SoTier

It would certainly force the anti-vaxxers to put their money where their mouths are.

The only reason I don't think it's legally sedition is because none of the Republican officials Trump's pressured bowed to the Dictator-Wannabe-in-Chief's threats. They saved his ass by refusing to do his bidding since there needs to be an actual seditious action. Otherwise, he's just exercising "free speech" however reprehensible and dangerous his words may be. Exactly.

The latest poll which came out yesterday has number of people willing to be vaccinated has grown to about 63% up from around 55-58% in October. I think that people are feeling more confident that the vaccine wasn't rushed to get it out before the election. That the Brits have already started vaccinations without significant issues also makes people more amenable to vaccination. The surging pandemic has probably also made people more willing to be vaccinated.

Hospital utilization is very uneven depending upon the area. In areas with relatively low community spread like where I live in Chautauqua County the hospitals can function normally, but in areas with higher community spread like in and around Buffalo, the hospitals are stressed as evidenced by not doing elective surgery. In some parts of the country, the conditions are much worse; emergency care has to be rationed so that patients like shoshin's friend who aren't in life threatening situations get shuffled to the end of the line. The biggest issue that's emerging now is the lack of medical personnel. Hospitals can expand their capacities by adding auxiliary facilities in tents or annex buildings but they can't add more doctors and nurses because there aren't any to be had. Governors -- including Cuomo -- are asking retired medical personnel to return to help with the pandemic.

That would require that the current administration take the pandemic seriously, which they never did except for a few short weeks back in the early spring. Since then, Trump and his minions have pretended it's no big deal, including now when 15-20 k Americans are dying weekly of the coronavirus, as they continue to hold Christmas parties despite public health warnings against gatherings of almost any kind.

The average Congressional district has a population of about 711,000 people. About 60% of the US population is over the age of 18, so there are about 425,000 people over 18 in each Congressional District. Most of them are citizens, and more than half are likely to be registered and actually vote. That's not a "very small number of voters".

There's also a truckload of court rulings going back as far as the Early National Period (pre-1830) and continuing to the present that says that state election rules cannot be changed after votes are cast.

Isn't it remarkable that "fake news" sources suddenly become "real news" sources when they post a story that the Trumplicans like? Bull manure. Democratic socialism has nothing to do with hating "individual liberties protected by our constitution". Democratic socialism advocates for social programs that benefit most Americans, regardless of their political or economic persuasion. Both Social Security and Medicare are "socialistic" programs that have been around for more than half a century. How do they infringe on any "individual liberty" except for preventing the elderly from the "individual liberty" to starve or die from lack of medical care? Take your stupid self to a real library and read some books on history, economics, and social policy instead of getting your "knowledge" from liars, con artists, and nutcases on right wing propaganda sites. Perfectly said. Thank you.

The ironic part of this latest farce is that Trump and his Trumplicans' rush to pack the federal judiciary and SCOTUS with conservative justices insures that they won't get a hearing in the SCOTUS. Conservative judges tend to be strongly in favor of states' rights and are NOT going to favor a group of states attempting to interfere with the electoral processes in another group of other states.

You're being too kind. Trump will be judged as the worst POTUS in US history by such a margin that he'll make previous candidates like James Buchanan, Richard Nixon, and Warren G Harding look like political saints.

They also put others at risk. Some people cannot be vaccinated because they are allergic to some ingredient in one or more vaccines or have other health issues. Contrary to the anti-vaxxer propaganda, so-called "childhood diseases" can cause death or serious life-long consequences. For women who cannot be vaccinated for health reasons, exposure to rubella while they are pregnant can produce birth defects in their unborn children.

It's entirely possible that we clinch on Monday night. The Carp and the Ravens looked good in their last games, but the Chiefs and Browns looked better. Moreover, the Ravens played the crappy Cowpatties while the Browns whipped the Titans and knocked them out of the AFCS lead.

Agreed. This policy strikes me as being influenced by anti-vaxxers who are using historical incidents of racism to set up a court case to get the entire policy of requiring all students to be vaccinated for specific diseases. New York State requires all students at public and private colleges and universities in the state who take more than 6 credit hours to show proof of immunity for several diseases. Exemptions are granted only for medical or religious reasons. The historical incidents this policy is based on involved medical experiments and medical lab research that exploited Black subjects without their knowledge and without compensation. I don't know that other minorities were also exploited in similar ways. None of the immunizations required by New York State are experimental ones but have been around for about 50 years, and some of them like the polio vaccine have been around for more than 60 years. They were effective in virtually eliminating childhood diseases like polio, measles, rubella, and chicken pox until recently when the anti-vaxxer nuts started using social media to peddle their lies.

Woooo hooooo!!!!

The SCOTUS refused unanimously and out of hand to even consider Trump's case from PA. Point. Set. Match. Time for the Trumplicans to fold their tents and slink away to their bunkers.

Fair enough about the issue of bonds as it's a legitimate concern. I see the housing bubble as a type of Ponzi scheme because it was built on continually finding new "investors" by expanding the pool of borrowers by lowering lending requirements as housing prices soared because of the demand created by the continually lowering of lending standards. These shaky "sub-prime" loans were then packaged into "mortgage backed securities" that were sold to other investors. It just went round and round until the proverbial manure hit the proverbial fan in the form of rising mortgage defaults brought down the entire thing.

Which "bubble" are you referring to? The housing bubble that collapsed and led to the panic that froze the financial markets in 2008? That was fueled by reckless lending practices that developed into what was essentially a Ponzi scheme by several of the largest mortgage lenders. There's a segment of conservative economists and politicians who believe that the dollar and other modern currencies are doomed to collapse because they are "fiat currencies" that are backed by the government that issues them rather than being backed by a commodity like gold. Believers in this idea in the US have been predicting "the collapse" ("burst"?) since the US disconnected its currrency from gold back in 1933, although there's no evidence that the gold backed currency makes an economy more stable than "fiat currency". This idea of an inevitable financial collapse became especially popular among anti-government conservatives like Tea Partyers and survivalists during the Great Recession.

The biggest threat to America and to "democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II" is Donald Trump, and he proves it over and over again. He's the one who tried to use the pandemic to try to get the elections "postponed" (ie, never to be held) and he's one who tried to stop mail-in balloting before the election, and he's the one who's been trying to overturn the election with bogus election fraud claims since the day he lost. He's also attempting to foment sedition by pressuring Republican state officials to break the law and declare him the winner in their states despite the election results and court rulings.

Cartilaginous spines like in sharks at best, but spines nonetheless.

I might consider Rodgers and Wilson, too, myself but they have been in the league 15 and 8 years respectively, so if I were building a team that could win now and into the foreseeable future, I'd go Mahomes first, Allen second. At the beginning of this season, I had Allen ranked second in the 2018 QB class to Lamar Jackson, but he's clearly surpassed Jackson (even if Jackson hadn't faltered recently), and while Baker Mayfield has recovered from his bad sophomore season, he's not proven himself as consistently good or as consistently clutch as Allen. A lot of people -- probably including some Bills fans -- have probably forgotten that the Bills looked to have won that game against the Cards on that beautiful Allen to Diggs TD pass in the closing minute, and Allen's led the Bills to wins by overcoming deficits late in games several times over the last two years. He's the real deal. As someone who spend much of this century ranting at the Buffalo Bills for a) not building a quality OL and b) not providing their numerous QBs with adequate targets, I find this guy Cian's take a lot of bull manure. No QB -- not Brees, not Mahomes, not Rodgers, not Wilson -- can succeed without protection and targets. Good protection and targets -- along with good/great coaching --- allows a QB to demonstrate his true talent level, whether it's modest like Nick Mullins or Ryan Fitzpatrick or great like Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers -- or Josh Allen.

I don't believe you because you have consistently started threads -- I think this is your third try but I might have missed one or more -- that raises the issue of "election fraud", including presenting supposed "evidence" that's little more than supposition and conjecture. You are simply trying to keep claims of election fraud on the front page of PPP, which suggests that you do, in fact, believe there was widespread election fraud. There's no evidence of any organized or widespread election fraud anywhere in the country as evidenced by nearly every single case being thrown out of court for lack of evidence, but that obviously isn't good enough for you. You'd rather believe some video purporting to show "something shady". The only "fraud" in Trump's "election fraud" campaign is Trump's siphoning off of nearly $200 million that his supporters contributed to help his legal fight into his own pockets.

Rudy's "witnesses" are garbage because they didn't provide any kind of evidence that isn't in the realm of rumor, innuendo, wishful thinking, supposition, and outright lies.

Trump's call to the GA governor yesterday to pressure him into calling a special session of the GA legislature to decertify the election and declare Trump the winner borders on sedition. He's lucky that Kemp resisted him, and that Raffensperger resisted Lindsay Graham's "suggestion" he not certify the election result. Their unwillingness to break the law on Trump's behalf keeps Trump's actions within the realm of sour grapes rather than making them criminal acts.

I think wearing a face mask after the second dose is recommended because we don't know enough about the vaccines yet. We know that they seem to be very safe with only mild side-effects. We know that they effectively prevent the worst/more serious cases of Covid-19 as well as mitigating the symptoms of less severe cases. We don't know if they actually prevent us from becoming infected or if vaccine simply works on the symptoms by making them much less severe (flu vaccines frequently do this). If the vaccine doesn't prevent a person from getting infected, there could very well be a "window" in which he or she can still spread the virus. Therefore, the recommendation to continue wearing a mask after the second dose. Stay tuned, though, because as more people get vaccinated recommendations may very well change.

Obviously Putin does since he's one of the few leaders -- if not the only one -- of a major country who hasn't publicly acknowledged Biden as President-elect. He's still hoping his lackey the Snowflake-in-Chief can somehow overturn the election results. If Putin thought he could manipulate Biden as easily as he's manipulated Trump, he wouldn't care who was POTUS. I don't think the US should attempt "regime change" in other countries even through the electoral process. Almost every time the US has meddled in a country during peace time to force out the current regime and put in another one it thought better, the situation within that country became worse. The US once supported Fidel Castro, albeit tepidly, against Fulgencio Bautista, the Cuban president. The US sponsored a coup d'etat against Chile's democratic socialist president Salvador Allende that plunged that country into more than a decade of terror under the vile, brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In the 1980s, the US aided the mujahideen against the Russian puppet government supported by the Russian military, and that eventually developed into the Taliban ruling Afghanistan. Can we honestly say that Iraqis are better off today than they were under Saddam Hussein (another dictator the US once supported BTW) before the Iraq invasion in 2003? I'd rather have the US try to encourage better behavior by governments rather than trying to change the governments themselves. We've tried being the world's policeman, and that's exploded in our faces almost every time. I think that a judicious use of trade and aid incentives are more likely to get countries like Cuba to give their people more freedoms than somehow forcing out the current authoritarian leaders and replacing them with other authoritarian leaders. I think that with a country like China there's not much that the US can do unfortunately.