I have a Korean friend that just reported on facebook that today they were actually attacked. So he's driving on the highway and suddenly a car starts swerving into him and literally tries to run him off the road. The guy goes around him and starts yelling "chink" at him. THen gets ahead of him and slams on his breaks. THen goes to the other side and his girlfriendwhatever throws a bottle at him through the window and hits him.

Luckily he recorded the guy's license plate and has been to the cops already.

But man :( I feel so bad for him. TIred of trump supporters like this being empowered by him to do this crap

I find this funny

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wire..._headlines_hed

First doubts I've read about a big second stimulus (but much smaller stimulus still possible). Shutdown negotiations are not going to be tied to stimulus, jobs and payroll reports not as bad as feared etc.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/an...ays-2020-09-04

No idea what's in the smaller version but assume/hope it's much more targeted towards those that need it.

Game of chicken continues.

How is it a game of chicken? Dems wanted to and did pass a bill and were willing to cut the total by 1/3 or more. The GOP didn't have the votes to pass anything.

Congressional Dems doing more to help Trump get re-elected than Republicans are.

Yep. The GOP should have jumped on the Dems bill. The long-term jobless numbers are just going to get worse between now and the election.

dola

There was a time when the President saying the Pentagon brass are warmongers in collusion with the military-industrial complex would have been pretty big news.

I still think a 2nd round of direct payments will happen. Gives Trump a chance to send to send a check directly to people with his name attached to it but paid for by other people.

The Census Bureau just hired over 300,000 people temporarily, so that makes the jobs number a bit less impressive.

In about 3 weeks about 100,000 (Bloomberg estimates about 130k) airline folks will be losing their jobs unless more is done. That'll be fun.

I'm not sure where the unemployment number settles, but it will be well north of 4%. Right now there are two trends, some temporary layoffs are returning to work while others are losing their jobs permanently. At some point basically everyone out of work now will fall into one of those categories and a temporary recession will look more typical.

Sorry you are going through this. There are rumors my company will reduce 5-10% sometime.

My company has said no travel through Q1, 2021. Exceptions have to go several levels up the food chain. All of my clients are okay with remote work even if we are in the middle of a project. I'm going to guess business travel will suck until a vaccine is produced or Q2 at the earliest.

I read an article that said hotels are like 50-60% below their year-of-year. My first thought was how can there been that many people staying at hotels to keep them at 50-40% booked.

Really no good answers for the travel, hospitality & cruise line industries right now.

As someone who works in food service, you'd be surprised (or maybe not) how many people in lower-income brackets who can't get approved for an apartment are long-term hotel tenants.

I honestly don't know to whose favor this will play and depends if there is a noticeable dive/stabilization in unemployment, GDP or markets while they are playing chicken. If there is a dive, it'll help Dems.

Because Trump signed the executive orders 3-4 weeks ago (?) he can hang his hat on something and say congress is playing games. I haven't read much from Biden on this, he seems to be willing to let Pelosi run with it. I think this is the right Biden strategy at least for now.

You're right, think I saw a segment on the long-stay hotels & motels. Admittedly, I was thinking of the Courtyards, Holiday Inns, Hilton Garden Inns etc.

I was demoted, taking a 20% paycut to start, our group is losing 22% of pilot jobs. Every new hire in the last 6 years is getting cut. There are threats that those job losses could double in the next few months. I still have a job, but my job is very threatened. The company only needs about a third of our pilot group to operate the schedules that they are currently flying. A furlough of 12-24 months would cost me between 150k and 400k. That's a lot of lost revenue. We are a one income family. Cuts that deep would take YEARS for the industry to recover from. It takes months to get pilots and planes back on line, and there's only a finite amount that can be returned per year. The annual amount of revenue that airlines pump into the economy (5% of GDP and 1.7 Trillion) would drop so much that the overall economy would be impacted.

I had the exact same thought.

I've seen hotels offering hotel rooms as office space for workers who can't go into work but don't want to or can't work well from home. Must be pennies on the dollar for the rooms and I'm not sure how many people would or can do that, but not a bad idea to try to fill some space that would otherwise go empty during the work week.

The Times story on the GOP finances is pretty amazing. I don't buy the idea that they will face a cash crunch, but spending 800 million since 2019 is shocking, in a where did all that money go, way.

I'll never understand why so many conservatives give their money to the grift machine.

One of Trump's spokesmen, Jason Miller, has spent 800k in legal bills trying to avoid child support. He surely isn't the one paying those bills.

This particular thread was mind boggling.

https://twitter.com/EricLiptonNYT/st...85784838541314

"Aides signed these super broad documents and then when things went sour with Trump (it happens sometimes)"

:lol:

227 million passed through a single LLC with ties to the Trump family.

I doubt justice ever comes, but if it does...

Oh yeah totally this. I tried to wrap my head around how they afford it but who knows.

Even those. I have regular, long-term delivery customers who bounce from room to room every couple months at the Holiday Inn and Hilton Garden in town.

DoJ asks a federal court to let them take over the defense of Trump in his defamation lawsuit. They really are the President's personal lawyers now.

I like how Parscale used a million dollars to promote his own tweets.

Here's the McConnell proposal for the second stimulus totalling $300B. Far cry from the $2T to $3T that Pelosi wants. I think both sides are too far apart for anything quick to happen.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sen...bill-mcconnell
I'm generally okay with school vouchers but it has little/nothing to do with coronavirus impact. I think business immunity from coronavirus lawsuits (unless there is gross negligence or like) has to be in there.

This and the draft legislation making it illegal for the Fed to loan money starting in January make it clear the GOP is going to do everything possible to sabotage the economy if Biden wins.

Fuck the whole lot of them.

The business immunity shield can go to hell. If you want to risk people's lives, you pay the bills for it

SI

I was thinking more of small business owners with the use case (and other similar variations) ... I go to restaurant, enter for pickup, see people waiting in line not social distancing, get a positive on coronavirus and then sue the restaurant.

EDIT: I think airlines (and airports & TSA) also. If I chose to fly, I shoulder that risk and shouldn't sue airlines unless there is gross negligence.

lol

Trump is still saying Mexico will pay for the wall and his crowds are still cheering it.

^^^^^^ this... a thousand times this.

I want a really /strict/ definition of small business if we're doing that. Expect every meat packing plant and refinery and Amazon warehouse to try to wriggle underneath this.

Hell, Texas Education Agency should be on the hook for the bullshit they're pulling with mandatory hours for virtual learning and trying to enforce kids in schools so Dan Patrick can say he sacrificed other kids at Trump's altar to open the economy. Of course the local schools will be the ones on the hook because little Jimmy didn't wear a mask all 8 hours of the day never mind that you're asking 7 year olds to do what fucking adults can't be bothered to.

In short, fuck Mitch and his liability shield.

SI

I can see your point of view. I don't know the legalese but I can see a bunch of legit small businesses being crushed with threats of lawsuits.


Haven't mentioned this to the wife.

But if she gets really seriously ill with coronavirus because of having to teach remotely from the school and because school is starting to bring back limited students, I would seriously explore options to sue.

If she catches it but recovers shortly after, no problem. There's been some teachers testing positive (before reopening to kids) and sent home. Apparently there is X weeks they get, after that they have to use their PTO, and then not sure what happens after that.

If you want to read more about it:
https://twitter.com/MaxKennerly/stat...39740663193601
Businesses are facing Covid-19 lawsuits. The GOP has a radical plan to shield them from liability. - Vox

The legal barriers are higher for plaintiffs wanting to sue than for businesses to sue anyone who brings a complaint against them. And they know they can try to sneak this by because it's too much minutiae to get into a sound bite. Mitch is going to be like "See... we tried to do a stimulus but this awful piece of legislation was a non-starter with the Dems. They're the ones standing in the way of your shiny new Trump check!"

"Well, it's the driver's fault for getting into a Ford Pinto. In fact we should be able to sue them for buying our shitty car. They should have known better"

So, again, fuck Mitch. I have no patience for this kind of willful disregard for human life in the pursuit of profits.

SI

Here's more details on the business protection.

I think #1 and #2 makes sense. Not sure how #3 should be worded legalese. There should be a process to positively conclude that it was caused by employer somehow.

My example above was more protecting businesses from consumers whereas the bill seemed focus on protecting businesses from employees.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/08/polit...ill/index.html

Protection for health care workers and businesses makes sense to me. The use case would be waiting in a dental office or having a cleaning, getting a flu shot etc.

Isn't this the risk that the business demanded to take when they demanded the government to allow them to open up? I know several businesses had customers sign waivers before they would allow them in for just this reason. I am not sure why this would need to be in the bill anyway. I feel like this is the same as the concussion discussion in football. The argument against the employee is simple. They could have got it at work or they could have got it on their way to work when they stopped at Starbucks, or when they picked up the mail, or that one time they mistakenly shook hands with the co-worker on the way into the office etc.

If Trump was a more traditional president, he should be seriously considered for the Peace prize for UAE-Israeli breakthrough. And certainly if he gets SA and other ME frenemies to join in "normalization" he should be way up there, just not sure UAE alone is enough to offset his other negatives.

Wiki says the critieria is "According to Nobel's will, the Peace Prize shall be awarded to the person who in the preceding year "shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses".

https://apnews.com/4ec1ce1ff6cf9d7321d9cad200650e2c

I'll be surprised if it doesn't go to the opposition leader in Belarus.

And the Israel/UAE peace deal is mostly hype and seemed to come with an agreement for the U.S. to sell the UAE a shit ton of weapons.

I keep wondering when exactly the UAE was any threat to attack Israel.

A memo went out dod wide today explaining the tax deferral and strongly encouraging everyone, especially young enlisted soldiers, to set up a discretionary allotment of 6.2% of their base pay. It goes on to reinforce the fact that you have to pay this money back so do not see it as or use it as extra income because from January through April of next year they can expect to pay 12.4% of their base pay in social security.

So if federal agencies are warning people not to spend this "extra" income then what exactly was the point again?

What i remember reading is Trump was not authorized to remove the tax but only defer it, only congress can say remove it. The thought is once it is "deferred", congress will formalize it and say no need to pay it back.

So yeah, smart thing is to save the "deferred" taxes in case it needs to be repaid but I'm thinking it'll be made permanent.

No way congress passes that since Democrats and rightly so view it as defunding social security.

Holy crap!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/polit...ge%2Fstory-ans



And Woodward is indicating he has tapes, but I don't know if this convo was recorded.

The only point of the tax deferral is to help Trump win the election. He doesn't care what happens to those people. If Biden wins they'll just say he raised their taxes.

You are right, it is "defunding social security" but there is precedence with Obama and congress (Pelosi supporting) passed it last time.

IMO, if not done, this would have too much negative play leading to Nov. I think there is a good chance congress will make it permanent.

It was indeed. CNN just played it.

Is it fake news if Trump says it himself on tape? Why the hell would he talk to Woodward on tape?

He's not a bright man. Woodward is the closest thing we have to a celebrity journalist - maybe Trump was blinded by the celebrity?

Maybe. Incredibly dumb. I know Trump has a thousand lives but this has to be the final nail in the coffin.

Twitter comments would suggest otherwise

That recording should be in every Biden ad for the rest of the campaign.

Everything the GOP is doing is with an eye towards fucking the country if Biden wins. This tax deferral, the new stimulus, the ACA lawsuit, drafting legislation to make it illegal for the Fed to loan money, everything.

dola

GOP: He didn't do it.
Trump: I did it.

GOP: He didn't mean to do it.
Trump: I wish I'd done it sooner.

GOP: He did it for benign reasons.
Trump: I did it for the worst reasons.

GOP: He's sorry.
Trump: I'm never sorry.

GOP: He's chastened.
Trump: I'm doing it again tomorrow.

— Radley Balko (@radleybalko) February 5, 2020

It's not going to put a dent in his base. His base believes this is a cultural war that they have to win no matter the cost. This will make it more difficult for him to pull the few remaining undecideds and that's probably the most we can ask for with Trump.

Why would this time be any different? His zealots will just pivot to "see? he didn't want to create a panic"

SI

These tapes mean nothing. Trump will continue to not experience any major sustaining blowback.

The talking points are that actions speak louder than words and just look all he did to take it seriously while the same people downplay the severity of COVID because that's been Trump's talking point for 6 months.

Correct. Had a 70+ year old aunt-in-law post something on Facebook yesterday that was akin to "if the liberals win, it is the end of America. Trump may not be the man we like, but he is the man God sent to save America."

It doesn't matter what he does at this point. He could suspend elections or roll out tanks on election day to keep blacks from voting. It literally doesn't matter.

But we know that isn't true. No, he won't lose half his support, but he's already lost a few points and he can't win without expanding his support from 2016. Every time he loses a tenth of a point or something matters. If he has lost 2 or 3 points of his 2016 support, he can't win.

He is a bigger idiot than I'd ever imagined, and I'd imagined him to be a substantial idiot.


Just. Wow.

I agree, it won't hurt him significantly.

Woodward's timing is curious though. It would have been better if this came out mid-Oct which gives Trump less time to react.

OK, if you want to nitpick, nothing he does matters to the 40%.

I was wondering about this too, except it feels like Biden is losing a little momentum now, so I'm thinking maybe they did it to stunt any momentum Trump might be picking up.

This right here. (And this is true for all of these things that come up and some of y'all keep syaing "IT WON'T MATTER!!!") Yes, he SHOULD lose virtually all of his support for this one, but he won't. However, it's reasonable to assume that it'll move more undecideds to Biden (heck, my wife is one..she's already told me this is the final straw) and some Trump supporters to third party or Biden. How many? Hard to tell. But a non-zero loss of his voters and a non-zero number of third-party voters who switch to Biden for a guy who won by a razor-thin margin and hasn't expanded his base? That's important.

I wonder why Woodward wouldn't say something earlier if he could have prevent people from needlessly dying.

I do not want to distract from the fact that our President is an immoral grifter and half the country is perfectly okay with that.

I'm angrier at Woodward than Trump. I already knew Trump was a scumbag of the highest order, so I'd expect this from him. But Woodward held this information until now...to sell a book? ...so his favored candidate can win the election? That's absolutely inexcusable.

Dems can't appoint SCOTUS Justices if you mismanage COVID so badly that everyone is dead so there's no one left to appoint.

We’ve received a whistleblower complaint alleging DHS suppressed intel reports on Russian election interference, altered intel to match false Trump claims and made false statements to Congress.

This puts our national security at risk. We will investigate:https://t.co/Z7npo3P6zv

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) September 9, 2020

Two scandals in one day that would destroy any other presidency, we just call it Wednesday.

I don't know if it's 'candidate' related. Woodward has written an in depth book about every President since H.W. And I don't think his "Obama's Wars" was all that flattering to Obama.

But Woodward is also an 'old style' journalist, who believes his job is to report the story fully, even if revealing parts of it earlier may have saved lives.

If so, then I'll let Lt. Dan Kaffee respond for me.


https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/3159b07...7-c07a4b199022

Woodward is a grade a piss of sh*t. He should have said something the moment he heard Trump peddling lies. His failure to say anything probably cost some lives.

A politician acting in craven self-interest is truly an unprecedented occurence.


Sometimes the simplest, understated answers are the best. Like apples of gold in settings of silver you might say. Well played.

I'm also confused by the Woodward outrage. It seems we are simultaneously saying it won't change anything even now, but yet he cost lives by not saying something earlier. Which is it?

Jesus Christ. This is madness.

How is their meddling with weaponized propaganda not an act of war? WTF.

Let me shut up smh.

Can't recall if I posted it here, but a good friend lost both of her parents to COVID within a five-day period this summer. They were conservatives who didn't take the virus seriously, but weren't by any means full-blown MAGA; they were the type who could have been swayed.



I'd like to make Bob Woodward sit down and explain to my friend why he thought he should hold this information for 7 months.

Funny thing is that Biden just released a major economic plan today.

And it will get no coverage because Trump is increasing his rate of "would destroy any other President" scandals to over one a day.

One of Trump's skills--from the 2016 Primary onward--is that his opponents can get no traction whatsoever. We might be praising Trump. We might be cursing Trump. But we are always talking about Trump.

Biden's speech trashing Trump was fantastic today. I doubt it'll get much play aside from being played live today.

edit: In a pleasant surprise, CNN is discussing Biden's speech.

Romney comes out HARD against Trump's virus revelations.

Not gonna be enough to change the narrative, Don.

I will be announcing a list of future potential Supreme Court Justices at 3:30 P.M. Eastern from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 9, 2020

Do people really think that would have changed anything? He's been caught lying incessantly for years. Bob Woodward wasn't going to change the position of your friends parents. They were going to sacrifice themselves for Trump regardless.

It could have forced Trump to change his tactics if it had been disclosed early on, though. He could have been forced to acknowledge the threat before March, perhaps allowing/forcing him to somewhat save face by doing a 180 on his messaging. Instead, he was simply content to stick with the "no problems here" messaging to keep the economy and stock market up in hopes the virus wouldn't be really bad so he could coast to re-election.

That changed when the market started tanking, he gave that mid-March "hostage" press conference which caused the market to REALLY tank, but by then he was so far down the path to "this is going to go away soon" that he couldn't walk it back because, you know, true tough guys don't admit they are wrong.

I'd argue that if a medical expert like Fauci didn't move the needle for people who didn't want to take COVID seriously, then Woodward's tapes wouldn't have either.

In February? It absolutely would have changed a lot and would have saved lives. If Trump gets out in front of this with his supporters the anti-vaxxers don't find an ally and the nonsense doesn't reach the point it has. Releasing it now does nothing though. His supporters are far too gone. Trump could go out to the rose garden and say it on live TV and most could say it didn't happen or claim he was misunderstood.

People were generally listening to Fauci initially. That changed as Trump, Fox News, and other GOP continually attacked him to keep up with thr Trump narrative.

You think this is on Woodward? There were lots and lots of people within the administration that knew this as well and did nothing.

Haven’t we now reached the point where Trump has to call HIMSELF a disgruntled failing hack he hardly knows?

— Dennis Herring (@dcherring) September 9, 2020

Especially when he reveals the list

The Coronavirus
That Covington Catholic Kid
The guy with the gun in St. Louis (but not his wife)
Putin
Don Jr.
A name randomly selected from anyone who donates $100 or more dollars to his campaign by midnight tonight.

I think it's fair to question why Woodward waited to release these tapes, but I also think that the earlier he released them the less of an effect they would've had.

I think it's revisionist history to suggest these tapes would've changed minds in February.....in February covid was still largely an unknown horror story from across the oceans & I'd suspect this tape's release would've been largely dismissed at the time and served literally zero purpose & forgotten, rather than run up the flag pole. To some degree these tapes only became remarkable once we passed tipping points of deaths, knowledge gained & consistent administration response.

Sure Trump could have gotten in front of it if he wanted, but Woodward bringing this out would have had zero impact. Trump would have just attacked him and called it all fake news and his supporters would have followed.

Any judge willing to grant him immunity from his numerous wrongdoings
Judge Judy
Judge Dredd

SI

Doesn't matter if it would have worked. You do the right thing. Period. Consequences be damned.It's not JUST on Woodward, but sitting on the tapes for 7 months is 100% inexcusable. The fact that other scumbags sat on it doesn't excuse him sitting on it (with evidence.)

Also, how poor does your grasp of American history have to be to think "I, as President, will confess gross malfeasance to Bob Woodward" is a good idea?

Yeah, this is specifically what I meant by this...

So Trump gave Woodward 18 interviews for the book. This is probably just a drop in the bucket of stuff he has on tape, not that it will matter to anyone at this point.

The Bolton book episode suggested that the timing & release of such things might not be entirely under Woodward's control, for whatever that is worth.

You're wrong and this shows a lack of understanding for the tenets of basic journalism. Woodward is old school and you see the story through. When you have unprecedented access and the chance to expose a President who is incriminating himself on god knows what else 18 separate more times for a larger expose you don’t sabotage that for one tidbit that would have made literally zero impact had it come out in Feb/March/April/May/June.

Read up on Watergate some time.

"They were conservatives who didn't take the virus seriously,"


But its a journalist's fault? The enemy of the people?



I swear these are some logic-bending times we live in.

Saving lives >>>> respecting the tenets of basic journalism