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Zorro's JournalTrump Files Lawsuit In Pennsylvania Alleging Election Officials Totally Disregarding His Feelings
WASHINGTON—Blasting the complete lack of empathy, campaign attorneys for President Donald Trump filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania Thursday alleging state election officials were totally disregarding his feelings.
“A lot of these ballots clearly contain information that makes me sad and scared, and it’s just not right,” said Trump, who cautioned the media to refrain from issuing any results that would hurt him.
“I’m angry and confused, and I demand that election officials cease being mean immediately. All this vote counting completely flies in the face of my emotions, and I won’t stand for it. We won’t let the Democrats make me cry.”
At press time, an angry mob of Trump supporters had surrounded a vote counting facility to demand election officials make the president smile.
https://www.theonion.com/trump-files-lawsuit-in-pennsylvania-alleging-election-o-1845587740
Trump Defends Lawsuits: "No One Knows More About Fraud Than Me"
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump offered a full-throated defense of his election-related lawsuits on Thursday, arguing, “No one knows more about fraud than me.”
Trump ridiculed television commentators who have dismissed his accusations of election fraud, claiming that he has “much more experience in fraud than all of these beauties put together.”
“People forget that, right when I became President, I settled a twenty-five-million-dollar fraud case against me,” he said. “You can’t beat hands-on experience like that.”
“For my entire life, I have been drenched in fraud,” he said.
Trump said that, when his election lawsuits are argued in court, his special expertise will win the day. “Fraud is my middle name,” he boasted.
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/trump-defends-lawsuits-no-one-knows-more-about-fraud-than-me
A beach bar on the Florida-Alabama border reclaims its Mullet Toss -- masks optional
Flora-Bama’s decision to hold its popular fish-throwing contest reflects the dilemma confronting small businesses during the pandemic: balancing economic survival with a desire for normalcy and the preservation of traditions that distinguish their communities, despite the health risks.PERDIDO KEY, Fla. — Nothing was going to stop the dead fish from flying.
Not the governor next door. Not the leftover hurricane damage. And definitely not the pandemic.
Cameron Price grabbed the mic with one hand and scooped a ray-finned mullet out of a cooler with the other. He turned to the 1,000 or so revelers crowding the shoreline behind the famed beach bar that literally straddles the Florida-Alabama state line.
“The Flora-Bama is the last bastion of freedom in America,” he said to cheers on a recent Saturday. “It is so awesome to see all of you guys out there without masks, enjoying yourselves in the sunshine, in the salt air, and just having such an awesome time out here.”
Flora-Bama’s Interstate Mullet Toss has been a springtime tradition for nearly 35 years: People wait in line for hours to test how far they can throw a dead fish across the state line. It’s the bar’s biggest weekend, attracting upward of 30,000 people over its typical three-day run and generating millions for the local economy. Beachfront rentals and hotels from Gulf Shores, Ala., to Pensacola, Fla., are booked up months in advance.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/road-to-recovery/2020/11/03/florabama-fish-toss-pandemic/
Trump says dealings with leading Democrats more difficult than Russia, China and North Korea
Trump said Tuesday that it has been more difficult during his presidency to deal with some Democratic politicians, whom he called “horrible people,” than leaders of Russia, China and North Korea.
Trump made his assertion during a wide-ranging call-in interview with the hosts of Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” during which he also said he thinks he has a “solid chance” of winning the election but left open the possibility he could fall short.
Asked if he’s loved the job of being president, Trump lashed out at several leading Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), a leading player in Trump’s impeachment, using pejorative nicknames for them.
“We’ve dealt with horrible people like Shifty Shiff and Crazy Nancy and Cryin’ Chuck Schumer. You deal with some horrible people,” Trump told the hosts. “You deal with people that are very deceptive."
Trump said old friends ask him, “Tell me who’s the country that’s most difficult to deal with. Is it Russia? Is it China? It is North Korea?”"
“By far, the most difficult country to deal with is the U.S., not even close,” Trump said he tells his friends.
“They all say, ‘You’ve got to be kidding,'" Trump said. “And I say, ‘No, I’m actually probably not kidding.’ We have very, very deceptive people. … I think they’re sick in some ways, like an Adam Schiff. I think Adam Schiff is a sick person, and we deal with them, we just deal with them, but it’s a shame.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/2020/11/03/trump-biden-election-live-updates/
Ladies and gentlemen, I present our "President" of the UNITED States of America...
As Climate Disasters Pile Up, a Radical Proposal Gains Traction
The idea of modifying Earth’s atmosphere to cool the planet, once seen as too risky to seriously consider, is attracting new money and attention.As the effects of climate change become more devastating, prominent research institutions and government agencies are focusing new money and attention on an idea once dismissed as science fiction: Artificially cooling the planet, in the hopes of buying humanity more time to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
That strategy, called solar climate intervention or solar geoengineering, entails reflecting more of the sun’s energy back into space — abruptly reducing global temperatures in a way that mimics the effects of ash clouds spewed by volcanic eruptions. The idea has been derided as a dangerous and illusory fix, one that would encourage people to keep burning fossil fuels while exposing the planet to unexpected and potentially menacing side effects.
But as global warming continues, producing more destructive hurricanes, wildfires, floods and other disasters, some researchers and policy experts say that concerns about geoengineering should be outweighed by the imperative to better understand it, in case the consequences of climate change become so dire that the world can’t wait for better solutions.
“We’re facing an existential threat, and we need to look at all the options,” said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at the Columbia Law School and editor of a book on the technology and its legal implications. “I liken geoengineering to chemotherapy for the planet: If all else is failing, you try it.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/28/climate/climate-change-geoengineering.html
Hundreds Die at Sea Off Senegal's Coast on a Perilous Route to Europe
Source: New York Times
Those attempting to migrate from West Africa to Europe are once again taking a route so dangerous it’s known as “Barcelona or die.”
An estimated 150 migrants are thought to have died after the wooden boat they were traveling in was shipwrecked off the coast of Senegal on Friday, the latest in a deadly series of accidents for those trying a dangerous sea route around northwest Africa to reach Europe that had become less popular in recent years.
The boat capsized and many of the passengers drowned, according to Alarm Phone, a hotline for migrants stranded at sea, and Senegalese firefighters who saw the aftermath on the beach. It had been less than a week since the last such disaster, in which at least 140 people trying to get to Europe drowned when their boat caught fire.
Both boats had been going to the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago 60 miles off the Moroccan coast, which in recent months has received dozens of boatloads of travelers as other routes through the Sahara and across the Mediterranean to Europe became more difficult and dangerous.
There has been a resurgence in clandestine emigration by sea, the Senegalese government said in a statement last week. It said it was carrying out surveillance operations by air and by sea, and had arrested 28 people suspected of trafficking migrants.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/02/world/africa/senegal-migrants-drown.html
Susan Collins Unsure Whether She Will Vote for Herself
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Plunging her reëlection bid for the United States Senate into uncertainty, Susan Collins announced on Monday that she was unsure whether she would vote for herself.
Collins, who had long been expected to back herself in 2020, said that nagging doubts about her record in the Senate had given her pause.
“For much of my career, I have been troubled and concerned about a whole range of issues,” she said. “The fact that I have been troubled and concerned as much as I have has left me troubled and concerned.”
Collins shed no light on her soul-searching process other than to say that she would spend the remaining hours until the election wringing her hands.
“I will make my decision when I am in the voting booth on Tuesday,” she said. “Or not.”
https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/susan-collins-unsure-whether-she-will-vote-for-herself
Islamic State attack on Kabul University kills 22, wounds 22
Source: Washington Post
An hours-long siege on Kabul University claimed by the Islamic State left at least 22 dead and 22 wounded Monday after two gunmen stormed the campus, took several students hostage and battled security forces for hours before the scene was cleared and all hostages were freed.
The attack in Afghanistan's capital began with an explosion at the gates of the university just before 11 a.m. Monday.
Thousands of students fled, but a number trapped inside began posting to social media describing seeing classmates gunned down.
“God give patience, my classmates martyred and wounded in front of my eyes, and I am taken hostage,” Qaseem Kohestani, a fourth-year student at the university’s public policy school, posted to Facebook.
A law student told The Washington Post that dozens of students and some professors were taken hostage in the attack. The student spoke on the condition of anonymity because of security concerns.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/kabul-university-attack-hostages-afghan/2020/11/02/ca0f1b6a-1ce7-11eb-ad53-4c1fda49907d_story.html
At a top hospital, Catholic restrictions on women's healthcare are growing worse
Back in 2014, then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris imposed a strict condition on the affiliation between Hoag Memorial Hospital and St. Joseph Health System, a Catholic hospital group: For the most part, Hoag was to be exempt from Catholic church restrictions on women’s healthcare services.
Doctors at Newport Beach-based Hoag say that condition has been flagrantly breached by Providence Health, the successor to St. Joseph — and the violations are proliferating.
Since 2015 and up to the present day, a managed health plan controlled by Providence has been refusing to pay for contraceptives prescribed by Hoag OB/GYNs for their patients.
The health maintenance organization, Heritage Healthcare, has cited the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services as grounds for refusing payment, even though the 2014 agreement under which Harris approved the affiliation explicitly states that Hoag would not be bound by the so-called ERDs then or “in the future.”
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-11-02/hiltzik-catholic-womens-health-hoag
The real results of Trump's trade tariffs
Opinion by Editorial Board
PRESIDENT TRUMP regularly blames Democrat Joe Biden for “shipping your jobs” to China, while boasting that he is bringing them back, in part by “charging China a lot of money, too, with the tariffs,” as Mr. Trump put it on Oct. 10. Any voters still inclined to credit the president’s narrative need to acquaint themselves with the latest data, which show the paltry results of Mr. Trump’s trade policies toward China.
First, some background: As of the end of 2018, Mr. Trump had launched a wave of tariffs on $370 billion worth of Chinese goods, to which China had responded with levies on $185 billion of U.S. goods. Mr. Trump bargained some of these away in a February 2020 “Phase 1” deal with China in which Beijing agreed to cut some of its tariffs and to buy $200 billion worth of specified U.S. products through 2021.
Troubling in theory, because it enshrines the idea of explicit government management of global trade flows, Mr. Trump’s deal has been a bust in practice, too. According to a recent report by Chad Bown of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China has bought only 53 percent of what it should have through September 2020. Chinese imports from the United States are now lower than they were before the trade war. Some of this shortfall is, of course, due to the coronavirus-induced global downturn, and to other disasters, such as the Boeing 737 Max crashes that have hammered that company’s foreign sales, including to China. Yet much of it is due to the fact that Mr. Trump’s targets were unrealistic from the start. As Mr. Bown and other analysts noted even before the pandemic hit, U.S. producers often lacked the productive capacity to meet the deal’s targets.
The U.S. trade deficit with China now stands exactly where it did when the president took office, having risen during his first 18 months, then come back down in the wake of the tariff war. The U.S.’s global trade deficit, meanwhile, is substantially higher than it was when Mr. Trump took office. As for manufacturing, the tariffs seem to have mainly shifted jobs from industries that do not benefit from such levies to those that do, pretty much as Economics 101 predicts. A December 2019 Federal Reserve paper found that tariffs helped raise manufacturing employment by 0.3 percent in industries exposed to Chinese competition, while cutting it 1.1 percent in industries that rely in Chinese-made inputs. Meanwhile, factory jobs also suffered somewhat from China’s retaliatory tariffs.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-real-results-of-trumps-trade-tariffs/2020/11/01/90f67fe0-1944-11eb-82db-60b15c874105_story.html
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