Category 3, Nobel Peace to Colombia Pres.
Friday, October 7, 2016
Hurricane: More than two million people were urged to leave the Florida coast yesterday as Hurricane Matthew approached. Gov. Rick Scott said, “This storm will kill you. Time is running out.”
The storm did kill nearly 300 people in Haiti and levelled thousands of homes. Haiti has still not recovered from a 2010 earthquake and the hurricane adds thousands of homeless to the country’s troubles. One medical specialist told the LA Times, “We keep saying that we are a resilient nation,” he said. “But I don’t know how much more we can take.”
Matthew was downgraded to a Category 3 storm by the time it hit Florida overnight. Disney World and SeaWorld shut down their theme parks. The storm is punching into Orlando and Jacksonville, bringing a storm surge as high as 11 feet.
Peace: The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos for his efforts to end the 52-year civil war with the communist rebels known as FARC, even though his peace deal was voted down by the public.
It’s Political: Hillary Clinton has left the campaign trail again to prepare for Sunday night’s second presidential debate. Having performed in the first debate like a student who didn’t do the homework, Trump is under pressure to get ready for the second bout, but his campaign isn’t saying whether he’s actually prepping. If he does poorly, it could be over for the Cheeto-head.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog says the voters still capable of changing their minds are picking sides between Trump and Clinton, who now have a combined 84 percent of voter opinion. Their report says, “Third-party candidates have tended to fade in the polls as Election Day approaches — Johnson and Jill Stein, the Green Party nominee, appear to be following the same trend.”
DOA: Former White House ethics lawyers Norman Eisen and Richard W. Painter, who vetted candidates for presidential appointments, write in the NY Times that Donald Trump’s non-payment of federal taxes and refusal to disclose his returns would immediately kill his chance to be given a federal job. “If the White House were to so much as delay in disclosing the tax returns of a nominee, much less tell the Senate that a nominee did not want to disclose them, the nomination would be dead on arrival,” they say.
Eisen and Painter go on, “No presidential nominee with Mr. Trump’s tax situation, his years of undisclosed tax returns, and his attitude toward paying taxes could have been approved by the Senate. Indeed, no president would have dared nominate him. All of us should weigh that heavily in assessing Mr. Trump’s fitness for the Oval Office.”
The anti-Trump hits keep rolling. Thirty former Republican congressmen joined in a statement condemning Trump’s run for the presidency. Their statement says, “Sadly, our party’s nominee this year is a man who makes a mockery of the principles and values we have cherished and which we sought to represent in Congress.”
One of the signatories is former Rep. Bill Clinger from the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Nation: The train in the New Jersey Transit crash in Hoboken was moving at 21 mph, just slightly more than twice the speed it should have been travelling as it entered the station, according to federal investigators. The train’s single operating “black box” recorder shows that the engineer hit the brakes only one second before impact. The engineer has said he doesn’t remember the crash.
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