In a newly leaked tape, Jared Kushner reveals himself to be even more hollow-headed than his detractors could have believed, and it's pretty clear now why Team Hatepumpkin has been unable to mount any plausible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s because Kushner and the rest of the team could not plausibly respond themselves out of a wet paper bag. The vapidity is, for this crowd, endless and all-encompassing.
In an April interview with book writer Bob Woodward, obtained by CNN, Kushner explains why The Pandemic Is Solved Now. The country had seen roughly 40,000 deaths at that point, pandemic numbers were soaring, and In Charge Of Everything Jared explained to Woodward that we were now at the "beginning of the comeback phase."
Why? Because Donald Trump was back in charge, yanking command back from "the doctors."
From the audiotape: "There were three phases. There’s the panic phase, the pain phase, and then the comeback phase. I do believe that last night symbolized kind of the beginning of the comeback phase. That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors. They’ve kind of, we have like a negotiated settlement."
That might indeed be the tersest possible explanation of why there are now nearly a quarter million dead Americans, a number that may yet double in coming months. Jared also appeared to brag to Woodward about Trump's deftness in "owning" the opening while passing all responsibility for testing and other measures to the states. "The opening is going to be very popular. People want this country open."
On the other hand, "if it opens the wrong way, the question will be did the governors follow the guidelines we set out or not?"
What comes across most in the audio clips from Blowhard Jr. is the extended Trump clan's complete confidence that they are the smartest people in the known universe. It is self-evident, in their minds, that Daddy knows better than any of the government pandemic experts, just as Daddy knows better than foreign policy experts, economic experts, and everyone else. The way to straighten everything out is to fire those other people and have the superior Trump clan make decisions in their place.
"The most dangerous people around the President are over-confident idiots," he ... said willingly. But now Daddy has replaced those people with "more thoughtful people who kind of know their place."
...
Ahem.
We know, from Donald Trump's repeated wordburps, that Donald Trump feels Kushner is the smartest non-Trump person he knows. This may be true; the runners-up in the Trump Genius Hierarchy, after all, are Uday, Qusay, Jeffrey Epstein, and a room-temperature McDonalds Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Since Uday and Qusay have the job of polishing Mar-a-Lago's membership lists, Epstein is dead, and Trump has tasked the Filet-O-Fish with shepherding his unending tax audit through federal systems, that just leaves Jared.
And Jared, in the days before Trump's "reopening" demands would send the pandemic spiraling out of control in nearly every state in the country, was bragging that things were now going to be fine, because Trump had pushed the irritating fact-knowing experts out of the way. Trump's in charge, "not the doctors."
Yeah. Yeah, that does sound like exactly what happened. For once, the White House ain't lying.
Jared Kushner is fuck up & twit always failing but sure he's the smartest person in the room "There’s the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase ...Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors ... We have, like, a negotiated settlement" -Kusner Click pic.twitter.com/Pc0MWQaWdU
As recently as this month, impeached president Donald Trump was still claiming that Mexico was paying for his stupid border fencing, more than five years after the lie first passed through his gross lips as a 2016 presidential candidate. Back here in reality, not only has the U.S. taxpayer been stuck with the bill, initial agreements with private contractors building the monstrosity have ballooned into the billions of dollars, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica report.
“On the same day in May 2019, the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a pair of contracts worth $788 million to replace 83 miles of fence along the southwest border,” the report said. But just barely a year later, contract modifications had inflated that number to well over $3 billion. Overall, Trump’s racist vanity project has cost us “about five times more per mile than fencing built under the Bush and Obama administrations.” But that doesn’t quite make for a good rally chant, does it?
Texas can flip blue this year, with sky-high early turnout in key counties. Not only would it build a Biden landslide, we can flip a U.S. Senate seat and win back the state House. Turnout2020 is making calls to Texas voters on Wednesday, Thursday and up to Election Day. Sign up for a shift to help Texans vote early, and sign up for phonebank training if this is your first time.
The Texas Tribune and ProPublica report that “[w]hile adding work to a contract is not unusual on its own,” this is also the Trump administration we’re talking about, and massive federal contracts have been awarded to contractors based on the simple fact that the impeached president liked what they said while he was watching cable news during executive time (remember that?).
That was the case with Fisher Sand and Gravel, which also built the multimillion-dollar privately funded border fencing through financial backing from the We Build the Wall scam. Engineers say that private fencing was so shoddily built that it’s now on the verge of collapse. But when the company should have been laughed out the door and crossed off a list of businesses the federal government does business with, the Trump administration awarded Fisher Sand and Gravel over $2 billion to build more fencing, this time paid for by us.
“Experts say the frequent use of so-called supplemental agreements to add work or increase the price has amounted to giving no-bid contracts to a small group of pre-selected construction firms,” the reports said, “many with executives who have donated to Trump or other Republicans.” The leaders of contractor SLSCO, which the report said has tacked on another $500 million to its initial agreements, have given thousands to Republican candidates. SLSCO’s $2.2 billion in federal contracts? Paid for by us.
Congress has funded some money for border security but not the billions upon billions Trump has demanded for a wall, so he’s just pilfered it from the rest of the government (with the help of feckless Republicans like Texas’ Sen. John Cornyn). That money grab was blocked by lower courts but then allowed to continue by the Supreme Court. Litigation will now be heard by the high court early next year. While Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has pledged to stop construction should he win the 2020 election, “[t]he ACLU, which represents the Sierra Club and Southern Border Communities Coalition in the lawsuit, has said it would seek to tear down sections of the wall if it wins the case,” USA Today reported.
Oh such brave inside White House sources while remaining anonymous. Fuck off.
On Tuesday afternoon, the White House issued a statement that named “ending the COVID-19 pandemic” as one of Donald Trump’s big “accomplishments from the first term.” Apparently if you turn the corner enough times, magic really does occur. Or dizziness.
The claim of victory comes as the nation is seeing a broad-based “third surge” that has taken the number of new cases to record highs. Deaths always lag behind new cases, but after eight weeks of straight increases in COVID-19 across the nation, fatalities are also rising, reaching levels not seen since mid-August. So far this week, the nation is trending over 12,000 cases a day higher than last week, making another new record on Thursday or Friday a near certainty, and bringing the nation close to 100,000 cases a day as the election draws near. All those new cases mean that healthcare resources are strained to the limits, with full ICUs and states preparing to implement triage.
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Still, both Trump and his campaign surrogates are concerned that all the press around a pandemic that has sickened 9 million Americans and now killed over 230,000 is “exorbitantly negative.” People are ignoring the fun, lighthearted side of the disease. “Like Barron Trump is a case,” said Trump. “He has sniffles. He was sniffling, one Kleenex, that’s all he needed … and he was better.” The people suffering major long-term neurological damage after a bout with COVID-19 will surely laugh at that one. If they still can.
With six days to go before the election, Trump is pushing harder than ever that COVID-19 is nothing but a media hoax. Only this time, even people within the White House are pushing back.
As The Daily Beast reports, officials on the Coronavirus Task Force are taking the claims about “defeating” the pandemic as a “personal slight.” They’re also taking it with a fair bit of confusion, as they can’t see how anyone—even Donald Trump—can push a line about “ending” the pandemic while cases are at record highs and still rising. After all, it has only been three days since Mark Meadows made what seemed to be a formal decree of surrender to COVID-19 when he said, “We’re not going to control the pandemic.” Pivoting to a victory celebration just seems … bizarre.
While the new White House statement brags about Trump’s “decisive action,” the truth is it has been his strategy to do nothing. Nothing, that is, except complain about governors who did try to take action. And while the same statement says that Trump has “engaged scientists and health professionals” to understand and “defeat” COVID-19, a report at The Washington Post details how the White House has, from the outset, manipulated the news about the pandemic and downplayed its seriousness.
The Post story looks back to the Feb. 25 announcement in which Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said that “disruption to everyday life may be severe” and “we expect we will see community spread in this country.” It shows how Trump’s team leapt into action, not to address the pandemic, but to stifle Messonnier and spread a more upbeat message.
If the task force members cited by Daily Beast still want to stay anonymous, the Post report leans heavily on someone who has stepped out as a vocal, public critic of the White House reaction: Olivia Troye, a former top aide to Mike Pence. Troye is open about how Pence was picked initially to chair the task force not out of some expertise, but because Trump wanted someone who would “stay in line” with his messaging. But the most disturbing thing may be what she had to say about Trump’s initial reaction when informed about the threat of the 2019 novel coronavirus.
“He asked the right questions early on. He said how bad is this? How does this compare to the flu? How does it spread?” said Troye. “I saw a man who normally I had seen in various situations sometimes act irrationally or say things publicly. But in that moment he was serious ...”
Trump understood the threat. He collected the right information. But he reacted, not to save Americans, but to prop up the stock market and take the route he saw as most effective to bolster his chances at reelection—even if that meant softpeddling the crisis and allowing hundreds of thousands to die.
On Wednesday morning, assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services Brett Giroir also spoke up against the message that the White House has been pushing and addressed Trump’s claims. In an interview on NBC’s Today, Giroir was asked about a tweet from Trump saying that cases are up only because “we test, test, test” and the the whole thing is “a fake news media conspiracy.”
Giroir started off by saying that the apparently low level of cases in March and April was “probably false” and the result of insufficient testing, but that doesn’t mean we’re not seeing even more cases in October. “We do believe, and the data shows, that the cases are going up,” said Girior. “It’s not just a function of testing. Yes, we’re getting more cases identified, but the cases are actually going up. And we know that too because hospitalizations are going up ... And we do know deaths are increasing, unfortunately. So, we do assess that the cases are actually going up, they’re real, because hospitalizations and deaths are starting to go up. ”
Giroir also insisted that “nobody is waving the white flag.” He might want to speak to Meadows about that one. Or he could call up the White House. Because they’ve decided to wave the victory flag and call it a day.
Of course they are. Time to make the Hatch Act a felony.
National Security Adviser er Robert O’Brien addresses the press during a meeting with Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, on October 20, 2020, in Brasilia, Brazil. | Andressa Anholete/Getty Images
Experts say it’s pretty clearly an ethics violation.
Just a week before the election, Trump’s National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien is visiting key swing states in what appears to be a naked attempt to boost his boss’s reelection chances — a move some say is consistent with a broader administration campaign.
O’Brien traveled this week to Minnesota and Wisconsin, two important swing states, nominally to discuss the centrality of mining and supply chains to building weaponry. But he went to the same locations — a copper-nickel mining region of Minnesota and the Fincantieri Marinette Marine shipyard in Wisconsin — that President Trump and Vice President Pence had both also visited.
National Security Council spokesperson John Ullyot told me that during his travels in these states, O’Brien “held important meetings” crucial to understanding industry’s role in keeping America safe. “The important work of protecting our national security continues regardless of domestic political events,” he said.
But a senior NSC official, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss the matter freely, said O’Brien is traveling to election hot spots to keep in Trump’s good graces. The staffer said there’s no indication Trump ordered O’Brien to those states, but suggested the national security adviser knows he’s on a shortlist for defense secretary in the president’s second term.
This isn’t new behavior for O’Brien, either.
Last month, he spoke at Drake University in Iowa — an important state for the president to win — about Trump’s foreign policy. While that in itself is not unusual for a national security adviser to do, O’Brien comments veered into the political. “The world is more peaceful and prosperous, we believe, because of the president’s policies,” he stated, adding “there’s more to come in a second Trump term.”
Donald Sherman, deputy director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a watchdog group, told me it’s quite clear O’Brien is stumping for Trump in his official capacity.
“Folks in national security and diplomacy don’t normally campaign at all,” he said, “because we don’t want national security and diplomacy politicized.” Former secretaries of state Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell didn’t attend their party’s political conventions while they served in their roles, for example.
It’d be one thing if it were just O’Brien doing this. The problem is that it looks like many in the administration are shilling for the president close to the election — and using taxpayer funds to do so.
Top Trump officials are openly violating the Hatch Act
The Hatch Act of 1939 bars most federal civilian workers from engaging in overt partisan political activity — including openly supporting a candidate in a race or using an official capacity to stump for a politician. Some Cabinet departments, including the State Department, augment these statutory limits with additional policies intended to maintain a clear wall of separation between partisan politics and nonpartisan government functions.
But Trump administration officials keep busting through that wall.
His decision shattered years of precedent in which sitting Cabinet members, and especially high-profile ones like secretaries of state, don’t engage in openly partisan political activities. It was a norm Pompeo’s predecessors in both Republican and Democratic administrations believed was important to uphold.
And then there’s Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, who in August turned an official taxpayer-funded event with food producers in North Carolina into an impromptu rally to support Trump’s reelection campaign.
According to a letter sent by six House Democrats to the department’s ethics chief, standing before the assembled crowd alongside Trump, Perdue told him: “Mr. President, as you saw those throngs of people lining both sides of the road from the airport all the way to Mills River here, those were those forgotten people that voted for you for 2016. And I’ve got better news for you: They and many others are gonna vote for you for four more years in 2020.”
Sherman, the deputy director of CREW, said the Perdue example makes clear the US government does actually punish federal employees — even top ones — for violating the Hatch Act, even if the reprimand isn’t particularly severe.
Yet the Trump administration continues to act as if the restrictions on such activities by senior government officials don’t apply. “It seems obvious that the Trump administration has orchestrated a government wide-effort to use official resources to prop up his campaign,” Sherman said.
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When an Amazon Prime Video user buys content on the platform, what they're really paying for is a limited license for "on-demand viewing over an indefinite period of time" and they're warned of that in the company's terms of use. That's the company's argument for why a lawsuit over hypothetical future deletions of content should be dismissed. From a report: Amanda Caudel in April sued Amazon for unfair competition and false advertising. She claims the company "secretly reserves the right" to end consumers' access to content purchased through its Prime Video service. She filed her putative class action on behalf of herself and any California residents who purchased video content from the service from April 25, 2016 to present. On Monday, Amazon filed a motion to dismiss her complaint arguing that she lacks standing to sue because she hasn't been injured -- and noting that she's purchased 13 titles on Prime since filing her complaint. "Plaintiff claims that Defendant Amazon's Prime Video service, which allows consumers to purchase video content for streaming or download, misleads consumers because sometimes that video content might later become unavailable if a third-party rights' holder revokes or modifies Amazon's license," writes attorney David Biderman in the motion, which is posted below. "The Complaint points vaguely to online commentary about this alleged potential harm but does not identify any Prime Video purchase unavailable to Plaintiff herself. In fact, all of the Prime Video content that Plaintiff has ever purchased remains available."
Windows Central reports: Microsoft is preparing a major OS update for Windows 10 in 2021 that sources say will bring with it a significant design refresh to the Windows UI. I'm told that Microsoft is planning to update many top-level user interfaces such as the Start menu, Action Center, and even File Explorer, with refreshed modern designs, better animations, and new features. This UI project is codenamed "Sun Valley" internally and is expected to ship as part of the Windows 10 "Cobalt" release scheduled for the holiday 2021 season. Internal documentation describes the project as "reinvigorating" and modernizing the Windows desktop experience to keep up with customer expectation in a world driven by other modern and lightweight platforms.
Windows 10 has remained much the same these last few years, with little to no changes in its design or feature set. Many other platforms on the market have gone through entire redesigns or UI refreshes in the last five years, and while Windows 10 has gone through minor design iterations with the introduction of Fluent Design, we've not seen a significant refresh or rethinking of its UI. The Sun Valley project appears to be spearheaded by the Windows Devices and Experiences team, lead by Chief Product Officer Panos Panay, who took charge of said division back in February. Microsoft announced in May that the company would be "reinvesting" in Windows 10 in the 2021 timeframe, and my sources say that Sun Valley is the result of that reinvestment.
Like Nvidia's RTX 3000 line, the new cards offer 60+ fps 4K gaming, with full DirectX 12 Ultimate support, including hardware-accelerated real-time ray tracing.
Performance
Big Navi offers huge generation-on-generation gains... much like Nvidia's RTX 3000 series did, versus its RTX 2000 series. [credit:
AMD ]
RDNA2 brought enormous gen-on-gen fps gains from last generation's "little Navi" RX 5000 series—but what most people will care about is how the components compare to Nvidia's offerings, not to last generation's AMD. In terms of sheer GPU horsepower, Nvidia's RTX 3000 series and AMD's RX 6000 series appear to be in a dead heat. As always, it's worth taking a vendor's own private benchmarks with a grain of salt—but we don't expect to see materially different results in private testing later as these cards filter down to the market.
L.A. Dodgers third baseman Justin Turner was pulled from Game 6 of the World Series after testing positive for the coronavirus, but later returned to the field after his team’s win, hugging players and at one point removing his mask for photos.
According to @Ken_Rosenthal, Justin Turner was asked to not return to the field for the celebration after receiving a positive COVID-19 test. pic.twitter.com/IXZSjtJZtx
ESPN reports: “The veteran infielder was not immediately with his teammates as they celebrated the franchise’s first World Series title since 1988. But the 35-year-old did return to the field with his wife about an hour after the game and took photos with the World Series trophy. He got a hug from longtime teammate Clayton Kershaw and sat front and center next to manager Dave Roberts for a team photo, occasionally lowering a mask he otherwise wore throughout the celebration. Sources told ESPN’s Jeff Passan that Turner had been asked to isolate after the positive test but that no one stopped him from going on the field to celebrate.”
USA Today writes: “A handful of teammates and club president Andrew Friedman offered myriad and largely lame explanations for a jarring visual —Turner, sometimes masked, sometimes not, mugging for the team photo and hugging teammates. Friedman leaned on the fact that Turner was largely surrounded by teammates with whom he was quarantining or had been in contact with. The team will have multiple rounds of testing before leaving Texas. Yet, an on-field post-championship celebration is not a bubble. There are photographers and camera crews and league officials, not all of them locked down with the Dodgers. The threat of infecting a teammate or teammate’s family member was real. What’s more, there are millions of people watching on television, all having just learned of Turner’s positive test, only to see him mingling and mugging. For the millions who have been locked down, distanced, unable to access testing or see loved ones, it was a galling image.”
Justin Turner was on the field celebrating the Dodgers' World Series win after he was pulled from Game 6 for testing positive for COVID-19. pic.twitter.com/ZD5eVFbQNu
DESPITE a positive Covid-19 test, Justin Turner continued to play for five innings before being removed. DESPITE a second positive he returned to the field and embraced teammates and removed his mask.
Thanks to everyone reaching out! I feel great, no symptoms at all. Just experienced every emotion you can possibly imagine. Can’t believe I couldn’t be out there to celebrate with my guys! So proud of this team & unbelievably happy for the City of LA#WorldSeriesChamps
Hundreds of Trump supporters and their MAGA gear were left stranded for hours in freezing temperatures following a rally for the president at Omaha’s Eppley Airfield on Tuesday night. Buses apparently could not get to the airport.
The Washington Post reports: “At least seven people were taken to hospitals, according to Omaha Scanner, which monitors official radio traffic. Police and fire authorities didn’t immediately return messages from The Washington Post early Wednesday and declined to provide reporters on the scene with precise numbers of how many needed treatment.”
Posts on social media chronicled the unfolding scene.
If you’re waiting on someone who attended the @realDonaldTrump rally in #Omaha, it may be a while until they get on a bus and get out. Traffic along the small roadway to the private side of Eppley Airfield is backed up and buses were having trouble getting through. We saw this: pic.twitter.com/DTRKnH5lkb
President Trump took off in Air Force One 1 hr 20 minutes ago, but thousands of his supporters remain stranded on a dark road outside the rally. “We need at least 30 more buses,” an Omaha police officer just said, shaking his head at the chaotic cluster that is unfolding.
One officer advising 8 to 9 elderly people who are struggling. Seperate officer advising they have located an elderly party who is frozen cold unable to move with an altered mental status.
BREAKING—Elderly attendees at Trump’s Omaha MAGA rally being treated for *hypothermia* after AF1 departs. Attendees stuck trying to get out of airport hanger, waiting for delayed buses & walking 3.7 miles to airport economy parking lot. So far 9 rushed to ER. https://t.co/Y17H0bWBnwpic.twitter.com/QrqTLdKxNa
The above video & this one were taken around 10:15pm. The #Trump rally ended around 8:45pm. Some just gave up and walked from the airfield, back to wherever they parked. It was about 32° out at the time. Many had already spent hours outside as they waited for POTUS to arrive. pic.twitter.com/JYXCLypTQl
Apple is stepping up efforts to develop its own search technology as US antitrust authorities threaten multibillion-dollar payments that Google makes to secure prime placement of its engine on the iPhone, Financial Times reported Wednesday [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. From the report: In a little-noticed change to the latest version of the iPhone operating system, iOS 14, Apple has begun to show its own search results and link directly to websites when users type queries from its home screen. That web search capability marks an important advance in Apple's in-house development and could form the foundation of a fuller attack on Google, according to several people in the industry. The Silicon Valley company is notoriously secretive about its internal projects, but the move adds to growing evidence that it is working to build a rival to Google's search engine. Two and a half years ago, Apple poached Google's head of search, John Giannandrea. The hire was ostensibly to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities and its Siri virtual assistant, but also brought eight years of experience running the world's most popular search engine. The company's growing in-house search capability gives it an alternative if regulators block its lucrative partnership with Google. When the US Department of Justice launched a case last week, over payments that Google makes to Apple to be the iPhone's default search tool, urgency was added to the initiative.
Judd Legum, reporting at Popular Information: In September, Facebook announced that it would stop accepting new political ads starting October 27. From October 27 through Election Day on November 3, political groups are permitted to run, subject to limitations, Facebook ads approved and running before October 27. In October, Facebook announced that after the polls close, it would ban all political ads indefinitely. The purpose of that policy is to prevent a campaign from declaring victory prematurely. Both policies were part of a high-profile effort to convince the public that the company was taking election integrity seriously. But on the first day of the moratorium, Facebook approved numerous Trump ads that appeared to violate its pre-election policies. At the same time, Facebook rejected scores of ads, many from groups aligned with Democrats, that do not violate its rules. Popular Information contacted Facebook regarding Trump's ads early Tuesday afternoon. Several hours later, Facebook told Popular Information that some of the ads did violate its policies and hundreds of Trump's ads were taken down.
The Trump campaign produced a number of ads that said "Election Day is Today." These ads violate Facebook's policies. Why? In order to comply with the moratorium, the ads need to begin delivering impressions prior to October 27. The Trump campaign spent a small amount of money delivering these ads to Facebook users in Ohio and elsewhere. But, while early voting has started in many states, it is not Election Day anywhere. These ads should not have been approved because they violate Faceboo's policy against misrepresenting the date of the election.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Microsoft Teams is continuing to ride the remote work and learning wave kicked off by the coronavirus pandemic. During Microsoft's Q1 2021 earnings call, CEO Satya Nadella shared that Microsoft Teams has passed 115 million daily active users. That's up 53% from the 75 million daily active users in April. Some 15 months ago, Microsoft Teams had just 13 million daily active users. "Teams now has more than 115 million daily active users," Nadella said. "We are seeing increased usage and intensity as people communicate, collaborate, and coauthor content across work, life, and learning. Microsoft 365 users generated more than 30 billion collaboration minutes in a single day this quarter." On the call, Nadella highlighted how quickly features are being added to Teams. "We are accelerating our innovation for both first-line as well as knowledge workers, with over 100 new capabilities in the last six months," he said. "Including breakout rooms, meeting recaps, shift scheduling, and large scale digital events, up to 20,000 participants. To help people transcend both time and distance, employee health and wellbeing is a top concern for every CEO. We are innovating with new experiences to help people prioritize wellbeing in the flow of work. New insights in Teams provides personalized recommended actions, making it easier for employees to create healthy work habits and for leaders to build high performing teams."
omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: Playing through the greenery and litter of a mini forest's undergrowth for just one month may be enough to change a child's immune system, according to a small new experiment. When daycare workers in Finland rolled out a lawn, planted forest undergrowth such as dwarf heather and blueberries, and allowed children to care for crops in planter boxes, the diversity of microbes in the guts and on the skin of young kids appeared healthier in a very short space of time. Compared to other city kids who play in standard urban daycares with yards of pavement, tile and gravel, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds at these greened-up daycare centers in Finland showed increased T-cells and other important immune markers in their blood within 28 days. "We also found that the intestinal microbiota of children who received greenery was similar to the intestinal microbiota of children visiting the forest every day," says environmental scientist Marja Roslund from the University of Helsinki. Prior research has shown early exposure to green space is somehow linked to a well-functioning immune system, but it's still not clear whether that relationship is causal or not. The experiment in Finland is the first to explicitly manipulate a child's urban environment and then test for changes in their micriobiome and, in turn, a child's immune system. While the findings don't hold all the answers, they do support a leading idea -- namely that a change in environmental microbes can relatively easily affect a well-established microbiome in children, giving their immune system a helping hand in the process. The study was published in the journal Science Advances.
I sure have missed Barack Obama. As much as I’ve come to appreciate the talents and charms of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, it is great to see the 44th president out there again talking to voters, and even having some fun, for example, slamming Trump’s heretofore unknown Chinese bank account. The “Beijing Barry” line was epic. But when it comes to health care, and the Republican push to overturn the Affordable Care Act in the middle of a pandemic with no plan to replace its protections for people with preexisting conditions, Obama turned serious.
In Miami on Saturday, President Obama eviscerated the current occupant of the White House and his party on health care, and specifically on what would happen if the Supreme Court does strike down the ACA:
When they’re asked about it, they say, well, look, we’re going to have a great replacement. It’s coming. It’s going to be there in two weeks. It’s been 10 years now. Every two weeks they say they’ve got a replacement and they haven’t come up with [anything]. They’ve never had a replacement. I promise you. I’ve asked. I asked back when I was president. I said, show me your replacement and we can talk. Nothing, nada, zero, zilch, goose egg. The reason they don’t show you their plan to actually provide people protections when it comes to preexisting conditions is because they don’t have one and they never have.
To his credit, Obama’s vice president got off a pretty good zinger of his own on this point during last week’s presidential debate: “He’s never come up with a plan. I guess we’re going to get the preexisting condition plan the same time we [get] the infrastructure plan that we waited for since ’17, ’18, ’19, and 20.”
Jokes aside, let’s make clear what would happen if Amy Coney Barrett and the radical right-wing majority on the Supreme Court disappear Obamacare. At least 21 million people who have gotten health coverage through the law would lose it, including 12 million adults benefitting from the ACA’s expansion of Medicaid, and three million kids who got covered through their parents thanks to that expansion or the law’s expansion of the Children’s Health Insurance Program.
Plus, up to 133 million Americans now suffer from some kind of preexisting condition. The ACA prevents health insurance companies from discriminating against them on price, or simply denying or retroactively cancelling their coverage—two things that were all too common beforehand. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation’s analysis, 27%—more than one out of four—of all adults ages 18-64 has a preexisting condition serious enough that they would find themselves unable to get coverage at any price if not for the ACA. Please note that analysis was done pre-COVID, which has left huge numbers of Americans with a diagnosis that could put them in a similarly dire situation if Obamacare is repealed.
As we know, The Man Who Lost The Popular Vote has no plan—there wasn’t even one in the big fat binder full of malarkey he had press secretary Kayleigh McEnany present to Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes after he stormed out of their recent interview.
President Trump’s press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, gave us a heavy book that she described as the president’s health care plan. It was filled with executive orders and congressional initiatives, but no comprehensive healthcare plan. https://t.co/Mn6HRAOwHLpic.twitter.com/WmsoRQP2WJ
This is just the latest attempt by Trump to fool people with an eye-grabbing visual that has no actual substance when one examines it closely. In many ways, it’s a metaphor for his entire gaslighting presidency. What’s incredible—and I mean this literally, in that I find it impossible to believe—is that two separate polls found that over 80% of Republicans somehow think their candidate will do more to protect people with preexisting conditions than the Biden-Harris ticket.
Trump keeps saying he’ll show us his plan, just like he did in the summer, and in the spring, and in 2019, and long before that.
I’m thinking it must be the same “corner” Trump’s been saying—with the dead-eyed look of a guy selling snake oil cures—we are “rounding” on COVID-19. Most recently, the Orange Julius Caesar repeated the lie about his (nonexistent) healthcare plan to Stahl:
Trump: It is developed, it is fully developed. It's going to be announced very soon--
Stahl: When?
Trump: When we see what happens with Obamacare.
Yeah, I’ll believe that just as much as I believe we’ll see his taxes when the audit is finished. One might ask what Trump hopes to accomplish by pulling stunts like this, given that the media debunks them immediately. The answer is that, as the aforementioned surveys show, there are plenty of people who simply ignore the real media if the impeached president tells them something different. Trump’s campaign strategy—i.e., whatever his gut tells him to do in a given moment—relies on there somehow being enough of these voters to put him over the top. We’ll find out if he’s right in a week.
Regarding the election, this question of where the Republican replacement plan for Obamacare is has also tripped up candidates further down on the ballot. One of the only races where a Democrat is concerned with holding on to a U.S. Senate seat is in Michigan. That’s where Republican John James last week face planted when an interviewer asked about the lack of a replacement plan for the ACA either from Trump or on his own campaign’s website.
Now I want to focus specifically on people with preexisting conditions. As he has before, Trump on 60 Minutes maintained that he would protect them if Obamacare fell—and he said he “hoped” it would fall. Here’s the relevant section of the interview:
Trump still continues to promise his nonexistent health care plan. He then says regarding Obamacare and the Supreme Court: "I hope that they end it, it will be so good if they end it." Asked how he will protect preexisting conditions, Trump continues to have no answer. pic.twitter.com/6sKUJEdjzX
They will be “totally protected,” Trump claimed. What he either doesn't know, comprehend, or care about is that he can't protect people with preexisting conditions without a larger national healthcare system that either is the ACA—or something so similar that the difference is meaningless—or something even more progressive like Medicare for All.
Here's why: if Trump tries to just require the insurance companies to sell policies to people with preexisting conditions at the same price as everyone else, even though those folks will almost certainly need more health care, he'll put them out of business. Putting aside how one feels about such a development, it would cause a tremendous disruption to our healthcare system.
The requirement that insurance companies treat people with preexisting conditions the same as everyone else works hand in hand with other elements of Obamacare—or any conceivable national health insurance system. Without being part of that system, such a requirement would mean large numbers of healthy people with enough money to pay out-of-pocket healthcare expenses as long as they didn’t become really sick or injured would simply go uninsured until they became really sick or injured. At that point, those people would buy insurance—paying the same premiums as everyone else—and run up huge medical bills that lead to major losses for the insurance companies.
In order to avoid those losses, the companies would have to ramp up the cost of premiums, which would only drive additional healthier people out of the market, thus driving up premiums even more, and rinse and repeat. The cycle—known as a “death spiral”—would destroy the insurance market completely, as Larry Levitt, the Kaiser Family Foundation’s executive vice president for health policy, explained in a Washington Post op-ed. Regarding the protections for people with preexisting conditions, Levitt’s piece concluded: “You can’t just sprinkle magic pixie dust and wish away the complications and trade-offs—which, so far, is Trump’s approach.”
The only way to require the companies to not discriminate on preexisting conditions without bankrupting them and/or creating the death spiral is to give them something in return. The individual mandate was supposed to get people to buy insurance (and if they didn't, to contribute to the pot anyway), but that's gone. Nevertheless, far more impactful were: 1) the creation of the individual market that allowed millions of people to buy insurance without having to go through an employer, and 2) the subsidies in the ACA that have made insurance premiums affordable for millions who couldn't have afforded it before. Most of the people getting insurance on the exchanges created by Obamacare are receiving subsidies—84% during the most recently completed open enrollment period—so the exchanges without the subsidies would do little good.
Having those millions more customers—all under 65 years old, as seniors citizens get Medicare—means millions of younger, relatively profitable policy-holders who balance out what the companies lose by no longer being able to discriminate against those with preexisting conditions.
There’s also another element the system needs in order to work. The government shouldn’t subsidize the purchase of crap policies—that’s an industry term—that don’t provide adequate coverage. So the ACA included rules to establish baselines of what must be covered in every policy, in order to ensure that the companies don't just get all these new customers on taxpayers' dimes, and then sell them junk insurance, not to mention protecting consumers in general. Note that Trump has actually weakened those safeguards, as the Brookings Institute explained here.
All these pieces complement one another. Protecting people with preexisting conditions requires these other components to make it work for: a) the companies, b) the people who need insurance, and c) the government. That's why you need Obamacare, or something more progressive like Medicare for All. There is simply no other way, despite what Trump pretends.
Furthermore, it’s not just that Trump is lying about protecting people with preexisting conditions if Obamacare is repealed. He’s also been lying when he talks about the things he’s done to protect them thus far, such as when he claimed that he had “saved Pre-Existing Conditions in your Healthcare.” (It’s important you all know that’s his capitalization, not mine.) How exactly? Well, a month ago Trump signed an executive order that he touted with great fanfare because it supposedly protects people with preexisting conditions no matter what happens with Obamacare at the Supreme Court.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? The problem is that, because it is an executive order issued by the president alone rather than actual legislation, it will do as much to accomplish what it claims to accomplish as the email I sent to Ralph, my second cousin once removed, in which I too declared protections for people with preexisting conditions. In fact, the very people Trump has appointed to leading administration positions in health care admitted as much in a press briefing. Ah, what a joy it must be to serve in that administration.
The reality of Trump’s record is somewhat different from the grandiose claims he’s made, as Margot Sanger-Katz laid out in the New York Times. Her article included this remark from someone who will never be confused with a progressive on health care:
“If there’s any merit in the president’s record on pre-existing conditions, it is purely by accident,” said Michael Cannon, the director of health care policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institution. Mr. Cannon, who favors a less regulated health insurance market, is no fan of Obamacare, but says that Mr. Trump has little to support his claims.
Health care consistently ranks as one of the most important issues for American voters as we head into the final week of this election, and not only because we are in the middle of a pandemic. Joe Biden has pledged his support for strengthening Obamacare by making a public option available to all. He’ll also reform the law so that working- and middle-class families who are just above the current income cutoffs will be able to receive premium subsidies. Biden will reduce the maximum cost of premiums purchased on the Obamacare exchanges from 9.86% of household income to 8.5%, saving significant money for large numbers of Americans. He’ll also provide the Obamacare subsidies to people who would’ve received Medicaid if their states had accepted the ACA’s expansion of that program, so that they will get coverage without having to pay a dollar in premiums.
What’s Donald Trump’s plan? Apparently it’s to get rid of Obamacare, and the protections it provides to tens of millions of people with preexisting conditions, while lying about having a way to protect them without the law.
Conservatives love to talk about having healthcare choices. Judging the plans of the two major candidates, it shouldn’t be a difficult choice at all.
German authorities are trying to force internet service providers to block major porn sites that don't implement age verification systems. Gizmodo reports: Currently, German law requires porn sites to restrict access to individuals 18 or older. What's changed is that German authorities, like the British before them, have now dubbed it a good use of their time to actually pursue porn sites they think aren't doing enough to prevent under-18 browsing, and are trying to compel them to introduce more stringent age verification systems. That in turn comes with all the complications and privacy issues that thwarted a similar effort in the UK, such as the technical difficulty enforcing the rules, censorship, and -- depending on how sites choose to comply -- the possibility third-party age verification services would build databases of who's watching what and when.
Per Motherboard, German regulators -- in an effort spearheaded by the director of the State Media Authority (LMA) of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Tobias Schmid -- are in the process of forcing telecoms like Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom to impose Domain Name System (DNS) blocks against sites like Pornhub and YouPorn. The DNS system is essentially the phonebook of the internet, translating domain names into IP addresses so users can navigate the web. DNS blocking Pornhub would prevent German internet users from typing "pornhub.com" into a stock web browser and immediately arriving at the page. The logic, apparently, is that faced with the threat of a losing the majority of their web traffic from Germany, major porn sites will cave to regulators and enforce the rules.
But it's not exactly foolproof (or teenproof). It would be trivial for German youth to evade these blocks by using an alternate DNS provider or simply downloading a browser plugin. They could also use a virtual private network, which creates an encrypted bridge from a user's device to a server somewhere else, to visit a porn site from another country. Or, they could simply drop the IP address into their browser and arrive at any site without needing to go through DNS. (Pornhub's happens to be 66.254.114.41. You're welcome, Germans of the future.) According to Motherboard, German regulators are also only targeting a handful of the largest sites on the web, meaning anyone could simply navigate to a lesser-known porn site and watch uninhibited.
The Department of Health and Human Services has nearly turned into a ghost town, Politico's Dan Diamond reports, quoting a number of HHS staff who are discouraged, disheartened, and looking for the exits. It's not just the incessant infighting between heavyweights Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services head Seema Verma. It's not just month eight of a pandemic they've completely botched. It's the losing battles on all fronts, including the great likelihood that Trump is not going to be back in office next year.
At least 27 high-level political appointees are gone already, and if Trump loses, dozens will bail, a senior official told Diamond. That would leave the nation to face what could be the worst three months of the pandemic, November until the end of January, without a functioning health department. "There will be a mass exodus should the election go" against Trump, the official said. They warned that some of the dozens of political appointees still there are busy trying to line up their next job. "I've personally seen people working on their resumes inside the office," the official added. "It's no secret."
"Those jobs are always hard. Those jobs in a no-win situation are extremely hard. Those jobs in a no-win situation, when there's sniping and 'Lord of the Flies' situations, are impossible," said a different former senior official who left in the last year. The departures already include "the Centers for Disease Control's chief of staff, deputy chief of staff and a senior counselor to CDC Director Robert Redfield; the Food and Drug Administration's top policy official, its top legislative official, top communications official and a senior adviser to FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn; and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' chief of staff and top communications officer." Even the liaison office at the White House which coordinates the hiring of political appointees has been rocked with turnovers—twice since February.
Trump's efforts to erode the federal workforce by imposing political and loyalty litmus tests has been harmful across the government. But HHS has been in the spotlight all year because of the pandemic and Trump's many, many missteps, conflicting orders, and vast incompetence. "It's pretty shitty to come to work and be accused of meddling every single time something, somewhere goes wrong, even when no political [appointee] knows about it," one official told Diamond.
These political officials—appointed by Trump—are officially off the Trump ship. "Three Trump appointees who left HHS this year told POLITICO that they're planning to vote for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, with two saying that Trump's haphazard approach to the coronavirus was a factor in their decision." One of them told Diamond, "I've never voted for a Democrat for president, but Biden hit the sweet spot. I know he's not too far left and he understands how to make government work. […] And I know he'll never make fun of [Anthony] Fauci in public."
Many are looking for work now, before it all falls apart, because they think they'll be tainted by having worked for Trump in this disaster—a Democratic White House and Senate will put them entirely on the outs when it comes to policy, because they've been pushing such a hardcore, anti-Obamacare line for so long. "'Trump health official' already gives people a certain impression, and that's with the president in office," a former official who left for an outside job this year said, adding that trying to find a job with any of the national healthcare associations would be a "likely non-starter" after the election.
On top of all of this, two key officials who have been prominent in Trump's criticisms—FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and CDC Director Redfield—could be leaving any day now, quitting before Trump fires them. "When you speak to folks 1-on-1, it's pretty clear that everyone has their mindset to 'we're on the way out,'" said one official who's already working on their exit strategy.
I'm not sure this is what "ending the pandemic" looks like
The White House’s science policy office on Tuesday ranked “ending the Covid-19 pandemic” atop the list of President Donald Trump’s top first-term accomplishments, even as the country registers record amounts of infections and hospitals fill up again.
The list, included in a press release from the Office of Science and Technology Policy credits the administration for taking “decisive actions to engage scientists and health professionals in academia, industry, and government to understand, treat, and defeat the disease.”
It’s the latest inaccurate claim from the administration on the severity of the pandemic, which Trump has downplayed throughout his reelection campaign, and as Vice President Mike Pence’s office is dealing with an outbreak. Trump, who insists the country is "rounding the turn" on the coronavirus, continues to hold packed campaign rallies and attacks the news media for focusing on surging infections.
Despite the White House’s optimistic rhetoric, health officials warn that things could get worse as winter approaches and people are forced to spend more time indoors.
Last week, the country set a new record of 83,000 cases in a single day, and the seven-day case average is now hovering around 70,000 — more than any other time during the pandemic. Over 42,000 people are hospitalized with Covid-19, up from about 30,000 one month ago, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
The Tuesday press release from the White House science office touting “Science and Technology Accomplishments” includes a report detailing some of the “significant investments, accomplishments, policies, and other actions undertaken by President Trump to advance science and technology.”
“The highlights in this report represent just a fraction of the achievements made by the Trump Administration on behalf of the American people,” Kelvin Droegemeier, who heads the office, said in a statement. “We have achieved a proud record of results, and under President Trump’s leadership, science and technology will continue to inspire us, unite us, and guide us to ever greater progress.”
The report itself does not mention ending the pandemic as an accomplishment, a spokesperson for the office later noted on Twitter. The spokesperson said the report was intended to highlight the administration’s progress on confronting the pandemic.
The U.S. so far has recorded more than 8.7 million coronavirus cases and at least 226,000 deaths, more than any other country.
The first rule of understanding Donald Trump is to understand that Donald lies about everything, all the time. He does it mostly for the purposes of self-aggrandizement, sometimes as a shield to mask his complete lack of knowledge on the subject at hand, and sometimes for no discernible reason at all. The man is a human bullshit bomb. We know this. We've known this since before he descended on his own golden escalator. Somehow the most salient point of the Trump presidency—his status as anti-reality propagandist, flitting between ignorance, incompetence, and delusion—is both commonly understood to be true and not considered, for some reason, a catastrophic failure of democracy.
Wait—we know the reason. The reason is that the Republican Party is itself so corrupted an institution that they have embraced Trump's falsehoods as both election strategy and plan of governance. And because Republicans have declared that Trump telling lies to the American people relentlessly and on all subjects is Good now, and a decades-complacent press corps is reliant on Important Person Says Thing as dominant storytelling device, falsehood-stuffed propaganda is now considered merely an alternative, possibly controversial means of leadership. Might be bad; might be good. We are not allowed to judge.
It's the week before the election, and fact-checkers are still trailing behind Trump's every public appearance attempting to sweep up the shards of whatever the hell he last burped out, never making headway because Trump will repeat them all again hours later to a new audience of cheering gullibles. The New York Times fact checks one of his recent speeches with a nice pretty chart highlighting all of the things that were untrue. It turns out to be a lot! A whole lot!
"A detailed examination of his statements in Janesville by The New York Times found that more than three-quarters of the president’s assertions were either false, misleading, exaggerated, disputed or lacked evidence," sayeth the Times. "Less than a quarter were true."
Other fact-checkers have reported that Trump's use of lies has soared significantly this year as the orange hatepumpkin attempts to gaslight the public into believing a soaring nationwide pandemic is Actually fading, and tariffs being paid by American taxpayers are Actually being paid by foreign nations, and that our military had been reduced to battling our enemies using nothing more than sharp sticks before Actually, Donald came in to buy them new boxes of bullets, causing big, burly soldiers with tears in their eyes to come up to Donald and call him sir.
What the three-quarters number shows, bluntly, is that Trump is reliant on lying as his primary means of getting through his speeches. Or, as the Times puts it, his "falsehoods are the foundation of his campaign rallies and the connective tissue" of his narratives. Trump lies mostly for self-aggrandizement, but also lies because he is so disinterested in governance—or anything else—that it is impossible to drill anything into his thick skull if he doesn't want it there. It is an absolute certainty that Trump's revolving staff have, at multiple points, attempted to explain to him how tariffs work. They have failed, every time.
Whether Trump's fictions are the result of malice or mere dementia is beside the point. He's gotten worse as the stress builds. Whether he wins or loses the election, his post-election claims will ratchet up yet again. He will go into hysterics. He will claim that the whole planet is conspiring against him. He will retain access to the nation's nuclear weapons, because Mike Pence and the rest of Trump's staff wills it.
We're about to enter a new period of mass hysteria. Trump will lie about the election results—whatever they are. Republican Party leaders will back those lies, no matter how egregious. The Republican base, now so addicted to conspiracy theory that the party would come apart at the seams if they were deprived of them, will lash out based on those lies.
For four years, the story has been Republicanism's descent into rank propagandism as means of retaining power—but it has been all but ignored, dwelt on by dedicated media fact-checkers as Trumpian oddity while the rest of politics and press dodges its uncomfortable implications. The press has been betting, if only out of laziness, that it will collapse with no damage done; Republicans themselves believe they still have the option to abandon fascist techniques if straddling them at some point proves too damaging.
It will all come to a head next week. Republicans have doubled down on Trump's approach time after time after time, immunizing him from both crimes and basic standards of decency. The lying was the point, back when politicians and press were asked to back up their claims of inherent virtue with action. Now the lying has become a form of governance unto itself, and the election a referendum as to whether Americans will be governed by facts or by fiat.
He's setting it all up, right in public view, right in front of the media. Doesn't it at least trigger their professional pride? Aren't they upset on some level that he's so transparently using them to spread misinformation & they're doing so little to stop it? https://t.co/TbSzB2v5y6
In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with Dan Merkle, executive director of elections at ABC News, about projecting the winner of individual states and the overall presidential race, as well as when we might expect those projections.
ICE has to be completely gutted after being the gleeful racist enforcement squad under Trump
The federal government’s two immigration enforcement agencies have been shamelessly and corruptly all-in on impeached president Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, from launching politically motivated raids targeting so-called sanctuary cities, to promoting his racist border wall just days before the end of voting next week.
That’s also exactly why the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is again preparing for the possibility of using these two agencies against communities, in case of “civil unrest amid a contentious election,” CNN reports. And even though a top official says there’s no “specific intelligence that suggests any particular threat of violence."
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement is putting personnel on standby in the run up to next week's election, according to a senior ICE official,” CNN reported, “while Customs and Border Protection has been regularly training personnel—an extension of the deployments this summer, an agency official said.”
Those are among the same heavily militarized forces that kidnapped protestors right off the streets in Portland, Oregon, earlier this year, and “have no business appearing at protests,” border advocates note. But that’s exactly why these out-of-control agencies could be used again—and even though one of the administration’s unlawfully appointed officials said there’s no direct threat calling for it in the first place.
"’We have teams ready to go as needed,’ said Ken Cuccinelli, the senior official performing the duties of the Homeland Security deputy secretary”—that’s the actual job title he’s been given because he’s not supposed to be in his job in the first place, may I note—“but pointed out that ‘we don't have any specific intelligence that suggests any particular threat of violence,’” the report continued.
Americans everywhere certainly have been preparing themselves for the possibility of taking to the streets this election, but only because this fascist in the White House has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power. He’s also been the political figure actively encouraging violence. When it comes to unrest and threats of violence, perhaps DHS should look within instead of at us.
The ways in which Donald Trump has found to skim funds from the government—in other words, to enrich himself by stealing money from you—are legion. Whether it’s the Air Force keeping his money-losing Scottish golf course afloat, massive overcharging for his Washington, D.C., hotel., or the way he has made slipping money into one of his clubs a prerequisite for getting on the government’s agenda, one thing is clear: When Trump talks about getting more done in the last four years than anyone else, what he really means is enriching himself.
Last week, David Fahrenthold and the crew at The Washington Post looked at how the State Department had gone deep on funneling money to Trump, and on covering up how much money that might be. After agreeing before a federal judge to release thousands of pages of financial records in two batches, the first of which was to come before the election, the State Department released the first batch on time. Except that “batch” turned out to be one (1) receipt for a single hotel room. How much did the State Department really channel into Trump’s very expensive but badly tailored pocket? It’s literally, and very, very intentionally, impossible to know until the remainder of the documents are released.
But while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continues this last ditch cover-up, Fahrenthold had continued his number-crunching. And it’s turned up a few other items ...
As The Washington Post reports, Trump hasn’t made money from the White House just by skimming directly from government funds, but that has been a significant source of his revenue. For example, rather than meeting with Japanese President Shinzo Abe at the White House, or Camp David, or any other government property, Trump insisted that they hold the meeting at Mar-a-Lago, his privately owned club in Florida. Then he charged the government for every room, every meal, every drink, and every round of golf—including his own.
That’s right. Trump charged the American people to Trump eat Trump’s food at Trump’s club. The prime rib on the buffet line is even better when it’s free. It gets better: Trump charged $3 for water, even when he was the one drinking it.
In addition to straight-out paying himself to feed and house himself, Trump has, of course, charged the government the equivalent of two years’ presidential salary simply so the Secret Service can ride golf carts. Room charges have run into the millions. But taking it from everyone’s taxes isn’t the only way Trump has fended off his creditors in the past four years. He’s also insisted that Republican functions take place at his properties, and that conservative groups hold their events at his hotels. Add it all together, and Trump has collected a minimum of $8.1 million funneled through his properties either directly from taxpayers or from political groups hoping to have his support.
Those are just the payments we know about, not including whatever is hiding in the “second batch” at the State Department, or in the files of other agencies. And it’s not including $5.6 million that Trump has paid himself by spending money from his own campaign since 2017. Why did Trump immediately start campaigning again following his inauguration? Because it was the best way to ensure that he had a steady stream of revenue. Oh, and while Trump may be shutting down televised campaign commercials in Florida, the latest move that shows his campaign coffers are running dry, he has not stopped paying himself. Far from it. Trump is Trump’s biggest “customer.”
As the Post study makes clear, it’s not that Trump’s properties won this business through some form of competitive bidding. The government is a “captive customer” of Trump. If he goes to Mar-a-Lago or his club in New Jersey, the White House officials, staffers, military officers, and the ubiquitous Secret Service members come along. Not only has Trump not seen fit to give these required guests a discount, in many cases the cost of rooms has suddenly soared.
Back in 2016, Trump tsk’d over how he would be stuck behind his desk every day.
“If I win, I may never see my property. I may never see these places again. Because I’m going to be working for you, I’m not going to have time to go play golf. Believe me.”
That was an absolutely incredible 140 golf trips ago. Trump has only been in the White House 196 weeks, and he’s had to squeeze in a few things like nuclear arms negotiations, NATO meetings, global financial negotiations, and a pandemic response around his play dates. Fortunately, he’s always been able to slip away to make sure that he keeps spending—and keeps pocketing your money.
How much of your money has Trump taken? Trump refuses to say. Maybe Joe Biden can hire Fahrenthold to do a little forensic accounting … for the Justice Department.
A Cleveland, Ohio grand jury indicted Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman on felony charges. New felony charges. Back in August, right-wing fraudsters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman were reported as suspects in a series of misinformation robocalls that seemed to target urban communities in Michigan and elsewhere. The calls were filled with false information that was clearly hoping to scare or dissuade people from mailing in their vote.
On Tuesday, the two men were indicted on eight counts of “telecommunications fraud” and seven counts of bribery in connection with “more than 8,000 calls” placed in Cleveland and surrounding areas. This is just a small part of the fraud being perpetrated by way of robocalls and Jacob Wohl. Earlier this month, Michigan’s attorney general announced similar charges against the pair.
The calls told prospective voters that while mail-in voting sounded “great,” it would also be used by collection agencies and authorities to collect debt or pressure those with outstanding warrants. Because Wohl and Burkman are low-level, intellectually vapid scumbags, they buttoned their fraud by ending the robocalls with the tag that they were produced by a “civil rights organization founded by Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl.” First rule of perpetrating a fraud is not to tell people you’re perpetrating a fraud.
The pair of crummy low-lifes are also facing a civil lawsuit in New York, filed on behalf of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, calling their robocall scheme a violation of the Voting Rights Act. According to Daily Dot reporter Zachary Petrizzo, Wohl and Burkman had no lawyer for that New York appearance on Monday. Reportedly, Wohl defended robocalls saying mail-in voting could lead to “forced vaccination” as not targeting of Black and Brown communities because the anti-vaxxer movement “is a diverse movement.”
Of course, these two yokels have a Trump-long history of seemingly felonious behavior. In May, recordings purporting to show them scheming to slander Dr. Anthony Fauci came to light. The new robocall campaign is a move up in the dynamic duo’s criminal behavior, which up until now has been attempts to connect sexual scandals to Democratic officials like Sen. Elizabeth Warren. So far they haven’t been as successful at lying as their political party leadership has been.
On Tuesday, the United States will pass 9,000,000 cases of COVID-19. By Friday, the nation will almost certainly be racking up over 90,000 cases in a single day. And by the end of the week, the rate of deaths—always a lagging indicator—are again likely to be pushing above 1,000 a day.
The most horrible thing about the COVID-19 crisis as America moves from a dark summer to a darker fall may be its utter predictability. Last week may have taken the nation above the peak rates of growth seen back during the June-July surge, but it was possible to predict that event well in advance. That’s because for eight solid weeks, the rate of infection has been marching upward with terrifying regularity. And that’s because this new surge in cases is very broad-based, and so nearly immune to any change in purely local actions.
Though the weekend decline in testing tends to make Monday and Tuesday of each week seem artificially low when it comes to cases reported, there is every possibility that election week will see the nation at 100,000 cases a day. What does that mean? It means that the United States will be seeing more new cases of COVID-19 in a day than Japan, Venezuela, or China has seen in the entire pandemic. More cases than Australia, Greece, Norway, and South Korea have seen combined over a span of nine months.
There’s no reason to believe it will end there. Because to stop it will require the one thing that Donald Trump won’t deliver: coordinated nationwide action.
Right now, Europe is seeing a renewed wave of COVID-19 that is again ravaging areas that were hit extremely hard in the earliest weeks of the pandemic. France hit a peak of over 52,000 cases on Sunday that was eight times its worst day back in March and April. It’s not so surprising that several nations that have reinstituted social distancing restrictions are now seeing the same kind of protests that popped up months ago in the U.S.—they thought they had sacrificed enough, cooperated enough, been good enough to put this thing behind them. Now, after a summer that saw them welcoming tourists, dining in restaurants, and renewing schools … things are as bad, or worse, than they ever were in the spring.
It’s horrible. But it’s also exactly what was predicted at the pandemic’s beginning. Experts from the outset knew that no nation could survive in constant quarantine until a vaccine is ready. They always anticipated that there would be periods of reopening, and then renewed restrictions to reassert control. They don’t seem to have anticipated the reluctance that would generate such lags in reaction, making each swing of the needle more severe. Or account for how people would simply grow exhausted, even with saving their own lives.
How hard is COVID-19 to control? Take a look at the tiny Faroe Islands, with a population less than 49,000. They’ve done enough tests there for every single person on the islands to be tested three times … and they’re still having cases. Granted, they had just four cases on Monday, but it shows that completely eliminating COVID-19 from any population is fearsomely hard. (Though it is possible. Forty-eight countries that have previously reported cases of COVID-19 reported no new cases on Monday, and over half of those nations have reported no cases for weeks.)
There are still countries where life is going on devoted to the idea of fighting COVID-19. Australia is still reporting cases in single digits, and so is Singapore, and so is the much-lauded New Zealand. South Korea has already seen a second wave of cases, but it deployed the same dedicated effort to managing that renewed threat as it had in the first round and was equally as effective.
The difference between the United States and every other nation on the planet is simple enough: They’re still fighting. Even Sweden, long criticized for a policy of letting most of its population carry on—and racking up one of the highest per capita death rates—is “tweaking” its rules to tighten restrictions on schools, transportation, and nightclubs.
There’s really only one country that has made surrender its official policy. Unfortunately, we’re it.
Donald Trump made the decision all the way back in March that not installing a national testing and contact tracing system would be the most effective way to kill more of his political opponents. That decision has successfully killed one out of 1,000 Black Americans. It’s also done something else Trump and his followers wanted—it’s caused a fiscal crisis in America’s cities that they can blame on Democratic leaders. Trump’s plan for addressing this can be summed up in a word: Don’t.
Trump’s calculation has always been allowing Americans to die in great numbers while claiming to have done a “fantastic job.” Except that covering up the way that grandparents, parents, siblings, and children are either dying or getting very ill has proven more challenging than Trump thought. He may gripe about the media saying “COVID, COVID, COVID,” but some of the reddest locations in the nation are now showing confirmed case counts that exceed 5% of the population. That turns out to be hard to miss.
Right now in Europe, protestors are complaining because their nations are attempting to regain control over a virus that has already killed over a million people worldwide. Right now in the United States, the government has made it official policy that it’s not going to attempt control.
Which is where we all came in.
Donald Trump hasn’t spent the last nine months fighting COVID-19, he’s spent that time fighting hope. And now the only hope that remains is showing Trump the door.
And this is the entire reason DeJoy was placed over USPS
Residents of Baltimore City line up to vote as early voting begins in the state of Maryland at Edmondson High School on October 26, 2020, in Baltimore, Maryland. | J. Countess/Getty Images
The deadline has passed to safely mail your ballot. Here’s what to do if you still need to vote.
More than 71 million Americans have already voted in the 2020 election, and if you’re not one of them: What are you waiting for?
But less than one week out from Election Day, your voting plan needs to be realistic. Specifically, you should now plan to vote in person or drop off your mail ballot, if you already have one.
To put it another way: It’s now probably cutting it too close to send your ballot through the mail.
The United States Postal Service recommends that “as a common-sense measure, you mail your complete ballot before Election Day, and at least one week prior to your state’s deadline.”
Some states require ballots to be postmarked by Election Day but have cutoffs on how late they can be received. For example, Pennsylvania requires a November 3 postmark, but those ballots have to arrive by November 6 or they won’t be counted.
So if you haven’t dropped your stamped ballot in the mailbox yet, it’s time to come up with a new plan.
The good news is there is still plenty of time for that! If you have a mail ballot in hand, you should still have the option to drop it off with election officials, at a polling place, designated drop-off location, or drop box before or on Election Day. And if you hadn’t thought about voting until today, it’s time for you to figure out how you’ll vote in person, either early or on Election Day.
If you still want to “vote by mail,” drop that ballot off
Voting by mail doesn’t have to mean literally voting by mail. Most states offer some kind of drop-off option.
Many states allow you to drop off your ballot at your local election office. At least 20 states will let voters drop off their mail ballots at their polling stationon Election Day. And about 40 states are offering some sort of drop boxes where voters can return ballots, though it may depend on the county where you live.
Only two states — Tennessee and Mississippi — don’t allow for the hand delivery of ballots. Kentucky doesn’t allow people to hand-deliver ballots but does have drop box locations. Missouri, for some reason, makes a distinction between absentee voters (those who have a valid excuse) and people who just preferto vote by mail. Only absentee voters can hand-deliver ballots; mail voters must send through the mail.
But as always, check the rules of your state, or call your local election officials, to find the best drop-off option.
If you requested a mail ballot and haven’t received it, or if you have a mail ballot and haven’t turned it in yet, you can still vote in person. Many states, like Pennsylvania, require you to bring your mail ballot to the polling station and turn it in to poll workers. If you don’t have a ballot — you requested one but never got it, or you threw it out, or your dog chewed it up — that’s also okay. But, as in Pennsylvania, you may have to vote via provisional ballot, which will count as long as election officials can verify you didn’t already vote by mail. This is just a safeguard against people voting twice, which is illegal, despite what people are saying.
A few states, such as New York, automatically let your in-person vote override your mail vote, but definitely check your state’s rules first. Other states, like Florida, ask that you bring in your ballot, but if you don’t have it, election officials will let only let you cast a ballot in person if they can verify you haven’t already submitted a vote by mail. Some states, like Michigan, may ask voters who don’t turn in their ballots to sign an affidavit canceling any mail ballot before they can vote.
If you’ve sent in your ballot already, or are planning to drop it off as soon as you finish reading this, do sign up for ballot tracking, if it’s available where you live. Many other states let you track the progress of your ballot on a voter portal on a state or local election site. This will tell you whether election officials have received your ballot, and, in some cases, it will let you know whether it’s been rejected or accepted.
If your ballot has been rejected, some states allow you to go through what’s called a “cure process,” and many other states have adopted procedures to cure ballots during the pandemic. This process allows voters to fix any mismatched or missing signatures, or other possible mistakes that might otherwise prevent their vote from being counted. In many places, election officials are supposed to contact voters directly, but if anything seems amiss with your mail-in vote, you can always call the election office yourself.
Otherwise, plan to vote in person as soon as you can
Voting in person is always an option for those who haven’t cast their ballots yet. If possible, you should do it now, or as soon as you can, rather than waiting until Election Day on November 3.
But if you can only vote in person on Election Day, then stick to that plan and do it!
For those concerned about the Covid-19 risk of voting in person, public health officials say it’s relatively safe, and about as risky as going to the grocery store. You should still take precautions, though, like wearing a mask, trying to stay 6 feet apart from others while standing in line and inside the polling place, and washing your hands or using hand sanitizer once you’ve voted.
If you’re still worried, check with your local election officials to see what kinds of precautions they’re taking at your local site. This is another reason to vote early, and to try to do it during off hours, when the polls might be less crowded.
As Vox’s Dylan Scott reported, voting by mail may be the safest option from a public health perspective, “but whether it’s simply too late for you to vote by mail or you prefer to vote in person to eliminate the possibility of any mistakes in your ballot being processed, you can vote safely in person.”
There is still plenty of time to cast your ballot. The United States could see unprecedented turnout this election, but that still requires everyone who’s eligible to get out and vote. So go and do it, now.
The United States is in the middle of one of the most consequential presidential elections of our lifetimes. It’s essential that all Americans are able to access clear, concise information on what the outcome of the election could mean for their lives, and the lives of their families and communities. That is our mission at Vox. But our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources. Even when the economy and the news advertising market recovers, your support will be a critical part of sustaining our resource-intensive work. If you have already contributed, thank you. If you haven’t, please consider helping everyone understand this presidential election: Contribute today from as little as $3.
In recent years, the cost of solar and wind energy has declined precipitously, which has accelerated the growth of these renewable energy technologies. Increasingly, utilities are now planning for a future grid dominated by solar and wind. That will require changes in grid management and transmission upgrades as well as the addition of storage to smooth out the supply from variable generators.
Grid storage is still pretty early days, but we’re already seeing huge cost reductions as the industry matures. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) highlighted this recently, showing that grid-scale battery-project costs in the United States dropped 70 percent in just a few years.
Between 2015 and 2018, average project costs decreased from $2,152 per kilowatt-hour of storage to $625. Costs will need to drop much more for grid batteries to scale, but that’s a huge improvement in a short period of time.
Chef Chris Hanmer sets up the flag in front of his business in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on April 21, 2020. | Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images
Here’s why the coronavirus outbreaks in the Dakotas got so bad.
The third surge of Covid-19 cases is leading to worsening outbreaks across the United States. But two states — North Dakota and South Dakota — have coronavirus outbreaks that far surpass the rest of America.
The latest news: With hospitals at capacity, North Dakota’s governor is letting health care workers stay at work even if they test positive for the coronavirus. It’s an extraordinary step, but it reflects how desperate the state is to address staffing concerns at widely strained hospitals.
While the Dakotas managed to avoid big outbreaks during the spring and for most of the summer, the current situation suggests that was more an element of luck and timing than anything else. With the coronavirus, it often seems like a matter of time before it hits your area to some extent. And if a country or state doesn’t have the proper precautions in place — and the Dakotas didn’t — the virus can and likely will spread through its population. It’s a lesson in the need for constant, continued vigilance against the virus.
North and South Dakota now have multiple times the US’s weekly average for daily new coronavirus cases per 100,000 people. Overall, America is seeing 35 cases per 100,000 people as of November 9. South Dakota, meanwhile, has 137 per 100,000, and North Dakota has 177 per 100,000. The Dakotas were the first two states in the US to surpass 100 cases per 100,000 people.
Greater testing capacity doesn’t explain the spikes in coronavirus cases in either state. In North Dakota, the seven-day average of total tests didn’t increase over the last week, whereas the number of cases increased by more than 21 percent. In South Dakota, the testing average actually decreased by more than 2 percent over the previous week as cases increased by more than 4 percent.
Bothstates have also seen their hospitalizations and deaths increase since September. North and South Dakota report the highest and second-highest, respectively, Covid-19 death rate over the previous week out of all states, Washington, DC, and US territories.
And the percent of tests coming back positive, which is used by experts to gauge testing capacity, is more than 16 percent for North Dakota. In South Dakota, it’s an astonishing 54 percent. The recommended maximum is 5 percent. That suggests that, if anything, testing in the Dakotas is still missing a lot of cases, and each state’s outbreak is even worse than the official figures indicate.
Unlike other states, South and North Dakota never fully closed down, with the Republican governors in each state resisting ever issuing a stay-at-home order. So most of each state remained open — allowing the virus to spread freely through bars, restaurants, parties, celebrations, rodeos, rallies, and other large gatherings. Among those potential spreading events was a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, in early August, which some experts now blame for a Covid-19 surge that followed in the region, particularly in the Upper Midwest.
Neither state has adopted a mask mandate, which research shows can help suppress the coronavirus. Based on some national data, both Dakotas have some of the lowest rates of mask-wearing in the US.
Bonny Specker, an epidemiologist at South Dakota State University, was blunt in her assessment of the situation in the Dakotas. “Federal and many state leaders have not implemented mandates or reinforced [public health agencies’] recommendations to prevent the spread of the virus,” she told me. “In South Dakota, the governor had the information needed to minimize the impact of this virus on the health of South Dakotans, but she ignored that information as well as national recommendations from the CDC.”
Meanwhile, much of the public never saw the coronavirus as a major threat to the Dakotas, leading to less adherence to precautions. “Our low rates in the spring and summer built a sense of complacency, and that it was more of a problem for the rest of the country,” Paul Carson, an infectious disease expert at North Dakota State University, told me, speaking of his state’s experience in particular.
This follows the playbook set by President Donald Trump, who has pushed a false sense of normalcy and told his followers to not let the coronavirus “dominate your life” even after he himself got sick with Covid-19. North and South Dakota are led by Republican governors, and Trump won each state by 33 and 26 percentage points, respectively, in this year’s election. Trump also held a massive July Fourth rally in South Dakota at Mount Rushmore, attracting thousands of his supporters from around the region, despite public health experts’ advice against large gatherings.
All of this — a rejection of even the most basic precautions against Covid-19 by much of the public as well as state and national leaders — has allowed the coronavirus to spread out of control. With each new interaction, the virus has an opportunity to spread. So it has in the Dakotas.
The only way this could turn around quickly is if the public and its leaders act. But there’s still a lot of resistance in both states to stricter measures, including mask mandates and especially lockdowns.
So there’s another possibility: The coronavirus will continue spreading in North and South Dakota, fueling more serious illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths.
“I fear we won’t see behavioral changes until people have been personally affected, or can’t get medical care because our hospitals are being overrun — which may not be too far off,” Carson warned.
The Dakotas resisted basic policies to fight Covid-19
North and South Dakota have taken a very libertarian approach to dealing with Covid-19, never instituting stay-at-home orders or mask mandates even as other states, including some of their neighbors, did.
South Dakota in particular took a very hands-off approach, with no restrictions even on large gatherings. The strongest action Republican Gov. Kristi Noem took was to push businesses to follow safety guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Otherwise, Noem has boasted about her state’s loose strategy: She argued in an ad that businesses struggling with restrictions in other states should “come grow [their] company” in South Dakota.
“Here in South Dakota, we trust our people,” Noem said. “We respect their rights. We won’t shut them down.”
Noem still defends her approach, arguing in an op-ed in October that she’ll continue to resist stricter measures. “I’m going to continue to trust South Dakotans to make wise and well-informed decisions for themselves and their families,” she wrote.
North Dakota has done a little more. While avoiding statewide restrictions and lockdowns, Republican Gov. Doug Burgum this month called for reduced business capacity and other limits as cases spiked in his state. But these are mere recommendations — it’s hard to know whether any businesses are following them — and even then, he stopped short of recommending closures.
North Dakota also has one of the most expansive testing regimes in the US — consistently reporting one of the highest rates of coronavirus testing in the country. This may partially explain its high case count, although its positivity rate indicates that it still doesn’t have enough testing. And that testing-and-tracing system can only do so much once the virus is completely out of control, which growing hospitalizations and death rates are evidence of.
“Our contact tracers are overwhelmed with a backlog of cases,” Carson said. “We have further heard from many of our contact tracers that they are meeting increasing resistance from people to give up their contacts or abide by quarantine rules. People have become fatigued with the restrictions.”
Similar to South Dakota’s governor, North Dakota’s Burgum has pushed a message of personal responsibility. “It’s not a job for government,” he said. “This is a job for everybody.”
Social distancing and masking are effective for curtailing Covid-19. As a review of the research in The Lancet concluded, “evidence shows that physical distancing of more than 1 m is highly effective and that face masks are associated with protection, even in non-health-care settings.”
Government mandates seem to help, too. A study in Health Affairs found that “government-imposed social distancing measures reduced the daily growth rate of confirmed COVID-19 cases by 5.4 percentage points after one to five days, 6.8 percentage points after six to ten days, 8.2 percentage points after eleven to fifteen days, and 9.1 percentage points after sixteen to twenty days.”
And a study from the nonprofit research institute IZA found that Germany’s local and regional mask mandates “reduced the cumulative number of registered Covid-19 cases between 2.3% and 13% over a period of 10 days after they became compulsory” and “the daily growth rate of reported infections by around 40%.”
Carson acknowledged that such mandates “did not seem so necessary earlier in our epidemic.” But by not instituting government policies and allowing the public to act recklessly, North and South Dakota kept themselves vulnerable to the coronavirus. That vulnerability took a while to expose itself in two sparsely populated states with relatively little travel in and out — but once it appeared, Covid-19 has exploded, rapidly spreading across both of the Dakotas.
This wasn’t unpredictable. In the spring, a South Dakota meat plant became the US’s top coronavirus hot spot — showing Covid-19 could reach even mostly rural areas like South Dakota. But the outbreak didn’t change Noem’s approach.
Ian Fury, a spokesperson for Noem, defended her actions: “Since the start of the pandemic, Governor Noem has provided her citizens with up-to-date science, facts, and data, and then trusted them to make the best decisions for themselves and their loved ones.”
Burgum’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The public, fueled by Trump, didn’t follow proper precautions
It wasn’t just the government that allowed Covid-19 to spread in the Dakotas. The public has played a role too, with large parts of each state acting as though everything is normal and refusing to embrace even the most basic precautions against the coronavirus.
COVIDcast, a project from Carnegie Mellon University that tracks real-time Covid-19 data, shows that North and South Dakota have some of the lowest levels of uptake in the US for social distancing and masking. South Dakotans are the 12th most likely and North Dakotans are the 17th most likely, out of the 50 states plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico to leave their homes for six or more hours a day. South Dakotans and North Dakotans are also among the least likely — 50th and 48th, respectively, out of all 50 states plus DC — to wear masks.
While touring Bismarck, North Dakota, in October, Deborah Birx, a White House coronavirus task force leader, acknowledged the problem. “This is the least use of masks that we have we seen in retail establishments of any place we have been,” she told reporters.
Perhaps the most infamous example of either state’s lack of adherence to Covid-19 precautions is the Sturgis motorcycle rally. From August 7 to 16, bikers came from across the country, attending events and hitting up local bars and restaurants. Masks were uncommon — even shunned. Among the T-shirts sold at the events, one stated, “Screw Covid-19, I went to Sturgis.”
Insufficient contact tracing makes it difficult to say with any certainty how much of the current epidemic originated at the Sturgis rally, but Covid-19 cases surged in the region, and particularly the Dakotas, in the weeks after the rally.
It’s not just Sturgis, though. On July Fourth, Trump held a large rally at Mount Rushmore, which is in South Dakota, that thousands of people attended, seldom wearing masks. Families and friends held their own parties and celebrations around the summer holidays, including Labor Day in September. There were rodeos and state fairs. Schools have reopened, with universities and colleges in particular fueling outbreaks nationwide.
“Those events, combined with the lack of leadership in encouraging the public to wear masks or practice social distancing, have contributed greatly to the current situation we are in,” Specker said.
Bars and restaurants are of special concern to experts: In these spaces, people are close together for long periods of time, they can’t wear masks as they eat or drink, the air can’t dilute the virus the way it can outdoors, and alcohol can lead them to drop their guards further.
Another problem is older teens and young adults may act more recklessly, believing they’re at lower risk of contracting Covid-19. But as a recent CDC study noted, younger people tend to spread the virus to their parents, grandparents, teachers, and so on. That, Carson said, appears to have happened in North Dakota: “We saw a surge of cases in our communities that had students coming back to start college. Those cases spiked in the young college-age population, then eventually spilled over into the broader community.”
Trump and Republican leaders have encouraged this. While touting their messages of personal responsibility, many Republicans have also downplayed the threat of Covid-19. Trump has deliberately done this — telling journalist Bob Woodward, “I wanted to always play [the coronavirus] down.” Even after his illness, Trump has tweeted, “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” He’s even mocked masks and claimed — falsely — that they’re ineffective. (In reality, the evidence for masks keeps getting stronger.)
For Trump, the goal here is political: If he manages to convince people that things are okay and normal, it could boost public perception of his handling of the pandemic. Republican lawmakers, in many ways beholden to Trump’s supporters, have by and large followed the president’s lead.
In North and South Dakota, that has seemingly translated to a predominantly Republican public going out, too often without masks, and spreading the coronavirus across the states.
North and South Dakota now have a serious and growing crisis
Experts often compare the spread of the coronavirus to a runaway freight train: The virus can take a while to build up, but once spread hits exponential growth, it takes an immense amount of work and time — up to weeks or months — to slow things down.
“Until the leaders of state and federal government support recommended public health policy, it is going to be difficult to slow the spread of this virus,” Specker said.
For the coronavirus, the solutions are the same things everyone has heard about for months now: More testing and contact tracing to isolate people who are infected, get their close contacts to quarantine, and deploy broader restrictions as necessary. More masking. More careful, phased reopenings. More social distancing.
This is what’s worked in other countries, from Germany to South Korea to New Zealand, to contain their respective outbreaks. It’s what’s worked in parts of the US, like New York and San Francisco.
But, crucially, this has to be sustained. Until a vaccine or similar treatment is available, the coronavirus will remain a constant threat in the US. Even less densely populated places, like the Dakotas, aren’t going to be safe for long without proper precautions in place.
Yet North and South Dakota leaders have continued resisting more hands-on approaches, calling for personal responsibility and limited, if any, role for government. Some local officials have stepped up to fill the vacuum, but they have more limited powers and reach than state leaders.
This fall and winter stand to hasten the spread of the coronavirus, too. Schools will continue to reopen. Increasingly cold weather will further push people indoors, where, due to poor ventilation, the virus has an easier time spreading than it does outdoors. Families and friends will gather for the winter holidays, from Thanksgiving to Christmas to New Year’s. A looming flu season could strain hospitals further, inhibiting their ability to treat a surge of Covid-19 patients.
If it gets bad enough, the only possible solution to avert further spread could be a lockdown. Already, the mayor of Fargo, North Dakota, mentioned the possibility. “The concern is that if we don’t start turning this around and our numbers keep going up, it’ll be difficult to keep the businesses going and being open,” Democratic Mayor Tim Mahoney, a physician by training, said.
Given that the outbreaks are already so bad and state leaders have still refused tougher actions, another possibility is the Dakotas will continue tolerating a high number of cases and deaths, failing to take any serious action in response.
If so, the two worst outbreaks in one of the countries struggling the most with Covid-19 will remain bad and perhaps get even worse.
Murder seems to be their go-to conflict resolution tool as long as the recipient is Black.
Philadelphia police have been the focus of protests since two officers shot and killed 27-year-old Walter Wallace in West Philadelphia on Monday. Video of the incident went around social media, showing the confrontation between officers and Wallace, that ended with the two police officers shooting no less than 10 shots at Wallace from about 10 feet away. Wallace’s mother, on the scene, trying to de-escalate the situation, runs over to her son, screaming and throwing her handbag at one of the officers.
The news and video of police officers, unable to de-escalate a situation with a member of the Black community, leading to execution-style death, has led to protests and aggression in the streets of Philadelphia. Overnight, news reports of confrontations between police and protesters filled the airwaves. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw has said she called for an investigation into the shooting, while Mayor Jim Kenney who said that "I have watched the video of this tragic incident and it presents difficult questions that must be answered.”
According to police, the officers were responding to reports of a man with a knife. When they arrived they “witnessed a male on the block. Immediately they noticed he had a knife in his possession and he was brandishing it, and waiving it erratically." According to witnesses, they had pleaded with Wallace to drop the knife but Wallace was clearly having some kind of crisis at the time. A video of the final moments of the confrontation was taken by a bystander, who can be heard remarking at how surreal everything unfolding in front of him is.
In the short video, Wallace is clearly agitated, while a woman, identified later as his mother, attempts to calm him down, chasing after him and he walks around cars, crossing the street. The officers can be heard telling Wallace to put “the knife down,” as they keep a distance from Wallace. As the police officers back up into the middle of the street, Wallace emerges from between two parked cars, and then, as the officers step back, a series of shots from their firearms can be heard. Wallace collapses to the ground. His mother runs out screaming. The officers walk over, as people from the neighborhood run over to the fallen Wallace.
Walter Wallace Sr., the deceased man’s father, told the PhiladelphiaInquirer that his son had mental health issues and took medication. “Why didn’t they use a Taser?” According to Maurice Holloway, a witness to the events, Wallace was on the porch of his home, with a knife. People in the neighborhood were out and trying to talk with Wallace to get him to put the knife down. However, when police arrived they immediately took out their firearms. From there, the situation deteriorated, with Wallace’s mother attempting to shield her son and get him to drop the weapon, while officers trained their gun on Wallace as he became more agitated.
The two officers involved have not yet been identified, and were supposedly taken off of street duty until an investigation events is completed.
Warning: The video below is violent and graphic.
Philadelphia cops fatally shot Walter Wallace Jr. today, firing 10+ times at him while he stood at least 10ft away. He allegedly had a knife but cops made NO attempts at de-escalating the situation in this video. They went straight to killing Wallace in front of his loved ones! pic.twitter.com/U2zYGqK7Ag
As you might expect, early voting volume is high across the country. In many states, one week until election day, the early voting count is already more than half of the total 2016 counts. For The New York Times, Denise Lu and Karen Yourish provide the breakdown with cumulative charts by state.
Donald Trump raged on Twitter Tuesday afternoon as FOX News played Obama’s speech to voters in central Florida.
Now @FoxNews is playing Obama’s no crowd, fake speech for Biden, a man he could barely endorse because he couldn’t believe he won. Also, I PREPAID many Millions of Dollars in Taxes.
The biggest difference between now and 2016 is @FoxNews. They are a whole different deal. Despite this, our campaign is doing much better, with bigger crowds and even more (much!) enthusiasm, than we had in 2016. Big Debate & SCOTUS Win! Real Polls have us winning everywhere!
Obama ridiculed Trump for complaining about the size of the crowd at his inauguration this week: “Who is thinking about that right now?”
Obama also took Trump to task for neglecting the coronavirus pandemic: “What’s his closing argument? That people are too focused on COVID? He said this at one of his rallies. ‘COVID, COVID, COVID,’ he’s complaining. He’s jealous of COVID’s media coverage. … He’s turned the White House into a hot zone.”
“If we were focused on Covid now, the White House wouldn't be having its second outbreak in a month,” Barack Obama says to Orlando voters, adding that President Trump has "turned the White House into a hot zone” pic.twitter.com/R3RABEi9WB
Obama mocked Trump’s bizarre behavior: “Even Florida man wouldn’t be doing some of this stuff.”
Former Pres. Obama: "We've gotten so numb to what is bizarre behavior."
"We wouldn't tolerate it from a coworker…even Florida man wouldn't be doing some of this stuff. Why would we accept it from president of the United States?" https://t.co/OAHJc158Kapic.twitter.com/DDdOeUD0d5
National Security Adviser er Robert O’Brien addresses the press during a meeting with Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, on October 20, 2020, in Brasilia, Brazil. | Andressa Anholete/Getty Images
BREAKING—Elderly attendees at Trump’s Omaha MAGA rally being treated for *hypothermia* after AF1 departs. Attendees stuck trying to get out of airport hanger, waiting for delayed buses & walking 3.7 miles to airport economy parking lot. So far 9 rushed to ER. 
Residents of Baltimore City line up to vote as early voting begins in the state of Maryland at Edmondson High School on October 26, 2020, in Baltimore, Maryland. | J. Countess/Getty Images
Chef Chris Hanmer sets up the flag in front of his business in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on April 21, 2020. | Jerry Holt/Star Tribune via Getty Images
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