US Politics Mega-thread - Page 230

On May 29 2018 23:28 FueledUpAndReadyToGo wrote:
Trumps projecting has reached the next level, he now says it's Muellers team who is meddling in the next elections...therefore starting a witch hunt while complaining about a witch hunt. It's quite extraordinary.

On May 28 2018 15:13 sc-darkness wrote:


What a dumbass. How could you do something during campaign? Your opponent (Trump) would immediately cry it's anti-democratic and pretend to be a victim. I think Obama did the right thing. You only take action before or after campaign.

Perhaps 5,000 people died in Puerto Rico in 2017 for reasons related to September's Hurricane Maria, according to a study that dismisses the official death toll of 64 as "a substantial underestimate."

A research team led by scientists at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health didn't simply attempt to count dead bodies in the wake of the powerful storm. Instead, they surveyed randomly chosen households and asked the occupants about their experiences.

From that approach, they concluded that between Sept. 20 and Dec. 31, 2017, there were 4,645 "excess deaths" — that is, deaths that would not have occurred if the island hadn't been plunged into a prolonged disaster following the devastating storm.

But the estimate isn't as precise as the figure implies. The researchers calculate there is a 95 percent likelihood the death toll was somewhere between about 800 and 8,500 people. They say about 5,000 is a likely figure.

The findings are being published Tuesday by The New England Journal of Medicine.

The research team randomly selected 3,299 households in Puerto Rico. Local scientists surveyed them over the course of three weeks in January. People in those homes reported a total of 38 deaths. The scientists then extrapolated that finding to the island's total population of 3.4 million people to estimate the number of deaths. The researchers then subtracted deaths recorded during that same period in 2016 and concluded that the mortality rate in Puerto Rico had jumped 62 percent in the three months following the storm.

The death rate is a contentious subject, in part because federal and island governments haven't responded as rapidly to the disaster as they have in other hurricane emergencies. The study notes that 83 percent of the households in Puerto Rico were without electrical power for the time period looked at, more than 100 days, from the date of the hurricane until the end of 2017.

Puerto Rico residents and outside observers have long argued that the official death toll is hopelessly inadequate. It captures the number of deaths the medical examiner attributed directly to the storm — the high water and howling winds in the worst natural disaster on record for the U.S. territory. Maria came ashore as a Category 4 hurricane, with winds gusting at over 110 mph and drenching rainfall.

CNN surveyed funeral homes after the storm and tallied 499 hurricane-related deaths. The New York Times compared official death records from September and October 2017 and identified more than 1,000 excess deaths, compared with the average for 2015 and 2016. Alexis Santos, a researcher at Penn State University, and a colleague, used death certificates to come up with a similar estimate.

The government of Puerto Rico commissioned researchers from George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health to estimate excess deaths. Results of that study have been delayed and are due out this summer. "We have always expected the number to be higher than what was previously reported," said Carlos Mercader, executive director of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration. He says that's why it commissioned the study from GW. "Both studies will help us better prepare for future natural disasters and prevent lives from being lost."

ABC canceled its hit sitcom "Roseanne" on Tuesday after the show's biggest star, Roseanne Barr, went on a racist Twitter rant.
"Roseanne's Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show," ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement.

Disney CEO Bob Iger added on Twitter that "There was only one thing to do here, and that was the right thing."

The cancellation was a shock in Hollywood. The revival of "Roseanne" premiered to huge ratings just three months ago.

Pre-production was already underway on a second season, which was scheduled for Tuesdays at 8 p.m. this fall.

When Barr's racist tweets caught fire early Tuesday, ABC went silent for several hours.

When asked why ABC ultimately decided to cancel the sitcom, a Disney source said, "It's a question of right and wrong. And it's a question of our company's values."

Reactions to the decision were overwhelming and largely positive.

On May 30 2018 03:43 KwarK wrote:
Roseanne was full on "Trump and Putin have teamed up to personally hunt down the pizza pedophiles and Mueller is working with them to provide a smokescreen so that Soros doesn't get suspicious" insane. Evil goblins raping the children etc.

She never should have been let out of an asylum. Disney ought to have known this was inevitable, it's not like she's been quiet about here QAnon beliefs.

On May 30 2018 03:59 Plansix wrote:
Straight up, I am in shock they pulled the trigger so quickly. But given her previous behavior, they knew it wasn’t going to stop.

On May 30 2018 05:54 Plansix wrote:
I am 99% sure ABC owns the rights to those characters.

Edit: The new show was also terrible because Roseanne Conner was a pro-labor, working class woman who had no patience for male proformative ego stroking and distrusted rich people. The character that I watched in the 1980s and 1990s would have seen every shitty, under qualified boss she had ever had in Trump.

On May 30 2018 06:05 GreenHorizons wrote:


Don't think that's how TV shows work (though it's starting to be that way with one company running a show from production through distribution). Distributors buy episodes, so even if ABC/Disney did own rights to future shows, they'd certainly rather sell them than wait for her to not be a racist idiot.

I agree though that they also made her character worse.

On May 30 2018 06:30 Plansix wrote:

That seems to be the case in this matter. I would love to say that the show canceled because the star is super overtly racist has no future, but this is 2018 and surprises abound.

Edit: The dow dropped 400 points, our governments calculation of the dealt count due to a natural disaster was off by 4000, but this 'Roseanne' is leading on many major news sites.

On May 30 2018 06:57 GreenHorizons wrote:


I'll be impressed if any reasonably informed person can see major news outlets as much more than factional bougie propaganda machines by the end of 2020.

Literally every story has to be framed in the context of "how is this exclusively Trump's fault and not a natural extension of what we've been doing for decades. Also, how can we connect this to Russia?".

Something like PR inevitably leads us to conclusions that mean this isn't a "Trump" thing but decades of bad decisions shared by both political parties so it falls to the back burner.

Stories/news that hold both parties accountable and focus on the issues are always going to play second fiddle to any story that can be squarely framed as a direct result of Trump/Russia (Obama previously).

The sad part is despite basically being unable to go more than a segment or column without dragging Trump/Russia they've hit the wall. They can't drive Trump's numbers any lower and seem to be lost as to what to do now.

On May 30 2018 07:27 Womwomwom wrote:
The media isn’t explicitly anti-Trump. The best example is the New York Times, they’ve been pretty tolerant of Trump despite Trump’s Twitter outrage about them. Their Whitehouse reporting often straight up punts out Whitehouse endorsed leaks and spin, as expected of today’s access journalists. Let’s not even get started on their opinions page. That’s the end result of their change of editorial staff and company-wide purging of journalists.

What you’re correct on is that the media isn’t reporting or analysing institutional failures and it’s pretty obvious why. It’s an incredibly incestuous profession where all of these people have worked with each other, known each other, went to the same schools as each other and are often friends with each other. The vast majority of them are also white and have not faced the same experiences as minority Americans and don’t really care. For every Kareem reporting on racial injustice in the New Yorker, you have 10 Joe Scarboroughs on cable TV getting away with whitewashing his racial experiences growing up in Alabama.

Given the journalists in the field, what do you report on? There really isn’t much to report on because, in theory, everything is going good for the United States domestically. Everyone got a nice fat tax return, the economy still looks good and we’re seeing historic runs in the NBA and NHL. The economy is so good that Trump should be 20 points more popular if we look at past presidents and their economies. For most of white America, corruption (and foreign influences) are what you can easily report on.