Jared Kushner is a privileged white man whose greatest
accomplishments include being born into a privileged family and then
marrying into an even more privileged one. Somehow, this makes him think
he’s qualified to lecture Black people about how to make it in America.
So much so that he effectively implied that Black Americans don't want to be successful on Fox News this morning.
https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-appears-confuse-trump-george-bush-campaign-gaffe-2020-10
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-george-lopez-social-media-27e0006230358f0d0d98bf0e4c5959ca
CLAIM: In an interview, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden confused President Donald Trump with former President George W. Bush.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. Biden and his wife, Jill, were being interviewed by actor and comedian George Lopez during the virtual “I Will Vote” concert Sunday.
THE FACTS: Social media users are sharing a 27-second clip of Joe and Jill Biden to suggest that Biden is not mentally fit to run for office ahead of Election Day. But the clips being widely shared lack context.
https://www.politifact.com/article/2020/oct/26/context-did-joe-biden-confuse-donald-trump-george-/
In the clip, Biden says "George" while discussing the significance of the upcoming election, which some viewers took as an allusion to former President George W. Bush.
The clip was shared on Twitter by Republican National Committee rapid response director Steve Guest, who used it to attack Biden’s mental acuity. The next day, media outlets including Fox News, Sky News, and the Today Show published stories on Biden’s comments, and Trump tweeted about it.
Some reporters, however, pointed out that Biden could have been referring to his interviewer, comedian George Lopez.
Joe Biden: "Well, first of all, the reason they should vote is that there’s a lot on the ballot this year. I mean, this is the most consequential… Not because I’m running but because of who I’m running against. This is the most consequential election in a long, long, long time. And the character of the country in my view is literally on the ballot, what kind of country are we going to be. Four more years of George uh… George, we’re going to find ourselves in a position where if Trump gets elected, we are going to be in a different world. And so… The reason I think people should be voting is out of their own self-interest right now, because look, you know, everything is at stake from the environment to our health. You heard what his, his, his chief of staff —"
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/27/obama-blasts-kushner-black-american-comments-432829
Kushner made the comments during an interview on “Fox & Friends” on Monday morning during which he also referred to raising concerns about racial inequality as “complaining” and suggested that those who protested systemic racism over the summer were more interested in “virtue signaling” than solving those issues.
"The thing we've seen in the Black community, which is mostly Democrat,” Kushner argued, “is that President Trump's policies are the policies that can help people break out of the problems that they're complaining about, but he can't want them to be successful more than they want to be successful."
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.
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.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/25/world/trump-fake-news-legacy-intl/index.html
“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.”
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.)
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."
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.salon.com/2020/09/20/trump-and-his-supporters-have-made-a-mockery-of-us-patriotism/
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/26/politics/fact-check-testing-cases-october/index.html
President Donald Trump has claimed over and over in the past week -- at campaign rallies, on Twitter and in an interview with "60 Minutes" -- that the US is only seeing so many coronavirus cases because the country is doing so much testing.
Facts First: The spike in US coronavirus cases is not being caused by an increase in testing. The number of confirmed new cases is increasing at a faster rate than the number of new tests. And the number of hospitalizations and deaths is also rising, which shows that, contrary to Trump's repeated claims, the increase in the case numbers isn't merely being caused by tests capturing mild cases. Taken together, the numbers tell a consistent story: the situation in the US is genuinely getting worse.
"I know what my father believes in. Prior to politics, he supported gays, lesbians, the LGBQIA+ community," she said at the event Saturday in Tampa, Florida, which organizers said drew 150 people. "My father has always supported all of you. ... He's never done it for politics."
At the Philadelphia event, Lara Trump, the president's daughter-in-law, called him "the most pro-gay president in history." In Tampa, Richard Grenell, the former acting director of national intelligence, said, "Mr. President, the gays love you."
https://time.com/5903673/record-daily-coronavirus-cases/
There have been clear signs for weeks of a third wave of the pandemic in the U.S. as the weather gets colder and the virus has migrated from metropolitan regions to more rural settings. But it was far from certain, at the beginning of October, that the resurgence would surpass that of the summer, even though the figures were climbing far sooner than the timeline of the most promising vaccine trials, one of which was temporarily halted after a volunteer became ill but is set to resume soon.
We know now that the third wave will be worse than the second, which was far worse than the first, when cases peaked at 9.7 per 100,000 on April 7.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-endorsement-conservative-new-hampshire-union-leader-newspaper
“Joe Biden may not be the president we want, but in 2020 he is the president we desperately need. He will be a president to bring people together and right the ship of state,” it said. “Sadly, President Trump has proven himself to be the antithesis of thoughtful and pragmatic; he has failed to earn a second term.”
Florida’s COVID-19 death rate since the pandemic began is ninth among states, tied with Illinois, at 76 deaths per 100,000 people, according to the CDC. That’s higher than Texas (60) and California (43). A rate for New York State including New York City is unavailable.
Over the past three months, Florida’s death rate per 100,000 people has tripled, CDC data show. It was 25.9 on July 25. California then had 20.3 deaths per 100,000 and Texas 15.8 deaths.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/23/politics/biden-fracking-fact-check/index.html
Former Vice President Joe Biden claimed that he "never said I oppose fracking" when pressed by President Donald Trump on the issue during Thursday night's presidential debate.
Trump’s rapid action after the Sept. 25 fundraiser — one of dozens of high-dollar donor events he has headlined while in office — emblemizes how much he has abandoned his 2016 pledge to “DRAIN THE SWAMP.”
In the closing weeks of that election, Trump led cheering supporters in chants of that slogan, promising that he would completely disrupt the culture of Washington. He warned of the power of lobbyists and political donors who he said effectively bought off elected officials. He told voters he was uniquely prepared to take on the issue, because he knew personally as a contributor how the system worked.
But during his four years in office, Trump has taken few steps to clean up Washington. He has instead presided over a norm-shattering expansion of private interests in government.
Among the five pledges Trump made to “drain the swamp” and curtail the influence of lobbyists in a major campaign speech in October 2016, a Washington Post review found that he sought to address only two, through an executive order in January 2017 — which contained a major loophole.
The tweet linked to further rationale. “The biggest reason you haven’t heard much on NPR about the Post story is that the assertions don’t amount to much,” NPR’s Kelly McBride wrote.
https://www.wilx.com/2020/10/22/what-is-the-hunter-biden-laptop-scandal/
The New York Post published installments of the leaked emails, claiming they proved Joe Biden met with an adviser to Ukrainian energy company Burisma, where Hunter Biden was a board member. However, the emails alone do not prove that allegation. The emails use vague wording, and it is not clear whether the laptop actually belonged to Hunter Biden.
Currently, no one has been able to confirm the ownership of the laptop, the authenticity of the emails, or whether they had any effect on Joe Biden’s actions. If a verifiable source is found, News 10 will report it.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/19/trump-victory-democrats-election-430013
By almost every measure that political operatives, academics and handicappers use to forecast elections, the likely outcome is that Joe Biden will win the White House.
Yet two weeks before Election Day, the unfolding reality of 2020 is that it’s harder than ever to be sure. And Democrats are scrambling to account for the hidden variables that could still sink their nominee — or what you might call the known unknowns.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-trailing-polls-hunter-biden-little-impact-gop-pollster-1541861
Republican pollster Frank Luntz thinks former Vice President Joe Biden will win the presidential election on November 3 and it's too late for President Donald Trump to turn things around.
Luntz has criticized the Trump campaign for focusing on Biden's son, Hunter Biden, and his alleged financial dealings in Ukraine and China. The veteran Republican consultant thinks most people just don't care.
The Wall Street Journal newsroom has found that texts and emails recently given to the publication by Tony Bobulinski, a former business partner of Hunter Biden, the son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, provide no evidence that Joe ever used his political standing as a former vice president to aid Hunter's business dealings in China.
Following the publication of the opinion article, Wall Street Journal reporters Andrew Duehren and James T. Areddy wrote a news article stating, "The venture—set up in 2017 after Mr. Biden left the vice presidency and before his presidential campaign—never received proposed funds from the Chinese company or completed any deals, according to people familiar with the matter. Corporate records reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show no role for Joe Biden."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/mike-huckabee-hunter-biden-trump-mistake
"Yeah, it is a mistake because the average person doesn't understand it, it is too complicated, and, frankly, it doesn't matter to them," Huckabee said in response to "Fox & Friends" host Brian Kilmeade, who asked whether Trump should emphasize the story in the campaign's closing days.
"They care about their health care costs, they care about their taxes, they care about safety and their neighborhood on their block and in their yard. Focus on that and he wins the election by a landslide," Huckabee suggested.
Steipler The Steipler told fathers to look for 3 qualities in a son in law1 intelligence, diligence (hasmoda) and character (midos)One father objected saying there was no need for the third since all talmidei chachomim have midos.The Steipler responded “A wife is not a shtender!” after many years in yeshiva a bachor learns to relate properly to his shtender and gemora but not to a request to take out the garbage or who needs attention d character to put up with a sick wife a sick child to sleep. For that you need good character
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54625422
US President Donald Trump has a Chinese bank account and spent years pursuing business projects in the country, the New York Times has reported.
The account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management and paid local taxes between 2013 and 2015.
It was set up "to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia", according to a Trump spokesman.
Mr Trump has been critical of US firms doing business in China and sparked a trade war between the two countries.
The NY Times revealed the account after obtaining Mr Trump's tax records, which included both personal and company financial details.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/20/politics/republican-senate-reaction-trump/index.html
For four years, Republican senators have shrugged off President Donald Trump's constant string of controversies and scandals. They've ignored his Twitter outbursts and endless grievances. And they've avoided confronting him, while voting mostly in lockstep for his agenda and protecting him during his impeachment trial.
https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-350-prominent-republicans-voting-joe-biden-1540611
With two weeks until Election Day, former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele has endorsed Democratic nominee Joe Biden for president, joining 347 other prominent Republicans who are voting blue come November 3.
These Republicans have broken party lines to speak out against President Donald Trump and publicly endorse Biden. One of the most notable GOP groups is the Lincoln Project, whose ads have severely attacked the president. The anti-Trump group is led by several high-profile Republicans, including John Weaver, Rick Wilson, George Conway, Reed Galen and Jennifer Horn.
