Future debate plans and schedule

The next debate on the schedule is between the vice-presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Mike Pence to be held on October 7 at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. Usually the vice-presidential debate does not generate much excitement (with the possible exception of 2008 when Sarah Palin was debating Joe Biden and people wanted to see if she knew where Europe was) but given the utter disaster of the first presidential debate and no indication that Trump will behave any better in the next two presidential debates, this one might be the only chance to have anything approaching a substantive discussion of the issues. Harris is sharp and aggressive and quick on her feet and it will be interesting to see how Pence will defend his indefensible boss.
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Trump’s transition plans

There has been much speculation about whether Trump will accept the results of the election if he loses, speculation that has been deliberately fueled by Trump himself. As I have said before, this is just bluster, designed to sow fear and chaos. Joe Biden was right to dismiss that possibility in the debate. If Trump loses, he has to leave office because the only way he can continue is by a military coup and there is no way that the military is going to be part of that scheme. He may hope that the US Supreme Court will declare him the victor but that option is also a highly remote one unless the results are hair-splittingly close.

Tom the Dancing Bug 1506 donald and john – transfer of power

(Tom the Dancing Bug)

Scott Atlas is exactly the kind of ‘science expert’ Trump likes …

… because he tells Trump what he wants to hear. But the real scientists among the government’s top health advisors are now openly sounding the alarm about Atlas’s outsize influence with Trump that he is using to spread wrong information.

Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday joined fellow White House coronavirus task members Dr. Deborah Birx and Centers for Disease Control Director Dr. Robert Redfield in expressing his concerns that President Trump’s new favorite COVID-19 adviser, Dr. Scott Atlas, is feeding the President misinformation amid the pandemic.

On Monday, NBC News reported that while on a flight from Atlanta to Washington D.C., Redfield was overheard criticizing Atlas — a neurologist who hasn’t practiced medicine since 2012 — by proclaiming that “everything he says is false” on COVID-19.

Redfield’s reportedly dim view of the President’s favorite COVID-19 adviser comes a week after CNN reported that Birx, another prominent task force member who has managed to stay in the President’s good graces, has become “distressed” over Trump’s admiration of Atlas.

According to CNN, Birx views Atlas as “somebody who matches what (Trump) wants to believe” as the President continues offering a rosy picture of his administration’s COVID-19 response amid the country topping more than 200,000 fatalities from the novel coronavirus.

Trump loves people who can gauge what he wants to believe and then tell him that same thing.

What to look for on election night

The election system in the US is under attack as Trump seeks to preemptively discredit the process so that in the event that he loses, he can claim that the system was rigged against him, despite the manifestly obvious fact that he and the Republicans have gone to great extents to disenfranchise those groups of people whom they think might vote against him (people of color, the poor, and the young) and tilt things in favor of those whom he thinks like him (old, white, religious, suburban, and well-to-do).
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More on Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacists

As I expected, Trump’s refusal to condemn white supremacy in last night’s disgraceful apology for a debate has been the main topic of conversation today. You have to really see that exchange to appreciate it. Watch Trump get that hunted look in his eyes when he is asked if he will condemn white supremacists, as he tries desperately to think of a way to wriggle out of doing so. Notice that moderator Chris Wallace asks him “”Are you willing, tonight, to condemn white supremacists and militia groups and to say that they need to stand down…” But Trump responds with the infamous line to the Proud Boys to “Stand back and stand by“, that they are now gleefully taking as an endorsement of them.


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Reflections on last night’s ‘debate’

I watched the first presidential ‘debate’ last night between Joe Biden and Donald Trump with the idea of taking notes for an analytic blog post but within the first few minutes I gave up because what was happening was, to put it mildly, an utter disgrace. It was not a debate. It was a display of childish, petulant, rude behavior by a man-child that happens to be the president of the United States.

From the beginning Trump had an angry, choleric look, florid, scowling, and pouting, constantly interrupting and talking over Joe Biden and the moderator Chris Wallace. (Don’t they put make up on people so that they do not look so red?) Wallace was reduced to pleading with Trump to follow the rules that his team had agreed to and let the other person speak but it was no use. Trump simply raged on. Wallace has been criticized for losing control of the debate but it is not clear what he could have done other than simply get up and walk off, since Trump was so out of control. And I really mean out of control. Trump did not look like someone who was carrying out a pre-planned strategy of interrupting to throw Biden off balance. It was the other way around. Not only did Biden not get rattled, he would laugh at Trump and call him a clown and a racist and that seemed to enrage Trump even more. Trump looked like a man who is angry and thinks he is going to lose the election because he is being treated unfairly by everyone, including people in his own administration, and just let all his grievances pour out. It was a litany of the applause lines that he gives the audience at his rallies and on twitter but in the context of the debate they just seemed like random rants that had no connective tissue.
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Say goodbye to privacy

In an article titled The Big Tech Extortion Racket in the September 2020 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Barry C. Lynn discusses how much information Facebook and Google have on us and how their renting out this information to anyone willing to pay results in us being exploited. He says that by rolling back the anti-monopoly protections that had been in place, Congress has given them enormous power over the digital marketplace.
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