Has Trump Created a Death Cult?
President Trump has given up combating the pandemic. The days when he decided it best to take an active role, holding late afternoon televised briefings with Drs. Fauci and Birx alongside, are long gone. Even then, tormented by the nation's economic health suffering from 
Trump airport rally
the demands of public health, he was tweeting "LIBERATE MINNESOTA", and Michigan and Virginia, rushing to re-open the lockdown to restore the booming economy on which he was counting for re-election.
The rally he held in Tulsa on June 20 — an indoor event with spacing guides ripped off seats and few masks in view — serves as good as any the turning point when Trump discarded the standard "mitigation" protocols urged by his task force of experts led by Vice President Mike Pence. The president had never set the example of wearing a mask ("Somehow, I don't see it for myself") and thereafter switched emphasis to "Warp speed" of vaccine development, ready just before the election according to him.
More public events followed: five rallies in August, his celebration of his re-nomination August 27th before a closely-seated, mask-free assemblage at night on the South Lawn of the White House, 15 rallies in September, the gathering in the White House Rose Garden September 26th to announce Judge Barrett's Supreme Court nomination with guests packed tightly in folding chairs and again barely a mask in sight, and daily rallies in October beginning on the 12th once the president had recovered from his own bout with COVID-19.
By one count 27 cases of the disease had engulfed the White House, a dozen of them having attended the Rose Garden event. Summed up… Read More »
Unlike Predecessors, Trump Plays Hardball with the Chinese
You would have to be very attentive to lesser items in the media to stay abreast of all that the Trump administration has been doing to barricade the U.S. from China's reach. Whether blocking Chinese products from the U.S. market, or halting the sale to China of U.S. 
Huawei cell tower
technology, or expelling Chinese researchers at universities and corporations who are thought to be spies, the pace of these actions has been almost daily.
Trump came to office almost four years ago with fully-formed anger over China's multifaceted thievery of this country's know-how and the passivity of the last two administrations to do anything about it across sixteen crucial years. In July 0f 2017 he tweeted, "I am very disappointed with China. Our foolish past leaders allowed them to make hundreds of billions of dollars a year in trade".
And yet the president holds the strong men of other countries, such as China's president Xi Jinping, in awe. Trump forged a friendship with Xi, or so he told us, praising him lavishly perhaps in the belief that flattery would clear the way to impose a one-sided tariff schedule to level the trade imbalance. But Xi retaliated with his own tariffs. Back and forth went threats of further tariffs. Phase one of a trade deal last fall had the U.S. holding back further imposts in return for Beijing buying $211 billion of farm and other products by year end. China immediately fell behind in that pledge such that trade adviser Peter Navarro declared the deal already "over" by June. Before this jousting… Read More »
healthcare
Supreme Court About to Kill Obamacare at a Time Like This?
Oct 17 2020
A week after the election, the Supreme Court will hear arguments why the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in its entirety versus why it is too important not to continue undisturbed. If the justices decide the former, the consequences will be calamitous.
Almost all of the 23 million people and families — roughly 11 million who bought insurance on federal and state exchanges, and 12 million who obtained coverage from Medicaid expansion — will lose coverage under the Act, and in the midst of the most severe health crisis in a century.
Millions more have, owing to the pandemic's blow to the economy, lost jobs that provided employer-paid health insurance — 3 million so far estimates the Urban Institute and 12 million in total likely by year-end per Avalere Health. Many might 
qualify for Obamacare's subsidized insurance, but they too will add millions to the rolls of uninsured if the Supreme Court takes away that opportunity when it decides the case several months from now.
Gone as well will be the prohibition against denying coverage for reason of a pre-existing condition, as well as its companion rule that insurers cannot cancel policies when someone becomes ill. The popular provision of family plans covering sons and daughters until age 26 — some two million young adults according to the government — would also end.
laissez care
Republicans have been against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from the outset, ideologically averse to yet another large-scale government program. No Republicans voted for it and the Party has voted without success to repeal all or parts of the Act more than sixty…
Read More »
A week after the election, the Supreme Court will hear arguments why the Affordable Care Act should be struck down in its entirety versus why it is too important not to continue undisturbed. If the justices decide the former, the consequences will be calamitous.
Almost all of the 23 million people and families — roughly 11 million who bought insurance on federal and state exchanges, and 12 million who obtained coverage from Medicaid expansion — will lose coverage under the Act, and in the midst of the most severe health crisis in a century.
Millions more have, owing to the pandemic's blow to the economy, lost jobs that provided employer-paid health insurance — 3 million so far estimates the Urban Institute and 12 million in total likely by year-end per Avalere Health. Many might
qualify for Obamacare's subsidized insurance, but they too will add millions to the rolls of uninsured if the Supreme Court takes away that opportunity when it decides the case several months from now.
Gone as well will be the prohibition against denying coverage for reason of a pre-existing condition, as well as its companion rule that insurers cannot cancel policies when someone becomes ill. The popular provision of family plans covering sons and daughters until age 26 — some two million young adults according to the government — would also end.
laissez careRepublicans have been against the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from the outset, ideologically averse to yet another large-scale government program. No Republicans voted for it and the Party has voted without success to repeal all or parts of the Act more than sixty… Read More »
our democracy
Here’s What’s Coming at Us
in the Election from Hell
And this is without yet factoring in the president's illness Oct 5 2020
Well before midnight on November 3rd, Donald J. Trump will declare victory. Votes from the high percentage of Republicans who went to the polls will have put the president in the lead at that hour. Votes by Democrats, a high percentage of them mailed in, will have as yet barely been counted.
Trump will be following his rule. By end July he began insisting that the winner be declared on election night. “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!”, he tweeted. He had inserted himself into the Florida primary to say, 
Voters on a gym floor
with no evidence, "[M]any ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible...Must go with Election Night!”.
That Democrats are forecast to be the biggest users of mailed ballots means totals for Democratic candidates are expected to rise in the days after November 3rd — the so-called "blue shift". But Trump's voter base will have embraced his claim of election night victory, just as his instant claim of "exonerated" displaced the facts of the Mueller report ahead of its release. They will rebel against ongoing changes in the vote count because the president has told them that mailed ballots are rife with fraud. FBI Director Christopher Wray says, "We certainly have seen very active efforts by the Russians to influence our elections" and the expectation is that they will flood social media with the same message — that Trump has already won on election night. Trump believers will have joined the Russians against the rest of America.
alternate facts
By now the public is very much aware of the president's months-long tirade that calls voting by mail a "catastrophic disaster", "INACCURATE AND FRAUDULENT", "an easy way for foreign…
Read More »
Well before midnight on November 3rd, Donald J. Trump will declare victory. Votes from the high percentage of Republicans who went to the polls will have put the president in the lead at that hour. Votes by Democrats, a high percentage of them mailed in, will have as yet barely been counted.
Trump will be following his rule. By end July he began insisting that the winner be declared on election night. “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!”, he tweeted. He had inserted himself into the Florida primary to say,
Voters on a gym floor
with no evidence, "[M]any ballots are missing or forged. An honest vote count is no longer possible...Must go with Election Night!”.
That Democrats are forecast to be the biggest users of mailed ballots means totals for Democratic candidates are expected to rise in the days after November 3rd — the so-called "blue shift". But Trump's voter base will have embraced his claim of election night victory, just as his instant claim of "exonerated" displaced the facts of the Mueller report ahead of its release. They will rebel against ongoing changes in the vote count because the president has told them that mailed ballots are rife with fraud. FBI Director Christopher Wray says, "We certainly have seen very active efforts by the Russians to influence our elections" and the expectation is that they will flood social media with the same message — that Trump has already won on election night. Trump believers will have joined the Russians against the rest of America.
alternate factsBy now the public is very much aware of the president's months-long tirade that calls voting by mail a "catastrophic disaster", "INACCURATE AND FRAUDULENT", "an easy way for foreign… Read More »