WTF Community

The Latest - Wednesday, October 7

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A daily community thread to collect updates and events pertinent to the daily shock and awe, this is The Latest.


:warning: This thread has ended. The discussion continues: The Latest - Thursday, October 8.


Reminders


Today’s WTF


Earlier:

  1. Trump urged Congress to pass a new coronavirus stimulus package hours after ordering negotiators to stop talks with Democrats until after the election. “If I am sent a Stand Alone Bill for Stimulus Checks ($1,200), they will go out to our great people IMMEDIATELY,” Trump tweeted. “I am ready to sign right now. Are you listening Nancy?” Trump also called on Congress to “IMMEDIATELY” approve $25 billion for the airline industry and an additional $135 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, adding, “I will sign now!” (NBC News)

  2. Senior White House adviser Stephen Miller tested positive for the coronavirus. Miller said in a statement that he has been “working remotely and self-isolating, testing negative every day” over the last five days, but has since tested positive. Miller is the eleventh official to test positive after attending a White House event in the Rose Garden and the latest member of Trump’s presidential debate prep team to test positive. Miller also traveled aboard Air Force One on a Minnesota campaign trip with Trump and Hicks. (CNN / Axios)

  3. Top officials at the Justice Department were the main drivers behind the push to separate immigrant children from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border starting in 2018. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, and others at the DOJ were “a driving force” behind Trump’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy, according to a two-year inquiry by the Justice Department’s inspector general. “We need to take away children,” Sessions told the five U.S. attorneys along the border with Mexico in May 2018. Rosenstein went even further about a week later, telling the five prosecutors that it did not matter how young the children were. From the policy’s earliest days, the report says, Justice Department officials understood — and encouraged — the separation of children as an expected part of the desire to prosecute all undocumented border crossers. (New York Times / NBC News / The Independent)

  4. Mike Pence agreed to have a plexiglass divider between himself and Kamala Harris at tonight’s vice presidential debate. Pence initially argued there was no need for a barrier on his side of the stage, but changed his mind after viewing the setup during a walk-through of the debate hall. (Washington Post)


What we’re talking about


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:information_source: Voter Guides: FiveThirtyEight / Washington Post / NBC News / Wall Street Journal


Calendar


Previously

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He’s flip-flopping on the stimulus bill… some. It’s both not enough and the damage is done.

Global markets struggle to make sense of Trump’s stimulus tweet storm

Second stimulus check could bring you a bigger payment, whenever it comes

Before the talks to work out a deal came to a sudden stop, negotiators were closing in on a new rule that could bring your family more money than the first check.

Stock Futures Rise as Trump Softens Stance on Stimulus

S&P 500 is poised to recover some ground following the president’s overnight tweets that he would support slimmed-down bills on relief spending

Trump says he’d sign ‘stand alone’ stimulus check bill ‘immediately’

Trump reverses course on coronavirus relief talks, dangles new $1,200 stimulus checks

Earlier Tuesday, the president seemed to kill stimulus talks, tweeting that there would be no deal until “after I win” the election.

Trump Killed COVID Relief. The Decision Will Inflict Financial Hardship on Millions.

“After I win, we will pass a major stimulus bill that focuses on hardworking Americans.”

Politics

Trump Just Killed the Stimulus Talks. Is He Out of His Mind?

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Day 1357 Oct 7, 2020

Here we go again…sending subpoena’s, then T trying to refute them, and an appeals court saying you can not block them. And potentially going to the Supreme Court (Again)

Delaying is their strategy…

  • A federal appeals court rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to block enforcement of a grand jury subpoena demanding his income tax returns from his accountants.
  • But the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit suspended enforcement of that subpoeana by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., giving Trump time to ask the Supreme Court to hear his appeal of the new ruling.

A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to block enforcement of a grand jury subpoena that demands years of his income tax returns from his accountants.

But a three-judge panel on Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit suspended enforcement of that subpoena by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., giving Trump time to ask the Supreme Court, for the second time, to step into the case and block it permanently.

The panel’s decision was unanimous.

This is the second time that appeals court has rejected Trump’s request to deny Vance access to tax returns dating back to 2011 by upholding a lower federal court ruling.

Trump lost an earlier appeal of a similar ruling when he took the case to the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court this summer said that he did not have an “absolute” right to prevent his accounting firm Mazars USA from complying with the subpoena just because he is president.

But the high court also had allowed Trump to raise new objections with a federal court in Manhattan, which had rejected his first effort to stop the subpoena from being enforced.

However, a judge in that lower court quickly den

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Pence’s team agreed … to erect a plexiglass barrier near the vice president for Wednesday’s debate in Salt Lake City, a Pence aide and commission member told CNN, bringing an end for now the negotiations over coronavirus safety precautions around the contest.

Pence’s team made clear throughout the week that they thought putting any plexiglass barriers near the vice president was unnecessary and that they opposed such a move. Sen. Kamala Harris’ team, however, wanted the plexiglass barriers, in part, because of the ongoing spread of coronavirus inside the White House and the fact that Pence attended a Rose Garden event over a week ago that may have been the genesis of the spread. Pence has since repeatedly tested negative for the virus.

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Editor’s note: Quoting this in full because it’s probably the best single article I’ve read on exactly how WTF this moment has become. Please NYT, don’t sue.

As the virus consumes the U.S. government’s elite, Trump presides over a capital in chaos.

As the coronavirus upended the top echelons of the U.S. government on Tuesday — leaving President Trump convalescing in the White House, the Capitol eerily empty after lawmakers tested positive and most of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in quarantine — the president abruptly ended talks on a stimulus bill intended to shore up the nation’s pandemic-stricken economy.

Mr. Trump’s announcement Tuesday that he was ending talks with Democrats on the bill, which aimed to send more aid to Americans grappling with high unemployment and to help state and local governments stay afloat as tax collections plummet, sent the stock market sliding. It came after Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, warned that failing to inject more federal help into the economy would risk weakening the tenuous recovery.

In multiple tweets later Tuesday, Mr. Trump appeared to backtrack on his assertion that an agreement would wait until after Election Day, at one point urging both chambers to “IMMEDIATELY Approve” a lapsed loan program for small businesses, funds to prevent airlines from furloughing or laying off workers and another round of stimulus checks. It was unclear if his tweets, which came after stocks fell, reflected a willingness to restart negotiations with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Both provisions have bipartisan support, but several lawmakers have pushed for them to be included in a broader package.

Taken together, the events showed the extent to which the coronavirus is continuing to dominate life in America with less than a month to go before the presidential election. The outbreak at the White House has raised concerns in the city that surrounds it. New cases are surging in the upper Midwest. The average of new reported infections across the country is creeping up again, after a late-summer decline.

In New York, which was the center of the pandemic early on but has since seen a marked decline in cases, several worrisome outbreaks led Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to temporarily close nonessential businesses and schools in some parts of New York City and its northern suburbs.

And Mr. Trump, who left the hospital to convalesce at a White House that has become a virus hot spot, announced on Twitter that he wants to face off against his opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., in person next week — when he could still be contagious.

Mr. Trump said he planned to attend the debate in Miami, which is scheduled for Oct. 15. It was unclear if the debate commission would permit the debate to go ahead, given his illness, or whether Mr. Biden would agree to share the stage with him. And as both campaigns prepared for a vice-presidential debate on Wednesday, aides to Vice President Mike Pence raised objections to plans to put plexiglass dividers between him and his opponent, Senator Kamala Harris of California.

Mr. Biden, in a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., where a Civil War battlefield serves as a symbol of a country divided against itself, called for national unity and said that what “we’re experiencing today is neither good nor normal.”

Facebook removed a post from Mr. Trump on Tuesday that violated its policy against sharing misinformation about the virus, one of the few times that the social network had taken down one of his posts. In Mr. Trump’s message, he falsely suggested that the flu was deadlier than the coronavirus.

And hopes that a new vaccine could be authorized by Election Day — which Mr. Trump has relentlessly pushed for — faded after the Food and Drug Administration released updated, stricter guidelines for vaccine developers. The guidelines had been blocked by White House officials, including Mark Meadows, the chief of staff.

In pulling the plug until after the election on talks for a new bill to send aid to needy Americans, Mr. Trump accused Ms. Pelosi in a tweet of “not negotiating in good faith” and urged Senate Republicans to focus solely on confirming his nominee to the Supreme Court in the coming weeks. Mr. Trump said that he had instructed Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, to stop negotiating, sending the S&P 500 down as much as 1 percent in the immediate aftermath of his tweet. It had been up more than half a percent in the moments before. The index closed down 1.40 percent for the day.

“Our Economy is doing very well,” Mr. Trump tweeted as the market fell. “The Stock Market is at record levels, JOBS and unemployment also coming back in record numbers. We are leading the World in Economic Recovery, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Mr. Biden countered on Twitter that “the President has turned his back on you.”

Mr. Trump was recovering in the White House residence, as a number of advisers and other officials stayed home, because they had either contracted the coronavirus or been near people who had.

On Tuesday night, senior administration officials confirmed that Stephen Miller, Mr. Trump’s top speechwriter and policy adviser, had tested positive for the virus.

The Capitol , normally a beehive of a workplace for 535 legislators and thousands of staff members, was eerily empty on Tuesday after Senate leaders agreed to adjourn for two weeks beginning Monday, even as Republicans were trying to fast-track Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. More than 40 senators, along with more than a dozen congressional aides and reporters, have been tested for the coronavirus since late last week, officials said on Tuesday. Three Republican senators — Mike Lee of Utah, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin — have tested positive in recent days.

At the highest level of the military, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and several of the Pentagon’s most senior uniformed leaders were quarantining after being exposed to the coronavirus, a Defense Department official said Tuesday. The official said that almost the entirety of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including Gen. James C. McConville, the Army chief of staff, was quarantining after Adm. Charles Ray, the vice commandant of the Coast Guard, tested positive for the virus.

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Facebook bans QAnon across its platforms

The change is a significant escalation over its previous actions targeting QAnon and one of the broadest rules the social media giant has put in place in its history.

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You’d think he’d want as many extra barriers as possible given that he will be alone on a stage with a woman who isn’t his wife. :upside_down_face:

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lol so good

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Donald Trump mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.

Trump twice amplified supporters’ criticisms of Attorney General William Barr, including one featuring a meme calling on him to “arrest somebody!” He wondered aloud why his rivals, like President Barack Obama, Democratic nominee Joe Biden and former Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton hadn’t been imprisoned for launching a “coup” against his administration.

“Where are all of the arrests?” Trump said, after several dozen tweets on the subject over the past 24 hours. “Can you imagine if the roles were reversed? Long term sentences would have started two years ago. Shameful!”

By early afternoon, Trump was letting loose his frustrations in an all-caps missive that seemed aimed at nobody in particular.

“DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS, THE BIGGEST OF ALL POLITICAL SCANDALS (IN HISTORY)!!! BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!” Trump tweeted.

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Trump claims he is going to make the experimental drug he is on made by Regenero, available to everybody.

For free.

Turns out I got a detail wrong and adjusted this post; it was the drug cocktail from Regeneron he cut the promo for… and he has financial ties to its CEO.

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oh, like the insulin he made free like water

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Yup, just like that Jesus guy he hears is doing great things, really making a name for himself.

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Sadly, one more Covid-19 positive within the group.

Pentagon risk grows as Marine Corp’s No. 2 officer tests positive for coronavirus | Article [AMP] | Reuters

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White House Security Official Contracted Covid-19 in September

A top White House security official, Crede Bailey, is gravely ill with Covid-19 and has been hospitalized since September, according to four people familiar with his condition.

The White House has not publicly disclosed Bailey’s illness. He became sick before the Sept. 26 Rose Garden event President Donald Trump held to announce his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett that has been connected to more than a dozen cases of the disease.

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