#Katha Pollitt. "Managing Money," The Nation, October 5, 2020.
"Besides Ivanka Trump constantly angling to push Melania aside, there were incompetent underlings, officious men like Wolkoff's nemesis and one-time Trump campaign aide Rick Gates, and general wheeling and dealing, among the Trumps themselves. "Another was that Melania wasn't very interested in Be Best, or, indeed, anything besides clothes and facials, and expressing, in passive-aggressive ways, her contempt for anyone who criticized her."
"It is hard to believe she was unaware of Donald's opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ rights, his vow to build the wall, his claim that global warming was a hoax, his attacks on the media, and his overt appeals to religious fanaticism, racism, xenophobia, ignorance, and scorn of his base."
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff's portrait of Melania as cold, hostile, and self-centered and "not a normal person" seems right.
#"Britain's long, long road to a just transition," Sierra, November/December 2020.
On June 12, 2020, Prime Minister May introduced a net zero target for climate modification in Britain's Parliament, then a month before stepping down, she signed it into law. " 'She's in the dying embers of her premiership, and she rolls this very simple net zero grenade,' recalled Luke Pollard, the shadow secretary for the environment. He added, in a tone of grudging admiration, 'It was very good politics.' "
"In 2008, some 80 percent of the UK's electricity came from fossil fuels." "Today, only four coal-fired power stations remain in the country." "From 2010 to 2018,the UK boasted the fastest rate of decline in CO2 of any major economy --" "Only the United States, by virtue of its size, has cut more in absolute terms, but its rate of decline is one-eighth that of the UK."
#Nick Paumgarten, "The King of New York," The New Yorker, October 19, 2020.
"The pandemic degraded New York's already fragile finances. [Governor] "Cuomo is now contending with a budget deficit over two years of thirty billion dollars." "Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the Senate Majority Leader, dismissed such support for local and state governments as 'blue state bailouts', and suggested that they consider bankruptcy instead. Cuomo called this 'one of the saddest, really dumb comments of all time,' and noted, repeatedly, that Kentucky receives tens of billions more from Washington each year than it contributes, whereas New York gives tens of billions more." " 'That's the bailout!' he fumed."
"Trump not only 'caused' the virus (That's a fact!.' Cuomo said); he was also to blame for withholding previously earmarked funds for essential New York infrastructure projects, for having imposed the cap on federal deductions for local and state taxes, and for doing nothing to persuade the Senate to do right by the city that made him. Trump had even floated the ludicrous idea of cutting off federal money to Democratic cities, which he [Trump]' called 'anarchist jurisdictions.' "
#Ari Berman, "It Can Happen Here," Mother Jones, November + December 2020.
"Whom the census counts and doesn't count has always been politically charged. After the 1920 tally revealed that the majority of Americans lived in cities, the rural-dominated House of Representatives refused to use census data for congressional reapportionment for the first and only time in U.S. history."
"Experts are warning that the census data could be so skewed that Congress chooses to reject it, as it did in 1920 -- this time not for sinister reasons, but for the good of the country." "He [Trump] is working to transform long-standing nonpartisan institutions into explicitly partisan ones, shifting their essential mission from serving all Americans to furthering only the interests of a shrinking minority: white conservatives." "If voters are afraid to vote in-person, yet believe that postal delays will cause their mail-in ballots not to be counted, they may decide not to vote at all."
#Trump has called Dr. Fauci a "disaster," and on a call with campaign staff on October 19, said: "People are tired of COVID; Yup, there's going to be spikes, there's going to be no spikes, there's going to be vaccines, with or without vaccines, people are tired of COVID." "I have the biggest rallies I have ever had and we have COVID. People are saying what's so, just leave us alone. They're tired of it."
#Charlotte Alter, "Trump falls apart," TIME, October 10, 2020.
"The President could be impeached for abuse of power, publicly musters white supremacists, [uses] tear-gas on peaceful protesters for a photo op, pay less than his employees in taxes, declares that he'd refuse to accept the results of the election, hold a possible superspreader at the White House -- and millions of Americans will ignore it. To half of us, all this is an outrage; to the other half, none of it matters."
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