Good morning to everyone and I know that The Damn Fool is plastered all over the news.
I have a smattering of links here relating to Donald Trump and I know that the presidential election is a little more than 3 weeks away but…
I’m a little tired of Trump at the moment.
Sure enough, there are a few links here relating to Trump but: for some reason I didn’t want to be bothered today so…
Time to read pundits.
Scott Clement, Dan Balz, and Emily Guskin report for the Washington Post that a new Washington Post/ABC News poll shows pretty much what other national polls have shown in the past few days: a double digit lead for Biden.
The president has not managed to close the gap with Biden during a tumultuous period of events that included the first presidential debate, the debate between Vice President Pence and Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) and Trump’s hospitalization after testing positive for the novel coronavirus. In fact, the race has changed little over a period of months, with voters seemingly impervious to the flood of news and controversies.
Biden is favored by 54 percent of likely voters, with Trump favored by 42 percent. Libertarian Party nominee Jo Jorgensen receives 2 percent support, and Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins is at 1 percent. Biden’s lead among registered voters is also 12 points, consistent with Post-ABC polls taken in recent months.
Mark Leibovich of the New York Times writes about...the Trump supporter but this time from the point of view of Trump. I have to say that the commentary here on Joe Biden is interesting.
Until recently, it had been easy to consign the question of how Mr. Trump sees his supporters to the black hole of speculation about his true motivations, if anyone still bothers with that. In a broad political sense, Mr. Trump’s handling of the coronavirus has clearly driven away swarms of older voters, traditionally the Republican Party’s most bedrock constituency, who polls now show overwhelmingly support Joe Biden. As a general rule, saying that the coronavirus would “just disappear” or “go away” and that Mr. Trump himself feels 20 years younger after being treated for it is not going to play well with the demographic group — aged 65 and older — that accounts for roughly 80 percent of coronavirus deaths.
Mr. Biden has picked up on this message. Even before the president tested positive, Mr. Biden was pointing out how diligent the president always is in remaining physically apart from those who attend his rallies. “The next time he holds one, look closely,” Mr. Biden said during a visit to Manitowoc, Wis. “The folks who come are packed as tightly as they can be, risking disease, mostly without masks. But not Trump; he safely keeps his distance.”
Biden campaign sources say their candidate is absolutely targeting Trump-inclined voters by talking about how little he believes the president cares about them. Mr. Biden frequently brings up a recent article in The Atlantic, by Jeffrey Goldberg, that says President Trump has derided American combat troops as “losers” and “suckers.”
Kathleen Banks, Ashley Bieniek-Tobasco, Eric Coles, Ans Irfan, and Kate Mitchell write for the Boston Globe that trained public health officials need to be doing the work of public health.
The appointments of Dr. Atlas and Dr. Conley are only the latest outcomes of the misconception that public health leadership requires no public health training.
As a coalition of trained public health professionals (one of us is an MD who is also trained in the practice of public health), we argue that medical training alone does not prepare anyone to serve as a public health leader. Relying on clinical expertise alone — particularly when the clinical expertise is not even relevant to infectious disease transmission — makes no sense.
Engineers are hired to do engineering. Physicists are hired to do physics. Oncologists are hired to treat cancer patients. And public health experts should be hired to lead public health.
Universities across the country produce hundreds of public health graduates each year. As an academic discipline, public health focuses on improving the health of communities. We train in epidemiology, biostatistics, policymaking, communications, and leadership and management. Several of us specialize in how to evaluate programs and policies, streamline supply chains, design behavior change interventions, and curb the spread of disease across communities. We learn how to prevent poor health outcomes through policies and systems.
Katherine Harmon Courage reports for Vox on the various ways in which the nation’s colleges and universities are combatting Covid-19: some with good results and some with not so good results.
So how can universities do their best to support students wanting to do the right thing, and also help nudge others into line? Let’s take a look at how various schools are handling the key pillars of limiting Covid-19 spread, what seems to be working — and what doesn’t.
We’ve known since early in the year that keeping people physically distanced is one of the best ways to limit spread of the coronavirus, which is why universities sent nearly all of their students home midway through the spring semester.
Over the past two months, however, millions of students have returned to the majority of campuses across the US — campuses where, for the most part, in-person social gatherings are limited and masks are required.
But the similarities often end there. Although most schools have increased their offerings of online coursework, the number and sizes of in-person classes vary widely, as does the density of students in on-campus housing.
Maya King of Politico reports that the Black Lives Matter movement is forming a political action committee (PAC).
The Black Lives Matter PAC will formally roll out its programs as early as Monday, according to Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter. The committee plans to endorse a slate of candidates ahead of the general election, paying special attention to mayoral, county sheriff and district attorney races.
“We want to be able to not just speak in ‘get out the vote’ language,” Cullors said in an interview with POLITICO. “Black Lives Matter is launching our PAC so we can talk directly to voters about who we think that they should be voting for and what we think they should be voting on.”
“We want to be able to not just speak in ‘get out the vote’ language,” Cullors said in an interview with POLITICO. “Black Lives Matter is launching our PAC so we can talk directly to voters about who we think that they should be voting for and what we think they should be voting on.”
The PAC’s formation is the latest in a wave of political efforts from social justice organizations ahead of the November election. In late September the Movement for Black Lives, a coalition of more than 50 organizing groups nationwide, launched The Frontline initiative to turn out the vote among young people of color. Black Lives Matter has also spearheaded four separate projects aiming to encourage young Black voters to head to the polls, including a multi-million-dollar outreach campaign and anti-disinformation initiative.
Anna North of Vox on why Trump and right-wing organizations hate Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer so much.
Whitmer isn’t the only governor Trump has criticized — back in April, he also fired off “LIBERATE” tweets about Minnesota and Virginia, other states with Democratic leadership.
She’s also not the only public official to face pushback from lockdown skeptics. Indeed, Fox spoke at one point of the possibility that other states might overthrow their governors as well, according to the affidavit: “Everybody takes their tyrants.”
But Whitmer has received a degree of personal attention, both from the president and from opponents in her state, that her male counterparts haven’t necessarily experienced. That may be because, in addition to opposition to lockdown measures, she’s running up against the still widely held belief that any woman seeking or holding power is treasonous, underhanded, or illegitimate.
“She fucking goddamn loves the power she has right now,” Fox said at one point. “She has no checks and balances at all.”
It was reminiscent of complaints against other female leaders or candidates. For example, Fox News commentator Harlan Hill tweeted during the vice-presidential debate on Wednesday that Sen. Kamala Harris “comes off as such an insufferable lying bitch” (Fox News later said he would no longer appear on the network). Asked to comment on the tweet by Mediaite, he doubled down, saying, “I stand by the statement that she’s an insufferable power-hungry smug bitch.”
My United States Senator, Tammy Duckworth, writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer that, in part, her opposition to Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is personal.
While we are each, of course, entitled to our own beliefs about women’s access to constitutionally-protected healthcare choices, St. Joseph County Right to Life is an organization whose views are considered radical even within the larger anti-choice movement, in part due to its stated belief that steps in the in-vitro fertilization (IVF) process that gave me my children should be outlawed, that doctors who use IVF to help women start families should be put behind bars, and that will only go so far as to say that moms who have kids through IVF shouldn’t be criminalized “at this point.” Not that they believe moms like me aren’t criminals, just that we shouldn’t be criminalized yet.
While my two beautiful little girls are unique, my story of struggling with fertility is not. Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART), including IVF treatment, has enabled thousands of Americans to become parents in red and blue states alike. So I’m going to spend every moment I can from now until the final vote trying to ensure my fellow Senators—especially those on the other side of the aisle who cooed and cuddled Maile when she first visited the Capitol—fully consider the very real impact their vote on nominee could have on those Americans hoping to one day have daughters or sons of their own. With every ounce of love I have for my daughters, I’m going to urge my colleagues to fully consider the message their support of an ideologue who appears to believe my girls shouldn’t even exist sends not only to me, but to parents-to-be around this country struggling with infertility and whose dreams may only be achieved through IVF or other similar technologies.
The Editorial Board of the Arizona Republic, with reservations, comes out in support of Proposition 207 which, if passed, would legalize marijuana in the state of Arizona
We’re no cheerleaders for huffing weed. Then-California Gov. Jerry Brown made a salient point in 2014 when he said, “The world’s pretty dangerous, very competitive, I think we need to stay alert, if not 24 hours a day, more than some of the potheads might be able to put together.”
But even Brown succumbed to the inevitable that recreational marijuana would one day be legal in California and eventually in every corner of this country.
It will be legal because the United States made a mistake when it chose to employ criminal law to control marijuana use — an improper use of the government's most muscular authority. Now we’re in the process of a state-by-state correction.
...We think it is once again a sweetheart deal for the existing marijuana industry, because it was written by the industry. Nor are we fooled by the promise of multimillion-dollar budget windfalls.
***
But state lawmakers have had plenty of time to get in front of the parade and design the regulatory environment for the inevitable legalization of pot. Over and over they have refused to do so.
It’s time to get on with it.
A majority of Arizonans support legalization. Two-thirds of Americans and nearly 70% of millennials want it. And 63% of Republican millennials are thumbs up.
It’s going to happen. If not this year, soon.
Kwame Anthony Appiah of the New York Times writes about a concept that I haven’t heard about in a long time; the concept of “political Blackness.”
The old British concept of “political Blackness,” the heyday of which stretched from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, would make nonsense of such questions in a very immediate way: Ms. Harris’s mother, by this definition, is just as Black as her father. For proponents of political Blackness, “Black” was an umbrella term that encompassed minorities with family origins in Asia and the Middle East as well as in Africa and its diaspora. That’s not to say it was the sturdiest of umbrellas: It was never uncontested. Yet it may have lessons for us today.
In Britain, anyway, its legacy remains legible. Three years ago, in a public-awareness campaign designed to increase voter turnout among British minorities (“Operation Black Vote”), Riz Ahmed, a British actor and rapper of Pakistani parentage, appeared on a video. “Blacks don’t vote,” he said. “And by Black people, I mean ethnic minorities of all backgrounds.” The year before, the student union at the University of Kent attracted attention when it promoted Black History Month with the faces of six famous figures: Alongside four British people of African descent, it posted two of Pakistani heritage — the pop star Zayn Malik and Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London.
Finally this morning, Corinne Low and Shams DeBaron writes for The Nation that one of the legacies of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio could very well be: segregation.
One of the writers of this piece, Corinne, is an Upper West Side mom and a professor at the Wharton School who studies the economics of discrimination. The other, Shams, is a Black man experiencing homelessness and a screenwriter and hip-hop pioneer, in recovery from alcoholism. We met when Shams—and other homeless New Yorkers—were moved out of congregate shelters and into private rooms at hotels throughout the city, including the Upper West Side’s Lucerne Hotel, to slow the spread of Covid-19. It was sound public health policy, driven by the need for social distancing and the recognition that since tourists weren’t returning to New York anytime soon, vacant hotels could be used to save lives. Almost immediately, shelter residents and supporters found ourselves fighting against a 15,000-member Facebook group and a 501(c)(4) calling itself the West Side Community Organization. Rather than welcome their new neighbors, the group raised nearly $150,000 to hire Randy Mastro, a top litigator and former deputy mayor in the Giuliani administration, to drive homeless men from the neighborhood.
De Blasio immediately surrendered. Claiming he’d visited the Upper West Side himself and found the situation “not acceptable,” he announced that the men at the Lucerne would be shipped off to a soon-to-be-vacant Covid isolation hotel in the Financial District. We don’t know what Mayor de Blasio saw on the Upper West Side as he passed in his motorcade, but we know that he never set foot inside the Lucerne. He never spoke to shelter residents like Shams, who could have told him their stories. Instead, he made a choice: to prioritize the voices of an overwhelmingly white community over the impacted people of color—who make up 90 percent of shelter residents.
Everyone have a good morning!