Maybe NFL highlights aren't the same thing anymore.

By Samantha Schmidt & Daniel Cassady @ WashingtonPost.com, Sept. 23

[....] on Saturday, for the first time in days, mayors and representatives from more than 50 municipalities across Puerto Rico met with government officials at the emergency operations command center here in the island’s capital city. Many of the mayors learned about the meeting through media reports over satellite radio the night before. One mayor said his staff was informed after a man ran to his offices with a note telling him to make his way to San Juan.

Approximately 20 other mayors across the island still have not been able to make contact with government officials, leaving major gaps in the broader understanding of the damage Maria left behind.

The mayors greeted each other with hugs and tears, and they pleaded with their governor for some of the things their communities need most: drinking water, prescription drugs, gasoline, oxygen tanks and satellite phones. The entire population remains without electricity. Families everywhere are unable to buy food or medical treatment. Roads remain waterlogged, and looting has begun to take place at night.

“There is horror in the streets,” San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz said in a raw, emotional interview with The Washington Post. “People are actually becoming prisoners in their own homes.” [....]

 

By criticizing the views of both Berniecrats and Trumpites, Biden is positioning himself as the antidote to populism in all its forms and flavors

By Billie Scher @ Politico.com, Sept. 23

On Monday, former Vice President Joe Biden wrote a blog post that proves two things: Blogging isn’t dead and neither is Biden’s political career. In fact, in Biden’s essay, and in other little-noticed public pronouncements, you can see him sculpting a role for the 2020 presidential campaign that perhaps only he could get away with playing: the voice of anti-populism.

[....] Biden’s essay [....] made a bit of news in wonk circles because Biden used it to announce his opposition to a “universal basic income,” that newly vogue policy proposal [....]

But there’s more in the post to decipher. Biden criticized the “Silicon Valley executives” who have championed universal basic income for “selling American workers short” and undermining the “dignity” of work.

He recoiled at rhetoric, often wielded by Senator Bernie Sanders and his acolytes, that demonizes corporations [....] And he cut against the prevailing sentiment among Trump-friendly working-class whites that not everyone should go to college: [.....]

A few days earlier, the former vice president published a New York Times op-ed deriding President Donald Trump’s nationalistic foreign policy [....]

Is he even running for president? We can’t know for sure. But consider the following [....]

The "Barking Dog" at Alabama Adoration Rally: Trump also said he'd like to see NFL owners respond to players kneeling during the National Anthem by saying: "Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, he's fired. He's fired!"

"For a week, (that owner would) be the most popular person in this country," Trump said, "because that's a total disrespect of our heritage... he complained about NFL efforts to enforce penalties designed to prevent concussions. "They're ruining the game, right?" he said. "They're ruining the game."

@ NYTimes.com, 7:52 pm

A dam in northwestern Puerto Rico suffered structural damage on Friday, the governor said at a news conference, prompting evacuations of areas nearby in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

“Close to 70,000 is the estimate of people that could be affected in the case of a collapse,” the governor, Ricardo Rosselló, said about the Guajataca Dam, which is operated by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority. “We don’t know the details. It’s time to get people out.”

The news about the dam was a dramatic sign that the scale of troubles left behind by the storm were just being understood. Power remained out and phone service was still limited. On Friday night, the governor was flying over to the dam area to see how serious the risk might be, said a spokeswoman for the Puerto Rico Emergency Management Agency. 

A flash flood warning was previously issued by the National Weather Service for the municipalities of Isabela and Quebradillas, in the immediate areas of the dam. “This is an extremely dangerous and life-threatening situation,” the service said in an advisory.

Messages sent to the power authority about the condition of the dam were not immediately returned.bThe National Guard has been activated in the area, the governor said [....]

What must happen so that poor and middle-class families don’t end up paying for tax cuts for the rich.

Guest op-ed by Jacob J. Lew @ NYTimes.com, Sept. 22

Jacob J. Lew, a visiting professor of international and public affairs at Columbia, served as secretary of the Treasury from 2013 to 2017.

Lead.  The gift that keeps on giving.

Links: This is 63 pages long.  But, if you have been following this story, it is very.... terrifying.

          From the Freep. Concerning the deaths from Legionnaire's Disease.

Someone will go to prison over this lead in the water crisis. It won't be the ones that actually deserve to go, but someone will pay the price.

MAGA Day 244, President of the United States compared to a barking dog by tinpot NK regime, whose leader revels in getting Trump's goat: “There is a saying that the marching goes on even when dogs bark,” Ri said, according to South Korea’s Yonhap news agency.  “If he was thinking he could scare us with the sound of a dog barking, that’s really a dog dream,” he added. In Korean, a dog dream is one that makes little sense.

By Kenneth P. Vogel & Jo Becker @ NYTimes.com, 12:10 pm

Paul J. Manafort, President Trump’s former campaign chairman, has continued soliciting international business even as his past international work is under investigation.

WASHINGTON — Paul J. Manafort, the former campaign chairman for President Trump who is at the center of investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election, is working for allies of the leader of Iraq’s Kurdish region to help administer and promote a referendum on Kurdish independence from Iraq.

The United States opposes the referendum, but Mr. Manafort has carved out a long and lucrative career advising foreign clients whose interests have occasionally diverged from American foreign policy. And he has continued soliciting international business even as his past international work has become a focus of the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into ties between Russia and Mr. Trump and his associates [....]

In fact, the work for the Kurdish group appears to have been initiated this summer around the time that federal authorities working for Mr. Mueller raided Mr. Manafort’s home in Virginia and informed him that they planned to indict him.

While the Kurdish referendum, scheduled for Monday, would not immediately trigger independence [....]

"Iran does not threat anybody and the same way will not bend to anybody’s threat." President Rouhani

This speech deserves attention by anybody who thinks that ​Trump's speech at the U.N. deserves attention.  Maybe it will get fair coverage. We'll see.