Fox News uses the word 'hate' much more than MSNBC or CNN

Fox News is up to five times more likely to use the word “hate” in its programming than its main competitors, according to our new study of how cable news channels use language.

Fox particularly uses the term when explaining opposition to Donald Trump. His opponents are said to “hate” Trump, his values and his followers.

Our research, which ran from Jan. 1 to May 8, 2020, initially explored news of Trump’s impeachment. Then came the coronavirus. As we sifted through hundreds of cable news transcripts over five months, we noticed consistent differences between the vocabulary used on Fox News and that of MSNBC.

While their news agendas were largely similar, the words they used to describe these newsworthy events diverged greatly.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/fox-news-uses-the-word-hate-much-more-than-msnbc-or-cnn-145983

Failure to shore up state budgets may hit women's wallets especially hard

States are seeing enormous budget shortfalls because of the coronavirus pandemic, and the consequences for teachers and other public school employees could be dire. At least 640,000 education jobs in state and local government vanished between February and August 2020.

The states, which provide an average of about 47% of U.S. public school funding, are cutting school spending because their tax revenue is declining and they have no easy recourse to balance their budgets; unlike the federal government, states can’t just print money.

Negotiations continue around another pandemic relief bill, which would include money for states to spend on public education. But lawmakers have passed no measures since May, when the House of Representatives passed a US$3 trillion coronavirus relief bill that stalled in the Senate.

We study families, employment, corporations – and gender. We are tracking how the coronavirus pandemic is underscoring the disproportionate financial burden women bear when states slash their budgets in times of recession.

Read more: https://theconversation.com/failure-to-shore-up-state-budgets-may-hit-womens-wallets-especially-hard-145524

Jimmy Kimmel Live: Bernie Sanders Reacts to Trump Biden Debate

Jimmy Kimmel on Worst Debate Ever

Once a boom town, now a ghost town. Always a hometown.

Centuries-old sycamore trees tower over the dry riverbed of Harshaw Creek, in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona. Where houses once stood, flat barren earth stretches to the base of nearby low oak-covered hills. A crumbling wooden building, relic of a mining supervisor's home, and a cemetery are all that remain of what once was one of the West’s richest mining towns.

Now a ghost town, Harshaw was one of nine mining camps in the area that saw waves of prospectors come and go in the 19th century. It held some of the Arizona Territory’s highest-grade silver, lead and gold ore, so when the U.S. government passed the General Mining Act in 1872, giving prospectors the right to claim mineral deposits on public land for no more than $5 per acre, investors poured in. A patchwork of mining claims soon covered the region, with 40 operations in Harshaw alone. Within three decades, the Patagonia Mountains had produced 79% of all the ore processed in the territory, with a total value exceeding $2.5 trillion yearly in today’s currency.

With the mines came thousands of workers and their families, most of them Mexican Americans and Latinos. For nearly a century, they drilled and transported ore through tunnels for $2 a day — half of what their Anglo counterparts earned. But in 1925, and again in the 1950s, the combination of collapsing metal prices and exhausted mineral veins sent the mining companies looking elsewhere, leaving tons of untreated mineral waste behind and no future for the workers who’d powered the industry. Now, more than half a century later, mining is coming back to Harshaw: South32, an Australia-based polymetallic mining company, estimates that there are still at least 155 million tons of high-grade metals hidden deep underground. It is currently doing exploratory drilling half a mile away from the ghost town, acquiring permits and gearing up to operate in the near future. But whether modern mining — with its much greater profits and the promise of better environmental safeguards — will leave a better legacy this time around remains to be seen.

FRANK, HENRY, MIKE AND JUAN SOTO grew up in Harshaw in the 1940s and ’50s with their parents and three sisters. On a recent spring day, they sat around their family dining table on the south side of Tucson, 70 miles north of Harshaw. Angelita Soto, the fourth of the siblings, joined in by phone as the conversation flew back and forth in English and Spanish. The siblings laughed and reminisced about their childhoods: the pranks they played on each other, their backyard with its bounty of black walnuts, acorns, watercress and fruit trees. The Soto kids grew up running around barefoot, without tap water or electricity. “We were poor, but we had everything,” said Angelita.

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/issues/52.11/south-mining-once-a-boom-town-now-a-ghost-town-always-a-hometown
(High Country News)

Alcohol consumption in U.S. rose 14% during pandemic, RAND finds

Sept. 29 (UPI) -- Alcohol consumption in the United States increased by an average of 14% this spring, when most of the country was in some degree of lockdown because of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey released Tuesday.

Drinking rose by 19% among adults age 30 to 59 and by 17% among women, according to the poll of 1,540 Americans published in the JAMA Network Open.

Compared to the same period in 2019, women reported a 41% increase in "days of heavy drinking," the researchers said.

"Our study shows that people drank more frequently and, for women in particular, more heavily...during the initial stages of COVID-19 compared to their own behaviors from a year earlier," study co-author Michael S. Pollard told UPI.

Read more: https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/09/29/Alcohol-consumption-in-US-rose-14-during-pandemic-RAND-finds/7161601385728/

In Miami, Spanish-language ad by anti-Trump Republicans likens the president to Castro

WASHINGTON -- A group of political operatives with ties to former Republican Florida Gov. Jeb Bush pledged a month ago to “surgically target” small groups of voters around the state to help Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

Part of that strategy includes running TV ads focused on reaching Latino voters in Miami-Dade County.

Republican Voters Against Trump, an anti-Donald Trump super PAC, will begin airing a TV ad on Tuesday in Spanish that compares the president to Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Russian President Vladimir Putin and former Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

“Dictators. Communists. Enemies of freedom and America, but friends of Donald Trump,” the ad says, while playing images of violence in Venezuela and Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un. “Remember, dictators lie to you first and then ruin lives to get whatever they want.”

Read more: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article246067775.html

Mike Bloomberg commits $4 million to Biden ground game in Florida

Joe Biden’s ground game in Florida is getting a jolt from billionaire Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg told the Miami Herald Monday that he’s giving $4 million to get-out-the-vote efforts on behalf of the Democratic presidential nominee in the nation’s largest swing state. With the money, grassroots organizations held back for months by the coronavirus pandemic plan to promote Biden by talking face-to-face with voters in minority and “underrepresented” communities.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has upended this election season and changed the way campaigns are run in many ways — but one thing that remains unchanged is the importance of a strong ground game in engaging voters, informing them of what’s at stake in this election, and ensuring they know how to make their voices heard at the ballot box,” Bloomberg said in a statement to the Herald. “And that’s especially true of Florida, where mail-in ballots have already been sent out and early voting begins in just three weeks.”

Bloomberg’s spending on neighborhood canvassing is only one piece of a $100 million commitment to beat President Donald Trump in Florida, a state he must win to be reelected. About half that money has been put into TV ads largely intended to reach Black and Hispanic voters.

Read more: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article246051305.html

'We'll stop the bleeding': Democrats spot erosion of Trump's rural dominance

MONACA, Pa. -- Terri Mitko is sure there are former supporters of President Donald Trump who aren’t going to be voting for him again, because she lives with one: Her husband.

“There was a whole ‘I don’t want to vote for Hillary’ contingent. And Hillary’s not running this time,” says Mitko, an attorney and chairwoman of the Beaver County Democratic Party. “Trump was a breath of fresh air and had this schtick going about draining the swamp. ... Well, now we’re onto him.”

Beaver County, a hardscrabble western Pennsylvania manufacturing town in the midst of constructing a giant new plastics plant along the Ohio River, is one of the far-flung — “forgotten,” the president would say — areas that delivered a larger-than-anticipated margin for Trump in 2016. He carried it by 19 points over Hillary Clinton, netting 15,000 votes, about a third of the 44,000 total votes he won the commonwealth by four years ago.

As some polls show the race in Pennsylvania tightening into the final five weeks of the presidential campaign, Democrats believe Joe Biden’s ability to shave Trump’s margins in rural areas such as Beaver will be determinative throughout the Midwest — from western Michigan to northern Wisconsin. They are small towns alongside rivers and railroads, tucked into valleys and farmland adorned with Trump regalia. The president will easily win these areas. But preventing him from running up the score — to 60 or even 70 percent of the vote — could be the difference between a second Trump term and a President Joe Biden.

Read more: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article246072045.html

Police break up FSU off-campus party with over 1,000 people

TALLAHASSEE — As coronavirus cases spike among Florida State University students, local police said Sunday they broke up a party at an off-campus student apartment complex that involved about 700 vehicles and more than 1,000 attendees.

Tallahassee police said it was one of a dozen large gatherings they broke up over the weekend, including one Sunday where two people were injured by gunfire.

Police said the vehicles at the student apartment complex were blocking travel lanes and a Leon County sheriff’s helicopter was used to help disburse the crowd.

Florida State University reported that more than 1,400 students and 26 employees had tested positive for COVID-19 through Sept. 18. The university updates its coronavirus numbers weekly.

Read more: https://www.orlandosentinel.com/coronavirus/os-ne-coronavirus-fsu-covid-party-20200928-svwrq753yjg5bavycmoanev76a-story.html