May 28, 2020

KCBS lays off anchors Jeff Michael and Sharon Tay, and weatherman Garth Kemp

Prominent anchors Jeff Michael and Sharon Tay, along with meteorologist Garth Kemp, were cut from CBS TV stations in Los Angeles late Wednesday amid sweeping corporate layoffs.

Michael has been co-anchor of KCBS-TV Channel 2’s premier newscasts at 5 p.m., 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. for more than three years.

The Emmy Award-winning anchor joined KCBS in early 2017 after working as an anchor at rival Fox’s KTTV-Channel 11 for nearly two decades.

Michael became known to L.A. TV viewers in the early 1990s as a crime reporter for KABC-TV Channel 7. He provided live coverage of the Los Angeles riots in 1992, the infamous slow-speed chase of O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco and dispatches from Simpson’s criminal trial, among other major stories.

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2020-05-27/kcbs-anchors-jeff-michael-garth-kemp-sharon-tay-layoffs

Times are getting harder all over.

May 27, 2020

He was part of Amazon's coronavirus hiring spree. Two weeks later he was dead.

When Harry Sentoso got called back to work at an Amazon delivery center in Irvine in late March, he was excited.

He had been working in Amazon warehouses on and off for two years, always hoping to get a full-time position but always laid off after seasonal demand died down. Just a few weeks earlier, at the beginning of March, his bosses had told him they didn’t need him anymore. He had spent most of the month cooped up at home in Walnut, looking for other work.

Sentoso saw the warehouse job as a last chance to earn some cash before settling down to retirement. A small business he had started with a friend a few years earlier selling forklift tires hadn’t taken off, and he didn’t want to touch his savings if he didn’t have to. He had applied to dozens of jobs in recent years, but Amazon was the best the 63-year-old could find.

Before dawn on March 29, he left home in his Honda Civic, radio tuned to classic rock, and made the drive down to Orange County to work the early morning shift hauling and sorting packages before they went out to customers’ homes.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-05-27/la-fi-tn-amazon-worker-dead-hiring-wave

May 27, 2020

'Ugly Even for Him': Trump's Media Allies Recoil at His Smear of MSNBC Host

The Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Washington Examiner chastised the president for his unfounded attacks on Joe Scarborough.

Even President Trump’s most stalwart media defenders have recoiled at his baseless smears against the MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, whom Mr. Trump has all but accused of killing a former staff member two decades ago despite a total lack of evidence.

The president is accustomed to — and often relishes — blowback from critics in the press. But he is now facing an unusual chorus of reproach from the media platforms he relies on for comfort.

The New York Post, Mr. Trump’s first read in the mornings, lamented in an editorial on Tuesday that the president “decided to suggest that a TV morning-show host committed murder. That is a depressing sentence to type.” The Post’s editorial board went on to scold its most powerful reader: “Trust us, you did not look like the bigger man.”

“Vile,” declared the editorial board of The Washington Examiner, the popular conservative news site, in a scathing article on Wednesday that called Mr. Trump’s attacks “incompatible with leadership.” Mr. Trump is so enamored of The Examiner that he often grants interviews to its journalists, including one earlier this month.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/business/media/trump-joe-scarborough-conservative-media.html

May 27, 2020

The Price of a Virus Lockdown: Economic 'Free Fall' in California

California’s strengths — as a hub for commerce, tourism and education in the Pacific Rim — have become liabilities in the pandemic.

Locked down in their homes, the four former California governors clicked into a Zoom call and one after another described how they dealt with the crises that had defined their time in office. For Pete Wilson, it was the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Gray Davis evoked the electricity disaster that drove him out in a recall election, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jerry Brown lamented the Great Recession.

But the former governors agreed that nothing they confronted was as dire or will be more consequential than what the current occupant of the office, Gov. Gavin Newsom, now faces.

The economic collapse resulting from the coronavirus pandemic “dwarfs any problem the four of us had,” Mr. Davis recalled saying at the meeting, which took place late last month and was convened by Mr. Newsom.

“There’s no playbook,” he said. “There’s no precedent.”

California was the first state to shut down to counter the coronavirus and has avoided the staggeringly high infection and death rates suffered in the Northeast. But the debilitating financial costs are mounting every day. California has an estimated unemployment rate above 20 percent, according to Mr. Newsom — far higher than the 14.7 percent national rate and similar to the estimated rate for New York State, where the virus has hit the hardest.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/26/us/coronavirus-california-economy.html

May 27, 2020

An 'Avalanche of Evictions' Could Be Bearing Down on America's Renters

The economic downturn is shaping up to be particularly devastating for renters, who are more likely to be lower-income and work hourly jobs cut during the pandemic.

The United States, already wrestling with an economic collapse not seen in a generation, is facing a wave of evictions as government relief payments and legal protections run out for millions of out-of-work Americans who have little financial cushion and few choices when looking for new housing.

The hardest hit are tenants who had low incomes and little savings even before the pandemic, and whose housing costs ate up more of their paychecks. They were also more likely to work in industries where job losses have been particularly severe.

Temporary government assistance has helped, as have government orders that put evictions on hold in many cities. But evictions will soon be allowed in about half of the states, according to Emily A. Benfer, a housing expert and associate professor at Columbia Law School who is tracking eviction policies.

“I think we will enter into a severe renter crisis and very quickly,” Professor Benfer said. Without a new round of government intervention, she added, “we will have an avalanche of evictions across the country.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/27/us/coronavirus-evictions-renters.html

Hard times ahead.

May 27, 2020

Trump's mockery of wearing masks divides Republicans

Source: Washington Post

A growing chorus of Republicans are pushing back against President Trump’s suggestion that wearing cloth masks to prevent the spread of the novel coronavirus is a sign of personal weakness or political correctness.

They include governors seeking to prevent a rebound in coronavirus cases and federal lawmakers who face tough reelection fights this fall, as national polling shows lopsided support for wearing masks in public.

“Wearing a face covering is not about politics — it’s about helping other people,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) said Tuesday in a plea over Twitter, echoing comments by North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) last week. “This is one time when we truly are all in this together.”

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) posted a photograph on Instagram of himself in a mask Tuesday night. Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), who faces a tough reelection fight, has added “#wearyourmask” to his Twitter handle, after photographing himself earlier the month wearing a mask in an airport as part of an appeal for the public to “remain vigilant.” Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), a member of the Republican leadership who is running for reelection this year, shared a photo of himself in a mask Monday, asking others to adopt the practice.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-mockery-of-wearing-masks-divides-republicans/2020/05/26/2c2bdc02-9f61-11ea-81bb-c2f70f01034b_story.html

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The Republicans are oh so very concerned about the pandemic they'll even post a photo-op picture of them with a mask...

May 27, 2020

Florida makes a play for the Republican convention

President Donald Trump’s allies in his newly adopted home state of Florida are making a play to snatch the Republican National Convention from North Carolina.

Moving the presidential nominating convention to Florida — with Republican-led Jacksonville as a likely host city — was raised as a serious option to Trump in a phone call Sunday by one of his new favorite congressmen, Florida Rep. Michael Waltz, who represents Jacksonville and Orlando.

During the call, which concerned Trump’s plan to attend Wednesday’s SpaceX launch in Cape Canaveral, the congressman made a point of drawing attention to a Washington Examiner article last month in which the president expressed frustration with social distancing rules enforced by North Carolina’s Democratic governor that would make a traditional convention nearly impossible.

“That’s what kind of sparked the neuron there,” Waltz said he thought after reading the Examiner report.

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/05/26/florida-makes-a-play-for-the-republican-convention-1286834

Not "A neuron", but "the neuron"...Waltz' single, solitary neuron inside an otherwise empty head...

May 26, 2020

The wages of lickspittlery

All politicians portray themselves as people of boundless integrity and courage, who stand up for principle, tell it like it is and let the chips fall where they may. It’s usually not true, because when your job security depends on the fickle whims of the voters, fear often becomes your master. Say the wrong thing, offend the wrong constituency, do what’s right instead of what’s popular, and you could find yourself out of a job.

That’s the usual state of affairs. But for Republicans right now, the baseline level of fear is multiplied many times by the fact that their party is led by a mercurial, petty, vindictive president who clearly enjoys destroying Republicans who have won his disfavor.

For those who come from strongly Republican states where Trump remains reasonably popular, safe harbor is usually found in abject lickspittlery. Which can be an effective strategy, until it isn’t.

Consider the tale of Jeff Sessions, whose current predicament could arouse some sympathy were one to forget that before throwing his lot in with Trump, he was a hard-right crusader against hippies and immigrants.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/26/wages-lickspittlery/

May 26, 2020

In crucial Florida, some senior voters cast a skeptical eye toward Trump's reelection

Allen Lehner was a Republican until Donald Trump became his party’s nominee in 2016. The 74-year-old retiree says he couldn’t bring himself to vote for someone who lied, belittled others, walked out on his bills and mistreated women — but he also couldn’t bring himself to vote for Hillary Clinton. So he didn’t vote.

Trump has done nothing since to entice Lehner back.

Lehner, who now considers himself an independent, says he is frightened by the president’s lack of leadership and maturity amid the nation’s health and economic crisis. Several people in his gated community in Delray Beach, Fla., have gotten sick; at least one has died. He worries about his own health — he has an autoimmune disease — and also about his adult children, including a daughter who has gone back to work and a son whose pay has been cut.

He plans to vote for Joe Biden in November.

“Regardless of what they say about his senior moments, I think he would be good and take good care of the country,” said Lehner, who owned furniture and fireplace-supply stores in central Pennsylvania before retiring to Florida.

While Democrats have worried about Biden’s struggles to excite younger voters, older voters who are upset with the president are poised to be potentially more influential in November, especially in swing states whose populations skew their way, like Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/in-crucial-florida-some-senior-voters-cast-a-skeptical-eye-toward-trumps-reelection/2020/05/25/4e5e2ef8-9ab4-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html

May 26, 2020

Republicans' latest proposed tax cut for the rich could permanently hobble future presidents

At this point it’s almost a pathology. Whatever the crisis, whatever the state of the economy, Republicans crave another tax cut for the rich.

The latest proposal is for a temporary “holiday” on capital gains taxes, as White House adviser Kevin Hassett pitched Sunday on CNN and President Trump had earlier proposed via tweet. A one-time, temporary capital gains tax holiday would do little to stimulate the economy, even according to the GOP’s usual line that tax cuts goose growth. The move could, on the other hand, permanently hobble the ability of future presidents to fund the government.

A “capital gain” refers to how much the value of an asset (such as a stock) has increased over time. Taxes on capital gains are triggered only when the asset is sold. So if you bought a few shares of Apple stock when it IPO’d in 1980, your shares would be worth a fortune today — but you don’t owe Uncle Sam a penny until you cash out.

And perhaps not even then.

Only a small sliver — about a quarter — of U.S. stock is taxable, because most equities are held in tax-exempt retirement accounts or by tax-exempt nonprofits or foreigners, according to the Tax Policy Center's Steven M. Rosenthal and Lydia Austin. Sales of assets that are taxable are taxed at preferential rates (that is, lower than what you pay on your wage or salary income) if the investments are held for more than a year.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/whatever-the-crisis-republicans-want-another-tax-cut-for-the-rich/2020/05/25/96d0c6ac-9eb8-11ea-81bb-c2f70f01034b_story.html