Our President's going around saying Joe Biden will raise your taxes, but Joseph Stiglitz at the New York Times reminds us that the tax cuts for working families in the 2017 tax reform are about to go away next year, which means our President is actually the one who's going to raise your taxes! If Democrats do take back the Presidency and capture both Houses of Congress, they'll want to act on this with a quickness, and I wouldn't brook any hand-wringing from "moderate" Democrats about it if I were them.
Our President claims that the pandemic must be getting better because only 3% of E.R. visits are due to COVID now! In other news, whole milk is not at all too fatty because only 4% of it is fat! The punchline? For most of September only 2% of E.R. visits were COVID-related, meaning that the percentage of COVID-related E.R. visits has jumped 50% in just one month! See what I did there? And mine isn't even a stupid number trick.
When I read that Biden campaign aides are worried that, for example, only 25% of registered black voters in Pennsylvania have voted so far, I suspect a little rope-a-dope is happening. Remember when black groups in Alabama complained that they hadn't heard from Doug Jones's campaign in 2017? Remember who then turned out in huge numbers for Doug Jones and propelled him to a most unlikely victory? A little historical context (black voters would generally prefer to go to the polls as they were kept from doing for centuries) is in order -- and so's a little statistical context (roughly 65% of black voters voted in Pennsylvania in 2012 and 2016).
Uh oh: Kansas U.S. House Rep./Senate candidate Roger Marshall, locked in an unexpectedly tight race with Democrat Barbara Bollier, pushed to aid physician-owned hospitals while his wife made at least $190,000 over the last three years from real estate deals involving said hospitals. Even beyond the personal corruption, "physician-owned hospitals" is one of those things that sounds like a good idea (who likes health insurance corporations, after all?), except that they typically turn into boutique hospitals because nobody makes their owner/doctors do any hard work, and civilized people do recognize their obligations to the larger community. Anyway, the timing couldn't be better for this revelation.
Finally, both campaigns have locked in to winning Pennsylvania, for lots of reasons, so it's news that our USPS, recently sabotaged by our President, now takes a looooooong time to deliver first-class mail there, and that includes many of our votes. The amount of first-class mail taking longer than five days to deliver just in Philadelphia has tripled since January, but nothing to see here, people! (In the redder areas of the Commonwealth, are seeing similar problems -- but then blue voters could be doing most of the voting-by-mail there, so, yeah, our President obviously gamed this out.)
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