Wednesday, August 26, 2020

 

Quarantine Day #161.

Last night I went to bed at 10:30, fell asleep quickly, got up twice during the night, finally waking/getting up at 7:15.

Last night I played 4 games on Chess.com, winning 2 and losing 2. In the 1^st game I had the white pieces and I played The London System and he resigned on the 36^th move when I was up 3 pawns. In the 2^nd game I had the black pieces and played the Sicilian Defense. My finger slipped on one move and I lost a pawn but I still won in 43 moves. In the 3^rd game I was doing well when I blundered a rook and resigned 20 moves later. I had the white pieces again in the 4^th game and got a nice attack going but I missed the winning move and soon lost on time. My rating is now 1238.

 

I watched the first 20 minutes of the Today show and left for my walk in a 70-degree overcast sky. (Teresa would be leaving soon after to walk with her friend Angela.) It actually felt a little chilly as I left but I was sweaty by the time I returned 50 minutes later.

Teresa returned just before noon. She reported that her friend Angela fell while they were walking but she’s just a little banged up.

 

When an executive search firm created a list of qualified candidates for the position of postmaster general late last year, it gave 53 names to the United States Postal Service’s board of governors. 

Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s name was not among them. 

That’s because DeJoy is unqualified, and because his conflicts of interest are disqualifying. What DeJoy does have is a history as a megadonor for President Donald Trump and a willingness to erode this great institution, one the public has more faith in than any other, to serve the long-term goals of the GOP and the current needs of Trump. 

DeJoy’s predecessor, Megan Brennan, had a distinguished Postal Service career that began with her hiring as a letter carrier. Brennan’s predecessor, Patrick Donahoe, and Donahoe’s predecessor, John Potter, were also career postal service employees. Each pushed sensible plans to make the Postal Service more economical by offering more services, like banking, and cutting expenses by eliminating Saturday delivery and unneeded facilities. 

The suggested improvements were rebuffed by Congress.

DeJoy, a logistics executive, testified before the House Oversight Committee Monday, offering querulous answers and little explanation for disabling high-speed mail sorting machines and pulling blue mailboxes off the street months before an election that will be held largely by mail. 

It’s an increasingly important issue as Trump argues that mailed ballots will be untrustworthy even though states that vote exclusively by mail have had no widespread problems. 

DeJoy told the committee, “I am not engaged in sabotaging the election. We will do everything in our power and structure to deliver the ballots on time.” But DeJoy also said he won't return mailboxes and mail sorters to service.

Those moves, along with reducing overtime and cutting delivery trips, have resulted in delays in mail delivery, including medicine, bills and checks. America has a deep reliance on the Postal Service, which is the envy of the world. The House passed a bill to restore the machines but the GOP-controlled Senate won't address it. And New York Attorney General Letitia James has rightly filed suit to block postal services policy changes meant to slow down the mail ahead of the election.

DeJoy owns about $30 million in stock in a company, XPO Logistics, that works for the Postal Service. This massive conflict is a telltale sign, because XPO is the kind of company that would profit if the dream of many Republicans and Trump, privatizing the Postal Service, were realized.

But the Postal Service, though it needs reforming, can’t be privatized, because its mission of providing affordable reliable service to all Americans makes it, like nearly every service governments provide, unprofitable.       

DeJoy — conflicted, unqualified and actively undermining mail service in the run-up to an election — should resign. The USPS needs a leader with stellar credentials who can work with the White House and Congress to deliver to the nation the Postal Service it deserves.

 

As President Donald Trump asks voters for a second term, he has turned the Republican National Convention into a fantasyland version of his presidency. In this carefully curated world, staged by federal officials in Washington and Jerusalem, Trump has defeated the coronavirus, saved the economy, built a border wall, established peace in the Middle East, recalled U.S. forces from theaters of war, and even become a champion of immigrants at a time when he is sharply curtailing their access.

The distance between reality and Trump's presentation is both a glaring weakness for the president and a gap in which he sees strength heading into the November election.

Nearly 180,000 Americans died after Trump played down the threat of the disease and accused his Democratic rivals of perpetrating a "hoax" on the public. More than 30 million Americans are out of work because federal, state and local officials eventually shut down commerce to try to contain the outbreak. But the virus continues to spread and kill, and while stocks have rallied on support from the Federal Reserve and Congress, ordinary Americans have not seen the same kind of recovery.

Trump vowed during his first campaign that he would get Mexico to pay for a wall spanning the border between the two countries. Only a small portion of the wall has been built. Trump diverted military funding to try to build more of it. Obviously, Mexico didn't pay for it. But Trump's former campaign CEO and others were indicted last week on charges of defrauding donors to a charity that collected money under the auspices of funding construction of the wall. One of his sons, Donald Trump Jr., is quoted in a testimonial on the group's website.

"Peace in the Middle East. Never-ending wars were finally ended,” another of Trump's sons, Eric Trump, said. “Promises made, and promises, for the first time, were kept.”

On the same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who would later make an unorthodox speech by a U.S. diplomat to a party convention from foreign soil, pressed Arab-majority countries to make peace with Israel. That's a clear indication that the Trump administration realizes peace remains elusive in the region. Moreover, thousands of American troops are still deployed to Afghanistan, where the United States has been at war for nearly 20 years, and others are still stationed in Iraq.

"Obvious lie after obvious lie," Democratic nominee Joe Biden's campaign said in a statement about the convention's second night. His deputy campaign manager, Kate Bedingfield, said the convention is an "alternate reality."

Ominously for Trump, he has lost political support in suburban parts of swing states and among older voters, who are most susceptible to the coronavirus. Even some of his supporters say that they don't find him honest.

In his book "The Art of the Deal," Trump explained his view.

"I play to people's fantasies," he wrote. "People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That's why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration, and a very effective form of promotion."

After four years of alternate reality, punctuated by a convention in which hyperbole is a euphemism for outright lying, voters will get to decide whether they think Trump's exaggerations have helped them — or harmed them.

 

It was exactly six months ago Wednesday when the spread of the coronavirus in the United States had become too significant for President Trump to wave away. He and several members of the team planning the administration’s response held a news briefing designed to inform the public about the virus and, more important, to allay concerns.

This was the briefing in which Trump made one of his most wildly incorrect assertions about what the country could expect.

“The level that we’ve had in our country is very low,” Trump said, referring to new confirmed infections, “and those people are getting better, or we think that in almost all cases they’re better, or getting. We have a total of 15. We took in some from Japan — you heard about that — because they’re American citizens, and they’re in quarantine.”

That part was generally true. At the time, there had been only a smattering of confirmed cases, with the addition of passengers from the cruise ship Diamond Princess pushing the confirmed total to more than 50.

“So, again,” he added later, “when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

It was a brash prediction and seemingly an off-the-cuff one. Trump’s point was less about what was going to happen than arguing that his administration had done a good job. But by linking those two things, he made it simple for observers to use his assertion that the number of cases would fade as a baseline for measuring everything that followed.

 

 

President Donald Trump turned one of the most promising new treatments for COVID-19 into a political football this week, bragging that he pushed through emergency use authorization of convalescent plasma by confronting what he calls the government’s “deep state.”

Trump’s statements, if true, suggest the U.S. Food and Drug Administration acted at his behest – on the eve of the Republican National Convention -- instead of making its decision based on data.

With his reputation on the line, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn is defending the authorization but backtracking on statements he made about the plasma treatment Sunday evening at the White House with Trump standing nearby.

"It’s had an incredible rate of success," Trump said, calling it a "truly historic announcement" before Hahn spoke, referring to the data as "promising."

“The criticism is entirely justified,” Hahn tweeted late Monday after his earlier statements were challenged by fellow scientists and doctors on CNN and in The New York Times.

“What I should have said better is that the data show a relative risk reduction not an absolute risk reduction,” he said about his overstating the impact on those sick with COVID-19, while denying the FDA decision was "politically motivated."

 

Bart from Chicago called me. I met him a couple times last December. Mainly we discussed conditions here with the virus and when travel here might start again.

 

I beat Teresa in parcheesi today 7 games to 3. Did I mention she beat me yesterday 4 games to 3?

 

I finally got my Chess.com puzzle rating back over 1800.

At 8:30 the rain started which probably goes along with the fact that we barely hit 80 degrees today.

 

The US has 5,750,997 ð 5,790,573 ð 5,825,039 coronavirus cases with 177,100+ ð 178,300 ð 179,200 deaths.

Per Medellin Guru, as of this afternoon Colombia has a total of 551,696 ð 562,128 ð 572,270 cases with 18,184 deaths.  Medellin has 41,289 ð 41,884 ð 43,250 cases, an increase of 1,350 from August 25^th to 26^th. Envigado has a total of 2,291 cases, an increase of 38 from August 25^th to 26^th. So new infections have plateaued or even decreased recently for Colombia but are still increasing in Medellin and Envigado.

 

Joke of the day

Grocery stores in France look like tornadoes hit them. All that’s left is de brie.