“Wake me up when its over” In troubled times; a bit of Pure Joy
Category: Labor and Working
Trump asked for options for attacking Iran last week, but held off – source
Reuters – Middle East & Africa
Trump asked for options for attacking Iran last week, but held off – source
A view of a damage building after a fire broke out at Iran’s Natanz Nuclear Facility, in Isfahan, Iran, July 2, 2020. Atomic Energy Organization of Iran/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS –
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump, with two months left in office, last week asked for options on attacking Iran’s main nuclear site, but ultimately decided against taking the dramatic step, a U.S. official said on Monday.
Trump made the request during an Oval Office meeting on Thursday with his top national security aides, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, new acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller and General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the official said.
Trump, who has refused to concede and is challenging the results of the Nov. 3 presidential election, is to hand over power to Democratic President-elect Joe Biden on Jan. 20.
The official confirmed the account of the meeting in The New York Times, which reported the advisers persuaded Trump not to go ahead with a strike because of the risk of a broader conflict.
“He asked for options. They gave him the scenarios and he ultimately decided not to go forward,” the official said.
Trump has spent all four years of his presidency engaging in an aggressive policy against Iran, withdrawing in 2018 from the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, and imposing economic sanctions against a wide variety of Iranian targets.
Trump’s request for options came a day after a U.N. watchdog report showed Iran had finished moving a first cascade of advanced centrifuges from an above-ground plant at its main uranium enrichment site to an underground one, in a fresh breach of its 2015 nuclear deal with major powers.
Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman for Iran’s mission to the United Nations in New York, said Iran’s nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes and civilian use and Trump’s policies have not changed that. “However, Iran has proven to be capable of using its legitimate military might to prevent or respond to any melancholy adventure from any aggressor,” he added.
Iran’s 2.4 tonne stock of low-enriched uranium is now far above the deal’s 202.8 kg limit. It produced 337.5 kg in the quarter, less than the more than 500 kg recorded in the previous two quarters by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In January, Trump ordered a U.S. drone strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad’s airport. But he has shied away from broader military conflicts and sought to withdraw U.S. troops from global hotspots in keeping with a promise to stop what he calls “endless wars.”
A strike on Iran’s main nuclear site at Natanz could flare into a regional conflict and pose a serious foreign policy challenge for Biden.
Biden’s transition team, which has not had access to national security intelligence due to the Trump administration’s refusal to begin the transition, declined comment.
Reporting by Steve Holland; Additional reporting by Michael Martina and Michelle Nichols; Editing by Mary Milliken, Cynthia Osterman, Leslie Adler and Lincoln Feast.
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
One Writer’s End of Term List: 10 Things I Now Hate Because of Trump
Town and Country
One Writer’s End of Term List: 10 Things I Now Hate Because of Trump
Sorting through old papers, I’ll sometimes come across a note signed by my mother. She’s been dead 15 years and the sight of her signature triggers a rush of emotions. Autographs are more than scratches on paper. They are a legal representation of a person. For 50 years, I’ve viewed signatures on a scale that ranged from “necessary” to “heartwarming.” It never occurred to me that I could hate a signature.
I hate Donald Trump’s signature. I hate it aesthetically with the odd peak at the end that makes it seem like he’s signing his family’s original surname, “Drumpf.” I also hate the cruel bills and executive orders that he has signed to ban Muslims, roll back environmental protections, and protect Confederate monuments.
This anger extends beyond his signature. Trump has taught me to hate things that never seemed worthy of hatred, items like:
1. The number “45.” There are no photos of John F. Kennedy wearing a football jersey with the number 35. Historians and journalist sometimes use Bush 41 and Bush 43 to distinguish the two, but most presidents aren’t recognized by their sequential number. Still, Trump has embraced “45,” putting it on his golf hat and embroidering it on his cuffs. Many elevators skip the “13th floor” because it’s considered bad luck. In the future, we will skip from 44 to 46.
2: The color orange. Orange still doesn’t rhyme with any words, but it’s now synonymous with Trump whose nicknames include Agent Orange, the Mango Mussolini, the Cheeto in Charge, and Tangerine Jesus. Orange is now off-color forever. Sorry Howard Johnson’s. Sorry Princeton.
3. “Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.” Founded by the Ms. Foundation for Women, this day kicked off in 1993 and used to happen once a year in April. At the White House, every day is “Bring your daughter to work day” thanks to senior adviser and filler-enthusiast Ivanka Trump whose “work” drew eye rolls from world leaders and Christine Lagarde.
4. Words like “sir,” “hoax,” “sad,” and “huge.” How one man could ruin so many monosyllabic words is both sad and huge.
5. Phrases like “When you look at X…” or “When you think about it…” Trump uses these phrases as rhetorical tics, the filler between lies. I now cringe when I hear them. Even cliches that were already disliked—“It is what it is”—I now hate even more.
6. Escalators, stairs and ramps. Trump has issues with between-floor conveyances. He truly can make the most ordinary things seem weird.
7. Solar eclipses. I will always associate solar eclipses with Trump so it’s a good thing they don’t occur very often.
8. Mario Kart. In her book Full Disclosure, Stormy Daniels described Trump’s sexual apparatus: “It has a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool… I lay there, annoyed that I was getting fucked by a guy with Yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart.” If you can hear “Mario Kart” and not envision Trump’s penis, I am jealous.
9. True story: Trump ruined my friend Susie’s vagina. After Trump won in 2016, my friend Susie’s cervix spasmed and required medical attention. Susie wasn’t alone. In an article for The Cut, Emily Gould concludes her story about Gawker with a visit to the gynecologist. Gould explains she first felt pain in the area of her reproductive organs after watching Trump steamroll Hillary Clinton in a debate. The doctor responds, “Yeah, I’m seeing a lot of this lately. Women who haven’t had problems in years coming back in. People have all kinds of different reactions to trauma.”
10. Flushing twice. On the occasions when I have needed to flush a toilet twice, I never thought about it. Now that Trump regularly brings up bathrooms and the need for multiple flushes, I think of him as I watch the waste swirl into the sewer. To be fair, of all the associations, this one makes the most sense.
trump: I won the election by a lot !
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‘Betsy DeVos made a mess’ of the U.S. student loan system, teachers’ union boss says
Yahoo – Finance
‘Betsy DeVos made a mess’ of the U.S. student loan system, teachers’ union boss says
Fixing the U.S. student loan system goes beyond just debt forgiveness, according to one teachers’ union leader, and the current administration hasn’t done much to help borrowers.
“Look, Betsy DeVos made a mess of this,” Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “We have sued DeVos several times. We sued Navient. … But ultimately, just like mortgages, and just like other things, student loan debt needs to be transparent.”
The burden of the financial aid “needs to be clear,” Weingarten added. “People need to know what their choices are. And then we need to try to mitigate it to actually make [sure] student loan debt is not a death sentence for people.”
‘There’s a lot that you can do’
Currently, roughly 44 million Americans hold nearly $1.7 trillion in student loan debt.
Multiple lawmakers have proposed — through various bills and even on their respective campaign trails — cancelling debt for 37 million borrowers holding federal student loans. These loans are owed by Americans to the U.S. Department of Education.
Most recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) called for President-elect Joe Biden to use executive action to cancel “billions of dollars in student loan debt,” which she argued could be the “single most effective executive action available to provide massive consumer-driver stimulus.”
Weingarten stressed the same: “There’s a lot that you can do, executive action to clean this up.
Aarthi is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. She can be reached at aarthi@yahoofinance.com.
Column: Just when you thought the president could sink no lower….
Los Angeles Times
Column: Just when you thought the president could sink no lower….
“Despite the Left’s attempts to undermine this Election, I will NEVER stop fighting for YOU,” President Trump assured me in a fundraising email.
I don’t take campaign fundraising emails seriously (never mind literally). They’re all pretty stupid.
But this one was obviously different, for the simple reason that the election is over. Indeed, this note — one of a great many sent by the Trump campaign recently — was a plea for money to pay for the legal effort to reverse an election Trump lost by the same margin of electoral votes he once claimed amounted to a “massive landslide.” And if you read the letter’s fine print, you’ll discover that “fighting for you” actually means “fighting for me.” Most of the money from small donors will go not to the legal effort, but rather to pay down campaign debt.
In a sense I’m grateful that Trump is doubling down on everything wrong about his presidency in its final chapter. Yes, this is embarrassing for the country. Yes, Trump’s radioactive conspiracy theory of a stolen election will have a long, poisonous half-life. But Trump is removing all doubt that his narcissistic presidency was always entirely about him.
The country is in the midst of a health and economic crisis, but Trump’s primary focus is licking his own wounds, not tackling the country’s. He has largely abandoned formal intelligence briefings and hasn’t met with the coronavirus task force in months. Instead, with the exception of a Veterans Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery and a Friday night statement on the pandemic, he’s conducted his post-election presidency doing precisely what he’s always done — subordinating the office to his own wants, desires and petty grievances.
He punctuates his brooding and sulking with pathetic tweets brimming with conspiratorial or otherwise deranged hogwash, including the repeated claim “I won the election.” He continues to insist, as he has throughout his presidency, that proof for his lies is just around the corner. On Sunday, he promised a new lawsuit showing the “unconstitutionality” of the 2020 election.
“Nixon’s real tragedy is that he never had the stature to be a tragic hero,” Gary Wills wrote in “Nixon Agonistes.” “He is the stuff of sad (almost heartbreaking) comedy.” I think that’s a little unfair to Nixon, but it’s dead on with Trump.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh, as he finally turns on the real Judas in his eyes, Fox News (where I am a contributor). The network, he tweets, “forgot what made them successful, what got them there. They forgot the Golden Goose. The biggest difference between the 2016 Election, and 2020, was @FoxNews!”
Never mind that Fox was No. 1 in every time slot more than a decade before Trump descended that escalator in 2015. Never mind, that for four years, he began his day with his Presidential Daily Brief — “Fox and Friends” — and ended it with the primetime gang. And never mind that Trump and the opinion side of the network remain in a deeply codependent relationship.
He still didn’t get the full-throated, unwavering praise he needed, so now he finds joy in thinking about creating a new competing network, one without all the obvious anti-Trump bias!
Most presidents, if they’re remembered at all, get summarized with a single sentence. Whatever Trump’s sentence might have been before the election, he managed to rewrite it after the election: “A one-term president who was the first in American history to refuse to concede or recognize the election results.” Talk about scoring after the buzzer.
George H.W. Bush, the last incumbent president to lose a reelection bid, left office (after graciously conceding) in fairly bad odor on the right. After eight years of Bill Clinton, however, nostalgia for Bush was so strong, his son parlayed his patronymic name ID into a winning presidential bid.
If Trump had followed a similar course, he (or perhaps his sybaritic scion) might have cashed in on similar nostalgia after four years of a Biden presidency almost certain to be seen as disastrous by those on the right. Instead, he has chosen to prove that those of us who said “character is destiny” were right all along.
Let Trump continue insisting he didn’t really lose — it’s impossible to stop him after all. Let those who believe him — or pretend to — continue to march and tweet and rant, including the many highly compensated media personalities who’ve gotten rich off the Trump train.
But for the rest of us, the one thing we won’t ever feel about the Trump presidency is nostalgia — not least because he won’t really be gone. Even after he leaves the White House, he’ll be fighting for himself — and making sure we hear him — for the rest of his days.
Butter Is Booming, Whole Milk Is Back and Dairy Is Surviving
Bloomberg
Butter Is Booming, Whole Milk Is Back and Dairy Is Surviving
Justin Fox November 15, 2020
(Bloomberg Opinion) — With Americans staying home more than usual because of the pandemic, and doing lots of baking and cooking to pass the time, this has been a banner year for butter.
Land O’Lakes, the Minnesota-based dairy cooperative, expects to sell 275 million to 300 million pounds of the stuff this year — a 20% increase — as rising retail demand more than makes up for lost restaurant business. Nationwide, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, butter production is up 6% over the first nine months of the year and is on track to top two billion pounds for the first time since 1943.
This year’s boom is, as is apparent from the chart, part of a longer-term comeback. On a per-capita basis, Americans eat far less butter than they did in the early decades of the 20th century. But they eat more than they did in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
After staving off competition from margarine with nearly a century of lobbying for margarine bans, taxes and color restrictions, butter producers lost their regulatory advantages in the 1940’s and 1950’s and ceded a lot of market share to the cheaper spread — which had originally been derived from beef fat but was by then mainly made out of vegetable oil. As medical researchers began to link consumption of animal fats with heart disease in the 1950’s and 1960’s, margarine gained even more ground as a purportedly healthier alternative.
Those health claims were later mostly debunked, and the price difference between butter and margarine began to matter less as incomes rose and families shrank (food purchased for off-premises consumption accounted for more than 18% of consumer spending in the early 1950’s and just 6% in 2019).
Butter also benefited from the emphasis on genuine ingredients accompanying the good-food revival that began in the 1960’s (Julia Child certainly wasn’t going to use margarine). And let’s be honest, it tastes better. Corn oil, olive oil and other vegetable oils now play a much bigger role in American diets than they used to, so butter will probably never regain its central status of a century ago. But it’s not going away.
“It’s a survivor story,” says Peter Vitaliano, vice president of economic policy and market research at the National Milk Producers Federation.
The same goes for the dairy industry in general. It can seem awfully embattled from time to time, and for good reason. Giant, highly productive dairies have been driving lots of smaller farmers out of business. Competition from “milks” made of almonds, oats, soybeans and other plants has taken market share from the real thing and led to a dairy industry lobbying campaign reminiscent of the margarine wars of yore. President Donald Trump’s trade policies have caused problems too. Two big milk marketers, Borden Dairy Co. and Dean Foods Inc., have filed for bankruptcy in the past 12 months.
But the big picture for the industry since 1980 or so is of declining demand for its core product (milk, that is) being more than offset by rising sales of almost everything that can be made out of milk.
Even within milk sales there’s been an interesting shift lately, with whole milk outselling 2% milk for the first time in 15 years in 2018 and building on its lead in 2019, and skim milk sales drifting downward. If you’re going to drink milk, and not smashed-up almonds mixed with water, then you might as well drink the milkiest kind of milk.
Whole milk happens to be the most profitable product for dairy farmers, as it’s basically just what comes out of the cow and thus doesn’t require them to share much revenue with processors. It also has benefited from the new eat-at-home normal of the pandemic, with sales up 4.1% through August (2% milk sales are up too, with skim and 1% down).
But on the whole, it is products made of milk that have kept the industry going. The butter revival is one aspect of this. The rise of yogurt, which was close to nonexistent in the U.S. before the 1970’s, is another, even though it has faded a bit lately.
The main driver of the dairy industry’s resilience, though, has been cheese. Americans consume almost three times as much of it per-person as they did in 1970.
Not all of this is the result of what you’d call organic consumer demand. Yes, the big gains in Italian cheese consumption seem to reflect the fact that we eat a lot more pizza than we used to. One can also see hints in the data of the rising popularity of Mexican food (which in its north-of-the-border incarnation contains lots of Cheddar and Jack cheese), bagels’ emergence from regional-food status (cream cheese!) and other fun food trends.
But as cheese can be stored for longer than milk or butter or yogurt, it’s also something the dairy industry makes when it has more milk than it knows what to do with, resulting in the infamous “cheese mountain” that is occasionally reduced in size by big government purchases. Those have been especially big this year, with the Agriculture Department so far delivering more than 118 million food boxes — each containing several pounds of dairy products, mainly cheese — to food banks and other charities as part of pandemic-relief efforts.
The industry has also found new things to sell beyond milk, butter, yogurt and cheese, and new places to sell them. Forty years ago the U.S. hardly exported any dairy products. Now it exports a fair amount of cheese, mainly to Mexico, South Korea and Japan, and even bigger quantities of cheese-making byproducts such as whey powder, whey protein isolate and lactose, all of which are used in manufacturing foods and dietary supplements.
The main byproduct of modern butter-making is skim milk powder, most of which is exported to Mexico and Southeast Asia to be reconstituted, often in combination with vegetable oils, into various milk-like drinks. Overall, says Vitaliano, the U.S. exports about 4% of the milk fat it produces and 19% of the skim solids.
To bring things back to butter, the U.S. actually imports more of the stuff than it exports, with Ireland’s Kerrygold the No. 2 butter brand in the U.S. after Land O’Lakes. But the import quantities are still small relative to domestic production. So this year of high butter demand has been good for U.S. dairy cooperatives that specialize in the stuff, such as Land O’Lakes and No. 1 producer California Dairies Inc., which makes Challenge and Danish Creamery butter. (Both Land O’Lakes and California Dairies also produce private-label butter for retailers, so their role in supplying the country with butter goes way beyond their own brands.)
It has also been a good year for California dairies in general, given that the state accounts for just over 30% of U.S. butter production, with Land O’Lakes a big presence there too. Wisconsin, “America’s Dairyland,” focuses more on cheese, with a quarter of U.S. production. New York is tops in yogurt, with about 15% of production.
In terms of milk output for all purposes, California is No. 1 at more than 18% of the national total. It has held the top spot since passing Wisconsin in 1993, but the latter has been narrowing the gap lately. Idaho recently overtook New York for third place, and Texas may be nipping at its heels soon. For an ancient, not exactly fast-growing industry, dairy has a lot more drama than you might expect.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”
South Dakota ER nurse recalls how dying coronavirus patients spend last minutes insisting virus isn’t real
South Dakota ER nurse recalls how dying coronavirus patients spend last minutes insisting virus isn’t real
South Dakota ER nurse Jodi Doering has seen some disturbing examples of COVID-19 denial as she works through the pandemic.
After a Twitter thread of her experiences started circulating, Doering appeared on CNN’s New Day on Monday to describe how South Dakota hospitals are overwhelmed with coronavirus patients — and yet some of them don’t believe the virus they have is real. While many patients are “grateful for the care they receive” from nurses, some COVID-19 patients spend their last moments refusing to call family and friends because they’re convinced they’re going to be fine, Doering said. “Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real,'” Doering recalled. In some cases, patients even insist they have the flu or lung cancer to avoid acknowledging the coronavirus.
A South Dakota ER nurse @JodiDoering says her Covid-19 patients often “don’t want to believe that Covid is real.”
“Their last dying words are, ‘This can’t be happening. It’s not real.’ And when they should be… Facetiming their families, they’re filled with anger and hatred.” pic.twitter.com/tgUgP6znAT
— New Day (@NewDay) November 16, 2020
Doering went on to mention how more people have died of COVID-19 in South Dakota — 644 — than even live in the town where she’s from. South Dakota has the highest COVID-19 mortality rate of almost anywhere in the world — only North Dakota and the entire countries of Belgium and the Czech Republic rank higher. Without a mask mandate and with low rates of mask wearing, the Dakotas have seen coronavirus cases spike over the past few months.
More stories from theweek.com
Village Peoples Take on trump
Weekend Update: The Village People on Donald Trump Using Their Music – SNL
Secret intelligence exists that ‘would cast Trump in very negative light’, warns ex-FBI chief
Independent
Secret intelligence exists that ‘would cast Trump in very negative light’, warns ex-FBI chief
Former acting FBI director Andrew McCabe has warned that classified intelligence from bureau’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign ties to Russia could contain information that would “risk casting the president in a very negative light”.
Mr McCabe has been at the centre of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which a Republican-controlled panel is reviewing the FBI’s recision to initiate the investigation.
He testified before the panel on Tuesday and told lawmakers that officials had a “duty” to carry out the investigation due to the information they had collected. Mr McCabe personally approved the decision to investigate Mr Trump for possible obstruction of justice.
In an interview with CNN on Friday night, Mr McCabe was asked what the risks were if more information from the Russia investigation was to be declassified.
CNN anchor Andrew Cuomo said Mr Trump was told by Devin Nunes, a close ally of the president’s and former chair of the House Intelligence Committee, that if more previously unreleased information comes out, the more it will appear that the president was “framed”.
“From your knowledge, is there anything that could come out that people would look at and say, ‘wow, I can’t believe they ever included the president in this analysis, he and his people clearly did nothing’?” asked Mr Cuomo.
Mr McCabe replied: “There is some very, very serious, very specific, undeniable intelligence that has not come out, that if it were released, would risk compromising our access to that sort of information in the future.
“I think it would also risk casting the president in a very negative light – so, would he have a motivation to release those things? It’s almost incomprehensible to me that he would want that information out, I don’t see how he spins it into his advantage, because quite frankly, I don’t believe it’s flattering.
Asked if Mr McCabe thought there was more “bad stuff” about Mr Trump that wasn’t already publicly known, he replied: “There is always more intelligence, there is a lot more in the intelligence community assessment than what is ever released for public consumption.
“The original version of that report was classified at the absolute highest level I have ever seen. We’re talking about top secret, compartmentalised code word stuff, and it would be tragic to American intelligence collection for those sources to be put at risk.”
The FBI has been accused by the Senate Judiciary Committee of going “rogue” with the Russia investigation, with one senator describing it as the “biggest scandal in the history of the FBI” on Tuesday.
Mr Trump has repeatedly railed against the FBI for the investigation and maintained there was “no collusion” between his 2016 presidential campaign and Russia.
In 2019, after a report by former FBI director Robert Mueller concluded that Mr Trump’s campaign did not conspire with Russia during the 2016 election – but did not clear him of obstruction of justice – Mr Trump tweeted: “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”
During the hearing on Tuesday, Mr McCabe pointed out that Mr Trump fired then-director James B Comey in 2017 after Mr Comey refused to close an investigation into the president’s national security at the time, or say publicly that Mr Trump himself was not under investigation.
Mr McCabe said: “It became pretty clear to us that he did not want us to continue investigating what the Russians had done.
“We had many reasons at that point to believe that the president might himself pose a danger to national security and that he might have engaged in obstruction of justice, if the firing of the director and those other things were geared towards elimination or stopping our investigation of Russian activity.”