Cut to the News
Cut through the clutter to today's top news
July 9, 2020
Good morning
Welcome to today's top news.
Leading the News . . .
Biden would grant citizenship to 11 million illegal immigrants . . . Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joseph R. Biden on Wednesday formally embraced citizenship rights for 11 million illegal immigrants and a full erasure of all of President Trump’s get-tough border policies, as part of the party’s new unity platform. The former vice president would expand sanctuary locations, limit ICE’s ability to deport criminals in local jails,
and reverse deportations for some military veterans already ousted because of criminal records. The platform calls for an immediate 100-day halt to all deportations, and would unleash an army of overseers to police the way the Border Patrol and ICE’s deportation officers enforce immigration policy. A special eye would be paid toward the “racial underpinnings” of Trump policies. Washington Times
How about Biden promises, "If you like your country, you can keep your country." Then I'd feel so much better. Immigration is good, but too much that changes the culture too rapidly and is not absorbed is bad.
CDC considering giving vaccine to minorities before whites . . . The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and an advisory committee of outside health experts in April began working on a ranking system for what may be an extended rollout in the United States. According to a preliminary plan, any approved vaccines would be offered to vital medical and national security officials first, and then to other essential workers and
those considered at high risk — the elderly instead of children, people with underlying conditions instead of the relatively healthy. Agency officials and the advisers are also considering what has become a contentious option: putting Black and Latino people, who have disproportionately fallen victim to Covid-19, ahead of others in the population. New York Times
There's a rationale for this. Not saying I necessarily agree with it, but there's a rationale. Now, imagine if whites were getting sicker and the CDC proposed giving it to white people first.
US running short of masks, gowns, and gloves again . . . Health-care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic are encountering shortages of masks, gowns, face shields and gloves — a frustrating recurrence of a struggle that haunted the first months of the crisis. Nurses say they are reusing N95 masks for days and even weeks at a time. Doctors say they can’t reopen offices because they lack personal protective equipment. “A
lot people thought once the alarm was sounded back in March surely the federal government would fix this, but that hasn’t happened,” said Deborah Burger, president of National Nurses United, a union. Washington Post
Models project 200,000 dead by Election Day . . . As the United States surpasses 3 million coronavirus infections, forecasters are updating their models to account for the recent resurgence and reaching a grim consensus: the next few months are going to be bad.
The national death toll is now expected eclipse 200,000 by Election Day, according to the latest models. It’s a clear signal that, six months into the worst public health crisis in a century, the coronavirus pandemic remains as disruptive as ever. Politico
Hospitals strained in several states . . . Coronavirus patients are pouring into hospitals across the American South and West, straining front-line doctors and nurses and draining supplies of protective gear and testing equipment, according to health-care workers around the country. In pandemic hotspot states such as Florida, Arizona, California and Texas, hospitals are adding new intensive care unit beds and special air-flow systems to
treat the growing demand as virus hospitalizations set records almost daily. To cope with the wave of patients, hospitals are canceling elective surgeries to free up space for those sick with the virus. Medical staff warn they could become overwhelmed. Washington Post
Trump Tulsa rally may have contributed to COVID-19 spike . . .A controversial campaign rally held by President Donald Trump in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last month likely contributed to a rise in the number of coronavirus cases there, a top local health official said on Wednesday. Tulsa has confirmed hundreds of new cases of COVID-19 over the past two days, said Dr. Bruce Dart, health director for the city and county. “In the past few days, we’ve had
almost 500 cases. And we know we had several large events a little over two weeks ago, which is about right. So I guess we just connect the dots,” Dart said, apparently referring to the rally and accompanying protests. Reuters
Well, it hardly took a genius to figure out a mass indoor rally without masks was going to cause a COIVD spike. Bad idea.
Teachers frightened but need the salary . . . Christy Karwatt teaches social studies, but she’s been thinking more like a math teacher the last few days.. At 61, the Sarasota High teacher is entering her 27th year in Florida's retirement system, and she loves her job. She had planned on teaching three more years to maximize her retirement payment. But officials are pouring on pressure to reopen schools full time this fall.
In the meantime, Karwatt has begun crunching the numbers on just how much money she would sacrifice if she retired early. “I’m at an age where I am scared for my life,” she said. “What good is money if you are sick or dead?” USA Today
CDC will change its school reopening guidelines after Trump complains . . . The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will issue new guidance on schools reopening, Vice President Mike Pence announced Wednesday. He said that the guidelines will include preparing communities, schools, teachers and parents for students to return to classrooms safely. Trump denounced the old guidance. 'I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough
& expensive guidelines for opening schools,' Trump tweeted Wednesday morning – ahead of the DOE press conference. 'While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things,' he continued. 'I will be meeting with them!!!' Daily Mail
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Sanders: Platform would make Biden "most progressive president since FDR" . . . Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) spoke about the platforms created as a result of the task forces that Sanders helped form with 2020 Democratic presidential candidate former Vice President Joe Biden. "I think the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR. It did not have,
needless to say, everything that I wanted, didn’t have everything that Biden wanted, but there is no question that, on some of the major issues facing this country, if that agenda is implemented, life will improve for tens and tens of millions of working people. It will improve for our environment and for climate change, criminal justice, and for the needs of low-income people.” Breitbart
Prof's model gives Trump 91 percent chance of winning . . . President Trump is almost certain to win reelection in 2020, according to a political science professor whose “Primary Model” has correctly predicted five out of six elections since 1996. “The Primary Model gives Trump a 91 percent chance of winning in November,” Stony Brook Professor Helmut Norpoth said. He noted that his model, which he introduced in 1996,
would have correctly predicted the outcome of all but two presidential elections in the last 108 years: The exceptions include John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960 and George W. Bush’s election in 2000, when Bush won a majority of the electoral college despite losing the popular vote. Mediaite
John Solomon: Durham indictments likely around Labor Day . . . U.S. Attorney John Durham is moving toward indictments in his probe of the investigation into the investigators of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, according to investigative reporter John Solomon.
According to the Washington Examiner, which picked up his remarks on Fox: “My sources tell me there’s a lot of activity. I’m seeing, personally, activity behind the scenes of the Justice Department,” Solomon said on Tuesday, adding that Durham’s team “is trying to bring those first indictments, and I would look for a time
around Labor Day to see the first sort of action by the Justice Department.” White House Dossier
Supreme Court upholds Trump religious exemption to ACA contraception rule . . . A victory for religious freedom. Even Elena Kagan agreed. The rigidly doctrinaire yet widely celebrated leftist Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented. According to the Wall Street Journal: The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld Trump administration rules that expanded moral and religious exemptions to a federal requirement that employer-provided
health-insurance plans cover birth control with no out-of-pocket costs. The judgment came on a 7-2 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan in the majority, though not all agreed on the reasoning. White
House Dossier
Biden to tout "Buy American" plan in bid to steal working class voters from Trump . . . Former Vice President Joe Biden is expected Thursday to outline a plan that his campaign says is aimed at reviving the U.S. economy with an America-centric approach to job creation and manufacturing, issuing a direct challenge to President Trump as they compete for working-class voters less than four months before the presidential election. Biden is
poised to unveil his agenda while campaigning in Dunmore, Pa., where the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee will tour a metalworks plant before making his economic pitch to an American public still reeling from the coronavirus pandemic. Wall Street Journal
Congress moves toward mandating technology that blocks drunk driving . . . It’s not a law yet, but car manufacturers may soon have to include technology in all new vehicles that will test whether drivers are sober enough to operate a vehicle. The House passed a $1.5 trillion transportation and infrastructure measure last week that includes an array of new car safety requirements. Among them is a provision requiring the National Highway
Traffic Safety Administration within five years to develop a rule requiring advanced drunk driving prevention technology in all new cars. Washington Examiner
Wife of man alleged to have taken Trump SATs denies it . . . President Trump's niece Mary L. Trump alleges in her new tell-all book that her uncle paid a friend to take a college admissions test more than 50 years ago so he could gain acceptance into the elite Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. But in a video message, former tennis star Pam Shriver said her late husband met Trump after he was already enrolled at
the University of Pennsylvania. "My late husband Joe Shapiro passed away 21 years ago. He was a man of great integrity, honesty; he was a hard worker." Fox News
Pandemic mars Trump convention plans . . . President Trump’s plans for a full-scale GOP convention in Jacksonville, Fla., next month are looking increasingly bleak amid rising numbers of coronavirus cases. The state of Florida has experienced a significant surge in COVID-19 that shows little sign of slowing, and five GOP senators already have said they do not plan to attend the events in Jacksonville, where Trump is scheduled to
deliver a speech formally accepting the Republican presidential nomination. The Hill
Kayleigh McEnany blames violence on Democratic governors and mayors . . . White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Tuesday appeared on Sean Hannity’s FOX News show to reinforce President Trump’s message that Democrats run cities plagued by violence. Here’s a piece of evidence. What happened in New York City when a law and order Republican finally got control of the wheel? Rudy Giuliani cleaned up a city that had become unlivable,
putting in place no-nonsense policies that caused crime to plummet. Countless lives were saved, most of them black. White House Dossier
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China offers conciliatory tone . . . China’s top two foreign ministers kept to a conciliatory tone this week in public remarks about relations with the U.S., amid increasingly fraught tensions between the world’s two largest economies. “China’s US policy remains unchanged. We are still willing to grow China-US relations with goodwill and sincerity,” State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Thursday. “Some friends in the
US might have become suspicious or even wary of a growing China,” Wang said. “I’d like to stress here again that China never intends to challenge or replace the US, or have full confrontation with the US. What we care most about is to improve the livelihood of our people.” CNBC
Methinks they have neither goodwill nor sincerity.
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Mayor of Seoul missing . . . The mayor of South Korean capital Seoul is missing Thursday after leaving a verbal message that his daughter described as sounding like a will, police said. A massive search operation is underway for him. Police officers said they are looking for Mayor Park Won-soon at a small hill in Seoul’s Sungbuk neighborhood where his mobile phone signal was last detected. They said Park’s mobile phone was
currently turned off. Associated Press
Statue of Melania Trump burned in Slovenia . . . A wooden sculpture of U.S. first lady Melania Trump was torched near her hometown of Sevnica, Slovenia, on the night of July Fourth, as Americans celebrated U.S. Independence Day, said the artist who commissioned the sculpture. Brad Downey, a Berlin-based American artist, told Reuters he had the life-sized blackened, disfigured sculpture removed as soon as police informed him on July 5th of the
incident. Reuters
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A third of US families missed their July housing payments . . . Nearly one-third of American families have been unable to make full housing payments for July, a new survey has revealed as the US economy struggles to bounce back from crushing coronavirus losses. The survey by Apartment List, an online rental platform, found that 32 percent of US households did not make their full July payments on time. About 19
percent of survey respondents said they may no payment at all during the first week of the month, and 13 percent paid only a portion of their rent or mortgage. Daily Mail
Tesla close to fully autonomous car . . . U.S. electric vehicle maker Tesla is “very close” to achieving level 5 autonomous driving technology, Chief Executive Elon Musk said on Thursday, referring to the capability to navigate roads without any driver input. “I’m extremely confident that level 5 or essentially complete autonomy will happen and I think will happen very quickly,” Musk said in remarks made via a video message at the opening of
Shanghai’s annual World Artificial Intelligence Conference. “I remain confident that we will have the basic functionality for level 5 autonomy complete this year.” Reuters
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Seattle held training to help whites at "undoing their whiteness" . . . The City of Seattle held a segregated training session for white staffers last month in which they instructed workers on how to ‘undo their whiteness’ and affirm their ‘complicity in racism’, reports suggest. Titled ‘Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness’, the training session was reportedly held by the Office of Civil Rights on June 12,
the same day protesters took part in the CHOP zone demonstrations in the Capitol Hill district. Daily Mail
Ex-high school football player dives and catches child thrown from burning building . . . Phillip Blanks, now 28 and a former U.S. Marine, was at a friend’s apartment in Phoenix on Friday morning when he heard frantic screaming and a commotion. He immediately ran outside, barefoot, and saw the top floor of the apartment complex was ablaze and enveloped in smoke. He looked up and saw a petrified woman on a third-floor balcony with a child. Flames
quickly crept up behind her. “People started yelling for the lady to throw her kids down,” Blanks said. The mother dropped her son over the railing. As Blanks saw the small child falling, he dove forward, arms out. “I immediately got tunnel vision of the baby and somehow managed to catch him,” Blanks said. Washington Post
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Man driving stolen car crashes into woman driving stolen car . . . A police chase in Oregon ended when a driver fleeing authorities in a stolen car crashed into a woman driving another stolen car. The debacle took place Monday when police responded to a report of a stolen Toyota Land Cruiser driving through downtown Newberg, according to the Newberg-Dundee police. A pursuit ensued, and lasted for several blocks until the driver
crashed into another car near an intersection. Cops identified the driver of the first car as Randy Lee Cooper of Portland. After taking Cooper into custody, the police realized that the second car was also reported stolen in an unrelated crime three weeks ago. New York Post
Did he get her phone number?
Japan bans screaming on rollercoasters . . . The ban on screaming, along with a recommendation that visitors wear masks, is included in guidelines released by Japan’s theme-park associations when parks began reopening in May. The associations said they were following the judgment of health officials, who
have said actions such as coughing and singing can spread droplets widely. At the Fuji-Q Highland amusement park recently, the chief executive and his corporate boss took a ride on the Fujiyama roller coaster, and plunged 230 feet without so much as a peep. A video showed the two executives, both clad in masks, sternly riding the
coaster in complete silence. It ended with a message: “Please scream inside your heart.” Wall Street Journal
Also banned: Being amused at amusement parks
France ditches "Minister for Attractiveness" . . . France has changed the English version of the title of one its new Cabinet positions after ridicule online over the “minister for attractiveness” role. When the English Twitter account for the French foreign ministry Franck Riester’s new title of junior minister for trade and “attractiveness,” it immediately elicited mocking online and about whether it had been mistranslated. In France,
the term " attractivité" is often used to refer to attracting investment. Politico
It's France, come one. They should just create a "Minister for Le Sexy."
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Keith Koffler
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