categorization by political party, educational background, or socioeconomic demographics. It has been fanned by a handful of celebrities, but now, anti-vaccine groups are attracting a new type of clientele altogether.
I object to the terminology of the Pharma-pimping pre$$ (New York Times again, sigh), as if the "anti-vaxxers" are somehow making money of this. It's the exact opposite, and the "anti-vaxxers" are the ones trying to save not one;y lives, but freedom, liberty, and the very civilization itself.
Jackie Schlegel, founder of Texans for Vaccine Choice, which presses for school vaccine exemptions, said that her group’s membership had skyrocketed since April. “Our phones are ringing off the hook with people who are saying, ‘I’ve gotten every vaccine, but I’m not getting this one,’ ” she said. “ ‘How do I opt out?’ ” She said she often has to assure callers, “They’re not coming to your home to force-vax you.”
Not yet anyway, and those exemptions will soon be gone.
The fastidious process to develop a safe, effective vaccine typically takes a decade; some have taken far longer, but the administration of Trump, himself once an outspoken vaccine skeptic, has been saying recently that a coronavirus vaccine could be ready this fall. While it has removed certain conventional barriers, such as funding, many experts still believe that the proposed timeline could be unduly optimistic, but whenever a coronavirus vaccine is approved, the assumption has been that initial demand would far outstrip supply. The need to establish a bedrock of confidence in it has largely gone overlooked and unaddressed.
That is because, like with child care, the sick, genocidal globalists gamed out the fearful public rushing into their protective arms. It never occurred to them that we see them for what they truly are, and it leaves them astounded.
Earlier this month, a nationwide task force of 23 epidemiologists and vaccine behavior specialists released a detailed report — which itself got little attention — saying that such work was urgent. Operation Warp Speed, the $10 billion public-private partnership that is driving much of the vaccine research, they wrote, “rests upon the compelling yet unfounded presupposition that ‘If we build it, they will come.’ ”
Field of Nightmares!
In fact, wrote the group, led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Texas State University anthropology department: “If poorly designed and executed, a COVID-19 vaccination campaign in the U.S. could undermine the increasingly tenuous belief in vaccines and the public health authorities that recommend them — especially among people most at risk of COVID-19 impacts.”
Where is the trash can because that is where this agenda-pushing report can be filed!
The researchers noted that although billions of federal dollars were pouring into biomedical research for a vaccine, there seemed to be virtually no funding set aside for social scientists to investigate hesitancy around vaccines. Focus groups to help pinpoint the most effective messaging to counter opposition, the authors said, should get underway immediately.
I'm going to stop here and propose a simple thing that should end the debate: where the vaccines really good things that did protect health, would it not be SELF-EVIDENT and therefore readily believed?
The FACT that they have to resort to a SALES JOB to get us to ACCEPT it tells you all you really need to know!
The current political and cultural turbulence, abetted by the Trump administration’s frequent disregard for scientific expertise, is only amplifying the diverse underpinnings of vaccine-skeptic positions. They include the terrible legacy of federal medical experiments on African-Americans and other disadvantaged groups, a distrust of Big Pharma, resistance to government mandates like school immunization requirements, adherence to homeopathy and other “natural” medicines, and a clutch of apocalyptic beliefs and conspiracy theories particularly around COVID-19, sometimes perpetuated by celebrities, most recently Kanye West.
You can shove the last insult/compliment, and I'm heading to that avenue of treatment.
“It’s so many of our children that are being vaccinated and paralyzed,” he told Forbes this month. “So when they say the way we’re going to fix COVID is with a vaccine, I’m extremely cautious. That’s the mark of the beast.”
West is woke!
A poll in May by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only about half of Americans said they would be willing to get a coronavirus vaccine. One in five said they would refuse and 31 percent were uncertain. A poll in late June by researchers at the University of Miami found that 22 percent of white and Latino respondents and 42 percent of Black respondents said they agreed with this statement: “The coronavirus is being used to force a dangerous and unnecessary vaccine on Americans.”
“The trust issues are just tremendous in the Black community,” said Edith Perry, a member of the Maryland Community Research Advisory Board, which seeks to ensure that the benefits of health research encompass Black and Latino communities.
Where is BLM when you really, really need them, huh?
The solution, she said, is not just to employ the conventional strategy of meeting with Black church congregations, especially if the government and vaccine producers want to reach millennials.
“The pharmaceutical industry would have to convince some of the young people in Black Lives Matter to get on board,” Perry said. “Throw up your hands and say: ‘I apologize. I know we did it wrong and I need your help to get it right,’ because we need a vaccine and we need Black and Hispanic participation.”
They are already tools of the billionaires, and is that who is leading your congregation?
May God help you.
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Related:
"As demand for coronavirus testing surges around the nation, laboratories that process samples are again experiencing backlogs that have left anxious patients and their doctors waiting days — sometimes a week or more — for results. At the city and state levels, testing delays could mask persistent rises in case numbers and could cloud ways to combat the coronavirus, as health officials continue to find themselves one step behind the virus’s rapid and often silent spread, specialists said. Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, acknowledged the dangers associated with such delays in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired on Sunday. “The average test delay is too long,” Collins said. “That really undercuts the value of the testing, because you do the testing to find out who’s carrying the virus, and then quickly get them isolated so they don’t spread it around, and it’s very hard to make that work when there’s a long delay built in.” Though the coronavirus testing landscape continues to expand, most patient samples must still be routed through laboratories for processing, and the demand is once again straining supplies, equipment, and trained technicians and causing shortages. Additionally, negative results can be of little use if they are delivered after too long of a delay. Diagnostic testing, which searches for bits of the coronavirus’s genetic material, can only assess a person’s health status from the time the sample was taken, and cannot account for any subsequent exposures to the virus. To speed turnaround times, Collins said, health officials are pushing for more point-of-care testing — “on the spot” tests designed to be done rapidly and easily. A handful of point-of-care tests have been greenlighted for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration."
Test, test, test, trace, trace, trace.
"South Carolina has set another record for newly diagnosed COVID-19 cases in a single day. Sunday saw 2,335 people newly diagnosed with COVID-19, the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control reported. South Carolina has reported 2,000 new cases three times since the virus was first detected in the state in March. All have been in the past eight days. The state has spent much of the past month in the top four in the nation for new COVID-19 cases when adjusted by population. Health officials also reported 19 new deaths Sunday, bringing the death toll to 1,138 people, but one key statistic has been missing from the public over the weekend. Health officials said they are unable to release how many people are hospitalized with COVID-19 because the state is following a federal request to change how it reports hospitalizations."
"Most of the 85 young children in a South Texas county who are known to have contracted the coronavirus tested positive this month amid a surge in the state, a health official said Sunday. Nearly all of the children, most of whom are 1 year old or younger, are expected to recover on their own, Annette Rodriguez, the Corpus Christi-Nueces County public health director, told the Associated Press. One of the children died, but officials were still trying to determine the cause, she said. The county, which is home to about 362,000 people and sits on the Gulf Coast, is one of several COVID-19 hot spots in Texas, which has been hammered by the disease in recent weeks. Texas health officials reported 7,300 new confirmed cases on Sunday and said 93 more people have died due to COVID-19, bringing the number of reported cases to 325,030 and the number of deaths to 3,958. The state reported 10,592 individuals who were hospitalized with the virus on Sunday."
One child to many from COVID, if that was even the cause.
"The number of people hospitalized in New York with the coronavirus continued to drop to one of the lowest levels since the pandemic began, Governor Andrew Cuomo said Sunday. There were at least 720 people hospitalized in the state, the lowest since March 18 and down slightly from Saturday, Cuomo said. The number of deaths in the state rose slightly to 13. Daily statewide statistics show New York with more than 500 newly confirmed cases, representing about 1 percent of all tests performed. New York, once a pandemic hotspot, has so far avoided a surge in new cases like those plaguing other states in the South and West, but the Democratic governor has repeatedly warned New Yorkers could be at risk if they abandon social distancing and other practices adopted to stop the spread of the virus. More than 25,000 people have died statewide since the outbreak began earlier this year."
When is Cuomo going to be half account for those deaths, and isn't it odd that some reopening don't result in surges (usually in blue electoral states).
Virus delays oldest fishing rodeo in US; no new date set
They were just getting their $ea legs back from Obama's Gulf Gusher, too.
Also see:
17 new deaths, 177 new COVID-19 confirmed cases Saturday, state reports
113 Rhode Islanders were told they had COVID-19 when they didn’t
Both were page B6 upper-right hand corner specials.
"People seek relief from the heat — and that means taking off masks, despite health advice" by Lucas Phillips and John Hilliard Globe Correspondent and Globe Staff, July 19, 2020
People sought relief from scorching temperatures and humidity at public beaches and parks across the state Sunday — but even with the continuing threat of the coronavirus pandemic, many chose to skip the advice of health experts and not don masks.
I applaud them!
As much of the state sweltered under a heat advisory that is expected to last through Monday, crowds gathered on the shoreline of Boston’s M Street and Carson beaches.
At the M Street Beach early Sunday afternoon, among the throngs seeking to escape the summer heat there none could be seen wearing masks, despite warnings that the coronavirus can easily spread among such a large crowd. On Saturday, many hundreds of young people packed the sand also without masks or distancing from one another, which had raised the concerns of some epidemiologists.
Of course, if you protest police brutality it's okay.
Dr. C. Robert Horsburgh Jr., a Boston University professor of epidemiology, said it’s discouraging to hear that so many people would not follow the direction of medical experts or of leaders like Governor Charlie Baker, who has mandated masks in situations where distancing isn’t possible.
Baker is only asking the public to take reasonable steps to help stop the pandemic, Horsburgh said.
“I don’t want to jump on people; I get it, it’s hotter than blazes,” he said in a phone interview Sunday. “but I hope that people will think about their fellow citizens and maybe be more careful than they would be just for themselves.”
F**k your damn unhealthy advice and guilt trip!
Samuel Scarpino, a Northeastern University epidemiologist, said the state needs a coordinated, thoughtful messaging campaign that accurately conveys the importance of mask wearing.
“Our elected leaders need to mandate mask wearing in all public places (excluding those with a medical issue that would preclude safe mask wearing) and stress the importance of high compliance in mask wearing if we’re to continue leading slightly more normal lives,” Scarpino said in an e-mail on Sunday.
Slightly more normal?
Beyond that, the mask is a medical issue for anyone who wears one because it deprives the person of oxygen while they breathe in carbon dioxide.
The state reported 12 new confirmed coronavirus deaths on Sunday, bringing the Massachusetts death toll due to COVID-19 to 8,213. The total number of confirmed cases of the disease also grew by 218, reaching 106,882.....
Was a page B4 report today.
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Related:
Millions of homes face substantial flood risk
The article that appeared in print today is dated July 2, 2020(!) and more rain means cooler temperatures! The AGW promotion also comes as snow fell in New Hampshire yesterday.
Also see:
In the Covid-19 death of a hospital food worker, a microcosm of the pandemic
The article is dated June 30, 2020, and yet it appeared in print today.
Related:
Global cases surpass 14 million; 600,000 deaths
They have "never seen anything like this COVID surge."
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Time to go to the polls:
"Trump faces rising disapproval and widespread distrust on coronavirus, Post-ABC poll finds
By Scott Clement and Dan Balz Washington Post, July 17, 2020, 7:50 p.m.
WASHINGTON — Americans’ views of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic have deteriorated significantly as cases rise across the country and personal fears of becoming infected persist, a Washington Post-ABC News poll finds.
Grain of salt, please.
The Post-ABC poll shows 38 percent of Americans approve of his handling of the outbreak, down from 46 percent in May and 51 percent in March. Sixty percent disapprove, up from 53 percent in May and 45 percent in March.
More than half of the public — 52 percent — now disapproves ‘‘strongly’’ of Trump’s handling of the outbreak, roughly double the percentage who say they strongly approve of his efforts and an increase from 36 percent in strong disapproval since March.
Trump has sent mixed messages throughout the pandemic and has often been at odds with scientists and health officials in his administration. He now faces clear credibility problems with the public. More than 6 in 10 say they do not trust what he says about the outbreak, including 2 in 3 political independents and nearly 3 in 10 Republicans.
The pre$$ needs to look themselves in the mirror and include that in their poll!
Trump’s disconnect with the public is clear on questions about reopening the economy and the wearing of masks. While Trump has called on states to lift business restrictions in an effort to boost the economy, Americans say that controlling the spread of the virus is a higher priority.
Are you a slave or are you not a slave?
A 63 percent majority say it is more important to try to control the spread of the virus even if it hurts the economy, up from 57 percent in May. The share who ‘‘strongly’’ favor controlling the virus’s spread over restarting the economy has grown from 41 percent in May to 52 percent in the latest survey.
They are willing to cut their own noses off despite their own face, even if the proposed solution has failed. That must be why they want the mask.
On the subject of masks, nearly 8 in 10 Americans say they are wearing one most or all of the time when they come close to others in public. Trump wore a mask for the first time in public last week after months in which he showed reluctance to follow the recommendations of public health officials. Even after that display at a military hospital, however, he publicly contended the use of masks should not be mandatory.
Trump’s worsening ratings on management of the outbreak reflect not only a drop in approval among Democrats but also declines among some groups that have been core parts of his coalition since 2016. Trump’s ratings for handling the coronavirus have dropped by 16 percentage points among white evangelical Protestants to 68 percent today; by 15 points among white men without college degrees to 56 percent; and by 11 points among rural residents to 48 percent approval.
Political independents continue to give Trump negative marks for his handling of the outbreak by a wide margin, with 39 percent approving and 58 percent disapproving in the latest survey. A scant 4 percent of Democrats approve of Trump’s efforts. Among Republicans, nearly 4 in 5 approve, but a notable 19 percent disapprove.
The Post-ABC poll finds 66 percent of Americans saying they are very or somewhat worried about themselves or a family member becoming infected, hardly budging from 63 percent in late May and 69 percent in late March. Five percent say someone in their immediate family has already caught the virus, up from 2 percent who said this two months ago.
Because they will separate you from them and they will never be seen by you again.
The partisan gap in infection fears has closed somewhat in the past two months.
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I'm sorry, I'm sick of the distorted reality and fraud of that they say in their polls as they now make front-page news:
"Trump leans into false coronavirus claims, suggests he may not accept election results in combative Fox News interview" by Katie Rogers New York Times, July 19, 2020
WASHINGTON — An agitated President Donald Trump offered a string of combative and often dubious assertions in an interview aired Sunday, defending his handling of the coronavirus with misleading evidence, attacking his own health experts, disputing polls showing him trailing in his reelection race and defending people who display the Confederate flag as victims of “cancel culture.”
If that isn't the NYT pot hollering kettle, I don't know what is!
Trump suggested that he might not accept the results of the election should he lose. “It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election. I really do.” Trump, who has voted by mail, has repeatedly warned, without evidence, that mail elections would involve robbed mailboxes, forged signatures and ballots printed by foreign countries.
He must be taking his cues from them, and why should he accept defeat?
The Democrats never did!
The president’s remarks, delivered in an interview on “Fox News Sunday,” amounted to a contentious potpourri more commonly found on his Twitter feed and at his political rallies. The difference this time was a vigorous attempt by the host, Chris Wallace, to fact-check him, leading to several clashes between the two on matters ranging from the coronavirus response to whether Trump would accept the results of the election should he lose.
The president made a litany of false claims about his administration’s handling of the virus, despite evidence that key officials and public health experts advising the president made crucial missteps and played down the spread of the disease this spring. In the interview, Trump falsely claimed that the United States had “one of the lowest mortality rates in the world” from the virus.
“That’s not true, sir,” Wallace said.
Where were they in 2003, 'eh?
“Do you have the numbers, please?” Trump said. “Because I heard we had the best mortality rate.”
The United States has the eighth-worst fatality rate among reported coronavirus cases in the world, and the death rate per 100,000 people — 42.83 — ranks it third worst, according to data on the countries most affected by the coronavirus compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Trump said that by increasing testing, his administration was “creating trouble for the fake news to come along and say, ‘Oh, we have more cases.’”
Look at the TRICKY nd CONFUSING WAY the NYT presented the data!
You do the math and the death rate becomes 0.04283 -- and that is relative to alleged case levels, not total population.
They killed an economy and changed way of life over that?
Something wicked this way comes.
Trump falsely claimed that the coronavirus case rate in other countries was lower than in the United States because those nations did not engage in testing. When Wallace pointed out a low case rate across the European Union, the president suggested it was possible that those countries “don’t test,” and when Wallace pointed out that the death rate in the United States was rising, Trump replied by blaming China.
That's the default position and narrative that promotes war with China.
Why that would be needed when nearly every damn government is on board with COVID lockdowns means other intere$ts are at stake.
Trump called Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, an “alarmist” who provided faulty information in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. “I don’t know that he’s a leaker,” Trump said during the interview. “He’s a little bit of an alarmist. That’s OK. A little bit of an alarmist.”
Trump said that Fauci had been against his decision to close the borders to travelers from China in January. That is misleading: While Fauci initially opposed the idea on the grounds that a ban would prevent medical professionals from traveling to hard-hit areas, he supported the decision by the time it was made.
Trump also said Fauci had been against Americans wearing masks. Fauci has said he does not regret urging Americans not to wear masks in the early days of the pandemic, citing a severe shortage of protective gear for medical professionals at the time.
The pre$$ covering for the Deep $tate ghoul Fauci is not surprising, but Trump's disingenuousness is.
Why has he not fired that f**k, and why is Birx now taking the fall?
Sexism or hierarchy?
Trump said he doubted whether Dr. Robert R. Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was correct in predicting that the pandemic would be worse this fall. “I don’t know,” Trump said, “and I don’t think he knows.” He said public health experts and the World Health Organization “got a lot wrong” early on, including a theory that the virus would abate as the weather warmed — one that Trump himself had promoted repeatedly. Then the president reiterated his earlier claim, unsupported by science, that the virus would suddenly cease one day. “It’s going to disappear, and I’ll be right,” Trump said, “because I’ve been right probably more than anybody else.”
He's deluding himself, which is why one can not have faith in him.
On the upcoming election, Trump insulted that Fox News pollsters as “among the worst” when presented with data that showed him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, claiming that he had seen polls that showed him winning.
“I understand you still have more than 100 days to this election, but at this point you’re losing,” Wallace told Trump after detailing a new Fox News poll that showed Biden leading the president by 8 percentage points, 49% to 41%, among registered voters.
“First of all, I’m not losing,” Trump replied, “because those are fake polls. They were fake in 2016, and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016,” but in reality, the Fox News poll was much better for him than another major survey released Sunday. A Washington Post-ABC News poll showed Biden with a double-digit lead: 55% to 40% among registered voters. The numbers were part of a slate of polls showing Biden’s lead widening as the pandemic weighed on the president’s approval ratings.
Trump said he was not worried about losing the election with the decision this past week to replace his campaign manager, Brad Parscale. Trump called Parscale “a great digital guy” before saying that many of his 2016 campaign hands were getting more involved. He did not mention his new campaign manager, Bill Stepien, by name.
Trump suggested that he might not accept the results of the election should he lose. Wallace, who spent the interview grilling the president — a tactic he has used in other high-profile interviews — pointed out that Trump said the same thing in 2016.
In other words, he was all over him like green flies on shit!
“You don’t know until you see,” Trump said.
When Wallace asked the president if he could understand why Black people would be angry about their increased likelihood to be killed by police, Trump reiterated a claim he made in another interview last week: that white people are fatally shot in high numbers, too.
“I mean, many, many whites are killed,” Trump said. “I hate to say, but this is going on for decades.”
Statistics show that while more white Americans are killed by the police overall, people of color are killed at higher rates.
White lives don't matter.
Trump also refused to back down from supporting people who were against abolishing the Confederate flag, even as Wallace pointed out that they had used it in defense of slavery. The president equated the movement to pull down the flags and Confederate monuments to “cancel culture,” a term more commonly used to describe a boycott against a person, often a celebrity, who says or does something culturally offensive, “and you know, the whole thing with cancel culture, we can’t cancel our whole history,” Trump said. “We can’t forget that the North and the South fought. We have to remember that. Otherwise we’ll end up fighting again.”
It's cities versus rural now, different kind of civil war that has nothing to do with race.
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I think I'm going to sidestep the rank insubordination coming from the Pentagon in favor of payroll:
"Trump demands payroll tax cut as GOP looks to reduce benefits the unemployed get" by Jeff Stein and Erica Werner Washington Post, July 19, 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump sought to draw a hard line on the coronavirus relief bill Sunday, saying it must include a payroll tax cut and liability protections for businesses, as lawmakers prepare to plunge into negotiations over unemployment benefits and other key provisions in coming days.
Trump also said ‘‘we do need some kind of immunity’’ in the bill. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, has repeatedly insisted the legislation must include liability protection for businesses, health care providers, schools, and others. Democrats oppose this, too.
Without COVID, they could never indemnify corporations or other institutions, and when one things about it, what they are describing with their immunity is FA$CI$M! Can't sue the state or the corporations that control it.
Trump downplayed the spikes in coronavirus infections nationwide, arguing they are because of high levels of testing, something health specialists in his own administration dispute. He also argued the economy is ‘‘expanding and growing beautifully,’’ blaming Democratic governors for shutdowns he insisted were designed to hurt him in November.
He's wrong about the economy, but right about the bogus, wildly inaccurate, false-positive-generating tests.
Trump’s comments come as Senate Republicans are exploring new limits on emergency unemployment benefits for people who were high-earners before losing their jobs, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss details of internal planning.
If the White House and Senate GOP priorities make it into the bill, the legislation would effectively cut taxes for people who have jobs while cutting benefits for the unemployed.
McConnell is expected to introduce an approximately $1 trillion stimulus bill in coming days that will include a limited extension of the federal unemployment benefits approved by Congress in March. Those benefits are set to expire as soon as this week.
Republicans are seeking to curb the current infusion of federal spending on unemployment benefits as they try to constrain the overall cost of the relief package, which is likely to include expensive priorities such as state aid and school funding, among other urgent policies to deal with the pandemic.
McConnell and House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, will meet Monday to discuss the emerging legislation with Trump and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
One idea discussed by Republican policy makers is to eliminate or curb the amount of additional federal unemployment benefits allocated to people who earned above a certain income threshold before losing their jobs. Exactly what that number could be remains unclear. Republicans are exploring similar measures to target another round of $1,200 stimulus payments for those toward the bottom of the income distribution.
Limiting unemployment benefits to those further down the income distribution would help the GOP bring down the overall price tag of their bill. It could also raise new complications for the state unemployment offices that have already been overwhelmed by the complexity of getting funding out to an unprecedented surge of jobless Americans.
The fate of unemployment benefits is likely to prove one of the key sticking points in congressional negotiations, with tens of millions of Americans financially dependent on the outcome. Senior White House officials have in recent days sought to limit the extension while denying they are seeking to end federal unemployment benefits. Larry Kudlow, the president’s senior economic adviser, disputed Friday that the administration wants to dismantle the program.
Multiple other issues also remain to be fought out, but McConnell has acknowledged that negotiations on the upcoming package will be much more difficult as partisan tensions mount with the election approaching.
Complicating matters, the administration and Senate Republicans are at odds over priorities in the bill, with the administration opposing billions Senate Republicans sought to spend on coronavirus testing and tracing and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among other things.....
The Republican Senate has betrayed us!
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Related:
"More than 6 million people enrolled in food stamps in the first three months of the pandemic, an unprecedented expansion that is likely to continue as more jobless people deplete their savings and billions in unemployment aid expires this month. From February to May, the program grew by 17 percent, about three times faster than in any previous three months, according to state data collected by The New York Times. Its rapid expansion is a testament to both the hardship imposed by the pandemic and the importance of a program that until recently drew conservative attack. Among the 42 states for which the Times collected data, caseloads grew in all but one. The rolls have surged across Appalachian hamlets, urban cores like Miami and Detroit, and white-picket-fence suburbs outside Atlanta and Houston, rising faster in rich counties than in poor ones, as the downturn caused by the virus claimed the restaurant, cleaning, and gig economy jobs that support the affluent. Food stamps — formally known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — support young and old, healthy and disabled, the working and the unemployed, making it the closest thing the United States has to a guaranteed income. Though administered by states, the benefits are paid by the federal government, with no spending cap, and the program has largely avoided the delays that have plagued unemployment insurance. About 43 million people — roughly 1 of every 8 Americans — now receive SNAP, the Times found."
It's going to get even worse.
"Biden leads by double digits as coronavirus takes a toll on the president, poll finds" by Dan Balz and Scott Clement Washington Post, July 19, 2020
WASHINGTON — President Trump faces a significant challenge in his bid to win reelection in November, with former vice president Joe Biden holding a double-digit lead nationally and the president’s approval ratings crumbling amid a spreading coronavirus pandemic and a weakened economy, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The survey portrays an embattled president whose fortunes have declined markedly since the coronavirus arrived in the United States months ago. Trump’s prospects for winning in November appear to depend heavily on his ability to rally an enthusiastic core base of supporters and on convincing a broader swath of a largely skeptical public that he is dealing effectively with the pandemic.
Before the planned $camdemic, it was easy sailing to a second term. He had just cleared impeachment and the economy was roaring.
Biden leads Trump 55 percent to 40 percent among registered voters. That compares with a 10-point Biden lead in May and a two-point edge in March, at a time when the pandemic was just beginning to spread rapidly in parts of the country. Among those who say they are certain to vote, Biden’s lead stands at 11 points.
Trump maintains an edge in the passion for his candidacy: More than 9 in 10 Trump supporters say they are enthusiastic about voting for him, with nearly 7 in 10 saying they are very enthusiastic. That compares with roughly 8 in 10 Biden supporters who say they are enthusiastic, with just under 4 in 10 saying they are very enthusiastic. The percentage of very enthusiastic Biden voters has risen by 11 points since March.
I am very unenthusiastic regarding both.
Despite the president’s attempts to shift the electorate’s focus to his criticisms of Biden, both candidates’ supporters are treating the November election as a referendum on Trump. Among Trump voters, 72 percent say what is most important is reelecting the president, including 47 percent who say this is extremely important, while 21 percent say their motivation is to defeat Biden.
Then he is done. Hoover didn't win a second term, either.
Among Biden voters, the results are roughly the opposite, with 67 percent saying what is most important is defeating the president, including 48 percent who say this is extremely important, and 24 percent saying that electing the former vice president is their main motivation.
National polling results tell only a partial story of the state of the 2020 election. Trump’s hopes for a second term rest on whether he can assemble an electoral college majority in the states, even if he were to lose the popular vote, as he did in 2016. Current polling in battleground states shows a similarly challenging pattern for Trump, however, with the president struggling to replicate the often-narrow victories that led to his election four years ago. Still, the margins in many of those states are closer than the national numbers.
Other polls in recent days have also found Trump trailing by a wide margin nationally, and the president responded Wednesday by shaking up his campaign team, demoting campaign manager Brad Parscale and elevating Bill Stepien to the job of leading the reelection effort. To date, however, the president and his campaign have struggled to settle on a consistent and effective line of attack against Biden.
The poll offers a major reason for that: the pandemic that is weighing heavily on the president. The poll was taken as the number of new cases sets records almost daily and the death toll is rising again. What is not predictable is what the situation will be closer to the election and how any changes might affect judgments of Trump’s handling of the virus and, therefore, his prospects for reelection.
The current standing between the president and his challenger appears closely tied to overall impressions of how Trump is dealing with the country’s major problems. His job approval rating has dropped sharply in the past two months and stands at 39 percent positive and 57 percent negative among voting-age adults, with 48 percent of Americans saying they strongly disapprove of the way he is doing his job. In a late-March poll, when just two points separated Biden and Trump in a head-to-head test, Trump’s approval rating stood at 48 percent positive and 46 percent negative.
The drop in Trump’s overall approval is related to a more precipitous decline in how Americans judge his handling of the coronavirus pandemic. On that question, there has been a net drop of 28 points in his approval margin since March as the president has repeatedly contradicted or ignored health experts in his administration and in the states, stoked confusion about the importance of wearing masks and at times appeared indifferent to the crisis even as conditions in many parts of the country were worsening. Currently, 38 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the pandemic, and 60 percent disapprove.
The president’s one consistent strength over the past few years has been public perceptions of his handling of the economy, especially before the pandemic forced businesses to close and millions of workers to be laid off, sending the unemployment rate soaring into double digits.
That economy he was going to run on, gone. Destroyed by Trump-hating governors.
Today, despite the country’s economic problems, he is still narrowly in positive territory, with 50 percent of Americans approving of his handling of the economy and 47 percent disapproving. In late March, he enjoyed a far-more positive rating, with 57 percent approving and 38 percent disapproving, yet the survey results indicate that voter perceptions of Trump’s handling of the pandemic outweigh perceptions of his handling of the economy in the choice for president.
Among voters who approve of how he has handled the coronavirus, 93 percent support Trump over Biden, but of the far larger group who disapprove of Trump’s handing of the pandemic, an almost equal portion, 89 percent, supports Biden over Trump.
Trump’s level of support among those who approve of his handling of the economy is lower, with 80 percent favoring him over Biden, and Trump also trails Biden by more than 2 to 1 among those adults who say they approve of Trump’s handling of the economy but disapprove of the way he has dealt with the coronavirus.
All told, Biden bests Trump on six of seven attributes and on three of four issues measured in the poll.
There is no way he can lose.
The Post-ABC poll was conducted July 12-15 among a random national sample of 1,006 adults, with 75 percent of interviews conducted by cellphone and the remaining 25 percent by landline. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points; the error margin is four percentage points for the sample of 845 registered voters. Among the 342 Trump supporters, the error margin is six percentage points, and among the 449 Biden supporters, it is five percentage points.
OMG, the sample size is miniscule and heavily weighted toward Biden!
It's another $hit poll!
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Related:
How Elizabeth Warren has kept eyes on her for the vice presidential nod
No offense, but it is the look in the eyes that bothers me.
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
If only Trump could lead on race:
Eight years after police fatally shot a Black teenager, renewed calls for an investigation
The family of a teenager shot dead by police in New Bedford in 2012, along with many community advocates, point to the teenager’s death as a tragic symbol of broader problems in policing: the aggressive use of racial profiling.
Within the Boston Police Department, complaints against officers are rarely confirmed or result in punishment
Police data provide a sweeping look at the hundreds of allegations lodged each year against officers — and show how rarely the more than 2,000 members of the department are disciplined.
What is your opinion on the matter of sweeping police reform?
On top of battling Trump, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser is among the Black female mayors navigating a new political landscape
Bowser is part of an old guard of Black mayors and city officials who find themselves on the front lines of a changing political landscape in the wake of the protests over the death of George Floyd.
John Lewis is remembered as a civil rights icon and as the ‘conscience of Congress'
John Lewis, a lion in the civil rights movement whose bloody beating by Alabama state troopers in 1965 helped galvanize opposition to racial segregation and who went on to a long and celebrated career in Congress, died. He was 80.
He was a civil rights lion with a celebrated career in Congress who died of cancer according to his gravestone. He was eulogized as the gentle conscience of America and supporters hope he can still lie in state in the Capitol amid the pandemic as he is remembered in Massachusetts.
Amid renewed calls for racial justice, how meaningful is symbolic change?
Are changes to names and symbols with racist associations a distraction from the practical goals of the anti-racist movement, or a crucial step in remaking our society? It's complicated.
Except it's not.
Someone tore down a Union army statue in Saratoga Springs
The New York Times wonders why?
Fair housing groups slam Trump’s suburban racial rhetoric
Trump promotes caricature of what conservatives want
According the the caricature by Maggie Haberman of the New York Time, and after eight pages of obituaries, this was at the bottom of page A26:
"Mass protests rock Russian Far East city, challenge Kremlin" by Yulia Khorovenkova and Daria Litvinova Associated Press, July 18, 2020
KHABAROVSK, Russia — Mass rallies challenging the Kremlin rocked Russia’s Far East city of Khabarovsk again on Saturday, as tens of thousands took to the streets to protest the arrest of the region’s governor on charges of involvement in multiple murders.
The massive unauthorized crowds gathered despite local officials’ attempts to discourage people from taking to the streets, citing the coronavirus epidemic and an alleged averted terrorist threat.
Local media estimated the rally in the city 3,800 miles east of Moscow drew 15,000 to 50,000 people, while city authorities put the number at 10,000. Hundreds of people have rallied in the city every day this week against the arrest of Sergei Furgal, reflecting widespread anger over the arrest of the popular governor and a simmering discontent with the Kremlin’s policies.
Furgal, the Khabarovsk region governor, was arrested on July 9 and flown to Moscow, where he was put in jail. Russia’s Investigative Committee says he is suspected of involvement in several murders of businessmen in 2004 and 2005.
Furgal has denied the charges, which relate to his time as a businessman importing consumer goods ranging from timber to metals. Khabarovsk residents dismissed the charges as unsubstantiated and denounced the Kremlin for targeting a governor they elected.
A member of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, Furgal was elected governor in 2018, defeating the Kremlin-backed incumbent. His victory was unexpected: Furgal didn’t actively campaign and toed the Kremlin’s line, publicly supporting his rival.
People voted for him nonetheless, delivering a humiliating blow to the main Kremlin party, United Russia, that has been losing seats in regional governments over the past two years.
During his two years in office, Furgal earned a reputation of being “the people’s governor.’’ He cut his own salary, ordered the sale of an expensive yacht that the previous administration bought, met with protesters at rallies, and significantly reduced flight fares for residents in remote areas.
“Furgal became a political symbol for the residents of the region, and all accusations — no matter how grave — are from another, non-political dimension,” political analyst Abbas Gallyamov said in a Facebook post.
The unauthorized protests are the largest ever in Khabarovsk, a city of 590,000. Moscow has not yet appointed an acting governor 11 days after Furgal’s arrest.....
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Looks like the U.S. is back to destablizing Russia again, and what does it matter?
Putin is a flaccid f**k who has thrown in with the genocidal globalists anyway!
Also see:
Rouhani says 25 million Iranians may have been infected with coronavirus
They will be no help, either.
Oh, for the days of Ahmadinejad.
You know what the Globe forgot?
The ladies!
Maybe they can serenade them with a poem later.
