Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Trump Pandemic: Over 5 million infections; more than 200,000 dead. A blow-by-blow account of how the president mishandled the pandemic and killed thousands of Americans as a result. (Slate)
• Cities Weigh Cutting Police Budgets and Discover How Hard That Is: Officers’ pay is a large part of the spending and is often subject to collective bargaining. Pensions are locked in for years. (Wall Street Journal)
• It’s possible that POTUS 45 actually isn’t the hardest-working president in history: The president has spent all or part of 383 days during his presidency at properties he or his private company owns. That includes all or part of 132 days at his Mar-a-Lago property in Florida and all or part of 102 days at his club in Bedminster, N.J. If you’re curious, 383 days is about 3 out of every 10 days he’s been president (Washington Post)
• QAnon groups have millions of members on Facebook: The preliminary results of an investigation by Facebook shed new light on the scope of activity and content from the QAnon community on the platform. (NBC News) see also GOP are becoming the QAnon Party: When the GOP was under assault from the conspiracy-minded John Birch Society in the 1960s, responsible conservatives such as Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley Jr. marginalized them. That isn’t happening today (Washington Post)
• Five Ways White House and GOP Officials Are Undermining The Election Process: To better understand what’s a really big deal versus something that might be problematic but perhaps not as important, we broke out the potential ways voting could be limited or the electoral process undermined (FiveThirtyEight)
• How Jared Kushner Became the President’s Most Dangerous Enabler: Polished, soft-spoken, and a self-styled moderate, Jared Kushner has become his father-in-law’s most dangerous enabler. (The Atlantic)
• ‘Christianity Will Have Power’ Donald Trump made a promise to white evangelical Christians, whose support can seem mystifying to the outside observer. (New York Times)
• “. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic” An Open Letter to General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: If the commander in chief attempts to ignore the election’s results, you will face a choice. (Defense One)
• America’s All-Time Low in White Collar Crime Enforcement: Donald Trump calls himself the “law and order” president, but when it comes to white collar crime, he has overseen a significant decline in enforcement. (Bloomberg)
• I (still) believe the president, and in the president: I believe the president Made America Great Again. I believe we need him reelected to Make America Great Again Again. I believe Joe Biden is “Sleepy” and “weak.” I believe Biden could “hurt God” and the Bible. I believe that if Biden is elected, there will be “no religion, no anything,” and he would confiscate all guns, “immediately and without notice.” (Washington Post)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Claudia Sahm, former Section Chief at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and Senior Economist at the Council of Economic Advisers for the Obama Administration.
Total confirmed COVID-19 deaths: how rapidly are they increasing?
Source: Our World in Data
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