Debate Over The Debate #281
By Hank Silverberg
Biden vs. Trump. The 2024 campaign is going to be a repeat of 2020. The only real suspense left is who Donald Trump will pick as his running mate for vice-president.
Biden will campaign from the White House with an occasional foray out into the country to promote projects with which he has had some success, like the massive Build Back America infrastructure bill. And he will push for a bill to make the right to an abortion the law of the land.
But at the same time, he will have to deal with a widening war in the Middle East and a hostile do-nothing Republican-led House that wants to help Trump by blocking anything Biden wants. That, of course, includes help for Ukraine, which continues its desperate struggle to survive under the assault of expansionist Russia.
Trump will campaign as a victim. We're all out to get him after all, in his view at least. This week, instead of campaigning across America, he will be in a Manhattan courtroom as the first ex-president ever to be tried for a felony. At the same time, the self-proclaimed billionaire will also struggle to raise money for the campaign and for his defense fund for at least two more trials to come.
Amidst all this, several of the TV networks have been pushing for at least one debate between the two men to "help the voters decide" who to make their next president.
The question is--do we really need a debate for that?
Trump says he wants one. Biden has been non-committal and learning towards no.
In my opinion, here is what a Biden-Trump debate would look like:
Biden will make an attempt to talk about all the good things he has done, that infrastructure bill, lowering the inflation rate, lowering unemployment, keeping Russia out of Ukraine, backing Israel up to a point.
Trump will interrupt everything Biden says, never letting him finish a sentence. He will once again blame Biden for an illegal immigration problem that dates back 40 years and really comes from inaction in Congress. Trump will say Democrats want abortion on demand, but be non-committal on a national abortion ban. And Trump will take credit for everything good about America.
Biden will say Republicans want to control women's bodies with strict abortion laws, but he won't get a chance to really make any of his points because Trump will interrupt every time Biden speaks.
And somewhere along the line, Biden will produce a misspeak or a stutter as he's done his entire career, and Trump or his minions will call that dementia.
Enough said? Please don't torture us with a debate. We are already bracing for the thousands of ads on TV, radio and social media that will attack everything and everyone and really not tell us something we have not already heard a zillion times.
I see nothing to be gained from a debate, except a headache.
Homeless?
You may or may not notice them in your community, but they are there. The homeless! People who simply have nowhere to live. A significant number are mentally ill, including many veterans, but many are also families who have hit hard times. Many communities grapple with this issue in a number of ways. Shelters are set up in
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| (A homeless woman panhandles in Spotsylvania county, VA) |
The other option for the homeless is simply camping in the local woods or park, with or without a makeshift shelter or tent, and panhandling at local intersections. That often brings complaints from the community who rarely understand why people are homeless and it forces local governments to do something.
So what do you do? The issue has made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which next week will hear a case from Grants Pass, Oregon. An ordinance there that allows those camping in local parks to be fined and evicted has been on hold because of court rulings, since 2018. That's the kind of ordinance that just pushes the homeless all over to the next town and doesn't deal with the issue.
The SCOTUS case could refine a 2018 appeals court decision which allowed communities to prohibit tents in public spaces, but declared criminal citations and evictions a violation of the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment because the people simply had nowhere else to go.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates that on any given night more than 653,104 people are homeless in America, with 111,620 of them children. That's up 12% since 2022. While more than half of those reside in the nation's big cities, there is not a community in America that can escape this issue.
It will be interesting to see how the new conservative court handles penalties for the homeless which affects every community in the country.
Measles Alert
A successful measles vaccine has been on the market since the 1960's. Most Baby Boomers got shots as children, and when they had children, their kids got them, too. It can be a deadly disease at times, and very painful as well and there was very little resistance to the vaccine in much of the last 60 years.
By 2000, the United States was declared measles free.
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| (Animated Measles virus) |
The CDC says there have been 121 measles cases reported in 18 jurisdictions across the country with seven outbreaks of three or more cases so far this year. That's up from four outbreaks in 2023 when there were just 58 cases. . https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html And it matches the total number for all of 2022.
More than half (56%) of the cases this year resulted in hospitalization for the victims, with most of them under five years old.
The MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine is safe and effective, creating herd immunity in communities where 95% of the people are vaccinated.
Most of the cases are associated with international travel and occurred among those not vaccinated, even though they were eligible to get the vaccine.
The CDC has now alerted doctors across the country to warn their patients about the dangers of Measles and promote the availability of the vaccine.
General symptoms include fever, cough, runny nose, watery eyes and most noticeable, a rash of red spots.
Part of the problem is the negative connotations given to vaccines in general during the Covid-19 pandemic, even though the MMR vaccine has proven to be totally safe over five decades. The vaccine is usually given to children of kindergarten age, and the latest figures indicated only about 93% of them have received the two-dose vaccine. That leaves at least 250,000 children at risk.
Dumbest Quote of The Week!
I could use quotes from Donald Trump every week in this category. I chose this one this week because of my focus on what is likely to happen f there's a debate, and also because Trump is the king of dump quotes. Here's what he said at a rally in Pennsylvania not too far from Gettysburg:
"Gettysburg, wow—I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to look and to watch. And the statement of Robert E. Lee, who's no longer in favor—did you ever notice it? He's no longer in favor. 'Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.' They were fighting uphill... wow, that was a big mistake, he lost his big general. 'Never fight uphill, me boys,' but it was too late."
There's lots wrong with this statement. But much of the Gettysburg battle was fought on level ground. I'm not sure which general Trump was referring to since several were killed at Gettysburg, and Robert E. Lee was never "in favor" outside of the southern states. Trump has no sense of history. He mangles facts and he often rewrites it. Please, like I said above...no debate...please!
(Your suggestions and comments are welcome)
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