This will be a recording of lame duck shenanigans of the outgoing administration https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/11/16/arctic-refuge-drilling-trump/ Trump officials rush to auction off rights to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge before Biden can block it Officials aim to sell drilling rights to the pristine wilderness’s coastal plain before the president-elect takes office
Former Bush chief of staff cites 9/11 Commission, warns about slow transition Key Points George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff Andy Card said “it’s concerning” that the Trump administration has refused to cooperate with President-elect Biden’s transition team amid the coronavirus pandemic. Card explained the importance of transition time and cited the 9/11 Commission on the Bush administration’s shortened time in the context of the September 11 attacks. Card said its “hyperbole beyond expectation” to say that somebody stole the election Nobody stole the election, people close to Trump should tell him to concede: Fmr. WH chief of staff George W. Bush’s Chief of Staff Andy Card told CNBC that “it’s concerning” that the Trump administration has refused to cooperate with President-elect Biden’s transition team, as the nation faces the worst public health crisis in a century. “This pandemic demands that we get it [democracy] to work, and I don’t know why the Trump administration won’t share the details of trying to get vaccines into the states to the people at the right time, the right way, and mitigate the problem,” said Card. Coronavirus hospitalizations have hit an all-time high across the nation with nearly 62,000 infected patients in hospitals right now, according to Johns Hopkins. New cases continue to skyrocket and are still rising in 49 states. The U.S. has topped 100,000 new cases every day for more than a week and more than 1,400 Americans died from Covid on Tuesday. In an interview with CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers, former Obama administration Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius highlighted the importance of the Biden administration knowing where the PPE is located. That knowledge, she said, will be critical for the Biden administration if it invokes the Defense Production Act to push the PPE out to hospitals amid a surge in coronavirus cases. “Having a seamless transfer of information, having discussions in advance can only help get vaccines to the right places at the right time, and help governors understand what it is that they can count on from the federal government and what they need to put in place,” said Sebelius. Card helped guide Bush’s campaign through the 2000 recount, which held back the transition from President Bill Clinton to Bush for 37 days. In a Wednesday evening interview on “The News with Shepard Smith,” Card put the transition time into perspective when it comes to a national crisis. “The 9/11 Commission had said if there had been a longer transition and there had been cooperation, there might have been a better response, or maybe not even any attack,” the former chief of staff said. “This is very serious, so we’re calling on the president to open up the transition office, give the money out, let people start transitioning, and get ready to take the baton at January 20th at noontime, even if we don’t know the full results.” While Card highlighted that he believed all the votes needed to be counted, he told host Shepard Smith that Bush did the right thing in calling and congratulating Joe Biden. “I think it’s hyperbole beyond expectation, not credibility, to say that somebody stole the election, they didn’t,” said Card. “A record number of people voted, actually everybody should be celebrating that, that’s the sign of a great democracy. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/11/for...f-cites-9/11-warns-about-slow-transition.html wrbtrader
The Republicans don't really have anyone dynamic and exciting enough to fill the void in a post-Trump world. Trump will get to hang around play Kingmaker ,as you said, because of that.
And Biden is "dynamic and exciting" as an opponent? And he's going to be even more dynamic and exciting when he's 82?
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Biden to be a two-term president. *wink*
Trump's failure to work with Biden is becoming more urgent as Covid spread https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/16/poli...p-joe-biden-transition-coronavirus/index.html President Donald Trump is facing a barrage of calls to permit potentially life-saving transition talks between his health officials and incoming President-elect Joe Biden's aides on a fast-worsening pandemic he is continuing to ignore in his obsessive effort to discredit an election that he clearly lost. The increasingly urgent pleas are coming from inside his administration, the President-elect's team and independent public health experts as Covid-19 cases rage out of control countrywide, claiming more than 1,000 US lives a day. More than 246,000 Americans have now died from the disease, and a bitter winter lies ahead even amid encouraging news such as Monday's announcement that a vaccine developed by Moderna is demonstrating a high success rate in early clinical trials, the second such positive vaccine news in about a week. But instead of listening or mobilizing to tackle what some medical experts warn is becoming a "humanitarian" crisis, Trump spent the weekend during which the US passed 11 million infections amplifying lies and misinformation about his election loss. At one point, he appeared to acknowledge Sunday in a tweet that Biden won, before backtracking with a stream of defiance on Twitter. This came as the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, said on CNN's "State of the Union" Sunday that "of course it would be better if we could start working with" the Biden team that will take office on January 20. "It's almost like passing a baton in a race -- you don't want to stop and then give it to somebody," Fauci, who has been marginalized by the outgoing President, told Jake Tapper. "You want to just essentially keep going. And that is what transition is." Biden's incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain said Sunday that the President-elect's team had been unable to talk to current top health officials like Fauci about the pandemic owing to Trump's refusal to trigger ascertainment — the formal process of opening a transition to a new administration. "Joe Biden's going to become president of the United States in the midst of an ongoing crisis. That has to be a seamless transition," Klain said on NBC's "Meet the Press," adding that while the new administration planned to contact top pharmaceutical firms making the vaccine like Pfizer, it was particularly key to get in touch with Department of Health and Human Services officials responsible for rolling it out in the coming months. "Our experts need to talk to those people as soon as possible so nothing drops in this change of power we're going to have on January 20th," Klain said. But the official who is currently most influential with the President, Dr. Scott Atlas, who critics say favors a herd immunity approach that could lead to thousands of deaths, wrote an inflammatory tweet on Sunday that exemplified the White House's contempt for unifying leadership during the pandemic. Atlas called on the people of Michigan to "rise up" against new Covid-19 restrictions introduced in schools, theaters and restaurants by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer -- who was recently the target of an alleged domestic terrorism kidnapping plot. Whitmer said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer Sunday evening that she would not be "bullied into not following reputable scientists and medical professionals." 'We need to be prepared' Fauci is not the only senior US official calling for transition talks to open. Moncef Slaoui, the official in charge of Trump's vaccine effort, told the Financial Times in an interview that he wanted to reach out to Biden's team, but added that he couldn't do so without White House permission. As the Biden team increases the pressure for the launch of a proper transition -- which includes office space, meetings in government agencies and millions of dollars in government funding -- members of Biden's Covid-19 advisory board spoke in increasingly alarmed terms about the effect of a continued stalemate. Board member Dr. Celine Gounder told CNN on Saturday that the situation was like a terrorist attack or war and there needed to be a smooth handoff. "We need to be prepared, and in the absence of that critical data, there may be blind spots we're not able to anticipate and that leaves us quite vulnerable." (More at above url)
COVID-19 death toll could spike by some 200K, but Trump and Pence prioritize campaigning Sunday November 15, 2020 https://www.dailykos.com/stories/20...ing-but-Trump-s-focus-is-crying-election-foul