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 1st game I had the
white pieces and I played The London System and he resigned on the 36th
move when I was up 3 pawns. In the 2nd 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 3rd game I was doing well when I
blundered a rook and resigned 20 moves later. I had the white pieces again in
the 4th 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 25th
to 26th. Envigado has a total of 2,291 cases, an increase of 38 from
August 25th to 26th. 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.
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