Listing all Biden’s lies in the debate

Akela Lacey provides evidence of all the lies that Joe Biden made during the last debate with Bernie Sanders. The major one was when he said that he had never tried to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and veteran’s benefits when he has actually boasted about doing so.

In 1984, though, Biden co-sponsored an amendment to freeze military and domestic spending for a year, which included some built-in-adjustments for Social Security benefits — tantamount to cutting the program.

In the 1995 speech, Biden was more explicit: He bragged about advocating for cuts to Social Security. “I’m up for reelection this year and I’m gonna remind everybody what I did at home, which is gonna cost me politically,” Biden said, removing his glasses. “When I argued if we should freeze federal spending, I meant Social Security as well. I meant Medicare and Medicaid. I meant veterans’ bene— I meant every single solitary thing in the government. And I not only tried it once, I tried it twice, I tried it a third time, and I tried it a fourth time.”

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Even in times of crisis, Trump can’t resist being a racist

At a time when the world needs to come together to fight the pandemic, Donald Trump lets loose his racism yet again.

Trump also called the coronavirus “the China virus” at the press conference and argued it wasn’t a racist term. When a reporter noted that dozens of Chinese Americans have faced racist attacks because of the virus in recent weeks, the president doubled down.

“It’s not racist at all, no. Not at all,” Trump said. “It comes from China.”

One senator, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has vowed to “punish” China for the virus. “We will emerge stronger from this challenge, we will hold accountable those who inflicted it on the world,” he said last week.

Asked Wednesday if he agreed with Cotton, Trump said, “I don’t know if you’d say China is to blame. Certainly we didn’t get an early run on it. It would’ve been helpful if we knew about it earlier.”

As the press conference came to an end, one reporter asked about a tweet from CBS News reporter Weijia Jiang, who wrote on Tuesday, “This morning a White House official referred to #Coronavirus as the ‘Kung-Flu’ to my face. Makes me wonder what they’re calling it behind my back.”

Trump sidestepped the question about whether he thought the remark was appropriate, and doubled down on his earlier comments, saying again, “It comes from China.”

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‘Orwellian’ does not even begin to describe it

This video clip montage show how Fox News personalities suddenly switched from asserting that the coronavirus pandemic was a hoax to suddenly proclaiming its seriousness. What caused the change? Notice that the abrupt message reversal started after Trump’s address to the nation on March 11, after he must have realized that this crisis could not be combated by his usual bluster and lying and where he suddenly switched from proclaiming the pandemic to be a hoax to saying that it was a serious crisis. All these lemmings unquestioningly reversed course and followed him.

A silver lining in yesterday’s gloomy election news

As expected, yesterday was not a good day for Bernie Sanders in the three primaries held in Illinois, Florida, and Arizona (Ohio postponed its primary at the very last minute). There were all kinds of problems due to the confusion about the pandemic, and the absence of poll workers caused some polling stations to close. How this affected the overall turnout is not yet clear.
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We really need to take social distancing seriously

Starting at midnight last night, the ‘shelter in place’ order has been extended to Monterey county where I live due to two cases of Covid-19 being detected here. Since I have been voluntarily doing it already, this will not cause any change for me but it is going to be disruptive and costly for workers who lose their jobs and wages, parents with young children, businesses, and a whole host of others for whom the impact is not yet clear.

As I wrote before, there is something strange about this crisis because even though it is serious on a large scale, for most people things in their immediate surroundings seem so normal. This can cause people to minimize the danger and think it is overblown and thus ignore the recommendations. That would be very unwise. One woman, who describes herself as a “healthy 48 year old with no underlying conditions”, came down with the disease and had to be treated in the emergency room said that after her recovery, she was so irritated by all the comments that she read on various sites dismissing the threat that she decided to describe her “brutal” ordeal in order to let others know what it is really like and warn them not to take things lightly.
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Watching Bizet’s Carmen while ‘sheltering in place’

I am not a fan of opera, having seen only one live performance in my life. It was a long time ago when I was in Germany and we were taken as a group to see Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman. My reaction? Kind of meh. But I decided to take advantage of the New York Metropolitan Opera’s decision, during the time when they are shut down due to the pandemic, to broadcast recordings of their past live streams of operas for free with a new one every night. (See this post for details).
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Crises will be exploited by the wealthy and powerful unless we defy them

In this excellent short video below titled Coronavirus Capitalism, Naomi Klein reminds us that past crises such as 9/11, the financial collapse of 2008, and natural disasters are often used by governments to ram through laws and other actions that benefit corporate and oligarchic interests at the expense of the rest of us, taking advantage of the fact that the public is too alarmed to pay close attention to what is going on.

Klein says that these times call for extreme vigilance and mass mobilization to prevent the power structure in the US using the pandemic to provide yet more giveaways to the wealthy, and instead use the moment to enact progressive legislation, as occurred with the New Deal in the 1930s after the Great Depression. She says that victory will go to those who are willing to fight harder.

Primary election chaos in Ohio

Today is primary day in Ohio (in addition to Florida, Arizona, and Illinois). Or is it? Voters in Ohio would be justified in being confused but the answer is that there will definitely not be any voting in that state today.

Yesterday Ohio governor Mike DeWine asked a judge to delay the election to June 2 with early voting to be allowed up until June 1 because of the pandemic but the judge refused. Later last night, DeWine ordered the closing of the polling places anyway creating a legal and constitutional controversy.
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Great moments in capitalism

Two brothers in Tennessee were found to have hoarded over 17,000 bottles of hand sanitizer. How did they manage to acquire that many, you ask?

[Matt] Colvin and his brother Noah became the subject of national scorn after the New York Times published a story about how they cleaned out stores of sanitizer and wipes in an attempt to profit off the public’s panic over the coronavirus pandemic.
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Noah Colvin, of Hixson took a 1,300-mile road trip in early March across Tennessee and Kentucky, racking up thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer to resell online.

Meanwhile, Matt [described as an Amazon seller, whatever that is-MS] stayed at home, waiting for pallets of antibacterial wipes and even more sanitizer to be shipped, according to a New York Times article.
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The Colvins told the New York Times that Noah Colvin hit “little hole-in-the-wall dollar stores in the backwoods. The major metro areas were cleaned out.”

Matt Colvin said he was simply fixing “inefficiencies in the marketplace.” Some areas of the country need the products more than others, he said to the Times, and he’s helping send the supply toward the demand.

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