No October surprise

— 10.04.2020 08:48 AM


Comments (7)

Guess it isn’t a hoax, after all

— 10.02.2020 05:42 AM

It is what it is.

WASHINGTON — President Trump revealed early Friday morning that he and the first lady, Melania Trump, had tested positive for the coronavirus, throwing the nation’s leadership into uncertainty and escalating the crisis posed by a pandemic that has already killed more than 207,000 Americans and devastated the economy.

Mr. Trump, who for months has played down the seriousness of the virus and hours earlier on Thursday night told an audience that “the end of the pandemic is in sight,” will quarantine in the White House for an unspecified period of time, forcing him to withdraw at least temporarily from the campaign trail only 32 days before the election on Nov. 3.


Comments (19)

America to Trump: shut up

— 10.01.2020 07:41 AM

Jean Chretien used to say to us: “I don’t need to be in the paper every day. People don’t like it.”

Yep. And my daughter and I saw the same thing when we were recently knocking on doors for the Democrats: American voters saying, over and over, they’re sick of the drama. Sick of it. They want quiet and calm.

From The Hill:

Disaffected Republicans argue that no single storm has battered Trump. Instead, they say, the constant tensions and Twitter tirades in which he revels have had a cumulative and aggravating effect.

“I have said this since he was elected,” said one former GOP member of Congress. “This exhaustion, this never-ending drama and chaos…I think a lot of people are yearning for some kind of normalcy.”

Republican strategist Liz Mair agreed.

“Every day there is something that the president is going off about on Twitter, or in a press conference, or in a speech or what have you,” she said. “Nobody ever gets a break and he never takes a break. It’s just constant information overload, and eventually people get sick of that.”



Comments (7)

Enough, already

— 09.30.2020 01:38 PM


Comments (4)

Shitshow analysis, in tweets

— 09.30.2020 07:23 AM

Trump came to throw mud and heckle – be himself, in other words. He came to make Joe crack.

Joe didn’t crack. He kept his cool.

He won.


Comments (9)

One million dead

— 09.28.2020 07:59 PM

From the New York Times, here. Read this. It’s apocalyptic. And the writing is extraordinary.

More than H.I.V. More than dysentery. More than malaria, influenza, cholera and measles — combined.

In the 10 months since a mysterious pneumonia began striking residents of Wuhan, China, Covid-19 has killed more than one million people worldwide as of Monday — an agonizing toll compiled from official counts, yet one that far understates how many have really died. It may already have overtaken tuberculosis and hepatitis as the world’s deadliest infectious disease, and unlike all the other contenders, it is still growing fast.

Like nothing seen in more than a century, the coronavirus has infiltrated every populated patch of the globe, sowing terror and poverty, infecting millions of people in some nations and paralyzing entire economies. But as attention focuses on the devastation caused by halting a large part of the world’s commercial, educational and social life, it is all too easy to lose sight of the most direct human cost.

More than a million people — parents, children, siblings, friends, neighbors, colleagues, teachers, classmates — all gone, suddenly, prematurely. Those who survive Covid-19 are laid low for weeks or even months before recovering, and many have lingering ill effects whose severity and duration remain unclear.

Yet much of the suffering could have been avoided — one of the most heartbreaking aspects of all.

“This is a very serious global event, and a lot of people were going to get sick and many of them were going to die, but it did not need to be nearly this bad,” said Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, which aims to protect people’s health from epidemics and disasters.


Comments (6)