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EAU CLAIRE - Vice President Mike Pence stopped in western Wisconsin on Thursday to rally support for the Trump administration's efforts to revive the nation's economy clobbered by the coronavirus pandemic and to fight for voters in a politicallyunpredictable area of the state.

To a crowd of about 100 seated on the floor of a Midwest Manufacturing distribution building on the campus of Menards' headquarters, Pence said President Donald Trump will continue to impose tariffs in an effort to "level the playing field for American workers."

"It's a win for American jobs and American farmers," Pence said about the new trade agreement with Canada and Mexico. "This president stood strong and drew a hard bargain for Wisconsin dairy. It's true."

Vice President Mike Pence speaks at Midwest Manufacturing in Eau Claire on Thursday.(Photo: Tork Mason/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

Pence said Trump also pushed back against Canada over allowing product lines that would crowd out American dairy products.

"Canada agreed to end the unfair treatment of dairy farmers and we're going to increase our dairy exports by more than $300 million that's a win," Pence said, referring to projections from the International Trade Association.

While advocatesdescribe the trade agreement as a better deal than NAFTA, Brookings Institution fellowGeoffrey Gertzhas saidthe new pact"looks remarkably similar" to the agreement it would replace.

Among the biggest changes, he wrote in a 2018 analysis, were higher rules-of-origin requirements in the automobile industry and "marginally greater U.S. access to the Canadian dairy market."

Democrats have blasted the Trump administration's efforts to bolster a collapsing dairy industry in Wisconsin, pointing to arecent CNBC investigation that showed U.S. trade aid benefited mostly large farms and not the typical-size farm that has struggled in the state in recent years.

SPECIAL REPORT: Dairyland in Distress

Republicans see western Wisconsin the swingiest region of this swing state as a key to a successful re-election bid in Wisconsin. U.S. Rep. Ron Kinds district, the 3rd Congressional District, voted Democratic for president by 11 points in 2012, Republican for president by 4 points in 2016, and Democratic for governor by 2 points and Democratic for U.S. Senate by 13 points in 2018.

Farmers have takena lot of the economic hitsin Wisconsin in recent years.But Republicans have more than a 20-point edge over Democrats in how farm families describe their partisan leaning in Wisconsin, according to polling by the Marquette Law School.

And Trump has a similar margin over Biden among farm familiesin Marquette's polling dating back to last fall.

Wisconsin billionaire John Menard, the state's wealthiest resident and a GOP donor, and his family were seated among the crowd. Pence wasjoined by Ivanka Trump, President Trump's daughter and adviser, and U.S Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.

Pence made his pitch for manufacturing the same week Wisconsin's top elected Republican delivered a very different message on the issue. U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson this week touted outsourcing jobs, saying "it makes no sense for American workers to produce high-labor-content products" when businesses can get them "dirt cheap" overseas.

While Thursday's event was billed as one focused on manufacturing jobs, Pence also keyed inon two issues the Trump campaign is depending on to improve the president's position in his re-election bid.

The vice president received standing ovations while promising to defend law enforcement and to quickly fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court following her death.

Ginsburg, he said, "paved the way for women in the law."

"As we rightly honor her life of service, the Constitution of the United States provides the president shall appoint a judge to the Supreme Court and I promise you come this Saturday, President Donald Trump will do his duty as we nominate a principled conservative woman," Pence said.

Following the event, Pence took a bus to Minneapolis for an event focused on law enforcement.

Pence did not mention comments Trump made to veteran journalist Bob Woodward, admitting he deliberately downplayed the risk of the coronavirus to the public. Instead, he memorialized the 200,000 people who have died since the pandemic hit the United States.

"Thefamilies that have suffered loss during the course of this pandemic have always been on our heartsand you're in our prayers," Pence said. "There's not a day that's gone by Ihaven't thought about families who lost loved ones."

The vice president has visited Wisconsin four times over the last month, and at least five times this year.

He wasin Janesvillelast week, La Crosse on Labor Day, Darien in August and Ripon in July. It's the third visit to Wisconsin this week by top officials in the Trump administration.

RELATED: Biden maintains lead over Trump in Wisconsin and two other northern battlegrounds in UW poll

Thursday's visit coincides with a $2 million ad buy by Republicans to make a play for Kind's western Wisconsin seat, which covers Eau Claire.

The Congressional Leadership Fund will begin airing ads on television and posting them online beginning Friday.

Kind's GOP opponent, Derrick Van Orden, attended Pence's event, talking to attendees alongside U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany beforehand.

Pence's event was held at a time coronavirus cases are skyrocketing in Wisconsin and hospitalizations are at a record high. Crowd members and staff all wore masks inside the event and seating was spaced out.

Tiffany, who spoke to the crowd beforehand, said he has a good friend in intensive care with a coronavirus infection. He credited the Trump administration for approving therepurposed Ebola treatment Remdesivir, which he said his friend would have died without.

Ahead of the event, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwinripped the Trump administration's response to the pandemic and cited three areas of failure. She said the administration should have been "straight with the American people," created enforceable pandemic work standards on an emergency basisand unleashed "the full potential of the defense production act."

"Rather than saying, hey mayors, it's your responsibility, hey hospitals, it's your responsibility, hey states, it's your responsibility. And they're bidding against each other, being price gouged and it has done nothing to stem the short supply," she told reporters.

"If we could have right from the get-goreduced the transmission and then be at such a low number where every new case could be contact traced, quarantined, isolated, we wouldn't be where we are now," Baldwin said.

"In Wisconsin this past week we have had four of our record high days of positive tests. Four! We have more people in the hospital today in September, then we have at any other point in this pandemic," Baldwin said."If you hear me being quite emotional about it it's because I feel President Trump has been an utter failure in terms of this leadership on the pandemic."

Bill Glauber of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel contributed to this report.

Contact Molly Beckat molly.beck@jrn.com. Follow her on Twitter at @MollyBeck.

Our subscribers make this reporting possible. Please consider supporting local journalism by subscribing to the Journal Sentinel at jsonline.com/deal.

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Mike Pence rallies swing district voters in 4th recent campaign trip to Wisconsin - Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden have had their first debate matchup; next, their vice presidential nominees will have the chance.

Vice President Mike Pence and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) will face off in the next 2020 debate on October 7, with Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief for USA Today, moderating.

The debate will air live on ABC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, Fox, NBC, and PBS Utah from 9 to 10:30 pm ET from the University of Utahs Nancy Peery Marriott Auditorium in Salt Lake City, where there will be a small live audience of students. (Thats 8-9:30 pm CT, 7-8:30 pm MT, and 6-7:30 pm PT.) Debate organizers have secured the Cleveland Clinic as a health adviser to ensure that the debates can continue safely amid the pandemic.

Vice presidential debates havent historically attracted much fanfare, drawing much lower viewership than presidential debates. But Democrats are hoping that Harris a former San Francisco district attorney who earned a reputation for being a strong debater during the Democratic primaries and who is known for her incisive style of questioning witnesses during congressional hearings will go on the attack.

Her most notable debate performance during the primaries was when she criticized Biden, now her running mate, for opposing mandatory school busing during the 1970s, which she argued created an obstacle to desegregation efforts. Harris, as the most junior member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, also famously grilled Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearings in 2018 regarding his stance on abortion and about whether he had inappropriately discussed the Mueller investigation with Trumps personal attorney.

In preparation for the upcoming debate, Harris reportedly has been practicing with former presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, who has been playing the role of Pence in mock debates.

Pence, for his part, has enlisted the help of former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican who served at the same time that Pence was governor of Indiana, the Washington Post reported. Page, the moderator, hasnt announced debate topics yet, but Pence, as the leader of the White House coronavirus task force, will likely be called on to answer for his role in failing to prevent the deaths of more than 200,000 Americans amid the pandemic. He recently told the public to anticipate that cases will rise in the days ahead, predicting another surge.

Pence has faced criticism over his handling of the pandemic even from within his own camp: Olivia Troye, his former top aide on the coronavirus task force, went so far as to endorse Biden publicly, joining the group Republican Voters Against Trump.

There will also be two more presidential debates on October 15 and 22 in Miami, Florida, and Nashville, Tennessee, respectively. C-SPAN editor Steve Scully will moderate the Miami debate, and NBC anchor Kristen Welker has been selected to do so in Tennessee.

With just weeks to go before the November 3 election, Biden remains ahead in the polls, besting Trump nationally by a margin of about 7 points on average, according to FiveThirtyEight. He also appears to be carrying a narrower lead in critical swing states, including Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona. At this point, it doesnt seem like those polls will move significantly ahead of Election Day given that the biggest crises facing Americans a pandemic that shows no sign of slowing down, an economic downturn, and a national reckoning over race arent going away anytime soon.

It remains to be seen how much or little the Tuesday night debate and the three remaining shift those numbers.

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When is the next 2020 debate? Susan Page will moderate the vice presidential debate on October 7 - Vox.com

US Vice President Mike Pence speaks on Covid-19 testing in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington, DC on September 28, 2020.

Mandel Ngan | AFP | Getty Images

Vice President Mike Pence said Monday that Americans should expect Covid-19 cases to rise "in the days ahead" as testing increases and some Midwest states show worrying coronavirus trends.

The rate of Covid-19 tests that come back positive is now rising in 10 states in the Midwest and West, Pence said during a press conference from the White House's Rose Garden alongside President Donald Trump. With that development and the United States' "historic advance in testing," the public "should anticipate that cases will rise in the days ahead," he added.

"But as we more readily identify those who have contracted the coronavirus, the American people can be confident," he said.

The U.S. has the worst outbreak in the world, with more than 7.1 million cases and at least204,881 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. On Monday, Reuters reported the rate of tests coming back positive for Covid-19 is topping 25% in several Midwest states in the U.S. as the number of cases and hospitalizations also surge in the region.

Trump and other U.S. officials have suggestedincreased testing is the reason the United States has the most cases in the world. But infectious diseases experts and scientists have pointed to hospitalizations, deaths andthe positivity rate, which indicates the percentage of tests that come back positive in a given region, to dispel that claim.

Earlier in the day, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious diseases expert, said the U.S. is "not in a good place" as colder months loom and the number of newly reported coronavirus cases continues to swell beyond 40,000 people every day.

"There are states that are starting to show an uptick in cases and even some increase in hospitalizations in some states," Fauci told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview aired Monday.

"And I hope not, but we very well might start seeing increases in deaths," Fauci said. He added that he's concerned about being in "a position like that as the weather starts getting cold."

The U.S. government plans to distribute 150 million rapid Covid-19 tests made by Abbott Laboratories in "the coming weeks" as the country moves into its fall season, Trump announced Monday at the press conference. He said about 100 million of the tests will go toward efforts to reopen schools, while 50 million will go to nursing homes and assisted living facilities.

Abbott has previously said it expected to ship tens of millions of tests in September, ramping to 50 million tests a month from the beginning of October.

Trump also reiterated his claim that the U.S. outbreak is "rounding the corner," adding the nation has "too many states that are locked down right now."

"Nobody knows what the governors are doing, actually," he said.

Trump touted potential vaccines from Moderna, Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, which are all currently in late-stage testing. He said the vaccines are "coming fast" and the results from the trials are going to be "veryextraordinary."

"Vaccines are coming, but we're rounding the corner regardless," he said.

CNBC'sNoah Higgins-Dunncontributed to this report.

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Pence says Americans should expect coronavirus cases to rise 'in the days ahead' - CNBC

Though most people know Sacha Baron Cohens mockumentary movie Borat by the singular name of the fictional character at the center of it, the official title is much longer. The movie is actually called Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. And whenever the recently revealed sequel arrives, it appears that it will come with an even longer title that was recently filed with the Writers Guild of America.

In a filing on the official Writers Guild of America website (via The Film Stage), which has since been deleted, the title for Borat 2 was revealed to be Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan. Not only is that a longer title, but were betting that Vice President Mike Pence isnt going to be very happy about being referenced alongside a pornographic monkey, and his wife will probably be even less thrilled, perhaps banning him from being in rooms alone with any monkeys for the foreseeable future.

As for scripting duties, it appears a lot of people had a hand in this one. Sacha Baron Cohen, Anthony Hines, Peter Baynham, and Dan Mazer, all writers on the first film, came back to script the sequel. But theyve also been joined by Dan Swimer, Erica Rivinoja, Jena Friedman, and Lee Kern. The story is credited to Cohen, Hines, Swimer and Nina Pedrad, a writer on 30 Rock and New Girl, and sister of former Saturday Night Live cast member Nasim Pedrad.

Details on the story itself are rather thin, though previously we heard that because Borat is so well-known after the first documentary he made, he has to go undercover in various disguises to make this movie. The movie has been said to explore Donald Trumps relationship with the late, notorious sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and both Mike Pence and Rudy Giuliani make appearances in the movie. And now that we know the title, it would appear that the driving force of the movie is trying to give Mike Pence a pornographic monkey, whatever that means.

The movie has already been screened for focus groups, but we dont know if the original films director Larry Charles came back to direct or even who will be distributing the movie. Were also not sure if this is something that is meant to be released imminently before the election by way of a streaming service or if it will be released in theaters much later. Right now, were just waiting to see what kind of tricks Cohen has up his sleeve, and we cant wait to see how many high profile politicians he embarrasses this time.

Read more from the original source:
Official Borat 2 Title Revealed, and Mike Pence Won't Like It - /FILM

EAU CLAIRE Forty days before Election Day, Vice President Mike Pence stopped in Eau Claire to tout the Trump administrations record on the economy.

In friendly territory speaking to about 100 workers inside a countertop factory of Menards subsidiary Midwest Manufacturing the Republican vice president said President Donald Trump stands up for American jobs and American workers.

Pence highlighted the administrations efforts to roll back red tape, pass the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement and bring back manufacturing jobs, saying U.S. businesses created more than 7 million jobs, including 61,000 in Wisconsin in Trumps first three years in office.

The president said early on we were going to bring back our factories, we were going to bring back jobs, we were going to bring back those four beautiful words Made in the USA and and thats just what weve done, Pence said, drawing applause from the audience.

The presidents daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump, also addressed the crowd briefly, praising the craftsmanship she saw in a tour of Midwest Manufacturing and saying, Companies like yours, people like you, this is what President Trump is fighting for every single day.

The vice president, who chairs the White House Coronavirus Task Force, later acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a blow to the economy but insisted that Trump softened the impact by pushing for the distribution of personal protective equipment, ramping up testing and banning travel to the United States from China in late January actions Pence said saved hundreds of thousands of American lives.

Were slowing the spread, were working to flatten the curve and ... were opening up America again, Pence said.

Ivanka Trump backed up that claim, declaring, The great American comeback is well underway.

In Wisconsin, official seasonally adjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics figures show total employment rose from 2.99 million in January 2017 when Trump took office to 3 million in January 2020, a gain of 11,900. Total employment dropped to 2.86 million in August, or 129,700 below the level in January 2017. State manufacturing jobs rose from 468,400 in January 2017 to 484,100 in January 2020 before dipping to 458,700 in August.

The campaign of Democratic challenger and former Vice President Joe Biden offered a starkly different take than Pence on the economy and Trumps handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in a statement released Thursday in advance of the vice presidents visit to Wisconsin.

This week, Wisconsin passed the grim milestone of 100,000 positive COVID-19 cases and theres no end in sight, said Kate Bedingfield, Biden for President deputy campaign manager. Infection rates are skyrocketing, tens of thousands of workers have lost their jobs while tens of thousands more have dropped out of the labor force completely, small businesses have permanently closed, parents are anxious about sending their kids back to school all because President Trump and Vice President Pence still have no plan to get the virus under control.

By contrast, Bedingfield said, Biden has a plan to confront the pandemic and will restore the middle class and invest in Wisconsin manufacturing.

As of Thursday, the United States had reported nearly 7 million COVID-19 cases, or 22% of the 32 million cases worldwide, and 202,404 coronavirus-related deaths, or 21% of the 979,388 reported globally, according to Johns Hopkins University researchers.

Pence also touched on two other hot-button issues when he talked about filling the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy created by the death Friday of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the violence that followed Wednesdays announcement that a Kentucky grand jury brought no charges against Louisville police for the killing of Breonna Taylor, a Black woman, in a March drug raid connected to a suspect who didnt live at Taylors home. Two officers were shot Wednesday in the protests that erupted in response to the news.

After calling Ginsburg a true public servant who paved the way for women in the law and noting that he paid his respects Wednesday evening as she lay in repose at the Supreme Court, Pence said Trump plans to exercise his constitutional right to nominate a principled conservative woman to the court on Saturday.

After the United States Senate fulfills their duty to advise and consent ... were gonna fill that seat, Pence said.

The rush to replace Ginsburg before the election has drawn protests from Democrats who say its hypocritical for the Republican-controlled senate to take that action now when four years ago the body refused to give a hearing to former Democratic President Barack Obama nominee Merrick Garland, who was nominated eight months before the election, with GOP senators then claiming that letting voters have a say in the choice through the election was the right thing to do.

Regarding the wounded officers, Pence said they are expected to recover.

Violence against law enforcement must stop and it must stop now, Pence said, adding that he and the president support the right to peacefully protest but believe there is no excuse for the rioting, looting and violence that has followed incidents this year such as the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, both at the hands of police.

Ill make you a promise, Wisconsin, Pence said. Under President Donald Trump and this vice president and this administration, we will always back the blue. Were not going to defund the police, not now, not ever.

Midwest Manufacturing employee Mike Stanton of Eau Claire said he was fortunate to be picked to be one of the workers permitted to attend the event and came away impressed.

I thought it was great, Stanton said of Pences 35-minute speech. Im a pretty hard-core conservative, so I agree with everything he said.

After the event, Pence boarded a bus heading for a Cops for Trump campaign event in Minneapolis.

The rest is here:
VP Pence talks up manufacturing in EC | Elections - Leader-Telegram