US election 2020

[Tannin]

The final word on the Vice-Presidential debate comes from this headline (quoted from memory):

Pence had one job: to make Donald Trump look good. Instead, he reminded people what a world without Trump is like.

[watt price tully]

Two children at a school & a teacher where the Supreme Court nominee Barrett sends her children have contracted the Coronavirus.

Trump is an absolute disgrace not just as a POTUS but as a human being.

He should apologise and step down.

[watt price tully]

The Washington Post noting that as Trump stumbles Bidens lead is increasing albeit slightly in overall terms.

"...A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Sunday fits with the trend, putting Biden at 54 percent nationally and Trump at 42, a 12-point lead that is similar to the 10-point advantage Biden held in a September survey. While key battleground-state polls have shown a somewhat closer contest, the trajectory has been clear.

“These are not gigantic shifts, but when you were already down, it makes it even tougher,” said Chris Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion. “What was bad has gotten worse for the president....”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national ... story.html

Of course given what happened 4 years ago when the people of the US got the President they didn't deserve (gawd no one deserves that) then we need to take it with caution. However this far out of the November election one would rather be in Biden's postion that Trumps.

[Tannin]

However this far out of the November election one would rather be in Biden's postion that Trumps.

Indeed. Unfit, heavily overweight, infected with Covid, obsessive control fantasies and recurrent delusions, unemployed, heavily in debt - not a position anyone would want to be in.

[Lazza]

^^^^^^

Sounds like an ideal candidate to attract Republican voters

[Pies4shaw]

Anyway, back on the subject of the US election:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-13/ ... s/12758610

The smart money is pricing in a comfortable Biden victory. Like all of the polls, the smart money could be wrong, of course.

[pietillidie]

[roar]

^^ When was the planet "thinking about serious policy"? I think raging against the orange clown has affected your memory.

[pietillidie]

^^ When was the planet "thinking about serious policy"? I think raging against the orange clown has affected your memory.

From a certain perspective I can't argue with either point. The wasting of my time by this idiot aside, do you really want to head back to the 1930s or do away with post-WW2 coordination efforts, despite their flaws?

People underestimate the drain this twat has been on plenty of things that matter apart from my memory, including international coordination to help bring this bloody pandemic under control.

Trump cult members, ever glorying in their local identities, can't grasp that we need coordination across state and national borders to resolve a pandemic like this because, much like food safety standards, without coordination jurisdictions are incentivised to cut corners or grab a sneaky advantage in a race to the bottom.

So, no matter how good, say, Taiwan, South Korea, Australia and NZ do, their economies will be damaged by the failure of the US and Europe. Even the EU with its high degree of unification lacks sufficient cross-border coordination to contain this. (Needless to say, something made even worse by Brexit and the phenomenally futile and brainless negotiations going on at present).

Trump's pathological zero-sumism is the absolute opposite of what we need in this situation. Imagine if this virus keeps on and on, mutating into something worse.

And the pandemic is just the most immediate problem. Global warming, species loss, global tax avoidance, dangerous nationalism and the tensions of multipolarity won't fix themselves to anyone's favour without concerted effort.

The idea we can simply withdraw into local jurisdictions is entirely delusional, as is the idea that trade war won't result in actual war. These are idiotic fantasies peddled by innumerate fools who can't grasp the number of transactions going on beyond their four walls, a bit like Trump's Christian Taliban can't grasp the time scale needed for evolution.

Trump, and the autocrats, authoritarian populists and creeps he motivates globally will drag us all under if we can't see them off.

Sure, he's not the only creep, but he's the key creep right now. As Keating always said, if the US doesn't support it, then it's a waste of time. While less so some 30 years later, they're still the global superpower and can still spoil almost any initiative they like.

I don't know why more people aren't raging; I suspect it's because the daily fight is a very personal one given fear of infection and lockdowns, distracting from the wider political and geopolitical mismanagement at play. This is a monumental global economic disaster. I for one am tired of the lack of leadership on it, and tired of incompetent, destructive wreckers like Trump and Johnson making it worse.

[think positive]

[pietillidie]

The information that cones out is only going to get worse. Here is the White House privately signalling to elite hedge fund managers pandemic risk while telling the public it is under control:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/14/us/p ... trump.html

Think of all of the millions of backyard investors and business owners who could've moved early to protect their assets or adapt somehow with correct information. Instead, only elite, privileged hedge fund traders got something close to the truth.

This is the man draining the swamp for the little guy.

[pietillidie]

[Tannin]

PTID - that is great posting Sir. Succinct, accurate, and incisive.

[stui magpie]

I think it's generalised bullshit, but whatever floats your goat.

[pietillidie]

Trump cult members, ever glorying in their local identities, can't grasp that we need coordination across state and national borders to resolve a pandemic like this because, much like food safety standards, without coordination jurisdictions are incentivised to cut corners or grab a sneaky advantage in a race to the bottom.

As ever with Trump and friends, things are even worse than stated. He and his enablers are scuppering national coordination efforts and the efforts of sane state leaders to protect citizens.

In other words, if Trump's deranged incompetence doesn't kill you at federal level, the Christian Taliban courts will get you at state level with dissociative teenager-in-a-basement libertarian arguments that completely undermine public health.

The place is nightmare-thick with fruitcakes every which way you turn.

In 1900, when a suspected outbreak of bubonic plague led San Francisco authorities to quarantine the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit struck down quarantine and inoculation provisions that irrationally targeted Chinese residents, but ratified the city’s power to quarantine in general.

Five years later, the U.S. Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts upheld mandatory vaccination programs. States, the court ruled, were empowered to establish general regulations “as will protect the public health.” As in the two Chinatown cases, however, the court aimed to preserved its authority to intervene in narrow circumstances. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s opinion observed that certain “arbitrary and oppressive” vaccinations might be unconstitutional.

Modest and careful judicial intervention was the norm in courts across the country. When courts in Illinois, Kansas, Michigan and Wisconsin overturned policies prohibiting unvaccinated children from attending school, for example, they did so on the ground that their state legislatures had not authorized such policies. Such decisions respected the salus populi principle by leaving the legislatures empowered to mandate vaccination if they saw fit to do so.

The basic outlines of this approach remained in place for more than two centuries. Today, however, the tradition of salus populi is in collapse. In state and federal courts alike, Republican-appointed and Republican-elected judges are upsetting the long-established consensus.

This month, a bare majority of four Republican-appointed justices on the Michigan Supreme Court struck down the state’s 75-year-old emergency powers law as an “unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive.” In dissent, Chief Justice Bridget McCormack (who was endorsed by Democrats when she campaigned for election to the court) correctly identified the majority’s reasoning as “armchair history” that set aside decades of precedent.

Last month, a federal district judge in Pennsylvania appointed by President Trump struck down the state’s business closure rules and its limits on gatherings. The judge in the case, William Stickman, revived hoary ideas about freedom of contract and laissez-faire economic policy that once led the courts to strike down protective labor legislation like wage and hour laws.

And back in the spring, four justices connected to the Republican Party on the Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned their state’s common-sense emergency Covid-19 rules over the dissents of three colleagues.

The U.S. Supreme Court threatens to get into the action, too. In May, four conservative justices (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh) dissented from an order in South Bay United Pentecostal Church v. Newsom allowing California’s Covid-19-related restrictions to remain in place for gatherings at places of worship. Then, in Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Sisolak, decided at the end of July, those same justices dissented from a similar order leaving Nevada’s restrictions intact.

Next month, the court is scheduled to hear arguments on a startling and widely criticized decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Texas last year that offers yet another opportunity to strike down the Affordable Care Act. The health care of millions could be cast into question even as the pandemic rages.

All of this is a sharp departure from a long history of judicial solicitude toward state powers during epidemics. In the past, when epidemics have threatened white Americans and those with political clout, courts found ways to uphold broad state powers. Now a new generation of judges, propelled by partisan energies, look to deprive states of the power to fight for the sick and dying in a pandemic in which the victims are disproportionately Black and brown.

The results are already devastating.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/15/opin ... ourts.html

Everything this creep and his enablers touch turns to dog faeces.