Wednesday, November 04, 2020

Fauci: "I'm Not Trying To Undermine The President. But There Is Something That's Called Reality."

Dr. Anthony Fauci told the Washington Post last Friday that if the United States doesn't make an "abrupt change" in public health practices and behaviours, it will be heading into a long and potentially deadly winter.
We're in for a whole lot of hurt. It's not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.
Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last spring the US could surpass 100,000 new coronavirus cases a day - and the US topped 101,000 the day of the Post interview. 

Infections are increasing in at least 42 states and Donald Trump is publicly whining on a daily basis that the media is paying more attention to the virus than to him. He is a petulant little child banging his wooden blocks on the floor to get his parents' attention.

Fauci said Joe Biden's campaign "is taking it seriously from a public health perspective". In one of the more diplomatic statements I've read in a long time, he said Trump is "looking at it from a different perspective". Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said Fauci's comments were "unacceptable" and he criticized Fauci for "choos[ing] three days before an election to play politics".

In another recent interview, Fauci said:
I'm walking a fine line of being someone who is not hesitant to tell the president and the vice president what they may not want to hear. . . . That's when I got that nickname 'the skunk at the picnic.' . . . I'm not trying to undermine the president. But there is something that's called reality.
Fauci called the daily number of cases as winter approaches "extremely high and quite unacceptable". While some people have called this recent surge a "third wave", Fauci said the US is still struggling with the first wave.
We never got out of the real wave. We kind of went up and down within a wave. When I hear people talk about second and third waves, it really is the original wave that just resurges up, comes down a little, and resurges up again.
Fauci expressed disappointed that Trump regularly meets with only one medical adviser, Scott Atlas, a neuroradiologist with no experience in infectious diseases.
I have real problems with that guy. . . . [He's] talking about things that I believe he doesn't have any real insight or knowledge or experience in. He keeps talking about things that when you dissect it out and parse it out, it doesn't make any sense.
Atlas is a proponent of "herd immunity", which Trump has referred to as "herd mentality". Fauci said if the US opted for herd immunity, "the death toll would be enormous". In mid-October, William Haseltine, Chair and President of ACCESS Health International, told CNN:
Herd immunity is another word for mass murder. . . . [If the virus is allowed to spread] we are looking at two to six million Americans dead – not just this year but every year. This is an unmitigated disaster for our country – to have people at the highest levels of our government countermanding our best public health officials. We know this epidemic can be put under control. Other countries have done it. We are doing the opposite.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta (CNN) said recently that 60-70% of the population would have to become infected. "We know that with around 10% of the country that's become infected, 216,000 people have died, roughly. So, just do the math there."

Trump called Fauci an "idiot" earlier this month and has claimed (without explanation or evidence or any connection to reality) that if he had followed the advice of the country's most-knowledgeable infectious disease expert, a man with 50 years of experience, between 500,000 and 800,000 Americans would be dead (more than two or three times the currently reported death toll).
People are tired of hearing Fauci and all these idiots, all these people that have gotten it wrong. Fauci is a nice guy. He's been here for 500 years. He called every one of them wrong.
On September 18, Trump said he knows more than the experts at the CDC. "Yeah, in many cases I do."

There is no hope for someone like that.

Trump is strongly hinting he will fire Fauci after the election, when he won't have to even pretend to care that his stubborn idiocy and deliberate inaction is causing thousands of Americans to die each week.
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"This Is Who America Is"

So far, 64.4 million people — 1 out of every 2 voters in the US — have said they want more lies, more corruption, more racism, more cruelty, more sickness, more death, less healthcare, less income, less responsibility, less civility, and no empathy, no thought of anyone in the world but himself.

And those 64.4 million people who have embraced Donald Trump, every single one of them owns every racist slur, every sexist insult, every falsehood, every virus death, every decision that further destroys the environment, every inhumane and offensive policy, every million dollars of taxpayer money that goes directly into his wallet. You are bound to it all, you cannot evade or excuse any of it.

You know what he is. You chose him. That is who you are.

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Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Election Night (Part 1: Tuesday)

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Woman. Sidewalk. Motorcade. Trump. Finger.

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Birx Destroyed Her Reputation For Trump's Vanity Months Ago. She Cannot Save it Now.

At the start of 2020, Dr. Deborah Birx was a respected physician and experienced diplomat. After being named as part of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, she quickly became one of Donald Trump's more obsequious sycophants and it took her only a few months to utterly destroy her reputation.

Now she sees Trump is on the way out, so she is speaking out. It's far too late for her to salvage any of her credibility.

From the start of the pandemic, Birx has made misleading and false comments to give credence to Trump's indifference and lack of response and she has been silent when Trump spoke publicly about inane "cures" that would kill people if they tried them (injecting disinfectants into their lungs).

On March 2, Birx praised Trump's minimal restrictions on travel from China:

It's clear that the early work of the president both with travel restrictions and the ability to quarantine has bought us the time and space to have this task force be very effective.

Because testing was late and slow to begin in the US, what little Trump did regarding China had no effect on stopping the spread of the virus. Even after his alleged "ban", more than 430,000 travelers from China entered the US (even Fox reported this). Trump's delay on restricting travel from Europe was a principal reason there was a catastrophic number of infections and deaths in New York City.

Nevertheless, on March 13, when Trump declared a national emergency and said he took no responsibility for the US's response, Birx lavished praise on Trump as a bold leader:

[L]ast Tuesday, seeing the spread of the virus around the globe, the President realized that our current approach to testing was inadequate . . . to meet the needs of the American public.  He asked for an entire overhaul of the testing approach.  He immediately called the private sector laboratories to the White House, as noted, and charged them with developing a high-throughput quality platform that can meet the needs of the American public. . . . This innovative approach [will provide] convenient testing to hundreds of thousands of Americans within short turnaround times.  In less than two weeks together, we have developed a solution that we believe will meet the . . . testing needs of Americans.

Note: The US still — more than seven months later — has not met that goal.

Aaron Rupar, Vox:

Birx tried to explain away the US government’s ill-fated decision to try and develop its own coronavirus test by falsely suggesting that a test developed by the World Health Organization has major accuracy problems. (It doesn't.) This week, she bragged about the US passing South Korea in total number of coronavirus tests conducted, ignoring that South Korea has a much smaller population and had much more testing capacity during the critical weeks when the virus was first spreading.

On [March 23], Birx made a painstaking attempt to pretend there might be data-driven reasons underlying Trump's desire to relax social distancing guidelines as soon as possible, even though his motivations are transparently political. Then on Thursday, she tried to downplay reports that hospitals are preparing to make tough choices between treating patients and letting them die because of ventilator shortages — despite reporting about health care providers doing just that.

On March 26, Birx went way overboard, telling the Christian Broadcasting Network that Trump is:

so attentive to the scientific literature and the details and the data. I think his ability to analyze and integrate data that comes out of his long history in business has really been a real benefit during these discussions about medical issues.

Almost without exception, Birx has refused to counter Trump's propaganda and conspiracy theories., include the ravings of Dr. Demon Semen. Birx did not speak out in May, when Trump and members of the coronavirus task force were pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to convince states to change how they report data, a blatant attempt to lower the rising numbers of infections and deaths. 

Throughout the summer, Trump's plan to limit cases and deaths never included public health measures. All he wanted to do was distort and falsify the facts. Birx went along with it. (I didn't think Trump could possibly get to Election Day without ever having a plan (however perfunctory it might have been) to deal with the virus. I was wrong.)

David Smith, The Guardian, "Like other White House officials before her, she is said to be sacrificing a hard-won professional reputation at the altar of Trump's vanity."

In early August, Birx stated the obvious: infections were "extraordinarily widespread" throughout the country. Trump immediately blasted her on Twitter, saying she "took the bait" from "Crazy Nancy Pelosi" and was tricked into criticizing Trump.

Trump has never stopped ridiculing people who wearing masks, he has claimed more than 40 times that the virus will simply "disappear" (it won't), he pushed hydroxychloroquine as a safe and effective treatment (it isn't), he says increased cases is because of increased testing (nonsense), he stated 99 percent of coronavirus cases are "totally harmless" (wrong), and he continually assured the nation that children are "virtually immune" (they may actually spread the virus more than adults).

Through it all, Birx was mute. Now that it's obvious Trump is going down in flames, she has quickly become one of the rats desperate to flee the sinking ship. A few days ago, she countered Trump's lie that the US is "turning the corner' on the virus, writing in a memo that the US is "entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic":

Cases are rapidly rising in nearly 30 percent of all USA counties, the highest number of county hotspots we have seen with this pandemic. . . . Half of the United States is in the red or orange zone for cases despite flat or declining testing.

Jen Kirby, Vox: 

Birx's warning comes as some states are seeing record-level infections and hospitals are on the verge of being overwhelmed — a reprise of what some parts of the country saw in the earliest days of the pandemic. On, Friday, the US hit more than 99,000 new cases in a single day, breaking the previous record. More than 48,000 Americans are currently hospitalized with Covid-19. Deaths usually lag behind new cases and hospitalizations, but those are up, too; on average, roughly 800 deaths are being reported each day, according to the Covid-19 Tracking Project. Experts have said they believe it will get worse as winter approaches, as more people gather indoors. . . .

[Birx] has been reluctant to criticize Trump or publicly push back on some of his false statements. But the warnings in the memo are some of her bluntest yet. In the report, she says that the White House is putting too much emphasis on lockdowns, which are not really an issue anymore. Instead, she argued, the US needs "more aggressive action" on everything from testing to messaging. Consistent messaging, she wrote, was essential.

With the memo, Birx joins the chorus of scientists and experts who are warning of a possible "dark winter." Anthony Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert, said in an interview Friday that the United States is in for "a whole lot of hurt." Only an "abrupt change" in public practices and behaviors would change that, he said.

The memo argued that the White House could play a role in urging that change. "There is an absolute necessity of the Administration to use this moment to ask the American people to wear masks, physical distance and avoid gatherings in both public and private spaces," the report warns.

Birx has been a unwavering, top-level Trump Death Cult member for nine months. Nothing she says now will ever change that. Her comments last week are true, but it comes far too late for anyone to care that she is saying them. 

Likewise, at some point, Republicans will try to convince us they did not willingly and happily support every single one of Trump's illegal, racist, and inhumane policies and decisions. But we should never forget the truth. None of them should ever be taken seriously again. They will forever be branded with an orange T on their foreheads.

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Trump: Genocidal Dictators Are Easier To Deal With Than The United States
(Because Crazy Nancy & Cryin' Chuck Are Very Mean To Me)

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Trump: "I Don't Do Tweeting"

Among the things Donald Trump did yesterday:

1. He said he does not "do tweeting".

2. He tweeted 72 times.
  Trump has posted more than 10,000 tweets since the beginning of this year (an average of 35 tweets every day), according to the Trump Tweet Archive:
2009 Tweets:     56
2010 Tweets:    142
2011 Tweets:    774
2012 Tweets:  3,531
2013 Tweets:  8,138
2014 Tweets:  5,773
2015 Tweets:  7,497
2016 Tweets:  4,217
2017 Tweets:  2,588
2018 Tweets:  3,556
2019 Tweets:  7,781
2020 Tweets: 10,811 (thru Nov. 2)
Total:       55,012
Does not count at least 926 deleted tweets.
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Monday, November 02, 2020

Trump: Allowing Votes To Be Counted Is "Very Dangerous"

Donald Trump has admitted numerous times in the last few days that he does not expect to win without going to court and having biased judges ignore the law and rule in his favour.

On Monday, Trump went 0-for-3 in court, losing cases in Texas, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
Trump sulked, before whining and making empty threats on Twitter. One tweet was marked as "misleading" by Twitter.
Irony is very dead.
Trump: "I think it's terrible that we can't know the results of an election the night of the election." 

Voiceover: The results of the 2016 election were not known the night of the election.

The Times reported that Trump:
has no legal authority to stop the count on Tuesday night, and even in normal election years, states often take days or even weeks before completing their tallies and certifying the outcome.
"This is the most blatant, open attempt at mass disenfranchisement of voters that I've ever witnessed," said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has litigated several major cases this year.

Benjamin L. Ginsberg, a leading elections lawyer who has served as counsel to multiple Republican presidential candidates:
If a jurisdiction doesn't get done counting its ballots on election night because of the volume, broken machines or any other reason, there's zero grounds for stopping it under any state's laws. You're just going to disenfranchise people for his sport?
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One Day Before The Election, Trump Whines About Twitter ("From The Day I Was Born, I've Been Trending", Whines About The Electoral College, Whines About The Weather, Whines About Hillary's Emails, and Babbles About "Beyonsee", Jon Bon Jovi, & Lady Gaga


I'm Going To Start Getting On It

Elsewhere

Weather

* * *

Chants

Fighting Biden

Drinking Game

Oops

WTF?
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Election Night: How Will Networks Deal With A Trump Declaration Of Victory?

It is a virtual certainty that at some point on Tuesday night, Donald Trump will declare himself the winner of the 2020 election. That announcement will come long before all of the votes are counted, of course. His lie will be echoed and amplified by his sycophants at Fox, causing a ripple effect across other far-right media.

How will the mainstream news (network and cable television, media online) handle an extremely pre-mature declaration? That's a real worry, especially when I look back at how reporters have consistently failed to give their viewers and readers an accurate report of what Trump has been and what he has done. They have normalized (or severely downplayed) his aberrant (and abhorrent) behaviour. His vulgar and pugnacious comments, as well as his steady torrent of lies, have been presented in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post - the two most important newspapers in the country - as merely the latest chapter in the give-and-take of American politics.

Will those papers and the cable news networks forcefully call out his irresponsible tweets and label them as lies? (And it will be a lie, as opposed to "inaccurate information", because Trump will know all of the votes have not been counted.) With militia groups having made statements about terrorizing voters and killing Democrats, not taking a firm and unwavering stance could be a life-and-death matter.

Note: FiveThirtyEight ran 40,000 simulations of the election. Trump won about 10% of them.

On Saturday, CNN's "Reliable Sources" newsletter quoted a bunch of media people about their election night coverage. Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy, who write the newsletter, said their biggest fear is impatience. 
Americans are accustomed to knowing the outcome of elections within hours. For some, speed engenders trust in the result. Not-knowing stirs skepticism and distrust. Yet there's a lot we won't know on Election Night this year, due to the ways different states count mail-in ballots.
CNN DC bureau chief Sam Feist said:
This is the most unusual election in our lifetime because so many people have voted by mail. . . . We have to be patient with the election authorities so they can count the votes, and we have to be patient with our decision desk teams because the votes are going to be counted more slowly, so . . . we're going to be projecting states later than we've probably ever projected them.
A recent Gallup/Knight survey noted that 54% of US adults expect it will take longer than three days to know the winner of the election. 25% expect the winner will be known in one to three days and 21% think the winner of the election will be known on the evening of Election Day. (21% still sounds like a lot of people to me, though Trump's approval percentage is far higher.)

Michael Grynbaum of the Times spoke to several network executives about their coverage:

NBC News president Noah Oppenheim: Frankly, the well-being of the country depends on us being cautious, disciplined and unassailably correct. We are committed to getting this right.

ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos: We have to be incredibly transparent all through the night with what we know and what we don't know.

CBS News president Susan Zirinsky: "We're preparing the audience that this might not be over in one night."

Fox News president Jay Wallace: "Whatever [Trump] were to say wouldn't sway anything when it comes to what we're counting."

Speaking of Fox, Sunday's newsletter focused on Trump's favourite network, noting that its constant fawning coverage of Trump, while portraying Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as corrupt, un-American radical, gives viewers a distorted picture of the race. The network has been questioning the veracity of numerous polls. Various Fox chyrons reinforce the message: "BIG ENTHUSIASM FOR TRUMP DESPITE CONFLICTING POLLS", "MASSIVE ENTHUSIASM FOR TRUMP", and "TRUMP CLOSING THE GAP IN KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES" The network's chief political correspondent even spoke like Trump, saying that in the battleground states, "it is narrowing and narrowing fast."

Even if Fox's news people report the facts on Tuesday night, the hosts of the more-opinionated shows on Wednesday (and beyond) will not. And they have a history of trashing the reporting of their own network's news department when the facts don't line up with the propaganda.

The Associated Press "is pulling back the curtain this year" and explaining "how its experts make decisions or why, in tight contests, they are holding back. If necessary, top news executives will speak publicly in interviews about the process."

CNN reports that pre-election voting "has now surpassed two-thirds of all ballots cast during the 2016 presidential election". Nearly 92 million Americans have voted, as of last Friday. That total is roughly 67% of the approximately 136.6 million ballots cast in 2016.

Eric Boehlert, who writes the always-excellent Press Run, asked last week if Trump would be able to bully the media into calling a winner on Tuesday night:
For now, news outlets are saying all the right things about being patient on Election Night . . . But the Beltway press does not have a strong track record standing up to Trump's bullying during the last four years, especially media institutions, which have refused to wage any kind of collective battle with the White House as it dismantles decades of norms. Will the networks have the fortitude if they face the full onslaught from Trump, Fox News, the Republican Party, all of AM talk radio and hysterical right-wing voices online, waging war on the media for not declaring Trump the winner? . . .

TV news needs to break away from its decades-long tradition of marketing Election Night as one big game show that culminates with a late-night winner being announced . . . All that breathless chatter giving the illusion of real-time vote tallies, and bells ringing at the top of the hour to signify polls closing for a host of key states, needs to be reined in. . . .

Fact: State laws dictate that Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — potentially among the three most decisive states in the battle for the White House — cannot even start processing or counting mail-in ballots until Election Day.

The problem is the networks are working with an Election Night formula that has to factor in mail-in ballots, which this year will represent nearly [100] million voters. . . . It's also impossible to conduct exit polling since [100] million voters aren't "exiting" a poll location on Election Day . . .

Remember what happened Election Night two years ago? Relying on their old methods, TV outlets downplayed the more than 20 million early votes that had been cast and, based on in-person voting results, quickly announced there was no Blue Wave brewing, and that Democrats had failed to pull off a big night. But then as the early votes were counted over days and weeks it became obvious Democrats had pulled off a Blue Wave — they flipped 40 House seats.

Imagine what the results might look like this year with 80 million early votes.
(my emphasis)
There is also the possibility that the police in many towns and cities will act in support of Trump.

* * *

On January 30, 2018, during Trump's State of the Union address, Steve Bannon told interviewer Michael Lewis: "The Democrats don't matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."

That tactic has been a resounding success. In the past, an illegal action or offensive quote might have dominated a week's worth of news. Trump himself makes several of those every single day. Reporters barely have time to note one instance before being hit with two more. 

And that's why Trump can express praise for his armed supporters attempting to force a Biden campaign bus off a Texas highway and it will likely not even make a dent in the day's reporting.

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Sunday, November 01, 2020

Trump, On What He Will Do If Biden Wins: "Let's See What The Hell Happens"

Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.
Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776)
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