Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats and the Trump administration remain “miles apart” on negotiations over a coronavirus stimulus deal, Axios reports.
Said Pelosi: “It’s a chasm. Because they do not share our values, they don’t believe in science, they don’t believe in governance.”
“With no talks scheduled on a virus-relief package seen as vital by Federal Reserve officials and market participants alike, the stalemate between Republicans and Democrats risks dragging on for weeks,” Bloombergreports.
“The four main principals — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer — haven’t talked since Friday. And Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Schumer continued to exchange rhetorical broadsides on the Senate floor Tuesday, without new ideas for a compromise.”
“President Trump’s senior aides acknowledged on Tuesday that they are providing less financial assistance for the unemployed than the president initially advertised amid mounting blowback from state officials of both parties,” the Washington Post reports. You mean the President lied? I am shocked.
Wall Street Journal: Funding for $300-a-week unemployment benefits could run out in six weeks. Six weeks, or on October 1, one month before the election. Guess who is going to come begging for more relief then? LOL.
Trump really thinks he has the Democrats in a bind. But as you can see, it is the other way around. From Politico: “The administration feels confident they have the upper hand politically. One official said the White House feels it has Democrats in a ‘real pickle’ and if they try and block the executive actions they will look like they are trying to hurt people.”
There is no need to challenge the Executive Orders, because as we have found out, they are meaningless. The unemployment benefit, as we see, is less then we thought and will run out in six weeks. His protections against evictions won’t actually halt evictions. And the payroll tax “cut” is really just a deferment that actually may never be implemented.
Not only has Trump done little to soften the economic pain felt by voters, by pushing ahead on the payroll tax holiday — against the wishes of even his own party — he’s opened a new line of attack for Democrats to say he’s undermining Social Security and Medicare.
President Trump added a new adviser on the coronavirus pandemic, CNNreports.
Dr. Scott Atlas “frequently appears on Fox News and has advised Republicans in the past. And crucially, unlike the government’s medical experts who have advised Trump until now, has adopted a public stance on the virus much closer to Trump’s — including decrying the idea that schools cannot reopen this fall as ‘hysteria’ and pushing for the resumption of college sports.”
Said Trump: “He’s working with us and will be working with us on the coronavirus. And he has many great ideas. And he thinks what we’ve done is really good, and now we’ll take it to a new level.”
More proof that it is always 1955 in Trump’s mind: President Trump vowed to save “suburban housewives” saying he’ll protect them from an “invasion” of poor people supposedly led by Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), the Black senator from New Jersey.
Said Trump: “The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it, in a bigger form, with Corey Booker in charge!”
The suburbs are brown, black, yellow, tan and white.
New York Times: “In Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Indiana and elsewhere, some schools, mainly in suburban and rural areas, have been open for almost two weeks. Their experience reveals the perils of returning to classrooms in places where the coronavirus has hardly been tamed.”
“Students and teachers have immediately tested positive, sending others into two-week quarantines and creating whiplash for schools that were eager to open, only to consider closing again right away. All of this has only further divided communities where parents and teachers have passionately disagreed over the safety of reopening.”
A new Politico/Morning Consult poll finds 59% of Americans said they oppose fully reopening K-12 schools for the beginning of the academic year, up from 53% last month.
“President Trump’s interest in taking intelligence briefings has been declining steadily since his first months in office and has dropped to near zero in recent weeks,” according to a HuffPost review of all of his daily schedules.
“Trump went from a high of 4.1 briefings per week on average in March 2017 to 0.7 per week since July 1, shortly after it became public that he had ignored intelligence reports about Russia offering bounties to the Taliban for each American soldier killed in Afghanistan.”
“Monday’s briefing, in fact, was the first in August and the first since July 22. That month had only three briefings scheduled.”
“The U.K. recorded a steeper second-quarter contraction than its peers, a performance that means it suffered the worst economic hit from the coronavirus in Europe as well as reporting the highest death toll,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Spending cuts by state and local governments grappling with the coronavirus pandemic pose a headwind to the U.S. economic recovery as lawmakers consider how much federal aid to provide,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“State and local governments reduced spending at a 5.6% annual rate in the second quarter as they laid off workers and pulled back on services to offset plunging tax revenues. More cuts are on the way.”
A video of anti-racism protesters in Portland appearing to intentionally burn a stack of bibles quickly went viral among conservatives.
But the New York Times reports that it was a misleading video deliberately spread by Russia as part of the country’s campaign to interfere in the upcoming U.S. election.
Washington Post: A Florida sheriff banned his deputies from wearing masks at work. Marion County Sheriff Billy Woods disputed the idea that masks are a consensus approach to battling the pandemic despite a majority of epidemiologists and other health experts saying face masks and social distancing are key to slowing the spread of the coronavirus. Florida set a daily record for COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday.
CNN: For the 16th consecutive day the U.S. has averaged over 1,000 coronavirus deaths. The U.S. is averaging just under 53,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day – down 11% from the week prior.
From the Wall Street Journal and New York Times: Public hospital data about the coronavirus pandemic is lagging by a week or more since the Trump administration ordered states to bypass the CDC and report data directly to the Department of Health and Human Services. HHS officials said the quality-control process has led to some delays in reporting hospital capacity estimates. Nearly three dozen current and former members of a federal health advisory committee, meanwhile, have warned that the new coronavirus database is placing an undue burden on hospitals and will have “serious consequences on data integrity.”
“President Trump has privately said that he intends to replace Secretary of Defense Mark Esper after the November election,” Bloomberg reports.
Meanwhile, Esper has told people close to him “that he intends to leave regardless of the election’s outcome, meaning he could exit the administration about two months before Trump does, if the president loses.”
Esper will be replaced. But not by Trump.
“The U.S. Energy Department proposed easing water efficiency requirements for shower heads Wednesday following multiple complaints from President Trump about how low water flow is impeding his ability to properly wash his hair,” Bloomberg reports.
Said Trump: “You can’t wash your beautiful hair properly.”
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