Jul 17 2020

Black Helicopters and Secret Police

Think it hasn’t come to that? You are mistaken.

‘It was like being preyed upon’: Portland protesters say federal officers in unmarked vans are detaining them
By Katie Shepherd, Washington Post
July 17, 2020

Federal customs officials said Friday that their agents had detained a demonstrator in Portland, Ore., who had described being “terrified” by an encounter with unidentified men in military fatigues, offering a defense amid intense criticism of accounts of federal officials circulating in the city in unmarked cars.

Mark Pettibone, a 29-year-old demonstrator, told The Washington Post he was scared when men in green military fatigues and generic “police” patches jumped out of an unmarked minivan early Wednesday. Reports of similar incidents have sparked condemnation from civil-rights activists and lawmakers.

Pettibone told The Post in an interview he did not know who detained him. In a statement on Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection said its agents had taken the action and that they “had information indicating the person in the video was suspected of assaults against federal agents or destruction of federal property.”

When the agents approached him, Customs said, “a large and violent mob moved towards their location. For everyone’s safety, CBP agents quickly moved the suspect to a safer location for further questioning.”

The agency also disputed his description of not knowing who detained him, saying: “The CBP agents identified themselves and were wearing CBP insignia during the encounter. The names of the agents were not displayed due to recent doxing incidents against law enforcement personnel who serve and protect our country.”

In Pettibone’s account, when several men in fatigues approached him, his first instinct was to run.

He did not know whether the men were police or far-right extremists, who frequently don militarylike outfits and harass left-leaning protesters in Portland. The 29-year-old resident said he made it about a half-block before he realized there would be no escape.

Then, he sank to his knees, hands in the air.

“I was terrified,” Pettibone said. “It seemed like it was out of a horror/sci-fi, like a Philip K. Dick novel. It was like being preyed upon.”

He was detained and searched. One man asked him if he had any weapons; he did not. They drove him to the federal courthouse and placed him in a holding cell, he said. Two officers eventually returned to read his Miranda rights and ask if he would waive those rights to answer a few questions; he did not.

And almost as suddenly as they had grabbed him off the street, the men let him go. The federal officers who snatched him off the street as he was walking home from a peaceful protest did not tell him why he had been detained or provide him any record of an arrest, he told The Post. As far as he knows, he has not been charged with any crimes.

His detention, which was first reported by Oregon Public Broadcasting, and videos of similar actions have raised alarm bells for many. Legal scholars questioned whether the detentions pass constitutional muster.

“Arrests require probable cause that a federal crime had been committed, that is, specific information indicating that the person likely committed a federal offense, or a fair probability that the person committed a federal offense,” Orin Kerr, a professor at University of California at Berkeley Law School, told The Post. “If the agents are grabbing people because they may have been involved in protests, that’s not probable cause.”

Federal officers from the U.S. Marshals Service and Department of Homeland Security have stormed Portland’s streets as part of President Trump’s promised strong response to ongoing protests. Local leaders expressed alarm at news of Pettibone’s detention and echoed calls for the feds to leave that have grown stronger since Marshals Service officers severely wounded a peaceful protester on Saturday.

“A peaceful protester in Portland was shot in the head by one of Donald Trump’s secret police,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) wrote in a Thursday tweet that also called out acting DHS secretary Chad Wolf. “Now Trump and Chad Wolf are weaponizing the DHS as their own occupying army to provoke violence on the streets of my hometown because they think it plays well with right-wing media.”

Civil rights advocates suggested the Trump administration is testing the limits of its executive power.

“I think Portland is a test case,” Zakir Khan, a spokesman for the Oregon chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, told The Post. “They want to see what they can get away with before launching into other parts of the country.”

Jann Carson, interim executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon, called the recent arrests “flat-out unconstitutional” in a statement shared with The Post.

“Usually when we see people in unmarked cars forcibly grab someone off the street, we call it kidnapping,” Carson said. “Protesters in Portland have been shot in the head, swept away in unmarked cars, and repeatedly tear-gassed by uninvited and unwelcome federal agents. We won’t rest until they are gone.”

Nightly protests have seized Portland’s downtown streets since George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis in late May. For more than six weeks, Portland police have clashed with left-leaning protesters speaking out against racism and police brutality. Tear gas has choked hundreds in the city, both protesters and other residents caught in the crossfire. Protesters have spray-painted anti-police messages on the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse and Multnomah County Justice Center, which serves as the local jail and a police headquarters.

After Trump sent federal officers to the city, allegedly to quell violence, tensions escalated. The feds have repeatedly deployed tear gas to scuttle protests, despite a newly passed state law that bans local police from using the chemical irritant except to quash riots. On Saturday, federal agents shot a man in the face with a less-than-lethal munition, fracturing his skull. Local officials, from the mayor to the governor, have asked the president to pull the federal officers out of the city.

“I am proud to be among the loud chorus of elected officials calling for the federal troops in Portland’s streets to go home,” Portland City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty said in a statement shared with The Post on Sunday. “Their presence here has escalated tensions and put countless Portlanders exercising their First Amendment rights in greater danger.”

Pettibone says he was simply exercising his free speech rights on Wednesday when he was detained. He and a friend were walking to a car to drive home after a relatively calm demonstration in a nearby park. He said he did not do anything to instigate police that night, or at any of the other protests he had attended over the past six weeks.

“I have a pretty strong philosophical conviction that I will not engage in any violent activity,” he told The Post. “I keep it mellow and try to document police brutality and try to show up for solidarity.”

DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday night, and likewise did not answer questions from Oregon Public Broadcasting. The Marshals Service told the radio station its officers had not arrested Pettibone and said the agency always keeps records of its arrests.

Trump has cheered harsh tactics by officers in Portland, and the acting Homeland Security secretary has vowed to keep federal forces in Portland until local leaders “publicly condemn what the violent anarchists are doing.”

“We’ve done a great job in Portland,” Trump said at a news conference on Monday. “Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail. We very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily. It’s not hard to do, if you know what you’re doing.”

Yet the scene on Portland’s streets late Thursday reflected a different reality.

Protesters once again filled the streets in downtown, defiantly moving fencing meant to keep the crowd away from the Multnomah County Justice Center. And once again, federal officers launched tear gas into the protest.

As police, both local and federal, have responded to demonstrators with increasing force, the protests have grown more unwieldy and determined. Neither side appears ready to surrender.

“Once you’re out on the street and you’ve been tear-gassed and you see that there’s no reason — the police will claim that there’s a riot just so they can use tear gas — it makes you want to go out there even more to see if there can be any kind of justice,” Pettibone told The Post.

Jul 17 2020

Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: The Next Disaster Is Just a Few Days Away

Millions of unemployed Americans face imminent catastrophe.

Some of us knew from the beginning that Donald Trump wasn’t up to the job of being president, that he wouldn’t be able to deal with a crisis that wasn’t of his own making. Still, the magnitude of America’s coronavirus failure has shocked even the cynics.

At this point Florida alone has an average daily death toll roughly equal to that of the whole European Union, which has 20 times its population.

How did this happen? One key element in our deadly debacle has been extreme shortsightedness: At every stage of the crisis Trump and his allies refused to acknowledge or get ahead of disasters everyone paying attention clearly saw coming.

Blithe denials that Covid-19 posed a threat gave way to blithe denials that rapid reopening would lead to a new surge in infections; now that the surge is upon us, Republican governors are responding sluggishly and grudgingly, while the White House is doing nothing at all.

And now another disaster — this time economic rather than epidemiological — is just days away.

Eugene Robinson: For the next six months, we’re trapped on a leaking ship captained by a foolFor the next six months, we’re trapped on a leaking ship captained by a fool

This is the awful reality of our situation: For the next six months — at least — we are trapped on a badly leaking ship captained by an utter fool.

If he cared a whit about the well-being of the nation he is supposed to lead, President Trump would resign immediately. He would slink back to his gaudy apartment in Trump Tower, where he could look down at the new Black Lives Matter street painting on Fifth Avenue. Or he would flee to his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, where his rounds of golf might be disturbed by the sirens of ambulances rushing covid-19 victims to overburdened emergency rooms.

But it is absurd to imagine that Trump cares about anyone or anything but himself. He will not go voluntarily. So on Election Day, he must be made to suffer a humiliating defeat, and on Inauguration Day, he must be firmly escorted — bodily, if necessary — out of the White House.

This election is not about politics, ideology or even red vs. blue tribal identity. At this point, it’s about our collective survival.

Catherine Rampell: Who would kick millions off health insurance in the middle of a pandemic? Yes, Trump.

In the midst of a pandemic — when Americans most need health insurance, and millions can’t find work — the Trump administration wants to kick Americans off their health insurance if they aren’t working.

Heartless, but it’s true.

This week, the Trump administration and the state of Arkansas asked the Supreme Court to allow reinstatement of Medicaid work requirements. This disastrous policy was struck down by lower courts last year after causing 18,000 low-income Arkansans to lose their insurance. Subsequent research found that 95 percent of residents targeted by the policy were working, or had qualified for an exemption. They were kicked off Medicaid all the same.

That’s because the program’s reporting requirements were so onerous and confusing that it was nearly impossible to prove compliance.

These efforts to erect artificial barriers to safety-net services that Americans are legally entitled to, and desperately need, are of apiece with other Trump regulatory actions.

Timothy Egan: Our Life Was Languid. Then My Daughter’s Family Moved In.

It’s been exhausting and exhilarating.

When we lived in Italy some years ago, our family of four would sometimes visit a family of more — a married couple and nonna playing with her grandkids in the garden, an uncle with a mental disability, and the brother who never launched, all living in a modest house of weathered stone.

They argued without filter, finished each other’s stories, and each took a turn at cooking, cleaning or bringing money and food into the home. It was charming, particularly at the big afternoon meal on Sunday, and, we thought, anachronistic.

During the lockdown of 2020, our nest has been a quarantined family of six — our daughter and her husband, their twin 1-year old boys, my wife and myself. It’s been exhausting, kinetic, cramped, and one of the few consistent joys in this awful time.

But as it turns out, three generations living under one roof is not anachronistic; it’s the future. Or, more precisely, a past brought back to mainstream life. Two years ago, the Pew Research Center reported that 64 million Americans were living in multigenerational households — the highest number on record, and an increase of almost 70 percent from 1980.

Paul Waldman: How Trump’s war on the Postal Service could create an election nightmare

The Republican crony now running the USPS is making it more likely that your ballot will be tossed in the trash.

We should pause here to say that the USPS is nothing short of a national treasure. It’s older than America itself — Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general in 1775 — and every day it executes an astounding feat of logistics, delivering hundreds of millions of letters and packages to addresses across the country. They’ll take your letter from coast to coast not for the $30 or more that FedEx or UPS will charge, but for 55 cents. And they provide a stable, middle-class living for hundreds of thousands of workers who don’t need college degrees to succeed.

All of which is why the Postal Service is the most popular agency in the federal government, beating out the National Park Service, NASA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But now it’s under threat. And while untold numbers of customers missing their mail for a day or two is bad, on Nov. 3 it could turn into an absolute nightmare.

Thirty-five states now either allow no-excuse absentee voting or vote entirely by mail, and during this pandemic, more people than ever will choose to avoid polling places and cast their ballot that way. That already means that the Postal Service will have to handle more absentee requests and ballots than ever before — and Trump’s postmaster general has forbidden its workers from working overtime.

Now here’s the kicker. In 34 states, under current law it’s not enough that your absentee ballot be postmarked by election day. It has to be received by election authorities by election day.

That includes the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

So imagine you get your absentee ballot and finally fill it out on Saturday, October 31st. The next morning you drop it in the mailbox — but there’s no pickup on Sunday. It gets picked up Monday, but your local post office is so overwhelmed with thousands of mail ballots that your ballot doesn’t get delivered to your board of elections until Wednesday, November 4th.

If you live in one of those 34 states, your vote won’t count.

Jul 17 2020

Cartnoon

Amedeus, National Theatre, July 23 2020.

So, like yesterday.

Jul 17 2020

Story Hour with the Lincoln Project

Each day at 8 PM ET the Lincoln Project is reading a excerpt from Dr. Mary L. Trump’s book about her Uncle Donald and the Trump family, “Too Much and Never Enough.” Here are the first two readings,

Jul 17 2020

The Breakfast Club (Higher Standard)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

TWA Flight 800 explodes; Russia’s royal family executed; Disneyland opens; Nicaragua’s Somoza goes into exile; Apollo and Soyuz link up in space; Baseball’s Ty Cobb and jazz great John Coltrane die.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you. Never excuse yourself.

Henry Ward Beecher

Continue reading

Jul 16 2020

Object Permanence

This week the White House ordered hospitals to stop sending all data on Corona-19 patients to the Center For Disease Control in Atlanta but to send it to a central data base in Washington controlled by Health and Human Services.

The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public.

The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic.

Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir, the first drug shown to be effective against the virus. But the Health and Human Services database that will receive new information is not open to the public, which could affect the work of scores of researchers, modelers and health officials who rely on C.D.C. data to make projections and crucial decisions.

Restricting access to this vital information will put lives at greater risk and complicate the treatment of those who contract this virus.

Now, any data the the CDC had has disappeared from their web site

Since the pandemic began, the CDC regularly published data on availability of hospital beds and intensive care units across the country. But Ryan Panchadsaram, who helps run a data-tracking site called Covid Exit Strategy, said that when he tried to collect the data from the CDC on Tuesday, it had disappeared.

“We were surprised because the modules that we normally go to were empty. The data wasn’t available and not there,” he said. “There was no warning.”

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield told reporters on a conference call Wednesday that states were told to stop sending hospital information to the National Healthcare Safety Network site, the CDC’s system for gathering data, beginning Wednesday. Instead, all data will now be reported through HHS’ reporting portal, officials said, adding that the decision was made to streamline data reporting and to provide HHS officials with real-time data.

Public health specialists and former health officials acknowledged that the CDC’s data reporting infrastructure was limited, and said it needs to be overhauled to meet the demands of the Covid-19 pandemic. However, they expressed concern in interviews with CNBC that the change could lead to less transparent data.

It appears that the Trump administrations is desperately trying to hide the severity of this pandemic because Trump’s polling numbers are tanking. Trump believes that if there is no testing and no reporting he can disappear the pandemic from the headlines and refocus the news to him. Trump seems to believe that if it is out of sight, it is not only out of mind, it doesn’t exist. Like an infant, he thinks that if you can’t see it, it doesn’t exist. Sometime between 4 and 8 months, however, most babies start to figure out that just because something is out of sight does not mean that it isn’t there anymore. By the time is child is 2 years old, the child fully understands object permanence. Object permanence is a skill that Trump, the “stable genius,” apparently lacks. This would be fine if he were still in the private sector but he’s not. He’s President of the United States and a danger to the lives and well being of its citizens.

Jul 16 2020

Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Amanda Marcotte: Jeff Sessions’ downfall: The wages of loyalty to Donald Trump is public humiliation

Trump is a vampire who feeds off his own followers — and no one deserved to be drained more than Jeff Sessions

Former senator and disgraced former Attorney General Jeff Sessions has finally come, at age 73, to what is almost certainly the end of the road for his villainous political career. On Tuesday night, the right-wing Republican who served as a U.S. senator from 1997 to 2017 lost in his comeback attempt, defeated in the Republican primary for his old seat by Tommy Tuberville, a man whose cartoonish name better suited his previous career as head football coach at Auburn. The runoff election between the two wasn’t even close, with the Riverboat Gambler (a silly and self-serious nickname for Tuberville, especially when “The Tubz” was right there for the taking) taking more than 60% of the vote.

It’s tempting, since we’re talking about Alabama, to believe that the Tubz (I can’t help it) won on a wave of goodwill from the famously football-fanatical voters of that state. That fails to take into account that Tuberville may well be regarded as one of history’s greatest monsters in the parts of the state that Roll Tide.

No, the reason that Tuberville won is likely due to something far more sinister than inappropriate of confidence in the governing skills of college football coaches: Alabama Republicans are hyper-loyal to Donald Trump, and Trump told them to vote for Tuberville. [..]

But let us not shed tears for Sessions, for whom the phrase “hoisted by his own petard” may as well have been invented. In a world where so few evil people get any form of justice, we should allow ourselves the pleasure of laughing deeply, richly and at length at Sessions for this public humiliation. Sessions did this to himself. He, more than anyone else in power, invited Trump into our political system, and he knows exactly how Trump repays his loyalists: With a boot to the face and a laugh about what a simp you were to believe in him.

Richard Wolfe: Trump may be no good at leading America – but he’s really, really good at lying

US credibility has been contorted to protect the feelings of one man-child. No wonder he finds Anthony Fauci so offensive

t’s outrageous to say that Donald Trump is good at nothing.

He may be no good at leading the country through a pandemic and recession. He may be no good at healing a nation that is deeply scarred by racist power. He may be no good at diplomacy with his allies, or even recognising America’s enemies for what they are.

But he is really, really good at lying. An Olympic-standard, Guinness Book of Records fabricator of falsehoods. He regurgitates lies as rapidly and copiously as Joey Chestnut swallows hotdogs.

Trump represents the historic high-water mark for verbal cheating, which is surely the only part of his short legacy that will feature in US history exams in 2030.

According to the exhausted and exhaustive factchecking team at the Washington Post, Trump’s rate of lying is shaped remarkably like the country’s exponential rise in Covid-19 cases.

It took him 827 days to reach his first 10,000 lies, but just 440 days to reach his second 10,000 lies. [..]

Credibility was one of the most potent weapons in America’s arsenal of soft power. The kind of potency that allowed Kennedy’s secretary of state to convince Charles de Gaulle to support his case against the Soviet Union in the Cuban missile crisis. Based on Kennedy’s word, not the photographic evidence.

Today America’s credibility has been contorted to protect the feelings of one man-child, not the security of a nation. That’s why someone like Anthony Fauci is so deeply offensive to the factory of fraud built inside this White House.

Frank Figliuzzi: Trump’s Rose Garden speech was a warning to China — and American 2020 voters

Listen carefully as the president and his team ratchet up their finger-pointing at China while claiming a foreign power will exploit mail-in ballots.

China will likely be the next foreign power accused of undermining a U.S. presidential election — it just doesn’t know it yet. The Trump administration, through words and deeds, appears to be grooming the American voter to accept an eventual assertion that China sabotaged the 2020 election if the outcome doesn’t go President Donald Trump’s way.

At the president’s Rose Garden news conference Tuesday, as in other public comments over the last few months, Trump bashed China, painted former Vice President Joe Biden as a “gift to communist China” and raised the specter of massive mail-in ballot fraud in November.

These distinct elements are neither isolated nor random. Their increasingly frequent juxtaposition signals a potential prophylactic strategy in the making. The seeds of such a strategy were sowed during the onset of the coronavirus in the late winter and continued to be cultivated in the spring and into the summer, and it should be ready for Trump and his cohorts to harvest in the fall. If his plan bears fruit, the strategy will wreak chaos and confusion amid a contested election result by casting doubt on the legitimacy of the vote tally. The strategy can be fairly easily broken down into four broad parts, three of which are already unfolding.

 
Max Boot: Trump can’t land a blow on Biden, and it’s driving him crazy

President Trump has never had much of a positive program — and he certainly doesn’t have one today. Asked repeatedly to explain his second-term agenda, he has been unable to articulate anything except his trademark list of grievances, vanities and resentments.

But in the past, it didn’t matter much because he was so effective at tearing down his opponents with insults, nasty nicknames and baseless charges. He couldn’t make most voters like him, but he could convince them to hate his opponent. In 2016, he did quite a number on “Crooked Hillary” with the aid of Russian intelligence. Former attorney general Jeff Sessions’s defeat in the Alabama Senate primary shows that Trump hasn’t entirely lost his touch for tearing down the objects of his wrath.

But, as Trump made clear in his Rose Garden news conference-turned-campaign rally on Tuesday, he hasn’t had any luck so far in battering his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden. Trump prides himself on being a “counterpuncher,” but none of his punches have landed yet. He hasn’t even managed to tag Biden with a nasty nickname — neither “Corrupt Joe” nor “Sleepy Joe” has stuck in the way that “Low Energy Jeb” or “Lil’ Marco” did.

The problem, from Trump’s perspective, is that Biden isn’t an African American like Barack Obama, a woman like Hillary Clinton or a socialist like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). He’s a boring, moderate white guy who has been around forever without ever being demonized in the way that Clinton was for decades. Even his base voters will have trouble seeing Uncle Joe as someone who is plotting to promote a “far-left fascism” and to “end America” — the accusations that Trump hurled at the left on July 3. As Biden himself would say in his charming throwback way: “C’mon man!”

Greg Sargent: Don’t get fooled by Trump’s cynical new scam on the coronavirus

President Trump and his advisers are a crackerjack bunch, so they’ve quickly figured out that it’s bad politics to be seen overtly undermining the nation’s top infectious-disease expert amid a pandemic that’s surging in part due to Trump’s own disastrous incompetence.

So they are working to create the impression in multiple ways that Trump and Anthony Fauci are in the process of patching things up, and are totally on the same team. Some news organizations are taking the bait, claiming that the White House is now approaching Fauci with a “change in tone.”

Don’t get snowed by this new scam.

What’s really going on here is a kind of two-step, a double game. Trump and his advisers want him to reap the political benefits of appearing to harbor general respect for Fauci’s expertise, while simultaneously continuing to undermine Fauci’s actual claims about the threat the novel coronavirus will continue to pose — because those claims badly undermine Trump’s reelection message.

The White House is frantically scrambling to undo the political damage Trump continues to sustain after unnamed aides leaked campaign-style opposition research designed to undermine public confidence in Fauci. [..]

But something fundamental is getting lost: the reason the White House is undermining Fauci in the first place.

Jul 16 2020

Corona(tion)

Still a very, very bad idea. I was at an outdoor meeting in Niagra Falls New York (great Porterhouse, couldn’t find the hole in the wall last time I was there) in August and damn near died of Heat Exhaustion.

In Upstate New York. Next to a really, really big Fire Hydrant.

Enjoy your swelter in your CoVid Hotspot. Do me a favor and die before you can infect me why don’t you? Sometimes it’s hard to tell a Republican Asshole until they open their mouths and then it’s too late.

GOP Scales Back Convention Plans, Relenting On Virus Restrictions
by Brian Naylor, NPR
July 16, 2020

The Republican Party announced Thursday morning that it is scaling back its upcoming nominating convention and will hold what party chair Ronna McDaniel is calling a “convention celebration” next month in Jacksonville, Fla.

Bowing to the realities of holding a mass gathering in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic in Florida, which has seen a spike in new cases, attendance at the convention during its first few days, Aug. 24-26, will be limited to delegates only, which is a little more than 2,500 people.

On the final day of the Republican National Convention, Aug. 27, when President Trump will give his acceptance speech, each of those delegates will be able to have a guest, and alternate delegates will be able to attend. This will bring a total of around 7,000 people, an expected attendance in line with Trump’s one post-pandemic rally in Tulsa, Okla., last month.

The specific location of speeches and other events remains unsettled, with McDaniel listing the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena, an indoor facility seating 15,000 people, along with other nearby outdoor facilities as locations that will host different daytime and evening events.

McDaniel also listed health safety measures the party plans to implement. “This plan includes but is not limited to on-site temperature checks, available PPE, aggressive sanitizing protocols, and available COVID-19 testing,” she wrote.

Despite adjusting plans in the midst of the surge in COVID-19 across Florida, McDaniel still criticized North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, saying he decided “to play politics” by insisting on pandemic-related restrictions for the originally planned convention in Charlotte.

Formal convention business, with less than 200 party officials, will take place in Charlotte on Aug. 24.

In other words, thwarted in almost every respect.

Republicans are morons.

Jul 16 2020

Cartnoon

Having been born in the shadow of Ft. Detroit the best thing I can say about it is French Citizenship!

‘Course I still have to learn French and pass the Citizenship Test.

Jul 16 2020

The Breakfast Club (Cut Throat)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Test of the world’s first nuclear weapon; President Richard Nixon’s White House taping system revealed; John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and her sister die in a plane crash; Apollo 11 lifts off for Moon

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

A real diplomat is one who can cut his neighbor’s throat without having his neighbor notice it.

Trygve Lie

Continue reading

Jul 15 2020

Better Get Your 12 Gauge Buckshot Now

By the Pallet. I practice a lot.

Walmart will require face masks at all U.S. stores
By Hannah Denham and Taylor Telford, Washington Post
July 15, 2020

Walmart Inc. will require all shoppers to wear masks starting Monday, positioning employees at the entryways of thousands of its namesake stores and Sam’s Club locations to help with enforcement.

The nation’s largest retailer announced the plan Wednesday, citing the recent resurgence in U.S. coronavirus cases and the need for consistency across its operations. The company said about 3,500 of its more than 5,300 Walmart and Sam’s Clubs locations already are observing public health mandates within their respective markets.

“We know some people have differing opinions on this topic,” said a news release from Dacona Smith and Lance de la Rosa, the chief operating officers of Walmart and Sam’s Club, respectively. “We also recognize the role we can play to help protect the health and well-being of the communities we serve by following the evolving guidance of health officials like the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention].”

The world’s biggest retail trade group lauded Walmart’s move and expressed hope that it would be a “tipping point” for the retail industry. Only a handful of national retailers, including Costco, Apple and Best Buy, have blanket policies requiring masks at all of their stores.

“Workers serving customers should not have to make a critical decision as to whether they should risk exposure to infection or lose their jobs because a minority of people refuse to wear masks in order to help stop the spread of the deadly coronavirus,” the National Retail Federation trade said in a statement.

“Shopping in a store is a privilege, not a right. If a customer refuses to adhere to store policies, they are putting employees and other customers at undue risk,” the statement continued.

Mixed messaging from local and state governments, and varying business policies, have politicized mask use despite clear evidence that masks can help prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus, the pathogen that causes covid-19, which has killed at least 133,000 Americans. The number of confirmed U.S. coronavirus infections is approaching 3.5 million. The CDC, which originally downplayed the importance of masks, now calls face coverings “a critical preventive measure” and says they should be worn in public.

The move comes amid a surge in infections, particularly in the South and West, that has overwhelmed hospitals and raised fears of more outbreaks this fall and winter. The United States topped 50,000 new cases in one day for the first time on July 1, shortly after the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony S. Fauci, warned that the country could expect to see 100,000 new cases a day “if this does not turn around.” On Tuesday, the United States reported 62,429 daily new cases.

Economists say nationwide mask requirements could prevent a return to widespread shutdowns and further economic turmoil. Last week, a Goldman Sachs analysis estimated that a nationwide mask requirement could avert more shutdowns and the potential loss of $1 trillion from U.S. gross domestic product.

Walmart said it will station “health ambassadors” near store entrances to remind shoppers without face coverings to comply with the new policy. The company said it will use the next five days to train employees, post signs and prepare shoppers for the new policy.

“While we’re certainly not the first business to require face coverings, we know this is a simple step everyone can take for their safety and the safety of others in our facilities,” Walmart said in its release. “According to the CDC, face coverings help decrease the spread of COVID-19, and because the virus can be spread by people who don’t have symptoms and don’t know they are infected, it’s critically important for everyone to wear a face covering in public and social distance.”

The patchwork approach to masks and the political tempest surrounding them has left retail workers vulnerable as they enforce mask policies. Some workers say they have been told they cannot refuse service to maskless customers, even if local laws require the wearing of masks. In recent weeks, retail workers have been physically assaulted, even suffering broken limbs and, in the case of a security guard at a Family Dollar store in Michigan, killed while trying to enforce the mask requirement.

Jul 15 2020

Cartnoon

Rather more serious than I had hoped when I initially clicked on it.

Still, if you live in those parts of the Country likely to experience a roll back and not the Land of Steady Habits (of Cheating You) where things never got that bad or the Granite State where you are only twice as likely to die from long term radiation poisoning as you are in Las Vegas (to say nothing of the No Helmet, No Belt Organ Donors) but has one of the lowest rates in the World and declining, you might be inclined to ramp up your preparedness in inexpensive and non-obvious ways.

As always Les makes sense. Don’t buy any of his branded product though, high qualty but pricy and no better than some much cheaper.

Load more