Oct. 20, 2020
President
says Fauci has been a 'disaster'
|
By Rob Quinn, Newser Staff Posted
Oct 19, 2020 1:07 PM CDT |
(NEWSER) – President Trump slammed
his administration's top infectious disease expert in a call with his campaign
team Monday, calling Dr. Anthony Fauci a "disaster." "People are
tired of COVID. I have these huge rallies," Trump said. "People are
saying whatever. Just leave us alone ... People are tired of hearing Fauci and
all these idiots." Trump said he would fire Fauci if it wasn't for the
negative press, telling campaign staff that it's a "bomb" every time
Fauci appears on TV, but firing him would be a "bigger bomb," Forbes reports. "If there's a reporter on,
you can have it just the way I said it, I couldn't care less," Trump said,
per CNN.
Trump claimed that there
would have been 500,000 COVID deaths if he had listened to Fauci. Later in the
call, he upped that to 800,000, CNN reports. "He's been here 500
years," Trump said of Fauci, who has been director of the National
Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984. The Guardian notes that Trump's
campaign used Fauci's words in an ad last week, prompting Fauci to complain
that they had taken a "completely out-of-context statement and put it in
what is obviously a political campaign ad" without his permission. (On
Sunday, Fauci said he wasn't surprised that Trump tested
positive for the coronavirus after attending a Rose Garden event where no
precautions were taken.)
My Question would be: Who is the idiot….who
is the disaster?
This editorial
by the New Your Times tells you why I won’t
vote for Trump.
END
OUR NATIONAL
CRISIS
The Case Against Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign poses the
greatest threat to American democracy since World War II.
Mr. Trump’s ruinous tenure already has gravely
damaged the United States at home and around the world. He has abused the power
of his office and denied the legitimacy of his political opponents, shattering
the norms that have bound the nation together for generations. He has subsumed
the public interest to the profitability of his business and political
interests. He has shown a breathtaking disregard for the lives and liberties of
Americans. He is a man unworthy of the office he holds.
The editorial board does not lightly indict a duly
elected president. During Mr. Trump’s term, we have called out his
racism and his
xenophobia. We have critiqued
his vandalism of the postwar consensus, a system of alliances and
relationships around the globe that cost a great many lives to establish and
maintain. We have, again and again, deplored his divisive rhetoric and his
malicious attacks on fellow Americans. Yet when the Senate refused
to convict the president for obvious
abuses of power and obstruction,
we counseled his political opponents to focus their outrage on defeating
him at the ballot box.
Nov. 3 can be a turning point. This is an election
about the country’s future, and what path its citizens wish to choose.
Read the Full Editorial
The resilience of American democracy has been
sorely tested by Mr. Trump’s first term. Four more years would be worse.
But even as Americans wait to vote in lines that
stretch for blocks through their towns and cities, Mr. Trump is engaged in a
full-throated assault on the integrity of that essential democratic process.
Breaking with all of his modern predecessors, he has refused to commit to a
peaceful transfer of power, suggesting that his victory is the only legitimate
outcome, and that if he does not win, he is ready to contest the judgment of
the American people in the courts or even on the streets.
Kathleen Kingsbury, acting editorial page editor,
wrote about the editorial board’s verdict on Donald Trump's presidency in a
special edition of our Opinion Today newsletter. You can read
it here.
The enormity and variety of Mr.Trump’s misdeeds can
feel overwhelming. Repetition has dulled the sense of outrage, and the
accumulation of new outrages leaves little time to dwell on the particulars.
This is the moment when Americans must recover that sense of outrage.
It is the purpose of this special section of the
Sunday Review to remind readers why Mr. Trump is unfit to lead the nation. It
includes a series of essays focused on the Trump administration’s rampant
corruption, celebrations of violence, gross negligence with the public’s health
and incompetent statecraft. A selection of iconic images highlights the
president’s record on issues like climate, immigration, women’s rights and
race.
The urgency of these essays speaks for itself. The
repudiation of Mr. Trump is the first step in repairing the damage he has done.
But even as we write these words, Mr. Trump is salting the field — and even if
he loses, reconstruction will require many years and tears.
Mr. Trump stands without any real rivals as the
worst American president in modern history. In 2016, his bitter account of the
nation’s ailments struck a chord with many voters. But the lesson of the last
four years is that he cannot solve the nation’s pressing problems because he is
the nation’s most pressing problem.
He is a racist demagogue presiding over an
increasingly diverse country; an isolationist in an interconnected world; a
showman forever boasting about things he has never done, and promising to do
things he never will.
He has shown no aptitude for building, but he has
managed to do a great deal of damage. He is just the man for knocking things
down.
As the world runs out of time to confront climate
change, Mr. Trump has denied the need for action, abandoned international
cooperation and attacked efforts to limit emissions.
He has mounted a cruel crackdown on both legal and
illegal immigration without proposing a sensible policy for determining who
should be allowed to come to the United States.
Obsessed with reversing the achievements of his
immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, he has sought to persuade both Congress
and the courts to get rid of the Affordable Care Act without proposing any
substitute policy to provide Americans with access to affordable health care.
During the first three years of his administration, the number of Americans
without health insurance increased by 2.3 million — a number that has surely
grown again as millions of Americans have lost their jobs this year.
He campaigned as a champion of ordinary workers,
but he has governed on behalf of the wealthy. He promised an increase in the
federal minimum wage and fresh investment in infrastructure; he delivered a
round of tax cuts that mostly benefited rich people. He has indiscriminately
erased regulations, and answered the prayers of corporations by suspending
enforcement of rules he could not easily erase. Under his leadership, the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has stopped trying to protect consumers
and the Environmental Protection Agency has stopped trying to protect the
environment.
He has strained longstanding alliances while
embracing dictators like North Korea’s Kim Jong-un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin,
whom Mr. Trump treats with a degree of warmth and deference that defies
explanation. He walked away from the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, a strategic agreement among China’s
neighbors intended to pressure China to conform to international standards. In
its place, Mr. Trump has conducted a tit-for-tat trade war, imposing billions
of dollars in tariffs — taxes that are actually paid by Americans — without
extracting significant concessions from China.
Mr. Trump’s inadequacies as a leader have been on
particularly painful display during the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of
working to save lives, Mr. Trump has treated the pandemic as a public relations
problem. He lied about the danger, challenged the expertise of public health
officials and resisted the implementation of necessary precautions; he is still
trying to force the resumption of economic activity without bringing the virus
under control.
As the economy pancaked, he signed an initial round
of aid for Americans who lost their jobs. Then the stock market rebounded and,
even though millions remained out of work, Mr. Trump lost interest in their
plight.
In September, he declared that the virus “affects
virtually nobody” the day before the death toll from the disease in the United
States topped 200,000.
Nine days later, Mr. Trump fell ill.
The foundations of American civil society were
crumbling before Mr. Trump rode down the escalator of Trump Tower in June 2015
to announce his presidential campaign. But he has intensified the worst
tendencies in American politics: Under his leadership, the nation has grown
more polarized, more paranoid and meaner.
He has pitted Americans against each other,
mastering new broadcast media like Twitter and Facebook to rally his supporters
around a virtual bonfire of grievances and to flood the public square with
lies, disinformation and propaganda. He is relentless in his denigration of
opponents and reluctant to condemn violence by those he regards as allies. At
the first presidential debate in September, Mr. Trump was asked to condemn
white supremacists. He responded by instructing one violent gang, the Proud
Boys, to “stand back and stand by.”
He has undermined faith in government as a vehicle
for mediating differences and arriving at compromises. He demands absolute
loyalty from government officials, without regard to the public interest. He is
openly contemptuous of expertise.
And he has mounted an assault on the rule of law,
wielding his authority as an instrument to secure his own power and to punish
political opponents. In June, his
administration tear-gassed and
cleared peaceful protesters from a street in front of the White House so Mr.
Trump could pose with a book he does not read in front of a church he does not
attend.
The full scope of his misconduct may take decades
to come to light. But what is already known is sufficiently shocking:
He has resisted lawful oversight by the other
branches of the federal government. The administration routinely defies court
orders, and Mr. Trump has repeatedly directed administration officials not to
testify before Congress or to provide documents, notably including Mr. Trump’s
tax returns.
With the help of Attorney General William Barr, he
has shielded loyal aides from justice. In May, the Justice Department said it
would drop the prosecution of Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser
Michael Flynn even though Mr. Flynn had pleaded
guilty to lying to the F.B.I. In July,
Mr. Trump commuted the sentence of another former aide, Roger Stone, who was
convicted of obstructing a federal investigation of Mr. Trump’s 2016 election
campaign. Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, rightly condemned the
commutation as an act of “unprecedented, historic corruption.”
Last year, Mr. Trump pressured the Ukrainian
government to announce an investigation of his main political rival, Joe Biden,
and then directed administration officials to obstruct a congressional inquiry
of his actions. In December 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach
Mr. Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors. But Senate Republicans, excepting
Mr. Romney, voted to acquit the president, ignoring Mr. Trump’s corruption to
press ahead with the project of filling the benches of the federal judiciary
with young,
conservative lawyers as a firewall
against majority rule.
Now, with other Republican leaders, Mr. Trump is
mounting an aggressive campaign to reduce the number of Americans who vote and
the number of ballots that are counted.
The president, who has long spread baseless charges
of widespread voter fraud, has intensified his rhetorical attacks in recent
months, especially on ballots submitted by mail. “The Nov 3rd Election result
may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” he tweeted. The president himself has
voted by mail, and there is no evidence to support his claims. But the
disinformation campaign serves as a rationale for purging voter rolls, closing
polling places, tossing absentee ballots and otherwise impeding Americans from
exercising the right to vote.
It is an intolerable assault on the very
foundations of the American experiment in government by the people.
Other modern presidents have behaved illegally or made
catastrophic decisions. Richard Nixon used the power of the state against his
political opponents. Ronald Reagan ignored the spread of AIDS. Bill Clinton was
impeached for lying and obstruction of justice. George W. Bush took the nation
to war under false pretenses.
Mr. Trump has outstripped decades of presidential
wrongdoing in a single term.
Frederick Douglass lamented during another of the
nation’s dark hours, the presidency of Andrew Johnson, “We ought to have our
government so shaped that even when in the hands of a bad man, we shall be
safe.” But that is not the nature of our democracy. The implicit optimism of
American democracy is that the health of the Republic rests on the judgment of
the electorate and the integrity of those voters choose.
Mr. Trump is a man of no integrity. He has
repeatedly violated his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution
of the United States.
Now, in this moment of peril, it falls to the
American people — even those who would prefer a Republican president — to
preserve, protect and defend the United States by voting.
Oct, 16,2020
Fact check: Trump continues dishonesty bombardment at
Pennsylvania rally
Updated 1312 GMT (2112
HKT) October 14, 2020
How Biden's lead over Trump differs from Clinton's in 2016 04:40
Washington (CNN)President
Donald Trump has returned to the campaign trail with all of his usual campaign dishonesty.
Trump made
numerous false or misleading claims at his Tuesday rally in Johnstown,
Pennsylvania, his second falsehood-filled rally since he was hospitalized with
the coronavirus.
We're still
going through the transcript, but here's a quick roundup.
Biden's
positions
As he did at his Monday rally in Sanford, Florida, Trump baselessly
claimed that Biden supports policy positions that the former vice president
does not actually hold.
Trump lied, for example, that Biden's plan would "destroy protections
for pre-existing conditions." Trump is the one trying to eliminate
Obamacare, including the protections the law created for people with
pre-existing conditions. Biden, conversely, is running on a pledge to preserve
and strengthen Obamacare, including those protections for pre-existing
conditions.
Trump also
warned that Biden will "outlaw" private health insurance plans. But
Biden has vocally rejected proposals to eliminate private insurance, instead proposing a "public option" that would allow people to
voluntarily opt into a government insurance plan.
Biden's
childhood
Biden was
born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. But Trump said: "They say he was born in
Scranton, but he left, he left. He abandoned you."
Trump's
allegation is misleading to the point of absurdity. Biden didn't make his own
decision to leave Pennsylvania. His family moved from Pennsylvania to Delaware,
where his father had found a job, when he was 10 years old.
The
pandemic
Trump
offered another dishonestly rosy assessment of the state of the coronavirus
pandemic.
He claimed
that we are "rounding the turn on the pandemic," not explaining what
that means. And he said, "My plan: we're gonna crush the virus very
quickly. It's happening already. It's happening."
It's not
happening. The number of confirmed US new cases and hospitalizations is surging; there were 52,406 new cases on Tuesday, according to Johns
Hopkins University data. At the time Trump spoke, 33 states were seeing
increases in cases this week over last week.
Manufacturing
jobs
Trump
falsely claimed that "we added nearly 600,000 manufacturing jobs."
This would
have been an exaggeration even if you stopped the clock in February. (At that
point, before the pandemic-related crash in March, 483,000 manufacturing jobs had been added during the Trump presidency.) But now the
claim is flat wrong. As of September, 164,000 manufacturing jobs had been lost
since Trump took office.
Trump also
falsely claimed that President Barack Obama had declared that "you'll
never produce manufacturing jobs." That's not what Obama said. At a 2016
town hall event, Obama did say that some manufacturing
jobs were gone from the US for good -- but he also boasted about how many new
ones were being created in the US.
NATO
Trump made a
series of false claims about NATO.
He claimed
that he was responsible for securing an extra "$130 billion a year"
in military spending by other countries. Actually, NATO says the increase is
$130 billion total between 2016 and
the end of 2020, not $130 billion per year. (NATO does give Trump credit for
the increase, but it's worth noting that spending has been rising since 2015, before Trump took office.)
Trump said
that before him, NATO members "weren't paying their bills" and
"were delinquent." That's not how NATO works. While the alliance has a target of each member spending 2% of
GDP on defense, failing to hit that target doesn't create bills or debts.
And Trump
claimed that "Obama used to send them pillows." This appeared to be
Trump's usual reference to Obama's military aid to Ukraine, not about
contributions to NATO itself -- but it's inaccurate regardless. Obama did
decline to send Ukraine lethal aid, but he sent armored Humvees, counter-mortar
radar, night vision equipment, drones, and other military supplies.
The
border wall
For the
second consecutive night, Trump claimed that Mexico is paying for his border
wall.
"And
Mexico is paying for the wall, by the way. You know that. I've been saying it.
They hate to hear that. But they're paying," he said.
This is
simply false. The US government has paid for the wall -- in part with billions
of dollars Trump has controversially seized from other programs. The White
House declined to comment on Tuesday when we asked for an explanation of how
Mexico is supposedly paying.
Trump
vaguely said at the Tuesday rally, as he did at Monday's, that Mexico will
effectively cover the cost of the wall because of a "charge" he will
impose on cars crossing the border. (He called it a "border tax" on
Monday.) But he has not released any details of any such proposal, and, again,
the White House declined to explain on Tuesday.
Minnesota
and the National Guard
Trump
celebrated how the National Guard quelled violent protests in Minnesota after
the killing of George Floyd. He lamented, though, that it took "10
days" for the state to call his administration.
Minnesota's
Democratic governor, Tim Walz, activated the National Guard himself -- and he
did so two days, not 10 days, after the first protest violence. You can read a
full timeline here.
The
presidential debate and the phrase "law and order"
Trump told a
story about how Biden supposedly refused to utter the words "law and
order" at their first presidential debate. (Part of the story:
"Remember I said, 'So tell me, say the words law and order, say it, Joe,
say it.' He couldn't do it, he wouldn't do it, he wouldn't do it.") Trump
then acknowledged that Biden did say the words "law and order," but
he suggested that this doesn't count because Biden added extra words at the
end.
This is
ridiculous. Biden said at the debate that
"everybody's in favor of law and order." He then added, "Law and
order with justice, where people get treated fairly."
Trump is
free to argue that Biden adding "with justice" renders the words
"law and order" meaningless. But it's just false to suggest that
Biden refused say the words "law and order" at all.
CNN
and its cameras
Returning to
one of his favorite rally lies, Trump called CNN "fake," then said he saw the light
on CNN's camera go off -- insinuating that CNN had stopped recording because of
his jab.
Trump's
claim was, as usual, pure fiction. CNN does not turn its cameras off when he
insults CNN. And CNN photojournalists at his rallies do not even use a light
that would show Trump whether or not they are recording or broadcasting live.
Veterans
Choice
Trump
repeated another of his favorite rally lies, declaring that "we passed VA
Choice." Obama signed the Choice bill into law in 2014; it was an initiative of
two senators Trump has frequently criticized, Bernie Sanders and the late John
McCain. What Trump signed was the VA MISSION Act of 2018, which expanded and
modified the Choice program.
Trump has
made this claim more than 160 times.
Oct, 14, 2020
I want to get
away from politics for a while now. I went to the physiotherapist on Tuesday to
have her check to see if there has been any progress because of the exercises
that she has given me to do which I do faithfully. But my whole left side and
up the back was complaining as I told her. She gave me a real workover and
pressed in some places that almost made me jump but I trust her and really
walked straighter when I left. However, I told her that there are cases against
child abuse and against woman abuse, and I intend to add to that list Senior
abuse, as she beat me around. Ha.
I also had a communion service on Tuesday
morning at 6am. There were only two people there and we started at about 12
past 6 (people have trouble with public
transport being on time at that hour of the morning. One, came as we had
finished up the communion service and were putting the hots back in the
sacristy, but, being a real old
faithful, I gave her communion. She said that she was on night duty and had to
hurry to get things organized before she could come down. Wherever 2 or 3
gathered together in my name….. That’s us.
I will have another service on Friday the 16th
of Oct. for those who can leave their posts for a bit (maybe 10 0r 15 minute
service). We got the OK from the people at the top who said that we really need
prayer at our hospital. It is a government hospital but most of the staff are
Christian of one variety or another with a few Hindus (who join in) but I
haven’t come across any Muslims yet.
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