Monday, November 2, 2020

Video - #Vote #Election2020 #ElectionDay #ElectionDay - The 2020 Election Is Here -- and Trump Is Trying to Steal It: A Closer Look

Video - #DailyShow #DonaldTrump #100MostTremendousScandals Counting Down Donald Trump’s 100 Most Tremendous Scandals: 25-1 | The Daily Social Distancing Show

Video - #Vote #Election2020 #ElectionDay #ElectionDay - Lady Gaga's Speech at Joe Biden's Rally in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania 2020

Video - #Vote #Election2020 #ElectionDay #ElectionDay - Drive-in Rally with Sen. Kamala Harris in Bethlehem, #Pennsylvania

Video - #Vote #Election2020 #ElectionDay #ElectionDay - How will the vote go? Tension mounts ahead of U.S. presidential election

Vote - #Election2020 #ElectionDay #ElectionDay - Biden Campaigns With Lady Gaga In Pittsburgh

Vote - #Election2020 #ElectionDay #ElectionDay - Obama delivers scathing takedown of Trump at unscheduled Georgia rally

#Election2020 - Final Pennsylvania presidential polls have Biden winning the pivotal swing state

By Alex Abad-Santosalex
@vox.com 

 Pollsters found Trump would need a repeat of 2016’s surprise results to win the state again. Total swing states in the 2020 presidential election: Pennsylvania.
The final polls of the state from Monmouth University and Morning Consult have Biden ahead of President Donald Trump.
A Monmouth University poll — taken from October 28 to November 1 and released Monday morning — has Biden with a 5 to 7 percentage point lead over Trump among likely voters. The spread is the result of Monmouth pollsters modeling two turnout scenarios: the poll found Biden had 51 percent support compared to Trump’s 44 percent among likely Pennsylvania voters in a high turnout scenario; and 50 percent support for Biden compared to 45 percent for Trump in a low turnout model. The low turnout model took into account a large number of ballots being rejected, which remains a possibility due to a recent Supreme Court decision. If ballots aren’t rejected, given current turnout, the high turnout scenario is more likely.
Morning Consult’s poll, taken from October 22 to 31, did not differentiate turnout. It found Biden leading Trump by 9 percentage points among likely voters, 52 to 43 percent.
Morning Consult’s results are a bit of an outlier compared to FiveThirtyEight’s average of Biden leading by around 5 percentage points. Monmouth’s low turnout result is line with FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.
These polls are significant because of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College importance.
As national polls continue to spell out a Biden lead, and as the traditionally Republican-dominated state of Texas has become a toss-up race, the question for Trump and Republicans has become where the president’s path to reelection lies. A crucial piece to that puzzle is Pennsylvania, which swung for Trump in 2016 by fewer than 45,000 votes. Trump winning Pennsylvania was seen as part of the fall of the proverbial “Blue Wall,” a block of Democratic-leaning states that have boosted Democratic presidential nominees’ Electoral College totals in the past.
Pennsylvania, which has 20 electoral votes (candidates need to rack up 270 to win the White House) is seen as an opportunity for Trump once again this year. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained, Trump needs to pick up electoral votes in swing states, where polling currently shows him down between 5 and 9 percentage points, in order to win. While polling suggests the race is currently closer in swing areas like Nebraska’s Second District (where Biden has a 4.5 percentage point average lead, according to FiveThirtyEight). So Trump is working hard to make sure current polling isn't predictive of the outcome in the state. He visited Pennsylvania five times in September. In the weekend before the election, Trump visited the state an additional five times as part of his 17 rallies in four-day stretch tour. Biden and his team understand the importance as well, and will campaign with Lady Gaga and John Legend in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia on November 2.
It’s also crucial to understand that four years ago Pennsylvania’s final polls had Hillary Clinton leading Trump by around the same margin as Biden leads Trump. FiveThirtyEight’s final average of Pennsylvania polling had Clinton at 48.9 percent to Trump’s 45.2 percent — a lead that vaporized when votes were tabulated. As Vox’s Matthew Yglesias explained, polling methodologies have improved since then, but that does not mean polling will reflect the final result in the state. Biden is ahead now, but Trump’s late attention on the state could mean a victory for him there once all votes are totaled.
https://www.vox.com/2020/11/2/21545863/pennsylvania-final-polls-2020-biden-trump

#ElectionEve #Election2020 - COVID-19 Isn’t Just A Trump Failure. It’s a Right-Wing Failure Too.

By Jonathan Cohn
Republicans and their allies spent decades attacking the experts and agencies that the country needs right now.
Voters are getting exactly the picture they should on the eve of Election Day: President Donald Trump in denial of an ongoing pandemic and actively participating in its spread.
At rallies over the weekend, Trump repeated what has become his new favorite line: that the U.S. is “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus outbreak. He attacked doctors, allegedly for inflating COVID-19 numbers in order to make money, and Democratic governors, for supposedly overreacting to the threat.
He even hinted he might fire Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who since the start of the pandemic has arguably been the most consistent, reliable voice of reason at the national level.
Meanwhile, as of Sunday, reported cases were up 43% from two weeks ago and deaths were up 15%, as part of a third coronavirus surge that public health experts long predicted. Trump’s rallies, which pack thousands onto buses and into airplane hangars with sometimes poor ventilation, are likely playing some small part in this. As many as 30,000 cases and 700 deaths trace back to his rallies, according to one modeling exercise from some Stanford University economists.
The surge is hitting hardest in the upper Great Plains and Midwest, including the Dakotas and Iowa, where three very Trumpy Republican governors have been refusing to mandate mask-wearing and, in the case of South Dakota GOP Gov. Kristi Noem, bragging about it.
The U.S. is not alone in struggling with a new surge: France, Italy and even Germany are facing big increases. But the U.S. is the only one of those countries with a leader pretending things are getting better.
More than 230,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19, a number Trump himself once suggested would be a worst-case scenario. At this rate, nobody would be surprised if the number hits 300,000 or even 400,000 before the pandemic is over.
Trump’s determination to deny this reality, rather than react to it, has a lot to do with his personal traits ― his habit of surrounding himself with charlatans, his refusal to study problems in detail, and his apparent inability to summon the basic level of empathy we associate with most members of the human species.
But Trump’s behavior alone doesn’t explain why the U.S. pandemic response looks like it does. Right-wing thought and its grip on the Republican Party have also played a role ― by denigrating experts, undermining the public sector and preaching a libertarian ethos that says we can’t or shouldn’t bother responding collectively to big problems.
A Trumpy Approach To The Virus
It is not surprising that a president who seeks economic advice from Lawrence Kudlow, whose record includes predicting Bill Clinton’s tax hikes would kill the 1990s economy and that the 2007 housing bubble was a mirage, is taking cues on the pandemic from Scott Atlas, a politically conservative radiologist without special expertise in public health or epidemiology.
Nor is it surprising that a president who has suggested energy-efficient light bulbs cause cancer and once confused HIV and HPV would hype unproven (and later deemed to be too risky) COVID-19 treatments and speculate that injecting bleach might be an effective way to treat patients.
And when a politician literally brags that he could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing the support of his base, it is to be expected that he might be the type to hold big political gatherings smack in the middle of COVID-19 hot spots, creating what looks like a rolling series of superspreader events ― in order to rally his supporters or, maybe, just to bask in the adulation.
If Mitt Romney, who is famously data-driven and known for his managerial skills, were president, the federal response to COVID-19 would almost surely be a lot more aggressive and more faithful to science. The same goes for Republican governors like Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Larry Hogan of Maryland, all of whom have followed the advice of public health experts and acted aggressively to assist both providers and citizens in need ― frequently, because the federal government was not.
The Right’s Crusade Against Expertise
But the failures of the Trump pandemic response also have deep roots in the way mainstream Republican thinking has evolved over the past few decades. And that evolution has not taken by accident, as writers like investigative journalist Jane Mayer and political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein have chronicled over the years.
Conservatives have repeatedly questioned the authority of experts, especially scientific experts, because of an alleged liberal bias. And since the 1970s, they have invested heavily in the creation of an alternative reality with alternative facts, which are then spread by an alternative conservative media that now has a hold on anywhere from one-third to two-fifths of the population.
The most obvious (and, in the long term, possibly most dangerous) version of this is climate denialism, which has its roots in the funding of anti-regulatory think tanks during the 1970s and 1980s but really took off in the late 2000s, when newly elected President Barack Obama and his Democratic allies tried to pass a “cap-and-trade” scheme of tradable emissions permits to reduce carbon output.
Conservative groups, many of them funded by the Koch Brothers, declared all-out war and soon Republican leaders were denying that climate change was even a problem ― even though their 2008 presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, had proposed such a scheme.The party’s rhetoric has shifted a bit lately, now focusing more on the idea that climate change may be real but is unrelated to human activity ― a position that scientists almost universally reject but which is the predominant view among both GOP leaders and their voters. Just 35% of Republican voters believe climate change is a man-made phenomenon, according to Gallup, and just 18% think it will pose a serious threat in their lifetimes.It’s a straight line from that kind of thinking to Trump’s attacks on Fauci and, more broadly, his defiance of public health authorities who warned against preemptive loosening of COVID-19 restrictions in the spring and called repeatedly for mask mandates.And in this era of extreme polarization, when so many voters take their cues from their leaders, Trump can count on backing from the majority of Republican voters ― who, in poll after poll, have said the coronavirus threat is exaggerated and signaled strong approval of Trump’s response.
The Right’s Crusade Against The Public Sector
A big motive behind the right-wing attacks on independent expertise was a desire to weaken the case for regulation and taxes ― which, for conservative financiers like the Kochs, was very much an act of self-interest, since they perceived both regulation and taxes as direct threats to their income. The same motive explains their efforts to undermine the public sector more generally, by taking away the funds it needs to operate effectively.
One example of this is the systematic, long-term neglect of public health agencies. Spending on state public health departments has fallen by 16% since 2010, while spending on local health departments has fallen by 18% in that time, according to an analysis by The Associated Press and Kaiser Health News. That decrease is especially remarkable given that it took place against the backdrop of two major outbreaks, H1N1 and Ebola, that prompted widespread alarm about America’s lack of pandemic preparedness. A ‘herd immunity’ strategy really means more mass death ― which, alas, seems to be where we are headed. The result of that underfunding has been a severe strain on local agencies that, today, are responsible for key elements of the COVID-19 response, including the contact tracing necessary to quickly contain outbreaks when they happen. An inability to conduct sufficient contact tracing has hindered public health efforts in the case of several notorious superspreader events, including the Sturgis, South Dakota, motorcycle festival in August.
No single policy decision led to this neglect of public health funding. It’s the cumulative result of years and years of tight budgets, at both the federal and state levels ― which, in turn, reflect a broader mentality that government spending is always too high and that government programs are always wasteful.
This is the argument that conservatives have been making for decades and that the Republican Party, which not that long ago had a more nuanced view of government, now embraces as its central dogma. And underlying that skepticism about government is a broader belief about the role of misfortune in life and what, if anything, society should do about it.
The Right’s Crusade Against Solidarity
The core of modern conservative thinking ― the idea that unites its aversion to taxes, regulations and government ― is that societies are fundamentally helpless to address certain problems. Fighting poverty is futile. Slowing climate change is pointless. Making sure every kid has a good public school is impossible. The best hope is to let individuals, businesses and small communities act on their own.
Reasonable people can (and do) have good-faith arguments about what governments can and can’t accomplish. But some problems are simply too big and complex for anybody but governments to address. They are collective action problems, in others words. The pandemic is a perfect example of that.Nobody but the government has the resources to pay for and distribute protective gear. Nobody but the government has the ability to coordinate testing on a mass scale. Nobody but the government has the personnel to train and give hazard pay to front-line caregivers. Nobody but the government has the money to prop up the economy until the virus recedes enough to allow something resembling normal activity.The Trump administration has mostly failed on these accounts. (Vaccine development is the one exception; it invested massively in that, in ways that are likely to pay off shortly.) But the Republican Party has failed too ― most conspicuously, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his allies rejected hazard pay and extended economic relief, even as they found time to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court.The ultimate expression of this attitude is what’s come to be known as the “herd immunity” strategy, which is the idea that the best response to the pandemic is to let the virus run rampant through the population while, in theory, protecting the most vulnerable.
Among its chief promoters these days is reportedly Atlas, who from the look of things has replaced Fauci as the scientist with the most influence on Trump.
Most public health experts reject this strategy, in part because segregating the sick is difficult. Community spread inevitably takes the virus into nursing homes and other long-term care facilities through workers, and there are many others with underlying medical conditions that leave them at high risk.
A “herd immunity” strategy really means more mass death ― which, alas, seems to be where we are headed. One in five Americans already has a close family member or friend who died from COVID-19, according to a September poll.
That number is going to keep going up, and the only question is how high. The answer may depend on what happens Tuesday ― and whether not just the president, but also his party, still have control over the nation’s pandemic response come January.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-covid-super-spreader-herd-immunity_n_5fa06593c5b6befb90916015

Opinion: Hillary Clinton Was Right to Warn Us

 By Jennifer Senior

She grasped the danger posed by the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” Russian interference and Trump.
For just over two years, I was a daily book critic for this newspaper, and one of my final reviews was of Hillary Clinton’s “What Happened,” published in September 2017.
I liked it far more than I thought I would — actually, I just plain liked it — but that’s not what I want to discuss as these four grim years come to a close, with Hillary’s more dignified, more intelligent, more presidential presence rattling spectrally about. What I want to discuss is the chapter about Donald Trump and Russia.
I still remember my reaction to it. (Whoa, this chapter is LONG, I scribbled in the margins.) Hillary herself seemed aware that she’d become a bit obsessed. “At times,” she wrote, “I felt like C.I.A. agent Carrie Mathison on the TV show ‘Homeland,’ desperately trying to get her arms around a sinister conspiracy and appearing more than a little frantic in the process.”
Something drove me back to that chapter recently — maybe because we have to vote this horrid man out, when history will surely show that the Senate should have removed him when it had the chance. Rereading it now, what leaps out isn’t how long that chapter was. It’s how right it was. If anything, Hillary’s compendium of Trump’s ties to Russia was svelte. What we know about them today is that chapter, cubed.
This is the thing, if you go back and review Hillary’s speeches and tweets and debate performances from 2016: She was right about an awful lot. Not about everything. She had her share of lulus, like predicting that the election of Trump would set off a global financial panic and plunge the economy into a recession. (Oops. Took a pandemic to do that.)
But she did have some strikingly good insights. You see it in the “she warned us” memes on Twitter: Here’s the snippet of her listing possible reasons Trump hadn’t released his tax returns (he’s a tax evader, he’s in hock to mysterious creditors, he’s not the bazilionaire we think), all of which turned out to be true; there’s the snippet of Hillary telling Trump that he was a puppet, which is worth reading in fuller context:

TRUMP: … from everything I see, [Putin] has no respect for this person.

CLINTON: Well, that’s because he’d rather have a puppet as president of the United States.

TRUMP: No puppet. No puppet.

CLINTON: And it’s pretty clear …

TRUMP: You’re the puppet!

CLINTON: It’s pretty clear you won’t admit …

TRUMP: No, you’re the puppet.

CLINTON: … that the Russians have engaged in cyberattacks against the United States of America, that you encouraged espionage against our people, that you are willing to spout the Putin line, sign up for his wish list, break up NATO, do whatever he wants to do, and that you continue to get help from him, because he has a very clear favorite in this race.

So I think that this is such an unprecedented situation. We’ve never had a foreign government trying to interfere in our election. We have 17 — 17 intelligence agencies, civilian and military, who have all concluded that these espionage attacks, these cyberattacks, come from the highest levels of the Kremlin and they are designed to influence our election. I find that deeply disturbing.

Two weeks ago, Hillary slyly said her own polite version of I-told-you-so. “In my case, there’s a whole speech for everything,” she tweeted above a screenshot of this especially pungent quote from 2016:
Now, just imagine if you can. Donald Trump sitting in the Oval Office, the next time America faces a crisis. Imagine him being in charge when your jobs and savings are at stake. Is this who you want to lead us in an emergency? Someone thin skinned and quick to anger who’d likely be on Twitter attacking reporters or bringing the whole regulatory system down on his critics when he should be focused on fixing what’s wrong? Would he even know what to do?
Yet it never mattered. She couldn’t get enough voters to listen.
Why was this?
Tiresome to say, but part of it can be chalked up to gender. Novelists and Hollywood writers may create delightful female know-it-alls, from Elizabeth Bennet to Hermione Granger to Olivia Pope. But they seldom get happy endings in real life. In real life, such women are often despised precisely because they are right.
And if you reread Hillary’s speeches, you can see that her words were really unsparing and precise. She wasn’t shyly hiding her erudition. To wit: “Donald Trump doesn’t know the first thing about Iran or its nuclear program. Ask him. It’ll become very clear, very quickly.” Or: “There is a difference between getting tough on trade and recklessly starting trade wars.” In “What Happened,” she compares Putin to a subway manspreader.
Talk about a guy who had a problem with powerful ladies. After Hillary criticized one his policies, Putin told the press, “It’s better not to argue with women.” But some of the reasons Hillary’s warnings may have gone unheeded were more idiosyncratic. Early in her career, she tested good people’s patience not with her rightness, but with her self-righteousness. The former Senator Bill Bradley comes to mind: Decades ago, she batted away his request for a more realistic health care reform bill, adding that the Clinton administration would “demonize” anyone who stood in its way. “That was it for me,” Bradley told Carl Bernstein, “in terms of Hillary Clinton.”
Hillary has often been accused of having a Nixonian streak. According to a book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Hillary’s staff put together a so-called “hit list” in the waning days of her 2008 campaign, documenting those who had betrayed her and those who had not, using a loyalty scale of 1 to 7. (Among the most perfidious: Senators John Kerry, Ted Kennedy and Claire McCaskill.) When asked about her husband’s marital indiscretions, she famously dismissed the Lewinsky allegations as part of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy.” It made Hillary a uniquely bad messenger when it came to explaining to voters that something dangerous was afoot when it came to Russia.
The thing is … what’s the joke in Joseph Heller’s Catch 22? “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Turns out there actually was a vast, right-wing conspiracy. Was it politically tin-eared and self-serving of Hillary to invoke it when asked about Monica? Yes. But was it wrong? No. It was right. It was exactly right.
Prescient, if anything. Hillary saw the incipient makings of a conservative media ecosystem that was turning ever darker and more demented and underworldly by the year, until it became a straight-up orgy of phantasmagoria, news by way of Hieronymus Bosch.
I mean, Hillary is an actual demon from actual hell? Democratic officials run a satanic child pornography ring out of a pizza parlor? Exactly which corner of the triptych is that on?
During the Clinton administration, Hillary had merely to deal with talk radio and Fox News and the occasional hit piece from The American Spectator.
Now those outlets are at the center of the conspirakook bell curve. One America News Network has since come along; as has Breitbart News Network; as has Infowars, which is happy to peddle every varietal of outrageous hoax and disseminate propaganda from Russian news outlets and content farms (as I type, two of the top stories on Infowars are from Sputnik and RT). Not to mention countless Russian content farms and a cottage industry of one-man Trump bands online.
It’s notable right now that Biden isn’t talking that much about Russian disinformation. Perhaps it’s because he doesn’t have to. Trump’s fingers-in-the-ears approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic is fodder enough. So is the threat Trump poses to our lives in ways great and small, from American democracy to common decency.
But the Russians are at it again. They have targeted dozens of state and local government computer networks in the last few weeks.
Hillary did warn us. “Step back and think about it,” she wrote in “What Happened.” “The Russians hacked our election systems. They got inside. They tried to delete or alter voter information. This should send a shiver down the spine of every American.” Being Hillary, she had a firm policy response to that. Toward the end of her Russia chapter, she proposed a new doctrine, “that a cyberattack on our vital national infrastructure will be treated as an act of war and met with a proportionate response.” If Biden is elected — and God willing, he shall be (spit, knock wood, toss salt) — maybe he’ll take her advice. In this way, but also perhaps others.
In late August, Hillary warned that Biden shouldn’t concede the election if it’s too close to call. She got hell from conservatives for saying it. As recently as late September, prominent Democrats were publicly disagreeing with her too.
But Donald Trump has since made no disguise of the fact that he’s willing to win this election at almost any cost. He went so far as to say he needed to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court with a justice who’d break what he assumed would be a 4-to-4 vote, knowing the election could be decided there. Biden certainly has a reserve corps of lawyers working on his behalf, knowing that Trump has amassed the same. Both sides are bracing themselves for any and all outcomes.
So I guess it’s possible that Hillary was wrong to say what she did in August. But maybe — just maybe — she was once again able to see what we did not.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/opinion/hillary-clinton-biden-trump.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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Video Report - #Kabul #Afghanistan At least 19 killed after gunmen storm Kabul University

Video - Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari addresses a corner meeting in Taus Yasin, Ghizer

سپریم کورٹ بار کے الیکشن - صدارتی امیدوار لطیف آفریدی لالہ کا انٹرویو - Matiullah Jan MJtv

Video - #NayaDaur #Politics - Nawaz Sharif's Narrative And The Politics Of Brinkmanship

#Pakistan #PPP - Imran Khan is a hypocrite and a liar, Chairman PPP Bilawal Bhutto Zardari

Chairman Pakistan Peoples Party, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari has said that the Prime Minister Imran Khan is a liar who is playing politics of corruption and during his 2 years in power corruption has increased. He had promised to end corruption in 90 days and now says that he cannot end corruption with a switch button.
He said this while addressing a corner meeting in connection with the elections 2020 in Gilgit Baltistan. He said that his grandfather Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto ended FCR and rajgiri system from GB. His mother Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto introduced democracy and allowed political parties to work in GB. His father President Zardari gave identity to the people of GB, gave assembly, governor and chief minister to GB. Now PPP wants to give the people of GB their own province, right to rue, right to choose PM of Pakistan and right to property.
Chairman PPP said that this is not only an election but a referendum on the rights of people of GB. On 15th November we will win and will get the rights of the people. He said that these demands of the people of GB were already included in the manifesto of 2018 of the party. PPP had given subsidy to the people of GB in food items, clothes and petrol. Now Imran Khan wants to snatch this subsidy from the people of GB. WE will not allow the puppet prime minister to snatch these rights of the people and at the same time we will not let him hide his corruption and loot. He asked Imran Khan that why did he not come to GB in the last two years and suddenly felt to come here during election time. He asked Imran Khan that what he did for the people of GB during his government. Chairman PPP said that Imran Khan had a fright when he saw thousands of people from Khaplu to Ghizar corner meetings of PPP. He did not know that the people of GB are people of honor and loyalty and are with the party of martyrs. Imran Khan has a gall to ask for votes from these honorable and loyal people, he said.
Bilawal Bhutto Zardari said that Imran Khan is a hypocrite and since he has come to power there has been an increase in hunger, price hike, poverty and unemployment. On 15th November the people of GB will get rid of Imran Khan. He asked people to provide him an opportunity to serve them as they had given to Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.
https://www.ppp.org.pk/pr/24031/