US Elections 2020

[filghy2]

But I think since its clear that we have to come to an impasse as to how to enact change in this country, I'm going to give up too.

Even if the dice are loaded against change it can still be achieved if enough people are prepared push for it. What if FDR in the 1930s said that change was all too hard because Americans didn't want big government and, anyway, there had always been ups and downs in the economy? What if Lincoln had said that getting rid of slavery was too hard? What if people in the 1950s had said that abolishing segregation was too hard?

Ultimately 40-45% of Americans can only impose their views on the country if the majority choose not to fight against it. Trump and his cronies want you to give up in despair because it serves their purposes.

[broncofan]

Just to give an update: I know nobody was hanging on every word for my anecdote but just wanted to give an update because I said I know a bunch of people who were waiting on ballots. Everyone I know who was waiting on a ballot in PA has gotten their ballot and sent it in. I do anticipate it's probably going to work out for most people though some mail in ballots will probably be nullified for not being timely and for some minor errors filling them out. Still checking the polling at 538 every day. We'll see how it goes.

[broncofan]

I watched the second debate last night and thought Joe Biden did a good job. Biden does seem to have a pretty good handle on policy but is hampered by his inability to express himself gracefully. Trump interrupted less and made fewer insults but still lied in nearly every answer and made at least a couple of racist remarks.

The thing that I hope has really been hammered home is that Trump has caused about 150,000 preventable deaths. This is not just the conclusion of a recent research paper by academics at Columbia University but a fairly obvious point given the number of U.S. deaths from covid compared to the global total.

If this alone doesn't disqualify him for re-election then perhaps the fact that he is stunningly corrupt and has no respect for our form of government should. But maybe I can't judge a debate between someone who I know is objectively repugnant and a decent person with a sense of civic responsibility. We'll see what happens November 3rd and in the days that follow.

[Stavros]

But we did learn from the President what the future holds, not his next four years as President, but four years of Biden: the stock market will crash on day one; then the wider economy will collapse; there will be no air conditioning and no central heating, and just when you sit down to watch a ball game, the electricity will cut out- oh, and in all new buildings and renovated existing ones, there will be mandatory small windows...

...but how tame is Biden? No response to the preposterous claim the 45th President has done more for Black Americans than any President since Lincoln- was Biden incapable of rebutting this by citing LBJ? He wasn’t even articulate in defending his record as Senator, sponsoring the Violence Against Women Act, or pointing out that the HN1 response claimed to be a disaster was anything but and that its legacy was more or less trashed by the incoming administration.

Maybe they are so fed up they can’t be bothered to make a fist of it?

[broncofan]

...but how tame is Biden? No response to the preposterous claim the 45th President has done more for Black Americans than any President since Lincoln- was Biden incapable of rebutting this by citing LBJ? He wasn’t even articulate in defending his record as Senator, sponsoring the Violence Against Women Act, or pointing out that the HN1 response claimed to be a disaster was anything but and that its legacy was more or less trashed by the incoming administration.

Maybe they are so fed up they can’t be bothered to make a fist of it?

I've definitely lowered expectations. Imagine what a good debater would have done with Trump on both offense and defense. Some of us are so overwhelmed by the bullshit and the lack of fairness that outrage feels wasted and hard to sustain.

Biden still holds leads in polling in Pennsylvania, Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, and even North Carolina. Though I'd have loved to see a debate performance that really exposed the Trump administration's failings in vivid detail, a victory in the election could make a difference of hundreds of thousands of lives and will more than suffice for me.

If Trump loses and the margins are obvious, we'll also have to see whether he's willing to concede. Even if tradition and prosecutorial restraint makes it unlikely he will face legal jeopardy, does any of that apply to people in his orbit who have been involved in corrupt, illegal acts? Losing the Presidency means he loses control of the Justice Department, the pardon power, and any threats of intimidation or bluster lose all teeth. This is going to be a fascinating next ten days if Biden is successful.

[Stavros]

What about the transition period? Is it not the case that any losing or outgoing President can do lots of things between November and January? He may have ‘Conservative’ judges as a legacy, but he may also want to be as disruptive as he can be knowing there is nothing left, sort of like a tenant trashing the apartment he is leaving to spite the landlord...

[KnightHawk 2.0]

Over 5 months ago House Democrats passed the H.E.R.O.E.S Act,a stimulus bill designed to fund the U.S.Postal Service,Money for more testing and personal protective equipment for frontline workers,expand unemployment benefits and another round of stimulus checks for families,and over 5 months later it is still sitting on Senate Majority Leader's Mitch McConnell's desk and hasn't been brought to the senate floor for a vote,and yesterday Senate Republicans voted overwhelmingly to advance Amy Coney Barrett final supreme court confirmation,which will be held Monday Night,and this shows that
Republicans are a bunch of hypocrites,who back in 2016 didn't hold any confirmation hearings for Barack Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court and said that it was to close to an election and that the next president should chose the nominee for the Supreme Court,and 4 years later they break their own rule by ramming through Donald Trump's nominees,and this power grab also shows that Republicans know their time in control of the senate will be coming to an end.

[IwuvFBBs]

I'm confused or perhaps ignorant to your comment. How has Trump caused over 150,000 preventable deaths?

The timeline I'm aware of is that Democrats were against travel bans from highly affected places (China) back at the start of 2020 while Republicans were not. Disregarding political ideologies, it's obvious that restricting travel from key areas reduces the spread of the virus. I recall Trump recommending people to drink bleach to stop the virus. I'm always at odds on this because I can't see how people excuse them taking bleach (which obviously kills you) because the president said so. On the other hand, as president you don't say dumb things like that. Trump keeps saying more tests = more cases which is obvious. I don't believe this to be a significant margin but I have heard news of people testing positive when they don't have the virus. A very serious issue is that COVID related deaths are an ambiguous topic as of right now.

Another critical piece of information is the John Hopkins worldwide mortality rates. The US is doing far better than many countries with respect to COVID related mortality. If this is due to doctors not attributing the cause of death to COVID and instead by other diseases facilitated by COVID we don't know. We can speculate that our private health care system manipulates COVID info but we can't attest to it.

There's an obvious corruption issue but saying that Trump caused COVID deaths doesn't help. If anything, we should audit healthcare records because it's surprising that the US is doing a much better job at treating COVID than other countries with 1st grade healthcare systems. Unless of course, health care in the US is one of the best in the world but I'd need someone from a different country to verify this claim.

[Stavros]

I'm confused or perhaps ignorant to your comment. How has Trump caused over 150,000 preventable deaths?

The timeline I'm aware of is that Democrats were against travel bans from highly affected places (China) back at the start of 2020 while Republicans were not. Disregarding political ideologies, it's obvious that restricting travel from key areas reduces the spread of the virus. I recall Trump recommending people to drink bleach to stop the virus. I'm always at odds on this because I can't see how people excuse them taking bleach (which obviously kills you) because the president said so. On the other hand, as president you don't say dumb things like that. Trump keeps saying more tests = more cases which is obvious. I don't believe this to be a significant margin but I have heard news of people testing positive when they don't have the virus. A very serious issue is that COVID related deaths are an ambiguous topic as of right now.

Another critical piece of information is the John Hopkins worldwide mortality rates. The US is doing far better than many countries with respect to COVID related mortality. If this is due to doctors not attributing the cause of death to COVID and instead by other diseases facilitated by COVID we don't know. We can speculate that our private health care system manipulates COVID info but we can't attest to it.

There's an obvious corruption issue but saying that Trump caused COVID deaths doesn't help. If anything, we should audit healthcare records because it's surprising that the US is doing a much better job at treating COVID than other countries with 1st grade healthcare systems. Unless of course, health care in the US is one of the best in the world but I'd need someone from a different country to verify this claim.

The argument is simple: had the US Government acted sooner than it did to contain the virus, fewer people would have been infected, and fewer would have died. The evidence shows that countries which acted promptly using test and trace systems curbed the spead of the disease early in its life-cycle, South Korea being the best example, if we allow for actions by island states like Taiwan, Iceland and New Zealand having a natural barrier to the spread of infection, though this clearly does not explain how the UK has fared so badly. Being an island, or a group of island states ought to have been an advantage, but it was not.

Yes, the deaths per capita do not put the US top of the table, Belgium being so densely populated has, I understand, the worst record on this. Whether or not deaths due to Covid-19 are accurate is a difficult one, after all, most Africans infected with Malaria die from liver failure, but their livers would not fail were it not for the invasion of the malarial parasite. And why would doctors lie about a patient's death?

The US record of infections is lamentable, and crucial to this is to understand that many people can be infected and not know it, that many can suffer from Covid-19 and return to normal life, but that many do not, and that health-related problems may afflict someone for months, even years to come- Covid-19 is not just about death. Being infected and forced to quarantine also has economic effects, which could be losing income, or even losing a job.

And it is also about health care, and while the US scores highly in some areas, it fails in others (see the first link below). Thus, the main argument remains:

-the US did not create a test and trace system from the very beginning so that it could monitor who had been infected, when and where, and follow up their movements and social interactions, as was essential in combating HIV/AIDS in the 1980s.

-the 'travel ban' was imperfect: on 9/11 the US was shut down, nobody entered, nobody left (except for the 'plane carrying bin Laden's family members who were in the US at the time). This year, only Chinese nationals were barred from entering the US, up to 40,000 US citizens were allowed in from China (one of whom was responsible for the viral outbreak in Washington State), and there were no bans from Europe and the most infected area at the time, Italy, which became the source of many US infections on the East Coast.

-the Obama Administration left a pandemic plan which the succeeding administration binned because anything with Obama's name on it was binned. The lack of PPE early on in the crisis was caused by the Republicans in Congress refusing to fund its replenishment, because they opposed anything with Obama's name on it. And when Under-President Kushner was in day-to-day control of PPE it was denied to Democrat Stats and cities out of childish, if political spite, a good example of how not to conduct pubic health policy.

-Whatever the President said, and says, can be dismissed as he is an ignorant man, an incompetent manager, and indifferent to the pain of other people. That said, social media has played what might in some cases be a catastrophic role in misleading people, such as the sick lies promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News, and Rush Limbaugh on his talk show. These examples are tantamount to being an accessory to a crime, were Covid-19 a weapon used to kill people or make them ill. In these cases, there was a staggering dereliction of duty to tell the truth, and was done merely to protect the reputation of a man who went on to promote a bogus 'cure' in hydroxychloroquine, and the uses of ultra-violent light and bleach, proof were it needed, that the wrong man was in the most important job, and not leading the US, but failing it, enabed by his friends in the media.

Two links that give a profile for you to consider -

The US compared to other countries-
https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blo...-health-system

A more polemical view
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ailure/614191/

[broncofan]

I'm confused or perhaps ignorant to your comment. How has Trump caused over 150,000 preventable deaths? .

A recent study by Columbia University conducted by epidemiologists concluded as much. I'll link it if you don't find the rest of my argument convincing but logic should tell you the same thing.

The U.S has 4% of the world's population and 20% of the covid deaths. If the U.S. had its proportionate share of deaths then it would have 4% of the world's deaths. That would be 48,000 deaths (1.2 million times 4%) instead of 232,000 deaths. 232,000 minus 48,000 equals 184,000 deaths above its proportionate share.

The third thing I would say is that the United States is ranked 10th worst in deaths per capita out of 193 UN member countries. Do you not think being ranked 183rd out of 193 is bad? 183rd out of 193 is not good, it is not average, it is poor. And as I say below, per capita numbers should favor neither large nor small countries, though epidemiologists think they slightly favor larger countries.

Early on epidemiologists believed per capita numbers favor more populous countries because they have to be overwhelmed in more regions before their numbers are bad whereas a small, densely populated country can have very bad numbers per capita with one outbreak. So, the U.S. has the most deaths overall and the 10th most per capita.

As the wealthiest country in the world, one that can institute health measures and provide relief to the public, the U.S. should have done at least an average job per capita. An average job would have seen 184,000 fewer deaths.

As for the health measures, it's kind of shocking to me that you're still mentioning travel bans. They can be helpful but the country was seeded all over the place and spread takes place from within. Once a country has community spread, distancing, masking, and testing along with consistent public health messaging prevents further spread.