Hurricane Laura made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane in Louisiana overnight. I haven’t been able to find a lot of information on the damage so far. Right now Russel Honore is on MSNBC attacking the lack of action by FEMA. He explained that the areas that have been hit hardest are the poorest in the state; many live in mobile homes.
“Extremely dangerous” Hurricane Laura made landfall overnight near Cameron, Louisiana, bringing “catastrophic storm surge, extreme winds and flash flooding” to portions of the state, the National Hurricane Center said early Thursday. The storm had intensified rapidly into a Category 4 hurricane before slamming into the Gulf Coast near the Louisiana-Texas border.
Several hours after it came ashore, the storm was downgraded to a Category 2 hurricane, although the storm was still extremely dangerous. The hurricane center said life-threatening storm surge was continuing early Thursday along much of Louisiana’s coastline.
As of 7 a.m. local time, the storm was located about 20 miles north of Fort Polk, Louisiana, moving north at 15 mph. It was forecast to move across western and northern Louisiana through this afternoon and over Arkansas tonight, and become a tropical storm later on Thursday.
Now is probably as good a time as any to remind folks that trump took $44 billion from FEMA funds during the busiest hurricane season while Hurricane Laura approaches. https://t.co/Y6kp4n8n4i
…less than three weeks ago, instead of working with Congress to craft comprehensive legislation to address the ongoing crisis and deliver desperately-needed aid, President Trump looted FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund to the tune of $44 billion — authorizing the agency to pay for a $300 per week supplement to regular unemployment benefits.
The $300 a week benefit supplement is similar to the $600 one that was included in the CARES Act passed at the start of the pandemic. An extension of that $600 benefit was included in second relief package that the House has already approved, but that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won’t hold a vote on. And because the Senate won’t sign off on the House bill and Trump didn’t work with lawmakers to reach a compromise, the unemployment supplement isn’t coming from money appropriated by Congress. It’s coming from the government account meant to cover natural disasters like the one presently bearing down on Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.
“I am extremely concerned about the health and safety of Americans when Hurricane Laura comes ashore,” Rep. Donald Payne, Jr. (D-NJ), head of the subcommittee on emergency preparedness, response, and recovery, said in a statement. “The fact that President Trump would take up to $44 billion from FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund right before a possibly record-setting hurricane season shows his inability to protect our country during a crisis. If he had convinced his Senate allies to pass our Heroes Act, we would have extended unemployment benefits and still had plenty of money for FEMA and states to use to help Americans recover from a natural disaster, like Hurricane Laura.”
Meanwhile, Trump has been busy trying to reduce Covid-19 testing so that fewer cases will be discovered.
A sudden change in federal guidelines on coronavirus testing came this week as a result of pressure from the upper ranks of the Trump administration, a federal health official close to the process tells CNN, and a key White House coronavirus task force member was not part of the meeting when the new guidelines were discussed.
“It’s coming from the top down,” the official said of the new directive from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
White House coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci said he was in surgery and not part of the discussion during the August 20 task force meeting when updated guidelines were discussed….
“I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is,” he said.
The new guidelines raise the bar on who should get tested, advising that some people without symptoms probably don’t need it — even if they’ve been in close contact with an infected person.
Previously, the CDC said viral testing was appropriate for people with recent or suspected exposure, even if they were asymptomatic.
CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield said Wednesday that changes to the testing guidelines were made after “updated recommendations” from the White House coronavirus task force.
This will lead to more cases and deaths, because people can transmit the virus when they are not yet having symptoms. Trump couldn’t care less how many Americans sicken and die as long as he has a chance of being reelected.
If this guidance is followed there will be more super-spreader events like this:
Holy moley: The 2-day Biogen conference in a Boston Marriott in February led to 20,000 cases of coronavirus in the state, including 122 people living or working at homeless shelters, according to a new study. https://t.co/QfVi4fVUgx
A Biogen corporate meeting held in Boston in March that was initially connected to about 100 cases of COVID-19 could have led to a significantly higher number of infections. A new study suggests the meeting could have contributed to about 20,000 cases across four Massachusetts counties.
A new, 64-page study that has not been peer-reviewed, extrapolates the number of infections that stemmed from the company’s corporate meeting held at the Marriott Long Wharf hotel in February, the early days of the pandemic in the United States. According to The Boston Globe, researchers studied the genetic makeup of confirmed COVID-19 cases from 772 patients in Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, and Suffolk counties in the Bay State and concluded the meeting was a super-spreader event that infected “tens of thousands.” Jacob Lemieux, an infectious disease physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and one of the researchers involved in the study told the Globe he is confident in the method used to reason out the high number of infections associated with the meeting.
The research team analyzed the genetic sequence of the 772 patients and identified more than 80 distinct SARS-CoV-2 genomes that plagued the Boston area through the month of May. The origin of most of the genomes in those patients could be identified as having come from Europe or other parts of the United States. But, as the Globe reports, one virus had a unique genetic signature found in 289 of those patients. That particular signature was traceable to the Biogen meeting in February, the researchers said.
“By multiplying the proportion of conference-related viral genomes in each of the four counties by the total number of coronavirus infections in Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk and Suffolk, the scientists estimate that 20,000 infections could be linked to the Marriott event,” the Globe reported.
Cases stemming from the 460,000-person event, which kicked off on August 7, have now been spotted in eight states: Minnesota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Washington. That’s in addition to the cases spotted in South Dakota, where new cases spiked to 251 on August 22 and the seven-day average of new cases continues to climb. Altogether, the cases total more than 100, according to an Associated Press analysis.
Attendees have traveled to more than half of all the counties in the US since the festival wrapped up on August 16, according to anonymous cellphone data from Camber Systems, which was tracking their departures. CNN first reported the location data.
Ahead of the rally, as city officials said there was no way to stop people from coming even if the rally had been canceled in an official capacity, South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem welcomed the event with open arms. She’s also voiced doubt about the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines detailing the effectiveness of masks.
Once the revelers arrived, photos showed few masks and crowded bars, despite warning signs throughout the area. On stage at a packed concert, Smash Mouth’s lead singer mocked the pandemic: “We’re being human once again. F— that COVID s—,” he says in a video.
The crisis continues in Kenosha, Wisconsin after the police shooting of another innocent black man, Jacob Blake. Police in Illinois apprehended Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old boy who shot three protesters in Kenosha. Kenosha police failed to arrest Rittenhouse after the shooting even though he was approaching them with his hands up. He was white, so he was allowed to leave the state.
Jacob Blake: Sporting Events Postponed Across US As Stars Stage Boycott Over Police Shooting | Via Huffpost UK https://t.co/Z56YSL0ua2
NEW: Kyle Howard Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old who was charged with shooting and killing two people and injuring another in Kenosha during protests for Jacob Blake appeared in the front row at a Donald Trump rally in January, BuzzFeed reports.https://t.co/CNM2UZFCCg
If he was there at all, something prompted 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse to grab his rifle and make the short trip from his home in Antioch, Ill., to Kenosha, Wis., on Tuesday. If photos shared on social media are accurate, something spurred him to walk around the town with that rifle in his hands as protests over a police shooting continued into the night. If police are correct that Rittenhouse fired that rifle, if he did shoot three protesters, killing two of them, there was something that caused him to be there to pull the trigger.
This alleged chain of events came from somewhere. Most 17-year-olds don’t see it as their duty to protect the streets of their hometowns, much less of nearby towns where they don’t even live. If Rittenhouse shot those two people dead, there was some spur for him to do so that simply doesn’t exist for most other people.
It’s facile to assume that we can identify that spur as the rhetoric offered by President Trump and his reelection campaign. But it’s impossible not to notice how that rhetoric echoes in what appears to have happened in Kenosha.
The night before those protesters were shot, five different speakers at the Republican National Convention, including the president’s son, decried uncontrolled violent mobs that they claim have taken over the nation’s streets.
Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old Illinois resident, appeared on multiple videos taken throughout the night by protesters and bystanders who chronicled the events as peaceful protests gave way to chaos, with demonstrators, armed civilians and others facing off against one another and the police in the darkened streets.
The New York Times’s Visual Investigations unit analyzed hours of footage to track Mr. Rittenhouse’s movements in the moments leading up to, and during, the shootings….
About two hours before the first shooting, the producer of a video livestream interviews Mr. Rittenhouse at a Kenosha vehicle dealership.
Mr. Rittenhouse is there at the same time as several other armed men. Some of them are positioned on the building’s roof overlooking the parking lot where vehicles were burned the day before.
In a brief exchange on the livestream, he identifies himself as “Kyle.”
Read the rest at the NYT link.
There is so much more news. I haven’t even touched on the DNC hate-fest, which concludes today. Last night’s episode focused on Mike Pence pretending that Trump has defeated the coronavirus and saved America.
Vice President Mike Pence headlined the third night of the RNC, stoking "fear and loathing" and calling for law and order. "What they're doing is not new," says author and former Nixon White House counsel @JohnWDean. "This drives their authoritarian followers into their ranks." pic.twitter.com/aiYvcTl9Dk
Only voters can decide the political fate of Donald Trump. But the evidence of a dark, dispiriting election year suggests unequivocally that the President has failed to find answers equal to the magnitude and complexity of America’s two great crises — over health and race.
So at the shape-shifting Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Trump’s most loyal subordinate Vice President Mike Pence had little option but to do what he does best. He twisted the facts, spun a more pleasing alternative national reality and showered his boss with praise.
Even by the standards of 2020, it was a disorienting night. Adding to the awfulness of another police shooting of a Black man and the shooting of two protesters (by an apparent Trump supporter) and the pandemic about to claim its 180,000th American victim, a monstrous hurricane tore towards the Gulf Coast.
Already, there are doubts whether the President’s big acceptance speech and a fireworks display Thursday at the White House in front of a pandemic-defying crowd of more than 1,000 people will be appropriate given what forecasters say are “unsurvivable” conditions facing those in the path of Hurricane Laura.
My guess is Trump won’t want his final night of glory postponed. Whether his advisers can convict him to do it is questionable.
I’ll post a few more stories in the comment thread. I hope anyone in the path of Laura will stay safe. Take care everyone!
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Most of us knew the Republican National Convention was going to be deeply weird before we tuned in; expecting normalcy from this kind of event is like opening your mouth next to a UV light and expecting it to cure you of coronavirus. Nevertheless, what we saw tonight was so especially weird that it’s worth discussing beyond the usual, “Wow, was that a fever dream?” or, “Did you get anything from that word salad?” Because this was a glimpse of what we’re in for over the next four years if Trump continues the usual trend and wins himself a second term — and it’s both darkly funny and horribly dangerous.
Who to mention first? Natalie Harp, the woman who survived a diagnosis of terminal bone cancer because of experimental treatment and who claimed that “when Democrats say free healthcare, they mean marijuana, opioids” and “death panels” for the disabled? Representative Matt Gaetz, who referred to Democrats as “woketopians” (what?) ready to “disarm you, unlock the prisons” and “invite MS13 to live nextdoor” (a racist dog-whistle if ever I heard one)? The speaker opening the convention who reeled off a list of “Democrat policies” which would harm the country, none of which were actual Democrat policies? Former UN ambassador Nikki Haley saying that “Joe Biden is good for Iran and Isis, great for communist China”? Don Jr claiming that “the left” is trying to “cancel” the Founding Fathers? The nurse from a 2,000-person town in Virginia who said “I don’t want the media taking my story and twisting it so let me be clear: Donald Trump saved countless lives” during the pandemic, as the death rate surpassed 177,000? Or perhaps the St Louis couple who famously pointed their guns at Black Lives Matter protesters showing up to complain they’re facing charges and claim Democrats want to “abolish the suburbs”? Oh, I don’t know, Mom, don’t make me choose!
Now we know why convalescent plasma was suddenly given FDA approval this morning: it was central to quite a few speeches vaunting Trump as the hero of Covid-19 (“without him, millions would have died,” said Natalie Harp, without irony.) The fact that this important medical turning-point was timed perfectly for the beginning of the Republican convention really should give us all pause. Plenty have opined that a vaccine might be rushed through right before Election Day in November for the same reasons. Trump’s buddy Vladimir Putin made a similar PR move himself in August, announcing that the country had won the race for an inoculation despite the fact that only 24 percent of Russian doctors say they would take the vaccine themselves — so, y’know, it has precedent. Still, it beats injecting bleach into your veins.
Read the whole thing at The Independent.
Many people who watched the proceedings thought Donald Trump Jr. looked stoned during his convention speech.
Donald Trump, Jr. addressed the Republican National Committee on Monday, urging Americans to trust his father with four more years in office.
But instead of focusing on the words coming out of his mouth, many Twitter users were focused on his eyes, with many wondering if he might have been on drugs.
Quietly, Guilfoyle has become a key figure in the preservation and furthering of Trumpism. This week, the journalist Jason Zengerle wrote in the Times Magazine that Guilfoyle and Donald, Jr., “have become fund-raising powerhouses,” helping to amass the war chest that is keeping Trump—despite a pandemic, an economic crisis, and widespread civil unrest—within at least striking distance of a win in November. In early March, in what might go down as one of the final pre-pandemic fêtes of Trump’s first term in office, Guilfoyle celebrated her fifty-first birthday during a big donor retreat at Mar-a-Lago, the President’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. “It was like a Gatsbyesque extravaganza,” one guest told Zengerle. The President stood by Guilfoyle as the crowd of a hundred people sang “Happy Birthday.” Afterward, Trump kissed her on the head. “Four more years!” Guilfoyle shouted.
On Monday, Guilfoyle shouted some more things. Earlier in the day, the Trump campaign held a call with reporters, one of whom asked whether Guilfoyle, in her prerecorded speech, might go after Kamala Harris, the California senator and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee. (Guilfoyle was formerly married to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been described as Harris’s political “sibling.”) The campaign demurred, not wanting to give anything away. But the expectation that Guilfoyle might be deployed in some kind of surgical political strike proved misguided. At the podium, she delivered a short speech whose tone might be described as high-key dystopian. Going into the Convention, the Trump campaign had suggested that it was looking to strike a note of sunny optimism. Guilfoyle’s speech wasn’t it. “They want to destroy this country, and everything that we have fought for and hold dear,” she said. “They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think, and believe, so that they can control how you live! They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal, victim ideology, to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.” Howard Dean’s Presidential aspirations are popularly remembered as falling apart after one misdeployed yelp. On Monday, Guilfoyle went on for six minutes.
Imagine being Gavin Newsom last night. You’re currently dealing with multiple giant fires, an uncontrolled pandemic, and a once in a lifetime economic crisis. You turn on the TV and your ex-wife is addressing a Nuremberg rally along with her boyfriend, Donald Trump Jr.
Colbert was stunned by the speeches from Donald Trump Jr. ― son of President Donald Trump ― and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle. Trump Jr. delivered a sweaty rant that name-checked the Loch Ness Monster while Guilfoyle fired off a screaming speech that had Colbert reaching for the volume control. Or, as Colbert described it, “some very nuanced screams.”
Then he rolled clips of Guilfoyle’s loud address.
“And that wasn’t her only story to shriek,” he said before throwing to footage of her even louder closing lines in which she told viewers that Trump “emancipates you and lifts you up to live your American dream!”
When the camera came back to Colbert, he was in hiding.
“Is the loud lady gone?” he asked as he reemerged. “I’m scared. It’s the first time in my life I’ve had to turn down the volume on C-SPAN. God, I’m glad we already had our kids because I was too close to the TV, I might’ve been sterilized by that.”
Later, Colbert discussed Trump Jr.’s speech. He couldn’t get over “Junior’s sweaty face and wet, bloodshot eyes.”
“Either he’s high or that’s what happens when you live in the splash zone of Screamin’ Guilfoyle,” he said. “Just bring a poncho.”
Tim Scott waxed about his family arc — “from cotton to Congress in one lifetime” — and invoked George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Nikki Haley spoke of her Indian roots and alluded to her decision to take down the Confederate flag. Herschel Walker said he’s seen “racism up close” — and it’s not Donald Trump.
For a president credibly accused of stoking racial fears and divisions throughout his term, Trump, with his choice of speakers, leaned hard into the topic during the first night of his convention on Monday. One Republican after another defended Trump’s record on race, while highlighting Joe Biden’s race-related gaffes and history pushing the 1994 crime bill.
But even as speakers such as Scott and Haley attempted to soften Trump’s image on race — while essentially making the case that the racial justice movement has gone too far in its views of policing — others took a harder-edged tack that undercut the message of inclusion. In an ominous presentation that warned suburbanites that their safety is at risk if Democrats win, Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside their home in St. Louis, made clear that the president’s outreach would go only so far.
“What you saw happen to us could just as easily happen to any of you who are watching from quiet neighborhoods around our country,” Patricia McCloskey said. “Make no mistake: No matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”
It’s really a gorgeous morning here and last night was great but it’s the proverbial calm before the storm is here. Temple and I had a great walk at 7:30 to beat the first of the rain bands. It was in the 70s with a cool breeze. But, like everything 2020, here comes the turbocharged change!
Fortunately for those of us in the central and western Gulf Coast, Little Hurricane Marco just never quite got going. He is going to swipe us before puttering along towards Texas. As long as he doesn’t slow down, he’ll have some water but only enough to dampen the day.
Hurricane Bahamas, Homer Winslow 1937
Hurricane Laura, however, is going to pack a punch! She is strengthening and likely to cause some problems. My only solace is that this is a big news event which is likely to somewhat drown out the four nights of Klanfest. The RNC is evidently in disarray because of all Trump’s interference including 4 nights of him giving speeches which is irregular to say the least. From Vox’s Aaron Rupar: “The RNC disarray is a microcosm of everything Trump did wrong with the coronavirus. He had no plan. The result is chaos.”
The day it’s set to begin, there is still much we don’t know about what will be happening at the 2020 Republican National Convention. But what we do indicates it’ll have a circus-like quality.
Confirmed speakers include Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the St. Louis couple best known for brandishing firearms at protesters earlier this year, and former Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann, who became a symbol of white grievance last year after he was filmed in a viral video of a confrontation with Native American demonstrators. President Trump will likely deliver his convention-closing speech from the White House, flouting ethical concerns and laws prohibiting the use of government property for political gain, with other events set to take place on government property located conveniently near the downtown DC hotel he still owns and profits from. On Sunday, the RNC released a speaker list — with Trump scheduled to appear every day.
Half of the convention’s key speakers are the president and his family members? pic.twitter.com/293IJbsk80
My TV will be firmly tuned to the Weather Channel if we have power through the week. It’s generally on mute but on constantly during hurricane times here.
The disaster of a Post Office General is also on full display today.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney on Postmaster General DeJoy: "We now have facts that show that all major areas of the Post Office were slowed down in the first 2 months of his tenure … any CEO who had such a performance would already be out the door."https://t.co/ypnEOzcViY
President Donald Trump’s selection for a key Postal Service position, Robert M. Duncan, once had a very different job: steering the Republican Party while it undertook some of its most brazen voter suppression schemes.
Duncan is now the chair of the Postal Service board of governors, but he previously served as general counsel and then chair of the Republican National Committee from 2002 to 2009, a time when the committee and its state counterparts oversaw an unprecedented escalation of voter disenfranchisement efforts in swing states.
From 2004 to 2006, when Duncan was the committee’s general counsel, party officials challenged the eligibility of at least 77,000 voters, a 2007 report by the nonpartisan group Project Vote found.
As it happens, one of the party’s favored tactics relied on the U.S. mail. In 2004, Republicans in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania sent thousands of nonforwardable letters and postcards to select voters — particularly minority voters — and used the mail returned as undeliverable to come up with voter registration challenge lists.
We’ve had yet another senseless shooting of an unarmed black man by the police. This time it is in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The man is in serious condition.
WARNING: this video is extremely graphic.
Police in Kenosha, Wisconsin appear to shoot a man seven times in the back at point blank range after he ignores commands. We’re no other non-lethal methods considered, @KenoshaPolice? https://t.co/dO4VimGCky
Dozens of squad cars from the Kenosha Police and Kenosha County Sheriff’s department and Wisconsin State Patrol converged in the Wilson Heights neighborhood, lining the streets approaching the scene.
The incident was being turned over to the Wisconsin Department of Justice, Division of Criminal Investigation, which will be investigating the officer involved shooting.
At least a half dozen witnesses said that the man had tried to break up a fight between the two women outside a home at 2805 40th St. and that police had attempted to use a Taser on the man prior to the shooting. Then, they heard at least seven gunshots ring out.
Witnesses said he was unarmed and shot in the back.
A video that has since gone viral on social media shows the man walking away from officers and going around the vehicle to get inside. While the man is entering the vehicle the video shows an officer firing a gun at the man inside the vehicle. A woman in the video is screaming as he is being shot.
It was not immediately known whether the man had a weapon.
Residents who live across the street from the residence said while they have heard gunfire in the neighborhood before, never that close until Sunday.
“We’ve never had anything like this happen before,” said Juventino Camputano who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years.
Annie Louise Hurst, a 50-year resident of the neighborhood, just shook her head.
Jacob Blake is in the ICU fighting for his life. He should be home with his babies. Police shot him in the back 7 times in front of his children.
Mark my words we’re going to fight for accountability just as hard as you’re fighting to survive & make it home to your family Jacob. pic.twitter.com/8dcooPWSJn
On a late afternoon in March, a large military aircraft bearing the Russian Federation insignia descended into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Its mission: to deliver personal protective equipment and ventilators to nearby hospitals scrambling to treat patients during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo had pleaded for weeks with the federal government for additional resources, particularly ventilators, to treat the thousands of COVID-19 patients across the state. Yet news of the Russian delivery surprised those in the governor’s office working to obtain additional medical equipment. They’d thought the ventilator support would come from the U.S. stockpile or from an American company.
Officials in the U.S. State Department were surprised, too. Despite a department press release announcing the delivery, several senior officials working on the Russia portfolio in the department and elsewhere in the national security apparatus were unaware exactly how the 45 ventilators had ended up on American soil. Half of the shipment was paid for by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds, which is under U.S. sanctions. (The sanctions do not prohibit all transactions between U.S. entities and the firm, but they have limited the fund’s interactions with American businesses.) And the fund’s CEO, Kirill Dmitriev, had been scrutinized by Congress and former special counsel Robert Mueller for his communications with Trump transition officials shortly after Moscow had meddled in the 2016 election.
For years, the Trump administration had attempted to find ways to cooperate with Russia on the world stage but largely failed in those efforts because Moscow has continued to engage in activity that threatens U.S. national security, from hacking operations to reportedly offering bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. A public display of Russian supplies being offloaded caught some officials in the Trump administration off guard.
But there was a simple answer to the whodunit. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) told The Daily Beast it had assigned the State Department “to represent the U.S. in the transaction with the Government of Russia.” But it was President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped facilitate the ventilator delivery, according to two senior administration officials. During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Kushner headed “Project Airbridge”—the medical supply delivery program that worked to fast-track the delivery of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies by using federal funding to underwrite the cost of shipping. In an effort to supply New York City hospitals with the medical equipment they needed, Kushner looked in multiple places for the equipment and found a safe bet in Moscow, those officials said. While the State Department had been involved in the logistics of the onboarding and offloading, it was Kushner who helped strike the deal.
The ventilators turned out to be faulty and were cast aside by officials in New York and New Jersey, according to local officials who spoke with The Daily Beast. During that same time period, the city of Los Angeles was told by representatives of the federal government that it had lost a bid for N95 masks to a Russian entity, according to two people familiar with the matter. The L.A. officials were never told the Russian outfit’s name.
Kushner held the details of the New York shipment closely and accelerated the order by leaning on his personal relationship with Dmitriev, a confidant of President Vladimir Putin who’d been dispatched to make inroads with the inexperienced 2016 Trump transition team.
Collusion continues.
So, I’m off to try to get some more things cooked just in case the heat goes off. Don’t want any perishables lying around in a powerless refrigerator and at least the cooked stuff lasts a bit longer.
Take care! Be safe! Be kind and gentle with yourself!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The virtual Democratic National Convention turned out to be pretty inspiring. One of the nicest moments came when 13-year-old Brayden Harrington spoke about how Joe Biden helped him with his stuttering. Here’s the video of their first meeting.
Biden followed through and shared with Braden he overcame his own difficulties with stuttering. John Hendrickson wrote about Biden’s story in The Atlantic early this year. Hendrickson himself also struggles with stuttering.
You could hear the stutter in Brayden’s lungs, all those heavy inhalations, his search for sounds that wouldn’t come. The 13-year-old stared into a stationary camera and told the world about his problem, the affliction he shares with 3 million Americans, one of whom is now the Democratic nominee for president.
“Without Joe Biden, I wouldn’t be talking with you today,” Brayden began. A big smile revealed braces. “About a few … months ago I met him in New Hampshire. He told me that we were members of the same club: Wuh-w-we
… sssssss … sssssstutter.”
That last word—the S-word—took the air out of American living rooms tonight.
It’s one thing to wake up every morning with a neurological disability and face your classmates. It’s another to address a national audience when you know what’s going to happen—that a particular letter or sound is coming down the line, that it’ll all fall apart.
You probably first noticed Brayden’s disfluency on the w and s sounds. Purse your lips and say we as you read this sentence. Do you feel that tension around your mouth? That contraction of your jaw? Now say the word stutter, but hold the s for a few seconds before getting to the t. Do you feel that pressure? That twinge in your chest? Odds are you’re lucky, and you could finish those words on demand. Now imagine you can’t. Imagine it’s not just w and s, but j and l and m and at least a dozen more. The h sound is notoriously difficult, as in here—the thing you’re required to say each morning at the start of school. Many stutterers have trouble with b, as in Biden. Or Brayden.
By Leonor Fini
Consider the emotional maturity it takes at Brayden’s age to talk about his personal struggle—especially when that personal struggle is talking, when it’s hard to talk at all, when it hurts to speak….
He stood up and delivered his speech, and stuttered through it, and said all the words he wanted to say. He told a powerful story in just over two minutes, which is more than some other DNC speakers can claim.
Brayden Harrington, the teen who shared his story on the final night of the Democratic National Convention about how Joe Biden helped him with his stutter, told NBC News Friday it has boosted his confidence and is pushing him to help other kids like him.
“It will change my future,” Harrington, 13, told Nightly News’ Lester Holt in an appearance that will air Friday night. “And I have this thought going around my head that I kind of want to be a therapist when I grow up to help other children in need and other people in need. And that just really is heartwarming to me because some people really need some help with what’s going on.”
He added, “They’ve been hit mentally, too, sometimes with some people mocking them. And it’s just really nice to know that I have that thought in my mind that I want to be a therapist and help these people.”
Harrington, who said he’s been made fun of for his stutter, met Biden in New Hampshire earlier this year and he said he was moved to know that someone of the former vice president’s stature struggled with it as well.
By Leonora Carrington
“I knew that I wasn’t alone and someone knew what I was going through,” Harrington said, describing his relationship with Biden as “a tiny little friendship.” [….]
Harrington said after his appearance he received an outpouring of support and well wishes on social media, mostly from parents whose children also stutter. The teen said he sees himself as a hero to other kids.
“And that just made me feel really nice about how I made that address and how that’s impacted a bunch of children’s lives,” he told Nightly News.
Try to imagine Trump helped someone like that and inspiring that person to help others. You can’t. Trump would make fun of the kid and of Biden for trying to help him.
Biden is not running for President to reform American health care, or to rebuild our infrastructure, or to restore our overseas alliances, although he hopes to do all those things. He is running to be the un-Trump. This is what Biden began his campaign with a year and a half ago, and it is undoubtedly what he will end it with, seventy-five days from now. In his rousing, emotional, and surprisingly effective acceptance speech to the all-virtual Democratic National Convention, on Thursday night, it took Biden barely a sentence before he got to the point. “The current President has cloaked America in darkness for much too long,” he said, staring directly into the camera, a wall of sixteen American flags behind him. “Too much anger. Too much fear. Too much division.”
For the next twenty-four minutes or so, the former Vice-President talked of character and decency, of the “soul of America” and the wrenching test that it now faces. It’s a message that has changed very little—except in its urgency—since the spring of 2019, when Biden announced his campaign in a video in which he called Trump a “threat to this nation . . . unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime” and warned that the 2020 election would be a “battle for the soul of the nation.” “Everything that has made America America is at stake,” Biden said then, and that was before a deadly pandemic and its resulting economic crisis, before a wave of national protest over racial injustice that Trump has exploited as no President before him.
By Alice Rahon
On Thursday night, Biden was even clearer and more assertive: Trump, he said, is a “President who takes no responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, cozies up to dictators, and fans the flames of hate and division.” Trump believes “the job is all about him, never about you,” Biden said, and he has brought America to an “inflection point,” a “life-changing election” from which there is no turning away.
Without this clarity, Biden would not be the Democratic nominee….
Now seventy-seven and a two-time loser in Presidential politics, Biden has finally won the nomination that he first sought nearly four decades ago. And, on Thursday, he showed how he plans to run against Trump this fall, by making the case against him in simple, factual, devastating terms: five million Americans infected with covid-19, more than a hundred and seventy thousand dead, fifty million unemployed—and “the President still does not have a plan.” Biden signalled that he will make it a choice not between Republicans and Democrats but between Trump and not-Trump.
How will Trump and the Republicans who still support him respond to Biden’s and the Democrats’ message during their convention next week? Even they aren’t sure what they’ll do.
The Republican National Convention opens in just two days, but planners have yet to provide a final schedule or other key details about what will take place during the gathering that will culminate in the nomination of President Donald Trump for a second term.
Officials have confirmed the identities of a dozen or so convention speakers, but not when they will be speaking, where they will be, or what they will be talking about….
Homebody, by Daniel Ryan
Even aides to the Senate’s top Republican, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, seemed confused about whether he would have a convention speaking role. McConnell’s re-election campaign said Thursday he would be campaigning in his home state and would not be speaking at the event. Hours later, a campaign source said there had been “a miscommunication” and that the senator would submit taped remarks to be played at the convention….
There are many reasons for seeming chaos, officials said, including Trump’s insistence on approving most decisions and the egos of people who want prime-time speaking slots.
“You’ve got many senior Republicans who have higher approval ratings than Trump, and so that’s playing into who wants to be seen at the convention and who doesn’t,” Eberhart said.
The event, which opens Monday and closes Thursday night with Trump’s acceptance speech at the White House, will be a far cry from the glitz of conventions past, primarily because of the threat of the coronavirus pandemic. The convention is expected to be a mostly virtual affair, although small crowds are expected at some events.
I expect the GOP virtual gathering will be the opposite of the DNC production–filled with negativity and Trump’s gross, egotistical babbling.
I fell asleep before the key note speeches again last night for the DNC convention. The heat and just the overall level of chaos in the country is just exhausting me. I’ve really cut back on my TV consumption. Stuff still comes across the phone though. Every day, we get Corona Virus updates from the Governor and now we’re staring at two tropical storms heading towards the Gulf Coast. It doesn’t look we’ll get the eye but will be on the sloppy side of one of them. It’s been since 1959 there’s been two storms like this at once so it’s quite an oddity in terms of weather history.
Then, there’s the entire Post Office episode. I’m seeing days where I don’t get anything, which is unusual. This is especially true since I’m being bombarded with stuff about choosing a Medicare plan in the next few months. I remember one of my Dad’s friends was a letter carrier during WW2 during his stint in the army. He would tell us he was the most popular person in France because every one wanted their letters and packages from home. I remember when we would get mail and newspapers twice a day too. It sure is a different time but there’s always something of anticipation about the mail arriving even if you’re not a teenage me waiting to hear from her pen pal in France or get her latest issue of Teen Magazine. There’s always a bit of daily wonder in the mail.
Frank Morrison – Love Letter
So, what exactly do Republicans have against the Post Office? What on earth is Steven Mnuchin’s role in this wholesale destruction of mail delivery and what’s his agenda? We’re hearing all kinds of interesting things today at the Senate Hearing and from a Congressional Forum. The Hill reports this headline: “Ex-Postal Service board member testifies Mnuchin tried to politicize agency.”
The former vice chairman of the U.S. Postal Service board of governors and inspector general accused Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin of trying to politicize the independent agency during testimony before lawmakers on Thursday.
David Williams, a former Postal Service inspector general who resigned in April as the vice chairman of the agency’s board of governors, said that he stepped down from his role because he felt the Treasury Department was trying to make the traditionally apolitical agency a “political tool.”
“I resigned from the board of governors because I was convinced that its independent role had been marginalized and that representations regarding an independent Postal Service for the nation were no longer truthful,” Williams said during a forum hosted by the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“By statute, the Treasury was made responsible for providing the Postal Service with a line of credit,” Williams said. “The Treasury was using that responsibility to make demands that I believed would turn the Postal Service into a political tool, ending its long history as an apolitical public infrastructure.”
Williams said that Mnuchin “insisted” that all GOP appointees to the Postal Service board of governors and the Postal Regulatory Commission “kiss the ring” before confirmation and kept close tabs on labor agreements, price increases and volume discounts given to customers like Amazon and UPS.
Williams, one of the board’s designated Democratic members, served on the board of governors for nearly two years until his resignation and before that was the agency’s inspector general for 13 years.
Williams said that an executive hiring firm was contracted to recommend a candidate for the position of postmaster general, but the GOP donor who ultimately got the job, Louis DeJoy, was instead introduced late in the process by John Barger, another member of the Postal Service’s board of governors who was appointed by President Trump.
Williams said that DeJoy “didn’t strike me as a serious candidate” and that Barger helped him finish a number of sentences during the interview process.
Because Mnuchin’s meetings were private one-on-one discussions, they were not subject to the Government in the Sunshine Act, which requires that federal agency meetings be disclosed to the public. Yet many on the board were aware of the get-togethers, one person said. Mnuchin was requesting briefings before a decision was made, which the person called “unusual.” There was also discussion with Mnuchin about the “need to move quickly” on a selection, the person said.
Any White House or Treasury involvement with the Postal Service would be a breach of its charter as an independent, nonpolitical public entity, said Tim Stretton, a policy analyst for the nonpartisan Project on Government Oversight. The Postal Service operates on its own revenues separate from any federal appropriations process.
Trump has railed against the Postal Service while openly nursing grievances against Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, whose giant online retail operation relies on the Postal Service for many of its deliveries.
Mnuchin’s undisclosed meetings with Postal Service board members add to a broader narrative about financial and political conflicts of interest by DeJoy and some newly appointed board members, as well as White House influence over the Postal Service.
Six weeks ago, U.S. Postal Service workers in the high desert town of Tehachapi, Calif., began to notice crates of mail sitting in the post office in the early morning that should have been shipped out for delivery the night before.
At a mail processing facility in Santa Clarita in July, workers discovered that their automated sorting machines had been disabled and padlocked.
And inside a massive mail-sorting facility in South Los Angeles, workers fell so far behind processing packages that by early August, gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes.
Accounts of conditions from employees at California mail facilities provide a glimpse of what some say are the consequences of widespread cutbacks in staffing and equipment recently imposed by the postal service.
Memos are trickling down the United States Postal Service bureaucracy warning employees that they should not speak to the press and any customer asking lots of questions may be a journalist sneakily trying to get information out of them.
The memos outline what employees should do if contacted by the media, and are titled “Guidelines for Handling Local Media Inquiries.” Motherboard obtained two separate memos from postal employees in two districts. The memos are nearly identical, with different language only about who employees should contact if they receive a media inquiry. They were sent to employees in the last few days, following a spate of articles about the changes Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has made that have put the post office under major scrutiny.
“The Postal Service continuously strives to project a positive image, protect its brand, and present a unified message to the customers and communities it serves,” the memo begins. “It is imperative that one person speaks on behalf of the Postal Service to deliver an appropriate, accurate and consistent message to the media.”
“Avoid the temptation to ‘answer a few questions,'” the memo advises. “Keep in mind that, while most media representatives will identify themselves up front, sometimes they do not. If you are dealing with a customer, especially one who asks a series of questions, it is perfectly appropriate to ask, ‘Are you a member of the media?’ Asking this specific question will help ensure your interaction is not used as the basis for any kind of ‘official’ Postal Service statement or position.”
The memo misleadingly frames identifying oneself as a reporter when seeking information as a choice most reporters make but others don’t. It is broadly regarded across the journalism industry to be unethical to conceal one’s identity as a reporter when seeking information in a professional capacity except in extreme cases where it is otherwise not possible to gather information in the public interest, a condition which obviouslydoesn’tapplyto the USPS.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday that the agency will continue to prioritize ballots over other mail, as it has in past elections, expressing support for the practice of voting by mail.
It was the first time the embattled leader of the U.S. Postal Service has publicly answered lawmakers’ questions about mail slowdowns attributed to his cost-cutting policies that have spurred worries about the delivery of ballots for the November election.
>DeJoy, a former logistics executive and an ally of President Trump, announced he would suspend those policies — including cutting overtime and prohibiting extra mail-delivery trips — and would halt the removal of mail-sorting machines and public mailboxes before Nov. 3. But DeJoy is also considering a massive overhaul of the agency after the vote, The Washington Post reported Thursday, in which the Postal Service would implement geographic pricing, reduce mail-delivery standards and increase prices.
USPS already shut down 40% of the high-speed letter-sorting machines in the Seattle-Tacoma area, for example: https://t.co/SfxCqcmhg4
Reporting clearly shows that much of what Dejoy is saying is simply not true. The thing about this that is really confusing to me is that Republican’s tend to represent rural voters. These are the very people that would be hurt most by destruction of the USPS. My post office is about 6 blocks down the street. Rural voters sometimes are miles from theirs. The only thing I can think is that the people making these decisions see themselves making money from investments in FedEx and UPS.
The Postal Service is mandated to deliver to all of America, especially remote areas where private carriers won't go because it's not profitable.
That's why rural America — which was key to electing President Trump — is organizing to save USPS. https://t.co/FszjcxrDUF
Todd Troyer retired as an ironworker in Milwaukee and moved to rural Wisconsin 15 years ago. The Vietnam veteran has diabetes and heart conditions and gets his prescriptions and insulin through the mail.
When his supply runs low, Troyer, 69, phones in an order to the pharmacy at the nearest VA hospital, in Madison more than an hour’s drive away. He depends on the mail especially now during the pandemic, as cases in his region are continuing to rise.
“That’s the thing I’m worried about: Is it going to make it here or isn’t it? I don’t know,” Troyer says.
As if things weren’t already stressful enough, he says, now mail deliveries could be further delayed amid a standoff over the Postal Service’s future.
“What’s the deal with screwing over the mail?” Troyer says. “I mean, mail has been running since we had horse riders bringing it.”
In fact, you can trace the agency’s roots back some 245 years, when Benjamin Franklin became the country’s first postmaster general.
A Girl reading a Letter with an Old Man, c.1767 Joseph Wright of Derby
It’s still the same old economic rationale for public goods. You can’t provide universal delivery and turn profits.
Anyway, I keep writing on and on about the Post Office but it just seems some of the real great institutions of this country set up at its founding are just being trashed. I just really want some stability for awhile. Here’s another one of those crackpots. The Secretary of State is off on another anti-Iran rage. This is from Reuters: “U.S. will aim to block Russia, China from violating Iran sanctions: Pompeo”
The United States is prepared to block Russia and China from any attempts to violate sanctions on Iran, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Friday, one day after Washington moved to restore sanctions imposed on Tehran by the United Nations.
Pompeo, in an interview on Fox News, also said Washington was disappointed that its allies did not support the U.S. effort to push for a “snapback” of U.N. sanctions, including an arms embargo, after what the Trump administration said was Iran’s violation of its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Read this to see how crackers he really is.
Pompeo has seemingly bizarrely brainwashed himself that he is some sort of retired military general. falsely claimed fought in germany at a public hearing last month, demanded and got military housing. he was never in combat, left military before first gulf war. https://t.co/ypvXzuLhnn
The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
On Monday, Guilfoyle shouted some more things. Earlier in the day, the Trump campaign held a call with reporters, one of whom asked whether Guilfoyle, in her prerecorded speech, might go after Kamala Harris, the California senator and Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee. (Guilfoyle was formerly married to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been described as Harris’s political “sibling.”) The campaign demurred, not wanting to give anything away. But the expectation that Guilfoyle might be deployed in some kind of surgical political strike proved misguided. At the podium, she delivered a short speech whose tone might be described as high-key dystopian. Going into the Convention, the Trump campaign had suggested that it was looking to strike a note of sunny optimism. Guilfoyle’s speech wasn’t it. “They want to destroy this country, and everything that we have fought for and hold dear,” she said. “They want to steal your liberty, your freedom. They want to control what you see and think, and believe, so that they can control how you live! They want to enslave you to the weak, dependent, liberal, victim ideology, to the point that you will not recognize this country or yourself.” Howard Dean’s Presidential aspirations are popularly remembered as falling apart after one misdeployed yelp. On Monday, Guilfoyle went on for six minutes.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
So, now, of course (via Vice): 
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ecocatwoman
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Mama Lopez
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skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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