monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

The Trump administration has rescinded its policy that would bar
international students who only take online courses from staying
in the US, a federal judge announced Tuesday in Boston...

Trump's commutation 'does not have to be the end of the story', Andrew Weissmann wrote in a New York Times' opinion.
The former senior prosecutor in the Mueller team member is advocating that the self-confessed political dirty trickster be brought before a grand jury.

Trump and Stone will eventually pay for what they have done to this country...and by extension, to the world. They are disgusting trash...and I am confident they will pay a price.
I hope it is considerable.

New testimony further undercuts William Barr's explanation for removing prosecutor who probed Trump allies

Though it doesn’t definitively answer the question of what Barr was trying to do, these seven details only raise more suspicions about the propriety of his actions:

The paper of record is, more and more, the record of those living in a distant galaxy, one whose concerns are profoundly removed from the lives of most people. This is a galaxy in which, to choose just a few recent examples, the Soviet space program is lauded for its “diversity”; the doxxing of teenagers in the name of justice is condoned; and the worst caste systems in human history includes the United States alongside Nazi Germany.

I do wonder why a change to an executive decision is announced by a judge. It doesn't really sound like a court decision.

BOSTON — Facing eight federal lawsuits and opposition from hundreds of universities, the Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded a rule that would have required international students to transfer or leave the country if their schools held classes entirely online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The decision was announced at the start of a hearing in a federal lawsuit in Boston brought by Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs said federal immigration authorities agreed to pull the July 6 directive and “return to the status quo.”

“The government has agreed to rescind the July 6, 2020, policy directive and the frequently asked questions, the FAQ’s, that were released the next day on July 7,” Burroughs said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “They have also agreed to rescind any implementation of the directive.”

The judge said the agreement reverted policy to “the status quo” that had been developed in March, when schools nationwide were forced to halt in-person teaching because of the pandemic. Campuses have been sparsely populated in the months since.

An assistant U.S. attorney who participated in the hearing, Rayford A. Farquhar, confirmed the judge’s understanding of the agreement, according to the transcript.

The 45-page report titled “Weakening Our Defenses” (pdf) details how Trump’s far-reaching deregulatory push has exacerbated several major risk factors for contracting and spreading Covid-19, such as high levels of air pollution, hazardous working conditions, and lack of adequate health insurance.

“President Trump’s deregulatory agenda has affected all those factors, and, therefore, the disproportionate racial and economic justice impacts of deregulation are now most likely compounding in deadly ways in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic,” the report says.

“Even before the pandemic,” the report continues, “those regulatory decisions collectively were already causing dire consequences for public health and safety, the environment, and economic conditions—but we now know that those regulatory decisions have likely also increased our collective susceptibility to Covid-19.”

The report cites the Trump administration’s rollback of restrictions on nearly 2,000 forms of hazardous air pollution in 2018, weakening of the Clean Power Plan, and gutting of vehicle fuel efficiency standards in 2020 as examples of environmental deregulatory actions that left the U.S. more vulnerable to Covid-19. The U.S. currently has the most confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths in the world.

“These rollbacks have put all of us—especially low-income communities, Black people, and people of color, and essential workers—at higher risk of contracting and dying from Covid-19,” said Gina McCarthy, former Environmental Protection Agency administrator and current president of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The report also points to the Trump administration’s weakening of workplace safety standards at meatpacking plants, which have become major Covid-19 hotspots. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 16,200 meat and poultry processing workers have contracted Covid-19 at 239 facilities in the U.S.

“In October 2019, the Trump administration’s Department of Agriculture finalized a rule to ‘modernize’ swine slaughter inspections,” IPI’s report says. “The new program, which pig processing plants may opt into, reduces the number of food safety inspectors in plants and removes caps on pig slaughter line speeds.”

By forcing workers to perform their jobs in close proximity to one another, the report notes, the prioritization of speed over safety forces “likely puts meat processing workers at greater risk for Covid-19.”

The Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the Affordable Care and limit Medicaid eligibility by approving state-level work requirements also may have contributed to the spread of Covid-19, according to the new report.

“Though some of these state requirements have since been invalidated by the courts, other state programs could yet be implemented, and even the temporary loss of coverage in some states could be significant—particularly during a pandemic,” the report says.

Dr. Kathleen Rest, executive director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in a statement that the Trump administration’s “failure to listen to and act on the best available science is irresponsible and dangerous.”

“From day one, the Trump administration has attempted to roll back not only existing public health protections, but the scientific basis on which all public health protections are based,” said Rest. “That’s short-sighted and foolish at the best of times, but they have continued to dismantle safeguards even as the country faces the threat of Covid-19, one of the biggest public health crises in our history.”

I wish I could go to sleep and not wake up until Trump is gone. I think the whole world will sigh a huge relief, even his supporters will probably be relieved when he is gone. They just don't know it yet.

Mr. Navarro’s op-ed broadly lays out what White House officials have been saying privately about Dr. Fauci, and what Mr. Trump has said publicly — that they like Dr. Fauci personally but that he has “made some mistakes.” But Mr. Trump has stopped short of addressing public criticism from his aides.

NYT

Neither Navarro's nor Farah's quote is from the NYT