Trump has repeatedly said that only he will protect pre-existing conditions and Democrats want to take away those protections. He says this because he is a liar and he’s clueless. His administration has been working tirelessly with many right-wing clones in the states who have pushed this ridiculous lawsuit to totally repeal Obamacare with nothing to replace it.
They are still at it — in the middle of a global pandemic with 20 million people out of work:
The reality is that Americans place greater faith in Joe Biden than the president when it comes to healthcare, and right now, they are not buying what the administration is selling. Simply put, gutting Obamacare is a political loser.
From the looks of things, Trump’s 2016 campaign promise to “repeal and replace” the ACA must be kept regardless of the cost to himself and others. Yey, more than half of the U.S. favors leaving the ACA alone. Just a quarter want to see it struck down by the courts.
Even before this latest episode, the president’s reelection bid was in trouble, and DOJ’s latest stance won’t help. For all of Trump’s populism, he evidences a visceral disdain for at least half of the populace. Opposing mail-in balloting — even as his vice-president votes from out-of-state, listing the Indiana governor’s mansion as his residence — while jock-sniffing dead Confederate generals is, among other things, a bad strategy.
Nationally, Trump trails Biden by ten points now, and more in some polls. Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are for the moment, anyway, poised to turn blue. Fox News also shows Biden leading by two points in Georgia and ahead by a whisker in Texas. If the election were held today, the former vice president would be on track to capturing more than 330 electoral votes, a landslide by Trumpian metrics.
If Trump has his way with Obamacare, the ranks of the uninsured would more than double in Michigan and Pennsylvania. Florida would probably see a jump in uninsured by two-thirds. As for Wisconsin and Texas, the figure would swell by one-third.
Oh, and by the way, they say they will repeal the protections for pre-existing protections:
The Trump administration SCOTUS brief includes a section explicitly arguing that the ACA’s preexisting condition protections should be killed. pic.twitter.com/QpqolqkNs5
April 15 ='ed peak daily count for NY State, topping 10,000 new cases. But much of that reflected adding 100s of "suspected" cases that had died since Feb outside of hospitals to the tally. Without such a 1-day stats adjustment, #Florida#COVID19 new cases soars 9,000 in 1 day. https://t.co/WKichzYjuq
Voters think Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden is better suited to handle the issues of the day, expanding his lead over President Donald Trump in the battleground state of Florida.
Biden tops Trump by 9 points, 49-40 percent, in a Fox News survey of Florida registered voters. That’s up from a 3-point edge in April (46-43 percent).
Gosh, I wonder why?
By the way,Florida isn’t reporting hospitalization rates throughout the states. Some counties like Miami-Dade are reporting them and they are becoming overrun. Just saying.
Today’s Coronavirus Task Force briefing was even worse than I anticipated. You didn’t need Trump to be there blowing smoke and attacking reporters when you have Mike Pence sounding like Baghdad Bob on a good day.
Here are some highlights but they don’t do it justice:
Pence claims "we flattened the curve," which is no longer true — the trajectory of new US cases is now rising again pic.twitter.com/KrdmQ8A3W1
FAUCI: "What we're missing in this is something we've never faced before: a risk for you is not just isolated to you, b/c if you get infected, you are part of propagating the dynamic process of a pandemic … chances are that if you get infected, you're gonna infect someone else" pic.twitter.com/B5KHOOTxX2
Pence touted a decline in coronavirus cases in Oklahoma, the implication being that Trump's rally last weekend didn't cause an outbreak there. Here's what he was talking about. pic.twitter.com/JMZhUPA9JO
There were dozens of questions that went unanswered because Pence abruptly ended the briefing.
He and Birx tried to make the case that it’s all young people who are asymptomatic (or as Trump says “a ten year old with the sniffles”) but hospitalizations are going up. And I would bet money the death rate will go up as time goes on as well.
They are doubling down on killing their own voters. I will never understand it.
“So we’ve done a lot and we’re very proud of it and we had the best until this artificial problem ‘cause I call it an artificial problem.
“We had to turn off our country to save millions of lives and now we’ve turned it back on.And it’s coming back much faster than anybody thought possible.”
According to John Hopkins University’s tracker, there are approximately 2,422,000 cases of the virus in the U.S. and over 124,000 deaths. Additionally, millions of Americans have lost their jobs as a result of COVID-19.
This is why his poll numbers are cratering. He can’t lie his way out of it and his whining and blaming makes no sense.
President Trump traveled to Wisconsin on Thursday to tour a naval shipyard, where he bragged that he had the Navy steer a big contract Wisconsin’s way, which can only be construed as an order to boost his electoral chances in the swing state. I suppose it’s not surprising that he is so open about such things. After all, he was impeached for trying to extort a foreign ally into produce damaging information on his presumptive opponent, and every Republican senator except Mitt Romney backed him to the hilt. Why would he think interfering in a domestic military contract for his own benefit would be a problem?
Frankly, it probably isn’t. Trump’s corruption is now the norm and most people just shrug when he openly brags about it. Apparently, they believe everyone does it and it’s just the usual partisan fighting. But the way he’s dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic is something else again. The latest polling is devastating for his re-election prospects and it’s very much tied to the fact that he has so thoroughly mishandled the government response and refuses to change course.
Nearly three-fifths of voters disapprove of Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, including majorities of white voters and men. Self-described moderate voters disapproved of Mr. Trump on the coronavirus by a margin of more than two to one.
Only the true believers think he’s done a good job on the worst crisis of his presidency, and that’s largely because they get all their news from suspect sources. The Washington Post published an article about several studies showing that right-wing media has played a major role in misinforming its audience about the virus:
The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’s Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences.
On Thursday night, Trump appeared with Hannity for a “town hall” and repeated his daft line that if we didn’t do so much testing we wouldn’t have so many cases. He’s said that so often I think we can assume that his followers have been thoroughly indoctrinated in this nonsensical concept.
Joe Biden described the problem perfectly in the speech he gave on Thursday:
He’s like a child who can’t believe this has happened to him, with all his whining and self-pity. This pandemic didn’t happen to him. It happened to all of us. His job isn’t to whine about it. His job is to do something about it.
The president wants us to believe there’s a choice between the economy and public health. Amazingly, he still hasn’t grasped the most basic fact of this crisis: to fix the economy, we have to get control over the virus.
No, he can’t grasp this simple fact and I suspect that even if he could, he would be incapable of making the kinds of decisions necessary to make that happen. He trusts no one but his gut, and his gut keeps on telling him that this will all just “go away” and everything will be fine.
He’s now taken to bragging that the “mortality rate” in the U.S. is something to be proud of, which is just bizarre. The 126,000-plus dead human beings and their families don’t see it as such a great accomplishment, and Trump is signaling clearly that he has no intention of changing course in any way.
Coronavirus deaths are way down. Mortality rate is one of the lowest in the World. Our Economy is roaring back and will NOT be shut down. “Embers” or flare ups will be put out, as necessary!
Pew Research reported this week that a majority of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (61%) agree that when it comes to coronavirus, ‘the worst is behind us.'” I’m afraid they are in for a rude awakening. Those “embers or flare-ups,” as Trump calls them have turned into a wildfire that’s now out of control.
Twenty-nine states are currently aflame, with rising caseloads and hospitalizations, as we see the largest national numbers of the pandemic, surpassing the worst weeks of April when cases were concentrated in New York and a few other large cities. His favorite Republican governors — Greg Abbott of Texas, Ron DeSantis of Florida and Doug Ducey of Arizona — are in a particular bind, having followed Trump’s lead and opened up their states early, even seizing authority from local officials while arrogantly proclaiming their superior handling of the crisis.
DeSantis was particularly insolent and overbearing. Recall that on May 20, Vice President Mike Pence paid DeSantis a visit and they conspicuously dined in a burger joint without masks or social distancing, after which DeSantis delivered a Trumpian rant to the assembled media.
Gov. Ron DeSantis goes off on Florida doubters: "We've succeeded, and I think that people just don't want to recognize it." pic.twitter.com/FBi6F0saCo
He spoke much too soon. On Wednesday the state set a new single-day record, with 5,508 new cases of COVID-19. There were another 5,004 on Thursday. In fact, Florida has had more cases in June than in the previous three months combined.
When asked about the surge this week DeSantis said, “We are where we are,” and tried to act as though everything was going fine and it’s all just as expected. He’s now punted all the tough decisions to individual businesses and local officials, so it looks as though he plans to ride the wave wherever it takes him, all while pretending that was the plan the whole time.
In Arizona, Ducey has also loosened his grip and allowed mayors to require masks in public, while in Texas, Abbott has actually begun to slow down the state’s reopening and may even roll back toward a partial lockdown. But all these Republican state executives are stuck in the Trump maelstrom in which he continues to insist that the pandemic is “fading away” while they have to face the sickness and death that’s crashing all around them. He is an albatross around their necks.
Aside from the massive human carnage, the political ramifications are profound. The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein has been tracking the slow transformation of the Sun Belt from solid GOP to purple to potentially Democratic for a while. He believes the pandemic may be hastening the process and putting Republicans in a bind of their own making:
Until the 2016 election, Republicans had maintained a consistent advantage in the region’s big metros — including Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Phoenix — even as Democrats took hold of comparable urban centers in other parts of the country. But under Trump, the GOP has lost ground in these diverse and economically thriving communities. And now, a ferocious upsurge of COVID-19 across the Sun Belt’s population hubs — including major cities in Florida and North Carolina where Democrats are already more competitive — is adding a new threat to the traditional Republican hold on these places.
Polling shows that Biden is competitive in all those states at the moment ,and the question is whether that will hold up until November. According to the New York Times poll, a majority of voters strongly favor the government prioritizing the pandemic over a hasty reopening of the economy. Unfortunately, Republican voters, no doubt listening to Trump and Hannity, say they believe the opposite. Or at least they did. One has to wonder if those attitudes will hold now that the virus is no longer something that happens to other people far away.
“We live in an era where we think nothing can really stun us anymore,” Barbara McQuade and Joyce Vance begin at New York magazine’s Intelligencer. Immigrant children separated from parents, a president ignoring a deadly virus, police violence against people protesting police violence, troops in the streets, foreign military assistance to a foreign government leveraged for campaign dirt, you name it.
As former United States Attorneys, the attorney pair’s immediate concern is the damage done to the Department of Justice by a president who spends more time on sculpting his hair each morning than he spends on the job of president. He treats the presidency as a private fiefdom and installed William Barr to run the DOJ as his personal lawyer and enforcer.
Justice under Barr is neither blind nor balanced, but weighted in favor of the president’s friends and tilted against his enemies. So said Aaron Zelinsky, an assistant U.S. Attorney in Maryland, before the House Judiciary Committee this week. Prosecutors had been told to go easy in sentencing longtime Trump ally Roger Stone.
But we seem to live under a regime where the rules no longer apply to the president and those in his orbit. Trump has even told us this, declaring last summer, “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” Yesterday, Zelinsky testified before Congress — along with Donald Ayer, former deputy attorney general under George W. Bush and John Elias, a senior career official currently serving in the Justice Department’s antitrust division — to insist that the rules should still apply.
We are living in a troubled time where people are faced with a daily struggle to protect their families. The words of a federal prosecutor may seem to involve a remote threat, but our most fundamental rights are at stake here. The decay at the Department of Justice impacts all of us.
“It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye,” the saying goes. Putting a thumb in the eye of federal bureaucrats seemed like good fun to Trump’s followers when the reality TV star with mafioso pretensions ran for president. Since then, a global pandemic has killed 120,000-plus Americans and put millions of others out of work. Trump couldn’t care less. He needs his adulation fix and doesn’t care how many corpses he steps over to get it. His administration seems bent on dismantling not just the American system of checks and balances, but his own party. He’s made over the wink-and-nudge party of white people as an overtly white-nationalist one.
The man who so famously hates losers is defending symbols of the Confederacy erected to memorialize slavery and treason.
Amidst reelection plunging poll numbers, Trump is not backing off, he’s doubling down. Not since George Wallace in 1968 has the country witnessed a presidential campaign this “nakedly racist,” writes Eugene Robinson. Inflaming racist tensions is the only play in his playbook.
“It’s almost as though Trump is determined to destroy the Republican Party,” Robinson decides. “Let’s give him his wish.”
Early Wednesday morning in Madison, Wis., white men stopped at a traffic light beside Althea Bernstein called her the n-word then set the 18-year-old EMT on fire:
According to the police report, Bernstein turned and saw four white men in another car. One of them sprayed a liquid that landed on her face and neck and tossed a flaming lighter at her, lighting her face on fire, she told investigators.
“She drove forward, patted out the flames,” the report states.
Bernstein suffered suffered second- and third-degree burns. Madison had just seen local protests against police brutality. Police are investigating the attack as a hate crime.
Perhaps just the everyday racial attack too common lately, or else part of the warp and woof of Trump’s white nationalism unleashed. And Trump’s presidential campaign has not even gathered steam yet.
With Trump’s poll numbers sliding, a defeat in the fall means Trump and his henchmen could face prison after he leaves office. Not in the federal system, maybe. Trump will try to head that off with pardons. But in New York and elsewhere. Which is why (we might surmise) Trump and Barr “recently launched a frontal attack on the US’s preeminent prosecutor’s office” in New York City.
“We live in an era where we think nothing can really stun us anymore,” McQuade and Vance write. Which is why a friend last night brought up the infamous Brooks Brothers Riot of 2000. Republicans flew political operatives to Florida to pose as average citizens protesting to shut down the 2000 vote count. The resulting chaos and U.S. Supreme Court action handed the presidency to George W. Bush. And Democrats acquiesced.
With Republicans faced with losing power across the country and Trump’s associates possibly facing criminal charges, what more might they do this fall to tip the election in swing states? What are believers in democracy and the rule of law prepared to do this time to stop them?
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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like. Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.
This could happen to anyone. I thought everyone knew that:
As North Texas watches COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations surge, one family is shouldering a health crisis that they never expected to face.
That crisis, all began on May 30 when just a single relative, unknowingly infected with COVID-19, interacted with seven family members at a surprise birthday party.
Those seven family members then contracted and spread the virus to 10 other relatives.
Now, Ron Barbosa is keeping track of 18 people in his family who have tested positive for COVID-19.
Barbosa didn’t attend the party himself, but the celebration was for his daughter-in-law who turned 30.
However, Barbosa’s nephew hosted.
That nephew is the one who was unknowingly infected, thinking a slight cough was the byproduct of working in construction.
Before the party, he played golf with a few family members who also attended the event, according to Barbosa.
Even though everyone did their best to stay socially distant, Barbosa said it wasn’t enough.
“It wasn’t that long. It was only a couple of hours,” Barbosa, a volunteer EMT said. “But during that brief time, somehow the other 18 family members are now infected with COVID.”
Barbosa, who is also married to a doctor, said he and his wife refused to go to the party due to safety reasons.
However, it was a party that by current state health standards appeared harmless. A total of 25 people attended, and not all of them arrived and stayed for the same duration.
“When people started getting sick, we really let everyone have it,” Barbosa said. “We knew this was going to happen, I mean this whole time this has been going on we’ve been terrified.”
Among those infected are two young children, two grandparents, a cancer patient and Barbosa’s parents, who are in their 80s.
Three are now hospitalized: Barbosa’s parents Frank and Carole, along with his sister Kathy, who is battling breast cancer.
Kathy, per Barbosa, is recovering and feeling better, despite contracting the virus while simultaneously undergoing chemo treatments.
He says she went to the party and got infected, even though she was socially distanced outside on a porch.
But Barbosa’s parents are in a much tougher situation.
Frank and Carole are highschool sweethearts and have been married almost 68 years.
Barbosa said it’s likely Carole infected Frank after she stopped by the party to drop something off.
Carole has been hospitalized since June 13, and Frank has been in a hospital since June 17.
Frank is in the ICU and is on life support. Barbosa told WFAA that he is inches away from being put on a ventilator.
“My dad’s hanging on by a thread,” Barbosa said. “They’re saying this is one of the last straws for my dad.”
Visitation is mostly restricted, meaning calls to Barbosa’s parents are vital.
“That’s really the best medicine. You know they’re in there by themselves with no family,” Barbosa said holding back tears. “It’s heartbreaking.”
Barbosa told WFAA that his father is in need of blood plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients, who have established antibodies.
However, Barbosa said that doctors have informed him that there’s not a lot of it right now.
On Facebook, a plea for help from Barbosa was answered by a few firefighters once infected with COVID-19, who were willing to donate.
But he quickly learned that they couldn’t donate their plasma for one specific person because there was a shortage.
WFAA is now researching if that’s the case with blood banks across the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
In the meantime, Barbosa is using the phrase ‘Frank Alert’ to raise awareness about the need for more blood plasma with COVID-19 antibodies.
“If you’ve recovered…go donate your plasma,” Barbosa said.
Other than his sister and parents, Barbosa said that his family is mostly recovering.
In just a matter of weeks, they’ve gone through multiple emotions in this COVID-19 cautionary tale — starting with anger.
“We were horrified. People couldn’t believe that they took it to a family member,” Barbosa said.
“But now, we’re holding on together.”
He told them. So, they all knew, they did it anyway.
I understand why people need to socialize. Humans are built that way. But right now we’re putting ourselves and others lives in danger for a birthday party? Really?
Maybe some people think the two 80-year-olds were on their way out anyway so who cares. (I have heard this.) But the woman on chemo isn’t 80. If people are willing to say sick people are on their way out anyway too, then we are a more twisted nihilistic culture than even I suspected and I didn’t think I had any illusions left.
Biden gave a speech today on health care. He sounded very presidential, particularly in contrast to the rambling incoherent Trump.
I think the following is the most important thing he said because it illustrates just how daft Trump’s approach to this crisis is. If he had taken this approach I think he would have had a much better chance at re-election:
Biden on Trump: "Amazingly, he still hasn't grasped the most basic fact of this crisis: to fix the economy we have to get control over the virus. He's like a child who can't believe this has happened to him. All his whining & self-pity … his job is to do something about it." pic.twitter.com/MbGiTa6o7U
This is common sense. But Trump obviously can’t grasp it because he was persuaded that the economy would collapse if we didn’t open up, without understanding that you can’t make people go out and spend their money if they think it will kill them. He’s pretty dumb and his belief in the power of his cheerleading led him astray. Even if he convinced all of his followers to commit suicide on his behalf he can’t convince the rest of us. And without us, this economy isn’t going to recover.
You can watch Biden’s speech at the link below. It’s good!
She had to resign because of all the death threats
"Four suburban Southern California counties are among those primarily responsible for a dangerous rise in California’s coronavirus hospitalizations, according to a Los Angeles Times data analysis." Ventura, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties: https://t.co/a44m11E6Lehttps://t.co/DLWtd4NkPW
I put this up yesterday but I think it informs that data above. Those are the people who are spreading this goddamned virus all over Southern California and they’re doing it on purpose.
Here’s Orange County:
Ventura County:
I’m not saying that people in my Santa Monica neighborhood have been especially compliant. I walk every day and up until a few days ago I don’t think I saw even one person under 40 wearing a mask and the restaurants were all bustling for — indoors, with people sitting close together. I noticed a change when the Governor mandated mask-wearing and these numbers started to climb. But when you look at the data, it’s pretty clear where the hotspots are and they are in the places where right-wingers have been having screaming, tantrums over having to wear a mask and social distance. The results speak for themselves.
Terrific reporting on some upcoming studies demonstrating a direct link between misinformation propagated by Fox and others and the severity of the pandemic:
In recent weeks, three studies have focused on conservative media’s role in fostering confusion about the seriousness of the coronavirus. Taken together, they paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others.
The end result, according to one of the studies, is that infection and mortality rates are higher in places where one pundit who initially downplayed the severity of the pandemic — Fox News’ Sean Hannity — reaches the largest audiences…
A working paper posted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in May examined whether these incorrect beliefs affected real-world behavior.
The authors used anonymous location data from millions of cellphones to explore how the popularity of Fox News in a given Zip code related to social distancing practices there. By March 15, they found, a 10 percent increase in Fox News viewership within a Zip code reduced its residents’ propensity to stay home, in compliance with public health guidelines, by about 1.3 percentage points.
Given total stay-at-home behavior increased by 20 percentage points during the study period, that effect size is “pretty large,” said Andrey Simonov, the study’s lead author…
Another recent working paper, by economists at the University of Chicago and other institutions, similarly finds that Fox News viewers are less likely to comply with public health guidelines than consumers of other media. But their paper takes the analysis two steps further: It finds that Fox viewers aren’t a monolith, with fans of some media personalities acting distinctly from others. It also provides evidence that those behavioral differences are contributing to the spread and mortality rate of covid-19 in certain areas... [italics added]
viewership was associated with changing pandemic-related behaviors (like hand-washing and canceling travel plans) four days later than other Fox News viewers, while Carlson viewership was associated with changing behaviors three days earlier.
Given the importance of individual behavior in curbing the spread of the coronavirus, it stands to reason that places where people were slower to take preventive steps might see more severe outbreaks. That’s exactly what the final step of their analysis shows.
“Our results indicate that a one standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight is associated with approximately 32 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14 and approximately 23 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28…”
As anyone will quick to add, correlation doesn’t demonstrate causation. Striking, nevertheless.
