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babylonsister
babylonsister's Journal
babylonsister's Journal
July 10, 2020
‘Mary Trump says Ivana and Donald gave her a three-pack of underwear for Christmas one year, and an obviously re-gifted basket of crackers, sardines and salami another year (with an imprint of a missing can of caviar in the cellophane wrapping)’
How cheap is cheap for a supposed billionaire?
How the other half lives? 
https://bipartisanreport.com/2020/07/07/mary-trump-reveals-donalds-sadly-cheap-christmas-gifts/
Kevin Liptak
@Kevinliptakcnn
·
Jul 7
Mary Trump says Ivana and Donald gave her a three-pack of underwear for Christmas one year, and an obviously re-gifted basket of crackers, sardines and salami another year (with an imprint of a missing can of caviar in the cellophane wrapping)
@Kevinliptakcnn
·
Jul 7
Mary Trump says Ivana and Donald gave her a three-pack of underwear for Christmas one year, and an obviously re-gifted basket of crackers, sardines and salami another year (with an imprint of a missing can of caviar in the cellophane wrapping)
‘Mary Trump says Ivana and Donald gave her a three-pack of underwear for Christmas one year, and an obviously re-gifted basket of crackers, sardines and salami another year (with an imprint of a missing can of caviar in the cellophane wrapping)’
July 10, 2020
White House Advisers Sick of Trump’s ‘Woe Is Me’ Attitude to Crisis, Says Report
‘SNAP OUT OF IT’
Jamie Ross
Updated Jul. 10, 2020 9:46AM ET /
Published Jul. 10, 2020 9:00AM ET
Reuters / Kevin Lamarque
White House Advisers Sick of Trump's 'Woe Is Me' Attitude to Crisis, Says Report
https://www.thedailybeast.com/white-house-advisers-sick-of-trumps-woe-is-me-attitude-to-crisis-says-report?ref=homeWhite House Advisers Sick of Trump’s ‘Woe Is Me’ Attitude to Crisis, Says Report
‘SNAP OUT OF IT’
Jamie Ross
Updated Jul. 10, 2020 9:46AM ET /
Published Jul. 10, 2020 9:00AM ET
Reuters / Kevin Lamarque
President Trump is down in the dumps about the how the run-up to his election campaign is being spoiled by a string of crises, and his advisers are reportedly growing tired of his bad attitude. The Washington Post reports that advisers have started to brace themselves for a “woe is me” monologue whenever they drop a line to the president. White House figures including Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, have reportedly urged him to try out a “sunnier” demeanor or risk alienating his supporters. Other White House figures, including Hope Hicks, have reportedly tried to cheer him up by filling his diary with events he might enjoy. One unnamed outside adviser said Trump seemed almost “inconsolable” in a recent chat and complained about how “some stupid cop in Minneapolis kneels on someone’s neck and now everyone is protesting.” Another outside adviser said aides are urging Trump to “snap out of it” but that he seems “fixated.”
July 10, 2020
Quote of the Day
July 10, 2020 at 7:44 am EDT By Taegan Goddard
" Here, we're in a war zone that people refuse to accept."
https://politicalwire.com/2020/07/10/quote-of-the-day-2617/Quote of the Day
July 10, 2020 at 7:44 am EDT By Taegan Goddard
“We’re going to be worse than New York. But at least in New York, people took the virus seriously. Here, we’re in a war zone that people refuse to accept.”
— A Charleston, South Carolina emergency room nurse, to the Daily Beast.
— A Charleston, South Carolina emergency room nurse, to the Daily Beast.
July 10, 2020
Saving What We Can
By Connie Schultz
July 9, 2020 5 min read
snip//
Older readers tell me they fear they will never again see their grandchildren, their friends, their places of worship. "I'm 82 years old," a woman wrote to me earlier this week. "I know your inclination will be to reassure me, but please see the world through my eyes. It is very likely I will die before I ever see the people who matter most to me."
It does us no good to speculate about so much we cannot know, but isolation has a way of unlocking the darkest corners of our minds. How do we bring the light?
We keep living, is all I can figure. We fill the space we're in.
I've mentioned before how I often turn to the Irish priest John O'Donohue's book, "To Bless the Space Between Us." And here I am again, my coffee cup holding open the page titled "Equilibrium": "Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore, / May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul. / As the wind loves to call things to dance, / May your gravity be lightened by grace. / Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth, / May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect. / As water takes whatever shape it is in, / So free may you be about who you become."
I just checked on the hydrangea. Their faces are wide again, looking up at the sky as their petals glisten. I will join them in their reverie.
Have I read this before? I don't remember, but what I do know is that now, regardless of past interpretations, it speaks a different language to me.
Saving What We Can By Connie Schultz
https://www.creators.com/read/connie-schultz/07/20/saving-what-we-canSaving What We Can
By Connie Schultz
July 9, 2020 5 min read
snip//
Older readers tell me they fear they will never again see their grandchildren, their friends, their places of worship. "I'm 82 years old," a woman wrote to me earlier this week. "I know your inclination will be to reassure me, but please see the world through my eyes. It is very likely I will die before I ever see the people who matter most to me."
It does us no good to speculate about so much we cannot know, but isolation has a way of unlocking the darkest corners of our minds. How do we bring the light?
We keep living, is all I can figure. We fill the space we're in.
I've mentioned before how I often turn to the Irish priest John O'Donohue's book, "To Bless the Space Between Us." And here I am again, my coffee cup holding open the page titled "Equilibrium": "Like the joy of the sea coming home to shore, / May the relief of laughter rinse through your soul. / As the wind loves to call things to dance, / May your gravity be lightened by grace. / Like the dignity of moonlight restoring the earth, / May your thoughts incline with reverence and respect. / As water takes whatever shape it is in, / So free may you be about who you become."
I just checked on the hydrangea. Their faces are wide again, looking up at the sky as their petals glisten. I will join them in their reverie.
Have I read this before? I don't remember, but what I do know is that now, regardless of past interpretations, it speaks a different language to me.
July 9, 2020
July 7, 2020
Inside the Facebook Group Where Doctors Process Their Immense Coronavirus Grief
“If I die alone, who ever will remember that this happened to me, or know why?”
Will Peischel
As she sat on her couch in her house, alone, sick with COVID-19, an unwelcome series of thoughts crept into Erica Bial’s mind. If I die here, she wondered, who would ever notice? How long would the neighbor’s cat take to find me? Bial, a neurosurgeon living in Massachusetts, works at Lahey Hospitals northwest of Boston. She was two weeks into her self-imposed isolation with the disease, when it took a turn for the worse on her 45th birthday. “I had been—I thought—getting better,” she said.
Then came the seizures, the shortness of breath, and the feeling of being even more isolated as her symptoms became more serious. Bial, who doesn’t have children and had been furloughed from work, was severed from her usual supportive networks. Fear of infecting her colleagues prevented her from going to the hospital as a patient. “I probably have never gone that long without seeing someone,” she said. “It’s harder on the body than you think.”
After nearly seven weeks, she recovered. But during her illness, she couldn’t shake the question: “If I die alone, who ever will remember that this happened to me, or know why?” Where would she—and other physicians locked in the fight against the disease—be memorialized if they died? She saw no options, so in early April she created a Facebook page that she called COVID-19 Physicians’ Memorial.
The premise was simple: Create a community of mourning by running a record of announcements about the deaths of US physicians from the coronavirus. A digital graveyard, group-sourced by members of the medical community and close readers of the obituary section. Bial launched the page, informing friends and colleagues. Soon, doctors, next of kin, spouses, patients, random people, reached out to her with requests to share the passing of these physicians. “Within two weeks, it had gone from word of mouth thing with some colleagues and friends to several thousand people,” she said.
The page now has expanded to include about 200 stories. The page testifies to the threat COVID-19 poses to everyone exposed. Herbert Henderson Jr., a medical examiner in Carroll County, South Carolina, was 56 when he died. “So young,” one commenter observed. Another physician who appears on the page, Priya Khanna, who worked at Clara Maass Medical Center in New Jersey, was only 43 when she died in April. Not long after, her father, Satyender Khanna, a doctor at the same hospital also died from the virus. “What a blow to family and healthcare,” someone wrote. Another observed, “This hurts my heart. Looks so much like my family, could easily be us.” A third simply commented, “Heartache.”
more...
https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/07/inside-the-facebook-group-where-doctors-process-their-immense-coronavirus-grief/
Inside the Facebook Group Where Doctors Process Their Immense Coronavirus Grief
July 7, 2020
Inside the Facebook Group Where Doctors Process Their Immense Coronavirus Grief
“If I die alone, who ever will remember that this happened to me, or know why?”
Will Peischel
As she sat on her couch in her house, alone, sick with COVID-19, an unwelcome series of thoughts crept into Erica Bial’s mind. If I die here, she wondered, who would ever notice? How long would the neighbor’s cat take to find me? Bial, a neurosurgeon living in Massachusetts, works at Lahey Hospitals northwest of Boston. She was two weeks into her self-imposed isolation with the disease, when it took a turn for the worse on her 45th birthday. “I had been—I thought—getting better,” she said.
Then came the seizures, the shortness of breath, and the feeling of being even more isolated as her symptoms became more serious. Bial, who doesn’t have children and had been furloughed from work, was severed from her usual supportive networks. Fear of infecting her colleagues prevented her from going to the hospital as a patient. “I probably have never gone that long without seeing someone,” she said. “It’s harder on the body than you think.”
After nearly seven weeks, she recovered. But during her illness, she couldn’t shake the question: “If I die alone, who ever will remember that this happened to me, or know why?” Where would she—and other physicians locked in the fight against the disease—be memorialized if they died? She saw no options, so in early April she created a Facebook page that she called COVID-19 Physicians’ Memorial.
The premise was simple: Create a community of mourning by running a record of announcements about the deaths of US physicians from the coronavirus. A digital graveyard, group-sourced by members of the medical community and close readers of the obituary section. Bial launched the page, informing friends and colleagues. Soon, doctors, next of kin, spouses, patients, random people, reached out to her with requests to share the passing of these physicians. “Within two weeks, it had gone from word of mouth thing with some colleagues and friends to several thousand people,” she said.
The page now has expanded to include about 200 stories. The page testifies to the threat COVID-19 poses to everyone exposed. Herbert Henderson Jr., a medical examiner in Carroll County, South Carolina, was 56 when he died. “So young,” one commenter observed. Another physician who appears on the page, Priya Khanna, who worked at Clara Maass Medical Center in New Jersey, was only 43 when she died in April. Not long after, her father, Satyender Khanna, a doctor at the same hospital also died from the virus. “What a blow to family and healthcare,” someone wrote. Another observed, “This hurts my heart. Looks so much like my family, could easily be us.” A third simply commented, “Heartache.”
more...
https://www.motherjones.com/coronavirus-updates/2020/07/inside-the-facebook-group-where-doctors-process-their-immense-coronavirus-grief/
July 9, 2020
Jurisprudence
The Political Genius of John Roberts
The chief justice stood up to Trump, placated Democrats, and scored indisputable points for judicial supremacy.
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern
July 09, 20204:11 PM
snip//
As he did last year, Roberts played the term perfectly. He won the headlines and preserved the big lofty principle about big lofty courts, while still making it impossible for any of us to know exactly how corrupt the Trump family really is. But the stakes were even higher this year, as the election loomed over the term. And so he set out to ensure that the Supreme Court would not become a campaign issue. The chief justice knows that both parties treat the court like a piñata, trying to convince their respective bases that they know how to smack the most candy out of it. He knows Democrats remain traumatized over Merrick Garland’s stymied appointment and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s toxic confirmation. During the Democratic primary, multiple top-tier candidates pronounced themselves open to adding seats to the Supreme Court to counter Republicans’ judicial chicanery. Roberts also knows that a term filled with one conservative triumph after another would only have given Democrats ammunition to run against the court, framing it as a partisan institution in need of reform. That didn’t happen.
By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine mainstream Democrats seriously endorsing court packing after the term that just wrapped. A majority of the justices pushed back against the Trump’s administration’s attempt to deport Dreamers, to write LGBTQ people out of civil rights laws, and to shield the president from all congressional scrutiny. They halted, at least for now, the effort to regulate abortion clinics out of existence. And they shoved off an attempt to expand the scope of the Second Amendment.
snip//
The irony of Roberts’ endless maneuvering is that preventing the court from appearing political requires him to act politically. Brokering compromises behind the scenes, manipulating the docket to keep hot-button cases far away from the court, forecasting the impact of each decision on the election—these are inherently political acts undertaken to convince public that the court is apolitical. They are not the traditional duties of a jurist. But Roberts is the exceedingly rare judge who understands politics, not just party politics, but also how to behave politically. And he recognizes that, as Americans lose faith in the other two branches of government, he has the power, and perhaps the responsibility, to cultivate more trust in the court.
It is worth asking what Roberts will do when Trump eventually leaves office, when the chief justice no longer feels obligated to prove that his court is not beholden to a singularly toxic and corrupt president. To be sure, this chief justice is still not a centrist; he remains devoted to his pet projects, like blessing voter suppression laws or hobbling administrative agencies’ independence. It is simply too soon to tell whether Roberts has really had a change of heart on hot-button issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, or if he just wants to shield his court from political blowback in an election year. While he has succeeded in lowering the temperature of SCOTUS discourse, he has not clearly abandoned those conservative crusades that evoked so much Democratic outrage in the first place. Citizens United is still on the books. The Voting Rights Act in still in grave peril.
But if he has distinguished himself this term, it’s for steadfastly refusing to join in the abdication of conservative principles to the cult of Trumpism. The number of conservatives in public life who have stood up to the worst aspects of Trumpism—the xenophobia, the small-mindedness, the abject cruelty—has been vanishingly small. You may not agree with the chief justice’s views on race, religious liberty, or voting rights. But Roberts deserves credit not just for protecting his court from Trump, but also for positioning it to fight another day.
Dahlia Lithwick & Mark Joseph Stern: The Political Genius of John Roberts
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/political-genius-supreme-court-john-roberts.htmlJurisprudence
The Political Genius of John Roberts
The chief justice stood up to Trump, placated Democrats, and scored indisputable points for judicial supremacy.
By Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern
July 09, 20204:11 PM
snip//
As he did last year, Roberts played the term perfectly. He won the headlines and preserved the big lofty principle about big lofty courts, while still making it impossible for any of us to know exactly how corrupt the Trump family really is. But the stakes were even higher this year, as the election loomed over the term. And so he set out to ensure that the Supreme Court would not become a campaign issue. The chief justice knows that both parties treat the court like a piñata, trying to convince their respective bases that they know how to smack the most candy out of it. He knows Democrats remain traumatized over Merrick Garland’s stymied appointment and Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s toxic confirmation. During the Democratic primary, multiple top-tier candidates pronounced themselves open to adding seats to the Supreme Court to counter Republicans’ judicial chicanery. Roberts also knows that a term filled with one conservative triumph after another would only have given Democrats ammunition to run against the court, framing it as a partisan institution in need of reform. That didn’t happen.
By contrast, it’s difficult to imagine mainstream Democrats seriously endorsing court packing after the term that just wrapped. A majority of the justices pushed back against the Trump’s administration’s attempt to deport Dreamers, to write LGBTQ people out of civil rights laws, and to shield the president from all congressional scrutiny. They halted, at least for now, the effort to regulate abortion clinics out of existence. And they shoved off an attempt to expand the scope of the Second Amendment.
snip//
The irony of Roberts’ endless maneuvering is that preventing the court from appearing political requires him to act politically. Brokering compromises behind the scenes, manipulating the docket to keep hot-button cases far away from the court, forecasting the impact of each decision on the election—these are inherently political acts undertaken to convince public that the court is apolitical. They are not the traditional duties of a jurist. But Roberts is the exceedingly rare judge who understands politics, not just party politics, but also how to behave politically. And he recognizes that, as Americans lose faith in the other two branches of government, he has the power, and perhaps the responsibility, to cultivate more trust in the court.
It is worth asking what Roberts will do when Trump eventually leaves office, when the chief justice no longer feels obligated to prove that his court is not beholden to a singularly toxic and corrupt president. To be sure, this chief justice is still not a centrist; he remains devoted to his pet projects, like blessing voter suppression laws or hobbling administrative agencies’ independence. It is simply too soon to tell whether Roberts has really had a change of heart on hot-button issues like reproductive rights and LGBTQ equality, or if he just wants to shield his court from political blowback in an election year. While he has succeeded in lowering the temperature of SCOTUS discourse, he has not clearly abandoned those conservative crusades that evoked so much Democratic outrage in the first place. Citizens United is still on the books. The Voting Rights Act in still in grave peril.
But if he has distinguished himself this term, it’s for steadfastly refusing to join in the abdication of conservative principles to the cult of Trumpism. The number of conservatives in public life who have stood up to the worst aspects of Trumpism—the xenophobia, the small-mindedness, the abject cruelty—has been vanishingly small. You may not agree with the chief justice’s views on race, religious liberty, or voting rights. But Roberts deserves credit not just for protecting his court from Trump, but also for positioning it to fight another day.
July 9, 2020
‘All nine justices’ rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity: CNN’s Toobin
Published 33 mins ago
on July 9, 2020
On Thursday, following the Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling that President Donald Trump’s taxes are not immune from the Manhattan criminal investigation, CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin broke down the implications of the decision.
“All nine justices reject the position put forth by the president’s lawyers in this case,” said Toobin. “All nine justices say that the president does not have absolute immunity from a subpoena, and all nine agree that the case has to go back to district court.”
“This is a legal defeat for the president, but it may be a practical victory,” added Toobin. “The idea that the president can’t be subpoenaed is completely rejected but the Supreme Court, and that even the two dissenting justices agree on … the practical victory for the president is that the legal proceedings will continue. It seems unlikely, given this opinion, that the president will ultimately be able to stop the disclosure of these events to the grand jury in Manhattan, but it’s going to take time. I mean, this process will begin again. The district court will get briefings. They may hear evidence. That will be appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and then losing party will likely go back to the Supreme Court. All of this will take a while.”
Watch @ link~
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/all-nine-justices-rejected-trumps-claim-of-absolute-immunity-cnns-toobin/
'All nine justices' rejected Trump's claim of absolute immunity: CNN's Toobin
‘All nine justices’ rejected Trump’s claim of absolute immunity: CNN’s Toobin
Published 33 mins ago
on July 9, 2020
On Thursday, following the Supreme Court’s 7-2 ruling that President Donald Trump’s taxes are not immune from the Manhattan criminal investigation, CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin broke down the implications of the decision.
“All nine justices reject the position put forth by the president’s lawyers in this case,” said Toobin. “All nine justices say that the president does not have absolute immunity from a subpoena, and all nine agree that the case has to go back to district court.”
“This is a legal defeat for the president, but it may be a practical victory,” added Toobin. “The idea that the president can’t be subpoenaed is completely rejected but the Supreme Court, and that even the two dissenting justices agree on … the practical victory for the president is that the legal proceedings will continue. It seems unlikely, given this opinion, that the president will ultimately be able to stop the disclosure of these events to the grand jury in Manhattan, but it’s going to take time. I mean, this process will begin again. The district court will get briefings. They may hear evidence. That will be appealed to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and then losing party will likely go back to the Supreme Court. All of this will take a while.”
Watch @ link~
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/07/all-nine-justices-rejected-trumps-claim-of-absolute-immunity-cnns-toobin/
July 9, 2020
https://newrepublic.com/article/158394/desantis-florida-trump-devos-schools-coronavirus-death-march
Adam Weinstein/July 8, 2020
The Republicans Take America on a Death March
Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Betsy DeVos are willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives for nothing more than political points.
Late last month, Carsyn Leigh Davis turned 17 in an intensive care unit bed in Naples, Florida. Two days later, at 1:06 p.m. on June 23, she died at a children’s hospital across the state, in Miami, where she’d been transferred for last-ditch “heroic efforts” at saving her life. She was the latest of 3,281 deaths in the state from Covid-19 at the time; as I write this, less than two weeks later, the toll is now 3,841.
snip//
Keeping churches open—as well as beaches, restaurants, and dividend-yielding commerce—has been a big priority for Ron DeSantis, who, as Florida’s fourth consecutive Republican governor, serves two key constituencies: rich people in general, and one aged West Palm Beach snowbird heir in particular. In that spirit, DeSantis has resisted calls from medical experts and Florida residents to return to quarantine measures or shutdowns of nonessential businesses.
Like most of his fellow Republicans, DeSantis has spent the last few months in search of a communications strategy that might make people stop asking him things. There was the libertarian-dreamer gambit: “If everyone is, you know, enjoying life, but doing it responsibly, you know, we’re going to be fine,” he stammered in a July 2 press conference with Vice President Mike Pence. (People just need to exercise some lifesaving restraint, said the man who could actually mandate lifesaving restraint.) There’s been the denialist refrain: Theme parks are “safe” to open, he’s insisted over the protests of workers at those parks and in spite of rampant infections among Major League Soccer athletes at a Disney park. Then there was the fatalist who’d noted four days earlier that the median age of coronavirus carriers had plummeted to 40. “You can’t control … younger people,” he said. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”
But on Monday, Florida’s Republican leadership pivoted into coronavirus-era big government by, well, controlling kids. Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran—handpicked for the job by DeSantis after serving as the Republican speaker of the statehouse—ordered “All school boards and charter school governing boards” to “open brick and mortar schools in August at least five days per week for all students.” The order was written to give local districts the power to shut schools if public health demanded it, but the Politburo is making clear it doesn’t want any rogue commissars: “Logically, I don’t think they could say schools aren’t safe if they are allowing people to be out in public,” a Florida education department spokeswoman said.
snip//
DeSantis and many Republicans continue to give lip service to “protecting the most vulnerable,” but they know some young people do die; some get sick and stay sick, possibly for life; and some spread the disease to older people, who will die or be maimed. They don’t give a shit. “I think we overreacted,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said last week. “We closed too much of our economy down.” One White House official told reporters last week that Trump would have a new, election-optimized P.R. strategy for dealing with the Covid-19 threat: “The virus is with us, but we need to live with it.” This is the message of the Dear Leader who told us in March that “the problem goes away in April.”
As I write this, the virus has killed 44 times more Americans than died on 9/11. Eventually, many of our political leaders will be seen for what they are in this: witting accomplices to homicide on a scale that Republicans might call genocide, if they watched it unfold in another country. Who says exceptionalism is dead?
The Republicans Take America on a Death March
https://newrepublic.com/article/158394/desantis-florida-trump-devos-schools-coronavirus-death-march
Adam Weinstein/July 8, 2020
The Republicans Take America on a Death March
Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Betsy DeVos are willing to sacrifice thousands of American lives for nothing more than political points.
Late last month, Carsyn Leigh Davis turned 17 in an intensive care unit bed in Naples, Florida. Two days later, at 1:06 p.m. on June 23, she died at a children’s hospital across the state, in Miami, where she’d been transferred for last-ditch “heroic efforts” at saving her life. She was the latest of 3,281 deaths in the state from Covid-19 at the time; as I write this, less than two weeks later, the toll is now 3,841.
snip//
Keeping churches open—as well as beaches, restaurants, and dividend-yielding commerce—has been a big priority for Ron DeSantis, who, as Florida’s fourth consecutive Republican governor, serves two key constituencies: rich people in general, and one aged West Palm Beach snowbird heir in particular. In that spirit, DeSantis has resisted calls from medical experts and Florida residents to return to quarantine measures or shutdowns of nonessential businesses.
Like most of his fellow Republicans, DeSantis has spent the last few months in search of a communications strategy that might make people stop asking him things. There was the libertarian-dreamer gambit: “If everyone is, you know, enjoying life, but doing it responsibly, you know, we’re going to be fine,” he stammered in a July 2 press conference with Vice President Mike Pence. (People just need to exercise some lifesaving restraint, said the man who could actually mandate lifesaving restraint.) There’s been the denialist refrain: Theme parks are “safe” to open, he’s insisted over the protests of workers at those parks and in spite of rampant infections among Major League Soccer athletes at a Disney park. Then there was the fatalist who’d noted four days earlier that the median age of coronavirus carriers had plummeted to 40. “You can’t control … younger people,” he said. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do.”
But on Monday, Florida’s Republican leadership pivoted into coronavirus-era big government by, well, controlling kids. Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran—handpicked for the job by DeSantis after serving as the Republican speaker of the statehouse—ordered “All school boards and charter school governing boards” to “open brick and mortar schools in August at least five days per week for all students.” The order was written to give local districts the power to shut schools if public health demanded it, but the Politburo is making clear it doesn’t want any rogue commissars: “Logically, I don’t think they could say schools aren’t safe if they are allowing people to be out in public,” a Florida education department spokeswoman said.
snip//
DeSantis and many Republicans continue to give lip service to “protecting the most vulnerable,” but they know some young people do die; some get sick and stay sick, possibly for life; and some spread the disease to older people, who will die or be maimed. They don’t give a shit. “I think we overreacted,” Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin said last week. “We closed too much of our economy down.” One White House official told reporters last week that Trump would have a new, election-optimized P.R. strategy for dealing with the Covid-19 threat: “The virus is with us, but we need to live with it.” This is the message of the Dear Leader who told us in March that “the problem goes away in April.”
As I write this, the virus has killed 44 times more Americans than died on 9/11. Eventually, many of our political leaders will be seen for what they are in this: witting accomplices to homicide on a scale that Republicans might call genocide, if they watched it unfold in another country. Who says exceptionalism is dead?
July 9, 2020
Ousted U.S. Attorney to Testify Before House
July 9, 2020 at 8:21 am EDT By Taegan Goddard
Ousted U.S. Attorney to Testify Before House
https://politicalwire.com/2020/07/09/ousted-u-s-attorney-to-testify-before-house/Ousted U.S. Attorney to Testify Before House
July 9, 2020 at 8:21 am EDT By Taegan Goddard
“Geoffrey Berman, the former US attorney in Manhattan fired last month following a tense standoff with Attorney General William Barr, will appear on Capitol Hill Thursday in House Democrats’ latest push to scrutinize what they charge is unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department,” CNN reports.
July 8, 2020
Tulsa Official: Trump Rally ‘Likely Contributed’ To 500 New COVID Cases This Week
By SEAN MURPHY
July 8, 2020 5:34 p.m.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa that drew thousands of people in late June, along with large protests that accompanied it, “likely contributed” to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases, Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said Wednesday.
Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed new cases on Monday, a one-day record high, and another 206 cases on Tuesday.
Although the health department’s policy is to not publicly identify individual settings where people may have contracted the virus, Dart said those large gatherings “more than likely” contributed to the spike.
more...
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/tulsa-trump-rally-500-new-covid-cases-this-week
Tulsa Official: Trump Rally 'Likely Contributed' To 500 New COVID Cases This Week
Tulsa Official: Trump Rally ‘Likely Contributed’ To 500 New COVID Cases This Week
By SEAN MURPHY
July 8, 2020 5:34 p.m.
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) — President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in Tulsa that drew thousands of people in late June, along with large protests that accompanied it, “likely contributed” to a dramatic surge in new coronavirus cases, Tulsa City-County Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said Wednesday.
Tulsa County reported 261 confirmed new cases on Monday, a one-day record high, and another 206 cases on Tuesday.
Although the health department’s policy is to not publicly identify individual settings where people may have contracted the virus, Dart said those large gatherings “more than likely” contributed to the spike.
“In the past few days, we’ve seen almost 500 new cases, and we had several large events just over two weeks ago, so I guess we just connect the dots,” Dart said.
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https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/tulsa-trump-rally-500-new-covid-cases-this-week
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