Football protests

The National Football Season has started in the US and as expected, players and teams are engaged in various forms of protests for racial justice and against systemic police brutality.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic only one team, the Jacksonville Jaguars, admitted fans on Sunday. The Jaguars stayed in the locker room for the anthems while their opponents, the Indianapolis Colts, stood on the goalline. The Colts head coach, Frank Reich, was the only member of the team to kneel. Indianapolis Star reporter Joel Erickson estimated half the crowd stood for Lift Every Voice and Sing.
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The Green Bay Packers, Philadelphia Eagles, Buffalo Bills, Miami Dolphins and New York Jets also opted to stay in the locker room for the anthem during Sunday’s early kick-offs.

Elsewhere, Washington players decided to kneel for the anthem, while their opponents, the Eagles, left the field.

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Donald Trump’s magical thinking

After breezily and wrongly predicting, against all the evidence, that we should not worry about the coronavirus because it would magically go away, Trump is now predicting, again against all the evidence, that we should not worry about climate change because the world will magically get cooler.

During his visit to the US West Coast, Mr Trump repeated his argument that poor forest management was to blame as he met Californian officials involved in the battle against the wildfires at a stop near Sacramento, in the centre of the state.

Dismissing one official’s plea to not “ignore the science” on climate change, Mr Trump said: “It’ll start getting cooler, you just watch… I don’t think science knows actually.”
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How dirty money subverts democracy

Investigative reporter Tom Burgis has written a book Kleptopia: How Dirty Money Is Conquering the World. He was interviewed on the public radio program IA and also in the Daily Beast about his book. I have not as yet read Burgis’s book but I earlier reviewed another book on the same topic Moneyland: The inside story of the crooks and kleptocrats who rule the world by another investigative journalist Oliver Bullough.
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Trump still lying about covid-19 danger

After he was exposed as publicly playing down the seriousness of the virus even though he knew it was highly contagious and dangerous, Trump said that he only did so so as not to create panic. That explanation has been blasted as dangerous by creating a false sense of complacency at a time when accurate information was essential so that steps could be taken to minimize the spread.

But it appears that even now his administration is trying to minimize the danger by pressuring the scientists who work for the Centers for Disease Control to change their reports to comport with his optimistic statements.
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This is what happens with a rotten business person as president

When Trump ran for president in 2016, he touted the fact that he was a businessman and that this background would enable him to run the government more efficiently. The idea that being a businessman is good training for running a government is a dubious proposition at best because there are major differences between the two. With a business, you have to appease just the stockholders if it is a public company or nobody at all if you own a private company. But with government you have to deal with a huge number of different constituencies that have independent sources of power and are not beholden to you and finding ways to get things done takes a different skill set.
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The dangerous deception

Another day, another bunch of Trump lies revealed, as well the lies of those around him who are supposed to be public servants. Much attention has been paid to Bob Woodward’s latest book that says that Trump knew about the dangers posed by the coronavirus as far back as in February but downplayed the threat.

Donald Trump knew the extent of the deadly coronavirus threat in February but intentionally misled the public by deciding to “play it down”, according to interviews recorded by one of America’s most venerated investigative journalists.
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Fox News reporter confirms Trump’s derogatory comments about the military

Jennifer Griffin stands by her story that confirmed the report in The Atlantic that Trump constantly denigrates members of the military as losers and suckers and has contempt for those who get injured or killed. She also says that treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was lying when he said that he did not hear Trump say such things at a meeting at which he was present.

Trump is of course furious that the network that he thinks, with considerable justification, should be cheerleaders for him had a reporter say unflattering things and has called for her to be fired.

Michele Bachmann resurfaces and hilarity ensues

Were you wondering what the nutty former Minnesota congresswoman and onetime contender for the Republican presidential nomination was up to these days? Me neither. After deciding not to seek re-election in 2018 where she faced a good chance of losing, she faded away. Or so I hoped. But there she is in the news again spouting one of her trademark nutty theories, and this one is a real doozy.
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