The Breakfast Club (The Fool)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

U.S. embassies bombed in E. Africa; Congress OKs powers to expand the Vietnam War; The Battle of Guadalcanal begins; Kon-Tiki ends its journey; Comedy icon Oliver Hardy and news anchor Peter Jennings die.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

The fool is like those people who think themselves rich with little.

Luc de Clapiers

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Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Eugene Robinson: Trump is on a reckless quest to reopen schools

Is it possible that President Trump could do a worse job handling the covid-19 pandemic, causing even more needless illness and death? I fear we’re about to find out.

“OPEN THE SCHOOLS!!!” he tweeted again this week, for the umpteenth time. That’s the equivalent of chugging blindly down the Niagara River, approaching the lip of the falls — and giving the order to proceed full speed ahead.

Aided and abetted by Republican governors, Trump is pushing hard for in-person classroom instruction this fall in all of the nation’s schools, some of which have already started the new year. He has threatened to withhold federal funding from public school districts that don’t fully open; and while the official White House position acknowledges that “flexibility” is needed, Trump continues to bully local officials to “open 100 percent.”

Amanda Marcotte: Schools aren’t safe, and parents won’t believe President Bleach-Injector when he claims otherwise

Trump thinks that saying “OPEN THE SCHOOLS!” over and over will make it happen. Parents and teachers know better

Like a landlord trying to get potential renters to sign the lease before they notice the spreading mildew stain in the ceiling, Donald Trump is hoping to bamboozle Americans into reopening the schools, likely hoping that the coronavirus incubation period will delay a drastic explosion in cases until after Election Day. Despite fawning headlines late last month congratulating Trump for his supposedly “somber” tone and an alleged “shift” to taking the pandemic seriously, our president has returned to his standard operating procedure, which is trying to sell the public on flat-out lies about the coronavirus in much the same way he bamboozled investors into backing his craptastic real estate properties.

The good news, however, is that this probably isn’t working and may even backfire, as the public is simply not interested in the medical opinions of a man who went on live television in April and suggested that since household disinfectants kill coronavirus on countertops, doctors should consider “something like that by injection inside” the lungs of human beings.

“My view is the schools should open. This thing’s going away. It will go away like things go away,” Trump told the credulous crew at “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning.

Trump failed to explain the mechanics of how he imagines this working — perhaps by Lysol injections? — nor did any of the so-called “journalists” on Fox News press him on the particulars.

Paul Waldman: Trump’s voter suppression effort has devolved into farce

With less than three months before Election Day, President Trump’s efforts at voter suppression are becoming so desperate that they would not be out of place in a black comedy. It’s one more example of his ability to take something bad that others have done and create his own unique version of it, one that is simultaneously shameless, corrupt, and so ham-handed that it crosses over into farce.

Someone may try to produce a “Veep” or “Dr. Strangelove” satirizing the Trump era, but it won’t manage to be as absurd and horrifying as the reality.

This is illustrated by a pair of lawsuits Republicans have filed in an effort to make voting as difficult as possible in Nevada and Pennsylvania. You may have heard about the former, but the latter is even crazier and has gotten far less attention.

At the end of June, the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee sued election officials in all 67 counties in Pennsylvania, charging that the use of drop boxes where voters can deliver mail ballots violates the 14th Amendment. This terrifying threat to election integrity, they insisted, must be stopped.

Stephen M. Hahn: FDA commissioner: No matter what, only a safe, effective vaccine will get our approval
Stephen M. Hahn, a physician, is commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

Since the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, developing a safe and effective vaccine has been an urgent worldwide priority: to save lives, and to bolster the public’s confidence in returning to a semblance of normal life.

At the Food and Drug Administration and our parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, we recognize the vital importance of vaccine development. The framework in the United States to support a covid-19 vaccine is now in place. Testing is underway and manufacturing capacity is rapidly expanding. But let’s be clear: The development effort must adhere to standards that will ensure any covid-19 vaccine’s safety and effectiveness.

Large-scale clinical trials already have begun for several promising vaccine candidates. The data from these trials will enable the scientists at the FDA to determine which of these candidates has the greatest potential to provide protection from the virus, what the possible side effects are and how long immunity is likely to last. FDA scientists will need the information to decide whether approval of the vaccine for general use is justified. This fall, we expect to start identifying which vaccine candidates are truly viable.

Leana S. Wen: The fast one or the accurate one? How we can get more out of our covid-19 test options.

A friend of mine went to get tested for covid-19 recently and was asked, “Do you want the faster one or the more accurate one?”

The faster test would give her a result within 24 hours. It had a very low false positive rate but a 20 percent false negative rate, meaning that if the result was positive, she almost certainly had covid-19, but if it came back negative, she still had a 20 percent chance of having the disease. The more accurate test had a very low false and false negative rate, but because of the testing backlog, she wouldn’t get the result for 10 days.

As I thought through the decision with her, I saw the question she was asked as the key to our national testing strategy. In the absence of widespread testing that’s both fast and accurate, there’s one question to ask to determine which test you need: What’s your risk of covid-19?

The Breakfast Club (Lesser Evil)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

The United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II; LBJ signs the Voting Rights Act; Pope Paul VI dies; Scientist Alexander Fleming born; Funk singer Rick James dies.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.

Baltasar Gracian

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Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Amanda Marcotte: Right-wing conspiracy theorists get (even more) unhinged as Trump’s chances fade

With QAnon on the rise, Alex Jones tells his fans to “kill” progressives: Trump Nation is going full cuckoo

A pandemic is spiraling out of control and Donald Trump’s reaction is to roll his eyes and say, “It is what it is.” Unsurprisingly, polling data shows that his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, is pulling ahead, not just in national polls, but in a number of battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida, none of which Trump can afford to lose. After all, the incumbent has nothing real to run on. The economy is the worst it’s been since the Great Depression of the 1930s, Americans are losing health insurance by the millions, and Republicans are responding by trying to shortchange unemployment benefits for the millions of people who’ve lost their jobs.

With nothing real to hang on to, it’s no surprise that conservatives — already prone to spreading misinformation — are increasingly addicted to conspiracy theories, wallowing in paranoid fantasies to justify the ludicrous notion that there’s any reason to keep on supporting Trump and the Republican Party.

Unfortunately, this turn towards even greater conspiratorial thinking on the right is also extremely dangerous. There’s already a strong link between right-wing paranoia and right-wing violence. Add the increasing likelihood of Trump’s defeat, the rising stress from the coronavirus, and a blitz of violent propaganda, and there’s a real chance that right-wing conspiracism will lead to even more domestic terrorism, hate crimes and neofascist goons in the streets.

Heather Digby PartonTrump’s claims about mail voting were always incoherent: Now they’re falling apart

Donald Trump can’t keep his story straight: Now mail-in voting is totally fine in Florida. Anyone remember 2000?

I don’t know about you, but when I saw Donald Trump do an abrupt pivot on his crusade to depict mail-in voting as a form of voter fraud on Tuesday, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

That certainly wasn’t because I believe he’s seen the light and has realized that mail-in voting is perfectly safe, or that he realizes it’s imperative at a time when in-person voting may expose people to the deadly coronavirus. No, it was because he singled out Florida as the one state he believes really knows how to handle elections. Anyone who was around 20 years ago to observe the 2000 election will understand why I felt that awful sense of dread.

You may recall how that disputed election result, with a 538-vote difference in Florida and a recount in progress, was decided in favor of the Republican candidate — whose brother just happened to be the governor — helped along by the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, two of whom happened to have been appointed by their father, the former president. Let’s just say that the Republicans controlled the levers of government and they knew how to use them.

Ryan Goodman and Andrew Weissmann: Will Bill Barr Try to Help Trump Win the Election?

Two investigations appear to be potential fodder for pre-election political machinations.

Today, Wednesday, marks 90 days before the presidential election, a date in the calendar that is supposed to be of special note to the Justice Department. That’s because of two department guidelines, one a written policy that no action be influenced in any way by politics. Another, unwritten norm urges officials to defer publicly charging or taking any other overt investigative steps or disclosures that could affect a coming election.

Attorney General William Barr appears poised to trample on both. At least two developing investigations could be fodder for pre-election political machinations. The first is an apparently sprawling investigation by John Durham, the U.S. attorney in Connecticut, that began as an examination of the origins of the F.B.I. investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The other, led by John Bash, the U.S. attorney for the Western District of Texas, is about the so-called unmasking of Trump associates by Obama administration officials. Mr. Barr personally unleashed both investigations and handpicked the attorneys to run them.

But Justice Department employees, in meeting their ethical and legal obligations, should be well advised not to participate in any such effort.

Val Demings: Remember Senate Republicans who dismissed Trump’s wrongdoing — and show them the door

It has been six months since Senate Republicans voted to acquit President Trump in his impeachment trial. This November, voters have a remarkable opportunity to prove they have a stronger moral compass than those senators ― and show them the door.

There are lessons my parents taught me about America. They taught me there is dignity and honor in working hard and playing by the rules. That the Constitution and the law mattered. That voting was a civic responsibility and an obligation. That our nation and our family were worth defending against people who would take advantage. That I should treat others as I would want to be treated. That honesty, duty and integrity were inherently good and that to cheat, lie and steal was wrong. [..]

Of the lessons my parents taught me, the most important was the difference between right and wrong. When the president illegally demanded that a foreign country help him cheat in a U.S. election, that was wrong. When he illegally used U.S. national security policy to pressure them to do it, that was wrong. When he illegally tried to cover it up, that was wrong.

A child could understand this. Why not Sen. Martha McSally of Arizona? Why not Sen. Cory Gardner of Colorado, Sen. David Perdue of Georgia or Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa? Why was it too hard for Sen. Susan Collins of Maine to say, “It’s wrong to break the law and undermine our democracy”? Why couldn’t Montana’s Steve Daines or North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, or 45 other Republicans take a simple stand for right rather than wrong?

Perhaps, as Upton Sinclair once wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

But you, reader, have no such impediment. And in just a few short months, you may be able to remove that burden from your senator.

Michael McFaul: Why Trump’s complacency about Putin is a problem — whatever his motives

President Trump has changed his mind on many issues. Yet there is one theme of his presidency that remains strikingly constant: his peculiar deference to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin. We witnessed it again in Trump’s new interview with Jonathan Swan of Axios, when he once again refused to criticize the Russian president for allegedly offering Taliban fighters bounties in return for killing U.S. soldiers, and also excused Russian arming of the Taliban by arguing, “Well, we sold them weapons when they were fighting Russia, too. The Taliban, in Afghanistan. … I’m just saying, we did that, too.” (Note: The Taliban, which was formed in 1994, never fought Soviet forces, which left the country five years earlier.) We already knew that Trump had avoided raising the issue in a series of phone calls with Putin in the past few months.

Trump’s stubborn refusal to criticize Putin remains a mystery. But the damage this position has done to U.S. interests is known, and could become even greater in the future. Most troubling, Trump’s stance on Putin — which often contrasts with policies of his own administration — creates an ambiguity that is destructive in his own right. [..]

Given this consistent track record of supporting Putin, it should not be surprising that Putin might misjudge Trump’s commitment to NATO or deterrence more generally. Trump’s latest signal of weakness — refusal to even raise the issue of Russian actions against U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan — can only deepen Putin’s doubts about American resolve. Such doubts in turn can birth dangerous adventurism.

Blue Voices

I have my opinions, some of which you have heard. A Two-Part piece from Vice.

The Breakfast Club (Controlling Chaos)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Highlights of this day in history: Actress Marilyn Monroe dies; Cornerstone laid for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal; ‘American Bandstand’ debuts on network TV; Actors Richard Burton and Alec Guinness die.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

We’ve got a deeply flawed political system with an insane overreaching extremist element, with a Supreme Court that is completely loony.

Lizz Winstead

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The Squad

More like this please.

Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Republicans Couldn’t Care Less About the Unemployed

Their cruelty and ignorance are creating another gratuitous disaster.

In case you haven’t noticed, the coronavirus is still very much with us. Around a thousand Americans are dying from Covid-19 each day, 10 times the rate in the European Union. Thanks to our failure to control the pandemic, we’re still suffering from Great Depression levels of unemployment; a brief recovery driven by premature attempts to resume business as usual appears to have petered out as states pause or reverse their opening.

Yet enhanced unemployment benefits, a crucial lifeline for tens of millions of Americans, have expired. And negotiations over how — or even whether — to restore aid appear to be stalled.

You sometimes see headlines describing this crisis as a result of “congressional dysfunction.” Such headlines reveal a severe case of bothsidesism — the almost pathological aversion of some in the media to placing blame where it belongs.

For House Democrats passed a bill specifically designed to deal with this mess two and a half months ago. The Trump administration and Senate Republicans had plenty of time to propose an alternative. Instead, they didn’t even focus on the issue until days before the benefits ended. And even now they’re refusing to offer anything that might significantly alleviate workers’ plight.

This is an astonishing failure of governance, right up there with the mishandling of the pandemic itself. But what explains it?

Well, I’m of two minds. Was it ignorant malevolence, or malevolent ignorance?

George T. Conway III: Trump’s name should live in infamy

If there’s one thing we know about President Trump, it’s that he lies and he cheats. Endlessly. And shamelessly. But still, mostly, incompetently.

So it should have come as no surprise that Trump finally went where no U.S. president had ever gone before. In a tweet last week, he actually suggested that the country “Delay the Election.”

That trial balloon was a brazen effort to see if he can defraud his way into four more years in the White House. And why not try? After all, Trump has managed to swindle his way through life, on matters large and small, essential and trivial. [..]

Trump’s sanction must come at the polls, and beyond. For the sake of our constitutional republic, he must lose, and lose badly. Yet that should be just a start: We should only honor former presidents who uphold and sustain our nation’s enduring democratic values. There should be no schools, bridges or statues devoted to Trump. His name should live in infamy, and he should be remembered, if at all, for precisely what he was — not a president, but a blundering cheat.

Michelle Cottle: Disenchanted Seniors for Biden

The pandemic is particularly dangerous for older Americans, and Trump is losing their support.

The ad opens with amateur footage of an older, white-haired woman, smiling and chatting with the toddler snuggled in her lap. In a voice-over, a younger woman reminisces about how her grandmother’s home had always been “the safe place.”

Then came the coronavirus. [..]

In recent decades, older voters have tilted conservative. “No Democrat has won or broken even with seniors in two decades, since Al Gore in 2000 devoted much of his general-election campaign to warning that Republicans would cut popular programs like Social Security and Medicare,” The Times recently noted.

This was certainly the case in 2016, when Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 13 percentage points among voters 65 and up, according to data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Along with his xenophobic scaremongering and culture-war revanchism, the Donald Trump of 2016 explicitly promised older voters that he would protect Social Security and Medicare. He assured them that he had their backs.

Four years on, many seniors aren’t feeling all that reassured and are wondering if maybe the president has turned his back on them. A growing pile of polls show this crucial cohort slipping from his grasp.

Charles M. Blow: Trump Forecasts His Own Fraud

In the president’s world, he is never to blame for failure.

This election is in danger of being stolen. By Donald Trump.

Trump is a win-at-all-costs kind of operator. For him, the rules are like rubber, not fixed but bendable. All structures — laws, conventions, norms — exist for others, those not slick and sly enough to evade them, those not craven enough to break them.

Trump is showing anyone who is willing to see it, in every way possible, that he is willing to do anything to win re-election, and will cry foul if he doesn’t, a scenario that could cause an unprecedented national crisis. [..]

In Trump’s world, he is never to blame for failure. He is the best, the greatest ever, like no one has ever seen before. He doesn’t fail. In reality, his life is chock-full of failure.

At the same time Trump is attacking voting by mail, he is undermining the mechanism by which it would be done: the United States Postal Service. This is fueling concerns by many that the Postal Service is being damaged precisely because of Trump opposition to mail-in voting.

Elizabeth Drew: Let’s Scrap the Presidential Debates

They’ve become unrevealing quip contests.

Nervous managers of the scheduled 2020 presidential debates are shuffling the logistics and locations to deal with the threat of the coronavirus. But here’s a better idea: Scrap them altogether. And not for health reasons.

The debates have never made sense as a test for presidential leadership. In fact, one could argue that they reward precisely the opposite of what we want in a president. When we were serious about the presidency, we wanted intelligence, thoughtfulness, knowledge, empathy and, to be sure, likability. It should also go without saying, dignity.

Yet the debates play an outsize role in campaigns and weigh more heavily on the verdict than their true value deserves. [..]

The better way to pay attention to and choose among the presidential candidates is to follow the long campaign that so many complain about. The reason for such moaning has always been a mystery, because unless the campaign is taking place in your living room, you can simply switch it off.

The key words are “pay attention to,” because over the stretch of 2015-2016 it wasn’t impossible to see the implications of a Trump presidency. Not just the vulgarity but the ignorance and insensitivity and extreme narcissism were apparent more than a year before Election Day.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump is getting truly desperate — and that means he’s increasingly dangerous

Maybe Trump can’t successfully steal the election — but he’ll do as much damage as possible on his way out the door

One of the first things that activists and educators who work to stop domestic violence learn is this: The most dangerous time for the victim is when she tries to leave the abusive relationship. The abuser, desperate to keep his power and control over the victim, will drastically escalate the threats and violence if he senses that she’s looking for an escape route. If she does get out, the abuser will often track her down and try to force her to return through violence. This is why advocates for victims emphasize the importance of careful planning to escape an abusive relationship, since abusers rarely just let a victim walk away.

The parallels between the situation of many abuse victims and the nation’s dilemma when it comes to removing Donald Trump from power have not been lost on feminists. As sex educator Twanna Hines noted on Twitter on Friday, Trump “knows his time is up.” She predicted that he will lash out the way that abusers do “when the relationship is ending.” [..]

But even though we’re likely to see a situation where former Vice President Joe Biden is sworn in as president on Jan. 20, 2021, that doesn’t mean we’re in anything like a position to relax. Like the abusive husband who would rather see his wife injured or dead than let her move out in peace, Trump will, as Election Day nears, increasingly turn to schemes to keep power that will pose real threats — not just to our democracy, but to the immediate safety and well-being of Americans.

Even if Trump is successfully removed from office, the amount of damage he could well do to punish the American people for rejecting him is, frankly, terrifying.

The Axios Interview

Pretty much just as terrible as you’ve been hearing.

The Breakfast Club (Transparency)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Nazi police arrest Anne Frank and family; Britain declares war on Germany in World War I; Three civil rights workers found slain in Mississippi; The Bordens axed to death; Jazz great Louis Armstrong born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Every president thinks that all information that comes to the White House is their private preserve after they all promise an open administration on the campaign trail, but some are more secretive than others. Some want to lock down everything.

Helen Thomas (August 4, 1920 – July 20, 2013)

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