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.”
Friday, October 30, 2020
Donald Trump has run a historically bad reelection campaign
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/29/opinions/trump-bad-reelection-campaign-wierson-honan/index.html
As we head into the final days of the presidential contest -- a time when candidates generally race to make their best closing arguments to the voters -- it is worth looking at how badly run the Trump campaign has been.
Thursday, October 29, 2020
White House informs Congress of plans to sell as many as 50 F-35s to UAE
The Trump administration has updated Congress of its intent to sell F-35 advanced fighter jets to the United Arab Emirates, a ranking House Democrat announced on Thursday. The informal notification to the House Foreign Affairs Committee revealed that the White House plans to sell as many as 50 units of the Lockheed Martin-made jets for roughly $10.4 billion, a senior congressional staffer told The Times of Israel. Israel has ordered the same number of F-35s from the US, though not all of them have been transferred yet.
Donald Trump's secret sauce for not paying his debts
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/10/28/politics/donald-trump-loans-debt-new-york-times/index.html
How do you get a bank to forgive almost $300 million in loans for a failed real estate project? You act like Donald Trump.
Which means this: Donald Trump was such a public bully that the lenders preferred to work to eat the debt (or a large portion of it) rather than risk a fight with him because, well, they had made the calculation it simply wasn't worth it.
U.S. election result will shake up Israeli politics
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's biggest domestic political asset is on the ballot on Nov. 3 — his relationship with President Trump.
Why it matters: The outcome of America's election could help determine whether Israel soon faces yet another election of its own.
White House Touts Trump’s 5 Science Accomplishments, Including ‘Ending The Pandemic’
Well, here’s some amazing news. On Tuesday, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release of the Trump Administration’s science and technology accomplishments from President Donald Trump’s first term. The release accompanied the unveiling of a longer document from the Office and listed five highlights. Guess what the first one on the list was. “Ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”
The press release included a quote from Ivanka Trump, listed as an Advisor to the President. Because, after all, when you think of science and technology, you think of Ivanka Trump, right? This was the statement from Trump’s daughter: “Over the past four years, President Trump’s policies and investments in science and technology ensure America stands ready to solve today’s most pressing challenges and that our workforce is prepared for tomorrow’s innovations. For years to come, these achievements will guarantee the United States remains the world’s leader in research, discovery and the advancement of industries that will shape our future.”
Trump claims he ‘ended’ the pandemic as cases surge
The deluge of early votes for Tuesday’s US presidential election has topped 70m – the equivalent of more than half of all votes cast in 2016 – as Donald Trump brazenly listed one of the highlights of his presidency as “ending the Covid-19 pandemic”.
Trump’s claim, delivered in a White House press release, came in a week that has seen days of record new infections, daily deaths running at almost 1,000 a day, and a 23% increase in cases.
But it was the coronavirus pandemic that continued to dominate the agenda. Asked about Trump’s claim to have “ended it”, even the White House communications director, Alyssa Farah, struggled to defend the assertion.
“I think that was poorly worded,” Farah told Fox news. “The intent was to say that it is our goal to end the virus. But what I would say is this, because of the president’s leadership, we are rounding the corner on the virus.”