#and where are all the op-eds and media campaigns to push HIM out/force him to step aside? | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

phroyd · 4 years ago

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This week’s remarkable character assault by some top White House advisers on Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious-disease expert, signified President Trump’s hostility toward medical expertise and has produced a chilling effect among the government scientists and public health professionals laboring to end the pandemic, according to administration officials and health experts.

As novel coronavirus cases surge out of control coast to coast, the open rancor between the scientific community and a White House determined above all to resuscitate the economy and secure a second term for Trump threatens to further undermine the U.S. response, which already lags behind those of many other developed nations.

A chorus of voices — including Fauci; Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and even Mick Mulvaney, the White House chief of staff during the start of the pandemic — has been speaking out publicly and with increasing urgency about the crisis in ways that contradict or undermine Trump. Some of them have sharply criticized testing capacities and efficiencies, suggested that everyone wear masks and warned of the virus spread worsening.

Though Trump does not automatically distrust the expertise of public health officials, he is averse to any information or assessment that he considers “bad news,” that compromises his economic cheerleading message or that jeopardizes his reelection, according to several administration officials and other people with knowledge of the dynamic.

In addition to Fauci, the White House has repeatedly undermined and sidelined the CDC over the last several months, which prompted four former CDC directors to pen an op-ed in The Washington Post this week that argued no president had politicized the CDC to the extent that Trump has.

The result has been open warfare from some hard-line Trump loyalists seeking to discredit Fauci, the longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases who is shown by polls to be regarded as a truth-teller by a majority of Americans.

Two of the White House officials with the closest and longest-standing ties to Trump, deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino and trade adviser Peter Navarro, attacked Fauci this past week. Navarro penned an op-ed in USA Today in which he stated that Fauci was “wrong about everything,” while Scavino shared a cartoon on social media mocking Fauci as “Dr. Faucet,” drowning Uncle Sam with a deluge of “extra cold” water.

Their critiques were echoed by one of Trump’s outside economic advisers, Stephen Moore, and come after the White House anonymously shared last week with The Post a lengthy, researched list of comments Fauci has made intended to support Trump’s earlier claim that “he’s made a lot of mistakes.” The list was reminiscent of research that campaign operatives distribute to reporters about their political opponents.

Trump sought to distance himself from those efforts and insisted he has a good relationship with Fauci, despite the fact that Fauci no longer briefs the president on the pandemic and is rarely if ever in the Oval Office anymore. Trump told advisers to tamp down their criticism of Fauci because he believed it was politically harmful to him, aides said, and in a show of solidarity Vice President Pence tweeted a photograph of him meeting with Fauci in the Situation Room.

Fauci said the push to discredit him was “bizarre,” telling the Atlantic, “If you talk to reasonable people in the White House, they realize that was a major mistake on their part, because it doesn’t do anything but reflect poorly on them.”

The interpersonal strife and the deliberate push by some inside the White House to protect Trump by sowing distrust of scientists is hampering the nation’s efforts to combat the virus, according to public health experts.

“It seems that some are more intent on fighting imagined enemies than the real enemy here, which is the virus,” said Thomas R. Frieden, a former CDC director and president of Resolve to Save Lives.

“The virus doesn’t read talking points,” Frieden said. “The virus doesn’t watch news shows. The virus just waits for us to make mistakes. And when we make mistakes, as Texas and Florida and South Carolina and Arizona did, the virus wins. When we ignore science, the virus wins.”

Trump in recent weeks has been committing less of his time and energy to managing the pandemic, according to advisers, and has only occasionally spoken in detail about the topic in his public appearances. One of these advisers said the president is “not really working this anymore. He doesn’t want to be distracted by it. He’s not calling and asking about data. He’s not worried about cases.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews countered in a statement: “President Trump has always acted on the recommendations of his top public health experts throughout this crisis as evidenced by the many bold, data-driven decisions he has made to save millions of lives. Any suggestion that the President is not working around the clock to protect the health and safety of all Americans, lead the whole-of-government response to this pandemic, including expediting vaccine development and rebuilding our economy is utterly false.”

At federal health agencies, the barrage against Fauci has taken a significant toll, seen by many as a broadside against their community at large. The acrimony has angered career scientists at the National Institutes of Health, where Fauci is hailed as a hero, and at the Food and Drug Administration, where officials work closely with Fauci and his team, according to current and former government officials.

Many FDA career scientists and doctors see the White House criticism of Fauci as an effort to bully him — to make it clear that no one should consider crossing the president in the months leading up to the election, according to people familiar with the scientists’ thinking.

“To see an NIH scientist and a doctor attacked like that, the feeling is, ‘Oh, my God, that could just as easily be me,’ ” said a former FDA official, who like some others interviewed spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid without risking retribution.

Some agency professionals worry the episode is a sign the FDA might come under political pressure to approve a vaccine or treatment for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, before it has been fully vetted for safety and efficacy.

Furthermore, they say the character attacks further undermine America’s historic standing as a worldwide leader in public health, which is already tarnished by the nation’s beleaguered response to the coronavirus and inability to contain it.

Another former senior administration official called the Fauci attacks a global embarrassment. “It’s one thing to question science,” this official said. “It’s another thing to attack science.”

Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local labs, said, “The whole public health community has been demoralized by this.”

Indeed, almost 90 organizations — including the American Society for Microbiology, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and several AIDS groups, as well as the public-labs association — sent a letter to Pence, who chairs the White House’s coronavirus task force, condemning the recent moves.

“We object to any attempt to cast doubt on science and sow mistrust for public health expertise, and to spread misinformation during this challenging time for all Americans,” the letter read. “Such efforts not only put the health of our population in greater peril, but also undermine the work underway to move our country beyond the pandemic and return to normalcy.”

The substance of Trump allies’ criticism of Fauci centers on his statements early in the pandemic that wearing masks would not necessarily stop the spread of the virus. But as Fauci and other scientists learned more about the virus, their assessments evolved with that knowledge.

“That’s really the nature of science,” Fauci said Thursday in a live-stream conversation with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “You look at the data and the information you have at any given time, and you make a decision with regard to policy based on that information. As the information changes, then you have to be flexible enough and humble enough to be able to change how you think about things.”

Moore, a conservative economist who is on leave from the Heritage Foundation to run a group called Save Our Country focused on reopening the economy, said the fact that Fauci is heralded in the media and trusted by the public is a problem for efforts to convince schools and businesses to reopen.

“I’ve seldom seen someone who has been more wrong more consistently over his whole career than Dr. Fauci that continues to be listened to and held up as some kind of expert,” Moore said.

He went on to express dismay that Fauci does not act like “a team player” by parroting to the public Trump’s talking points.

Navarro has led a fierce campaign inside the White House against Fauci, telling colleagues that the infectious-disease expert “has no clue what he’s talking about,” according to a person who heard his comments.

Others in Trump’s orbit have privately shared frustrations about Fauci, including White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Pence chief of staff Marc Short. Still, Meadows reacted angrily about Navarro’s op-ed, and Short told others he thought it was a mistake, White House officials said.

In recent weeks, there was what one adviser described as a “widespread effort” by White House officials, lawmakers and outside advisers to convince Trump to wear a mask in public — something he did for the first time last weekend when he visited Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

In the coming weeks, health officials plan to more forcefully urge people to not only wear masks but to wear them consistently and correctly and to emphasize that masks are a supplement — not a substitute — for social distancing, one federal official said.

“You have to acknowledge the obvious, that this thing is going to be with us for a long time,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “You have to be realistic. People are willing to do difficult things if you give them a pathway of how do we get to the end of it.”

This week, Redfield said that Trump ought to “set an example” by wearing a mask and that the epidemic could be brought under control in four to eight weeks if everyone wore one.

On June 30, Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner and an informal Trump adviser, had a call with House Republicans, organized by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), on which he laid out a grim prediction of rising case numbers and encouraged people to wear masks.

“At some point, we’re going to have a confluent epidemic in the U.S.,” Gottlieb said in an interview. “At some point, we’re going to have so much infection that it’s going to be hard to prevent a simultaneous national epidemic. It’s going to be very difficult for us when this starts to run into flu season.”

Phroyd

#science #covid #trump

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orbemnews · 4 years ago

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Black and Hispanic communities are confronted with vaccine misinformation. Here’s what you need to know: Buffalo Bayou Park in Houston last week. Some experts have raised concerns about intensifying the spread of the virus while the vaccination process is underway.Credit…Mark Felix for The New York Times HOUSTON — Orders requiring masks and limiting the occupancy of restaurants and other businesses were lifted across Texas on Wednesday, a move that some medical experts said was premature while the state was still in the throes of the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses are still allowed to require employees and customers to cover their faces and limit the number of people they allow inside. Cities can choose to keep limits in place in municipal facilities, and they remain on federal property. When Gov. Greg Abbott announced the changes last week, he argued that he was pushing back against the economic devastation wrought by months of limitations on movement and commerce. In a news conference at a restaurant in Lubbock, Mr. Abbott, a Republican, noted the hindrances for workers and small businesses. “This must end,” he said. “It is now time to open Texas 100 percent.” Moments after Mr. Abbott’s announcement, patrons at Barflys in San Antonio removed the plexiglass dividers separating themselves from the bartenders. At Barflys on Tuesday, an hour before the mask mandate was to expire, Amber Jowers, 32, was the bartender on duty. She welcomed the policy change. From now on, she will no longer wear a mask at work, she said. “And we’re taking the sign down at midnight,” she added. “We have to get back to normal now.” Barflys is a softly lit pub with a pool table, dartboard, and a slot machine. Metallica, Salt-N-Pepa, and the Texas Tornados play from the sound system. On the smokey back patio, Sophie Bojorquez, 47, sat at a table with friends. She is a vaccinated nurse and a self-proclaimed anti-masker. “I’m happy about the governor’s decision. The masks impeded the herd immunity we need. Now they want to vax so fast,” she said, shaking her head. The patio bartender, Britt Harasmisz, 24, said that most of her customers didn’t wear a mask even before the mandate ended. And though her employer decided that Barflys would no longer require face covers, she said that she would continue to wear one while working. “A lot of people have been vaccinated, Governor Abbott was vaccinated, but a lot of us on the front lines have not,” she said. “I’m going to wear a mask everywhere I go.” The move to open Texas has faced intense resistance. The governor’s medical advisers have said that they were not involved in the decision. And some experts have raised concerns about intensifying the spread of the virus while the vaccination process is underway. Texas, which is averaging about 5,500 new cases a day, has one of the lowest vaccination rates in the country. Lina Hidalgo, the county judge in Harris County, which includes Houston, has argued that lifting the mask mandate means workers must be the ones to enforce rules in retail establishments and restaurants. “We know better than to let our guard down simply because a level of government selected an arbitrary date to issue an all-clear,” Ms. Hidalgo, a Democrat and a persistent critic of Mr. Abbott, said in an op-ed column published this week by Time magazine. “I am working to clearly explain to the residents of my county that we will spare ourselves unnecessary death and suffering if we just stick with it for a little bit longer.” Bert Rossel, 39, stopped in for a drink at Barflys on Tuesday evening. He said he had known the pub’s owner for many years and worked for him at one time. Mr. Rossel is in the insurance business nowadays. He said he believed that the pandemic had been hyped on social media as another distraction, or as he calls it, “the latest hot topic.” “It’s survival of the fittest,” Mr. Rossel said. “My B.M.I. is higher than normal. Obese people are more susceptible to corona, but it’s been over a year. I would have gotten it already.” As the evening advanced, the patrons at Barflys drank beer and downed shots, smoked and gossiped, enjoying each other’s company. No one paid attention when, at midnight, Ms. Jowers pulled the sign from the front door that read, “MASKS REQUIRED UPON ENTRY.” — Rick Rojas, James Dobbins and Dave Montgomery United States › United StatesOn March 9 14-day change New cases 56,507 –13% New deaths 1,885 –20% World › WorldOn March 9 14-day change New cases 414,200 +11% New deaths 10,062 –10% U.S. vaccinations › President Biden attended vaccinations at a medical center for veterans in Washington on Monday.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times When President Biden pledged last week to amass enough shots by late May to inoculate every American adult, the pronouncement was greeted as a triumphant acceleration of a vaccination campaign that seemed only weeks earlier to be faltering. But the announcement was also a triumph of another kind: public relations. Because Mr. Biden had tamped down expectations early, the quicker vaccine production timetable conjured an image of a White House running on all cylinders and leaving its predecessor’s efforts in the dust. The Biden administration has taken two major steps that helped hasten vaccine production in the near term. His aides determined that by invoking the Korean War-era Defense Production Act, the federal government could help Pfizer obtain the heavy machinery it needed to expand its Kalamazoo, Mich., plant. Crucially, Mr. Biden’s top aides drove another vaccine manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, to force a key subcontractor into round-the-clock operations so its vaccine could be bottled faster. At the same time, Mr. Biden benefited hugely from the waves of vaccine production that the Trump administration had set in motion. To Trump administration aides, the new president’s crowing rings off-key. “They criticize what we did, but they are using our playbook every step of the way,” said Paul Mango, the Trump administration’s deputy chief of staff for health policy and a senior official in the vaccine production effort then known as Operation Warp Speed. He said President Donald J. Trump’s team oversaw the construction or expansion of nearly two dozen plants involved in vaccine production and invoked the Defense Production Act 18 times to ensure those factories had sufficient supplies. Beyond the nuts and bolts of production, the Biden White House has pursued a starkly different messaging campaign than Mr. Trump’s: underpromise, and then try to overdeliver. Mr. Trump routinely boasted of imminent achievements, including a vaccine rollout before Election Day, only to fall short. Carefully calibrated goals “avoid losses,” said David Axelrod, the senior strategist for President Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008 and 2012. The Biden administration, he added, “must have learned that lesson from watching Trump.” Katie Rogers contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett and Susan Beachy contributed research. Covid-19 information pamphlets with a mask and disinfectant kit distributed in San Jose, Calif.Credit…Ulysses Ortega for The New York Times Black and Hispanic communities are confronting vaccine conspiracy theories, rumors and misleading news reports on social media. The misinformation includes false claims that vaccines can alter DNA or don’t work, and efforts by states to reach out to Black and Hispanic residents have become the basis for new false narratives. “What might look like, on the surface, as doctors prioritizing communities of color is being read by some people online as ‘Oh, those doctors want us to go first, to be the guinea pigs,’” said Kolina Koltai, a researcher at the University of Washington who studies online conspiracy theories. Research conducted by the nonprofit Kaiser Family Foundation in mid-February showed a striking disparity between racial groups receiving the vaccine in 34 states that reported the data. State figures vary widely. In Texas, where people who identify as Hispanic make up 42 percent of the population, only 20 percent of the vaccinations had gone to that group. In Mississippi, Black people received 22 percent of vaccinations but make up 38 percent of the population. According to an analysis by The New York Times, the vaccination rate for Black Americans is half that of white people, and the gap for Hispanics is even larger. The belief that doctors are interested in experimenting on certain communities has deep roots among some groups, Ms. Koltai said. Anti-vaccine activists have drawn on historical examples, including Nazi doctors who ran experiments in concentration camps, and the Baltimore hospital where, 70 years ago, cancer cells were collected from a Black mother of five without her consent. An experiment conducted in 1943 on nearly 400 Black men in Tuskegee, Ala., is one of the most researched examples of medical mistreatment of the Black community. Over four decades, scientists observed the men, whom they knew were infected with syphilis, but didn’t offer treatments so that they could study the disease’s progression. Researchers who study disinformation followed mentions of Tuskegee on social media over the last year. The final week of November, when the pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Pfizer announced promising results in their final studies on the safety of their Covid-19 vaccines, mentions of Tuskegee climbed to 7,000 a week. Los Angeles students inside a Boys & Girls Club in August.Credit…Jae C. Hong/Associated Press The Los Angeles Unified School District and its teachers’ union have reached a tentative agreement to restore in-person instruction, clearing the way for a mid-April reopening of some classrooms in one of the last large school districts to bring students back in substantial numbers. The deal, contingent on teacher vaccinations, extensive health measures and the county’s impending exit from the state’s most restrictive tier of health regulations, was announced on Tuesday evening in a joint statement by the district superintendent, Austin Beutner, and the union president, Cecily Myart-Cruz. “The right way to reopen schools must include the highest standard of Covid safety in schools, continued reduction of the virus in the communities we serve and access to vaccinations for school staff,” they said. “This agreement achieves that shared set of goals.” The agreement is subject to approval by the district’s school board and ratification of the union’s membership. Under the tentative deal, elementary school and high-need students will be brought back in about six weeks, to allow time for returning school employees to be fully vaccinated, according to officials familiar with district negotiations. As middle school and high school teachers become inoculated, those students will then be phased in. The agreement will not immediately restore instruction to pre-pandemic levels. At most, officials said, it will be a blend of remote and in-person teaching, allowing students to come into school for several hours a week in small, stable cohorts while still taking classes online. The last day of school is June 11, and the district expects to offer summer school as it did last year. This month, California began immunizing teachers statewide, with Gov. Gavin Newsom setting aside 10 percent of new doses for school employees and channeling 40,000 doses specifically to Los Angeles school employees. About 38,000 of the district’s 86,000 teachers and other support personnel have been vaccinated, given appointments or waived the privilege, Mr. Beutner said. Most of those have been employed in the district’s preschools and elementary schools. In the governor’s State of the State address on Tuesday, Mr. Newsom said that “there’s nothing more foundational to an equitable society than getting our kids safely back into classrooms.” “Look, Jen and I live this as parents of four young children,” Mr. Newsom noted, echoing the pandemic frustrations of many California parents. “Helping them cope with the fatigue of ‘Zoom school.’ The loneliness of missing their friends. Frustrated by emotions they don’t yet fully understand.” He also noted that the state has committed $6.6 billion for tutoring, summer school, extended school days and mental health programs. “We can do this,” the governor said. “The science is sound.” Handling the Johnson & Johnson shots at a hospital pharmacy in Denver on Saturday.Credit…David Zalubowski/Associated Press President Biden will announce on Wednesday that he intends to secure an additional 100 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 single-shot vaccine by the end of this year, with the goal of having enough on hand to vaccinate children and, if necessary, administer booster doses or reformulate the vaccine to combat emerging variants of the virus. Mr. Biden will make the announcement during an afternoon meeting with executives from Johnson & Johnson and the pharmaceutical giant Merck, according to two senior administration officials. The rival companies are partnering to ramp up production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, in a deal brokered by the White House. In announcing that agreement last week, Mr. Biden said that the United States would now have enough vaccine available by the end of May to vaccinate every American adult — roughly 260 million people. But the senior officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preview the president’s announcement, said the administration was trying to prepare for unpredictable challenges, from the emergence of dangerous virus variants to manufacturing breakdowns that could disrupt vaccine production. The officials said that they expected the doses to be delivered sometime in the second half of this year, but could not be more specific. They said Mr. Biden would direct officials at the Department of Health and Human Services to negotiate the details with Johnson & Johnson, and that Wednesday’s announcement would be a first step. The White House had initially intended to hold Wednesday’s event at the Baltimore manufacturing facility of Emergent BioSolutions, another company that partners with Johnson & Johnson to make coronavirus vaccine. But Mr. Biden canceled his trip after The New York Times published an investigation into how Emergent used its Washington connections to gain outsize influence over the Strategic National Stockpile, the nation’s emergency repository of drugs and medical supplies. The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, has since said that the administration will conduct a comprehensive audit of the stockpile. Emergent officials will not attend Wednesday’s session. In explaining the change in plans, Ms. Psaki said that the administration thought the White House was a “more appropriate place to have the meeting,” which it is billing as a celebration of what Mr. Biden has called the “historic” partnership between Johnson & Johnson and Merck. The administration says the collaboration will increase manufacture of the vaccine itself, and will also bolster Johnson & Johnson’s packaging capacity, known in the vaccine industry as “fill-finish” — two big bottlenecks that have put the company behind schedule. Wednesday’s announcement is in keeping with Mr. Biden’s aggressive efforts to acquire as much vaccine supply as possible, as quickly as possible. Before Mr. Biden took office, he pledged to get “100 million shots into the arms” of the American people by his 100th day in office — a timetable that seemed aggressive at the time, but more recently has looked tame. He has been trying to speed it up ever since. At the time, two vaccines — one made by Moderna and the other by Pfizer-BioNTech — had been authorized by the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use. In January, Mr. Biden said the administration would have enough vaccine to cover every American by the end of summer. Last month, the president announced his administration had secured enough doses from those two companies to have enough to cover every American by the end of July. The recent addition of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which received emergency authorization in late February, opened a path for the administration to move up the timetable yet again. But Johnson & Johnson and its other partners, including Emergent, were behind schedule, which prompted the administration to reach out to Merck. Residents of a nursing home near Paris wait under observation after receiving their vaccines last month.Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times BRUSSELS — The European Union exported 25 million doses of vaccines produced in its territory last month to 31 countries around the world, with Britain and Canada the top destinations, just as the bloc saw its own supply cut drastically by pharmaceutical companies, slowing down vaccination efforts and stoking a major political crisis at home. The European Union — whose 27 nations are home to 450 million people — came under criticism last week, when Italy used an export-control mechanism to block a small shipment of vaccines to Australia. The move was criticized as protectionist and in sharp contrast to the bloc’s mantra of free markets and global solidarity in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. The issue of vaccine production and exports has also created a bitter dispute between the European Union and Britain, which recently departed the bloc, prompting accusations that Brussels wants to deprive London of doses out of spite, in part because Britain is doing so much better with its rollout. The tensions culminated in a diplomatic spat on Wednesday, after a top E.U. official accused the United States and Britain of implementing an “export ban” — a charge the British government vehemently denied. Practically speaking, ban or no ban, Britain is not exporting vaccines authorized for use at home. The country has said that it would be prepared to give excess shots to neighboring Ireland but only after it was done with its own vaccination efforts. The United States has also been hoarding doses, in part through a wartime mechanism known as the Defense Production Act which permits the federal government greater control over industrial production. President Biden last week promised each adult American at least one vaccine dose would be offered to them by May. But information made public for the first time, recorded in detailed internal documents seen by The New York Times, shows that the European Union, far from being protectionist, is in fact a vaccine exporting powerhouse. Of the nearly 25 million total vaccines made in the European Union that were exported from Feb. 1 — when the export mechanism came into force — to March 1, about a third, more than eight million doses, went to Britain. And while the United States kept doses for itself, the European Union shipped 651,000 vaccines to the country last month, and made vaccines for others across the Atlantic: The country that received the second-largest number of shots made in the European Union was Canada, with more than three million doses last month, while Mexico received nearly 2.5 million. Kim Andon gives Birch Creek resident Vincent Williams the Moderna vaccine at the Yukon Flats Health Center last month in Fort Yukon, Alaska.Credit…Ash Adams for The New York Times Everyone aged 16 and older living or working in Alaska is now eligible to receive the vaccine, Gov. Mike Dunleavy said on Tuesday evening, making it the first state to allow all of its residents access to the vaccine. Alaska has fully vaccinated 16 percent of its population, the highest rate in the country, according to a New York Times database. Adam Crum, the commissioner of the state health department, said, “If Alaskans had any questions about vaccine eligibility and criteria, I hope today’s announcement clears it up for you.” He added, “Simply put, you are eligible to get the vaccine.” Mr. Dunleavy encouraged all “Alaskans that are thinking about” getting vaccinated to do so, adding that the vaccine “gives us the ability now in Alaska to far outpace other states.” The announcement came as other states were rapidly expanding access to vaccines, with New York and Minnesota announcing on Tuesday that they would grant eligibility to wide swaths of their populations. The pace of vaccinations in the United States has continued to accelerate, with about 2.15 million doses being given daily, according to a New York Times database. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Tuesday that about 61.1 million people had received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including about 32.1 million people who have been fully vaccinated by Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine or the two-dose series made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Some parts of Alaska have reached 90 percent vaccination rates among seniors, Governor Dunleavy said in a statement. In the Nome Census Area, over 60 percent of residents 16 and older have received at least one shot. “We want to get our economy back up and running. We want to get our society back up and running,” the governor said. “We want to put this virus behind us — as far as possible, as soon as possible.” The Pfizer vaccine is available to people 16 and older in Alaska, the governor said, while the Johnson & Johnson and Moderna vaccines are available to those 18 and older. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said on Tuesday that his state would lower its age threshold for Covid-19 vaccine eligibility beginning on Wednesday, allowing anyone older than 60 to be inoculated. New York State is also opening vaccination eligibility next week to a large number of public-facing workers, including government employees, nonprofit workers and essential building services workers. Those people can begin to get vaccinated on March 17. New York will join a handful of other U.S. states that allow vaccinations for all people over 60; the majority have set their minimum age eligibility requirement at 65. Mr. Cuomo, in an appearance in Syracuse, pointed to expected increases in supply from the federal government as the reason behind expanding vaccine eligibility. Among the workers eligible to get vaccinated next week are public works employees, social service and child service caseworkers, government inspectors, sanitation workers, election workers, Department of Motor Vehicle employees and county clerks. Appointments will open for those over 60 starting at 8 a.m. on Wednesday, Mr. Cuomo said. People over 65 became eligible for a vaccine in January. Elsewhere, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota announced on Tuesday that the state would expand eligibility to more than 1.8 million Minnesotans this week, including essential workers in industries like food service and public transit, and people 45 and older with at least one underlying medical condition. The announcement is “weeks ahead of schedule,” the governor said in a statement, as the state is set to reach its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of Minnesotans 65 and older this week. In Ohio, residents 50 and older, as well as people with certain medical conditions who had not yet qualified, will be eligible to receive a vaccine this week, Gov. Mike DeWine announced on Monday. The same day, Gov. Henry McMaster of South Carolina announced that residents 55 and older, those 16 and older with high-risk medical conditions and some frontline workers were eligible. John Druschitz displays a stack of medical bills as well as careful notes he took about the timeline of his illness.Credit…Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times John Druschitz spent five days in a Texas hospital last April with fever and shortness of breath as doctors puzzled over a diagnosis. They initially suspected coronavirus. But ensuing lab work was ambiguous: Multiple molecular tests for coronavirus came back negative, but an antibody test was positive. Doctors found that Mr. Druschitz, 65, had an irregular heartbeat and blood clots in both his lungs. They sent him home on oxygen, and ultimately did not give a coronavirus diagnosis because of the negative tests. He didn’t think much about the decision until this fall, when he received a $22,367.81 bill that the hospital has since threatened to send to collections. Working with a patient advocate, he discovered that his debt stemmed in no small part from his diagnosis. Not having a coronavirus diagnosis disqualified his hospital from tapping into a federal fund to cover his bills. Mr. Druschitz ultimately fell short of qualifying for multiple federal health programs that would have paid for his care if the details had been slightly different. On the day the hospital admitted him, he was 64 years old, 23 days away from qualifying for Medicare. He had mistakenly terminated his private health plan one month early. If his hospital visit had happened 24 days later, Medicare would have covered the vast majority of the costs. Because he was uninsured, the hospital sent a letter less than a week after discharge offering to “help apply for medical assistance through various government programs.” Mr. Druschitz had not yet received a bill at the time. When it did arrive, six months later, he was told that offer had expired. Another source of federal funding would have become available if the hospital had determined he had coronavirus: the Covid-19 Uninsured Program. Created last spring, the program pays the medical bills of coronavirus patients who lack health coverage. It has faced some criticism from hospitals and patients for being too narrow, and for covering bills only where coronavirus is the primary diagnosis. A patient with a primary diagnosis of respiratory failure and a secondary diagnosis of coronavirus would not qualify, for example. The Health Resources and Services Administration, which runs the federal fund, does not have plans to change that policy. So far, it has spent $2 billion to reimburse health care providers for the bills of uninsured coronavirus patients. Robbie Fairchild, a former dancer at New York City Ballet, lost his health insurance during the pandemic. He is now running a flower business to help with finances.Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York Times Across the United States, thousands of actors, musicians, dancers and other entertainment industry workers are losing their health insurance or being saddled with higher costs in the midst of the pandemic. Some were simply unable to work enough hours last year to qualify for coverage. Others were in plans that made it harder to qualify for coverage. The insurance woes came as performers faced record unemployment. Several provisions in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan, which passed the Senate on Saturday and is expected to pass the House on Wednesday, offer the promise of relief. One would make it a lot cheaper for people to take advantage of the federal government program known as COBRA, which allows people to continue to buy the health coverage they have lost. Another would lower the cost of buying coverage on government exchanges. Many of the more than two dozen performers interviewed by The New York Times said that they had felt abandoned for much of the year — both by their unions and by what many described as America’s broken health care system. “You never think it’s going to be you,” said Robbie Fairchild, a former dancer at New York City Ballet who was nominated for a Tony Award in 2015 for his star turn in “An American in Paris” on Broadway and who later appeared in the film adaptation of “Cats.” Unlike other workers who simply sign up for a health plan when they start a new job, the people who power film, television and theater often work on multiple shows for many different employers, cobbling together enough hours, days and earnings until they reach the threshold that qualifies them for health insurance. Even as work grew scarce last year, several plans raised that threshold. Musicians are struggling, too. Officials at Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, the New York local that is the largest in the nation, estimate that when changes to its plan take effect this month, roughly one in three musicians will have lost coverage. Insurance plan officials say they were left with no choice but to make painful changes to ensure their funds survive because health care costs have been rising at rates that have outpaced contributions. Source link Orbem News #Black #communities #confronted #Hispanic #Misinformation #Vaccine

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saraseo · 4 years ago

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reading-writing-revolution · 4 years ago

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Heather Cox Richardson:

August 11, 2020 (Tuesday)

The big news of the day is that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden named his running mate: California Senator Kamala Harris.

Harris was born in Oakland, California. Her mother was an endocrinologist who immigrated to the U.S. from India; her father is an economist from British Jamaica who is now retired from the Stanford University economics department. Harris has a degree in political science and economics from Howard University and a law degree from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She spent seven years as the District Attorney of San Francisco, then six as the Attorney General of California. Both are elected offices, and in both she developed a reputation as a tough prosecutor. In 2016, California voters elected Harris Senator with more than 60% of the vote. Shortly after arriving in Washington, she was placed on the important Senate Judiciary Committee, so she has had a front-row seat at the hearings and proceedings of the past three years.

Harris is perceived as solidly in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. Her inclusion on the ticket disappointed members of the progressive wing, who had hoped for someone closer to their own principles to balance out the moderate Biden. It seems likely that Biden himself would have preferred former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, with whom he has a close relationship, but her association with the attack on Benghazi, Libya, would be prime fodder for Republican attacks.

Still, Harris stakes out some important turf for the Democratic ticket. She is a woman with both Black and South Asian American roots, enabling the Democrats to illustrate their commitment to a multiracial democracy by nominating her. She is crackerjack smart, a quality that many Americans would like to see in an administration. She is seen as a defender of the rule of law at a time when it seems under attack—she caught Attorney General William Barr in a falsehood at his confirmation hearing, noticeably throwing him off and forcing him to avoid her question out of fear of perjury. At 55, she is a generation younger than Biden (or Trump) balancing out the older ticket. And since she was hard on Biden during the primaries, his invitation to her indicates his willingness to accept criticism and continue to work with those who are not yes-men, a significant contrast to Trump.

Finally, I’m pretty sure Harris is the first Democratic nominee for the top of the ticket who has ever hailed from California, and one of the first from the far West. In 1988, Michael Dukakis’s running mate Lloyd Bentsen was from Texas, and LBJ was from Texas, but I can’t think of another. This is significant because since World War II, the far West has been Republican turf. It is where Reaganism rose in the 1970s to win the White House in 1980 and take over the nation. That the Democrats are cracking into that Republican stronghold with a national candidate suggests they are marking a sea change in American politics.

Already Republicans are insisting that Harris, a former prosecutor, is, as Trump tweeted, part of a “radical left.” National Review ran an article titled “Kamala Harris Is Farther Left than Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.” Trump campaign advisor Katrina Pierson said that Harris had “gleefully embraced the left’s radical manifesto” during her own run for the presidency, and that Biden’s choice showed that he was “surrendering control of our nation to the radical mob.”

The Republicans are clearly hoping to convince voters that Harris is an extremist. It will not be an easy charge to make stick to a former prosecutor, especially on a day when a Republican candidate who supports QAnon conspiracy theories won a congressional primary in a solidly-Republican district in Georgia, virtually guaranteeing that she will go on to Congress. Marjorie Taylor Greene seems the definition of an extremist. She has spouted anti-Semitic, anti-Black, and Islamophobic comments, and called George Soros a “Nazi.” She has defended QAnon, a mysterious source of a belief that Trump is secretly fighting against a well-connected ring of Satan-worshipping pedophiles that has taken over the government, praising the source as “someone that very much loves his country, and he’s on the same page as us, and he is very pro-Trump.”

When Trump talked to Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity tonight on his show, though, there was something else on his mind. Asked about Senator Harris and her previous comments about Biden and race, Trump responded by talking about the 2016 Russia investigation. According to the transcript, he riffed on how bad the media is and how the “fake reporting” got the Russia story wrong. Then he complimented Hannity on getting “the Russia hoax correct,” and finally, after complaining about Pulitzer Prizes, moved on to how “we caught Obama Biden. That’s why I didn’t think that [Obama’s National Security Advisor] Susan Rice could get it because he’s part of this whole illegal thing that happened, which is one of the worst perhaps the worst political scandal in the history of our country, and they got caught. Now let’s see what happens but they’re caught red handed…. Russia, Russia, Russia was made up fabricated….”

Russia is clearly on Trump’s mind. This morning, he tweeted “John Bolton, one of the dumbest people I’ve met in government and sadly, I’ve met plenty, states often that I respected, and even trusted, Vladimir Putin of Russia more than those in our Intelligence Agencies. While of course that is not true, if the first people you met from… so called American intelligence were Dirty Cops who have now proven to be sleazebags at the highest level like James Comey, proven liar James Clapper, & perhaps the lowest of them all, Wacko John Brennan who headed the CIA, you could perhaps understand my reluctance to embrace!”

What might be behind this is that Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), chair of the Senate Homeland Security & Governmental Affairs Committee, is under fire for his ongoing investigation of the debunked theory that it was Ukraine, not Russia, that attacked the U.S. in the 2016 election, and of the idea that Hunter and Joe Biden were involved in corruption in Ukraine. Intelligence experts and the chairs of the Senate Intelligence Committee have warned Johnson that he is amplifying Russian disinformation.

This weekend, Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post warning that Johnson was taking information from Ukrainians with ties to Russia. The accusations hit close enough to home that Johnson responded yesterday with an 11-page single spaced letter denying he was spreading Russian lies and instead accusing Democrats of trying to hurt Trump by attacking Johnson's investigation.

But, as Ryan Goodman and Asha Rangappa at JustSecurity pointed out, the letter was disingenuous, at best. They write, "the letter itself contains apparent products of Russian disinformation. And while Johnson denies taking information directly from two specific Ukrainians linked to Russia and its disinformation efforts, he makes no mention of his staff taking information directly from one of those individuals’ principal collaborators, which reportedly occurred over the course of several months."

This controversy might be bothering the president. One of the things not on Trump's mind, though, is the bill to help Americans weather the coronavirus pandemic by extending federal unemployment benefits, shoring up ailing states and cities, and preventing evictions, all things that his executive actions did not, in fact, do.

Senior administration officials say there is little chance of talks about a new coronavirus relief bill any time soon. White House chief of staff Mark Meadows is away for the week. More than that, though, the White House thinks it has Democrats in a “real pickle” because if they try to stop the Trump’s executive actions of last Friday, they will look like they are refusing to help ordinary Americans. While this was clearly the plan for those three memorandums and one executive order, it doesn’t look to me like it has worked. Democrats are not pushing back on legal grounds, but on the grounds that the measures don’t actually do anything, and that seems to be the story that is dominating the media.

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gyrlversion · 6 years ago

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What Joe Biden Is Teaching Democrats About Democrats

Joe Biden in Fullerton last October. Photo: Leonard Ortiz/Digital First Media via Getty Images

Over the past five years, the Democratic Party has seemed to race leftward so fast that its recent standard-bearers are considered no longer qualified to lead it. Bill Clinton? An embarrassment not welcome on the campaign trail. Barack Obama? A neoliberal whose half-measures should not be repeated. Nor does the new crowd of Democrats qualify by the stringent standards of ideological purity: Cory Booker has ties to Wall Street; Kamala Harris was a prosecutor; Beto O’Rourke once mused about cutting Social Security.

But nobody is thought of as more retrograde than Joe Biden — “a deeply flawed candidate who’s out of step with the mood of his party,” Politico wrote last year. Biden’s heresies are comprehensive: on foreign policy (supporting the Iraq War), social policy (his dismissive treatment of Anita Hill, harsh criminal-justice stances, opposition to school busing), and economic policy (support for the Reagan tax cut, balanced-budget fetishism). And Biden, being Biden, has articulated these positions with cringey sound bites that make the situation even worse.

The prevailing mood toward a Biden candidacy has been a combination of anger that he has the temerity to lead a party that has left him behind and sympathy that he’s too addled to grasp his predicament. A genre of op-ed has developed out of liberals pleading with Biden, with such headlines as “Why Joe Biden Shouldn’t Run for President” (The Week, The Guardian); “I Like Joe Biden. I Urge Him Not to Run” (the New York Times); “I Really Like Joe Biden, but He Shouldn’t Run for President” (USA Today); and, as exasperation has sunk in, “Again, Joe Biden, for the Love of God: Do Not Run for President” (The Stranger).

The poor guy has disregarded all the advice and decided to run anyway. And initial polling has revealed that a large number of Democrats have not left Biden behind at all. He begins the race leading his closest competitors, including early front-runner Bernie Sanders, by as much as 30 points. Perhaps it was the party’s intelligentsia, not Biden, that was out of touch with the modern Democratic electorate.

The conclusion that Biden could not lead the post-Obama Democratic Party is the product of misplaced assumptions about the speed of its transformation. Yes, the party has moved left, but not nearly as far or as fast as everybody seemed to believe. Counterintuitively, House Democrats’ triumph in the midterms may have pushed their center of gravity to the right: The 40 seats Democrats gained were overwhelmingly located in moderate or Republican-leaning districts.

Biden’s apparent resurrection from relic to runaway front-runner has illustrated a chasm between perception and reality. The triumph of the left is somewhere between a movement ahead of its time and a bubble that has just popped.

This is not to say we imagined the whole thing. Beginning in President Obama’s second term, important social movements began to burble out of the left and into American culture. Black Lives Matter helped drive criminal-justice reform to a point where even President Trump went along with a bill to shorten sentences for thousands of people in federal prison. The #MeToo movement highlighted workplace discrimination and sexual exploitation, exposing sexual predators in media, politics, and other commanding heights of culture. In just a couple of years, attitudes seemed to leap forward two generations.

And then, in an economic analogue to these social movements, the Sanders campaign sparked to life a socialist faction inside the Democratic Party. The influence of socialist thought can be seen in Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, the latter of which argues that climate change demands a sweeping reorganization of the entire economy.

News accounts have emphasized the growing share of self-identified liberals in the party as well as the diminishing stigma of socialism among younger Democrats. But political parties are large groups of people, and they change very slowly. Socialism may be growing less unpopular, but it remains quite unpopular. In a recent poll, just 10 percent of Americans held a positive opinion of socialism, and 29 percent said it is compatible with American values (against 57 percent saying otherwise). While the liberal share of the Democratic electorate is rising, it’s only just caught up to the combined share of Democrats who call themselves moderate or conservative. A small majority of Democrats say they wish the party would move in a more moderate direction.

In the New York Times, Frank Bruni suggested that Biden’s “party can’t get enough of the word progressive, but he’s regressive, symbolizing a step back to an administration past.” Yet, according to another recent poll, it seems most Democrats can get enough of the word progressive and also are quite fond of the administration in which Biden served: When Democrats were offered a choice of different ideological labels, “socialist” and “democratic socialist” each drew 1 and 6 percent, respectively, and “progressive Democrat” got 5 percent. Sixteen percent of respondents chose “moderate Democrat,” and 20 percent of them picked “Obama Democrat.”

So why did the media spend the past few years getting the state of the Democratic Party so wrong? One reason is that a numbers of factions had an incentive to hype the rise of the left. The left itself came out of 2016 giddy with its conviction that Sanders lost to Hillary Clinton only out of inertia (or even, the more radical members of the movement claimed, party manipulation). Sanders had won the young, and therefore the future.

In reality, Sanders received lots of votes from people who either appreciated his earnest persona or objected to Clinton for a variety of reasons, including her being too liberal. (Sanders ran up the vote in places like West Virginia and Oklahoma with many of the same conservative Democrats who had supported Clinton over Barack Obama in 2008. Both times, they were registering protest votes against the party and its presumptive nominee. The Sanders movement convinced itself that his success reflected an unsated demand for socialism. The rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—young, nonwhite, native to social media—gave the movement the ideal image of its ambitions. Their plan to take over the party involved repeating that they had already done so.

In this project, they enjoyed the support of the conservative media. Saddled by his own unpopularity, Trump cast his opponents as radical socialists. Last year, a White House economic report hysterically announced, “Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in American political discourse,” as if, any day now, bands of bloodthirsty Marxist guerrillas might descend from the mountains. Right-wing media focused almost obsessively on Ocasio-Cortez and a handful of her closest allies, including Minnesota’s Ilhan Omar, Massachusetts’s Ayanna Pressley, and Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib. That these had a habit of supplying TV-ready controversies made the cycles of outrage perfectly symbiotic. The conservative media would attack Ocasio-Cortez and her crew, who would rally their supporters to defend against the attacks. Both had an interest in portraying her as the Democratic Party’s true leader.

On top of it all, the familiar cast of centrist independents cycling through the greenrooms of CNN and MSNBC found the left to be a convenient balancing tool. Trump’s gross bigotry and authoritarianism threatened to place them in the uncomfortable spot of blaming the country’s problems on a single party. But you can’t make a centrist message out of distancing yourself from one entire party and three members of the other party. To make the comfortable “both sides have gone too far” formulation work, the Democratic left flank had to be portrayed as a dominant force. “Liberals wondering why conservatives who worry about Trump don’t join the Democrats should consider what is happening on their own side of the aisle,” wrote anti-Trump conservative Peter Wehner in The Atlantic. “Progressivism is wrecking the Democratic Party even as crude populism and ethnic nationalism have (for now) wrecked the Republican Party.” This message formed the basis of the Howard Schultz campaign.

The most important ingredient in the delusion was Twitter. It is hard to exaggerate the degree to which the platform shapes the minds of professional political observers. Part of Twitter’s allure to insiders is that it creates a simulacrum of the real world, complete with candidates, activists, and pundits all responding to events in real time. Because Twitter superficially resembles the outside world’s political debate — it does, after all, contain the full left-to-right spectrum — it is easy to mistake it for the real thing.

But the ersatz polity of Twitter doesn’t represent the real world. Democrats on Twitter skew young and college educated. A study last month found that the Twitter-using portion of the Democratic electorate harbors far more progressive views on everything than the party’s voting base.

One striking example of the disconnect took place earlier this year in Virginia. An old medical-school yearbook showed Ralph Northam, the state’s Democratic governor, in a picture featuring a blackface costume and Ku Klux Klan robe and hood. If you followed the debate on Twitter, as nearly all political reporters did, Northam’s resignation was simply a given. The debate turned to when he would step down, who would replace him, and what other prominent people would have career-ending blackface yearbook photographs.

Virginians, however, were split in ways the political elite would never have guessed. Whites and Republicans favored his resignation, while African-American voters believed, by a 20-point margin, that Northam should not resign.

As the Democratic Party in 2019 begins to wake up to the fact that its intellectual and activist vanguard is deeply at odds with both its voting base and the vast majority of its elected officials, the politics of Washington and the 2020 primary are shifting in unexpected ways.

In Congress, Nancy Pelosi survived a campaign in which more than three dozen Democratic candidates, nearly all running in conservative or moderate districts, refused to endorse her for House Speaker. Pelosi, in turn, has embraced the large wing of newly elected centrists that gave her the majority. Pelosi has repeatedly dismissed Ocasio-Cortez and her peers as irrelevant.

“When we won this election, it wasn’t in districts like mine or Alexandria’s … But those are districts that are solidly Democratic. This glass of water,” she said at one event, hoisting a glass, “would win with a D next to its name in those districts.” In an interview, she repudiated socialism (“I do reject socialism as an economic system. If people have that view, that’s their view. That is not the view of the Democratic Party”), and when asked about the faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez, she replied, “That’s like five people.”

Pelosi keeps making this point so insistently and even rudely because, perhaps, the media have kept missing it. Only half of House Democrats support Medicare for All, and slightly fewer representatives support the Green New Deal. (Pelosi’s assessment of the latter — “It will be one of several or maybe many suggestions that we receive. The green dream, or whatever they call it” — summarized its very dim prospects.) Meanwhile, Pelosi has broken from the left on other high-profile controversies. She has refused to initiate impeachment hearings and held a vote condemning anti-Semitism following Ilhan Omar’s comments accusing Israel supporters of foreign allegiance.

When asked about the faction associated with Ocasio-Cortez, Pelosi replied, “That’s like five people.”

College-educated white Democratic voters have shown a growing concern about structural bias in American society: a transformation owed to social progressives, who tend to be the most skeptical about nominating a white man for president. To them, the struggle against racism and sexism correlates with a belief in increasing representation of women and people of color. Many Democratic voters, on the other hand, have arrived at the opposite conclusion. If racism and sexism are so endemic, they’ve decided, then beating Trump requires nominating a white man. “You’ll always hear, ‘There’s no way a woman can win this,’ and they go back to Hillary,” one voter told the Times. “Even among my female friends.”

Most of the party’s presidential candidates took the claims of the ascendant left at face value when they undertook their campaigns. Candidates like Harris, Booker, O’Rourke, and Elizabeth Warren designed their platforms as if they had to compete ideologically with Sanders. Several of them have already advocated Medicare for All or the Green New Deal, which could expose them to withering attacks from Trump if they win the nomination. Harris told an interviewer that, yes, she would do away with private health insurance. Julián Castro endorsed cash-payment reparations. Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand called for abolishing ICE, before backing off and saying they only wanted to reform it.

None of these plans stands a chance to pass Congress under the next president, even in the best-case scenario. All of them poll badly. (Medicare for All sounds popular until you tell people it means eliminating private insurance, at which point it grows unpopular.) The candidates seem to have overestimated how much left-wing policy voters actually demand. Democratic voters might be dissuaded from nominating their former vice-president if they hear more about his long record or if he repeats the undisciplined campaigning that led to defeats in both of his previous presidential campaigns. But it is already clear enough that he is supplying something much closer to what the party’s electorate wants than either the political media or the other candidates had assumed. A Democratic Party in which Biden is running away with a nomination simply cannot be the one that most people thought existed. Some of Harris’s advisers, the Times recently reported, are urging her to stop mollifying activists and embrace her prosecutorial past.

It might slowly be dawning on the left that its giddy predictions of ascendancy have not yet materialized. Corey Robin, a left-wing writer who has previously heralded the left’s impending takeover of the Democratic Party, recently conceded he may have miscalculated. “We have nothing like the organizational infrastructure, the party organization, the intellectual and ideological coherence, or political leadership we need,” he wrote. “I don’t see anything on the horizon like the cadre of ideologues and activists that made the New Deal or Reagan Revolution.”

The long-term question for the left is whether it can build a movement that can dominate in the real world, not just on Twitter and in some magazines. The short-term question is whether it can leverage what power it does have among activists and intellectuals without blowing up an election many Democrats see as an existential fight for the republic.

*This article appears in the May 13, 2019, issue of New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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libertariantaoist · 7 years ago

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What in the name of Allah is going on with the spat between Qatar, on one side, and the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates, and most of the rest of the Arab states on the other? Accusations that Qatar is the fulcrum of “terrorism” in the region, emanating from Riyadh and Abu Dhabi – the twin epicenters of Islamic extremism on earth – seemed to have been broadcast from Bizarro World. And the incident that sparked the controversy — in which much of the Arab world, led by the Saudis, blockaded tiny Qatar — added the extra-hot spice of cyber-espionage to an already indigestible dish.

Shortly after President Donald Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia, where he announced his “anti-terrorist” initiative, the web site of the Qatar News Agency, run by the Qatari government, was hacked. A “fake news” story was posted by the hackers, purporting to describe a speech given by the current Emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad al-Thani, in which he called for better relations with Iran, praised Hamas and Hezbollah, and predicted that Trump’s term in the White House would be short.

Despite the Qataris’ claim – since verified by the FBI, according to Qatar’s foreign minister – that the Qatar News Agency site had been hacked, and that the Emir had given no such speech, both the Saudis and the UAE, through their official media outlets, launched a campaign targeting Qatar. Overflight rights were revoked: diplomatic contacts ended: Qatar citizens were forbidden to enter Saudi/UAE territory even to change planes. And in a public statement delivered in the rose garden of the White House President Trump clearly sided with the Saudi/UAE consortium, complementing a series of remarkably stupid tweets that basically said the same thing.

The US news media managed to get a Russian angle on all this, claiming that “Russian hackers” were behind the targeting of the Qatar News Agency: as usual they offered no evidence for this assertion. Yet just who was behind this hacking incident seems crucial to understanding the real genesis of – and motive behind – the Qatar controversy, which could augur a new regional crisis possibly dragging in Iran.

So let’s look at the timeline in the context of yet another hacking incident, this one involving the hotmail account of Yousef Al-Otaiba, the UAE’s well-connected ambassador to the US. The hackers, who call themselves “GlobalLeaks,” released a tranche of emails between Al-Taiba and individuals connected to the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). The Foundation is a pro-Israel thinktank originally called “Emet: An Educational Initiative, Inc.,” founded in 2001 by a group of pro-Israel billionaires and designed to blunt growing American sympathy for the Palestinians. FDD has since expanded its mission, under chief honcho Clifford May, to encompass a full-scale projection of Israeli propaganda in the US. The Otaiba-FDD emails reveal extensive cooperation between the ostensibly ultra-Islamic UAE – which, like its Saudi allies and much of the Arab world, has never recognized the state of Israel — and the staunchly Zionist FDD. (See some of the emails here, here, here, and here.) A great deal of the back and forth is between FDD general counsel and former Bush era National Security Advisor John Hannah and Mr. Al-Otaiba.

The emails detail FDD’s efforts to show Al-Otaiba that UAE companies doing business with Iran need to be sanctioned: a “target list” is included. The correspondence also details plans for a June 11-14 meeting with FDD personnel and UAE political and military officials, including the ambassador, FDD CEO Mark Dubowitz, and former US defense secretary Robert Gates. And most significantly, on the agenda was “discussion of possible U.S./UAE policies to positively impact Iranian internal situation” including “political, economic, military, intelligence, and cyber tools” designed to “contain and defeat Iranian aggression.”

Hmmmm… “cyber tools,” eh?

Now add to the timeline this reporting by the New York Times:

“[T]hree days after the Trump meeting in Riyadh, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies held a conference in Washington dedicated to criticism of Qatar, titled ‘Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Global Affiliates.’

“Robert M. Gates, the former defense secretary and a friend of Mr. Otaiba, gave the keynote. Attendees included many of the authors of the critical op-ed articles and senior Obama administration officials. Organizers encouraged Mr. Otaiba to attend, and his staff sent Abu Dhabi, the Emirati capital, a detailed report.

“No representative of Qatar was invited. The hack of the Qatari news agency took place after midnight that night.”

What a coincidence!

As this piece in the Washington Post puts it, the speculation that “Russian hackers” under Russian state control are behind the Qatar hack is “unlikely.” Emails from the hackers bearing Russian “(.ru) addresses seem designed to put detectives off the trail. The Post piece avers that hackers-for-hire were the responsible parties, but the question is: who were they working for?

Which leads us to a larger question: who benefits? Clearly both the Saudis and the Israelis – whose semi-clandestine alliance has been documented in this space – had everything to gain from this intra-Arab spat. United by fear and hatred of Iran, Riyadh and Tel Aviv have been quietly cooperating to unite the Sunni Arabs against Iran – and draw the United States into open conflict with Tehran. Both abhorred and denounced the Iran deal, and are seeking to actively undermine it: that’s another item at the top of the FDD/UAE meet up.

Another factor is the relationship between Mr. Al-Taiba and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and a powerful figure in the administration: the ambassador has been described as Kushner’s “mentor” when it comes to schooling him on all matters Middle Eastern. Kushner, for his part, is a strong advocate for Israel.

There are no innocents, no “good guys” in this part of the world: the reality is that all of these Middle Eastern actors have been subsidizing terrorist outfits, in Syria and elsewhere. The Saudis are perhaps the worst offenders: their worldwide network of radical Wahabist mosques and “educational” outfits has been pushing a terrorist agenda for decades. The UAE has also been a lucrative source of funding for radical Islamic terrorism, notably in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And while Qatar has not been stingy in this regard, its stance has been notably non-sectarian: while they’ve given support to the Muslim Brotherhood – perhaps the least radical Sunni organization – they are also capable of sending official congratulations to recently re-elected Iranian President Hassan Rouhani. This is their great “sin” in the eyes of the Saudi-led Sunni Axis: they have tried to mediate the Sunni-Shi’ite religious war, which threatens the entire region with the kind of bloody turmoil that occasioned Europe’s Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants.

The idea that Qatar is solely responsible for the growth and development of Middle Eastern terrorism is laughable on its face: that narrative simply won’t stand even the most careless scrutiny. And the proposition that Saudi Arabia is any kind of anti-terrorist bulwark is a cruel joke. That the Trump administration is taking this line is absolutely criminal: it amounts to appeasing and succoring the epicenter of radical Islamic terrorism.

The crazy notion that Iran is the world’s leading exporter of terrorism is a page right out of the Israeli-Saudi playbook: for the Trump administration to echo this nonsense contradicts the facts and contravenes American interests in the region. For it is the Saudis who have been funding and arming ISIS, and al-Qaeda, in Syria. And the Israelis have openly proclaimed their preference for ISIS over Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad. It is radical Sunni fundamentalists, not pro-Iranian Shi’ites, who have been conducting a global jihad against American and European targets. Iran is fighting ISIS in Syria – while the US in bombing Syrian government troops, the main obstacle to the ISIS/al-Qaeda forces.

The Saudi-Qatari conflict has all the hallmarks of a joint Saudi-Israeli operation, complete with cyber-hacking, a full-scale propaganda war, and a clueless Uncle Sam stupidly falling for a brazen deception. What’s amazing is that, despite the plethora of evidence that the whole thing is a pretty transparent put up job, the usual suspects continue to get away with it.

#justin raimondo #antiwar.com #qatar #saudi arabia

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sinrau · 4 years ago

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President Trump listens to Anthony S. Fauci speak at a coronavirus briefing at the White House on April 17. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)By Philip Rucker,

July 17, 2020 at 7:46 PM EDT

Scott Becker, chief executive of the Association of Public Health Laboratories, which represents state and local labs, said, “The whole public health community has been demoralized by this.”

“I’ve seldom seen someone who has been more wrong more consistently over his whole career than Dr. Fauci that continues to be listened to and held up as some kind of expert,” Moore said.

He went on to express dismay that Fauci does not act like “a team player” by parroting to the public Trump’s talking points.

This week, Redfield said that Trump ought to “set an example” by wearing a mask and that the epidemic could be brought under control in four to eight weeks if everyone wore one.

Coronavirus: What you need to read

The Washington Post is providing some coronavirus coverage free, including:

#IFTTT #WordPress

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orendrasingh · 5 years ago

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Coronavirus has robbed the Democrat of his typical back-slapping approach as he faces growing scrutiny and a third-party challengeThe Tampa, Florida, rally for Joe Biden on Thursday evening began as it normally might have, before a once-in-a-century pandemic transformed all aspects of American life, including the presidential campaign. A local high school student recited the pledge of allegiance, a campaign organizer pleaded with supporters to volunteer and a local DJ spun R&B music between speakers.But in a sign of how profoundly the coronavirus crisis has reshaped American politics, that was where the similarities ended.With much of the US still in lockdown, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee has been forced to take his campaign to unseat Donald Trump online. It has not always been easy.His campaign’s first attempt to recreate a traditional rally – part of a virtual swing through the battleground state of Florida – was later described by his opponents as an “unmitigated technological failure”. The video stream was glitchy and pixelated. The audio was choppy, rendering some remarks nearly incomprehensible. And there were lengthy delays between speakers and at one point, the feed went dark for several minutes.“Am I on?” asked Biden, beaming into the telecast from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he has been isolated since the middle of March. An off-camera voice replied that he was. Biden removed a pair of aviator sunglasses as he walked toward the camera.“Good evening, Tampa. Thanks so much for tuning in,” he continued, a hint of irritation in his voice. “I wish we could have done this together – and it had gone a little more smoothly.”For nearly two months, Biden has been the test subject in a novel political experiment: running for president in the age of Covid-19.Social distancing restrictions imposed to stop the spread of the virus have already starved the campaign of a victory tour to mark his ascent to the Democratic nomination. It may well deny Democrats the chance to formally nominate him in person at the party’s national convention this summer. Endorsements from former rivals and party leaders occur online to varying degrees of fanfare. . The remote set-up, anathema to Biden’s back-slapping, glad-handing approach to politics, has left the candidate walled off from voters and competing for visibility.Yet, technical difficulties aside, his campaign of confinement seems to be working.In recent weeks, Biden has widened his lead over Trump as the president’s support slips amid growing disapproval of his response to the pandemic. Surveys from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona – key battlegrounds that Trump won in 2016 – show Biden ahead. At a recent virtual fundraiser last week, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, his new campaign manager, expressed optimism about Biden’s prospects in Florida and Arizona.“The natural state of this race is to be a referendum on Donald Trump and every time Donald Trump steps to the microphone he hurts himself,” said Mark Mellman, a veteran Democratic pollster. “That’s a pretty good position for Joe Biden to be in.”Biden initially struggled to adapt to his cloistered reality. In March, the campaign turned a recreation room in the basement of his home into a studio, though not fast enough for his critics, who launched a “Where’s Joe” campaign to mark the candidate’s relative disappearance from the national stage.But since then, Biden has been busy. Nearly every day he makes appearances on local TV news channels or national talkshows. He launched a podcast, where he has hosted conversations with prominent Democratic governors and potential vice-presidential candidates. He spends time each day speaking with a voter – a frontline worker, campaign volunteers – and he participated in what the campaign billed as a “virtual rope line”.“So what’s up?” he said to Ashley Ruiz of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, one of several voters on the rope line. “Tell me about your situation, Ash.”•••Biden’s rise in the polls comes as he contends with an allegation from Tara Reade, a former aide in his Senate office who accused him of sexual assault in 1993. In an interview this week with Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News and NBC television host, Reade said he should withdraw from the presidential race.Biden has forcefully denied the allegation. “It’s not true, I am saying unequivocally. It never, never happened,” he said last week, in an interview addressing her claim for the first time publicly.Publicly, Democrats, including prominent MeToo advocates, have rallied around Biden, though privately some in the party have expressed concern about the continuous drip of reporting on the matter.So far the allegation appears to have marginally dented his reputation, but not his lead. Most voters – 86% – are aware of the allegation, according to a Monmouth poll, which found the electorate divided over whether they viewed the claim as credible. At the same time, the poll showed Biden nine points ahead of Trump.Despite Trump’s falling electoral fortunes, many Democrats remain anxious about Biden’s position – and his strategy.David Axelrod and David Plouffe, two of Barack Obama’s top campaign strategists, implored Biden’s campaign to expand its digital footprint in a joint New York Times op-ed that compared the atmospherics of the candidate’s home videos to “an astronaut beaming back to earth from the International Space Station”.“Online speeches from his basement won’t cut it,” they wrote.Lis Smith, the former top adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign, followed with an op-ed on Thursday that offered a blueprint for turning Biden into the “hottest bad boy and disrupter in the media game”. She suggested his campaign use TV appearances and digital content to highlight Biden’s empathy, a trait even supporters say the president has lacked in response to the rising coronavirus death toll.Part of the campaign’s evolving digital strategy includes partnering with groups that already have an online presence, like JoeMamas2020, a national coalition of “moms, caregivers, moms to be, aunts & all the parental figures in between” with about 27,000 Facebook and 1,200 Twitter followers. The group has helped amplify Biden’s appearances and policy proposals while spreading the word about upcoming events.Julie Zebrak, the group’s co-founder, said the online army is growing with women energized to help elect a candidate who promises to restore stability and calm after four years of what Trump’s critics view as chaos and controversy.“We are all extremely enthusiastic for Joe Biden to beat Donald Trump,” she said.Yet the same traits that endear Biden to a growing coalition of suburban women and Never Trump Republicans have largely failed to excite younger, progressive voters. It’s not that they prefer Trump – they don’t – but a lack of enthusiasm among those voters could spell trouble in November if they stay home or vote for a third-party candidate.The campaign has also ramped up its outreach to young people, who overwhelmingly supported Biden’s rival Bernie Sanders. On Friday, Biden presented his economic pitch in an appearance on NowThis, a social-media-heavy news outlet with a young, progressive audience.“This crisis hit harder and will last longer because Donald Trump spent the last three years undermining the core pillars of our economic strength,” Biden said in remarks that attacked Trump’s stimulus efforts a kind of “cronyism” and corporate welfare. Before he began speaking, Biden removed a face mask, a pointed rebuke of the president who had refused to wear one.Still, new research conducted on behalf of NextGen America found many young people weren’t convinced Biden’s policies meet the scale of the challenges bearing down on their generation.This makes the efforts of groups like Progressive Turnout Project, which endorsed him this week, all the more important. In the coming months, the group is investing more than $52m to turn out low-propensity Democratic voters – including young people and people of color – in 17 key battleground states.“The best thing we can do is go and knock on doors and have face-to-face conversations with voters,” said Alex Morgan, the group’s executive director. “We are still looking to do that. But it’ll be knocking on that door and then taking a few big steps back and having a more distant conversation.”•••Biden’s campaign also faces another looming threat. The Michigan congressman Justin Amash, who left the Republican party last year after voting to impeach Trump, recently announced that he would seek the Libertarian party nomination.His entrance has alarmed Democrats, who fear he could siphon off Never Trump voters who might otherwise back Biden, particularly in Amash’s home state of Michigan, where third-party candidates pulled away a combined 5% of the vote share in 2016. Hillary Clinton lost the state by just 10,704 votes, less than 0.25%.Many Democrats believe Biden’s fate may well rest on his ability to persuade their own side to vote.“Trump has shown no desire or ability to moderate for those swing voters in this election,” said Addisu Demissie, who served as Cory Booker’s presidential campaign manager. “So those voters are now likely going to end up either Biden voters or non-voters or third-party voters, and that’s the competition.”This week, Trump traveled to the battleground state of Arizona, where he toured a medical mask facility without wearing one himself. The visit was a symbolic show of his administration’s push to reopen the US economy but there were unmistakable elements of his signature campaign rallies, including the music that played when Trump finished his remarks (the Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want).Trump’s cross-country venture stood in striking contrast to Biden’s virtual swing through Florida – which included a rally, a roundtable in Jacksonville and an appearance on the local news in Tampa. The technical glitches only further highlighted the limitations of his confinement.But the coronavirus has also upended Trump’s strategy, erasing the booming economy he has made a centerpiece of his re-election campaign. In recent weeks, his campaign has all but abandoned championing the president’s leadership, instead focusing its efforts on diminishing Biden.Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, previewed the onslaught on Twitter this week, comparing the Trump re-election juggernaut to the Death Star from the Star Wars movies. “In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time,” he wrote.As Trump prepares to make even greater use of the advantages of incumbency, Biden faces his biggest test yet. Can he really lead a Rebel Alliance from his basement?

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thisdaynews · 5 years ago

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Inside Beto O’Rourke’s collapse

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/inside-beto-orourkes-collapse/

Inside Beto O’Rourke’s collapse

A year ago, in the aftermath of his near-miss Senate run,O’Rourke was already viewed as a top-tier presidential contender, improbablypolling third, behind former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Former President Barack Obama was publicly drawing comparisons between the former Texas congressman and himself, while former Obama aides were privately encouraging young operatives to move to O’Rourke’s hometown, El Paso, to get in early on the campaign. The media would soon encamp on the sidewalks there.

Rival candidates feared O’Rourke would swamp them with his donor list, after raising more than $80 million in his near-miss Senate campaign against Ted Cruz.

Dan Pfeiffer, the former Obama communications director, said in an op-ed for Crooked Media at the time that he had “never seen a Senate candidate — including Obama in 2004 — inspire the sort of enthusiasm that Beto did in his race.” And when O’Rourke announced his candidacy in March, spinning through crowds in southeastern Iowa, then driving east to New Hampshire, it appeared he might in the presidential race, as well.

In the first day of his campaign, he raised a staggering $6.1 million.

Then it evaporated.

The proximate cause of O’Rourke’s fall was not in the unorthodox things he did. His meandering, solo road trip through the Southwest, the livestreaming of his dentist visit, even the infamous“born to be in it” Vanity Fair cover — which he later said he regretted — all happened before O’Rourke cratered.

Rather, it was everything hedidn’tdo — rendering himan object lesson in the familiar limits of charisma, the liability of high expectations and the importance of organization.

Or, as O’Rourke might say, of having one’s “shit” together.

For too long — and irreparably — he did not.

While other candidates were assembling campaign staffs and volunteer armies in early nominating states, O’Rourke lacked the infrastructure necessary to organize his own supporters. Lawmakers and major Democratic donors could not get calls returned. When the campaign’s skeletal staff promised to reach out, it sometimes forgot.

The signs of disorder were startling. He announced his candidacy before hiring a campaign manager. Two senior officials who had worked on O’Rourke’s Senate run and on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, Becky Bond and Zack Malitz, abruptly left. On the eve of his campaign announcement, O’Rourke was forced to personally apologize to at least one prominent Iowa Democrat for his lack of organization, according to a source familiar with the conversation.

O’Rourke’s initial handling of the media was just as clumsy. He alienatedreporters by refusing to provide basic information about his schedule — including, for many outlets, the location of his campaign’s first public event. He later acknowledged he needed to do a “better job” reaching a national audience.

But at first, he believed he didn’t have to — that based on the success of his Senate campaign’s social media effort, he could largely bypass the traditional press, two people familiar with the campaign said.

It was a miscalculation, and O’Rourke was punished for it. When he hesitated or demurred — as he did frequently on policy questions early in the campaign — he was cast as a lightweight in a field populated by senators and a former vice president.

“I heard the way you ingratiate yourself to voters is to stand on things, so I found this park bench here,” Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., joked at an event in New Hampshire this spring, referring to TV coverage of O’Rourke standing on tables and countertops while speaking at events.

That gentle ribbing gnawed at O’Rourke’s supporters. Theyoften contrastedO’Rourke’s trajectory with that of Buttigieg, another young, relatively inexperienced politician who is currentlysurging in the presidential race.

Entering the contest with less attention, Buttigieg was still introducing himself to the electorate when O’Rourke was getting knocked down. If initial expectations had not been so high for O’Rourke, he might never have become the serious contender he briefly was. But he also might not have fallen so hard.

By summer, Jen O’Malley Dillon, O’Rourke’s highly-regarded campaign manager, had built out his political and policy operation, recruiting top talent to El Paso. O’Rourke had set forth a swath of detailed plans on issues ranging from climate change to immigration and government reform. And following the shooting in El Paso in August, his controversial proposal of a mandatory buyback of assault weapons helped push the nation’s gun control debate to the left.

But it was too late. O’Rourke’s fundraising had fallen off almost immediately after he entered the race, and he never recovered. He performed poorly in the first primary debate, appearing shaken when a fellow Texan, Julián Castro, tore into him over his opposition to decriminalizing border crossings. O’Rourke disliked debates and preparing for them, and he felt after the encounter with Castro that he had been stilted and over-prepared, according to a source familiar with the campaign.

He raised just $3.6 million in the second quarter of the year, and $4.5 million in the third quarter.

By Friday, an adviser said, O’Rourke was running out of money. The campaign explored the possibility of public financing, but abandoned the idea, a campaign adviser said. Layoffs, said Aleigha Cavalier, O’Rourke’s press secretary, “were never an option” O’Rourke considered.

Instead, standing on a box in a park by the Des Moines River, O’Rourke told a small group of supporters that he could “clearly see at this point that we do not have the means to pursue this campaign successfully.”

It didn’t matter that he had a policy platform or a campaign infrastructure, or that he had largely stabilized his relationship with the press. By the time he did, O’Rourke was no longer a top-tier competitor. Democratic voters were not taking him seriously anymore.

In a sign of the campaign’s frustration, Rob Flaherty, O’Rourke’s digital director, posted a photograph on Twitter of a t-shirt he said the campaign was “going to put out but didn’t.”

It read, in all caps: “HE WASN’T STREAMING HIS DENTIST APPOINTMENT HE WAS SHARING THE HYGIENIST’S STORY.”

Before O’Rourke’s arrival at the park on Friday, his staff set out a box with the words “soap” and “Beto 2020” stamped on it in black lettering.

A woman craning for a photograph of the platform said, “Where he began is where he’s ending.”

A woman next to her, noting that O’Rourke is only 47, hinted he might run again.

O’Rourke suggested in an interview in September that he will not. “I cannot fathom a scenario where I would run for public office again if I’m not the nominee,” he said.

On Friday, speaking in a sweater, he told his supporters, “This has been the honor of my lifetime.”

Then he lingered for more than an hour, hugging supporters and staffers in the dark across the street from the convention center where the other, still-running candidates assembled for the massive state party event known as the Liberty & Justice dinner.

Embracingtearful supporters, O’Rourke described his campaign as a “transcendent” experience. “As tough as this day is,” he reassured one man, “there’s just something beautiful that’s going to stay with me, some kind of optimism I have about where the country’s going because of all the people I’ve met.”

If he couldn’t answer why that wasn’t enough, it was because what O’Rourke cherished about running for office — the crowds, the road, the exchange of ideas, even as his crowds thinned — rarely is.

After O’Rourke left,Norm Sterzenbach, the veteran strategist who marshaled O’Rourke’s operation in Iowa, stayed behind, removing campaign signs. When a staffer told him that a drill to disassemble large, wooden lettering at the edge of the park wasn’t working, Sterzenbach pulled one down with his hand.

“Gravity,” he told the staffer. “One of the most powerful forces in nature.”

Alex Thompson contributed to this report.

#collapse #Foreign #Politics #Rourke

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phroyd · 4 years ago

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President Trump is so fixated on finding a vaccine for the novel coronavirus that in meetings about the U.S. pandemic response, little else captures his attention, according to administration officials.

Trump has pressed health officials to speed up the vaccine timeline and urged them to deliver one by the end of the year. He has peppered them with questions about the development status and mass-distribution plans. And, in recent days, he has told some advisers and aides that a vaccine may arrive by Nov. 1, which just happens to be two days before the presidential election.

Trump’s desire to deliver a vaccine — or at least convince the public that one is very near — by the time voters decide whether to elect him to a second term is in part a campaign gambit to improve his standing with an electorate that overwhelmingly disapproves of his management of the pandemic.

“We remain on track to deliver a vaccine before the end of the year and maybe even before November 1st,” Trump told reporters at a Friday news conference. “We think we can probably have it some time during the month of October.”

Trump has repeatedly offered similar promises, adding to the pressure scientists and officials at the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health feel to develop, test and authorize a coronavirus vaccine on what some of the president’s aides refer to as “Trump time.”

Several Trump aides said one key to the president winning reelection is having a vaccine or demonstrating rapid progress toward one, as well as a robust economic turnaround, over the next two months.

Democratic strategists, too, said a vaccine announcement could play in Trump’s favor, but they cautioned that it is unlikely to significantly change the contours of the race.

“If they pull a vaccine out of their a-- it will be the October surprise of October surprises,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster. “I think you’ll see some of the angst lifting off of the American electorate. But I think it will be difficult connecting the dots to Donald Trump given where public perception of him is on covid, and given that this is a guy who a couple months ago said people should try to get sunshine and disinfectants inside of themselves.”

There is intense disagreement over whether the FDA should use its emergency authority to clear a vaccine before it is formally approved, which some in the scientific community say could be dangerous.

Top health officials, including FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn and Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, have said a vaccine could be available before the end of the year. But they have been careful to qualify their statements and, unlike the president, have stopped short of promising one by then. White House officials also have been careful not to project a specific date for a vaccine announcement.

Fauci said in an email that “the most likely timetable for a vaccine to be utilized by the public” is November or December of this year or the beginning of 2021. He said it is “unlikely, although possible” that the efficacy and safety of a vaccine could be determined in October.

Asked about an emergency use authorization by the FDA, Fauci wrote, “If an EUA was granted before we had established that the vaccine was truly safe and effective, I would be disappointed. An EUA for a vaccine should be based on a considerable degree of safety and efficacy. . . . I would be against an EUA if it were issued without sufficient data to establish a strong signal of efficacy and safety.”

Other experts said it was unlikely that a vaccine would be ready by Election Day, but that Trump could be able to tout progress on it before people vote.

“Everything would have to be unfolding according to perfection,” said Scott Gottlieb, a former FDA commissioner in the Trump administration. “The vaccine would need to be highly effective, and you’d need to have trials ahead of schedule.”

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has accused Trump of putting “political considerations ahead of the safety and well-being of the American people with tragic results” throughout the coronavirus pandemic. The former vice president said in remarks Friday, “My guess is he is going to announce a vaccine, he’s going to say it’s going to be available around Election Day, he’s going to hype it.”

Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said Biden is eager for a swift vaccine, but not at the expense of safety.

“Joe Biden wants a safe vaccine ready yesterday,” Bates said in an email. “But there is no excuse for the wealthiest, most technologically advanced nation in the history of the world being the hardest-hit by this pandemic. The inescapable, tragic, infuriating reality is that Donald Trump has never taken the deadliest public health crisis in 100 years seriously.”

FDA officials both publicly and privately insisted that politics will not influence their decision on when to approve a vaccine. Current and former administration officials, as well as vaccine experts, said they were confident in the career regulators at FDA to make a science-based decision.

One former senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a candid assessment, said the FDA’s leadership is “weak” and “fails to articulate that it’s going to stand for regulatory science.” But this official expressed confidence in the officials at the FDA’s office of vaccines.

“I know they take this responsibility very seriously and they understand what’s at stake,” this official said. “Without a clear blessing from this office, I don’t think Americans would be willing to be vaccinated.”

Underscoring the concerns about the vaccine process appearing political, the Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh was unwilling to discuss the politics of vaccine development or assess how a possible breakthrough could impact the campaign — even though Trump’s second-term agenda, distributed by the campaign, includes “Develop a Vaccine by The End of 2020.” Murtaugh deferred all questions on the matter to the White House.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said in an email, “The rapid research, development, trials, and eventual distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine is emblematic of President Trump’s highest priority: the health and safety of the American people — it has nothing to do with politics. This President understands that this vaccine cannot get bogged down in government bureaucracy, which is why he has cut through every piece of red tape to achieve the fastest-ever launch of a trial.”

Inside the West Wing, there is some concern and nervousness about “potential politicization” and people not trusting a vaccine if they believed it was produced in a “rushed process,” according to a senior administration official, who like some others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid.

The administration has developed Operation Warp Speed, a process to mass distribute an eventual vaccine, and is planning a $150 million public service announcement campaign to convince people that the vaccine is safe, effective and can be trusted, this senior official said.

The communications strategy developed at the White House would limit Trump’s personal messaging about a vaccine — other than to “spike the football,” as the senior official put it — and instead be led by experts, including Fauci, Hahn, White House coronavirus response coordinator Deborah Birx, and Moncef Slaoui, the chief scientific adviser to Operation Warp Speed.

The White House plan would stress to the public that a vaccine went through the “traditional FDA rigor,” as well as seek validation from throughout the scientific community, in medical journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine and from medical professionals with large media platforms, such as CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, according to the senior official.

The plan, according to a draft shared by the senior official, is to “replace distrust, disbelief, skepticism and cynicism with trust, credibility, confidence, certainty, transparency and optimism for COVID-19 medical countermeasures.”

Although the White House aims to depoliticize the vaccine rollout, the draft plan lists as one of its objective to “ensure the administration is able to receive due credit for undertaking this historic and unprecedented effort.”

Trump’s opponents are preparing for the president to try to mislead the public about the status of a vaccine in the run-up to the election, much as he has exaggerated many other aspects of his record over the years.

Rick Wilson, a strategist who helps run the Lincoln Project, a group of anti-Trump Republicans airing advertisements aimed at defeating him, said the group’s internal polling data suggests that many voters would not trust whatever breakthroughs Trump proclaims.

“We think Trump’s lying is priced-in with a lot of people,” Wilson said. “So if he could say tomorrow, ‘We’ve cured it, it’s done,’ many people, even some of his supporters, will say, ‘That’s just Donald being Donald.’ ”

Officials on the administration’s coronavirus task force said that a vaccine was not on the agenda in the early months of the outbreak. Vaccine developments are discussed in smaller groups or among the principals directly involved.

“We should have been talking about a vaccine instead of having weeks of discussions on masks, but they have caught up well now, it seems,” said one official familiar with the task force.

As part of the administration’s communications push, Slaoui and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar wrote an op-ed published Wednesday in USA Today describing how the United States was developing a vaccine at record speed with safeguards in place.

“The strategy we devised for OWS will allow us to accomplish this goal while following all the same procedures for safety and efficacy, applied by the same apolitical FDA experts, that Americans expect with all vaccines,” Azar and Slaoui wrote.

Experts warned that Trump’s promises that a vaccine would end the pandemic are dangerous.

“There’s this general feeling that the vaccine is going to get us out of this. There are so many people hanging everything on the hopes of a vaccine starting in January,” said Rochelle Walensky, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Getting out of this pandemic has to be a multipronged approach and no single thing is going to get us out. Certainly I don’t think a vaccine in the short-term is going to get us out.”

Trump’s repeated pressure on the FDA not only to approve a vaccine, but also to advance coronavirus treatments has undermined public confidence in the FDA, as well as in other federal agencies, according to medical professionals.

The FDA approved an emergency use authorization for hydroxychloroquine, an existing anti-malaria drug, to treat coronavirus, but had to eventually revoke the authorization because the drug was shown to be ineffective and cause heart problems in some patients.

Last month, Hahn and Azar appeared alongside Trump and hailed convalescent plasma as a “major therapeutic breakthrough” despite the treatment being around for more than 100 years and having only a modest effect.

“I’d like to think at this point in the administration, when people see Donald Trump hyperbolize, they see it as hyperbole,” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “That’s the problem. If President Trump stands up and says, ‘This is a major breakthrough, this is going to save all our lives,’ people can’t necessarily believe that.”

Phroyd

#trump #vaccine #election

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recentnews18-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/inside-the-beltway-critics-slam-stupid-newspaper-war-on-trump/

Inside the Beltway: Critics slam 'stupid' newspaper war on Trump

With much rustling of pages, some 350 newspapers on Thursday will denounce President Trump’s scorn of the press by publishing their own editorials on the matter. The collective effort was organized by Boston Globe op-ed page editor Marjorie Pritchard, who insists the press is not an “enemy of the people,” and plans to sound the alarm on the president’s “unrelieved press bashing.”

The New York Times, The Dallas Morning News and The Denver Post are among those joining the fray, right along with weekly papers with circulations of 4,000. This editorial salvo could be a bust, though.

“Most journalists agree that there’s a great need for Trump rebuttals. I’ve written my share. But this Globe-sponsored coordinated editorial response is sure to backfire: It will provide Trump with circumstantial evidence of the existence of a national press cabal that has been convened solely to oppose him. When the editorials roll off the press on Thursday, all singing from the same script, Trump will reap enough fresh material to whale on the media for at least a month,” writes Jack Shafer, senior media analyst for Politico.

“Editorial pages of America, don’t unite! Think for yourselves! Reject this stupid pro-press assignment!” Mr. Shafer counsels.

James Freeman, assistant editorial page editor at The Wall Street Journal, is not particularly comfortable with Ms. Pritchard’s hope that the mass editorial effort will “educate readers,” or convince them that Mr. Trump’s press criticism are an “attack” on the First Amendment.

“Organizing large coalitions of people to simultaneously express similar messages is generally the work of politicians and public relations executives, rather than journalists,” writes Mr. Freeman.

“The First Amendment does not say that the government cannot criticize the press. Mr. Trump enjoys free speech just as his media adversaries do. Rather, the First Amendment prevents government from infringing on the rights of Americans to speak and publish. And on that score, there’s a reasonable case that Mr. Trump’s predecessor presented a greater threat to press freedom, to say nothing of Mr. Trump’s 2016 opponent. [Democratic presidential nominee Hillary] Clinton wanted to restrict the ability of Americans to make a documentary about her. We don’t recall editorial boards joining together to announce they were not with her,” Mr. Freeman said, adding that The Wall Street Journal would not be participating in the editorial attack.

Some hope that the press has a teachable moment during all this melodrama, however.

“The editorials Thursday will create a lot of chatter. Trump backers will call journalists whiners and journalists will counter-attack. Twitter and cable news will have a ball with it all. And Friday morning we will be right where we were this morning. Divided,” predicts Al Tompkins, a senior analyst at the Poynter Institute, a media think-tank.

“Before you publish your editorials extolling the virtues of journalism, ask yourself: How are you doing with that listening tour? How have you changed because of what you learned? How willing are you to be changed by discourse?” asks Mr. Tompkins.

CUOMO-ISM

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had a thing or two to say Wednesday as he publicly signed new legislation to curb sex trafficking in the Empire State. In the process, Mr. Cuomo took a moment to mock President Trump’s signature campaign promise to make America great again.

“We’re not going to make America great again. It was never that great. We have not reached greatness. We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged,” the governor and potential presidential hopeful told his audience, who were, according to multiple press reports, “stunned” by the remark.

A few hours later, Mr. Cuomo’s press secretary issued a terse statement affirming that the New York governor believe America is “great,” and will be greater then all citizens achieve their potential. One critic had an observation about Mr. Cuomo.

“At 1:30 p.m. @NYGovCuomo says America ‘was never that great’ by 4:11 p.m. he changed his position to ‘America is great’ — he changes his views quicker than Omarosa,” tweeted former White House press secretary and author Sean Spicer in the immediate aftermath.

FOR THE LEXICON

“Anti-Trump delirium”

That’s a handy new term from Fox News Channel host Laura Ingraham, who says that Democrats are now motivated primarily by their obsessive and rigid rejection of President Trump and each and every one of his policies — to the point that many Democrats now espouse socialism.

“Anti-Trump delirium,” Ms. Ingraham says, “is pushing Democrats out of the American mainstream.”

She advises that Democrats need “a little less rage, and a little more reality.”

$38 TRILLION, NOT $32 TRILLION

A recent report suggested that implementing a socialist-style single-payer health-care system would cost American taxpayers $32 trillion. But hey, that’s not all. Adding free college for everybody and a guaranteed job paid for federal funds also has a price tag.

The total cost of the top three favorite socialist perks? That would be $38 trillion.

Republican National Committee researchers have done all the math here to discover that The “College for All Act” would cost $807 billion over a decade while the plan to provide jobs at $15 an hour to anyone who wanted one would amount to $5.4 trillion.

The GOP researchers cited facts and figures, from a variety of sources, including The New York Times, Tax Policy Center, George Mason University, Congress, and even Sen. Bernard Sanders himself, who tends to promise these three benefits in most of his speeches.

POLL DU JOUR

•56 percent of registered U.S. voters say U.S. security in space should be a priority for the federal government; 69 percent of Republicans, 51 percent of independents and 47 percent of Democrats agree.

•51 percent of voters overall say “conflict in space” is a threat to the U.S.; 60 percent of Republicans, 48 percent of independents and 47 percent of Democrats agree.

•47 percent overall have heard about the creation of a U.S. Space Force; 50 percent of Republicans, 41 percent of independents and 50 percent of Democrats agree.

•43 percent overall support the creation of a Space Force; 64 percent of Republicans, 40 percent of independents and 25 percent of Democrats agree.

•28 percent overall say Congress should provide increased funding for the Space Force; 43 percent of Republicans, 25 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats agree.

Source: A Politico/Morning Consult poll of 1,992 registered U.S. voters conducted Aug. 10-12.

• Murmurs and asides to [email protected]

The Washington Times Comment Policy

The Washington Times welcomes your comments on Spot.im, our third-party provider. Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.

Source: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/15/inside-the-beltway-critics-slam-stupid-newspaper-w/

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movietvtechgeeks · 7 years ago

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Latest story from https://movietvtechgeeks.com/billy-bush-finally-comes-donald-trump/

Billy Bush finally comes out on Donald Trump

After a very long silence, former "Today" co-host Billy Bush has spoken out on Donald Trump, the man responsible for his being fired for laughing along during the infamous "Access Hollywood" tape that surfaced October 2016. Trump wound up moving into the White House while Bush got to see his long-term career go up in flames. He's remained silent, but recently as Trump has commented that the tape 'didn't even sound like his voice," this seems to have inspired Bush to talk. Billy Bush has pushed back at President Donald Trump’s reported statements suggesting that the voice on the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” “Access Hollywood” tape was not his, writing that Trump did indeed make the comment in his presence and seven other men. “Of course he said it. And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator,” Bush wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Sunday. “Along with Donald Trump and me, there were seven other guys present on the bus at the time, and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act.” Bush recounted several of the sexual harassment allegations against Trump, including those of Jill Harth and Kristin Anderson, stating that he believes the women. “President Trump is currently indulging in some revisionist history, reportedly telling allies, including at least one United States senator, that the voice on the tape is not his. This has hit a raw nerve in me,” he explained. “I can only imagine how it has reopened the wounds of the women who came forward with their stories about him and did not receive enough attention.” Bush continued, expressing remorse for his part in stroking “the ego of the big cash cow along the way to higher earnings,” referring to Trump’s tenure on “The Apprentice,” which at the time made him NBC’s “biggest star.” He also affirmed his solidarity with the women reporting stories of sexual harassment from Trump, acknowledging the difficulty of “being summarily dismissed and called a liar…You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.” He finished on a personal note, stating that after being fired from “Today,” the “last year has been an odyssey, the likes of which I hope to never face again: anger, anxiety, betrayal, humiliation, many selfish but, I hope, understandable emotions.” Bush’s op-ed for the New York Times comes amid rumblings that the host is preparing to emerge from his post-Trump exile and seek new TV work. He is booked to appear on Monday’s edition of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” On Oct. 7, 2016, The Washington Post published the details of the 2005 tape and posted the audio, in which Trump, in a conversation with Bush, made the remarks about Nancy O’Dell, then the co-host of “Access Hollywood,” as well as women in general. He and Bush had been riding on a bus, but they were both wearing microphones as a camera crew captured their arrival to the NBC Burbank lot, where Trump was to do a cameo on “Days of Our Lives.” “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” Trump says on the tape. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” The release of the recording created a crisis for the Trump campaign, as a number of Republicans urged him to drop out of the presidential race. Trump dismissed it as “locker room talk.” But Bush was fired by NBC over the audio, as he was heard going along with Trump’s remarks. It’s still unknown how the tape was leaked to the Post. As stories have recently surfaced that Trump is questioning the authenticity of the recording, “Access Hollywood” released a statement saying, “The tape is very real.” A member of the production crew also confirmed to media outlets that he recalls hearing the audio of the conversation as it was taking place.

BILLY BUSH OP-ED ON DONALD TRUMP ACCESS HOLLYWOOD TAPE

He said it. “Grab ’em by the pussy.”

Of course he said it. And we laughed along, without a single doubt that this was hypothetical hot air from America’s highest-rated bloviator. Along with Donald Trump and me, there were seven other guys present on the bus at the time, and every single one of us assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.

We now know better.

Recently I sat down and read an article dating from October of 2016; it was published days after my departure from NBC, a time when I wasn’t processing anything productively. In it, the author reviewed the various firsthand accounts about Mr. Trump that, at that point, had come from 20 women.

Some of what Natasha Stoynoff, Rachel Crooks, Jessica Leeds and Jill Harth alleged involved forceful kissing. Ms. Harth said he pushed her up against a wall, with his hands all over her, trying to kiss her.

“He was relentless,” she said. “I didn’t know how to handle it.” Her story makes the whole “better use some Tic Tacs” and “just start kissing them” routine real. I believe her.

Kristin Anderson said that Mr. Trump reached under her skirt and “touched her vagina through her underwear” while they were at a New York nightclub in the 1990s. That makes the “grab ’em by the pussy” routine real. I believe her.

President Trump is currently indulging in some revisionist history, reportedly telling allies, including at least one United States senator, that the voice on the tape is not his. This has hit a raw nerve in me.

I can only imagine how it has reopened the wounds of the women who came forward with their stories about him, and did not receive enough attention. This country is currently trying to reconcile itself to years of power abuse and sexual misconduct. Its leader is wantonly poking the bear.

In 2005, I was in my first full year as a co-anchor of the show “Access Hollywood” on NBC. Mr. Trump, then on “The Apprentice,” was the network’s biggest star.

The key to succeeding in my line of work was establishing a strong rapport with celebrities. I did that, and was rewarded for it. My segments with Donald Trump when I was just a correspondent were part of the reason I got promoted.

NBC tripled my salary and paid for my moving van from New York to Los Angeles.

Was I acting out of self-interest? You bet I was. Was I alone? Far from it. With Mr. Trump’s outsized viewership back in 2005, everybody from Billy Bush on up to the top brass on the 52nd floor had to stroke the ego of the big cash cow along the way to higher earnings.

None of us were guilty of knowingly enabling our future president. But all of us were guilty of sacrificing a bit of ourselves in the name of success.

Ten years later, I did speak up. Soon after Mr. Trump declared his candidacy, I let it be known on “Access Hollywood Live” that I thought this was an absurd idea.

In the days, weeks and months to follow, I was highly critical of the idea of a Trump presidency. The man who once told me — ironically, in another off-camera conversation — after I called him out for inflating his ratings: “People will just believe you. You just tell them and they believe you,” was, I thought, not a good choice to lead our country.

I tried to conduct a serious interview with him as a candidate; each time I requested one I was turned down.

This moment in American life is no doubt painful for many women. It is especially painful for the women who have come forward, at the risk of forever being linked to one event, this man, this president of the United States. (I still can’t believe I just wrote that.)

To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump. You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.

I have faith that when the hard work of exposing these injustices is over, the current media drama of who did what to whom will give way to a constructive dialogue between mature men and women in the workplace and beyond. The activist and gender-relations expert Jackson Katz has said that this is not a women’s issue — it’s a men’s issue. That’s a great place to start, and something I have real thoughts about — but it is a story for another day.

Today is about reckoning and reawakening, and I hope it reaches all the guys on the bus.

On a personal note, this last year has been an odyssey, the likes of which I hope to never face again: anger, anxiety, betrayal, humiliation, many selfish but, I hope, understandable emotions. But these have given way to light, both spiritual and intellectual. It’s been fortifying.

I know that I don’t need the accouterments of fame to know God and be happy. After everything over the last year, I think I’m a better man and father to my three teenage daughters — far from perfect, but better.

Movie TV Tech Geeks News

#Access Hollywood #Billy Bush #Donald Trump #Featured

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everettwilkinson · 7 years ago

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What ending DACA will mean — CONGRESS already eyeing immigration reform, OBAMA to speak out — AP: N. KOREA likely ‘readying launch of a ballistic missile,’ maybe ICBM — B’DAY: Blake Hounshell

Good Monday morning and happy Labor Day! LONDON CALLING — You may already have seen it, but the first edition of London Playbook went out early this morning. Our new London-based reporter Jack Blanchard is at the helm. London Playbook will bring you up to speed on the day ahead in Westminster. The launch edition featured a scoop on the progress of the Brexit talks, plus an interview with U.K. International Trade Secretary Liam Fox. Sign up for free http://politi.co/2txnK5S … The first edition http://politi.co/2gEkK2p

BUZZ — IF TRUMP ENDS DACA, which it seems like he will in some form, Republicans on Capitol Hill are already considering a push for immigration reform, according to people we’ve spoken to in recent hours. There is no finalized plan yet about what the GOP will do, but there are already quiet conversations in Republican ranks. There will be tremendous pressure from companies and outside groups to prevent the full repeal of DACA. Congress already has a full plate, and this is just another issue they’ll have to confront.

Story Continued Below

TOP STORY — “Trump has decided to end DACA, with 6-month delay,” by Eliana Johnson: “Senior White House aides huddled Sunday afternoon to discuss the rollout of a decision likely to ignite a political firestorm — and fulfill one of the president’s core campaign promises. The administration’s deliberations on the issue have been fluid and fast moving, and the president has faced strong warnings from members of his own party not to scrap the program. … [C]onversations with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who argued that Congress — rather than the executive branch — is responsible for writing immigration law, helped persuade the president to terminate the program and kick the issue to Congress, the two sources said.

“In a nod to reservations held by many lawmakers, the White House plans to delay the enforcement of the president’s decision for six months, giving Congress a window to act, according to one White House official. But a senior White House aide said that chief of staff John Kelly, who has been running the West Wing policy process on the issue, ‘thinks Congress should’ve gotten its act together a lot longer ago.’ White House aides caution that — as with everything in the Trump White House — nothing is set in stone until an official announcement has been made.” http://politi.co/2examFe

— NYT’s Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush: “[S]ome key details had not yet been resolved. Among them: whether beneficiaries of the program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, would be allowed to renew their protected status during the six-month period. … The temporary solution has been the subject of quiet negotiations between Mr. Trump’s legislative staff and members of Mr. Ryan’s staff, according to an administration official familiar with the talks. … The president’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who are both advisers to the president, back extending the DACA protections.” http://nyti.ms/2xIuPPZ

SCOOP — “Obama to speak out if Trump ends DACA,” by Michael Grunwald: “Obama used executive actions to launch the program in June 2012, providing assurances before his re-election that he would protect the so-called ‘Dreamers.’ Trump had suggested in the past that he didn’t want to deport Dreamers, saying in April that they should ‘rest easy,’ but the immigration hawks in his administration have argued that DACA is an illegal program. Obama’s current plan is to post a statement on Facebook and link to it on Twitter, where the former president has more than 94 million followers.” http://politi.co/2wxBjCx

— BuzzFeed’s Zoe Tillman and Adrian Carrasquillo: “There have been some efforts from within Trump’s White House to save DACA in recent days, but there has been limited support for keeping the Obama program among senior staff. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway recruited Hispanic Trump supporters to reach out to the president in a behind-the-scenes bid to get him to keep the program, according to a source. As it became clearer that Trump is leaning towards ending it, a source said Conway supports ‘POTUS outcomes on this. Period.’” http://bzfd.it/2gDuY36

THE TWO ENDS OF THE HOUSE REPUBLICAN CONFERENCE — FLORIDA REP. ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN (@RosLehtinen), who’s retiring after this term: “After teasing #Dreamers for months with talk of his ‘great heart,’ @POTUS slams door on them. Some ‘heart’…” … IOWA REP. STEVE KING (@SteveKingIA): “Ending DACA now gives chance 2 restore Rule of Law. Delaying so R Leadership can push Amnesty is Republican suicide.”

PIC DU JOUR — NPR’s @adrianflorido: “I just spotted @CBP immigration agents outside the main flood shelter in downtown Houston. This is why immigrants don’t want to come.” http://bit.ly/2eUkYi6

HOUSTON CHRONICLE’s SUSAN CARROLL and LOMI KRIEL: “Nearly four days after Harvey’s record flooding slammed a rescue boat into an Interstate 45 frontage road bridge, family members of the final, missing volunteer pulled his body from Cypress Creek in Spring. Alonso Guillen, a 31-year-old disc jockey from Lufkin … was a recipient of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program … His father is a lawful permanent, but his mother is still in the application process for legal status.

“Reached at her home in Piedras Negras, Mexico, across the border from Eagle Pass, Rita Ruiz de Guillen, 62, said … she hoped U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials would take pity and grant her a humanitarian visa so that she could come to Houston and bury her son, but she was turned back at the border. ‘When we are with God, there are no borders,’ she said. ‘Man made borders on this earth.’” http://bit.ly/2exrrPe

TRUMP’S LABOR DAY MESSAGE — His op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “We must fix our self-destructive tax code” http://bit.ly/2gyIcKJ

****** A message from Hewlett Packard Enterprise: How are Hewlett Packard Enterprise‘s supercomputers helping create the future in science, medicine and national security? Learn more: hpe.com/supercomputing ******

BULLETIN at 2:17 a.m. — “SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – S. Korea media: Seoul military says N. Korea appears to be readying launch of a ballistic missile, possibly an ICBM.”

WHAT THIS MEANS — “North Korea defies predictions — again — with early grasp of weapons milestone,” by WaPo’s Joby Warrick: “The device that shook the mountains over the Punggye-ri test site on Sunday represented a quantum leap for North Korea’s nuclear capability, producing an explosion at least five times greater than the country’s previous tests and easily powerful enough to devastate a large city. And if studies confirm that the bomb was a thermonuclear weapon — as North Korea claims — it would be a triumph of a different scale: a major technical milestone reached well ahead of predictions, putting the world’s most destructive force in the hands of the country’s 33-year-old autocrat.

“The feat instantly erased lingering skepticism about Pyongyang’s technical capabilities and brought the prospect of nuclear-tipped North Korean intercontinental ballistic missiles a step closer to reality, U.S. analysts and weapons experts said. Many predicted that a miniaturized version of the presumed thermonuclear bomb would soon be in North Korea’s grasp, and that it probably already exists.” http://wapo.st/2iVBkvt

— “South Korea simulates attack on North’s nuke site after test,” by AP’s Foster Klug and Youkyung Lee in Seoul: “Following U.S. warnings to North Korea of a ‘massive military response,’ South Korea on Monday fired missiles into the sea to simulate an attack on the North’s main nuclear test site a day after Pyongyang detonated its largest ever nuclear test explosion. South Korea’s Defense Ministry also said Monday that North Korea appeared to be planning a future missile launch, possibly of an ICBM, to show off its claimed ability to target the United States with nuclear weapons, though it was unclear when this might happen.” http://bit.ly/2gxs38r

— “Seoul tries to ignore Trump’s criticism: ‘They worry he’s kind of nuts,’ one observer says,” by WaPo’s Anna Fifield in Tokyo: “Moon Jae-in’s office said that his government would continue to work towards peaceful denuclearization after tweets and actions from Trump that have left South Koreans scratching their heads at why the American president is attacking an ally at such a sensitive time. …

“‘It’s strange to see Trump going after South Korea more aggressively than he’s going after China, especially since China also thinks that dialogue is central to solving this problem,’ said John Delury, a professor of international relations at Yonsei University in Seoul.” http://wapo.st/2eCOpsh

— “Mattis warns of ‘massive military response’ to NK nuclear threat,” by CNN’s Angela Dewan, Taehoon Lee and Eli Watkins: http://cnn.it/2eBJFD2

TRANSLATING TRUMP — “Trump Can’t Stop Trade With North Korea. But He Does Have Options,” by NYT’s Paul Mozur in Shanghai: “President Trump said on Sunday that the United States could consider stopping all trade with countries doing business in North Korea, in a move that could spell economic catastrophe for the pugnacious country. One problem: It would mean economic disaster for the United States as well. Despite years of economic sanctions and international condemnation, North Korea still conducts modest trade with a host of United States allies, including Brazil, Germany and Mexico.

“But the North’s biggest partner by far is China, which accounts for about four-fifths of its trade and helps the country with its fuel, food and machinery needs. China is also the largest trading partner of the United States, in a relationship worth nearly $650 billion a year in goods and services covering a range of items, like auto parts, apple juice and Apple’s widely anticipated new iPhone. …

“The United States has limited options. It could more broadly target Chinese companies that do business in North Korea. But that could prove ineffective against a Chinese government that worries that trade limits could worsen conditions in the North, making the situation there even more unpredictable.” http://nyti.ms/2vYQYHE

FOR YOUR RADAR — REUTERS/Xiamen, China — “Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Monday that Washington’s actions towards Russian diplomatic facilities in the United States could be described as ‘state hooliganism’. ‘I am inclined to call what is happening state hooliganism,’ he told reporters at a BRICS summit in China.”

— SPEAKING OF “STATE HOOLIGANISM” — WaPo’s Josh Rogin last year: “In a series of secret memos sent back to Washington … diplomats reported that Russian intruders had broken into their homes late at night, only to rearrange the furniture or turn on all the lights and televisions, and then leave. One diplomat reported that an intruder had defecated on his living room carpet. … [I]n the first term of the Obama administration, Russian intelligence personnel broke into the house of the U.S. defense attache in Moscow and killed his dog.” http://wapo.st/2931Wof

ABC’S MARY BRUCE speaks to MATT MIKA — Mika, a lobbyist for Tyson Foods, was shot during the congressional baseball practice in June. MIKA: “We all yelled gun. I don’t know who yelled it first and we started running. That’s when I turned like this and ran that way. That might have been when I got hit or when I was over there.” BRUCE: “You still don’t know when you got hit?” MIKA: “All I know is when I got around to the gate I had blood all over my chest, on my pants.” http://abcn.ws/2gEgNdY

COMING ATTRACTIONS — “Russia probes kick into high gear,” by Austin Wright and Ali Watkins: “The congressional Russia investigations are entering a new and more serious phase as lawmakers return from the August recess amid fresh revelations about contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia. In the coming weeks, both intelligence committees are expected to conduct closed-door interviews with high-ranking members of the Trump campaign, and potential witnesses could include Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort and Donald Trump Jr. The two panels are also looking at possibly holding public hearings this fall. In addition, Trump Jr. is set to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is conducting its own parallel investigation into President Donald Trump and his associates’ alleged ties to Moscow.” http://politi.co/2eCOVpS

JOIN US! — We are heading to Georgetown University for our next “Playbook University” Thursday at 4:15 p.m. Jake and Anna, a spring 2017 fellow, will head to the Institute of Politics and Public Service at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy to talk news of the day and introduce GU Politics’ newly-minted fellows class to Georgetown Hoyas at their annual open house. The fellows http://bit.ly/2v384IE … Event details http://bit.ly/2g6HHel

DAILY MAIL – “A new royal baby is on the way as thrilled Kate and William announce she is expecting their third child — but she is suffering from severe morning sickness again” http://dailym.ai/2eUmH74

HMM — “The Same Agency That Runs Obamacare Is Using Taxpayer Money to Undermine It,” by NYT’s Audrey Carlsen and Haeyoun Park: “Instead of using its outreach budget to promote the Affordable Care Act, the department made videos critical of the law. In June, the health department posted 23 video testimonials on YouTube from people who said they had been ‘burdened by Obamacare,’ including families, health care professionals and small business owners. … While it’s not certain where the money for the videos came from, several former health officials who worked in the Obama administration said that they suspect it came from the budget meant to promote Affordable Care Act. …

“In addition to the YouTube videos, the department has used Twitter and news releases to try to discredit the health law. Since being sworn in as health secretary on February 10, Tom Price has posted on Twitter 48 infographics advocating against Obamacare, all of which bear the health department’s logo.” http://nyti.ms/2vYe2pZ

SUSAN GLASSER in the latest “Global POLITICO” podcast interviews former DHS SECRETARY JEH JOHNSON: “[M]ore than a month after naming John Kelly … Trump has yet to name a replacement as secretary of Homeland Security. Not only that, he appears nowhere close to doing so and has not even interviewed any candidates for the job. Big mistake, argues Jeh Johnson, who served as the Obama administration’s DHS chief until Trump’s inauguration in January.

“[J]ohnson says, ‘We need to have a Senate-confirmed secretary of Homeland Security; we need to have somebody occupying that office full time, 24/7, to keep his or her eye on aviation security, border security, cybersecurity, maritime security, FEMA, the Secret Service, and all the other things that DHS covers.’ In particular, he cited the Secret Service’s empty coffers and Trump’s failure to address America’s vulnerable election infrastructure a full year after the Russian tampering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election as crises where having a permanent secretary in place really matters.” http://politi.co/2eCJCah … Listen to the full podcast http://apple.co/2kAoZfH

SPEAKING OF ELECTIONS — “Cash-strapped states brace for Russian hacking fight,” by Cory Bennett, Eric Geller, Martin Matishak, and Tim Starks: “The U.S. needs hundreds of millions of dollars to protect future elections from hackers — but neither the states nor Congress is rushing to fill the gap. Instead, a nation still squabbling over the role Russian cyberattacks played in the 2016 presidential campaign is fractured about how to pay for the steps needed to prevent repeats in 2018 and 2020, according to interviews with dozens of state election officials, federal lawmakers, current and former [DHS] staffers and leading election security experts.

“These people agree that digital meddlers threaten the public’s confidence in America’s democratic process. And nearly everyone believes that the danger calls for collective action — from replacing the voting equipment at tens of thousands of polling places to strengthening state voter databases, training election workers and systematically conducting post-election audits. But those steps would require major spending, and only a handful of states’ legislatures are boosting their election security budgets, according to a POLITICO survey of state election agencies.

“And leaders in Congress are showing no eagerness to help them out. ‘States ought to get their own money up,’ said Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who chairs the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration, which oversees federal elections. ‘We’re borrowing money. We got a big debt limit coming up.’” http://politi.co/2eUQJHE

BUSINESS BURST — “Investors Hedge Their Bets Entering Choppiest Season for Markets,” by WSJ’s Gunjan Banerji: “U.S. stock investors have been unfazed this year by everything from North Korean missile launches to the congressional debt ceiling deadline. Now, as the most turbulent season for equities looms, hedging activity and money flows indicate that investors are starting to doubt that markets can only climb higher.” http://on.wsj.com/2wxZyQV

WEST COAST WATCH — “After Bay Area violence, California debates classifying ‘antifa’ as a street gang,” by L.A. Times’ James Queally, Ben Oreskes and Richard Winton: “As forces on the extremes of the nation’s ever-widening political divide continue to battle with fists and weapons on the streets of California, law enforcement officials and politicians have started debating whether these extremist groups should be classified as street gangs. Such a designation could give law enforcement new tools to combat the groups. Numerous laws on the books give authorities the power to restrict the movements of gang members and enhance criminal charges against them. But such a move raises legal issues because unlike with traditional street gangs, the underlying motive of these extremist groups is political expression rather than criminal enterprise.” http://lat.ms/2gxLwFU

CLICKER – MATT WUERKER’s cartoons in August – 8 keepers http://politi.co/2gxZyr7

****** A message from Hewlett Packard Enterprise: A nation‘s strength is increasingly measured by its technical prowess. As the designer and builder of more supercomputers than any other company in the world, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is proud to lead the way in one of the future‘s most important technologies. Visit hpe.com/supercomputing to learn more about how Hewlett Packard Enterprise‘s supercomputers are helping create the future in science, medicine and national security. ******

MEDIAWATCH – “Trump’s EPA attacks AP reporter in personal terms,” by Matt Nussbaum: “President Donald Trump’s habit of singling out reporters for attacks is being adopted by his federal agencies, with the [EPA] excoriating an Associated Press reporter in unusually personal terms on Sunday after the reporter wrote a story that cast the agency in an unfavorable light. … ‘[T]he Associated Press’ Michael Biesecker wrote an incredibly misleading story about toxic land sites that are under water,’ the statement began. ‘Despite reporting from the comfort of Washington, Biesecker had the audacity to imply that agencies aren’t being responsive to the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey.’ … It then continued the attacks on Biesecker, saying he ‘has a history of not letting the facts get in the way of his story’ and noting that a July story he wrote inaccurately characterized an interaction between EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt and Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris.” http://politi.co/2eUXNUI … The original AP story http://bit.ly/2eD7tGx

— AP RESPONDS http://bit.ly/2gET9Ow

BONUS GREAT HOLIDAY WEEKEND READS, curated by Daniel Lippman, filing from Great Barrington, Mass.:

–“The Exile,” by Khaled Almilaji in Toronto Life: “I worked as a doctor during the Syrian Civil War, treating wounded protesters and vaccinating children. When I moved to the U.S. to get my master’s, my future seemed clear. Then Trump’s travel ban left me stranded in Turkey, 5,000 miles away from my pregnant wife.” http://bit.ly/2wYu4VR (h/t Longreads.com)

–“Snow Fall: The Plane Went Down With His Wife, His Kid… and a Secret,” by Andrew Dubbins in The Daily Beast: “Tony Mink was an experienced pilot, but as he flew his family to a Rocky Mountain Christmas vacation, he may have cut one corner too many. And then the blizzard hit.” http://thebea.st/2vETTd3 (h/t Matt Brooks)

–“Dick Jokes, Drunk Takes, and Best Friends: How ‘Superbad’ Was Born,” by Andrew Gruttadaro in The Ringer: “The 2007 teen comedy still resonates. Ten years later, the cast and crew explain how it all came together.” http://bit.ly/2gzdEvY … The original trailer http://bit.ly/2iVmMMm

–“The Once and Future Liberalism,” by Walter Russell Mead in the Jan. 2012 edition of the American Interest: “The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age.” http://bit.ly/2wvTSaW

–“The Search For Aaron Rodgers,” by Mina Kimes in ESPN the Magazine: “Winning isn’t everything. After Super Bowl XLV, Green Bay’s hero QB has been on a journey to find out what is.” http://es.pn/2gpE9QI (h/t Longform.org)

SPOTTED: Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Sunday night performance of “A Little Night Music” at the Signature Theatre … Eric Schultz at the U.S. Open on Saturday where he saw CoCo Vandeweghe and then Rafael Nadal play

WEEKEND WEDDINGS – OBAMA ALUMNI — Matt Lehrich and Stephanie Beechem “were married at sunset yesterday in Seattle’s Olympic Sculpture Park, five years after meeting while working together in the Obama White House as members of the WH communications and research operations. Matt’s brother Jesse officiated and the crowd danced into the night. The couple is now based in San Francisco, where the groom is a communications consultant and the bride works for the University of California.” Pic http://politi.co/2wBl71A

SPOTTED: David Axelrod, Dan and Howli Pfeiffer, Amy Brundage, Rachel Racusen and Max Gleischman, Cody Keenan, Kristen Bartoloni, Bobby Whithorne, Ellen Canale, Sean Smith, Pat Cunnane, Hannah Hankins, Lauren Thorbjornsen, Marie Aberger, Andrew Nesi, Lauren Hickey, Kyle O’Connor, Tim Skoczek, Allison Kelly, Peter Velz, Ezra Mechaber, Jess Allen, Bart Jackson, Emily Cain.

— Sameer Punyani, an associate at Booz Allen Hamilton and a former Obama appointee at the Pentagon and White House and a 2008 OFA campaign alum, and Bhavna Changrani, a DOJ trial attorney, were married on Sunday evening by the beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “Friends and family came from as far as London, India, and Australia to celebrate with the DC couple. The couple met through a dating app in December 2015. They had their first date in mid-January 2016 right before the ‘Snowpocalypse’ snowstorm. The couple went on five separate dates during the storm and the rest was history.” Pics http://politi.co/2wApytB … http://politi.co/2eUBiPU

–SPOTTED: Rohit Punyani and Dipali Amin, Nick Lombardo and Rachel Goodman, Andrew and Alexandra Dawson, Dan Austell and Lynn Langton Austell, Vinisha Patel, Dan Kastner, Mike Abbate and Erica Woodward, Ursula Zeydler.

–Zach Cikanek, managing director at FP1 Strategies, and Jolyn Lorenzetti, government relations and PAC manager at Genworth Financial and an alum of Jeb 2016 and Romney 2012, got married on Saturday at St. Isaac Jogues in Hinsdale, Illinois, with an evening reception at Drury Lane Theatre in Oakbrook Terrace, Illinois. The couple met while working for former Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Ill.). Their honeymoon is an 11-night south Caribbean cruise. Pics http://politi.co/2gy76tN … http://politi.co/2iWhOPf SPOTTED: Charlie and Lisa Spies, Dave Kochel, Marisa Tank, Duane and Caroline Duncan, Keith Gardner and Jennifer Bogart-Gardner, Brian and Sarah Colgan, James and Iris Miller, James and Katie Christophersen, Uriel and Maya Dabby, Erin Kelly.

— Caitlin Poling, national security adviser to Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) and Andrew McLennand, who works at the State Department, got married on Saturday with a ceremony and reception at the Arts Club of Washington, the former home of President James Monroe. Pic http://politi.co/2exKWHB

TRANSITIONS — MICHAEL SHORT, who formerly worked in communications for the Trump White House, is now at the National Association of Manufacturing. … KAIVAN SHROFF has joined the Institute for Education as COO and director of strategy. He most recently was a civic tech fellow at Microsoft in New York City.

BIRTHDAY OF THE DAY: Anu Rangappa, principal at Kolar Strategy Group and a DNC alum. How the Trump presidency is going: “Dishearteningly. I am a Democrat, but my patriotism far outweighs any sense of partisanship. My dad was the only of his siblings to learn to read and would cry himself to sleep from hunger as a child growing up in India. Within one generation, he became a celebrated professor in botany with a daughter who has flown aboard Air Force One. That kind of potential for a meteoric life-trajectory does not exist – so consistently for millions of people – anywhere else in the world. The President’s chaotic messaging and inconsistent, short-sighted policy prescriptions have dampened hopes that many more Americans, potential immigrants and citizens around the world can achieve such an unimaginable quality-of-life like the one my family has worked to have.” Read her Playbook Plus Q&A: http://politi.co/2wy6duG

BIRTHDAYS: Blake Hounshell, Politico magazine editor-in-chief (@blakehounshell) (hat tip: Ben Chang) … Jared Weinstein, a partner at Thrive Capital and a Bush W.H. alum … Harold Ickes … Anthony Weiner … Uber’s Keith Hensley, a Bush WH and Robert Gates alum … Jocelyn Pickford … William Hildebrandt Surgner … Wash Examiner’s Susan Ferrechio … Sophie VandeHei is 15 (h/t Autumn) … Brian Schweitzer, former Montana governor … Jared Allen, senior director for media relations at the National Automobile Dealers Association … Bernard Kerik … Michael McAuliff … The Economist’s Alex Travelli … Lynn Stinson … Bob Kenney … Politico’s Jeffrey Ahn … Laura Schlapp of Sen. Roberts’ office … Tom McInerney … Al Fish …

… Bernard Coleman III, global head of diversity and inclusion at Uber … Shira Kramer … Sean O’Hollaren, SVP of gov’t and public affairs at Nike and a Bush WH alum … Devin McBrayer … Estephania Gongora … Matthew Groves … Victoria Cram … Dana Gartzke … Glynnis MacNicol … Hannah Lerner … Kali Murphy … Brock McCleary … Chad Horrell, director at DCI Group … Chase Clymer … Graham Weinschenk … Matt Modell … Ashley Harvard … Jamie Moore … Jordan Fischer … Bernie Bennett … Jerry Huang … Daniel Pablo Pinto … Tyler Jones … Bailey Cultice … World Golf Hall of Famer Tom Watson … Beyonce Knowles (h/ts AP)

****** A message from Hewlett Packard Enterprise: To super compete, America must super compute. Supercomputing is key to future breakthroughs in medicine, science and manufacturing. As the designer and builder of more supercomputers than any other company in the world, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is helping America increase its competitive edge in not only today‘s economy, but tomorrow’s. Visit hpe.com/supercomputing to learn more about how HPE supercomputers help America compete. ******

SUBSCRIBE to the Playbook family: POLITICO Playbook http://politi.co/2lQswbh… New York Playbook http://politi.co/1ON8bqW … Florida Playbook http://politi.co/1OypFe9 … New Jersey Playbook http://politi.co/1HLKltF …Massachusetts Playbook http://politi.co/1Nhtq5v … Illinois Playbook http://politi.co/1N7u5sb … California Playbook http://politi.co/2bLvcPl … Brussels Playbook http://politi.co/1FZeLcw … London Playbook http://politi.co/2xfDPuK …All our political and policy tipsheets http://politi.co/1M75UbX

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from CapitalistHQ.com https://capitalisthq.com/what-ending-daca-will-mean-congress-already-eyeing-immigration-reform-obama-to-speak-out-ap-n-korea-likely-readying-launch-of-a-ballistic-missile-maybe-icbm-bda/

#TrumpNews #CapitalistHQ.com

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melindarowens · 7 years ago

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Story Continued Below

TRUMP’S LABOR DAY MESSAGE — His op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: “We must fix our self-destructive tax code” http://bit.ly/2gyIcKJ

BULLETIN at 2:17 a.m. — “SEOUL, South Korea (AP) – S. Korea media: Seoul military says N. Korea appears to be readying launch of a ballistic missile, possibly an ICBM.”

— “Mattis warns of ‘massive military response’ to NK nuclear threat,” by CNN’s Angela Dewan, Taehoon Lee and Eli Watkins: http://cnn.it/2eBJFD2

CLICKER – MATT WUERKER’s cartoons in August – 8 keepers http://politi.co/2gxZyr7

— AP RESPONDS http://bit.ly/2gET9Ow

BONUS GREAT HOLIDAY WEEKEND READS, curated by Daniel Lippman, filing from Great Barrington, Mass.:

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source https://capitalisthq.com/what-ending-daca-will-mean-congress-already-eyeing-immigration-reform-obama-to-speak-out-ap-n-korea-likely-readying-launch-of-a-ballistic-missile-maybe-icbm-bda/ from CapitalistHQ http://capitalisthq.blogspot.com/2017/09/what-ending-daca-will-mean-congress.html

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pointlomadem · 7 years ago

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Club President Jonathan Wubbolding called the meeting to order at 4:02 PM and thanked everyone for coming. Next, he welcomed new Club members and among those who introduced themselves were Michelle Morgan, Carl Yaekel, and Gail Saivar. After making a call for any elected officials or their representatives, former elected officials, or any candidates who wished to speak, the following responded:

Doug Case, Political Affairs Director for State Senator Toni Atkins, said that three of Sen. Atkins’ bills had recently been released from the Appropriations Committee and would come up for vote soon: SB 562 – the Healthy California Act; SB 2 – the Building Homes and Jobs Act; and, SB 179 – the Gender Recognition Act.

Glenn Jensen, an economist running to replace Duncan Hunter in District 50, said he was tired of partisan politics and that we needed to appeal to moderate Republicans and Independents in order to win races. If elected, he promised to compel the government to deal with every issue, such as health care and climate change, as a national security matter and with fiscal discipline.

Jonathan explained that John Hartley, coordinator for Neighborhoods for Fair Elections, had been rescheduled to speak in July.

Liz Silverman spoke about SB 562, which would create a single-payer universal health care system in California and provide comprehensive coverage for all its citizens. Though it would raise taxes, she believed the vast majority of people would save money because health care premiums, deductibles, and co-pays would be eliminated and costs would be controlled through a reduction in administrative overhead and though negotiation with pharmaceutical companies. She urged Club members to help canvass local neighborhoods and to contact their representatives, and asked the Club to endorse the bill. Jonathan entertained a motion to endorse, Susan Peinado moved that the Club endorse SB 562 – the Healthy California Act, it was seconded, hearing no discussion, a voice vote was made and the endorsement passed.

Cody Petterson

James Elia

Fred Rogers

Glen Jensen

Dave Furlano

Cody Petterson

Merrin Muxlow

John Hartley

Cody Petterson

Cody Petterson and clubmembers

Cody Petterson

Program: Dr. Cody Petterson – Democratic State of Play Moving into 2018 Local anthropologist Cody Petterson discussed the current state of play within the San Diego County Democratic Party. The overarching theme of his talk was the need for activists to transition from protest to power and to move from focusing on national abstractions to developing progressive policies that dealt with concrete local problems.

While protests have been great for solidarity, he said that they were now wasting too much time and resources and that there was a need to have more forces out in the field working in the chambers of power, speaking before city councils and planning boards, manning phone banks, walking precincts, and writing op-eds because the bulk of our problems were right here at home and we could have a direct hand in solving them.

Acknowledging that there was still a lot of antagonism within the party as a result of the 2016 primary, he said he was very motivated to help foster party unity and thought it could be achieved by focusing on common issues. He spoke about social science’s idea of the Overton window, or window of discourse, which he defined as perspectives that are legitimate to have with regard to topics, and said such a window was created after the primary when there was dramatic shift to more agreement within the party on a range of ideas.

He then provided a rundown on the current local political scene, discussed the various issues, and looked ahead to the 2018 elections. He said there was a need to develop more leadership at the local level and that progressives were shifting to vetting and then promoting candidates rather than relying on the party pipeline. He went on to say that we should not abandon our representatives after helping get them elected; we needed to actively support them when they act in line with our values and speak out when they move away from them because it would help push our progressive issues and create accountability.

Next, he covered the issue of homelessness, the need for effective mass transit, the fact that the San Diego Police Department was critically understaffed, and most important to him, the inventory and affordability problem in local housing. He said that it was unfortunately not the time to campaign on climate change because he felt that people don’t care about it and that we’ve failed to educate even ourselves on the nuts and bolts of the issue, but that it was, however, the time to identify proxy issues that will inevitably impact the climate and that voters already respond to, such as the need to intensify urban development and avoid urban sprawl.

The primary lesson he learned from 2016 was that no one was going save us but ourselves; when you see something that needs to get done, the person to do it was you, and the time to do it was now. He said that though it was a burdensome time for us, there was something powerful in it because we have entered a heroic age. His parting message to everyone was: “Save us and become heroes.”

You can listen to a Podcast of Cody’s talk here.

Club Reports Vice President – Merrin invited everyone to attend the third PLDC Happy Hour at 5:30 PM on Wednesday, June 14, at the Old Venice Restaurant. She also said volunteers were needed to help set up/break down and man the Club’s booth at the June 24 OB Street Fair.

Treasurer – Jonathan announced that after a month-long search for a new Treasurer, he’d appointed long-time Club member Dave Furlano to the position and asked the Club to ratify the appointment. Dave introduced himself, said he had an undergraduate degree in pharmacy and a PhD in chemistry, became involved in drug development working for the FDA and in Big Pharma, and that now he wanted to step up and contribute to the Club. Susan Peinado moved that the Club ratify Jonathan’s appointment of Dave as Club Treasurer, it was seconded, hearing no discussion, Jonathan called for a voice vote and the motion carried.

Announcements

Fred Rogers, Vice President of the San Diego County Democrats for Environmental Action, announced that a public forum on the Soccer City proposal would be held on Wednesday, June 14, at the Mission Valley Library on Fenton Parkway.

Kathy Stadler of San Diego County Indivisible said they wanted to put a personal face on the statistics of Americans who would be harmed if the Republican health care bill became law and urged people to share their experiences in 15-second to one-minute videos. They could stay and record one after the meeting or go to www.sandiegoindivisible.com/press/media.

James Elia announced that an event called “Serve Our Vets’ Pets” would be held on June 17, 11:00 AM – 2:00 PM at Nate’s Point Dog Park in Balboa Park where people could contribute food and other items for veteran’s pets. He said more info could be found on the Support Underserved Vets with Pets Facebook page and at http://www.gofundme.com/veteransandpets.

John Hartley, the coordinator for Neighborhoods for Fair Elections, which pushes for campaign finance reform in San Diego, invited everyone to attend their kick-off event on June 10, 10:00 AM, at the First Unitarian Church across from the UCSD Medical Center. The topic will be “Does San Diego Have Fair Elections? Past, Present, and Future.”

Phil Manson said the Pacific Beach Democratic Club had invited the Club to attend the next Drinking With Donkeys on May 31, 5:30 PM, at Stone Brewing in Liberty Station to get to know members from five other clubs.

Jonathan announced that there would be no Club meeting in June because of the Club’s participation in the OB Street Fair. He thanked everyone for coming and invited everyone to meet afterwards at the Point Break Café at 2743 Shelter Island Drive to continue discussion.

The meeting was adjourned at 5:33 PM.

Meeting notes: Deborah Currier, Secretary Photo credit: John Loughlin

Notes from May Meeting – Democratic State of Play Moving into 2018 Club President Jonathan Wubbolding called the meeting to order at 4:02 PM and thanked everyone for coming.

#Cody Petterson

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