rcummings

4 minutes ago, TopDeadSenter said:

Winning hearts and minds by attacking Rand Paul and his wife? The intolerance on display is quite staggering, this is fascism in action. Lucky the police haven't been totally defunded and were there to protect the couple from the leftist mob. I don't suppose this violence and intimidation will impress the average voter. Hope they find out who paid for this and take drastic action to stop this disgraceful behaviour.

And you know that it was paid for how exactly?

5 hours ago, MaxYakov said:

Older man gets permission from the Secret Service to leave his basement to ride his bike while talking to himself.

Younger man flies Air force One to his rally(s) and speaks for 1 hour and 41 minutes to thousands (Tulsa, June 2020).

 

Helmut Norpoth's model predicts a landslide win for the younger man. So, ladies and gentlemen place your bets. (Norpoth's model has correctly predicted 25 of the previous 27 elections)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How about younger man violates health and safety rules while older man sets an example.

And as for your "expert" predictor...he got right 5 out of 6 elections that he actually predicted.

Whereas Allan Lichtman has gotten 9 out of 9 right.

Professor Allan Lichtman, who has accurately predicted elections since 1984, says Biden will win

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/08/05/professor-allan-lichtman-predicts-joe-biden-beat-donald-trump/3304680001/

7 minutes ago, connda said:

Hate to tell ya'll this, but Biden and the Democrats presidential platform is one huge plank they says,
***  "Not Trump!" ***
Other than that they presented virtually no policy.

In fact neither side is presenting platforms based on policy.  And the electorate are too busy hating the other side to give a rip about US domestic and foreign policy.  So whichever side wins - you'll end up with a dysfunctional dystopia that I expect will usher in a Great Depression that will make the 1930s look like a cake walk as well as ushering in World War 3. 
And the billionaires will make even more billions.

I'm torn.  Alfred E. Newman or John McAfee?  "Hummm"

 

This is utterly false. Clearly you haven't even bothered to look at what they offered. On health care, they have a plan that should cover about 97 percent of al Americans.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/8/20/21372511/joe-biden-dnc-2020-obamacare-health-care-plan

The Republicans took a beating on that in the 2018 midterms.

And on taxes, once again, a detailed proposal.  Among other things, for those earning over 1 million per year, capital gains would be taxes at the same rate as earned income. No more government subsidies in the form of tax breaks.

Raising the top rate back to 39.6

Imposing a 15% tax minimum on corporations with over 100 million in income. Corporations like Amazon can actually pay nothing.

There's a lot more but just cited this to who how false your assertion is.

59 minutes ago, Tippaporn said:

Fox News - Authorities seize thousands of fake IDs headed to New York in Kentucky

 

"The IDs were heading from China to various locations in New York, the federal agency said, adding that the fake driver’s licenses were seized at an Express Consignment Operations hub in Louisville, Ky."

 

ABC News - Thousands of fake IDs bound for New York seized in Louisville

 

"The shipments all originated in China."

 

American Military News (mostly factual - least biased according to Media Bias Fact Check) - 20,000 fake licenses mostly from China seized at Chicago O’Hare airport in 2020

 

"CBP noted some of the fake licenses going through the IMF facility, bound for Michigan, actually had working bar code strips."

 

Currently 32 states require a form of ID to vote.

And these fake drivers' licenses were going to be used for illegal voting? Because people are going to risk imprisonment to case a fake ballot?  Can you think of any other reason why illegal drivers' licenses might be in demand?  Something that might actually promise economic and mobility benefits? Anything at all come to mind?

56 minutes ago, Thailand said:

Propped up by trillion dollar injections of cash, a huge bubble.

Not just that. The Republicans slashed corporate taxes and capital gains taxes. So much of the stock market rise is due to changes in tax policy.

Then there's also the factor of stock buybacks.

Until the Reagan administration changed the rules. stock buybacks were actually illegal because it was obviously a way to manipulate stock prices. After the Trump tax bill was passed, most of the money repatriated to the US actually was spent on stock buybacks. The motive for this being that in most corporations big bonuses for execs are tied to stock prices. Had the money not been used in this way, there would have a lot less need to rescue corporations.

There's also the issue of excess liquidity. As an increasingly higher percentage of wealth accrues to the 1 percent, there are less opportunities for productive investments. So the money has to go somewhere. Much of it goes to t-notes. Which is why US bonds now can offer a rate of return that is lower than inflation. In effect, it's costing you money to buy bonds. Germany, for one, now offers bonds that even nominally lose some value. So with all that cash sloshing around with nowhere to go, some of it ends being invested in stocks. Higher demand drives higher stock prices.

35 minutes ago, pegman said:

News saying it possibly could reach a Cat 5. That area of the Gulf is reported to be bath water warm which will energize the storm more.  Cat 5 has winds >156 miles per. I hope they are better at dealing with this than COVID.

Hurricanes really are getting stronger, just like climate models predicted

https://www.livescience.com/climate-change-hurricanes-stronger.html

8 hours ago, Logosone said:

Trump has done exceptionally well with the economy.

 

Polls show that a majority of voters support his performance on the economy. But his approval rating does not match the support for the economy.

 

Obviously the reason is the Covid 19 issue and Trump is being blamed for mishandling it. Even though it was the CDC that did not produce tests on time, and then tests that did not work.

 

 

Actually not. His approval ratings were much lower than his approval ratings on the economy long before covid.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/?ex_cid=rrpromo

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_trump_job_approval-6179.html

21 minutes ago, Logosone said:

The point is that Trump announced a public health emergency 24 hours after the WHO did, he banned flights from and to China two days thereafter, long before most other countries in the world. So Trump showed decisive leadership and action.

 

The sad truth is that even now we do not know if lockdowns really worked, if travel bans work. Yes now the majority view is that travel bans do work, however, at the time many epidemiologists of world reknown like Pete Piot said they make no sense at all which was why the EU did not impose them until much later. We will have to wait for some time to know if even lockdowns worked.

 

My own personal view is that lockdown could have worked if it was put in place early enough, but it looks it was put in place too late everywhere.

 

The US failure on the testing front is the CDC's failure, not Trump's. He has certainly provided enough funding now, America has tested more than most countries in absolute terms. He obviously does not deny the usefulness of testing or else he would not support one of the largest testing programmes in the world.

 

Trump has of course invoked laws to force 3M to make PPE equipment in the US.

 

Where Trump has been wrong about the virus that is not surprising, he is not a scientist, and even the scientists have been wrong time and again.

 

YOu seemed determined to repeat the same points without responding to the flaws in them that I pointed out.

As I pointed out announcing a public health emergency is one thing. Actually doing something about it is quite another. Especially when the announcement if followed by over a month of denying that there is a serious problem. Doesn't make much sense.

And once again, banning flight between China and the USA would only have made sense if flights were also banned between Europe and the USA. As well as banning domestic flights. Trump waited 40 days to ban flights from Europe. And 44 days to ban flights from the UK and Ireland. Trump's China flight ban was useless.

No, Trump hasn't provided enough funding for testing. And the reason the US has to do so many tests now, is because it did too few before. The requirements for number of tests grow exponentially the longer adequate testing is delayed.

Your comments about Trump forcing 3M to make PPE equipment in USA false. 3M already manufactured masks. It's a big part of its business. He did attempt to stop 3M from selling masks to Canada. Trump did not order manufacturers to switch to the manufacture of PPE equipment.

Yes scientists made mistakes. Science is a Bayesian pursuit. So if your assumptions prove wrong, you change your assumptions. But Trump persists in flogging the same falsehoods long after they have been disproved or, as in the case of claiming that the reason reason people think there is a resurgence of the virus is that more testing is being done. How can someone be so obtuse as to misunderstand what is a matter for math at the level of arithmetic?

1 hour ago, Logosone said:

Well Trump did ban flights from China two days after declaring the public health emergency. Which was a lot earlier than most EU countries, barring Italy, I remember flights from China still arriving in Germany long after Trump banned them in the US.

 

I seem to remember at the time the WHO and many, many epidemiologists, including the world reknown Pete Piot, were saying that closing borders and suspending flights would be completely pointless. How times have changed.

 

In fact in addition to the China flight ban additional travel restrictions were placed on foreign nationals who had traveled within the past 14 days in certain countries, with exceptions for families and residents. Americans returning from those regions underwent health screenings and a 14-day quarantine.

 

Meanwhile New Orleans celebrated the Mardi Gras on 25 February. But sure, it's all Trump's fault. Sure.

 

And how could Trump institute a national testing programme? That was the job of the CDC, who were struggling with even producing test kits. And when they did they did not work. So not much Trump could do there.

 

As for PPE gear Trump set up a clandestine programme of government employees who literally stole millions of PPE units from other countries. He went above and beyond what is even legal to get PPE for the US.

 

Of course Trump has said some things about the virus that turned out to be false, most people have because the facts about the virus were like shifting sand. Remember the expert at Imperial College Neil Ferguson first predicted 510,000 dead in the UK, who now still have 41500. So if even the experts got it wrong, you can hardly expect non scientists to get it right all the time.

 

The fact remains that his termination of air traffic with China made no sense if it wasn't accompanied by similar termination of air travel with Europe and internally in the USA. Just a political stunt.

And the CDC failure to come up with a test kit is one thing. The failure of Trump to providen funding for and coordination of national testing is quite another. To this day, he's done virtually nothing about that. In fact he denies the usefulness of testing.

As for his program of stealing PPE equipment of abroad. Whatever you may think of that, it wasn't nearly enough and doesn't excuse his dereliction of duty to invoke the defense act and get american manufacturers to make the stuff.

What experts were saying was based on their understanding at the time. What Trump was saying was based on nothing but his desire to wish the pandemic away. And why are you putting it in the past tense? Trump is still saying that there isn't a resurgence of the virus. It's just an artefact of increased testing. How obtuse or deranged does someone have to be to persist in spouting such an obvious falsehood? Were ICU's overflowing with patients not evidence enough?

10 minutes ago, Logosone said:

Ah yes, Mr Invisible Secretary of State with the shortest tenure of any Secretary of State, fired by Trump. An objective judgement no doubt.

 

Daniel W. Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University was highly critical of Tillerson, calling him an "unmitigated disaster", and "the most incompetent Secretary of State in modern history.

 

Elliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins University said that Tillerson might be one of the weakest Secretaries of State in American history.

 

Elizabeth Saunders of George Washington University said that Tillerson's tenure had damaged the State Department "for a generation" and decreased America's ability to respond to major crisis.

 

So maybe not the best guy to throw stones.

But the way he damaged it was in alignment with Trump's policy of weakening the State Dept. Trump had no quarrel with Tillerson until Tillerson got fed up with Trump and let it be known.

1 hour ago, Logosone said:

No. Trump declared a public health emergency on 31 January, which was 24 hours after the WHO itself declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. That was the same day Italy declared a health emergency and suspended all flights to and from China. Italy suspended China flights long before any other EU country, however, the US suspended China flights only 2 days later. Which was quite foresighted and good leadership, since the US at that time had nowhere near the number of cases Italy did. 

 

I of course never said the USA was the first to close its borders, typical leftist misrepresentation, if you read the post carefully I said the USA was one of the first countries to close down air travel with China, and that was indeed the case. Sadly it was still not early enough and cases did spread in the US, as indeed was the case in Italy as well.

 

However, politicians will act based on scientists' advice. The fault here, lies with the scientists.

 

You can certainly not blame the White House for the CDC's terrible failures in producing test kits and then test kits that worked. That was one of the main reasons the virus spread so easily in the US. And that was the CDC's fault.

 

As for blaming Trump for the deaths caused by a virus, which has strangely killed millions outside the US as well, that is frankly preposterous and can hardly be taken seriously.

 

The totally false statement that Trump's poll numbers on the economy are in decline is again simply purposeful misstatement of reality:

 

Why Trump’s Approval Ratings on the Economy Remain Durable

 

Yet polling data and interviews with voters and political analysts suggest that a confluence of factors is raising Mr. Trump’s standing on the economy issue, which remains a centerpiece of his pitch for a second term. 

 

Polling suggests that Americans who form Mr. Trump’s voter base are less likely to have lost a job or income than Democratic or independent voters. That divergence is partially driven by race — the coronavirus crisis has disproportionately harmed Black and Latino workers, who lean heavily Democratic — but may also reflect regional divides. Small business owners in small, more rural states that backed Mr. Trump in the 2016 election report less economic damage from the crisis than those in larger blue states, according to an analysis of census survey data by the Economic Innovation Group in Washington.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/us/politics/trump-economy.html

 

Now it is of course true that Trump's approval rating for handling of the economy came down from a record-breaking and unprecedented 60% just prior to the virus but to say it has fallen, well, yes from an absolute record high level maybe to a still very good level that is higher than the one enjoyed by Obama, Bush and Biden.

Declaring a public emergency is one thing. Actually doing something about the emergency is something else. Trump may have declared an emergency but he continualy denied there was one until early March.

It's clear the Trump's ban on air travel from China was entirely political. Were it not political, but based on sound epidemiological reasons, then he would also have banned air travel from Europe and domestic air travel as well. Instead he waited 40 days to ban travel from continental Europe. What's more he even waited an additional 4 days to ban traffic from the UK and Ireland. (You know anyone who has golf resorts in those 2 countries?)

He refused to institute a national testing program or invoke the Defense Act to command industries to manufacture PPE gear.

Even to this date he continues to claim that there was no resurgence in virus infections even though positivity rates climbed as did deaths. Instead he still claims it is an illusion based on higher testing rates. The same Trump supporters who question Biden's mental competence think nothing of this massive failure of intellect on Trump's part.