Viral News: The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a press release yesterday listing among President Trump’s “first term” accomplishments, “Ending the Covid-19 Pandemic.” 

  The release says, in part, “From the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this administration has taken decisive actions.”

  This comes despite President Trump’s admission to reporter Bob Woodward that he kept the lid on about the pandemic because he didn’t want people to panic. As of this morning, the average of new cases over the past two weeks is up 41 percent and 968 people died in the past 24 hours. Nearly 8.6 million Americans have been infected and 227,701 have died, the most of any country in the world

  The OSTP release repeatedly extolled President Trump’s leadership and even quoted his daughter, Ivanka. Trump is a firm denier of climate change, and now the virus, yet the release said, “President Trump has solidified America’s standing as the most scientifically and technologically advanced nation the world has ever known.”

 Trump is treating the pandemic as more of a political problem than a health crisis. Out there campaigning, he keeps saying the pandemic is winding down when it’s actually getting worse.

  In a recorded interview with Bob Woodward last April, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner said that Trump was “getting the country back from the doctors” in what he called a “negotiated settlement.” Kushner also said the US was moving swiftly through the panic and pain phases and that the country was at the “beginning of the comeback phase.” 

  “That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work,” Kushner said. “Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.”

  Kushner also said Trump doesn’t want to be a pessimist. “So if you basically say this is coming back in the fall, don’t gear up, then people won’t rehire, people will stay unemployed,” he told Woodward. “And if you’re planning for the worst-case scenario, that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the things that the president’s great at is he’s a cheerleader. He’s trying to make people feel good about the outcome.”

The Numbers Game: Joe Biden leads Trump by eight percentage points in Michigan, according to a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College.  Michigan was one of Trump’s surprising wins in 2016, but the new poll  says he’s losing some of his most stalwart supporters, white voters without college degrees.

  The Real Clear Politics national average has Biden leading Trump by 7.8 percentage points. Biden leads by 3.8 percent in the critical state of Pennsylvania, but the gap is narrowing. Biden can win if he takes Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania … all states that Trump won in 2016 …  and hangs on to the states Hillary Clinton won that year.

Pen Pal: Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security under Kirstjen Nielsen, has identified himself as the anonymous author of a 2018 NY Times Op-Ed in which he described President Trump as “impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective,” setting off turmoil within the administration and a hunt for the author’s  identity. 

  Taylor was also the anonymous author of “A Warning,” a book he wrote the following year that described the president as an “undisciplined” and “amoral” leader whose abuse of power threatened American democracy.

The Obit Page: Diane di Prima, one of the last of the Beat poets and possibly the genre’s most prominent woman, has died at 86 in San Francisco. 

  She was friends with the likes of writers Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Frank O’Hara, and Audre Lorde. She was part of  Timothy Leary’s psychedelic community in upstate New York.

         From: “An Exercise in Love”:

            “My friend walks soft as a weaving on the wind

             He backlights my dreams

             He has built altars beside my bed

             I awake in the smell of his hair & cannot remember

             his name, or my own.

The Bulletin Board: The Supreme Court made rulings that allow North Carolina and Pennsylvania to count absentee ballots after election day so long as they are postmarked before. That’s a big win for the Democrats. The newest justice, Amy Coney Barrett, did not take part in the decisions. — At least three people have died in a knife attack in the southern French city of Nice in what appears to be an act of terrorism.  One woman was decapitated. The attacker was shot and captured.

Spoil Sports: Major League Baseball says it’s investigating following the decision by Dodger third baseman Justin Turner to take part in the celebration of his team’s World Series win. Turner had been pulled from the field and put in isolation after a mid-game positive result for the coronavirus, but he returned to be with his jubilant team mates. 

  The league said in a statement, “While a desire to celebrate is understandable, Turner’s decision to leave isolation and enter the field was wrong and put everyone he came in contact with at risk. When MLB Security raised the matter of being on the field with Turner, he emphatically refused to comply.”

Terminal Diagnosis: Actress Ellen Pompeo, the “Grey” of the long-running television series “Grey’s Anatomy” says this may be her last season with the show, which would probably end it. This will be the 17^th season, an eternity in television entertainment. The actress, who started out playing an intern, is now 50. 

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