Sunday, November 1, 2020
Politics is complicated
Shannon Nuszen: From missionary to observant Jew
https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/shannon-nuezen-from-missionary-to-observant-jew-647124
Some time ago, I met a most interesting woman, highly qualified to talk about the tactics of proselytizing Jews, to bring them to believe in Jesus as the Messiah and the training required by missionaries. She is Shannon Nuszen, a former Evangelical missionary, who is today a Torah-observant Jew. In light of the recent controversy in Israel concerning the now-defunct missionizing Shelanu TV program – an offshoot of the widespread GOD TV – both directed especially at Jews, I wanted to find out what spreading the Gospel to Jews implies, and its modus operandi.
'An incredible scar': the harsh toll of Trump's 400-mile wall through national parks
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/oct/31/trump-border-wall-wilderness-wildlife-impact
Donald Trump entered the Oval Office with a campaign promise to build 450 miles of a new “border wall system” – a combination of infrastructure including bollard barriers, roads, perimeter lighting, enforcement cameras and other technology – even amid the pandemic, has continued at an increasing pace. According to Customs and Border Protection, 400 miles of the border wall system has been completed so far, with physical barriers from 18-30ft tall. If he wins, he may well aspire to wall off the border in its entirety.
Trump Thinks He’s Found Biden’s Greatest Vulnerability
After 18 months of flogging the Hunter Biden story, what does President Donald Trump have to show for his efforts? His opposition research on former Vice President Joe Biden’s son culminated in his own impeachment. Despite railing against the scion’s alleged swampiness at nearly every rally, Trump’s convoluted narrative about Biden family corruption has taken root only on Fox News. At the very least, the accusation that Hunter leveraged his father’s high office to enrich himself has failed to measurably move the polls. Even Trump’s ardent supporters are now encouraging him to change the subject. Yet he remains obstinate in his obsession.
Without a coherent message or an affirmative vision for a second
term, Trump has clearly been betting his reelection on what military
planners would call a “psyop,” or a psychological operation.
That is, he hopes to use gamesmanship to destabilize the mind of his
adversary, forcing him into a moment of anger or incoherence that
illustrates his lack of fitness for the office. (“Too old and out of it”
is how Trump puts it.) His attacks on Hunter Biden should be understood
as the pillar of this strategy.
Here's what happened when NBC News tried to report on the alleged Hunter Biden emails
Trump and his allies say there is evidence of corruption in emails and documents allegedly found on a laptop belonging to Democrat Joe Biden’s son. They say those and other documents show that Hunter Biden used his father’s influence to enrich himself through business deals in Ukraine and China, and that his father not only facilitated that, but may have benefited financially.
But
the Wall Street Journal and Fox News — among the only news
organizations that have been given access to key documents — found that
the emails and other records don’t make that case. Leaving aside the
many questions about their provenance, the materials offered no evidence
that Joe Biden played any role in his son’s dealings in China, let
alone profited from them, both news organizations concluded.
Alleged Hunter Biden Emails Circulated in Ukraine as Rudy Giuliani Dug for Dirt There Last Year
https://time.com/5902557/hunter-biden-rudy-giuliani-ukraine/
Explicit photos and emails purportedly belonging to Hunter Biden were circulating in Ukraine last year at the same time that Rudy Giuliani was searching for dirt there on former Vice President Joe Biden, two people approached about the material during that period tell TIME.
The emails’ alleged availability, which has not
been previously reported, comes to light in the wake of Giuliani’s
recent claims that he obtained private photos and emails of Hunter Biden
from a broken laptop abandoned in Delaware. Giuliani, who is President
Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, has passed this material to right-wing
news outlets, which began publishing it last week. Giuliani did not
respond to requests for comment on the origins of the material he
obtained.
A once restrained Fauci unleashes on White House coronavirus approach days before election
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/01/politics/donald-trump-anthony-fauci-2020-campaign/index.html
As President Donald Trump fights his way through the final days of the presidential campaign denying the pandemic — by lashing out at doctors, disputing science and slashing the press for highlighting rising coronavirus case counts — the long-running rift between the White House and Dr. Anthony Fauci burst into the open Saturday night.
But Fauci's restraint appeared to have evaporated in a Washington Post interview that was published Saturday night, in which he called out the White House for allowing its strategy for fighting the virus to be shaped in part by a neuroradiologist with no training in the field of infectious disease and said he appreciated chief of staff Mark Meadows' honesty when he admitted to CNN's Jake Tapper during a recent interview that the administration has given up controlling the spread of the virus.
Saturday, October 31, 2020
Doctors groups rip Trump for touting baseless conspiracy over COVID-19 death count
Medical groups are slamming President Donald Trump for resurfacing a baseless conspiracy on campaign stops that doctors are inflating the number of COVID-19 deaths in the USA in order to drive up profits during the pandemic.
Trump uses Midwestern swing to launch false attacks on doctors while Covid cases rise
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/31/politics/donald-trump-doctors-midwest-2020-election/index.html
"With us, when in doubt -- choose Covid," Trump said. "Now they'll say 'Oh that's terrible what he said,' but that's true. It's like $2,000 more, so you get more money."
White House aide says Trump's vaccine-by-Election Day promise was 'arbitrary'
A top White House adviser on Friday called President Donald Trump’s long-shot pledge to have a coronavirus vaccine by Nov. 3 “kind of an arbitrary deadline,” as Election Day prepares to come and go with no shot having even applied for approval yet.
“We’ve got nearly half a dozen vaccines that are in Phase Three clinical trials, which is record time to get it there for a novel virus like we’re dealing with,” White House strategic communications director Alyssa Farah told reporters. “We’re still highly confident we’ll have one by the end of the year and be prepared to deploy it to a hundred million Americans.”
In the Oct. 22 debate with Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Trump claimed that “we have a vaccine” that is “ready” and would be announced “within weeks.”
At a campaign rally in Arizona this week, Trump assured attendees that they would have a vaccine “momentarily,” a promise that came as the country has seen a surge in new cases nearly everywhere.
Twitter CEO suggests Holocaust denial not banned, in Senate grilling
Gardner specifically asked Dorsey: “If somebody denied the Holocaust happened, it’s not misinformation?”
“It’s misleading information,” Dorsey responded. “But we don’t have a policy against that type of misleading information.”