Sen. Martha McSally (R-AZ) is polling far behind Democratic challenger Mark Kelly, and one pollster says that the incumbent Republican's numbers are even worse than they first appear.
In a column for The Arizona Republic, Laurie Roberts cites a new poll from OH Predictive Insights that shows McSally losing to Kelly by a stunning 13 points in a state that has been home to past Republican presidential nominees Barry Goldwater and John McCain.
This represents a deterioration in support for McSally, who trailed Kelly by a comparatively modest nine points in last month's poll.
"McSally is doing terribly," pollster Mike Noble tells Roberts. "There’s no way to find a bright spot on that one."
Roberts dug further into the poll's internals and found some even more ominous news for McSally.
"The bad news comes from Maricopa County, where Republicans rule," Roberts writes. "Her Maricopa County numbers are a disaster. In May 2019, this same tracking poll showed Kelly up over McSally, 46%-41%, among likely voters in Maricopa County. In May 2020, Kelly has climbed to 54% in Maricopa County while McSally has dropped to 36%."
Or put another way, writes Roberts, "Kelly has gone from a five-point advantage in Maricopa County to an 18-point cruise."
The Wisconsin primary election was generally regarded as a disaster as voters braved the coronavirus to stand in long lines for hours just to vote. While the state has seen another COVID-19 outbreak connected to the election, now it's being discovered that thousands of ballots weren't even counted because of "technical glitches."
According to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel nearly 2,700 ballots in Milwaukee weren't sent and about 1,600 in the Fox Valley weren't processed due to glitches and mail problems.
"In Milwaukee, 2,693 voters were not sent absentee ballots after technical issues marred their production on March 22 and March 23, according to a report by the Wisconsin Elections Commission," the paper revealed.
Only about half of those people who didn't get their ballots eventually did vote, either with a replacement absentee or at the polls.
"A separate problem emerged when about 1,600 ballots for the Appleton and Oshkosh areas were located at a mail processing center the day after the election," said the report. "It was not clear in the report if the ballots were on their way to voters or on their way back to clerks when they were found. Either way, they were discovered too late to be counted."
The report also acknowledged that for any official it would present "terrific challenges," but given the concern with the virus, it made things worse.
There was also the matter of dealing with the instability of whether or not the election would take place. The governor wanted to hold the primary election until it was proven to be safer and polling places could prepare for conducting an election in the coronavirus era. The conservative Wisconsin state Supreme Court overruled him.
A new study published Monday revealed a strong correlation between the election in the state and an increase in coronavirus infections, increasing calls for a better national vote-by-mail system for November.
“When the average number of votes per voting location increases by 100 (a 0.10 unit change), the rate of positive tests in a county rises by roughly 0.034 to 0.035 (3.4 to 3.5 percentage points) two to three weeks after the election,” the researchers wrote.
The election commission is considering mailing absentee ballot request forms to all voters ahead of the election to help make it safer and less confusing for those hoping to stay safe while exercising their right to vote.
A leaked Department of Defense memo undercuts some of the Trump administration's rosy projections about the coronavirus pandemic, including President Donald Trump's declaration that there will be a vaccine for the disease by the end of the year.
The memo, which was obtained by Task and Purpose, warns that America's armed forces face "a long path ahead" to resuming normal operations, especially given "the real possibility of a resurgence of COVID-19" in the coming months.
This runs counter to the president's prediction that the United States is unlikely to see a new wave of COVID-19 in the fall.
Additionally, the memo says that the military needs to prepare to run operations without a viable vaccine for the disease "at least the summer of 2021," which would be well past the president's goal of having a vaccine ready within the next six months.
"All indications suggest we will be operating in a globally-persistent COVID-19 environment in the months ahead,” the memo states. “This will likely continue until there is wide-scale immunity, through immunization, and some immunity post-recovery from the virus.”
Sources tell Task and Purpose that the memo is "outdated," although they declined to provide specifics on how things have changed since it was originally drafted.
“Our bishop always told us, even as they wheeled him into the operating room, he proclaimed that God is still a healer. … I don’t know how, but I have to say: God will get the glory from this.”
Like some other congregations struck by the pandemic, the Virginia church was asking questions about the problem of suffering: why a good and powerful God, who is a “healer,” allows the pandemic’s suffering and death to take place.
These are questions that fiction has explored for years, including, perhaps most famously in recent years, William Paul Young’s evangelical bestseller The Shack. In 2017, the novel was made into a Hollywood blockbuster that grossed over US$96 million globally, starring Octavia Spencer and Sam Worthington.
My current research examines how contemporary American novels — both popular evangelical and more literary fiction — treat the theological problems of suffering and evil. In a new research paper, I suggest that the massive popularity of The Shack was due to its inadvertent polytheism. Many gods, it turns out, solve the problem of evil in a way the Christian one God cannot.
‘The Shack’ trailer.
Confronting God
In The Shack , protagonist Mack (Sam Worthington), gets the chance to question God. He wants to know why God allowed his daughter Missy to be sexually abused and murdered.
After a mysterious invitation, Mack travels to the site of the murder years before. The dilapidated shack in the snowy mountains magically turns into a beautiful summer cabin by a lake. There, Mack meets the members of the Trinity, the three divine persons in one God worshipped by Christians.
Mack spends a weekend with the Trinity, cooking, hiking and gardening as they take turns trying to “justify the ways of God to men,” to use the words of English poet John Milton.
But the divine beings strangely proliferate. Mack meets a Hispanic woman in a cave named Sophia (Greek for wisdom), played by Alice Braga.
When the time comes for God to lead Mack to his daughter’s body, the Father appears as an Indigenous man (Oneida actor Graham Greene from Six Nations of the Grand River).
What is going on with this strange proliferation of divine beings, as they take turns deflecting and diverting Mack’s questions about the problem of evil?
Back to polytheism
The answer is that Young has inadvertently rediscovered the ancient Israelite polytheism of 3,000 years ago, for the simple reason that justifying the gods’ ways to humans is an easier task than justifying God’s ways to humans.
El, the Canaanite creator deity, bronze statue with gold leaf from 1400-1200 BC.
(Wikimedia Commons/Oriental Institute Museum, University of Chicago)
Over the past few decades, critical scholars of the Bible have come to realize that the ancient Israelites worshipped a pantheon of gods.
If this comes as a surprise to most readers of the Bible, this is understandable: The Bible was written by religious elites who, over the centuries, textually condensed the pantheon of gods into the single God of the Abrahamic religions.
A historical shift to monotheism can be traced through biblical texts: for example, what’s known as the second commandment, “You shall have no other gods before me,” from the biblical book of Exodus clearly presupposes the existence of multiple gods.
Baal, with right arm raised. Bronze figurine from 1400-1200 BC.
(Wikimedia Commons/Louvre Museum)
There was Baal, the storm god. They were joined by Yahweh — a name which which came to be understood in Judaism as the sacred name of God, “too holy to be uttered aloud.”
Over time Yahweh absorbed Baal’s attributes and rose to the top of the pantheon, displacing El and acquiring El’s spouse as his own.
The Biblical record, as well as archaeological and other textual evidence, suggests that as the centuries went on, the other gods were demoted to angels, or denied existence altogether, until Yahweh reigned alone.
Scholars continue to debate the historical development of this process, but it appears likely that the pantheon still existed during the time of the Israelite monarchy, even until the Babylonian exile in 586 BC.
Divine niches filled
So when the divine beings proliferate in The Shack, it is for a logical reason and a historical reason.
The historical reason is that when the other gods disappeared, they sometimes left niches that would eventually be filled with other divine beings, such as angels — or eventually the members of the Christian Trinity.
The logical reason is that it’s much easier to explain the problem of evil when there are many different divine agents, who sometimes work at cross-purposes.
Divine conflict doesn’t occur in The Shack, but the multiple divine beings work to deflect questions and divert Mack’s attention.
Papa, the Father, explains free will and the Holy Spirit talks of Adam and Eve’s “original sin” in the Garden of Eden, a state of “fallenness” believed to be borne by all their descendents. The Son emphasizes the importance of a relationship with God, and Wisdom describes human ignorance. But Mack never really gets a good answer about why innocent people suffer.
The Shack instead stumbled accidentally upon a startling solution: recovering the ancient Israelite polytheism out of which Young’s Christian tradition grew.
It’s inadvertent because the characters don’t present themselves as polytheistic beings but rather as different faces of one God. “We are not three gods,” is the Father’s official position.
But, as I suggest in my new article, The Shack’s popularity may be due in part to the pantheon that Mack (re)discovers. Perhaps we should abandon the Father’s pretence and embrace polytheism as a theologically easier answer to the problems of evil and suffering.
Vice President Mike Pence reportedly walked away from a question about whether or not he's taking hydroxychloroquine.
Pence on Tuesday was asked the question as he appeared at the U.S. Capitol for a coronavirus meeting.
According to Politico reporter Burgess Everett, Pence ignored the question and kept walking.
The White House has also refused to confirm or deny that Pence was taking the drug.
The question about Pence came after President Donald Trump claimed that he is taking the controversial drug as a preventative measure against contracting COVID-19.
The debate over masks has devolved into a binary and partisan choice, but a conservative editor explains why it doesn't have to be that way.
Jonathan Last, executive editor of The Bulwark, laid out the evidence for wearing protective masks in some situations, and shows why they're unnecessary in others.
"There is some debate over how effective masks are in curbing the spread of aerosolized particles and that level of efficaciousness will depend on a bunch of factors: what the mask is constructed of, how it’s worn, etc," Last wrote. "But there is no serious debate that there is some effectiveness."
It doesn't matter whether masks slow the spread of virus particles by 80 percent or 20 percent, he argued, because masks are a low-cost way to reduce the broadcast of aerosolized saliva droplets which carry virus particles.
"It’s basically a freebie," he argued. "In the grand scheme of economic expense and behavior modification, wearing a mask costs us next to nothing."
Research shows masks aren't necessary while taking a run outside or going for a walk, because they're low-risk events, and they're probably not necessary if proper social distancing is observed.
"What we’re thinking about is reducing large-spread events," Last wrote. "The big-ticket items are places where you spend significant amounts of time face-to-face with multiple people in closed spaces: Riding mass transit, in the work place, in a school setting, at social gatherings. You should not be in a movie theater, for instance, without a mask. Or a bar. Or sitting in a doctor’s office or any place that is indoors and has a waiting room."
Last dismissed arguments that masks are unhelpful, at best, or harmful at worst.
"This is BS on the order of magnitude of anti-vaccine and flat-earth theories," he argued. "There is not merit to both sides here."
Any risks involved in wearing a mask can be easily mitigated by washing them occasionally or disinfecting them between uses.
"These ought to be no-brainers for everyone while the outbreak is still operating at a large scale," he wrote. "Being smart about masks is one of the ways we can keep pushing on the virus."
Conservative Charlie Sykes has found himself aghast at President Donald Trump and his allies' latest wild proclamations about the coronavirus.
Writing in The Bulwark, Sykes marveled at Trump's declaration that he's been taking unproven medical treatment for COVID-19, even as he refuses to take precautionary steps such as wearing a face mask around the White House.
"In the middle of his latest briefing, the president claimed that he was currently taking hydroxychloroquine -- an unproven drug that might actually kill vulnerable patients -- and had been taking it for some time," Sykes writes. "It’s an open question as to whether or not the president of the United States is taking an unproven and unnecessary medication which the medical establishment has warned is dangerous in the context of COVID-19, or lying about taking this medication. Satire despairs."
He then contrasted this with son Eric Trump's message that Democrats would only pay attention to COVID-19 throughout the presidential election and then promptly forget about it if Trump loses, despite the fact that the disease has killed more than 90,000 Americans in just the past two months.
"TrumpWorld insists that we believe... the pandemic was the worst thing that ever happened to America; but it was an over hyped scam," he concludes. "The Trumps’ multiple stories are yet another sign that they view their voters as marks. In their defense: they may not be wrong."
After President Donald Trump claimed Monday that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine on a daily basis for more than a week in an effort to prevent Covid-19—even though the anti-malaria medicine has not been proven effective for that purpose—medical professionals condemned Trump for continuing to recklessly tout the drug and warned the public against following the president's lead.
"If everything else we know about President Trump hasn't proven to you that he does not understand medicine or healthcare, and certainly doesn't have your best interests at heart, this statement and the fact that he's taking this drug should be everything you need to know," Dr. Rob Davidson, an emergency care physician and executive director of the Committee to Protect Medicare, said in a video posted to Twitter following Trump's remarks.
"The FDA recently issued a warning that this should not be used outside of hospital settings because of the risk of death. We know that patients with lupus depend on hydroxychloroquine, and when President Trump was touting it in March, they ran into shortages," Davidson continued. "We in the healthcare field need to come out in one voice against the use of this drug and against the advice of this president, knowing that he is going to put more people in harm's way."
Trump said during a press briefing Monday that "you'd be surprised at how many people are taking" hydroxychloroquine, adding that he has been taking the drug every day for a week and a half as a preventative measure.
"I happen to be taking it," Trump said after claiming without evidence that many frontline workers are also taking the drug. "I'm not gonna get hurt by it."
Asked to provide evidence that the drug is effective in preventing coronavirus infection, Trump said: "Here we go, are you ready? Here's my evidence—I get a lot of positive calls about it."
"I get a lot of tremendously positive news on the hydroxy," Trump continued, "and, you know, I say, hey... what do you have to lose?"
Following Trump's comments, which reportedly "surprised many of his aides," the White House released a memo from the president's physician Dr. Sean Conley, who wrote that "after numerous discussions he and I had regarding the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine, we concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks."
The memo, dated May 18, does not explicitly say that Trump is taking hydroxychloroquine.
As Vox's Zack Beauchamp wrote, "the president is either doing something irresponsible or lying irresponsibly."
"On the one hand, if Trump—a notorious liar—is telling the truth about taking the drug, it's certainly newsworthy that the president is taking a dangerous medication for no good reason," wrote Beauchamp. "On the other hand, Trump may be trying to goad the media into getting bogged down in an issue that's less important than the actual outbreak and Trump's failed response to it. At the press conference, he told reporters, 'I was just waiting for your eyes to light up when I said this, when I announced this,' indicating he's perfectly aware that he's starting a controversy."
"Either way," Beauchamp added, "it's terrible behavior that reflects poorly on the man in charge of our country—just one more example of the wild unfitness for office that’s been on display throughout the pandemic."
The president's comment certainly sparked alarm across the media, including from his favorite television network, Fox News.
Fox anchor Neil Cavuto warned in a segment following Trump's comments that "if you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus... it will kill you."
"I cannot stress enough," Cavuto said. "This will kill you."
Dr. Steven Nissen, the chief academic officer of the Miller Family Heart, Vascular, and Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, told the New York Times in an interview that he is concerned Trump's comments will lead the public to "believe that taking this drug to prevent Covid-19 infection is without hazards."
"In fact, there are serious hazards," said Nissen.
As of late, the president has been holding his fire on Obama Vice President Joe Biden who is the presumptive 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, using the Justice Department's attempt to dismiss the charges against former Trump adviser Michael Flynn to push an "Obamagate" conspiracy theory --including calling for the former president to be investigated.
According to Robinson, going after the extremely popular Obama is a huge mistake on Trump's part.
"President Trump’s increasingly frantic attempts to smear former president Barack Obama reek of panic. As disgusting as these efforts are, they are likely to backfire, perhaps in spectacular fashion," the columnist began.
Noting that Trump has been presented with internal polls showing him losing to Biden, Robinson stated that Trump appears to have fallen back on the strategy that helped him win in 2016 -- appealing to his follower's racism. And that means going after Obama instead of Biden who is white.
That, in turn, is likely to motivate black voters who are already solidly behind Biden.
Polls show the Republican Party in danger of losing not only the presidency but also the Senate in November, " the columnist explained. "You will recall that if Hillary Clinton had squeezed just a total of 80,000 more votes out of three Democratic strongholds — Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia — she would now be campaigning for reelection and Trump would be just another Twitter troll."
"In those cities, and across the nation, African American turnout in 2016 was lower than Democrats had hoped for and expected. But there is one political figure who has demonstrated an unprecedented ability to bring black voters to the polls in tidal-wave numbers: Obama," he suggested before adding, "In 2008, Obama’s historic triumph, the rate of black voter turnout nationwide essentially equaled white turnout for the first time in history. In 2012, black turnout actually exceeded white turnout, 66.6 percent to 64.1 percent, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center."
Writing he doesn't see "Trump’s tirades and tweets as anything resembling a strategy," Robinson said there is nothing tactical about the president's attack on Obama -- it's "personal."
"Maybe Trump just cannot abide the fact that Obama is a Nobel laureate, respected around the world, while he has had to endure being snickered at by world leaders and portrayed as hapless and ignorant by the 'fake news' media he claims to hate yet compulsively devours. Increasingly, his imagined victimizer is Obama himself. Trump even tries to blame Obama for his own administration’s botched response to a disease that did not exist when Obama was in office," he wrote before concluding, "I thought everyone knew you don’t tug on Superman’s cape. But apparently Trump still thinks you can get somewhere by spitting into the wind."
Speaking to The Daily Beast this Tuesday, comedian Patton Oswalt talked about his latest stand-up special and his life in quarantine. During the interview, Oswalt said that Fox News pushing the country to reopen was "the height of evil."
"It’s very, very frustrating when you see people’s economic and job frustration being weaponized to benefit the rich," Oswalt said. "Obviously you sympathize with people that are out there going, you know, reopen businesses and stuff because they have to go work. But those kinds of protests are being astroturfed by wealthy people to get those people back working for them."
"And it's the people who are working who are being put at the most risk, Oswalt says.
"So it’s the height of evil when you see the Fox and Friends people, who are in remote studios and safe from each other going, ‘We need to end this social distancing, don’t you think?’ Why don’t you guys do it first? You’re seeing them throwing bodies onto the barbed wire to benefit themselves," he said.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisted on Tuesday that President Donald Trump is actually "taking" hydroxychloroquine after a note from his doctor cast doubt on the president's claim.
McEnany was asked about a statement made by the president's doctor which was designed to back up the president's claim of taking hydroxychloroquine. The statement, however, never spelled out whether Trump was taking the drug or not.
"I can absolutely confirm that," McEnany told Paula Reid of CBS.
"Why was the statement last night so vague?" Reid wondered.
"Well, the president said himself he's taking it," the press secretary replied. "That's a given fact. He said it. The purpose of this letter was to show Dr. Conley agreed with the analysis that the benefits outweighed the risk."
"The president should be taken at his word," she added.
President Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and The Trump Organization were dealt a blow Monday when a federal court judge refused to put a class action lawsuit against the family and the family business on hold.
Calling it an "Ugly Pyramid Scheme," Law & Crime reports the "class action plaintiffs allege that the Trump family business promoted a multi-level marketing, or pyramid, scheme known as ACN Opportunity, LLC. ACN, the plaintiffs said, was a 'get-rich-quick scheme' that relied on Trump and his family 'conn[ing] each of these victims into giving up hundreds or thousands of dollars,' in violation of various state laws."
The anonymous plaintiffs say ACN was paying the Trumps for their endorsement, which included positive mentions on various episodes of "Celebrity Apprentice," but that financial link was never disclosed.
The judge appeared to agree.
“Plaintiffs were duped about the nature of the relationship between ACN and Defendants,” Judge Lorna G. Schofield wrote.
The original case was filed "as an anti-'racketeering enterprise' action," Law & Crime adds, but "was later streamlined" when two federal charges were removed after the Trumps tried to have the case dismissed.
A 2018 New York Times article on the original case reported that the "complaint alleges that Mr. Trump and his family received secret payments from three business entities in exchange for promoting them as legitimate opportunities, when in reality they were get-rich-quick schemes that harmed investors, many of whom were unsophisticated and struggling financially."
It called ACN "a telecommunications marketing company that paid Mr. Trump millions of dollars to endorse its products."
One of the many lawsuits that the Trump Organization and members of the Trump family have faced allegations that they engaged in an illegal pyramid scheme. Attorneys for the company have tried to get the class action lawsuit placed on hold, but Judge Lorna G. Schofield — a federal judge in New York — has refused to stay the case.
In Law & Crime, reporters Matt Naham and Aaron Keller explain, “The class action plaintiffs allege that the Trump family business promoted a multi-level marketing or pyramid scheme known as ACN Opportunity, LLC. ACN, the plaintiffs said, was a ‘get-rich-quick scheme’ that relied on Trump and his family (conning) each of these victims into giving up hundreds or thousands of dollars,’ in violation of various state laws.”
Members of the Trump family named in the lawsuit include President Donald Trump and three of his children: Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump and White House Senior Adviser Ivanka Trump.
According to Naham and Keller, “The plaintiffs claimed that the Trump family falsely endorsed and promoted ACN by insisting that the enterprise ‘offered a reasonable probability of commercial success’ — even using ‘The Celebrity Apprentice’ to draw them in.”
The plaintiffs first filed the lawsuit in October 2018, alleging “racketeering and conspiracy to racketeer.” And in January 2019, attorneys for members of the Trump family requested that the case be thrown out altogether — which didn’t happen, although the “racketeering and conspiracy to racketeer” claims were dismissed.
Trump Organization lawyers were hoping that Schofield, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, would put the case on hold. But the Southern District of New York judge ruled that the lawsuit would not be stayed.
The 64-year-old Schofield, Naham and Keller report, applied the “traditional standard” for determining whether or not to stay a case.
“The first factor is whether the parties applying for the stay — the Trumps and ACN — are likely to succeed on the merits,” Naham and Keller note. “Here, Schofield ruled that they are not…. The second of the four factors for a stay, irreparable injury, did not outweigh the defendants’ loss on the first factor, the judge ruled. The third factor, ‘substantial injury’ to the plaintiffs, factored ‘lightly against a stay.’ The fourth factor, ‘public interest’ weighed ‘slightly in favor of a stay,’ the judge ruled.”
Schofield, in her ruling, asserted, “As a private business dispute, the action does not give rise to a public interest in the lawsuit. That one of the defendants has since assumed a position of national prominence does not create the type of public interest typically found to weigh against a stay.”
