"Hurricane Delta has strengthened back into a Category 2 as it heads for a Friday landfall on the Gulf Coast with storm surge flooding, damaging winds and rainfall flooding from Louisiana and east Texas to Mississippi."
"The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature has been given to the U.S. poet Louise Glück for what the Swedish Academy calls 'her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.'"
"Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, told Congress in February that the EPA had 'cleaned up more Superfund sites in the last three years than the Obama administration did in their first term.'… But an investigation by InsideClimate News, the Texas Observer and NBC News, based on interviews with more than 50 experts inside and outside of government and a review of thousands of pages of EPA records, found that virtually all of those cleanups had begun decades earlier."
"The researchers found that the coronavirus can live on the skin for a 'significantly longer' amount of time than the flu. Specifically, SARS-CoV-2 lived on skin for more than nine hours, while the influenza A virus lived on skin for less than two hours." Wash your hands, people.
"So what’s the difference between the virus spreading through respiratory droplets and being airborne? It comes down to the size of the droplets and how they travel." Wear a mask. Also we still don't have enough masks (especially N95s).
"Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government's top infectious diseases expert, emphasized the dangers of Covid-19 on Tuesday, contradicting President Donald Trump's false claim that the coronavirus was only as deadly as the flu… People infected with Covid-19 do display 'flu-like' symptoms, Fauci said Tuesday in an interview with NBC News' Kate Snow. But the damage the coronavirus can do 'is very much different from influenza.'"
"Regeneron says it has applied to the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization for its experimental monoclonal antibody therapy, the same antibody cocktail given to President Donald Trump Friday after he was diagnosed with the virus."
"There’s evidence that reinfection is unlikely for at least three months even for people who had a mild case of COVID-19. That’s how long New York City researchers found stable levels of protective antibodies in a study of nearly 20,000 patients of the Mount Sinai Health System."
"President Trump has credited the apparent improvement of his coronavirus infection to, as he put it in one tweet, 'some really great drugs' that were 'developed, under the Trump Administration.'… Yet in April the National Institutes of Health abruptly terminated funding for the China bat research project with no clear explanation. In the weeks earlier, Trump administration officials had been pushing a largely discredited theory that the Chinese lab that EcoHealth Alliance was partnered with – the Wuhan Institute of Virology – had accidentally released the virus causing COVID-19." Trump's constant beating of the drum about what was done under his presidency (which almost all turn out to be the conclusion of projects started under Obama or Bush) reminds me of Chekov's schtick about how everything was invented in Russia (which was a Cold War joke).
"A grand jury indicted Mark and Patricia McCloskey Tuesday on charges of exhibiting guns at protesters in a June incident in their neighborhood and added a charge of tampering with evidence for both members of the couple."
"First-time claims for unemployment benefits totaled 840,000 last week, higher than expected in another sign that the spike in job growth over the summer has cooled heading into Election Day… Though the total was a bit worse than Wall Street expected, it still represented a modest decline from the upwardly revised 849,000 from a week earlier. It also was the lowest level of claims since the virus-induced shutdown in mid-March."
"Two years ago, about 12% of American households reported they didn't have enough food. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, that number has nearly doubled. It's even more severe for Black and Hispanic families… Experts say the problem of food insecurity in America needs longer-term solutions. Erthain Cousin, former U.S. Ambassador to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, tells NPR's Michel Martin the country needs to think bigger than food banks and start investing in businesses that can improve nutrition in low-income communities." An audio story.
"President Donald Trump said Thursday that stimulus negotiators are 'starting to have some very productive talks,' days after his stunning decision to halt deliberations with top Democrats."
"President Trump called for another round of coronavirus stimulus checks to Americans after calling off stimulus negotiations with Democrats on Tuesday afternoon."
"After a rocky, short-lived tenure at the National Institutes of Health, a former top federal scientist who clashed with the Trump administration in the early days of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak has stepped down from his post over what he said were continued efforts to thwart his work on the nation's pandemic response."
"The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow counting for the 2020 census to end soon… In an emergency request on Wednesday, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall said that the Census Bureau must immediately wrap up its field operations, now that it's passed the bureau's internal target date of Oct. 5, in order to have a chance of meeting the legal deadline for delivering the first set of census results to President Trump by year's end."
"That brazen ruling in Michigan previews where the U.S. Supreme Court might take the country, especially with the breathing room that a 6–3 conservative supermajority would create. Although the news media have mostly focused on what a Justice Amy Coney Barrett would mean for abortion and gun rights, her confirmation may pose a more fundamental threat to good governance. The United States Supreme Court, like the Michigan Supreme Court, may become an even more stridently partisan instrument than it already is, one that by design will frustrate Democratic efforts to govern." Well, that was the plan when the GOP set up the Federalist Society, wasn't it?
"A Pro-Trump militant group has recruited thousands of police, soldiers, and veterans. An Atlantic investigation reveals who they are and what they might do on Election Day."
"A federal judge in California has ordered that Twitter reveal the identity of an anonymous user who allegedly fabricated an FBI document to spread a conspiracy theory about the killing of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer who died in 2016."
"President Donald Trump required personnel at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to sign nondisclosure agreements last year before they could be involved with treating him, according to four people familiar with the process… The four people familiar with the process did not know whether, during the president's most recent visit over the weekend, he had the same requirement for Walter Reed staff members who had not previously been involved in his care."
"President Trump said Thursday that he’s not contagious 'at all' days after he was discharged from the hospital after a brief stay to treat him for Covid-19." And yet people coming near to him must don full PPE (N95, gown, gloves, eye protection).
"President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that he might have contracted Covid-19 from Gold Star family members who were too close to him when telling stories of their loved ones who died in the line of duty."
"A Postal Service mail carrier in New Jersey was arrested Wednesday for allegedly discarding mail, including 99 general election ballots… The discarded ballots were addressed to residents of West Orange, N.J., U.S. Attorney Craig Carpentino said."
"Liban Osman is featured prominently in a video released last week by the conservative media operation Project Veritas claiming there is 'massive voter fraud' in Minnesota orchestrated by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar… In his first interview, Liban Osman tells the FOX 9 Investigators he was offered $10,000 by community activist Omar Jamal to say he was collecting ballots for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar." Project Veritas lie? Shocked, shocked I am…
"Be the eyes and ears of the Trump campaign. Be vigilant. Don't assume the worst in people. And be courteous -- even to Democrats… Those are just some of the instructions the Trump campaign is giving to the tens of thousands of poll watchers it's preparing to deploy across the country as part of a nationwide effort on Election Day, according to training videos the campaign has posted in 17 states that were reviewed by CNN."
Sen. Mike Lee is saying the quiet part out loud. "Lee is articulating a view that has long been in vogue on the American right but which Republican politicians were generally hesitant to express openly. The premise is that liberty is a higher value than democracy, and they define liberty to mean a right to property that precludes redistribution. That is to say, the far right does not merely view progressive taxation, regulation and the welfare state as impediments to growth, but as fundamentally oppressive. A political system that truly secured freedom would not allow the majority to gang up on the minority and redistribute their income for themselves." And then there was his tweet this from late last night… "Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity (SIC) are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that."
"President Donald Trump said his coronavirus infection was a 'blessing from God' because it educated him about potential drugs to treat the disease in a video meant to demonstrate his return to work after several days in the hospital." He then went on to say that politics is delaying the vaccine. The crazy intensifies. Also, this tidbit which I thought about when his doctor released the statement, "Trump's labs, he said, 'demonstrated detectable levels of SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies from labs drawn Monday.'… Regeneron, the company that makes the experimental antibody treatment given to Trump on Friday, said the test likely showed evidence of the treatment, not Trump's own immune response."
"Just a reminder that before Trump’s COVID diagnosis…" A twitter thread on the number of things that happened just before Trump contracted COVID.
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