Saturday, August 22, 2020

And another day of rejections, approvals, threats, defiance, conspiracy theories, ‘white supremacy,’ lies, muzzles, sibling love, a disaster in California, and an asteroid headed our way comes to a close:

"It's the phoniness of it all. It's the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel.” -- Maryanne Trump Barry

Deaths

US: 180,174 (+974)

World: 808,684 (+5713)

Cases

US: 5,841,428 (+44,701)

World: 23,379,580 (+271,430)

Countdown: 73 days.

At least 550,000 absentee ballots have been rejected in this year's presidential primaries, an NPR analysis finds. Far Outpacing 2016. And that's almost certainly an underestimate since not all states have made the information on rejected mail-in ballots available.

House approves bill to send $25 billion to Postal Service and halt changes.

The White House issued a veto threat on Friday for House Democrats' proposed bill that would provide $25 billion to the US Postal Service. Trump admitted last week that he opposes much-needed funding for the USPS because he doesn't want to see it used for mail-in voting this November.

Washington State Postal Workers Defy USPS Orders And Reinstall Mail Sorting Machines.

Coronavirus will be with us forever, Sage scientist warns. Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Today programme, Sir Mark said that, in order to control the pandemic, "global vaccination" would be required, but coronavirus would not be a disease like smallpox "which could be eradicated by vaccination".

Trump claims "deep state" at FDA is making coronavirus vaccine testing difficult. President Trump called out the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Saturday, claiming the agency was making it difficult for drug companies to test possible coronavirus vaccines and therapeutics on people. In a tweet, the president also accused members of the federal agency of slow-walking efforts to test possible vaccines and treatments for COVID-19 until after the November election.

WHO says children aged 12 and over should wear masks like adults. -- Everyone wear a mask.

US intel agencies find Wuhan officials kept Beijing in the dark for weeks about coronavirus. The reports also say that when the Chinese Communist Party learned about the virus, it sought to obscure the full extent of that knowledge from the rest of the world -- painting an overall picture of a dangerously secretive political system, the US officials said. The Trump administration has repeatedly made that accusation and US officials say the Chinese conduct fits a pattern that was also seen during the outbreak of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, in 2003.

'White supremacy' was behind child separations — and Trump officials went along, critics say.

Biden's convention embraced racial justice. BLM leaders saw it as mostly lip service. The embrace of the movement against racial injustice was a dramatic shift from the party's last convention four years ago and did not go unnoticed by Black Lives Matter activists. But its leaders viewed the gestures as mostly lip service, without a real commitment to policy change: They want Biden to commit to defund the police and to crack down on misconduct by law enforcement.

Trump's claim the Democrats omitted God from The Pledge of Allegiance distorts what happened. "Under God" was included in the pledge recited on all four convention nights and omitted during two caucuses before evening conventions started.

The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network.

In a private meeting inside Trump Tower days before his inauguration, Donald Trump told a group of civil rights leaders something most Republicans wouldn’t dare publicly acknowledge: lower turnout among Black voters did, in fact, benefit him in the 2016 presidential election.

President Donald Trump's sister calls him 'cruel' in audio secretly recorded by her niece Mary Trump. -- She calls him ‘stupid’ and ‘phony,’ as well.

California Has Australian Problems Now. The situation today in California isn’t yet quite as grim, although this week CalFire advised every citizen of the state — all 40 million of them — to be prepared to evacuate. Already, more than 100,000 already have. Over just the last seven days, 700,000 acres have burned in California — a number that would have been, in recent memory, a historically devastating year of fire. In just five days, more land has been burned than in all of 2019, and 500,000 of those acres are in and around the Bay Area.

Trump issues disaster declaration for California as wildfires rage.

The Atlantic Is Awash With Far More Plastic Than Previously Thought, Study Finds.

With fewer in-person medical appointments and more virtual ones, patients are monitoring their health at home and catching potentially deadly signs and symptoms earlier, spurring a movement to get more monitoring devices into patients' hands.

Oh, great: NASA says an asteroid is headed our way right before Election Day.

Life’s short. Live, love, create, and help others.

Until next time, my friends. Stay safe and stay sane. Good night.