Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday that the White House could do a better job of taking precautions against the coronavirus, following a possible superspreader event that may have led to the infections of President Donald Trump, the first lady, several Republican senators and dozens of White House aides last month.
McConnell, who is notoriously loath to criticize Trump or break with him in any way, said he’s personally avoided visiting the White House because of it’s lax virus protocols.
“I actually haven’t been to the White House since August 6th because my impression was their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,” the 78-year-old majority leader said at an event in Kentucky.
“If any of you have been around me since May the 1st, I’ve said, ‘Wear your mask. Practice social distancing.’ … Now, you’ve heard of other places that have had a different view, and they are, you know, paying the price for it,” he added at another event.
In sharp contrast to Trump, McConnell has placed a big emphasis on mask-wearing and social distancing in the Senate and at public events in his home state, touting those steps as the most effective way to slow the spread of COVID-19 and protect vulnerable groups.
The recent outbreak that has infected at least 30 White House staffers and other GOP officials has directly threatened McConnell’s majority in the Senate, which is racing to confirm a conservative Supreme Court justice before the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Three Republican senators, including two Judiciary Committee members, have announced testing positive for the virus following the Sept. 26 Rose Garden ceremony. Sens. Mike Lee (Utah), Thom Tillis (N.C.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) are all currently quarantining. If any more GOP senators contract the virus, it could derail the confirmation process and postpone a final vote on Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.
Trump’s increasingly erratic behavior this week may also threaten the reelection bids of GOP incumbents facing tough fights, which could hand Democrats control of the Senate.
Thank you Mr. McConnell. It took four years for you to speak some truth about Trump!
It was announced this morning that the United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) won the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to combat hunger and food insecurity around the globe.
The organization provided assistance to almost 100 million people in 88 countries around the world last year.
“I think this is the first time in my life I’ve been without words,” WFP’s head David Beasley told The Associated Press from Niger. “I was just so shocked and surprised.”
Beasley said he found out about the award from a WFP media officer who had just been informed by the AP.
The Nobel Committee said that the coronavirus pandemic has added to the hunger faced by millions of people around the world, and called on governments to ensure that WFP and other aid organizations receive the financial support necessary to feed them.
“With this year’s award, the (Committee) wishes to turn the eyes of the world to the millions of people who suffer from or face the threat of hunger,” said Berit Reiss-Andersen, the chair of the Nobel Committee, announcing the award in Oslo. “The World Food Program plays a key role in multilateral cooperation in making food security an instrument of peace.”
“The World Food Program contributes daily to advancing the fraternity of nations mentioned in Alfred Nobel’s will,” she said.
The 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded to the US poet Louise Glück “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
She is the first American to win the prestigious award since Bob Dylan was honored in 2016. Toni Morrison was the last American to receive the prize before him, winning in 1993.
Glück was born in New York in 1943 and is a professor of English at Yale University in Connecticut. She made her debut in 1968 with “Firstborn,” and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and the National Book Award in 2014.
Glück is a professor of English at Yale University and made her debut in 1968 with “Firstborn.” Credit: Niklaus Elmehed/Nobel Prize
Glück, the 16th woman to win the literature prize, has published 12 collections of poetry and several volumes of essays on poetry. Her writing is characterized by a striving for clarity and focuses on themes of childhood and family relationships, according to notes from Anders Olsson, Chairman of the Nobel Committee.
But he emphasized that while autobiographical background was significant, she is not a confessional poet, comparing her to Emily Dickinson. Glück’s work seeks the universal and she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs, Olsson noted.
“Snowdrops,” from her 1992 Pulitzer-winning collection “The Wild Iris,” describes the miraculous return of life after winter:
“I did not expect to survive,
earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect
to waken again, to feel
in damp earth my body.”
Her 2006 collection “Averno” is an interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s descent into hell in the captivity of Hades, the god of death. Her latest collection was “Faithful and Virtuous Night” in 2014, for which she won the National Book Award.
In 2015, she was given a National Humanities Medal by Barack Obama at the White House.
Glück, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, will receive 10 million Swedish kronor ($1.1 million) for the award, which was announced at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm.
Her 1999 collection Vita Nova ends with the lines: “I thought my life was over and my heart was broken. / Then I moved to Cambridge.”
The Chronicle of Higher Educationhad an article yesterday describing the losses in the higher education workforce due to the coronavirus pandemic. Seven percent or 337,000 individuals have lost their positions since March 2020. Here is an excerpt:
“The work-force that serves much of higher education in America has shrunk by at least 7 percent since Covid-19 arrived on American shores — a staggering, unprecedented contraction, according to federal data. And like the national economic downturn that is running parallel to this unprecedented viral outbreak, much also remains uncertain about what a “recovery” will actually look like for higher education.
An estimated 337,000 fewer workers were employed by America’s private (not-for-profit and for-profit) and state-controlled institutions of higher education in August compared to February, according to a release by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which calculates industry-specific employee estimates each month. At no point since the bureau began keeping industry tallies in the late 1950s have colleges and universities ever shed so many employees at such an incredible rate.
… The worst month for job losses in higher education was recorded in May 2020, when the bureau estimated that 457,000 fewer people were employed in the sector relative to February. At that point, higher ed’s estimated work force had been reduced by 9.81 percent since February.
But private colleges have mounted a small comeback. Between February and April, private institutions shed a net of 237,000 employees. But since then, the bureau estimates that private institutions have hired or rehired around 100,000 employees. By comparison, state-controlled, public institutions collectively have not posted cumulative month-to-month job losses of less than 200,000 since April.
… It’s impossible to know yet which classes of employees in higher education have been or will be most affected by job losses.
Manycolleges have moved to eliminate certain sports programs, like swimming and tennis. Otheruniversitiesandcolleges have cut traditional liberal-arts programs such as language studies and sociology.
Furloughs, layoffs, and contract nonrenewals continue to make the careersofadjuncts and contingent faculty members as perilous as ever. Even the job stability associated with tenure-track and tenuredfaculty members has been threatened as some institutions, like the University of Akron, invoke clauses within faculty contracts that supersede those protections.
While the industry in the coming months and years may recover the number of jobs it has lost, some of the types of jobs that have vanished are unlikely to return.”
It is my opinion that it will take years for the job market in higher education to return to pre-coronavirus levels.
The Vice Presidential Debate last night (see video above for highlights courtesy of CNBC) was a much more civilized affair than the Presidential Debate of two weeks ago. Kamala Harris and Mike Pence showed much more decorum and respect for the event than President Trump did which allowed for less interfering and hearing more about what the two parties had to say. Susan Page, the debate moderator, controlled the exchanges much better than did Chris Wallace, the Presidential Debate Moderator. However, Page never followed up any of her questions when the speakers decided to avoid answering them which was often. This was also more of a debate about policy and less about personalities.
I thought Harris landed a couple of blows especially when asked about taking a vaccine for coronavirus and what the Trump Administration knew back in January about its dangers as per Bob Woodward’s book, Rage. Later on when asked if she would take a vaccine, she said that “..if Anthony Fauci recommended it, I would be the first on line for it. If only Donald Trump recommended it, I wouldn’t take it.” She also was strong in criticizing Trump’s comments about our men and women in the military as well as those about white supremacy. Pence was strong in discussing the economy and in hammering away at Biden’s plan to pack the US Supreme Court. Harris did not reply to the latter.
Below is a recap of key takeaways courtesy of the New York Times and other media.
I rated the debate a tie.
Tony
—————————————————————-
Kamala kept the focus on the pandemic
As the most important topic in the country, COVID-19 was, predictably, the first question of the night: What would a Biden-Harris administration do to combat the pandemic that a Trump-Pence administration wouldn’t? Just as predictably, Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, answered the way she’s always said she would: by prosecuting the case against Trump.
“The American people have witnessed what is the greatest failure of any presidential administration in the history of our country,” Harris said. “Here are the facts: 210,000 dead people in our country in just the last several months. Over 7 million people who have contracted this disease. One in five businesses closed.”
Citing the revelatory recordings from the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, Harris went on to accuse Trump and Pence of knowing “on Jan. 28” that the virus is “lethal in consequence, that it is airborne, that it will affect young people,” but “cover[ing] it up” because they wanted Americans to remain “calm.”
“Can you imagine if you knew on Jan. 28 what they knew … what you would have done to prepare?” Harris asked the audience. “How calm were you when you were panicked about where you were going to get your next roll of toilet paper? How calm were you when your kids were sent home from school, and you didn’t know when they would go back? How calm were you when your children couldn’t see your parents because you were afraid they could kill them?”
During the Democratic primary, Harris was more focused on manufacturing memorable moments than hammering home a message. Remember, she initially captured the national spotlight when her barbed interrogations of Trump’s Cabinet appointees were cut into viral videos highlighting her prosecutorial prowess — and that’s largely how she’s conducted herself on the trail (just as when she launched into Biden on busing).
But Wednesday night was different. Again and again, Harris skillfully dodged questions that it wasn’t in Joe Biden’s best interest to answer: on China, on presidential disability, on expanding the size of the Supreme Court. (Pence did the same when asked if he’d want Indiana to outlaw all abortions.) Instead, whenever the moderator, Susan Page of USA Today, tried to ask about other topics, Harris always pivoted back to the pandemic — and the possible fallout of Trump’s efforts to axe the Affordable Care Act, including the end of protections for pre-existing conditions.
Her mission was clear: Remind voters (as she repeated at least a half dozen times) that “over 210,000” Americans have died from COVID-19. Her message was even clearer: Trump and Pence had their chance to keep you safe — and they failed.
As usual, the mild-mannered Hoosier devoted himself to the task at hand with all the aw-shucks moxie he could muster, and his smooth affect came in handy as he methodically attempted to sand the rough edges off every controversial aspect of Trump’s record.
The New York Times report that Trump only paid $750 in federal income taxes during his first year as president? Pence countered that it was simply a sign that, as a businessman, Trump had dedicated his life to creating “tens of thousands of American jobs.”
That maskless Rose Garden announcement ceremony for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, which has since been tied to a growing cluster of COVID-19 cases in and around the White House? Just another example of how “President Trump and I trust the American people to make choices in the best interest of their health.”
Trump’s reluctance to condemn white supremacists during the first presidential debate? Nothing but more evidence of how “the media” chooses to “selectively edit” a president who “respects and cherishes all of the American people.”
Trump seemed happy with Pence’s performance. “Mike Pence is doing GREAT!” he tweeted at one point. “Mike Pence WON BIG!” he added later. And it’s not hard to see why: The vice president did his level best to reframe the abnormalities of Trump’s presidency in the ho-hum terms and tone of everyday American politics, while also arguing that Biden would be worse.
But the question now is whether Pence’s efforts will make any difference. Nothing this year has discernibly changed the public’s opinion of Trump — not impeachment, not a racial reckoning in the streets, not even a global pandemic. Instead, those events seem to have solidified the president’s high disapproval rating and low standing in the polls.
It’s unlikely that one measured debate performance by his running mate will shift many votes.
Harris didn’t tolerate Pence’s interruptions
During last week’s presidential debate, Trump was responsible for more than three-quarters of the interruptions: 71, compared with Biden’s 22.
The event was an unintelligible, chaotic mess because of it.
Harris, however, seemed to arrive in Salt Lake City on Wednesday with a plan: to jump down Pence’s throat the second he made so much as a peep during her turn to talk.
“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” the senator said, when Pence tried to contradict her remarks on COVID-19. “I’m speaking.”
“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said when he tried to interject as she was discussing the Supreme Court. “I’m speaking.”
“Mr. Vice President, I’m speaking,” she said when he accused her of lying about the economy.
“It would be important if you said the truth,” Pence snapped.
“If you don’t mind letting me finish,” Harris snapped back, “we can then have a conversation, OK?’
Ultimately, Pence interrupted Harris 10 times — twice as much as she interrupted him, according to CBS News. But the debate never spun out of control, in part because Harris was so swift to call Pence out.
The tactic also had another, subtler effect. One of the most interesting questions heading into the debate was how Harris’s gender and race — she’s the first woman of color on a major-party presidential ticket — would influence the dynamic onstage. Would viewers stereotype her as “an angry black woman” if she was too assertive? According to Axios, Harris’s advisers “studied research about the different ways men and women are judged in public speaking.” They apparently concluded that Harris would look strong if she stuck up for herself — even as she took care to avoid any big rhetorical risks or made-for-TV moments.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded this morning to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna for their 2012 work on the development of Crispr-Cas9, a method for genome editing. The announcement marks the first time a science Nobel has been awarded to two women.
Dr. Charpentier, who is French, is the director of the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin. Dr. Doudna is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the third and fourth women to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in the 21st century, out of more than 50 recipients.
“This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” Goran K. Hansson, the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as he announced the names of the laureates.
Fast, efficient and economic, Crispr “solves problems in every field of biology,” said Angela Zhou, an information scientist at the CAS at the American Chemical Society.
“This technology has utterly transformed the way we do research in basic science,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. “I am thrilled to see Crispr-Cas getting the recognition we have all been waiting for, and seeing two women being recognized as Nobel Laureates.”
Claes Gustafsson, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said, “There is enormous power in this genetic tool, which affects us all.”
Yesterday, Dr. Anthony Fauci contradicted President Donald Trump’s false claim that the coronavirus was only as deadly as the flu.
People infected with Covid-19 do display “flu-like” symptoms, Fauci said in an interview with NBC News’ Kate Snow. But the damage the coronavirus can do “is very much different from influenza.”
“You don’t get a pandemic that kills a million people and it isn’t even over yet within influenza,” said Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “So it is not correct to say it’s the same as flu. It has some overlapping symptomatology early on. But flu doesn’t do the things to you that Covid-19 can.”
“Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu,” Trump tweeted. “Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!”
Trump’s cavalier attitude toward Covid-19 and his boastful tweets about his apparent recovery, coupled with his insistence on taking off his mask for a photo opportunity upon returning, angered coronavirus survivors and those who have lost loved ones.
Asked about Trump’s messaging, Fauci opted not to antagonize the president.
“I have a job to do, and my personally contradicting the president of the United States publicly is not a good thing if I want to get my job done,” Fauci said.
Instead, he reiterated the message he has been repeating for months as the country has been logging 40,000 new Covid-19 cases a day and continues to lead the world with more than 7.5 million confirmed cases.
“There are some things that should be universally practiced, and that is the universal wearing of masks, avoiding crowds, keeping a distance, doing things outdoors more than indoors and washing our hands frequently,” Fauci said. “That doesn’t matter who you are. That’s what you should be doing.”
Pressed by Snow about the “mixed messaging” coming out of the White House, Fauci said: “This is not a trivial disease. People in the United States should realize that it is not a trivial disease.”
That having been said, Fauci said that at the moment there are “five candidates” in the third phase of advanced trials involving thousands of people. “It is very likely that we will know by November or December of 2020 that we have a safe and effective vaccine,” he said.
Trump has suggested several times, without providing evidence, that a vaccine could be ready by Election Day.
That is highly unlikely, Fauci countered, yet again.
“It is conceivable that we will know earlier, like in October. I think that is unlikely but not impossible,” Fauci said. “I feel cautiously optimistic, Kate, that we will have a safe and effective vaccine that will be able to be distributed by the end of this year or by the beginning of next year.”
I hope that Fauci is not putting his job in jeopardy by contradicting the President. As I have said several times on this blog – Dr. Anthony Fauci is the only person in Washington we should believe when it comes to coronavirus.
Reverend John Jenkins Has Tested Positive for COVID-19
Dear Commons Community,
Notre Dame is back in the spotlight after the school’s president, Reverend John Jenkins, tested positive for COVID-19 after attending a high-profile event at the White House. Jenkins was pictured without a mask during a White House event at the Rose Garden nominating Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court on September 26. Some students of the school, which has instituted coronavirus mitigation protocols and briefly suspended in-person classes after an outbreak, started a petition calling for the president to resign.
More than ten attendees — including the President of the United States Donald Trump and Jenkins — have since tested positive for covid-19, the disease caused by coronavirus. As reported by Yahoo News.
Rev. Jenkins apologized for attending the event and “regretting my error in judgment” and “failing to lead as I should have.”
The situation enraged students at the prestigious university.
“Notre Dame is kind of a good example of like a microcosm of the United States in terms of just people are frustrated at the hypocrisy of the lack of leadership,” Makira Walton, a 21-year-old Notre Dame student, told Yahoo Finance. “It’s obviously a very deadly disease and, and we shouldn’t just use statistics to discount what is a loss of life that is very personal to some people — I think that kind of gets lost in translation.”
Walton, who co-authored the petition calling for Jenkins’ resignation, added that while she was “very, very thankful that nobody has seemed to have had very serious symptoms from this White House outbreak, including Father Jenkins,” the situation was frustrating since the school’s leader was “in direct breach of the University’s COVID-19 procedures, as he was recorded shaking hands with several unmasked individuals and photographed sitting without a mask in close proximity to other attendees.”
“It’s frustrating,” Patrick Kell-Dutile, one of the authors of the petition for Rev. Jenkins to resign, told Yahoo Finance. He noted the stress of “having gone through the entire process in the late spring … of going home early from last school year, and having to finish the year remotely, and then going through the lockdown when the entire summer, having to take these sort of preventative measures.”
The political science and Spanish double major, a junior, has been living on campus housing since early August and was supposed to be studying abroad in London this semester.
“The president of the university — who has brought forth these guidelines for us to follow — deciding that maybe they don’t apply to him,” Kelly-Dutile added, “that seems kind of hypocritical.”
Jenkins penned an op-ed in the New York Times back in May stating that “what we most need now, alongside science, is that kind of courage and the practical wisdom it requires” and adding that in reopening, the school is taking a “courageous” stance “as we face the threat of the virus and seek to continue our mission of education and inquiry.”
Walton, a marketing major with a minor in constitutional studies, stressed that “I honestly don’t even know what he could do other than resign. I don’t know, maybe give up his salary to make sure that like Notre Dame helped, like cleaning staff is like actually compensated fairly for all of the overtime and risk that they’re putting themselves into.”
Notre Dame recently relaxed some of its rules after a drop in testing positivity rate. As of October 4, only 2 cases had been reported, and the 7-day positivity rate for the school was 0.7%.
Changes include:
Students are allowed to eat at designated indoor spaces now, rather than to be confined to their dorm room
The allowable number of people at “informal gatherings” has increased to 20 (but social distancing is advised)
The number of people students can have “two additional residents” in their dorm room provided they are masked, they socially distance themselves, and “leave doors open”
Another student, who asked not to be named for privacy reasons, noted that those who “had hearings for breaking COVID rules … were given amnesty as a result of the behavior of our president.”
Notre Dame did not respond to request for comment about the rumored amnesties.
Jenkins should have known better than to be caught up in the White House ceremony without wearing a mask.
Students Demonstrating at Metropolitan University – “People before profit,” one protest sign reads.
Credit…Mary Turner for The New York Times
Dear Commons Community,
The New York Times has an article this morning entitled, “It Really Was Abandonment: Virus Crisis Grips British Universities”, that reports on the rapid and uncontrolled spread of coronavirus in UK universities. To date, roughly 90 British universities have reported coronavirus cases. Thousands of students are confined to their halls, some in suites with infected classmates, and many are struggling to get tested. The government, fearful of students seeding outbreaks far from campus, has warned that they may need to quarantine before returning home for Christmas. As reported.
The outbreaks have shone a harsh light on Britain’s decade-long campaign to turn higher education into a ruthless market. By cutting state grants and leaving schools dependent on tuition fees and room rents, the government encouraged them to jam more students onto campuses.
The pandemic threatened to dry out that income stream. But Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government largely withheld the rescue money it gave to other industries, so universities carried on as normal, whatever the risks.
To academics, the government’s policies reflect not only its erratic and fumbling approach to the coronavirus, but also its longstanding suspicions of universities. Echoing American ideas about the supposed coddling of left-wing students, some Conservative lawmakers in Britain have accused universities of stifling politically incorrect speech, and threatened a crackdown.
“There’s a lot of money being splashed around on other parts of the economy, but the government isn’t offering universities any money,” said Steven Fielding, a professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. “The relevant people in government see universities as antagonists, political antagonists, and people like me as the enemy.”
… Supplied with little more than a single mask each, some first-year students watched their food supplies dwindle and trash and laundry accumulate when coronavirus cases forced their suites into isolation. Lucia Dorado, a freshman, recalled leaving meals and tea at a suitemate’s door, and watching students keep partying in the courtyard.
“It really was abandonment,” Ms. Dorado said of the university. “They put in barely anything to battle this, and it’s come at the expense of our mental and physical health, really.”
Tony
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