Polls are open from 7:00 AM to 8:00 PM. Here’s a link to information on voting in person: sos.state.mn.us/elections-voting/election-day-voting/. Things to remember:
‘This proposal is laden with poison pills Republicans know Democrats would never support.’
Senate Republicans on Tuesday released their latest version of a pandemic relief bill. The so-called skinny proposal, known as the “Delivering Immediate Relief to America’s Families, Schools and Small Businesses Act,” omits most of the funds included in the bill passed by the House of Representatives in May. But it contains provisions that would make it harder for workers to sue if they got sick and that would funnel public funds to private and parochial schools.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell introduced the bill as “a new targeted proposal, focused on some of the very most urgent healthcare, education, and economic issues.” He noted that it “does not contain every idea our party likes.”
But it does contain two provisions that GOP senators like a lot. Continue reading.
The Trump administration flew immigrant detainees to Virginia this summer to facilitate the rapid deployment of Homeland Security tactical teams to quell protests in Washington, circumventing restrictions on the use of charter flights for employee travel, according to a current and a former U.S. official.
After the transfer, dozens of the new arrivals tested positive for the novel coronavirus, fueling an outbreak at the Farmville, Va., immigration jail that infected more than 300 inmates, one of whom died.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency moved the detainees on “ICE Air” charter flights to avoid overcrowding at detention facilities in Arizona and Florida, a precaution they said was taken because of the pandemic. Continue reading.
President Trump has an explanation for the new revelations that he purposely downplayed the risks of coronavirus: He says he didn’t want to cause panic.
Experts say Trump had another option: He could have calmly, but accurately, explained to Americans the risks associated with the outbreak and what they could do to lessen the danger.
Excerpts released this week from famed journalist Bob Woodward’s upcoming book, “Rage,” have raised questions about whether more lives could have been saved if Trump had, early in the pandemic, shared with Americans all the information about coronavirus he himself had. Continue reading.
President Donald Trump has been widely criticized this week because of the bombshell revelations in veteran journalist Bob Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” which shows that back in February, Trump was privately acknowledging that COVID-19 had “deadly” potential and could become the worst health crisis in over 100 years —even though publicly, Trump was claiming that it didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. Trump has defended his coronavirus lies by claiming that he didn’t want to create a “panic,” and his economic adviser, Larry Kudlow, is defending the president’s COVID-19 response.
Kudlow told CBS News, “I think we did the right thing, and I think we did it pretty well. We did the best we could, and I think it’s really quite effective. I think the president led wisely, I think the vice president led wisely.”
Trump’s critics have been stressing that tens of thousands of lives in the U.S. could have been saved if the president had publicly acknowledge the danger that COVID-19 posed earlier and had promoted social distancing measures back in January and February. But Kudlow is echoing Trump’s talking point that he didn’t want to cause a “panic.” Continue reading.
A members-only social media network founded in 2013 by former representative Jason Lewis, the current Republican nominee for Senate in Minnesota, hosted message boards that promoted a pro-Hitler documentary, called for migrants to be put in camps, and raised money for an ad campaign that paid Lewis and his business partners.
In 2014, Lewis sat down with Fox Business host John Stossel to promote the network, which he called Galt.io, after the hero of an Ayn Rand novel. Lewis, still a talk radio host, explained that Galt.io would be a closed community whose members could invest using a digital currency earned with their participation or bought with real money. The Galtcoins functioned like Reddit upvotes, signaling which topics people cared the most about as they invested into “causes” or “missions.”
“We’re not going to tell people what causes are going to win,” Lewis told Stossel. “That’s going to be a function of the marketplace. So once that cause is out there, what people are interested in is going to be determined on Galt.io.” Continue reading.
The shameless sycophants at Fox News, who spent late February and early March deluding their audience about the danger posed by the novel coronavirus, are arguing that President Donald Trump was correct — in fact, noble — to intentionally “play it down,” as he claimed in an interview with The Washington Post‘s Bob Woodward.
In taped interviews with Woodward for his forthcoming book, Trump said on February 7 that the virus was “more deadly than even your strenuous flus” (contradicting his public statements at the time), and added on March 19 that he was “playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”
The Wednesday leak of those interviews triggered a media and political firestorm over the president’s deception. But Fox quickly rallied to the president, and after he doubled down at an afternoon press conference by saying that he intentionally downplayed the virus to avoid a “frenzy,” the network’s hosts have settled on the position that he was right to do that. Their argument implicitly excuses their own irresponsible coverage as the virus spread across the country. Continue reading.
If you haven’t heard, this Donald Trump guy doesn’t seem to be a particularly good guy. He doesn’t seem to be a particularly competent guy. Frankly, he seems like he’s bad for our country. Hold on while I set fire to my possessions for fear I catch and spread the very real United States coronavirus pandemic. As former journalist turned celebrity political author Bob Woodward releases excerpts and audio recordings of President Trump to promote Woodward’s new book, the public is once again being treated to information we already knew, just coming out of the pedestrian mouth of the Donald himself.
Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana has made a name for himself as a slow-talking craven insect of a politician. Whether he is defending the Confederacy, or promote pro-Putin conspiracy theories on the Sunday shows, or blaming China and Mardi Gras drinking for the spread of the coronavirus in Louisiana, Sen. Kennedy has shown himself to not only be a foolish mind, but also a truly shameless one.
Kennedy came on CNN to talk with anchor Pamela Brown about the day’s news. Brown’s opening question to Kennedy was whether or not Trump’s admission that he “downplayed” the threat of the virus—literally calling it the “new Democratic hoax”—was “acceptable to you?” Kennedy gave a nice via satellite pause before beginning on-brand dumb: “You’re talking about the Woodward book?” Oh, man. Wow. It is literally the reason he is on the show, to be asked his thoughts on a Republican leader who has been recorded admitting to misleading the public about the then-impending public health crisis. A crisis that has claimed hundreds of thousands of American lives, and will potentially take hundreds of thousands more American lives. Continue reading.
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough busted Vice President Mike Pence for “lying through his teeth” about President Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The vice president went on Fox News and Twitter to clean up the president’s recorded confession to reporter Bob Woodward that he had purposefully downplayed the pandemic, and the “Morning Joe” host rolled supercut video of Trump’s past statements that undercut each of Pence’s unctuous praise.
“When I look at Mike Pence and I see him lying through his teeth, a man who, I mean from everything I’ve known, he’s a man of great faith and he let us know that through his entire public life that he’s a man of great faith, so who’s to doubt that,” Scarborough said. “I just wonder, though, when he’s lying through his teeth for this president, I really do, I go what’s Mike Pence going to do after this? Where does he go to get his reputation back? Because Donald Trump’s been lying through his teeth about the coronavirus for well over a year.” Continue reading.
Donald Trump admitted on Wednesday that he intentionally downplayed the threat of the coronavirus despite knowing how deadly and dangerous it was.
He defended his actions to a crowd of reporters by saying, “I love our country and I don’t want people to be frightened, I don’t want to create panic.” However, his attempt to deflect criticism after getting caught lying to the public doesn’t match reality.
For years, Trump has attempted to stoke fear in Americans, often lying and creating alternate realities to do so. Continue reading.
