Over time, as Silicon Valley companies had to change the way its employees work during the COVID-19 pandemic, "an undercurrent of resentment has bubbled up across the tech industry against those splitting time between work and family, and it's spilled out in public on employee message boards, company chat software and on social networks," reports CNET. From the report: At Facebook, the pushback has forced COO Sheryl Sandberg, a parent herself, to defend the company's policies. "I do believe parents have certain challenges," Sandberg said in an August meeting, according to a report in The New York Times. "But everyone has challenges, and those challenges are very, very real." Meanwhile, some employees at Apple, Facebook and Uber say they're barely making it all work. More than half of 1,000 people surveyed by Care.com said they felt like they'd let down their colleagues due to juggling children and work during the pandemic. Of the respondents to the survey, published in August, 52% said they hide their childcare issues because they worry colleagues won't understand. And 45% believe their career advancement has suffered because they're juggling work and kids at home.
As the pandemic spread, many tech companies expanded policies to help parents deal with the sudden responsibility of caring for children while also working full time. Some, like Google and Microsoft, extended paid time off. Companies like Apple, Facebook and Uber also emphasized willingness to allow for more-variable work schedules. [...] Other tech firms express the same sentiments to caregiver employees and to the press. But some employees say the companies haven't successfully woven those feelings into their hard-charging cultures, which, before the pandemic, often included the expectation that people would endure long commutes to the office so they could be at their desks, working into the evening.
It's led to surprising clashes within tech companies, where parent employees are learning that some managers and peers resent the benefits and flexibility parents are getting. Many parents are also reporting they need more time to finish tasks, in part because of the regular interruptions caused by children. A July survey of 1,726 active job seekers by the recruiting site ZipRecruiter found that mothers at home with school-age kids expect work hours to reduce by 9%, while fathers say they expect a drop of 5%. Taken together, these new working arrangements have led some nonparent employees to accuse the parents of being treated better by management while failing to pull their weight.
Amazon is continuing to fight the Department of Defense over a $10 billion contract, as the Pentagon has completed its review of the deal and determined once again that it was correct to award the entire project to Microsoft.
The DOD launched bidding for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) project, a massive cloud-computing contract, in 2019. By April of that year, the shortlist was down to two finalists: Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure. Amazon was widely considered the favorite, and many industry watchers expressed surprise when Microsoft ultimately landed the deal in October 2019.
Amazon filed suit, alleging that the decision was politically motivated and quoting President Donald Trump's alleged intention to "screw Amazon." In February of this year, a federal judge agreed to order an injunction on the deal pending the outcome of the case.
Donald Trump's campaign is broke, and his ad spending in the first week of September took a major hit. In six key battleground states, the Trump campaign spent just under $4 million in TV and radio advertising for Sept. 1-7 while the Biden campaign posted nearly $20 million in ad spending, according to NBC News.
Arizona: Biden $2 million, Trump $0
Florida: Biden $5.1 million, Trump $1.9 million
Michigan: Biden $2.6 million, Trump $0
North Carolina: Biden $3.0 million, Trump $1.3 million
Pennsylvania: Biden $4.7 million, Trump $0
Wisconsin: Biden $2.2 million, Trump $670,000
Overall, according to data from Advertising Analytics, the Biden campaign dropped $24.5 million on broadcast ads Sept. 1-7 as Team Trump spent just $6.2 million. But according to NBC, Trump super PACs swooped in to narrow that spending gap to around $6 million, with Biden and pro-Biden PACs spending a total of $29.4 million to $23.3 million for Trump and pro-Trump PACs.
Still, the spending gap along with Biden's massive $364.5 million haul in August is worrisome for both Trump's reelection bid and Republicans running down-ballot. The Trump campaign still hasn’t released its August fundraising totals.
"Talking to my Republican sources, it's clear that this is a problem not just for the Trump campaign, but it's a problem for the entire GOP," Washington Post reporter Robert Costa told MSNBC Tuesday.
Costa said Republican strategist are uneasy about what they view as a "lack of grassroots momentum" that's hurting fundraising across the board. In 2016, Trump used earned media from rallies and other campaign events to help make up whatever shortfalls he initially suffered in fundraising and spending. But this year, Trump isn't getting a boost from his campaign rallies due to his abysmal handling of the pandemic. What comes around goes around.
Nationwide, Trump and his PACs had outspent Biden and his PACs $124 million to $38.4 million as of Aug. 31, according to CNN. But Trump had a head start of a month, and Biden/outside groups still managed to outspend Trump/outside groups in the battleground states, $183 million to $158 million, as of Aug. 31.
Based on the September start, Biden appears poised to completely light up the airwaves as Trump goes increasingly darker by comparison.
It is pretty amazing. And hilarious. Major wealth transfer from GOP rubes to GOP consultants, vendors, and grifters. Such patriotism!
We know the Trump campaign is broke. Not only are its actions indicative (like pulling its TV advertising in key battlegrounds), but it still hasn’t released its August fundraising numbers. The Biden campaign had no problem bragging about its record-shattering $365 million August.
Stories have dug into the cesspool that is the Trump campaign, such as the $15,000 per month payments the partners of the two Trump sons are skimming from the campaign. But like everything Trump, no matter how bad you think things are, they are always, always worse.
Five months later, Mr. Trump’s financial supremacy has evaporated. Of the $1.1 billon his campaign and the party raised from the beginning of 2019 through July, more than $800 million has already been spent. Now some people inside the campaign are forecasting what was once unthinkable: a cash crunch with less than 60 days until the election [...]
Is it really that unthinkable? This is the guy, after all, who bankrupted a casino. Literally everyone around him is a crook. Why would anyone think he’d manage his campaign any differently?
That NY Times story has plenty of examples of wasteful spending, like Trump’s $11 million Super Bowl ad, which Trump insisted on airing because then-candidate Michael Bloomberg was busy pissing away his own money ($1 billion!) in his hilariously ill-fated Democratic primary bid. There’s the $800,000 former campaign manager Brad Parscale spent promoting his own Facebook page. Or how about the $1 million the campaign spent advertising in the Washington DC media market so that Trump could see himself while watching Fox and Friends during his “executive time.” At least $4 million has gone into Trump properties.
Ultimately, Trump has acted like his donor’s money is his own piggy bank—from supporting his own family, to paying his own legal bills, to taking the entire family on trips as, one Trump campaign official put it, “sponsoring vacations.”
And then there’s the biggest line item expense: “Under Mr. Parscale, more than $350 million — almost half of the $800 million spent — went to fund-raising operations.”
Thats’s … wow.
So there was this scam operation in Republican politics called BMW Direct. They typically worked with fringe House candidates, delivering eye-popping fundraising numbers. The catch was that almost all that money was eaten up by fundraising “expenses.” For example, back in 2008, they worked for a candidate challenging then-Rep. Barney Frank, then representing a safely blue district.
Charles A. Morse, a conservative Republican gadfly from Brookline, ran a brief write-in campaign to unseat US Representative Barney Frank in 2006. It fizzled completely when he received just 145 votes in a primary and dropped out two months before the general election. "I never saw him," Frank said when asked about Morse's presence in the campaign. Yet the political fund-raising firm that ran Morse's campaign finances reported that it raised more than $700,000 for his race, much of it from GOP contributors across the country eager to help defeat a Massachusetts liberal - and some of it donated well after Morse abandoned the race.
The punchline? 96% of that $700,000 that was raised, for a campaign that received 145 votes in a primary, went to pay for that fundraising. The campaign was ultimately left with just $28,000. Now multiple that by dozens of campaigns, and they did this for years. BMW Direct became Base Connect. It then became Forth Right. Then the guy behind it finally plead guilty to a felony last year, because the whole Republican Party is a bunch of crooks.
The point of that tangent is that the Trump campaign didn’t even need to hire a scam outfit like BMW Direct to deliver inflated fundraising numbers, only to see that money consumed by “expenses.” They did it to themselves. The call was coming from inside the house.
It is impossible to overstate just what a disaster that campaign has been, which again, is only to be expected given Trump’s history of attracting incompetent felons into his inner circle (clearly makes him feel smart and superior, like a mastermind), and his history of disastrous money management.
Current campaign manager Bill Stepien is so clearly leaking this damaging information to shunt blame to Parscale, who in turn ju jitsu’d the attack and redirected it Jared Kushner. “I ran the campaign the same way I did in 2016, which also included all of the marketing, strategy and expenses under the very close eye of the family,” Parscale said,. “No decision was made without their approval.” It’s true, Kushner has always been the de facto campaign manager. It’s also true that Kushner is incompetent, thus didn’t realize Parscale was part of the grift: “Millions more followed to firms tied to R.N.C. and Trump-linked officials, including more than $39 million to two firms, Parscale Strategy LLC and Giles-Parscale, controlled by Mr. Parscale since the beginning of 2017.”
These people deserve each other.
Let them all yell and point fingers at each other as the USS Trump takes on water, now lacking the money to wage even the most basic level of battleground state advertising.
It’s just funny. So funny. And fun.
It was just last year that their campaign was bragging about expanding the map to places like Minnesota and Nevada. “Obviously, we have to go back and win Michigan again, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin,” Parscale boasted. “We plan on also being in Minnesota very soon. I think New Mexico is in play in 2020. I think New Hampshire, I think we continue to grow the map. I think Nevada, you know even Colorado. And so those are, those are states we did not win in, in 2016 that I think are open for 2020.”
Now, they’re struggling to hold on to demographically (read: white and old) Republican states like Alaska, Iowa, Ohio, and Montana. Texas is looking sketchy for the GOP. In fact, the Republican Party is under serious threat up and down the ballot, anywhere in the country that has those places called “suburbs.”
And did I mention they’re broke? Because they’re broke.
As the COVID-19 pandemic stretches on with very little relief in sight, the decisions we all make can get a little fuzzy. Some of us might allow a playdate outside to get maskless at points, or allow kids to get closer than they should be. It isn’t a good thing. It isn’t a smart thing. But there are aspects to the public health crisis that are mental, and we all try and deal with those things as best as we can. However, driving a motorcycle to hang out in close proximity to 250,000 other people for a 10-day party/festival is straight up dangerous and ignorant.
The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota, which took place the first week of August, worried health professions around the world as hundreds of thousands of attendees from all different parts of the country went maskless, drank, and reveled—and guess what? Wearing T-shirts that read “Screw COVID. I went to Sturgis” didn’t stop them from spreading COVID-19 is a massive way. A new study entitled “The Contagion Externality of a Superspreading Event:The Sturgis Motorcycle Rally and COVID-19,” by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics found that the 10-day event can be tied to 250,000 coronavirus cases.
According to the study, which used anonymized cellphone data from the rally where around 500,000 people congregated, there were a “total number of cases to 266,796 or 19 percent of 1.4 million new cases of COVID-19 in the United States between August 2nd 2020 and September 2nd 2020,” connected to the rally. IZA estimates that the costs of this event to the public will be over $12 billion. It is important to note that to reach this number, researchers worked under the conservative assumption that all of these new cases were nonfatal. The researchers explain that the conservative nonfatal modeling is in order to give a general ballpark figure for public officials to work with. We already know that people have died as a direct result of COVID-19 exposure at the Sturgis rally.
Researchers also pointed out that the states and localities where some of the spreaders from the rally returned were able to mitigate the spread locally. But those examples were solely in places actually implementing public safety measures like masks, social distancing, and early testing and quarantining. Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, a Trump death cult member, promoted how everything was “back to normal” in South Dakota, welcoming the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally to her state and helping spread death across the country.
Xiao Huang, a California homeowner, shared his experience with a neighborhood “Karen” who entered his garage to deliver a racist tirade because she didn’t like that his kids were coloring the alley outside their garage with chalk.
“Tell your kids to stop it or else I’m gonna…” the woman screeched.
“You’re gonna do what?” the man replied.
“Do you live here? You’re such an unfriendly person that I knew I couldn’t talk to you.” Karen replied, touching the man’s car. When told to stop to touching his car, Karen ran her hand up the side of the car, beating it repeatedly.
“Oh, you son of a bitch. I don’t think you live here because you have slanted eyes,” the woman said, pointing.
“Slanted eyes?” the man replied. “Wow, that’s racist.” He later added, “You’ve had a problem with me since I moved in here.”
“We saw a guy that didn’t have slanted eyes that moved in,” the woman replied, before moving toward the man and kicking something in the garage.
Added Xiao on Facebook: “I can’t tell you how upset I am. I pride myself in how I present myself. Jenine and I do the best we can to raise our kids right, teaching them right from wrong, respect others, doing the right thing even when people aren’t looking. I am not going to let this woman and her husband’s action overshadow all the good that I see in my neighbors and this world. To all my friends, please help me share this, make this go live, share this, get the word out. The only way we can stop people from acting like this is to make sure they understanding it is wrong and they can’t get away with it.”
The woman credited for creating the “gender reveal party” back in 2008 is speaking out after revelations that one of the parties sparked California’s El Dorado fire which has burned more than 10,000 acres near Los Angeles.
Said Jenna Karvunidis, who created the “gender reveal party” for her first child but has since spoken out against them, on Facebook: “Stop it. Stop having these stupid parties. For the love of God, stop burning things down to tell everyone about your kid’s penis. No one cares but you. It was 116 degrees in Pasadena yesterday and this tool thought it would be smart to light a fire about his kid’s dick. Toxic masculinity is men thinking they need to explode something because simply enjoying a baby party is for sissies. Oh, and of course I’m getting hate messages. Excuse me for having a cake for my family in 2008. Just because I’m the gEnDeR rEvEaL iNVeNtoR doesn’t mean I think people should burn down their communities.”
Redditor /u/Amaroko placed this WD Blue drive on an empty cardboard box, and held a Blue Yeti mic just above it while it powered on. Spectral analysis of the audio shows a 90Hz baseline—90 cycles (revs) per second and 60 seconds per minute works out to 5,400RPM. [credit:
Amaroko
]
Last week, the fine Redditors of /r/DataHoarder got upset with Western Digital again—this time, for misrepresenting the rotational speed of their WD Red Network Attached Storage hard drives. (Although the linked post brings things to a head, members of the German-language forum hardwareluxx.de began investigating the issue more than year ago.)
We found this controversy reminiscent of earlier complaints that Western Digital was not properly disclosing use of Shingled Magnetic Recording technology in their NAS drives. But the new complaint is that Western Digital calls 7200RPM drives "5400 RPM Class"—and the drives' own firmware report 5400 RPM via the SMART interface.
Recently, redditor /u/Amaroko set out to prove or disprove earlier netizens' findings. For each of several drive models, Amoroko placed a sample of that drive on an empty cardboard box, with a Blue Yeti mic held directly above it, then powered the drive on. Spectral analysis of the recorded audio using Adobe Audition showed a baseline frequency of 120Hz for two models of WD 8TB "5400 RPM class" drive.
"A new study suggests fresh asphalt is a significant, yet overlooked, source of air pollution," reports Science. "In fact, the material's contribution to one kind of particulate air pollution could rival or even exceed that of cars and trucks."
UPI reports:
And its emissions double as its temperature increases from 104 to 140 degrees Fahrenheit, researchers found. Sunlight plays a key role in these asphalt emissions, with even moderate levels of sunshine tripling the release of air pollutants, according to the study published Sept. 2 in the journal Science Advances... In-use pavement usually gets as hot as between 117 and 153 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, while roofs can reach 167 degrees, the study authors said.
As the major contributors to air pollution get cut back — for example, through cleaner vehicle emissions — passive pollution sources like these will have a growing influence on the air we breathe, said Peter DeCarlo, an associate professor and air pollution expert with Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore. "In doing that reduction, we are discovering these new sources that are now playing a more prominent role in our air pollution issues," DeCarlo said.... Asphalt probably contributes most to air pollution when it's freshly laid, DeCarlo added. During the paving process, asphalt is heated to as much as 248 to 320 degrees Fahrenheit, the researchers said. "If you've ever been around people laying asphalt, you smell it. It's clear something is getting into the air when that happens," DeCarlo said. But asphalt likely continues to emit air pollutants even after it's aged, when sunlight bakes the material, he noted.
Switching to concrete for paving would help reduce emissions, he said, but concrete is not an ideal paving material in all locales. Another possible solution might be the application of "cool pavement" technology, where colored sealants are applied to paved surfaces so they reflect more solar energy and become less likely to heat up, Gentner said. Emissions might also vary with different asphalt application methods and different formulations of the paving product, Gentner suggested.
"Fans have flocked to a church in Germany to hear a chord change in a musical composition that lasts for 639 years," reports the BBC. "It is the first change in the piece, As Slow As Possible, in seven years."
The Guardian reports:
The performance of the composition began in September 2001 at the St Burchardi church in the eastern town of Halberstadt and is supposed to end in 2640 — if all goes well.
The music piece by the American composer John Cage is played on a special organ inside the medieval church... A compressor in the basement creates energy to blow air into the organ to create a continuous sound. When a chord change happens, it's done manually. On Saturday, soprano singer Johanna Vargas and organist Julian Lembke changed the chord.
The BBC notes the score for the 639-year composition is just eight pages long. But though the piece was written in the 1980s, it wasn't until nine years after the composer's death in 1992 that anyone dared to attempt playing it. That performance then began — with a pause that lasted nearly 18 months.
The next chord change is scheduled for February 5 of the year 2022.
If you spend any time on the internets, and if you have any conservative family members on social media that you still occasionally check in on, you might find yourself having to read through some profound rationalizing on behalf of an indefensible Republican administration.
Another example of class warfare. The left hate him because through hard work he became rich. It's an obvious attempt by leftists to crucify him in the mainstream media without one shred of proof. I have literally not seen one shred of proof of his guilt.
What was the outcome of his trial? Oh wait, there wasn't one. He wasn't even charged. So could it be that instead of being a criminal he was actually just a victim of leftist hysteria?
Convenient that the footage starts on Wile E Coyote but we don't see what Roadrunner was doing before hand. So this violent antifa roadrunner could be speeding around, looking for trouble and violence and the footage starts right when the Coyote is defending himself.
Is there any radical leftist more violent and thuggish than Lincoln? The man basically founded antifa. Sounds like Boothe saw him as a legitimate threat and acted in self defence to me.
Big fan of rubber which is recyclable. Created jobs, industry, loved family values so much that he even let young children work alongside their parents. Sure some people died but everyone dies eventually. but how many more would have died if crooked Hillary had been in charge?
It's funny that the left literally hate people for simply asking questions. A group of people making simple inquiries is literally Hitler according to leftists.
The whole philosophy of the Borg is togetherness and equality. The left pretends to want those things but it's obvious they just want to agitate. If leftists hate the Borg it's clear they stand for nothing
When a leftist opposes law and order you have to wonder their motivations. Seems to me the Empire brought peace to the galaxy and it was radical leftist terrorists that were destroying that peace. Why? Because they were sad that the government wasn't giving them handouts?
Literally creates jobs for the entire town. He then tries to block out the sun so the town needs more electricity and thus CREATES MORE JOBS and a violent antifa thug named Maggie shoots him for his trouble.
Great now the left is trying to besmirch a man who literally worked at CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS helping to cheer up sick kids by being a clown! Is there any low that the left won't sink to, attacking a children's entertainer? It's just sad.
Ask yourself what Mario is doing that Bowser needs to take the princess away? We've only ever heard one side of it in the MSM but it looks to me like Bowser is doing everything he can to protect princess peach from two vicious brothers who are nothing more than antifa thugs.
Loved his wives and kids and the left tries to turn family values into some sick power game, because that's all the left understand. Max was an outside agitator that teamed up with radical antifa Furiosa to stir up violence and trouble.
When Obama became the president to bring him to justice, things change.
- Didn't blow up anything personally - Wasn't even in america when 9/11 happened - Killed before he could stand trial (convenient) - Hated big government Yep, sounds like another victim of the "tolerant left"
So now we are just poisoning people we don't like? Sure he was young and when you're a teen you do some rebellious stuff but boys will be boys. Does that mean we poison them? Any teen who rides a skateboard or wears a backwards cap now should be poisoned?
And sadly, the way many conservatives are acting right now.
Literally the hardest working virus in 2020. Creating healthcare work, bringing people together, and by every measurable standard a raging success in the virus world but that doesn't fit the leftist narrative of "success = evil"
A new study by Vanderbilt University political scientist Larry Bartels suggests that there's a theme to the escalating conservative willingness to upend democracy in America, discrediting election results and advocating for lawbreaking—and even violence, if necessary. It's about whiteness. Specifically, it's about racist conservative fear of nonwhites, and their determination to block nonwhite Americans from upending their "traditional" way of life.
You know: fascism. As President Dumbass defends a teenage mass shooter who traveled across state lines explicitly for the purposes of murdering American protesters he determined needed murdering, it's not surprising to hear that anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-anybody-who-isn't-white sentiment is the defining force behind conservative premises that our laws and elections may no longer be sufficient, and may have to be restructured by force.
Intelligencer's Eric Levitz gives a summary of Bartels' findings. Making ideological distinctions in the population is notoriously difficult, given the complexity of each individual's positions; Bartels filtered through YouGov poll respondents to isolate "ethnic antagonism" as specific voter disposition, as opposed to partisanship, economic conservatism, cultural conservatism, or other factors. This was scored according to responses to questions such as "discrimination against whites is as big a problem today as discrimination against Blacks and other minorities," questions that measure white voter anxiety towards other American groups.
After filtering out those ideological distinctions, Bartels found that "ethnic antagonism" is a better predictor of anti-democratic beliefs than any other category. It's not economic anxiety or culture war battles that are causing Republicans to increasingly declare that "force" may be necessary to upend the results of elections. It's racism.
Bartels even found that the other ideological dispositions, such as economic conservatism, were negatively associated with those authoritarian beliefs. Nope! It’s just the racism.
Now, at this point it may seem obvious that Republican devotion to Trump is based on racism, and not fears about any other sodding thing in existence. Trump has managed to kill off nearly 200,000 people through incompetence, drive us into a recession-bordering-on-depression, and has managed to handle even the rote "inspirational" parts of the job with all the charisma of a rotting fish. Just as he did during the 2016 campaign, he instead is making a racial, racist case for keeping power based on stoking fears toward anti-police-brutality protesters, racially repackaging the pandemic as "the China virus," and similar new bleatings.
Trump knows his appeal is based on racism. Trump's campaign is operating under the assumption that his appeal is based on his racism. Republican lawmakers supporting Trump are standing behind his adventures in racism, and adding their own versions. And we've now got yet another study showing that racism, violent racism, is the impetus behind Republican anti-democratic beliefs.
It seems the only people left in America uncertain about whether Republican and conservative rhetoric aimed at discrediting elections and thwarting the normal rule of law is racially motivated are the nation's political pundits and headline writers. Everyone else is pretty clear on where we stand.
In past years, those anti-democratic and authoritarian sentiments manifested themselves through racial gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts. Trump's Republican allies have cut straight to the point, however, with suggestions that a November election that does not return Trump to power might not have legitimacy at all. The suggestions are being opportunistically amplified by foreign anti-democratic groups; they are almost certain, now, to cause post-election violence and terrorism.
You know, from racists. Trump's most devoted—and dangerous—base.
An in-kind donation to the Trump campaign from the federal government.
The Trump administration has given up on any serious attempts to curb the nation's ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. As U.S. deaths inch towards the 200,000 mark, outside experts are now warning Americans to ignore the "dysfunctional" Centers of Disease Control and Prevention after the agency issued new, Trump-favored guidelines to reduce testing, rather than expand it. There is no federal contract tracing effort. There is no standard, expert-based pandemic policy—each state has been left to its own devices, with federal officials ignoring even the most serious state outbreaks.
Don't worry, though. It's not like the Trump-led federal government is entirely asleep at the wheel. The Department of Health and Human Services is seeking bids for a new quarter-billion dollar communications contract, reports Politico. No, not to encourage Americans to social distance, wear masks, or get tested—don't be stupid. The new publicity campaign will instead "defeat despair and inspire hope," advising businesses how to operate "in the new normal" and instilling "confidence to return to work and restart the economy."
Yeah, we're all going to die.
You will note, dear tired reader, that this language sounds very much like Trump's own anti-pandemic anti-policy. Rather than taking more aggressive steps to curtail the pandemic—as nearly every other nation on the planet has—the new publicity campaign will presume we live in a "new normal." It will be based, says "a senior HHS official" who for some reason would not go on the record to say these embarrassing things, on "defeating the mental health challenges of the coronavirus," which sounds explicitly like Trump's own insistence that it's depression over social distancing that's killing people, not the deadly disease marked on the death certificates.
So instead of a new testing program or, say, mailing out masks to every American household, we're getting an advertising campaign meant to "defeat despair." Oh, and Politico reports the contract will be managed by Trump ex-campaign guy Michael Caputo.
Odds that Trump loyalist Michael Caputo is going to sign off on a $250 million ad campaign telling Americans to "defeat despair" through the remarkably effective practice of wearing masks, against Donald Trump's personal wishes? Zero. Less than zero. Zero minus the square root of Ivanka.
Anyhoo, the idea that the Trump-led federal government is, immediately before the (cough) November elections, going to be combatting the COVID-19 pandemic via an ad campaign telling Americans to maybe just stop being sad about it is ... well, let's be honest. It's so on-brand it hurts.
It's the "Be Best" of infectious disease campaigns. Sorry, we still need to limit testing—but here's some tips on how you can restart the economy, fellow patriots. Nothing inspires "hope" like getting your unmasked face back to work, unless it's getting legislation passed immunizing your employer from consequences if you die afterword. Now that's inspiring.
Students walk on campus at the University of South Carolina on September 3, 2020. In the final week of August the university reported a 26.6% positivity rate among the student population tested for Covid-19. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images
At schools around the US, suspensions — and dismissals — are rising along with cases. And a growing number of students are seeing classes go online.
Coronavirus cases are flooding the campuses of US colleges and universities, leading to last-minute instructional changes — and sudden disciplinary actions — that have caused difficulties for students and their families.
This week at Northeastern University in Boston, 11 students were dismissed from their program without tuition reimbursement for violating Covid-19 social distancing policies, and the Ohio State University suspended 225 students before classes even began for similar infractions.
There have been more than 50,000 confirmed cases on college campuses since the pandemic began, according to the New York Times, a number that has increased dramatically in recent weeks. That’s prompted a number of colleges, like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to cancel in-person classes after students had already paid tuition. And as Vox’s Terry Nguyen has reported, rising case numbers have also left many students scrambling to find housing off-campus — or transportation back home.
The increasing infections have left college towns such as Auburn, Alabama, and Ames, Iowa, hot spots for coronavirus outbreaks. More than 1,000 cases have been discovered at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, nearly 1,200 at University of South Carolina, nearly 1,400 at the University of Alabama, 540 at the University of Kansas, 752 at Texas A&M, and 962 at University of Iowa.
University administrators are all handling the surges differently. Currently, around 20 percent of colleges are either primarily or fully in-person, according to a tracker from Davidson College’s College Crisis Initiative. Around a third are either fully or primarily offering courses online. Overall, Irwin Redlener, director of the Pandemic Resource and Response Initiative at Columbia University, described the current higher education situation to Politico as “national chaos.”
Some schools, like Boston University and Colby College, are checking students daily for coronavirus symptoms. Others are setting up quarantine dorms and creating screening stations throughout campus. But many aren’t conducting robust testing of students — in fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t recommend testing when some colleges opened for summer instruction.
And when things go awry, it’s often students who take the blame for the failure, leading to a rash of suspensions at schools including Syracuse University, the University of Miami, and the State University of New York, among others.
Some argue this is an ineffective strategy given the patchwork of policies employed by universities around the country largely fails to protect students. Julia Marcus, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and Jessica Gold, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, wrote in the Atlantic this summer:
Relying on the self-control of young adults, rather than deploying the public-health infrastructure needed to control a disease that spreads easily among people who live, eat, study, and socialize together, is not a safe reopening strategy—and yelling at students for their dangerous behavior won’t help either.
Rising cases — and sudden policy changes — have left students in a difficult place
That schools would see high case numbers and be forced to move instruction online should have been obvious, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill sophomore named Suzy told Nguyen.
“From the moment we stepped foot on campus, I knew we weren’t going to be there for a long time,” Suzy said. “Parents knew. I overheard someone joking that they’ll see their kids in two weeks.”
And this has largely been the case, leaving students frustrated at sudden changes, and upset to learn they would not be attending class in person after paying tuition or making travel plans.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill held in-person classes for only one week before shutting down on August 17. Jarrah Faye, a sophomore at UNC and a residential adviser in a first-year dorm, told Nguyen she had to both find new housing for herself and support freshmen moving out while keeping up with online classes.
“Where am I going to live? I have so many questions and so little time to think about what I’m going to do and where I’m going to go,” Faye told Nguyen. “Had this been done better, low-income students like myself wouldn’t have been put in this position of wondering whether our housing will be refunded, or if we’ll have enough money to get food if dining halls close down.”
With cases continuing to climb, colleges are now faced with a new problem: Whether to send students back home to communities where they could continue to spread the virus, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has warned against doing, or risk keeping them on campuses to wait out a pandemic. It’s another piece of the complexities of education in 2020 — but one that many see as a problem that could have been avoided.
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Even since the first outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019 in China at the end of last year, there have been concerns around whether it’s even possible to develop lasting immunity against COVID-19. After all, even though humans are beset with thousands of disease-causing viruses, only seven are known to be coronaviruses. Of these, there are good indications that two—SARS and MERS—do generate an immune response that is thought to provide an extended period of immunity. The other four coronaviruses, which are the cause behind about 15% of chest colds, don’t generate a lasting immune response and can return after a short period.
If the body can’t develop lasting immunity, then not only is it impossible to achieve “herd immunity” as people become infected, but the quest for a effective vaccine is also very problematic. That’s why papers reporting a rapid decline in antibodies after only two months, and reports of people being reinfected with COVID-19 have generated widespread concern.
However, new information from a paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week, is considerably more hopeful, because it appears to show that antibody levels against the SARS-CoV-2 virus can persist months. And that those most at risk may have a stronger antibody response.
Honestly, the earlier papers showing a decline in antibodies weren’t that surprising, because they focused with patients who had light or asymptomatic cases of COVID-19. These patients had low levels of antibody production to begin with, when compared with patients who had moderate or severe cases, so it’s not really shocking that a few weeks on, some had antibody levels that dropped below the detection limits of some tests. What it does suggest is that an effective vaccine would have to generate higher levels of immune response than these light infections. Fortunately, Phase 2 trial results from the major vaccines indicate that this is the case.
When it comes to reinfection … it’s hard to say anything at this point except that it seems to be very rare, because the three cases that have been presented so far in pre-print articles are all quite different in timing and outcomes.
The new data comes from Iceland, the one nation on Earth that has approached the virus with a simple plan: Test everyone, isolate those who test positive, and continue until no one tests positive. The fact that Iceland’s population is significantly less than the state of Wyoming undoubtedly makes this more possible, but it remains one of the world’s most consistent, easy to explain, and straightforward ways of dealing with the pandemic. Iceland also has the benefit of being able to say their program worked. The first cases of the disease appeared on the island nation in February. By April, it was pretty much over. 1797 people were found to be infected before April 30—only 13 new cases appeared since then.
In this case, the authors of the paper (unsurprisingly a long list of “-sons” and “-dottirs” of Reykjavik) looked at data from 2102 samples collected from 1237 persons over a period ranging up to 4 months. Why four months? Because that’s pretty much the period between when those people were infected, and when the paper was written. That’s a review of 69% of all the people infected in the nation. Hard to ask for more than that.
91% of the people tested positive on antibody tests at the start of the test—meaning that some people who tested positive with PCR testing earlier didn’t test positive on the antibody tests even at the start of the test. Part of this may reflect some limits on the sensitivity or accuracy of the test, while part may be people whose infections never generated an antibody response. This means that some of the people who were in the earlier “antibodies falling” test may have been excluded from the ranks of the Iceland test from the outset, because by the time they got the antibody test, up to two months after recovering, they had already dropped below detectable levels.
In any case, what comes after the enrollment of patients is interesting: “Antiviral antibody titers assayed by two pan-Ig assays increased during 2 months after diagnosis by qPCR and remained on a plateau for the remainder of the study.” That is, antibody levels in those patients who tested positive initially actually rose over the first two months, they then remained fairly steady over the next two months. It’s hard to find any bad news in that.
Because they had a relatively large pool of samples, the researchers were also able to split their data out over several demographic groups.
Women had about 9% lower antibody production than men … which seems odd, considering that men seem to die at a higher rate from COVID-19. This could be a connection between the cytokine storm responsible for a large number of COVID-19 deaths and gender, though the researchers did not speculate on this. That theory (that I just made up this moment, so even “theory” is being kind) might be bolstered by the fact that people on anti-inflammatory drugs also had a significantly lower immune response, and some anti-inflammatories have proven to lower mortality rates for COVID patients in extreme conditions. Stay tuned.
Smokers had a much lower level of antibodies. Like 58% lower. Which could, perversely, help protect them from cytokine storms. Although COVID-19’s direct infection and inflammation of the lungs is likely connected to a higher death rate among smokers. So is smoker’s overall lower health (Warning: while the results are really, I’m still just making these conclusions up).
SARS-CoV-2 antibody levels were higher in older people, with the level steadily increasing with age. Again, this probably shows that an over response by the immune system is one of the big factors involved in deaths due to COVID-19, just as it was with the 1918 flu pandemic. But the good news here could be that older people who recover from COVID-19 are well protected against reinfection. Oh and … see warning above.
With all that in mind, it’s not surprising that people who were hospitalized also had very high levels of antibodies. These are the folks whose systems fought like heck … and almost got them along with the virus. “With respect to clinical characteristics, antibody levels were most strongly associated with hospitalization and clinical severity, followed by clinical symptoms such as fever, maximum temperature reading, cough, and loss of appetite. Severity of these individual symptoms, with the exception of loss of energy, was associated with higher antibody levels.”
In any case, looking at antibody production over time was not the primary goal of this paper, but the steady levels of antibodies over the four month period is a relief for anyone not relishing the idea of getting a “booster” on a monthly or quarterly basis. If older people who survived COVID-19, or those who had a really tough fight but pulled through, have good protection against reinfection, that’s great.
Now we need a vaccine that gives that protection to everyone, without the risks of catching the disease.
He'd rather focus on direct racism than mocking the troops. And the GOP is fine with this.
President Donald Trump directed the Office of Management and Budget to end anti-racism trainings Friday. He later tweeted that such programs are a “sickness” that must be eradicated. He’s shown here during a news conference at the White House on Sept. 4. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A White House memo directing an end to the programs said the trainings are “anti-American propaganda” and must stop.
President Donald Trump directed federal agencies Friday to end diversity training programs, calling them on Saturday “a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue.”
Trump’s decision to eliminate the anti-racism training — featuring “critical race theory” and discussions of “white privilege,” according to the directive — comes amid a nationwide reckoning on racial injustice the president has firmly opposed.
The change was announced in a memo sent to the heads of federal agencies from Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought wrote that Trump ordered the sessions canceled after learning federal agencies are spending millions of dollars training employees in “divisive, anti-American propaganda.”
Those trainings taught workers that “virtually all White people contribute to racism” or benefit from it, the memo claims, adding that some of the trainings have stated there is “racism embedded in the belief that America is the land of opportunity or the belief that the most qualified person should receive a job.”
These teachings “engender division and resentment” within the federal workforce and contradict the “fundamental beliefs” of the nation, Vought claimed, adding that is why Trump has asked him to stop “these divisive, un-American propaganda training sessions.”
The memo repeatedly cites “press reports” as having illuminated the substance of the trainings. While it doesn’t identify what those reports are, a New York Post opinion piece on the subject was published Tuesday and picked up by Fox News, which the president watches almost religiously.
Agencies have been told to begin identifying trainings related to critical race theory or white privilege, as well as any training that suggests the US is “an inherently racist or evil country” or “that any race or ethnicity is inherently racist or evil,” and to investigate ways to end their contracts with those providing the instruction.
Following reporting on the memo, Vought tweeted, “the days of taxpayer funded indoctrination trainings that sow division and racism are over.” Trump, too, celebrated the decision on Twitter, highlighting the positive reactions of some supporters through retweets, and by asking people to “report any sightings” of the trainings “so we can quickly extinguish!”
Trump Orders Purge of ‘Critical Race Theory‘ from Federal Agencies https://t.co/ygXcTXRHsQ via @BreitbartNews This is a sickness that cannot be allowed to continue. Please report any sightings so we can quickly extinguish!
The decision is particularly salient, given that it comes amid one of the largest civil rights movements in American history, which has seen ongoing anti-racism protests that have sparked conversations about racial inequities in a number of industries.
Critical race theory aims to examine the systemic racism people are currently protesting
Trump’s decision seeks to root out trainings on critical race theory, framing it as an insidious idea that conceptualizes white people and institutions as inherently racist. This is not accurate, however.
Critical race theory is a school of thought that examines how race and racism is perpetuated through existing legal and cultural systems. It supposes that examining and critiquing social institutions — and creating spaces for people of color to share their experiences — can help create a fairer world. Examining the advantages white people enjoy in social, economic, and political areas (also known as white privilege) is a part of understanding and challenging those systems.
But the Trump administration has long pushed back on that concept, which has been thrown into the spotlight as the US grapples with racial fault lines exposed by the coronavirus pandemic — which has disproportionately killed people of color — and continued shootings of Black people by police.
Trump has said the Black Lives Matter movement is a “symbol of hate” and has called those protesting police brutality “thugs.” He’s threatened to end protests by sending US troops into American cities, saying ongoing anti-racism protests amount to “domestic terror.”
Throughout his presidency, Trump has vehemently opposed protesters’ and officials’ efforts to take down Confederate statues and has begun to promote a “law and order” campaign message that has included a racist dog whistle pledge to protect “suburban housewives” from “inner city” crime.
And the president has consistently declined to condemn brazenly racist comments or actions. For instance, when a supporter in a retirement community was filmed shouting “white power” while driving a golf cart bedecked with Trump memorabilia in June, he retweeted it.
Amid the pandemic, he’s called the coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and the “kung flu,” which his critics say has been connected to an increase in racist slurs and jokes against Asian Americans. He’s recently resurfaced birther conspiracy theories against Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris that echo the lies he repeatedly spread about former President Barack Obama.
The American public has responded in kind. Around half of Americans say the president has made race relations in the country worse since he took office, according to a Pew study — a number that has remained fairly steady since the start of Trump’s tenure. And Pew has also found confusion, as well as a deep partisan divide, over what the ongoing anti-racism protests are about.
Despite Vought claiming otherwise, it is these sorts of divisions that diversity trainings — including those that feature critical race theory — are meant to bridge.
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As November approaches, much of the focus on the 2020 presidential election centers on making voting—and especially voting by mail—as accessible as possible. But voter access is still a bigger picture issue. Given that the nation continues to face the novel coronavirus pandemic without real guidance from our federal government, poll worker turnout in November is a considerable concern. Now, major retailer Old Navy is offering an incentive for its store employees to work the polls.
Old Navy is working in partnership with Civic Alliance and Power the Polls to get 250,000 new poll workers, and it’s offering store employees eight hours of pay for poll work, as reported by CNN. If applicable, employees may also receive pay from their local election commissions for their work.
Nancy Green, CEO of Old Navy, said in a news release: “Every voice in this country matters and deserves to be heard at the polls, and if we at Old Navy can be even a small part of making that process more accessible to the communities we call home, we are on board.”
Old Navy is far from the only retailer to offer voting incentives. Patagonia, for example, will close all of its retail locations, headquarters, and distribution center on Election Day—and pay employees as a holiday. Ben & Jerry’s, Coca Cola, Uber, Cisco, and Twitter also offer Nov. 3 as a paid day off. Starbucks has said it will give employees flexibility on voting day, while Walmart will give workers pay for three hours. Apple is offering four hours of pay.
Why is it so important to get people to not only vote, but work the polls? First of all, the ongoing issue is tied to voter suppression—particularly against Black and brown voters—and a lack of polling places and enough poll workers can lead to ridiculously long wait times. In terms of the pandemic, however, it’s important to look at the demographics of most of our poll workers.
Older people make up a lot of our poll workers, and from what we know about the pandemic, older people may be particularly vulnerable to the virus. In 2018, for example, the majority of poll workers were over 60-years-old. So it’s not terribly surprising that since COVID-19 hit, poll workers have begun calling out. That means now is the time for new people to get involved as poll workers, and make sure they do so with enough time to get proper training. It’s also imperative that we protect the United States Postal Service and keep voting by mail as accessible as possible.
~35% of the country will vote for a Republican literally no matter what. Wipe your ass with the flag after shitting on a soldier's grave? Won't stop the GOP base.
At a campaign event on Friday, Joe Biden gave his reaction to The Atlantic article that claims president Donald Trump referred to dead American service members as “losers” and “suckers”.
“If what is written in The Atlantic is true, it is disgusting. It affirms what most of us believe to be true, that Donald Trump is not fit to be the commander-in-chief,” the former vice president and Democratic candidate said.
Trump’s Defenders: He Doesn’t Hate the Troops, He Just ‘Sounds Like an Asshole’
In The Daily Beast’s interviews with 11 senior administration officials, Trump aides, Republican operatives, and former and current friends of the president, several of them mounted a curious defense of Trump. Yes, they admitted, the commander in chief at times makes callous, tone-deaf comments about American military personnel behind closed doors. But it’s because he hates the wars they’re forced to fight, not the service members themselves.
6/9 While I am not surprised, I am disgusted by the current occupant of the Oval Office. He has repeatedly and consistently shown himself to be completely unfit for and to have no respect for the office he holds.
Per @JenGriffinFNC: This former official heard the President say about American veterans: “’What’s in it for them? They don’t make any money?’ It was a character flaw of the President: he could not understand why someone would die for their country, not worth it.”
NEW: Joe Biden on report claiming Pres. Trump made disparaging remarks about fallen U.S. troops, which the president has forcefully denied: "If what is written in the Atlantic is true, it is disgusting." https://t.co/9L4iOyxFHKpic.twitter.com/JcRWjSBUSk
This week, a slew of new, high-quality polls out this week confirmed their off-record observations: Biden continues to hold a steady lead over President Trump.
Post-convention national polls from Quinnipiac, Suffolk/USA Today, CNN and Selzer & Company show Biden ahead of Trump by 7-10 points. The FiveThirtyEight model, which incorporates a larger universe of polls, puts Biden's lead at 7.4 percent. That's not much different from Biden's pre-convention lead in early August of 8.3 percent.
Battleground state polling from Monmouth, Quinnipiac and Fox News find Trump trailing. More importantly, these polls show the president stuck in the low-to-mid 40 percent range.
As I've written for a while now, the margin between Biden and Trump is less instructive than the vote share that Trump is getting. For example, a Monmouth poll out this week found Biden's lead over Trump in Pennsylvania had narrowed from seven points in July (51-44 percent) to four points (49 to 45 percent.) A poll out from Quinnipiac this week showed Biden leading Trump by a more robust eight-point margin (52-44 percent) in the Keystone State. While the margins may be different, or have changed, one thing has remained constant: Trump has not been able to improve his share of the vote. He remains stuck at 44/45 percent of the vote. Pennsylvania is one of six states that Trump carried with less than 50 percent of the vote back in 2016. The fact that Trump continues to poll in the mid-40's suggests that his 48 percent showing here in 2016 is his ceiling. That was enough to win the state when third party candidates combined for four points. This year, he can't count on third-party candidates siphoning away that vote.
Trump still has pretty decent winning chances (~30% in our model) but I don't really buy that his chances are *increasing* and I don't get why there seems to be some sentiment to that effect. In some ways, rather, this was the most reassuring week of the campaign for Biden.
To put it another way, with the late conventions this year, we're rapidly transitioning from "it's still pretty early" to "we're in the stretch run". And out of that Trump went from...trailing by 8-9 points to 7-8 instead? (And that small bounce might fade anyway.) Not great.
Still “Likely Biden.” It’ll never be “Safe Biden.” Trump is the reason why his campaign can’t re-make the contest. He is likely to say and tweet ridiculous stuff all the way to November. Only Biden can change the trajectory of the race if he screws up badly.
The 2020 Election, a Race in Which Everything Happens and Nothing Matters
If a pandemic that has killed nearly two hundred thousand Americans can’t significantly hurt Trump’s support, can anything?
It’s tempting not to pay attention to any of this, given the stubborn immutability of Americans’ attitudes about the election. But the paradox of our politics right now is that just because the race seems immovable does not mean that nothing can move it. In 2016, Clinton entered into September with essentially the same lead over Trump which Biden has now. But she did not leave the month with that lead intact. By mid-September, the Quinnipiac poll showed her lead cut in half, to just five points. (And, of course, the national surveys did not reveal the true state of Clinton’s weakness in the battleground states that ended up deciding the race’s outcome in the Electoral College.) Biden today is a bad debate, a campaign stumble or two, and an October surprise away from a 2016 repeat. Which is why the small ups and downs of the race may, in fact, matter—the slight shifts that do not register in the national aggregate but mean everything in Wisconsin or Pennsylvania or Florida. But neither is Biden doomed to Clinton’s fate. It may be that we are stuck in an endless loop of replaying the events of 2016 so much that it has become almost impossible to look at the politics of 2020 for what they are: an increasingly uphill battle for an embattled incumbent at a time when the country is mired in crises for which a majority of Americans blame him. Biden may yet stumble, but isn’t it just as likely that the race moves as little in the next two months as it has in the past two? There are no examples in our recent history of an incumbent President down this far in the polls who has still managed to win. If Trump is at the same place on November 3rd that he is today, he would lose in a landslide as unprecedented in modern times as the Presidency that preceded it.
The possibility of a Trump win is real. But so is a Biden landslide, and this is one of the few articles that says so.
The Pentagon has ordered Stars and Stripes to shut down for no good reason
Trump wants to pull funding from Stars and Stripes, a newspaper for American troops that began in the Civil War and has been serving our soldiers.
Today Stars and Stripes is printed at sites around the world and delivered daily to troops — even those on the front lines, where the internet is spotty or inaccessible. As the “local paper” for the military, it provides intensive and critical coverage of issues that are important to members of the nation’s armed services and “cuts through political and military brass BS talking points,” Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., a Marine veteran, told Military.com.
It’s also arguably one of the most powerful weapons our soldiers have carried into battle with them. As a publication that’s underwritten by the military but not answerable to the brass, Stars and Stripes embodies that most American of values: the right to speak truth to power.
Seems clear to me that trump wasn’t to shut anything down that he can’t control.
Most likely scenario: Trump erupted when Stars and Stripes reported the poll of the military and said "Kill that goddamn thing!"And Mark Esper, loyal as ever, ordered it done. When it became a story that would hurt, Trump turned around and tried to take credit for saving it!
The latest polling suggests Trump’s ugliest campaign strategy may be imploding
As a new wave of unrest breaks out, some commentators have cracked open their well-worn pundit handbooks and recited a trusty old trope: Violence simply must help the “law and order” candidate. It cannot be any other way, because the handbook says so: Violence must beget backlash — a craving for the candidate vowing “strength.”
But what if a public backlash is brewing against what PresidentTrump is doing? What if many voters see Trump’s exploitation of the situation as part of the problem, and are recoiling from that? If so, this could challenge the conventional pundit playbook, and prompt a revisiting of how cycles of racial nationalism and attempts at reconciliation play out in our politics.
New polling suggests this possibility. A CNN poll finds that 58 percent of Americans say Trump’s response to the protests has been “more harmful,” while only 33 percent say it’s “more helpful.”
USC Dornsife, and the party affiliation graphs are fascinating. this is R leaners and they have been by far the most volatile group pic.twitter.com/AqVJYCQEYf
A new poll finds the Democratic nominee is running behind Hillary Clinton’s pace in the critical swing state.
The good news for Biden is that, while he probably won’t match Clinton’s numbers, he’s on pace to exceed former Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson’s margins with Hispanic voters in the 2018 race he lost narrowly, Odio said. And if Biden continues to get outsized backing from Black voters and keeps pulling more than 40 percent support from non-Hispanic white voters — who are still a supermajority in Florida — he’s in a good spot to win the battleground and end Trump’s hopes of reelection.
Recent polls of Florida’s overall electorate show Biden with a slight lead over Trump, within the margin of error in most polls, making it essentially a tied race here.
Good article, read beyond the headline. Room for Biden to grow, and FL is always tied. But win FL and Trump’s chances of reelection plummet.
"Objectivity" has left us with the false impression that looters and rioters have been dominating the streets. It's another reason to remain focused on what's driving the unrest and not get distracted.https://t.co/2xqayaY1Zshttps://t.co/SY0RjpoSTy
If a vaccine comes out before the election, there are very good reasons not to take it.
State and territorial governors across America have received a letter dated Aug. 27 from the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Robert Redfield, instructing them to grant facilities and licensing to a private contractor, McKesson Co., for mass immunizations. “CDC urgently requests your assistance in expediting applications for these distribution facilities,” Redfield wrote, “and, if necessary, asks that you consider waiving requirements that would prevent these facilities from becoming fully operational by November 1, 2020.”
With that mass vaccination date less than 58 days away—and, surely not coincidentally, two days before the national elections—states must scramble to submit their immunization scheme to the CDC for approval by Oct. 1. This must cover everything from logistics and personnel to public education and recruitment. The pace required here is astounding, dramatically more rapid than any prior drug or vaccine rollout in history. Though officials insist no corners are being cut, the timetable is simply too short for full safety analysis of any vaccine.
It is hard to comprehend the decision as anything but an election maneuver. In his speech to the Republican National Convention last month, President Donald Trump vowed, “We are delivering lifesaving therapies, and will produce a vaccine before the end of the year, or maybe even sooner! We will defeat the virus, end the pandemic, and emerge stronger than ever before.”
the other key difference: Nixon wasn’t the incumbent president. Trump is. https://t.co/8ML3qzqsLJ
And then there was that most telling of tells—the Trump campaign going dark during its convention week, pulling all TV advertising from the airwaves. A cash-flush campaign would use TV to reinforce the convention’s message, and there was no reason for the Trump campaign to not be cash flush, right? But there was literally no other explanation to their advertising silence: they were broke.
And now, we have confirmation that they are, indeed, broke.
My latest: The Trump campaign has canceled it's Phoenix TV ads next week -- and they may not resume until early October.https://t.co/LIvvHlF6zK
This is quite the remarkable turn of events. Arizona is a must-win state for Trump, and yet here he is, mere weeks before people stop voting, and they’ve pulled their ads.
On Thursday, records filed with the Federal Communications Commission by Phoenix-area television stations showed that the Trump campaign cancelled all of its ads between Sept. 8 and Sept. 14. The air time totaled approximately $580,000 in the Phoenix media market, which includes most of the state except for the areas surrounding Tucson and Yuma.
$580,000. That’s not exactly mega-bucks for presidential campaigns expected to spend half-a-billion dollars or more. And yet there is the Trump campaign, counting its pennies. And Tucson?
FCC records also show that the Trump campaign stopped advertising on Tucson television stations about two weeks ago.
Two weeks ago! How many more battlegrounds are being shortchanged by Trump’s flailing, cash-poor campaign?
Furthermore, this doesn’t just mean that the campaign is short on cash now, it means that the campaign’s fundraising status is such, that the campaign has no confidence that it can go the distance without serious cost-cutting.
Meanwhile, over at Biden HQ:
NEW: Biden campaign turns his Pittsburgh speech into a TV ad Will run nationally on cable networks + 9 battleground states: Arizona, Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin Campaign is spending $45 million on digital + TV ads pic.twitter.com/aWbQRQSLiM
Long-time readers will know about my skepticism over TV advertising. Public opinion simply doesn’t change, not on presidential preferences, and certainly not via a 60-second television ad. Nearly 200,000 dead have cost Trump a net three points in his job approval, according to the Civiqs daily tracking poll. If we’re lucky, the latest revelations of Trump grossly insulting our troops will cost him maybe another 1-2 points. If we’re lucky.
But that’s a separate debate. Fact is, presidential campaigns advertise. And if they don’t, it’s because they don’t have the money to do so. That goes extra for Trump, who was forcing his campaign to advertise in indigo blue Washington DC so he could watch himself during his copious daily TV time.
So how does the Trump campaign spin away this embarrassing admission of poverty? “With a permanent presence in the state since 2016, Arizonans have heard from the Trump campaign for years and know about the wins President Trump’s America First agenda has delivered for them in just one term,” said campaign spokeswoman Samantha Zager.
Okay then! Arizonas already know who he is! Mission accomplished! Except that …
The Economist’s Arizona polling aggregate, Biden leading Trump 52.2 to 47.8.
According to the polling aggregate, Biden is leading Trump is Arizona 52 to 48. The last two polls of the race have both given Biden massive leads in the state: 52-42 from Morning Consult, and 49-40 Fox freakin’s news.
So if we were to take that spokeswoman literally, we’d have to assume she’s saying “Arizonans know Trump well and they don’t like him and are going to vote for the other guy, so we’re cutting and running. See you somewhere else, maybe!”
In truth, they had to say something, and that’s about as good a line of bullshit as any. There really is no way to plausibly explain this away.
We’ll know in less than two weeks just how pitiful Trump’s cash position has become. Given the latest obvious cash-cutting moves, it can’t be that good.
Nope. Trump's just lying and making shit up in hopes that early voters will vote for him now based on his bullshit.
President Donald Trump again suggested that a coronavirus vaccine would “probably” be available in October, contradicting assessments this week by top health officials who have said it would be very unlikely.
Trump said in a press briefingFriday that there would be a vaccine “before the end of the year and maybe even before Nov. 1. I think we can probably have it sometime in October.”
The president's remarks came a day after the head of the government's vaccine accelerator, Moncef Slaoui, said that the government was "very unlikely" to greenlight a vaccine by early November, because data from late-stage clinical trials of leading vaccine candidates would not be ready by then.
"There is a very, very low chance that the trials that are running as we speak could read before the end of October,” said Slaoui, who heads the government's Operation Warp Speed, told NPR. “I think it's extremely unlikely but not impossible, and therefore it's the right thing to do to be prepared in case."
He is not alone in urging caution. While three vaccine developers have entered the final stages of trials, phase III, the studies take months and enroll tens of thousands of people.
The federal government's top infectious disease expert, Anthony Fauci, also cautioned this week that result could take longer.
“If you look at the projection of the enrollment and the kinds of things you'll need to get a decision about whether the vaccine is safe and effective, most of us project that that's going to be by November and December, by the end of this year,” Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, said on CNN. “It is conceivable that you could have it by October, though I don't think that that's likely.”
Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla told reporters this week that the company will know if its coronavirus vaccine works by the end of October. But it is unclear whether the Food and Drug Administration, the agency responsible for reviewing vaccines, would issue an emergency use authorization or approve the shot based on that data.
Trump had previously suggested that a vaccine could be ready before the election, and last month accused government scientists of trying to delay progress until after Nov. 3.
Meanwhile public confidence in coronavirus vaccines has slipped, with just 14 percent of voters be more likely to take a vaccine recommended by Trump, according to a POLITICO/Morning Consult poll.
But both Slaoui and FDA's top vaccine official Peter Marks have said they would quit their jobs if a shot was rubber stamped without enough data. FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn has also denied politics would play any role in their decisions.
The FDA has scheduled a public meeting for its vaccine advisory committee, a panel out outside experts, to discuss coronavirus vaccines on Oct. 22.
There are 96 military veterans in the 116th Congress, 66 of them Republicans. So far, we've heard not one word from any of the 66 of them about the contempt, the disdain, the vulgar words Donald Trump has for their service. Multiple news outlets have confirmed that Trump called fallen soldiers, their brothers and sisters in the military, "losers" and "suckers."
Among Senate Republicans who've served: Lindsey Graham, whose only defense of his very great friend in the Senate, John McCain, against Trump's multiple attacks over years was two tweets that didn't even mention Trump's name. Joni Ernst of Iowa is also a veteran who is continuing to run on her service for reelection this year. Not one peep from Joni yet. Same with Martha McSally in Arizona. Or Dan Sullivan in Alaska. All are running for reelection this year, and not a single one has yet said anything about Trump's vulgar attitude toward their service. Oh, and another one—Mitch McConnell, who served briefly in the Army Reserve during Vietnam even though he benefited from a pretty quick medical discharge—after just five weeks of active duty.
You'd think these senators—and every single elected representative—would want to defend their comrades, or at least want to speak up on behalf of their constituents and the families of all the fallen soldiers Trump has disparaged. For example, Susan Collins in Maine, where veterans are 10% of the population. Or Sullivan in Alaska, where they're 12% of the population. Nine percent of Graham's and McSally's constituents are veterans, and 8% of McConnell's.
It's not even about saving their political lives, it's about basic decency. Patriotism. Or even friendship—they all served with McCain in the Senate and none of them stood up against Trump.
Students walk on campus at the University of South Carolina on September 3, 2020. In the final week of August the university reported a 26.6% positivity rate among the student population tested for Covid-19. | Sean Rayford/Getty Images
President Donald Trump directed the Office of Management and Budget to end anti-racism trainings Friday. He later tweeted that such programs are a “sickness” that must be eradicated. He’s shown here during a news conference at the White House on Sept. 4. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images
