This is democracy in action?   China and Russia are laughing at us after the so called debate tonight.  It was more like a wrestling match, WWE style.  Trump was hitting below the belt, throwing chairs at Biden and punching when referee Chris Wallace was trying to break it up.  Biden was trying to stay calm and play by the rule.  I wish that he would have pull on Trump's wig and put him on a choke hold!

It was expected that Trump would come out swinging and try to drag Biden into the mud and force him to make errors.  But I think Trump overplayed his hand.  He interrupted way too much and frankly did not even give Biden a chance to make a mistake.  He went against the previously agreed rules for the debate so much that Wallace had to try to rein in many times.  Wallace was not successful (who would have?)  But Wallace, I thought, actually helped Biden by challenging Trump to answer his own questions and not interrupt Biden.  There was almost a separate debate between Wallace and Trump.  Given that this is a Fox News debate, it was better moderated for Biden than expected.

I think that Biden could have hit Trump harder.  For example, when Trump claimed that if Biden was president there would have been many more dead from COVID.  All Biden had to say was that if Trump did such a great job, why is the U.S. so much worse off than other countries?  Trump is obviously worse than the leaders of almost every country in the world.  When Trump attacked Biden's intelligence, saying he was last in his college class, Biden could have said: "I didn't need to pay someone to take my SAT.  Also my doctor did not order a dementia test for me!"  Sometimes you have to respond to a punch below the belt with a kick to the groin.

Trump once again refuses to refute white supremist groups and violence.  Instead he gave a shout out to the Proud Boys, a neo Nazi group, and told them to stand back and stand by.  The GOP can say that it is not a call to the group to get ready to battle.  But the Proud Boys are rejoicing and so you know how they interpreted that remark by Trump.  This is the exact type of chaos Russia, China and Iran like to see in our political process.

This debate probably won't change the minds of many people.  But if Trump and his supporters think that this will close the gap between the two, I don't think so.  Biden was not great but he held serve and given how badly this debate was, I am sure the ratings for the other two will be lower.  So there will be less chance for Trump to make up ground.  There are no winners tonight but Biden's supporters will be relieved.  The loser, however, is American democracy.

Taking a little break from politics and discuss college football today.  Well, that actually is politics as Trump has been telling the Big Ten and Pac 12 to join the other three big conferences to play this fall.  The Big Ten has decided to play an 8 game schedule and the Pac-12 will probably announce that they will play also.  Is this the right choice?   

I was against playing college football before.  I think college basketball with much smaller rosters and less physical contact, is much more safe to play.  Given that the southeast and southwest areas of the country were still seeing high number of cases, I thought that those conferences should not have started.  There were quite a few positive cases when training started but they kept going.  I have not heard much about cases in those conferences recently.  Either things are much better now or they are hiding the truth.

The other day the LSU coach said something to the effect that a great number of his players already had been infected.  They have recovered and are able to play now, he said.  He would not say how many players were/are infected.  It seems very suspicious to me.  Sure most young people are asymptomatic or recover quickly after being infected by this virus.  But they can transmit to other people and since they are not in a lockdown like NBA players and they are young and in many cases immature, I think the transmission rate would be high.  Also many young athletes develop myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart, after being infected.  It may not lead to damage but we are not so sure about it, especially years down the line.  So I still think it is risky for them to play football now.

Having said that, I think the Big Ten and Pac-12 are in better positions than the other conferences when they start in October.  They will have daily testing.  There is the antigen test which is cheaper than the standard PCR test.  The results are available in minutes as oppose to sending the tests to labs and results may not come back for days.  If the athletes are tested daily, then the chance of a positive person transmitting the virus will be very low.  I believe the antigen test, which is not as sensitive as the PCR test but is much faster and is good enough for screening purpose, gives college football a much better chance of successfully play out the season.  If this occurs, it may be used for opening schools for in person learning throughout the country.

The playoffs spots will be even more controversial this year as teams are mostly playing within the conferences.  How do you judge teams from different conferences when there are no interconference games?  It will be even more of a beauty contest than ever before.

 It is with great sadness that I hear the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.  Justice Ginsburg is certainly a great icon in American law.  A great talent, a great fighter for justice and in the past twenty years a great fighter against cancer and other health issues.  She will be greatly missed.

The possibility of her dying has been a great fear among Democrats since Trump was elected.  Certainly if Clinton had been elected, RBG would have retired.  But when Trump was elected, she did all she could to stay alive so that she would not be replaced by a Trump appointee.  She did not quite make it to January of 2021.  But maybe she stayed alive long enough to avoid the unthinkable:  McConnell being able to confirm a third Trump nominee.

Mitch McConnell is going to try to ram a nomination through before Biden becomes president.  Never mind the hypocrisy of him blocking Obama's nomination for eight months before the 2016 election.  Now with about one and half month left before the 2020 election, McConnell thinks it is legitimate for the GOP to grab another Supreme Court seat.  This just shows what kind of people McConnell and most of the GOP are today.

The GOP has 53 seats in the Senate.  With Pence being the tie breaker, the Democrats need to flip 4 votes to prevent McConnel to succeed in this travesty.  Collins of Maine and Murkowski of Alaska have indicate that they don't think it is right for this nomination to go forward.  Romney may be another vote.  Chuck Grassley and Lindsay Graham have indicated in the past that it would not be right to have a nomination late in the year of a presidential election.  These two are iffy at best though.  There is also the possibility if Kelley wins in Arizona in a special election to replace McCain, then he could be sworn in as early as November 30 instead of January.  That would make a lame duck confirmation of the appointee by Trump to be less likely.

There is also the possibility of an expansion of the number of Supreme Court justices if Democrats win the Senate and the presidency.  Chuck Schumur has threatened this if McConnell insisted on ramming this nomination through.   I don't know how legal this is and how hard politically this is.  I understand there is not a set number of justices according the constitution.  But will have to see how this shakes out.

How is this going to affect the election?   I don't know.  Is it going to pump up partisans on both sides?   I think so.  I would think that the Trump side will be more pumped up as I think they believe that they are going to lose ground in the election.  But the unfairness and hypocrisy of McConnell and the GOP may turn off some independents.  So we will see.  The other thing that I worry is that this becomes the main story each day, taking away the important discussions we need regarding the pandemic, the racial divide, foreign relations and the economy.  It is going to be a crazy month and a half.  Probably much longer because the election results maybe contested long after November 3, and a lame duck Senate may still be deciding a justice nomination into January.

 While traveling the past week, I didn't have much chance to watch sports.  But I did catch the men and women championships of the U.S. Open tennis.  They were both exciting and tension filled matches that went to the maximum number of sets.  Both champions won by coming from behind.  There were no spectators so you don't get the usual excitement and roar after great shots.  Still the telecasts showed that for a few hours sports can give relief to the problems of the world.

But the women championship did not hide the problems of the world.  Naomi Osaka had refused to play the semi-finals of the previous tournament in protest of racism.  The governing body of tennis backed down and postponed the tournament a day and she then agreed to play.  During the U.S. Open, Osaka wore a mask with the name of a victim of racial violence when she came onto the court before each match.  She also wore the mask during interviews after the matches.  This raised attention to systemic racism in the country.  While the NBA and other sports supported the protest movement, Osaka was the only top tennis player who openly supported the movement with her actions.

Osaka is now a three time major champion.  She is also at age 22, the future leader of women's tennis.  Her activism is to be applauded.  It can't be easy to be a champion on the court at the same time a champion for social issues off the court.  Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova were two names I can come up with who did the same.  But I think they were older and had been on tour longer when they became spokeswomen for their causes.  Prior to this, Osaka was seen as a young woman who laughed at herself for giving poor interviews and acceptance speeches.  It is amazing she is now an activist with  potential to be a great leader among sport stars.

 If you work for Trump you are going to have to be a liar.  The new medical advisor whom Trump is leaning on for the COVID response is Dr. Scott Atlas.  He has been shown on camera where he basically call for herd immunity to stop the virus.  Now that he is being challenged for this view, he is saying that he never advocated for herd immunity but that he is not surprised that people frame him because this is Washington!  Well, he is Washington now and he has the audacity to call people liars when what he said was recorded!  But Trump will like that he is caught with a lie because that has happened to Trump many times before and he and his base don't care.

Atlas has also questioned the effectiveness of wearing masks.  He and CDC also said that asymptomatic people don't need to be tested.  The FDA has said that a new vaccine may be fast track to market even if phase three trials are not completed.  I doubt that most scientists in the CDC and the FDA agree on these declarations.  It seems that the politicians are calling the shots in the Federal government and not the scientists.  Add to that of local and state level people like DeSantis of Florida and Kemp of Georgia, we can see that we will not be winning the fight against this virus any time soon.

When the CDC gave the new guideline that asymptomatic people don't need to be tested, Dr. Fauci was under anesthesia for surgery.  So they did not want to get the opinion of the top scientist on the epidemic before making such a decision.  In China when this pandemic started, they called on Dr. Zhong Nan Shan, their Dr. Fauci.  When he said the country needed to go into lock down mode, it was advice followed.  Here, we listen to incompetent people instead of our top scientists.  So we will continue to suffer.