Plans for hiking in Pennsylvania – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not one to submit tamely – The claims of Donald Trump Jr. vs. reality – Evening statistics
The dreary weather of yesterday has been easing since the morning and during the afternoon it became reasonably sunny. The forecasts for the mid-Atlantic generally are favorable now that the effects of Zeta have come and gone (and compared with the Gulf Coast area we got off lightly, with only a day of continual rain, and little wind to cause any damage), so I plan to take a brief jaunt over the weekend to further my goal of completing the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania by the end of the year. I don’t know if I can do the complete all that remains but with luck I should be able to cover the distance between LeHigh Gap and Rte. 309 on Sunday (about 13½ miles each way, which should be feasible if I start sufficiently early and if the drive to and from the trailhead is less than an hour).
I have been critical of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the past, but in the current contretemps that has erupted about her I stand firmly in her support. She has been assailed by various conservatives for publicly appearing in expensive clothes – specifically, for a photo on the cover of the Vanity Fair magazine. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with a woman (or a man, for that matter) wishing to look well-groomed and fashionable, and many conservative figures have done so on numerous public appearances. Melania, Ivanka, and Tiffany Trump have done precisely the same thing, without so much as a word of criticism directed at them. At least AOC pays her tailoring bills, which is more than I can guarantee for any member of the President’s family, given the example that its amiable patriarch sets by consistently defaulting on his personal debts. She has responded to these attacks with characteristic vigor: e.g., “Listen, if Republicans want pointers on looking your best, I’m happy to share,” and, in a comeback to Laura Ingraham’s comment about wearing outfits costing $14,000 in order to curse out Trump, “100% worth it, would do it again.”
The First Family has been making headlines on its own account, or at any rate one member has. Donald Trump Jr., in the course of abusing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison for limiting attendance at President Trump’s upcoming Minnesota rally to 250 people in order to comply with the COVID guidelines (he is inclined to issue gross insults towards anyone whose opinions differ from his own, a habit he has acquired from his father), claimed that deaths in the U.S. due to COVID-19 are down to almost nothing. In fact, an average of close to one thousand daily is succumbing to the disease. We are #10 in the list of nations ranked by mortality rate and two of the nations listed above us – San Marino and Andorra – are micro-states. Donald Trump Jr. cannot possibly excel his father’s record for blatant falsehoods, but he’s certainly giving it the good old college try.
Today’s statistics as of 8:00 PM – # of cases worldwide 45,890,088; # of deaths worldwide: 1,193,200; # of cases U.S.: 9,314,309 ; # of deaths U.S.: 235,142. Today’s case increase was nearly 100,000, and we have had yet another day of nearly 1,000 deaths. Our death toll has doubled since the middle of June; at the rate it is increasing, it will double again in another four months. So much for the claims about the virus being under control. At one point it appeared that Brazil’s case count was catching up to ours and would exceed it, but that is no longer true; its case count is now less than 60% of our own.