BlackMask Breaking News

(Bloomberg) — President Donald Trump said that Americans in the Medicare program for the elderly and disabled will be sent $200 discount cards for prescription drugs within weeks, potentially putting cash in their pockets ahead of his November re-election. “Nobody’s seen this before. These cards are incredible,” Trump said Thursday in a speech outlining what he called an “America First Health Plan” in Charlotte, North Carolina. “The cards will be mailed out in coming weeks. I will always take care of our wonderful senior citizens.” Trump didn’t explain in his speech what program or authority would allow the government to provide the cards. Assuming they are sent to 33 million Medicare beneficiaries, the figure Trump used, the cards would cost about $6.6 billion. Money for the cards will be drawn from a demonstration program Medicare uses to test new payment systems and other projects, and the cost will be offset by future savings generated from new price cuts Trump has ordered for drugs bought by Medicare, according to a White House official. The cards can be used for prescription drugs co-pays, the official said, but didn’t elaborate. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services referred questions about the cards to the White House. Trump is struggling to secure the votes of older Americans with less than six weeks before the election. Several recent polls indicate his re-election opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, is tied or leading Trump among people 65 and older, a turnabout from 2016 when the president won the senior vote by a comfortable margin. “Joe Biden won’t be doing this,” Trump said in his speech. The White House has been negotiating with drug makers over an order Trump signed in August that would cut the U.S. prices of some medicines by tying them to prices paid in other Western countries with national health-care systems. But the leading lobby group for the industry, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, said last week it had rejected a request from the administration to provide discount cards to Medicare patients as part of the deal. Trump issued the drug price order last week, after negotiations with the industry broke off, but it hasn’t yet taken effect. It isn’t clear whether it will ever generate savings for the government or whether they would be enough to offset the cost of the drug discount cards. Drug companies aren’t aware of Trump’s plans or where funding for the cards will come from, according to a person familiar with the industry’s negotiations with the White House. Trump’s speech was intended to set forth a health care agenda for his second term, addressing a key vulnerability for the president in the election. After his remarks, he signed an executive order that calls on Congress to retain protections for sick people buying insurance — safeguards guaranteed by the Affordable Care Act, a law Trump’s administration is asking the Supreme Court to strike down. The president has often promised he would produce a replacement for Obamacare, which guarantees insurers can’t deny coverage to sick people or charge them more. Just last week, the president said his plan is “ready.” But the order he signed essentially abandons the issue to Congress, suggesting he won’t offer his own plan before the election. Trump’s order purporting to protect people with pre-existing conditions won’t apply to consumers who buy short-term insurance policies that last less than a year, according to the White House official. The Trump administration has promoted the plans as a cheaper alternative to Obamacare plans. But they are cheaper because companies offering them are allowed to exclude sick people and because the plans seldom cover as many services as Obamacare policies. Nick Note: I got skunked….. Sources told me the administration was going to make a “big” health care announcement. I considered the possibility that it would be a vaccine. Not the joke shit above….. Trump has been laying the ground work and has made it clear the decision will be made by him in the White House on the vaccine roll out. And my belief is the stupid MAJORITY will suck it up like a blond coke whore with a bag of white powder spread out on a mirror!

https://youtu.be/mWHqZ-oC_9Y

Richmond Federal Reserve President Thomas Barkin said on Thursday that he is not worried about the possibility of inflation escalating in the near future, as reported by Reuters. Nick Note: they are buying the stuff by the truck load.. So lets not let it go to waste

When asked if he would give a “peaceful transfer of power” to Joe Biden were he to lose in the November election. “Well, we’re going to have to see what happens,” Trump said with a smile. “You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster.” The president said there would be no “transfer of power [but a] continuation” if the ballots, which he has issued a tirade on for promoting voter fraud – which has been disproven. “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very … there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation,” he say, adding “the ballots are out of control.” Nick Note: One way or another Trump told you he will be staying in power. Win lose or draw Trump will be your dictator elect!

There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path. The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery. Something has to give, and many things will, when the time comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of the “overtime count”—millions of mail-in and provisional ballots—could keep the outcome unsettled for days or weeks. If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern. As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights. “We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.” A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.” The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power. Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand. “We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.” Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al‑Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile. The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.

“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who teaches at Amherst, calls a “perfect storm” of adverse conditions. We cannot turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us. Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance.

Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged. Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before. Maybe you hesitate. Is it a fact that if Trump loses, he will reject defeat, come what may? Do we know that? Technically, you feel obliged to point out, the proposition is framed in the future conditional, and prophecy is no man’s gift, and so forth. With all due respect, that is pettifoggery. We know this man. We cannot afford to pretend. Trump’s behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously—to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives.

Nick Note: I want you prepared. Trump is setting up a circumstance that is he does not win the elections by a BIG margin he will creates a crises like he nation has never seen before and he will engineer in the confusion his continued power as a president. At this point with the virus crises in mind he will in fact be a de-facto Dictator. You have been warned. 

Major U.S. stock indexes closed lower on Wednesday, sliding in the final hour of trade, as market participants struggled to shake off worries about a lack of a coronavirus aid package and rising COVID-19 cases. How did major benchmarks fare? The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) tumbled 525.05 points, or 1.9%, to close at 26,763.13, while the S&P 500 (SPX) lost 78.65 points, or 2.4%, ending at 3,236.92. The Nasdaq Composite Index (COMP) shed 330.65 points, or 3%, finishing at 10,632.99, after plunging as low as 3%. That left the Dow 9.4% off its record close in February, the S&P 9.6% lower than its September all-time high and the Nasdaq 11.8% down from its September record, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The losses took the S&P 500 within a whisker of a correction, defined as a 10% pullback from a recent peak. Equities briefly caught a footing in Tuesday’s session, but were pressured again Wednesday amid deep-seated divides in Washington over additional pandemic aid and a resurgence of coronavirus cases in Europe and parts of the U.S., including in Texas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma and Colorado. “But I also think investors are reluctant to keep their feet completely out of the market,” he told MarketWatch, pointing to expectations for a safe and effective vaccine to be available at some point next year. Nick Note: We reversed Tuesdays gains. It looks to me to be a retest of the lows. I am not going to shit you I COULD BE WRONG! But my belief is the stock market is buying into a bounce back before the elections and massive stimulus with the FEDS pumping incredible sums of money into the market. We has a 5 year note auction today at the lowest rates ever. I rate the auction a A+. That tells me underlying sentiment is very very positive. Spreading on a bottom is suicide. Again I COULD BE Wrong But i  believe the selling is pretty close to a temporary end. This will sort itself out this week or next…..