Trump lies and dodges throughout the debate

The debate played out pretty much as I expected.

Joe Biden tried to give wonky answers to policy questions while serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) lied and lied repeatedly and avoided answering questions, pivoting almost immediately to complaining about the borders, and how everything was great when he was president and has gone to hell under Biden. It was basically the stuff that he says at his rallies.

His shtick was to largely claim that the US is weak and despised around the world because Biden has allowed open borders that allow millions of criminals and insane people into the country who are murdering people. He kept saying that over and over again. The moderators did not do any fact checking at all. The only thing they did was to repeat the question when SSACFT did not answer but then SSACFT would largely ignore it again.

While Biden tried to combat this with data, his presentation was not forceful enough.

On the optics, Biden seemed hesitant and soft-spoken and stumbled occasionally, while SSACFT portrayed confidence even as he flat-out lied. And in the US, since optics tends to win over substance, Biden would not have inspired his supporters with confidence.

Julian Assange finally walks free

He is now back in Australia, after years of being hounded by the US government that was angered by Wikileaks publishing documents that showed the horrific abuses by the US in Iraq, such as the Collateral Murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning of US forces in a helicopter gunship mowing down unarmed civilians in a street, after the gunners misidentified the camera equipment they were carrying as weapons.


[Read more…]

Debate mind games

The first debate between Joe Biden and serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) will be held on Thursday from 6:00-7:30 pm (Eastern Time) in Atlanta, GA in the studios of CNN that is hosting the debate. It is not clear if CNN is only streaming it on its own cable channels. If so, since I do not have cable TV nor do I subscribe to CNN, I will not be able to watch it live and will have to see it later when (if?) it is streamed online.

We are currently in the familiar game of setting expectations. Each side will of course claim victory whatever happens but beating expectations is one important metric that is used and is easier to do if each side sets a low bar for their own person and a high bar for the opponent.

SSACFT’s team and their right-wing echo chamber have had to do some serious contortions because I think that they really are afraid of what the debate might show. For the longest time they have been portraying Biden as doddering, drooling, and senile. But that hurt them when he turned in a feisty State of the Union speech and so now, fearing that this will happen again, they have started repeating the mantra that he was on drugs then and will be so again. There is zero evidence for any of this but that has not prevented them from spreading lies before on any number of issues so why stop now?
[Read more…]

Rishi Sunak’s hapless election campaign

The British prime minister gambled when he dissolved parliament and called elections for July 4th when he was about 20 points behind in the polls. For him to succeed in spite of that handicap would require everything to go right for him. And yet, there has been one thing after another that seems to be dragging him down.

It started with the announcement itself when a sudden downpour began when he was in the middle of delivering the news of parliament dissolution to the assembled press outside Downing Street. If the rain had started before the speech he could have changed the venue or the time. But since he had already started speaking, he had little choice but to gamely continue while getting soaked. It was not a good look and was considered an inauspicious start. Things have not gone better for him since.
[Read more…]

Trump’s second term agenda

Serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) has made all manner of statements about what he wants to do if he should be re-elected in November. But while he was erratic and chaotic during his first term, there is a well-organized group that is working to create a detailed agenda that will provide a blueprint that they want him to implement. It is called Project 2025 and it calls for the steady dismantling of many of the checks and balances that prevent ideologues from using the government as if it were a private company run by a CEO who can make unilateral decisions that will affect the entire population.

On his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver looks at who is behind Project 2025 and what they seek to achieve. It is not good.

Interesting insider view of UK politics

As the UK heads into its general election on July 4th, David Remnick had an interesting interview with Rory Stewart who was at one time an ambitious Conservative politician and member of parliament in the UK, intent on climbing up the leadership ladder and someday becoming prime minister. He had all the pre-requisites for a Conservative party leader, coming from a privileged family, attending an elite private school (Eton) and then Oxford University, and he quickly rose up the party ranks after he first became an MP in 2010. He competed for party leader in 2019, losing to Boris Johnson.
[Read more…]

Lessons of Covid for the next pandemic

Public health experts say that another pandemic is inevitable, that it is not a question of ‘if’ but when and what form it will take. So what lessons have we learned from the Covid-19 pandemic we just had (and that still lingers on) that we can apply to the next one?

Clearly scientists and health experts were scrambling to contain the virus and various measures were adopted, not all of them successful. Some will depend on the nature of the virus itself and how it is transmitted. If it is in the form of droplets that fall, then physical distancing will help though the distance required may be different from the six feet that we were told. If the virus is transmitted in the form of aerosols that float through the air and linger longer, distancing may not help. But in either case, masking helps but only if we use high quality N95 or KN94 masks and not the paper or the homemade cloth ones. So having a stockpile of those good masks at the ready to hand out to the public would be a good idea.

Avoiding crowded indoor spaces where lots of people gather is also recommended. If one has to be indoors with others, it would be better if the place is well ventilated.

Working at home, if possible, is probably beneficial. When it comes to closing down schools, offices, and restaurants, the cost-benefit analysis is more complicated.

One positive thing that came out of this pandemic is that scientists seem to have developed new techniques to quickly identify the nature of the virus and develop vaccines for it. Of course, that will not help much if the same nutters who opposed vaccinations the last time around are still vocal.

Kevin Drum provides a comprehensive list other the measures that were taken and how effective they were.

Charges dropped against Columbia student protestors

Columbia University had a terrible response to the student protests over Gaza, unleashing the police in a heavy-handed crackdown and arresting many people. Now charges against almost all of them have been dropped.

Dozens of pro-Palestinian student protesters arrested in April after occupying and barricading a building at Columbia University in New York City have had all criminal charges against them dropped, Manhattan prosecutors said at a court hearing.

The hearing at the Manhattan criminal courthouse came seven weeks after Columbia administrators called in hundreds of armed and heavily armored police officers to the university’s campus in a high-profile law-enforcement response that was broadcast live on national news channels.

Police arrested 46 protesters who had barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall, and cleared a weeks-old tent encampment on a nearby Columbia lawn that has inspired similar pro-Palestinian protests at universities around the world.

All 46 protesters, who were arrested on the night of 30 April about 20 hours after taking over the academic building, were initially charged with trespass in the third degree, a misdemeanor.

Stephen Millan, a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, told the court on Thursday his office would not prosecute 30 protesters who were Columbia students at the time of the arrest, nor two who were Columbia employees, citing prosecutorial discretion and lack of evidence. A case against another student was dismissed earlier in the month.

Millan said protesters wore masks and covered surveillance cameras, and there was insufficient evidence to show that any individual defendant damaged property or injured anyone.

No police officers were injured during the arrests, the prosecutor noted.

[Read more…]

Public health safety measures that would never pass now

The Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has been warning of the dangers of social media on young children and proposes warning labels for them. I am not sure what form that it will take and how effective it would be (assuming that it ever gets enacted) but it did make me think of one of the biggest positive acts by a former Surgeon General and that was the warning labels on tobacco packs promoted by his predecessor C. Everatt Koop. “As Surgeon General, he released eight reports on the health consequences of tobacco use, including the first report on the health consequences of involuntary tobacco smoke exposure. During Koop’s tenure as Surgeon General, smoking rates in the United States declined significantly from 38% to 27%”.

Thanks to actions like those taken by the government in those days, we now have cleaner air and water, fluoride in the water, and bans on the widespread use of some pesticides like DDT.

We also had the ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were destroying the ozone layer. That story of how the fight against that harmful chemical was won by scientists can be read here.
[Read more…]

Biden hammers Trump leading up to the debate

Up to now, Joe Biden has been relatively subdued in his attacks on serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT), despite getting severely attacked by SSACFT and his supporters in the right wing echo chamber. But in a new press release, the Biden campaign hammers SSACFT harder than anything I have seen so far. It is a pretty comprehensive takedown. It looks like this is the tack Biden is going to take in the debate on June 27th.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 17, 2024

Trump’s Debate Lies Show How Scared He Is

Donald Trump is a liar and a fraud. His campaign is full of liars and frauds. And their desperate leaks and lies to the right-wing media only underscore how scared Donald Trump is to debate.This is Donald’s debate playbook: lies, distractions, and deceit. Donald Trump and his campaign are scared because they can’t defend his record, personal conduct, or extreme agenda in front of the American people.Donald can’t defend that he’s a criminal who has been convicted of 34 felonies, was found liable for sexual assault, committed financial fraud, and is only out for himself.
[Read more…]