President Donald Trump
launched a new attempt to mislead America over the state of the
fast-worsening pandemic Tuesday, after his prime time televised
celebration of Amy Coney Barrett's Supreme Court confirmation failed to distract from the mishandled emergency that is threatening his reelection hopes.
Tuesday, October 27, 2020
Trump tries to distract Americans on pandemic in final election sprint
Haredim and Coronavirus: Policy Recommendations for Exit from Second Lockdown
https://en.idi.org.il/articles/32679
Large portions of the ultra-Orthodox community and their leadership have come to the conclusion that the risk posed by the virus is not as severe as claimed by the experts and professionals. This stems from their skepticism about the authorities but also from their dismissal of scientific and medical knowledge. The fact that the ultra-Orthodox sector in Israel is among the youngest communities in the world, has intensified this feeling, especially among the younger generation, that “It won't happen to me," and encouraged them to ignore the rules.
No matter who wins the US election, the world's 'fake news' problem is here to stay
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/25/world/trump-fake-news-legacy-intl/index.html
But the specter of disinformation and foreign electoral interference, which has loomed large over the 2020 presidential race,
is perhaps not as pernicious as the language now coming out of the
White House itself. Less than two weeks out from the election, Trump has
touted unfounded narratives and conspiracy theories casting doubt over mail-in voting and the November results -- which could leave Americans even more vulnerable to further manipulation, experts warn.
"There is no question that the fact that
the President of the United States is using this term to attack
independent media gives an element of license to other politicians
elsewhere, including some authoritarian leaders to dress up their own
attacks on independent media and point to the example of the US," said
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of
Journalism.
Third wave of coronavirus infections in the U.S.? More like 'wildfire,' epidemiologist says
“I look at it more as an elongated exacerbation of the original first wave,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Monday at an annual event for Yahoo Finance. “It’s kind of semantics. You want to call it the third wave or an extended first wave, no matter how you look at it, it's not good news.”
U.S. COVID-19 Cases Are Skyrocketing, But Deaths Are Flat—So Far. These 5 Charts Explain Why
https://time.com/5903590/coronavirus-covid-19-third-wave/
But despite this rapid uptick in cases, the daily death count in the U.S. is not yet rising at the same rate, and remains at lower levels than in April. At face value, a lower case-to-fatality rate suggests that fewer people who test positive for the virus are dying from it. But the virus hasn’t necessarily become less lethal; it isn’t mutating quickly enough for that to be the case.
What’s happening now is not a result of how the virus treats humans, but rather how humans are treating the virus—that is, how we test for it, how we avoid it and how we combat it. The following five charts explain how human-driven factors are, at least for the moment, keeping deaths from spiking as high as they did early in the pandemic, even as cases rise dramatically.
The coronavirus poses a greater mortality risk to the elderly compared to younger people. Among all Americans who have tested positive for COVID-19, the CDC’s current best estimate is that 5.4% died and were 70 or older, 0.5% died and were between 50 and 69, and only 0.02% died and were 20-49 years old.
In the first weeks of the pandemic, the virus tore through assisted-living facilities and nursing homes, where lots of vulnerable elderly people lived. As a result, the death count skyrocketed. But over time, as the virus spread in places like bars and college campuses, the share of U.S. COVID-19 cases have skewed younger, meaning many of those becoming infected are less vulnerable to severe illness. The CDC reported last month that children and adults under 30 made up around 16% of COVID-19 cases in February through April, but by August, that group accounted for more than one in three cases.
The number of younger people contracting the virus
continues to grow, contributing to the rise in overall cases. Yet
because they are less vulnerable to the virus, they are not driving up
the number of deaths in tandem. (While young people are less vulnerable
to COVID-19 in general, they can and do die from the disease, and can
spread it to other people.)
Lagging in the Polls, Trump Team Predicts Win Based on 'Enthusiasm'
https://www.newsweek.com/lagging-polls-trump-team-predicts-win-based-enthusiasm-1541073
Eric Trump told a rally crowd in Michigan the following day that he predicts a bigger win for his father than in 2016 based on "enthusiasm."
"The enthusiasm is unlike anything that we've seen before," he told a crowd of hundreds of people. "I'm telling you the polls are wrong. I am telling you they're going to get it wrong again."
Jared Kushner's very revealing comment on Black Americans' desire for success
"One thing we've seen in a lot of the Black community, which is mostly Democrat, is that President (Donald) Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about," senior White House adviser Jared Kushner said Monday morning on Fox News. "But he can't want them to be successful more than they want to be successful."
On Monday, Democratic National Committee National press secretary Brandon Gassaway issued a sharp rebuke of Kushner and his ilk.
"This
dismissive approach to the issues that Black voters care about is
indicative of Trump's callousness and disregard for the lives of Black
people," Gassaway said in a statement. "We cannot afford another four
years of a White House that does not take our voices seriously and tells
us to be grateful for whatever scraps are left over from the bargaining
table."
FactChecking Trump’s Fox News Interview
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/09/factchecking-trumps-fox-news-interview-2/
Trump said, “I’m bringing many of the troops home and most of the troops home.” But the number in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria is nearly the same as it was in the last month under President Barack Obama. The overall number of overseas troops is only slightly smaller.
Four years in, Trump has plenty of unfinished business
https://www.startribune.com/four-years-in-trump-has-plenty-of-unfinished-business/572853261/
Trump has made only modest progress toward meeting his 2016 pledge to bring home all troops from what he calls America's "endless wars."
When Trump took over the White House, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan stood at about 8,400, and there were about 6,800 troops in Iraq.
Within a year, the number of troops in Afghanistan climbed to about 15,000. Trump approved commanders' requests for additional troops to reverse setbacks in the training of Afghan forces, fight an increasingly dangerous Islamic State group and put enough pressure on the Taliban to force it to the peace table.
In February, the U.S. and the Taliban signed an agreement that calls for the eventual complete withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
With an eye toward the election, Trump has accelerated his push to bring troops home, teasing that all U.S. troops could be out of Afghanistan by the end of the year.
Trump's Twitter promises to bring U.S. troops home make headlines. Has he kept them?
Consequently, in the closing weeks of his 2020 re-election campaign, it would seem appropriate to consider whether or not he has lived up to this promise, how he has attempted to do so and if this effort has made the nation safer.
But as Americans vote this fall, Trump’s promise of a dramatic reduction in American troop presence abroad has not been achieved, nor has he dramatically shifted costs to U.S. allies. In fact, the Trump administration has increased U.S. defense spending in the last several years by nearly $140 billion, from $611 billion in 2016 to $750 billion in 2019, Foreign Affairs reported. When Trump settled into the Oval Office in January 2017, the United States had a little under 200,000 troops deployed overseas. Best estimates are that number has been reduced slightly, but this may largely reflect a difference in accounting. Since 2017, the Department of Defense has excluded troops deployed to Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria from its official reports, arguing that providing the number of troops in a combat theater violated operational security.
US election 2020: Has Trump kept his promises on the military?
https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54060026
The chart shows military spending has steadily increased since President Trump took office in January 2017.However, this spending is still significantly lower than during the first term of the Obama administration, using figures adjusted for inflation
The reduction of troops was much greater under President Obama, as both large-scale deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan ended during his years in charge.
Monday, October 26, 2020
Trump's '60 Minutes' tantrum told us everything
The blessing in Trump's "60 Minutes" performance is that it did help make the voters' choice clear. Both men are, in a sense, offering more of the same. Trump assures more drama. Biden promises a return to the steady and familiar.
Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein condemns Trump
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/289899
While a majority of Orthodox Jews are expected to vote for Donald Trump in next week’s U.S. presidential election, a major Israeli Orthodox rabbi who also has a large following in the United States strongly condemned the president in an interview this week.
Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein, one of the heads of Yeshivat Har Etzion, questioned Trump’s mental and moral fitness in an interview with the Israeli magazine Makor Rishon.
“This is a mentally disturbed person without any inhibition or judgement who controls the button of the the most powerful nuclear weapons in the world — and here people applaud him for opening an embassy in Jerusalem,” Lichtenstein said.
“They don’t stop for a moment to think about the moral damage that he inflicts on the United States, or even on the world. They don’t ask how it’s possible to abandon the fate of humanity to such an unbalanced man, who doesn’t recognize the concepts of truth and falsehood,” he said.
“All of this will harm us, even if there’s an embassy in Jerusalem,” he added.
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