monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The Trump administration fired the U.S. pandemic response team in 2018 to cut costs.

Snopes checks the following claim:

Latest American infected with novel coronavirus could be 1st case of 'community spread' on US soil

For Attorney General Bill Barr, the U.S. is beset by problems: non-believers, as well as liberals who believe in a “collectivist agenda.”

Barr made the comments at the NRB Christian Media Convention in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday.

“Politics is everywhere. It’s omnipresent. Why is that?” Barr asked the audience.

The answer, he continued, was a political landscape dominated by conflict and strife between two incompatible visions of the country: limited government and a broader view of the state that clamps down on liberty by forcing a “collectivist agenda” on individuals.

The nation’s chief law enforcement officer went on to address religion, bemoaning how faith has been removed from the public discourse over the past few decades.

He told the crowd that separation of Church and State, while advisable, “does not require that we drive religion from the public square and affirmatively use government power to promote a culture of disbelief.”

Religion, Barr argued, limits government “by cultivating internal moral values in the people,” as opposed to “utopian” and hubristic secular programs...

EDIT: One positive outcome of this near-pandemic is that China has forbidden the sale of wildlife for human consumption and has closed the traditional "wet markets" where wild animals are sold.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is not one to speak candidly. But while addressing reporters last night, he was uncharacteristically frank: His party would be “foolish” to not take Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) popularity seriously.

...While speaking to reporters McConnell hearkened back to the Reagan-era, when Democrats pushed for the Hollywood actor to become the nominee “because they thought he’d be the easiest to beat.”

“I think Republicans speculating about which Democratic candidate for president would be the easiest to beat may be a bit foolish,” he said.

Why President Trump Can’t Pardon Roger Stone

...Many scholars agree that once a president has been impeached, he or she loses the power to pardon anyone for criminal offenses connected to the articles of impeachment. Less noticed is that even after the Senate’s failure to convict the president, he or she does not regain this power.

Under Article II, Section II of the Constitution, the president is given the “power to grant reprieves and pardons for offences against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” Pardons are supposed to be used as acts of mercy. The framers thought of the pardon power as a “benign prerogative”—prerogative because it was mostly unchecked by courts or Congress, but benign because presidents would use it for the public good.

But the framers knew not to place blind trust in the president to wield the power justly. That’s why they explicitly forbade a president from exercising the pardon power in “cases of impeachment.” The clause prevents the worst abuse of the pardon power: a president’s protecting cronies who have been convicted of crimes related to the president’s own wrongdoing.

Conservative Poll Says Real Catholics Love Trump
By Ed Kilgore (note: Kilgore is Catholic)

There’s been so much attention paid to Donald Trump’s intense (if transactional) relationship with white conservative Evangelical leaders and voters that it’s easy to forget there are other people of faith who are politically active. Now, as in the recent past, those who self-identify with America’s largest religious denomination, the Roman Catholic Church, are very close to the average voter politically in how they feel about the 45th president. Yes, unsurprisingly, white Catholics are more prone to smile on Trump than nonwhite Catholics. But all in all, American Catholics are more likely than not to disapprove of the heathenish warlord’s tenure as president.

That basic conclusion is actually reinforced by a new survey from two conservative media outlets, EWTN News (Eternal Word Television Network, which offers exclusively Catholic content and also owns the conservative National Catholic Register) and RealClearOpinion Research. It shows Catholics overall being less than jazzed about Trump, though he’s doing a bit better of late:

Quote:

The poll found that slightly less than half of all Catholics (47%) approve of President Trump’s job performance. This marks a small improvement in his approval rate, which was 44% in November 2019. Likewise, about one-third (34%) of Catholics say they will definitely vote to re-elect President Trump, and another 12% report that there’s a good chance. Similar numbers say they will oppose him (36% would never vote for him; 10% say it is unlikely) — the remaining 8% say it is possible that they would vote to re-elect him.

But what’s interesting about the poll is that its sponsors work hard to correlate support for Trump with fidelity to the One True Faith:

Quote:

[T]he poll found that 18% of Catholics indicate that they accept all of the Church’s teachings and those are reflected in how they live their lives …

That relatively small group of Catholics often described as devout or active, one-fifth of the Catholic population, claims to accept all the teachings of the Church and lives and votes very differently from many of their fellow Americans and even their fellow Catholics. They are more active in their daily practice of the faith, go to Mass more often, and are guided by Catholic teaching on a more regular basis as they discern how to vote and how to respond to the great social issues and moral crises of our time.

And guess what:

Quote:

[P]ositive numbers for President Trump depend heavily on the devout Catholics. Among this group, 63% approve of the president. Similarly, 59% of devout Catholics plan to vote for Trump in 2020; another 8% say there’s a good chance, and only 20% say they will never vote for him.

If it weren’t for those bad, Cafeteria Catholics …

Quote:

n the head-to-head matchups against would-be rivals in the November election … President Trump still trails the Democrats among all Catholics, in every hypothetical matchup at this stage of the campaign.

[But] a majority of devout Catholics … support the president consistently against all of his prospective Democrat opponents.

The poll sponsors’ write-up frets that aside from presidential preferences, American Catholics continue to rebel against Church teachings on cultural issues:

Quote:

Less than half of all Catholics say that abortion (47%), euthanasia (45%), or physician-assisted suicide (41%) are intrinsically evil. This is, of course, in direct contradiction to the Church and is in sharp contrast with the views of active or devout Catholics; 71% of devout Catholics believe abortion is intrinsically evil, 70% believe physician-assisted suicide is intrinsically evil, and 64% believe euthanasia is intrinsically evil.

But there is some consensus among believers of all stripes:

[O]verwhelming numbers are found on the questions of whether Catholics believe in hell and the devil. Some 81% of all Catholics believe in hell, and 79% believe in the devil; and of those who believe in the devil, 79% say the devil is not merely a personification or a symbol of evil but is a fallen angel.

Some Catholics believe they and conservative politicians are fighting the good fight against Satan and his imps. Others get downwind of Donald Trump and smell the brimstone. Devoutly.

Quote:

Conservative Poll Says Real Catholics Love Trump
By Ed Kilgore (note: Kilgore is Catholic)

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Are there any other definable groups of people out there you might wish to add to your list of apparent deplorables? I sometimes get the impression that you may still be motivated by deep hostilities, implanted perhaps in childhood or early youth. If so that's unfortunate. Most people in their adult lives develop an appreciation for the complexity of human nature, the unique qualities of individual people, and the folly behind any effort to organize it all for everyone. Life is an unequal struggle, death a great equalizer and we remain unable to explain it all: even you.

Iran is an educated country where, heretofore, people had some respect for medical expertise.