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Category: Politics

The facts about Trump’s chances of getting reelected

The facts about Trump’s chances of getting reelected

Daniel W. Drezner writes: Over the weekend, the hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts read a lot of analysis about what the Trump administration was thinking and doing about reelection. What all of this analysis had in common was a refusal to acknowledge some brute facts. My personal favorite is this headline on an Associated Press story: “Coronavirus could complicate Trump’s path to reelection.” I know the AP is as strait-laced as possible in its coverage, and to be fair,…

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White House erects a blockade stopping states and hospitals from getting coronavirus PPE

White House erects a blockade stopping states and hospitals from getting coronavirus PPE

David Wallace-Wells writes: Whenever you start to think that the federal government under Donald Trump has hit a moral bottom, it finds a new way to shock and horrify. Over the last week, it has started to appear as though, in addition to abandoning the states to their own devices in a time of national emergency, the federal government has effectively erected a blockade — like that which the Union used to choke off the supply chains of the Confederacy…

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Americans officials at WHO transmitted real-time information about coronavirus to Trump administration

Americans officials at WHO transmitted real-time information about coronavirus to Trump administration

The Washington Post reports: More than a dozen U.S. researchers, physicians and public health experts, many of them from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, were working full time at the Geneva headquarters of the World Health Organization as the novel coronavirus emerged late last year and transmitted real-time information about its discovery and spread in China to the Trump administration, according to U.S. and international officials. A number of CDC staff members are regularly detailed to work at…

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‘They’re killing us,’ Texas residents say of Trump rollbacks of public health and environmental protections

‘They’re killing us,’ Texas residents say of Trump rollbacks of public health and environmental protections

The Associated Press reports: Danielle Nelson’s best monitor for the emissions billowing out of the oil refineries and chemical plants surrounding her home: The heaving chest of her 9-year-old asthmatic son. On some nights, the boy’s chest shudders as he fights for breath in his sleep. Nelson suspects the towering plants and refineries are to blame, rising like a lit-up city at night around her squat brick apartment building in the rugged Texas Gulf Coast city of Port Arthur. Ask…

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Don’t reopen yet, governors tell Trump as coronavirus death toll crosses 40,000

Don’t reopen yet, governors tell Trump as coronavirus death toll crosses 40,000

Reuters reports: Governors in U.S. states hardest hit by the novel coronavirus sparred with President Donald Trump over his claims they have enough tests and should quickly reopen their economies as more protests are planned over the extension of stay-at-home orders. New York continued to see hospitalizations decline to 16,000 from a high of 18,000, and the number of patients being kept alive by ventilators also fell. There were 507 new deaths, down from a high of more than 700…

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Lack of FDA vetting opens door to inaccurate coronavirus antibody tests

Lack of FDA vetting opens door to inaccurate coronavirus antibody tests

The New York Times reports: A law firm in Scottsdale, Ariz., tested employees who hoped, with the prick of a finger, to learn if they might be immune. In Laredo, Tex., community leaders secured 20,000 of the new tests to gauge how many residents had been infected. In Chicago, a hospital screened firefighters to help determine whether they could safely stay on the job. In recent weeks, the United States has seen the first rollout of blood tests for coronavirus…

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The soldiers on the front lines saving America right now are mostly women and more likely not white

The soldiers on the front lines saving America right now are mostly women and more likely not white

The New York Times reports: Every day, Constance Warren stands behind the cold cuts counter at a grocery store in New Orleans, watching the regular customers come and go. They thank Ms. Warren and tell her they do not like being stuck indoors, waiting out the epidemic. She wraps their honey-smoked turkey and smiles. It is good to have a job right now, the mixed fortune of being deemed an essential worker. But she wonders whether, once everyday life is…

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Gretchen Whitmer isn’t backing down

Gretchen Whitmer isn’t backing down

The New York Times reports: She is a first-term governor and rising star in the Democratic Party, a frequent critic of the Trump administration for its handling of the coronavirus health crisis and a prominent foil of the president’s in the heated debate over when to reopen the nation for business. Now the governor, Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, has also become a prime target in the growing partisan storm over stay-at-home orders during the outbreak, which was highlighted on Wednesday…

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Trump is inciting the violent overthrow of government

Trump is inciting the violent overthrow of government

Mary McCord writes: President Trump incited insurrection Friday against the duly elected governors of the states of Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia. Just a day after issuing guidance for re-opening America that clearly deferred decision-making to state officials — as it must under our Constitutional order — the president undercut his own guidance by calling for criminal acts against the governors for not opening fast enough. Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” followed immediately by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save…

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Coronavirus testing needs to triple before the U.S. can reopen, experts say

Coronavirus testing needs to triple before the U.S. can reopen, experts say

The New York Times reports: As some governors consider easing social distancing restrictions, new estimates by researchers at Harvard University suggest that the United States cannot safely reopen unless it conducts more than three times the number of coronavirus tests it is currently administering over the next month. An average of 146,000 people per day have been tested for the coronavirus nationally so far this month, according to the COVID Tracking Project, which on Friday reported 3.6 million total tests…

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What history can teach us about building a fairer society after the coronavirus pandemic

What history can teach us about building a fairer society after the coronavirus pandemic

Richard Power Sayeed writes: In the middle of the 14th century, the Black Death killed perhaps a third of Europe’s population, hastening the breakdown of rigid social hierarchies – what we now call “feudalism” – to an astonishing degree. But there was nothing inevitable about that transformation. It happened because people such as William Caburn exploited the crisis. Two years after the plague hit England, this Lincolnshire ploughman was in court for “refusing to work at the daily rate”. He…

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What do you owe your neighbor? The pandemic might change your answer

What do you owe your neighbor? The pandemic might change your answer

Alexander W. Cappelen, Ranveig Falch, Erik O. Sorensen, Bertil Tungodden and Gus Wezerek write: America will almost certainly emerge from the coronavirus pandemic as a different society. A new survey suggests the experience has already changed what we believe we owe our neighbors and how much economic inequality we find acceptable. Seeking to understand how the crisis might affect Americans’ moral perspectives, Times Opinion partnered with Alexander W. Cappelen, Ranveig Falch, Erik O. Sorensen and Bertil Tungodden at FAIR —…

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We are probably only one-tenth of the way through the coronavirus pandemic

We are probably only one-tenth of the way through the coronavirus pandemic

David Wallace-Wells writes: We are, finally, beginning to see some real plans from people with the power to enact them. On Tuesday, California governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a sort of road map for a gradual “reopening” of the state — including benchmarks for testing and hospital capacity, and continued social-distancing guidelines and even temperature checks. A handful of serious, sobering national proposals have been put forward by think tanks and the like in the U.S., and the White House has…

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Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say

Influential Covid-19 model uses flawed methods and shouldn’t guide U.S. policies, critics say

STAT reports: A widely followed model for projecting Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. is producing results that have been bouncing up and down like an unpredictable fever, and now epidemiologists are criticizing it as flawed and misleading for both the public and policy makers. In particular, they warn against relying on it as the basis for government decision-making, including on “re-opening America.” “It’s not a model that most of us in the infectious disease epidemiology field think is well suited”…

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Emmanuel Macron: The pandemic ‘will change the nature of globalization’

Emmanuel Macron: The pandemic ‘will change the nature of globalization’

The Financial Times reports: Unlike other world leaders, from Donald Trump in the US to Xi Jinping in China, who are trying to return their countries to where they were before the pandemic, the 42-year-old [French president] Mr Macron says he sees the crisis as an existential event for humanity that will change the nature of globalisation and the structure of international capitalism. As a liberal European leader in a world of strident nationalists, Mr Macron says he hopes the…

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U.S. intel warned about outbreak in November but White House ‘did not deem it of interest,’ report says

U.S. intel warned about outbreak in November but White House ‘did not deem it of interest,’ report says

The Times of Israel reports: US intelligence agencies alerted Israel to the coronavirus outbreak in China already in November, Israeli television reported Thursday. According to Channel 12 news, the US intelligence community became aware of the emerging disease in Wuhan in the second week of that month and drew up a classified document. Information on the disease outbreak was not in the public domain at that stage — and was known only apparently to the Chinese government. US intelligence informed…

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