Posted: June 28, 2025 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: cat art, caturday, Corrupt and Political SCOTUS, Donald Trump, ICE Immigration and Customs Enforcement, immigration, SCOTUS, SCOTUS decisions | Tags: ACLU, Birthright citizenship, California, executive orders, fascism, federal courts, haiti, immigration horror stories, nationwide injunctions |
East is a delicate matter, by Zakir Akhmadov
Good Afternoon!!
I don’t see any good news out there today. I wonder if things are just going to continue getting worse until fascism completely takes over our country. It’s already true that we are a failing democracy; and it’s not clear whether we can recover.
We still have some hope that the federal courts can rescue us, but the Supreme Court is making that less likely with each passing day. Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the latest nightmare decision from SCOTUS in the birthright citizenship case, and reactions to that decision are still dominating today’s news and opinion, and there are differing opinions about the fallout from the decision.
I also want to highlight some immigration horror stories that demonstrate how fascism really is coming to America, as Dakinikat suggested yesterday.
The Birthright Citizenship Decision
Nicholas Bagley at The Atlantic (gift link): The Supreme Court Put Nationwide Injunctions to the Torch. That isn’t the disaster for birthright citizenship that some fear.
Yesterday, in a 6–3 decision in Trump v. Casa, the United States Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in a case involving an executive order that purports to eliminate birthright citizenship.
Confusingly, the Court’s decision wasn’t about the constitutionality of the birthright-citizenship order. Instead, the case proceeded on the assumption that the order was unconstitutional. The only question for the justices was about remedy: What kind of relief should federal courts provide when a plaintiff successfully challenges a government policy?
The lower courts had, in several birthright-citizenship cases across the country, entered what are known as “universal” or “nationwide” injunctions. These injunctions prevented the executive order from applying to anyone, anywhere—even if they were not a party to the case. The Trump administration argued that nationwide injunctions were inappropriate and impermissible—injunctions should give relief only to the plaintiffs who brought the lawsuit, no one else.
In a majority opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration and put nationwide injunctions to the torch. That’s a big deal. Not only does it represent a major setback to the states and advocacy groups that brought the lawsuit, it also amounts to a revolution in the remedial practices of the lower federal courts.
But it is not, as the dissenting Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have it, “an existential threat to the rule of law.” It won’t even mean the end of sweeping injunctions in the lower federal courts. To the contrary, the opinion suggests that relief tantamount to a nationwide injunction will still be available in many cases—including, in all likelihood, in the birthright-citizenship case itself.
Cat of Morocco by Isy Ochoa
The author, Nicholas Bagley, is a law professor at the University of Michigan and in the past served as legal counsel to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He writes that Barrett’s decision was based on history. Nationwide injunctions did not become commonplace until fairly recently in U.S. history; therefore she argued that ‘The federal courts thus lack the power to issue nationwide injunctions. Period. Full stop.” Bagley’s take:
In my book, that’s a positive development. In 2020 testimony to the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. Senate, I argued that nationwide injunctions “enable opportunistic behavior by politically motivated litigants and judges, short-circuit a process in which multiple judges address hard legal questions, and inhibit the federal government’s ability to do its work. By inflating the judicial role, they also reinforce the sense that we ought to look to the courts for salvation from our political problems—a view that is difficult to square with basic principles of democratic self-governance.”
Although the Supreme Court divided along partisan lines, with the liberal justices dissenting, I don’t see this as a partisan issue. (The outrageous illegality and sheer ugliness of President Donald Trump’s executive order that lies underneath this fight may go some distance to explain why the three liberals dissented.) Nationwide injunctions are equal-opportunity offenders, thwarting Republican and Democratic initiatives alike. Today, it’s Trump’s birthright-citizenship order and USAID spending freezes. Yesterday it was mifepristone, the cancellation of student debt, and a COVID-vaccine mandate. Why should one federal judge—perhaps a very extreme judge, on either side—have the power to dictate government policy for the entire country? Good riddance.
ven as it ended nationwide injunctions, the Supreme Court left the door open for other forms of relief that are not nationwide injunctions—but that look a whole lot like them. That’s good news for opponents of the birthright-citizenship order.
You’ll need to read the rest at The Atlantic to understand Bagley’s arguments.
Jonathan Last [who is not a lawyer] at The Bulwark: The Supreme Court Just Made America a Dangerous Place.
The Supreme Court issued its birthright citizenship ruling this morning and it’s worse than just about everyone feared it could be.
The Court’s ruling is composed of two main parts.
The first is its declaration that it is possible that the president can contradict the plain-text reading of the Constitution by issuing an executive order doing away with birthright citizenship.
The second is that lower courts can no longer issue nationwide injunctions against blatantly unconstitutional policies imposed by the executive. Injunctions must now be created on a patchwork basis.
I want to impress upon you how dangerous this is. SCOTUS has empowered the president to impose whatever he likes—irrespective of its constitutionality—and then prevented judicial overview except at the localized level. Meaning that we will now have two sets of laws. One that operates in Red America and one that Operates in Blue America.
Separate, but unequal. A house divided against itself.
I think the majority believes it is being clever—that it has found a way to pretend to give Trump a win while (they tell themselves) ackshually delaying a substantive verdict.
But what they have done is not mere make-believe. They have set in motion a calamity.
Mr. Angel, Sir, Some Other Dude Done It, Elisheva Nesis, Israeli artist
I’m going to give you a bit more, because this article is behind a paywall. Last notes that the case before the SCOTUS was not about birthright citizenship, so they didn’t need to deal with that, and they didn’t specifically do that. That question will require further litigation.
The Supreme Court could have jumped ahead and simply ruled that the action proposed by the president’s executive order was unconstitutional. This would have meant widening the scope of the specific question in Trump v. Casa. But scope gets widened all the time. The Supreme Court is the Supreme Court. It can do whatever it wants.
The fact that the majority chose to delay answering this question is, all on its own, a statement. My theory is that at least two members of the majority do not believe that the birthright citizenship order is constitutional—but they want to delay making that judgment as long as possible.
And so, by constructing this new idea—that universal stays are now verboten—they tell themselves that they have handed Trump a tactical victory but set him up for a strategic defeat on the substance of his EO later on.
The Supreme Court majority thinks it’s being clever by playing within the rules. They’re actually being fools, because Trump isn’t playing within the rules. Their conception that injunctions should be limited just to the parties in each particular case works only if (1) similar cases will be decided similarly, and (2) the government knows this fact and won’t try to break the law. But the government is, right now, in the process of finding ways to ignore the courts—including the Supreme Court—with as little political price as possible. And the government has shown already—repeatedly—that it will break the law.
That’s very true. See this article at The Washington Post: Trump says he will move aggressively to undo nationwide blocks on his agenda.
An emboldened Trump administration plans to aggressively challenge blocks on the president’s top priorities, a White House official said, following a major Supreme Court ruling that limitsthe power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions.
Government attorneys will press judges to pare back the dozens of sweeping rulings thwarting the president’s agenda “as soon as possible,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
Priorities for the administration include injunctions related to the Education Department and the Department of Government Efficiency, as well as an order halting the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the official said.
“Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with numerous policies that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis,” President Donald Trump said Friday at a news conference in which he thanked by name members of the conservative high court majority he helped build.
Trump on Friday cast the narrowing of judicial power as a consequential, needed correction in his battle with a court system that has restrained his authority.
Scholars and plaintiffs in the lawsuits over Trump’s orders agreed that the high court ruling could profoundly reshape legal battles over executive power that have defined Trump’s second term — even as other legal experts said the effects would be more muted. Some predicted it would embolden Trump to push his expansive view of presidential power.
“The Supreme Court has fundamentally reset the relationship between the federal courts and the executive branch,” Notre Dame Law School Professor Samuel Bray, who has studied nationwide injunctions, said in a statement. “Since the Obama administration, almost every major presidential initiative has been frozen by federal district courts issuing ‘universal injunctions.’”
Huffpost’s Jennifer Bendery reports on the reactions of the ACLU and other civil liberties groups to the SCOTUS decision: Groups File Nationwide Class Action Lawsuit Over Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order.
Immigrants rights’ advocates on Friday filed a nationwide class action lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship, just hours after the Supreme Court partially blocked nationwide injunctions challenging Trump’s order.
The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Legal Defense Fund and other groups, was brought on behalf of a class of babies subject to the executive order, along with their parents. It charges the Trump administration with flouting the Constitution, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent.
Bohemio et el gato, Luis Garcés
It is also a direct response to the Supreme Court’s decision earlier Friday that puts new limits on nationwide injunctions, and reflects a new legal pathway that groups will likely turn to when challenging the Trump administration’s unlawful actions.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court struck down nationwide injunctions against Trump’s birthright citizenship order, narrowing their scope to provide relief to the specific plaintiff who is suing in a case rather than anyone who would be affected by the order. In addition to drawing sharp criticism from constitutional experts, the court’s decision is a major blow to pro-democracy groups that have been successfully challenging Trump’s lawlessness through the use of injunctions.
But the justices left the door open to challenging the administration in other ways, like class action lawsuits. The ACLU and its cohorts wasted no time using this legal pathway.
In a statement, the groups behind the new lawsuit noted that three lawsuits previously obtained nationwide injunctions protecting everyone subject to Trump’s executive order, but the Supreme Court’s decision narrowed those injunctions and potentially leaves children without protections.
“Every court to have looked at this cruel order agrees that it is unconstitutional,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead attorney in this case, said in a statement. “The Supreme Court’s decision did not remotely suggest otherwise, and we are fighting to make sure President Trump cannot trample on the citizenship rights of a single child.”
Read the rest at HuffPost.
Immigration Horror Stories
First, two incidents in California, which is still under Trump’s thumb with his commandeering of the National Guard and his stationing marines in Los Angeles and with masked ICE gangs roaming the streets. We aren’t getting as much coverage about the situation in California, but protests and ICE raids are still going on.
The Guardian: Federal agents blast way into California home of woman and small children.
Federal agents blasted their way into a residential home in Huntington Park, California, on Friday. Security-camera video obtained by the local NBC station showed border patrol agents setting up an explosive device near the door of the house and then detonating it – causing a window to be shattered. Around a dozen armed agents in full tactical gear then charged toward the home.
Jenny Ramirez, who lives in the house with her boyfriend and one-year-old and six-year-old children, told NBC through tears that it was one of the loudest explosions she heard in her life.
“I told them, ‘You guys didn’t have to do this, you scared by son, my baby,’” Ramirez said.
Ramirez said she was not given any warning from the authorities that they wanted to enter her home and that everyone who lives there is a US citizen.
The raid comes as federal agents have ramped up immigration enforcement in Los Angeles and across southern California over the last few weeks. Huntington Park is in Los Angeles county. Immigrants have been swept up in raids at court houses, restaurants and straight off the street. Some of the people targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) have been US citizens. In one incident, Ice agents detained a Honduran woman seeking asylum and her children, one of which was a six-year-old boy who had been diagnosed with leukemia.
The agents who raided Ramirez’s home in Huntington Park on Friday also reportedly sent a drone into the house after setting off the explosive device.
Two cats on a colorful cushion, woodcut by Theophile Steinlen
More details from ABC 7: Federal agents blast door off, shatter window during raid in Huntington Park.
Dramatic video shows the moment federal agents blew up the front door of a residence in Huntington Park early Friday morning, using a drone to search room by room for a man they say rammed a federal vehicle last week during immigration raids.
“They were right here with their rifles and we heard some screaming up in the front but we couldn’t see because everything was blocked, but it was pretty shocking,” said Lourdes Salazar.
That man, Jorge Sierra-Hernandez, was not home at the time, but his girlfriend and two young children were, leaving them shaking with fear due to the aggressive tactics of those agents.
He is now back home with his family after turning himself in Friday.
After the break-in and drone search:
Once the drone went out, at least nine agents moved in with guns drawn. They eventually escorted Ramirez and her children outside.
“They didn’t identify themselves until I came out, they told me they were from Homeland Security, from ICE,” said Ramirez.
She said pleaded with them to give her an explanation, but instead of giving her an answer, they said “when we find him he’s going to know why.” [….]
The agents claimed that Ramirez’s car ran into a truck carrying federal agents. It’s not clear if it was deliberate. The agents were also angry because protesters were throwing rocks at them during the incident. Why does that justify terrorizing a mother and two small children? DHS and ICE are on an out-of-control power trip.
Channel 4 Los Angeles reported on another incident: Family outraged after federal agents detain US citizen, accuse her of assault.
A 32-year-old U.S. citizen was released from federal custody Thursday evening after her family said she was wrongfully detained by agents during an immigration enforcement operation in downtown Los Angeles.
According to her attorney, Andrea Velez was released on bond after being detained by immigration enforcement agents on Tuesday and then charged with assaulting a federal officer. The Department of Homeland Security said Velez “forcefully obstructed an ICE officer,” but her family said that’s not the case.
Estrella Rosas documented the frantic moments as she saw her sister being thrown to the ground before being arrested and forced into an unmarked car by unidentified officers near 9th and Main Street in downtown Los Angeles.
Woman with a cat, by Marijan Trepše.
“We dropped off my sister to go to work like we always do, all of a sudden, my mom in the rearview mirror she saw how a man went on top of her. Basically, dropped her on the floor and started putting her in handcuffs and trying to arrest her,” said Rosas, recounting the arrest.
In the video, Velez’s mother and sister can be heard pleading for help. “That’s my sister. They’re taking her. Help her, someone. She’s a U.S. citizen,” said Rosas.
In the criminal complaint, prosecutors alleged that during an immigration enforcement Tuesday morning, “Velez stepped into an officer’s path and extended one of her arms in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending a male subject he was chasing and that Velez’s outstretched arm struck that officer in the face.”
In her court appearance Thursday, Velez did not enter a plea in federal court. Velez’s family said she was just walking on her way to work as a marketing designer and did nothing wrong.
Both sisters are U.S. citizens, but these days that doesn’t seem to matter.
One more awful immigration story from The Washington Post: DHS ends deportation protection for Haitians, says Haiti is ‘safe.’
The Trump administration announced an end to temporary legal protections for Haitian migrants in the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk of deportation.
The temporary protected status for Haitian nationals in the United States, granted after a 2010 earthquake near Port-au- Prince caused up to 200,000 deaths, will terminate Sept. 2, the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Friday.
“This decision restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary,” DHS said in a statement Friday. The “environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home,” DHS said, and Haitian nationals may “pursue lawful status” through other means if they are eligible.
The statement did not elaborate on why it considered Haiti safe for citizens.
That’s because Haiti is not safe.
Meanwhile, the U.S. government continues to advise Americans against all travel to Haiti, which has been under a state of emergency since March 2024 because of “kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.” The State Department’s travel advisory adds that “mob killings and assaults by the public have increased” and that crimes including “robbery, carjackings, sexual assault and kidnappings for ransom” are common.
Bedtime Story, by Jeanette Lassen
The U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince this week noted that some domestic air travel had resumed, and urged Americans to leave the country “as soon as possible.”
In a federal register notice of the decision, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi L. Noem said she decided to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti “because it is contrary to the national interest to permit Haitian nationals … to remain temporarily in the United States.”
“Widespread gang violence in Haiti is sustained by the country’s lack of functional government authority. This breakdown in governance directly impacts U.S. national security interests, particularly in the context of uncontrolled migration,” she said in the notice. While the situation in Haiti was “concerning,” she wrote, “the United States must prioritize its national interests.”
The puppy murderer has spoken.
More Important Stories to Check Out
NBC News: Senate Republicans release 940-page bill for Trump’s agenda as they race to vote this weekend.
Politico: Fresh megabill text overnight: what’s in and what’s out.
Bryce Edgmon and Cathy Giessel at The New York Times: Alaska Cannot Survive This Bill.
The New York Times: Senate Blocks War Powers Resolution to Limit Trump’s Ability to Strike Iran Again.
Ryan J. Reilly at NBC News: Pam Bondi fires three Jan. 6 prosecutors, sending another chill through DOJ. workforce.
CNN: University of Virginia president resigns amid pressure from the Trump administration.
Stars and Stripes: Trump eyes staff cuts to top spy agency as he sweeps aside Iran intelligence.
The Washington Post: DOGE loses control over government grants website, freeing up billions.
That’s all I have for you today. What’s on your mind?
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Posted: November 15, 2022 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: 2022 Elections, Donald Trump, just because, morning reads | Tags: Adam Frisch, Arizona, California, Colorado, House of Representatives, iran, Katie Hobbs, Loren Boebert, Nancy Pelosi, Russia, Trump whisperers |
Solitude (Loneliness), Paul Delvaux, 1956
Good Morning!!
As Daknikat wrote yesterday, it looks as if Republicans will win enough seats to control the House with a very small majority. But they won’t be able to do much. I suppose they’ll spend their time and energy investigating Hunter Biden and any other crackpot problem they can dream up. The good news is than Lauren Bobert’s seat is still undecided for now.
AP News: California wins leave GOP poised to seize US House control.
Two threatened U.S. House Republicans in California triumphed over Democratic challengers Monday, helping move the GOP within a seat of seizing control of the chamber while a string of congressional races in the state remained in play.
In a bitter fight southeast of Los Angeles, Republican Rep. Michelle Steel defeated Democrat Jay Chen in a district that was specifically drawn to give Asian Americans, who comprise the largest group in the district, a stronger voice on Capitol Hill. It includes the nation’s largest Vietnamese community.
East of Los Angeles, Republican Rep. Ken Calvert notched a win over Democrat Will Rollins. With 80% of the votes tallied, Calvert, the longest serving Republican in the California congressional delegation, established a nearly 5,500-vote edge in the contest.
Ten races in the state remained undecided as vote-counting continued, though only a handful were seen as tight enough to break either way.
It takes 218 seats to control the House. Republicans have locked down 217 seats so far, with Democrats claiming 205.
Should Democrats fail to protect their fragile majority, Republican Rep. Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield would be in line to replace Speaker Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco.
Read about the remaining undecided races at the link.
The Independent: Lauren Boebert – live: Republican under fire for ‘embarrassing’ tweet as she leads race by just 1,200 votes.
Lauren Boebert has taken aim at Nancy Pelosi and called for the House Speaker’s ousting while her own future in politics continues to hang in the balance.
“Waiting this long for election results is going to make firing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House that much sweeter,” she wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Automat, Edward Hopper
Republicans are just one seat away from control of the House of Representatives, with the balance of power potentially hinging on th eoutcome of Ms Boebert’s race among serveral others that have not yet been decided.
Ms Boebert’s race is still too close to call and it is unlikely that the outcome will be known until the end of the week – at the soonest.
The far-right Republican is currently leading Democratic challenger Adam Frisch by just 1,122 votes in what has shaped up to be an unexpectedly close race. The race could be headed for an automatic recount if neither candidate fails to win by a margin of more than 0.5 per cent.
If only she would lose! This is from Newsweek yesterday: Lauren Boebert in Danger as Rejected Mail-in Ballot Checks Could Help Rival.
The race for Colorado’s third congressional district remains too close to be called, as Trump-endorsed Rep. Lauren Boebert is currently only slightly ahead of her rival, Democrat Adam Frisch.
But the incumbent congresswoman’s narrow lead could once again be overturned if thousands of likely rejected votes in favor of her challenger were to be “cured”, as a recount looms over the Colorado race.
Every year in Colorado, thousands of ballots are reportedly rejected for issues related to signature verification, such as a missing signature or a discrepancy in the signature. Local officials then alert voters of the issue, giving them a week to fix the problem and make their vote count. The process, which is done in 23 other state besides Colorado, is called “ballot curing.”
Boebert was widely projected to win the midterms, with polling website FiveThirtyEight giving her a 97 in 100 chance of victory in the days ahead of the vote.
As of November 14 and with nearly all of the ballots being counted, Boebert is leading with 50.1 percent of the vote (162,040 votes) against Frisch’s 49.8 percent (160,918 votes).
A recount could be called if the final margin between Boebert and Frisch is less than or equal to 0.5 percent of the leading candidate’s vote total. At the moment, the gap between the two candidates is 0.38 percent.
Frisch could still oust the Republican incumbent, an election denier and one of Donald Trump‘s most ardent supporters, if thousands of votes likely rejected for signature verification were cast in support of the Democratic nominee.
So it’s still up in the air.
In Arizona, Katie Hobbs finally triumphed in the race for governor. AZ Central: Katie Hobbs elected Arizona’s 5th female governor, defeating election denier Kari Lake.
Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic election chief who built a national profile by standing up to false claims about the 2020 presidential election, has won the state’s race for governor.
The Associated Press, NBC News and CNN called the race for Hobbs shortly after 7 p.m. Monday, following a nail-biter week of election returns that highlighted the competitiveness of politics in the state.
The Lonely Ones, by Edvard Munch, 1935
“Democracy is worth the wait,” Hobbs posted on social media before issuing a statement thanking her family, volunteers and staff for their work.
“This was not just about an election — it was about moving this state forward and facing the challenges of our generation,” the statement read, ending: “Let’s get to work.”
Late-in-the-race polling showed her Republican opponent Kari Lake, the former television news anchor, with the momentum as Nov. 8 neared. Instead, voters offered a stunning rebuke of Lake, who was one of the nation’s most prominent election deniers.
With Hobbs’ win, Arizonans followed voters in other battleground states who rejected gubernatorial candidates who pushed false claims about election results.
As Arizona’s 24th governor, Hobbs will be the fifth female to hold the top elected office, more than in any other state.
That’s amazing. We just finally got our first female governor here in Massachusetts.
Donald Trump is supposedly announcing that he’s running for president today, and The New York Times and Washington Post can hardly wait. The NYT even hired another “Trump whisperer” to go along with their star access journalist Maggie Haberman. This is from Emptywheel: In the Wake of Trump’s Third Electoral Failure, NY Times Boasts of Hiring a Third Trump Whisperer.
…Jonathan Swan is a good reporter. Indeed, his move to the NYT, which frees him to write like a human being rather than a McKinsey consultant (AKA Axios style), will likely be a significant improvement on his coverage of DC politics.
But it is downright insane that, at a time the GOP and Fox News are at least making noise about ditching Trump, the NYT pitched this hire — and their own political reporting — in terms of Trump.
Our insightful, authoritative and addictive coverage of the election this year drove home an essential truth: The Times’s political team is simply the best in the business.
Take our coverage of Republicans and Donald J. Trump.
We have Maggie Haberman, the dominant reporter of the Trump era, whose prolific, revealing and exclusive coverage has become indispensable to millions of readers. We have Michael Bender, whom Maggie admired as her “fierce competitor” from his days at The Wall Street Journal, and who has delivered exclusives on everything from the former president’s plans to buy Greenland to examinations of how Trumpism remade the Republican party.
And today we are thrilled to tell you that Jonathan Swan, a gifted, dogged and high-impact reporter, will be joining The Times. Jonathan, a national political reporter at Axios, is one of the biggest news breakers and best-sourced reporters in Washington.
Even if you have never met Jonathan, you know his stories. He first reported that Trump would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, that the U.S. would pull out of the Paris climate deal, that Steve Bannon would be fired and that Paul Ryan would retire from Congress.
Or perhaps you watched his riveting interview with then-President Trump in 2020, which won Jonathan an Emmy (and made his facial expressions famous.) Ben Smith, the former media columnist for The Times, wrote at the time that it was “perhaps the best interview of Mr. Trump’s term.’’
Jonathan’s nine-part written series on the final days of the Trump administration won broad acclaim, and the podcast on which it was based rose to No. 1 on the Apple charts. [my emphasis]
Weekend Retreat, by Alan Parry
Again, I think the Swan hire is a net good for reporting — but aside from the degree to which Swan is an improvement over Jonathan Martin, who just moved to become Politico’s Politics Bureau Chief — that has nothing to do with the NYT.
Particularly accompanied as it is by Maggie’s multiple efforts to suggest Trump is still The One, the pitch of Swan as a Trump-whisperer — rather than simply as a very good reporter of right wing politics — this announcement commits to keeping Trump (as a politician, rather than, for example, a criminal suspect, something none of these three are very good at reporting) the center of attention.
The Washington Post article hyping Trump’s announcement–two years ahead of the 2024 election–of courses features gossip reporters Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey: Trump campaign operation takes shape ahead of expected 2024 announcement.
Really, who the hell cares? Why don’t these newspapers cover President Biden, who is actually accomplishing plenty, while Trump is likely to be indicted before 2024? Or they could cover the fact that Russia is still working to influence our elections, which CNN reported this morning: CNN Exclusive: US intelligence suggests Russia put off announcing Kherson retreat until after midterm elections.
The US has intelligence that Russia may have delayed announcing its withdrawal from the Ukrainian city of Kherson in part to avoid giving the Biden administration a political win ahead of the midterm elections, according to four people familiar with the intelligence.
Senior Russian officials discussed the US midterms as a factor during deliberations about the withdrawal announcement, one person familiar with the intelligence said. Waiting until after the US election was always a “pre-planned condition” of Russia’s withdrawal from Kherson, a second person familiar with the intelligence told CNN.
Still, the election was far from the only consideration in Russia’s retreat, officials said. Military analysts say Russia had few other operational options and had been preparing to pull back for weeks, leading US officials to wonder when the Russians would officially acknowledge the withdrawal.
While the intelligence is not a formal assessment of Russia’s intentions, it is a sign that Russia has a continued interest in influencing the US political landscape — although the sources said Russia probably miscalculated the impact such an announcement would actually have on the elections.
“I doubt Americans would really have noticed,” said another source familiar with western intelligence.
President Joe Biden last week appeared to hint that the US believed that the timing of Russia’s announcement was more than mere coincidence.
“I find it interesting they waited until after the election to make that judgement, which we knew for some time they were going to be doing, and it’s evidence of the fact that they have some real problems – the Russian military,” Biden said at a press conference last Wednesday.
Carl Gustav Carus, Woman on the Balcony
I’m going to end with this shocking story from The New York Times about Iran: Stymied by Protests, Iran Unleashes Its Wrath on Its Youth.
One girl, a 14-year-old, was incarcerated in an adult prison alongside drug offenders. A 16-year-old boy had his nose broken in detention after a beating by security officers. A 13-year-old girl was physically attacked by plainclothes militia who raided her school.
A brutal crackdown by the authorities in Iran trying to halt protests calling for social freedom and political change that have convulsed the country for the past two months has exacted a terrible toll on the nation’s youth, according to lawyers in Iran and rights activists familiar with the cases.
Young people, including teenage girls and boys, have been at the center of the demonstrations and clashes with security forces on the streets and university campuses and at high schools. Iranian officials have said the average age of protesters is 15.
Some have been beaten and detained, others have been shot and killed on the streets, or beaten in the custody of security services, and the lives of countless others have been disrupted as the authorities raid schools in an effort to crack down on dissent.
The authorities are targeting thousands of minors, under the age of 18, for participating in the protests, according to interviews with two dozen people, including lawyers in Iran involved in cases and rights activists, as well as parents, relatives and teenagers living in the country. Rights groups say that at least 50 minors have been killed.
The lawyers and many of the individuals interviewed for this article asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The targeting of young people comes amid a broader crackdown on protesters in which 14,000 people have been arrested, according to the United Nations. On Sunday, state media said an unidentified person had been sentenced to death for setting fire to a government building.
There’s much more at the link. Sorry to hit you with this horrifying story, but I thought it was urgent. What can the U.S. do about this? The U.N.?
Please share your thoughts and any other stories that interest you in the comment thread.
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Posted: December 19, 2020 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: California, CDC, Christmas, coronavirus pandemic, coronavirus vaccines, Covid-19, Donald Trump, FDA, Ivanka Trump, Thanksgiving surge, United Airlines, vaccine distribution plans |
Good Afternoon!!
As Christmas approaches, we are beginning to see the aftereffects of Thanksgiving travel and get-togethers. Today The New York Times reports: The U.S. has recorded over 250,000 cases in a day for the first time.
As the United States welcomed the news Friday that a second vaccine, by Moderna, had been authorized by the federal government for emergency use, the country confronted another stark reminder of how desperately vaccines are needed: a single-day caseload of over 251,000 new coronavirus cases, a once-unthinkable record.
It’s been only a week since the Food and Drug Administration first approved a Covid-19 vaccine, the one created by Pfizer and BioNTech. As trucks have carried vials across the country and Americans began pulling up their sleeves for inoculations, more ominous numbers have piled up:
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Monday: 300,000 total dead in the United States.
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Wednesday: 3,611 deaths in a single day, shattering the previous record of 3,157 on Dec. 9.
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Thursday: Over 1 million new cases in just five days, pushing the country’s total of confirmed cases past 17 million.
Three months ago, new cases were trending downward and death reports were flat, but those gains have been lost. Now there are nearly six times as many cases being reported each day, and three times as many deaths, according to a New York Times database.
The South is on a particularly worrisome trajectory. Georgia, Arkansas and South Carolina have all set weekly case records. Tennessee is confirming new cases at the highest per capita rate in the country.
As cases continue to spike, officials are warning that hospitals, which now hold a record of nearly 115,000 Covid-19 patients, could soon be overwhelmed. More than a third of Americans live in areas where hospitals are running critically short of intensive care beds, federal data show. A recent New York Times analysis found that 10 percent of Americans — across a large swath of the Midwest, South and Southwest — live in areas where I.C.U.s are either completely full or have less than 5 percent of beds available.
Business Insider: The Thanksgiving surge in coronavirus deaths is here. It’s ‘horrifically awful,’ a hospital chaplain said.
On Wednesday, the US reported a record of 3,448 deaths. In total, more than 312,000 have died in the country since the beginning of the pandemic (though that’s almost certainly an undercount).
This week alone, two school teachers in Texas who’d been married 30 years died together, holding hands. A convent in Wisconsin lost eight nuns. COVID-19 claimed a Chicago paramedic — the fire department’s third coronavirus death. An elder of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe died of the virus, just a month after his wife.
This unprecedented and tragic surge in fatalities is, in part, a product of pandemic fatigue, cold weather that has led people indoors, and the patchwork nature state policies on masks and closures — many of which are quite lax. But these recent record-breaking days of death, in particular, are the result of infections contracted around Thanksgiving.
Despite CDC warnings to the contrary, an NPR analysis of mobile phone data found that 13% of Americans ventured more than 31 miles from home on Thanksgiving Day. That’s not a huge drop from last year, when it was 17%.
But it’s common knowledge that the most Thanksgiving travel comes in the days before and after the holiday. The Transportation Security Administration screened 9.5 million airline passengers during the 10-day Thanksgiving travel period. That’s less than half of what the TSA reported in 2019, but it still included some of the busiest days since the pandemic began.
Cases generally take about two weeks to appear in official tallies, since the virus incubates in the body for an average of five days, then people usually wait a few days to get tested after symptoms appear. Then there’s the multiday wait for results, and the subsequent process of reporting them to health agencies.
Deaths, in turn, generally follow one to three weeks after a rise in cases.
Like clockwork, that is what we’re seeing now.
Read much more–with individual stories–at the BI link.
More on the horrific situation in California at The Guardian: California sees record 379 coronavirus deaths as ICU capacity plummets. State has 1.7m cases, nearly as many as Spain, with ICU capacity in southern California at 0%.
The coronavirus toll in California reached another frightening milestone on Thursday, with health officials announcing a one-day record of 379 deaths and a two-day total of nearly 106,000 newly confirmed cases.
The most populous US state has recorded more than 1,000 deaths in the last five days. Its overall case total now tops 1.7m, a figure nearly equal to Spain’s and only surpassed by eight countries. The state’s overall death toll has reached 21,860.
Many of California’s hospitals are running out of capacity to treat the severest cases, and the situation is complicating care for non-Covid patients. ICU capacity in southern California hit 0% on Thursday.
“It’s pretty much all Covid,” said Arlene Brion, a respiratory therapist at Fountain Valley regional hospital in Orange county, where she is assigned six or seven patients rather than the usual one to three. “There’s probably two areas that are clean but we’re all thinking eventually it’s all going to be Covid.”
The Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, who is quarantining after his daughter was exposed, gave a stark briefing to city residents, warning that within days LA county may declare a systemwide crisis, with all hospitals out of usual space and staffing. The hospitals are planning by identifying areas such as parking lots and conference rooms that can be used for patient care.
He also reminded residents that the governor earlier announced the state had ordered 5,000 additional body bags and has dozens of refrigerated trucks ready to use as temporary morgues to handle bodies too numerous for existing morgues. “That frightens me, and it should frighten you,” Garcetti said.
The Washington Post has a video and photo essay on a struggling California hospital. Is this what other states will face soon? Overwhelmed: Covid patients are treated in parking lots, hallways and lobbies of a California
hospital that, like the nation, is struggling to keep pace with the pandemic.
APPLE VALLEY, Calif. — The hospital spreads over a block along Happy Trails Highway, which splits this high-desert town in half as it runs low and wide down a gentle hill.
All around St. Mary Medical Center is a new silence.
Fat Jack’s Bar & Grill is shuttered, never to reopen. The Chamber of Commerce, featuring a rearing, life-size model of the mid-century movie-star horse Trigger, is empty.
“Intermission,” reads the marquee of the High Desert Center for the Arts, which sits at the edge of this longtime home of antique Hollywood royalty, the singing cowboy Roy Rogers and his co-star wife, Dale Evans.
The hospital, though, is alive with the dying.
Head over to the WaPo to experience it.
I wonder how many people boarded planes to visit relatives last month? How many of those people were carrying the virus? Check out this story at The New York Times: United Helps to Contact Passengers After Possible Covid-19-Related Death on Flight.
United Airlines said on Friday that it was working with health officials to contact passengers who might have been exposed to the coronavirus by a male passenger who died after a medical emergency on a recent flight.
The four flight attendants who responded to the emergency on board the flight, United 591, also went into quarantine for 14 days after the plane landed at its destination in Los Angeles, the flight attendants’ union said.
The flight, which took off from Orlando, Fla., and was diverted to New Orleans, prompted widespread alarm on social media after reports indicated that the man’s wife had told emergency medical workers that he had tested positive for the virus.
United Airlines said on Friday that the man’s wife was overheard telling an emergency medical worker that her husband had symptoms of Covid-19, including loss of taste and smell.
But United officials said medical professionals did not confirm at the time that the man had tested positive for the virus, and they are still not sure if he was infected. When the flight was diverted to New Orleans, the airline said, it was told that the passenger had experienced cardiac arrest.
Nevertheless, United Airlines said it had been contacted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “We are sharing requested information with the agency so they can work with local health officials to conduct outreach to any customer the C.D.C. believes may be at risk for possible exposure or infection,” the airline said.
But the U.S. Government is coming to the rescue with vaccines, right? Wrong.
The Daily Beast: Pence Said Pfizer Vaccine Distribution Was Going ‘Strong.’ States Are Calling Bullshit.
As Vice President Mike Pence sat for his COVID-19 vaccine shot on Friday morning, governors’ offices across the country were fuming, confused as to why their states were set to receive significantly fewer Pfizer doses than originally expected.
For months, states worked with the federal government to iron out plans for how many doses they’d receive, where and when they’d be distributed, and who would get the shots first. Senior officials with Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership to fast-track a vaccine, touted the administration’s planning as a success, saying that the Centers for Disease and Control and Prevention (CDC) had worked with states to make the distribution go smoothly.
But within days of declaring an unambiguous triumph, things have gone seriously awry.
As vaccines have made their way from warehouses to hospitals across the country, state officials from Iowa, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Georgia, and Washington State, among others, have been notified that they will receive thousands fewer doses than expected. Officials with two states told The Daily Beast that they would receive 30 percent less vaccine than planned. And when officials approached the federal government for answers, they said they were greeted with more confusion.
The search for answers extended up the ranks of the Trump COVID task force as well, where top members copped to being unaware as to why there were discrepancies between the numbers originally communicated to states and the number of doses shipped. As of Friday, the task force has not convened to discuss the issue, according to people familiar with the matter, even as a second vaccine from Moderna received its own emergency-use authorization.
Click the link to read the rest.
USA Today says they know what the problem is: States were left scrambling after finding out they’d get 20-40% less vaccine than promised. We now know why.
States were given estimates that turned out to be based on vaccine doses produced, not those that had completed quality control and were releasable.Only on Wednesday and later were states informed of the actual numbers.
“The ripple effect is huge,” said Claire Hannan, executive director of the Association of Immunization Managers. “The planning piece is critical. We cannot roll this vaccine out on the fly.”
After three days of confusion, the source of the problem was finally clarified Friday night by Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington state. He tweeted he’d had a “very productive” conversation with Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer for Operation Warp Speed, the administration’s COVID-19 treatment and vaccine program.
“That discrepancy was the source of the change in allocations,” Inslee tweeted. “It appears this is not indicative of long-term challenges with vaccine production.”
The sudden shift represents a huge headache for states as they scramble to adjust their vaccination programs.
A letter sent to governors Friday night from Heath and Human Services explained the discrepancy as confusion.
“We want to provide further perspective on the planning numbers generated in mid-November that are being compared with official weekly allocations. Official allocation numbers are only made available the week prior to distribution as they are based on the number of vaccine doses that have met FDA certification standards and have been released to the U.S. government,” it said.
“We hoped it was clear that those figures and the underlying projections from the companies were for planning purposes and could be refined, and that if the number of releasable doses from a manufacturer changed, the allocations to jurisdictions would change, too,” the letter went on to say.
That was in fact not clear to states. Governors nationwide have been asking for details and explanations since Wednesday.
Whatever. The truth is we don’t have a president right now, and even when the Trump people were paying attention, they didn’t really know what they were doing. Guess who was allowed to tell the CDC what to do during the pandemic?
Bess Levin at Vanity Fair: Ivanka Trump, Famed Public Health Expert, Screened CDC Guidance to Make Sure It Was Nice to Her Dad.
In an interview with The New York Times about how the administration manipulated the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, two former Trump political appointees say what they saw during their time at the Atlanta agency shocked them, the newspaper writes: “Washington’s dismissal of science, the White House’s slow suffocation of the agency’s voice, the meddling in its messages and the siphoning of its budget.” According to Kyle McGowan, a former chief of staff at the CDC, and his deputy, Amanda Campbell, the White House insisted on reviewing, and often editing, the agency’s COVID-19 guidance documents, “the most prominent public expression of its latest research and scientific consensus on the spread of the virus.” The guidance was not just vetted by the administration’s coronavirus task force but “an endless loop of political appointees across Washington.” The White House, McGowan says, was obsessed with the economic implications of the public health crisis. For example, the White House’s budget director took issue with the agency’s specific spacing guidelines for restaurants. “It is not the CDC’s role to determine the economic viability of a guidance document,” McGowan told the Times. That battle ultimately led to the agency simply offering a vague recommendation of “social distancing,” which could, really, mean anything, instead of strongly suggesting restaurants ensure six feet between patrons.
And then there were the times the CDC’s scientists were screened by a former purveyor of shoes and purses, Ivanka Trump, in addition to the White House’s undersecretary for lies, Kellyanne Conway:
“Often, Mr. McGowan and Ms. Campbell mediated between [CDC director] Dr. [Robert] Redfield and agency scientists when the White House’s guidance requests and dictates would arrive: edits from [White House budget director Russell] Vought and Kellyanne Conway, the former White House adviser, on choirs and communion in faith communities, or suggestions from Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and aide, on schools. “Every time that the science clashed with the messaging, messaging won,” Mr. McGowan said.”
Part of Campbell’s job was to help get approval for the agency’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report—a closely watched and previously apolitical guide on infectious diseases. However, political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services repeatedly requested that the CDC “revise, delay, and even scuttle drafts” they thought might be viewed as somehow critical of Donald Trump. “It wasn’t until something was in the MMWR that was in contradiction to what message the White House and HHS were trying to put forward that they became scrutinized,” Campbell said.
One more from The Daily Beast: History Will Agree That Trump Used Americans as Lab Rats.
Wednesday was a bad day in the fight against COVID-19. The government announced a record number of deaths, more than 3,600. Meanwhile, a House committee released internal Trump administration messages, which demonstrated that Americans were unknowing lab rats in the president’s grail-quest for herd immunity.
In a July 4, 2020 email, Paul Alexander, a political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services, spelled it all out. In his words, infants, young adults, and middle-aged folks with no conditions had “zero risk,” and were there to take the hit as America marched off a cliff. “We want them infected,” declared Alexander.
Unfortunately, the administration never asked their permission to become human guinea pigs. Indeed, as fate would have it, younger Americans are now dying at historic rates, according to a study recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. As for herd immunity, it’s a lot like waiting for Godot.
But then again, Alexander is the same fellow who also tried to muzzle Anthony Fauci and criticized the CDC as alarmist. In fact, he even commented that the agency’s COVID warning to pregnant women read as if it were designed to frighten as opposed to inform. As Alexander saw things, the agency was portraying the president and his administration as if they “can’t fix this” and that things are “getting worse.”
For the record, Alexander got it wrong on both counts. Donald J. Trump and his minions failed to fix things, and the situation has gone from bad to horrific. The CDC’s worries were borne out.
Early administration projections of no more than 70,000 dead now read like fantasies or wishful thinking. Come Joe Biden’s inauguration—a month away, as we’re losing around 3,000 Americans every day—the death toll may even surpass 400,000.
I’ve seen projections of 500,000 deaths by spring. And I doubt that will be the end of it, despite the vaccines.
I know this is a long and depressing post, but it’s important to understand how bad things are and how much worse they may get over the upcoming long winter. Take care, Sky Dancers. Please stay home as much as possible and wear your masks when you have to go out.
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Posted: February 29, 2020 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Foreign Affairs, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: California, CDC, coronavirus, Donald Trump, Oregon, Washington |
Aleksey Venetsianov, In the ploughed field. Spring. Cats at work
Good Morning!!
Today’s images are from an old favorite, Svetlana Petrova, the Russian artist who incorporates her ginger cat Zarathustra into iconic paintings.
Today’s news is less charming. As the world faces the possibility of a global pandemic, Trump has decided on a coronvirus strategy–calling it a “hoax.”
Politico: Trump rallies his base to treat coronavirus as a ‘hoax.’
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — President Donald Trump on Friday night tried to cast the global outbreak of the coronavirus as a liberal conspiracy intended to undermine his first term, lumping it alongside impeachment and the Mueller investigation.
He blamed the press for acting hysterically about the virus, which has now spread to China, Japan, South Korea, Iran, Italy and the U.S, and he downplayed its dangers, saying against expert opinion it was on par with the flu.
The cards players, Paul Cezanne
“The Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. They’re politicizing it,” he said. “They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa. No, they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.’ That did not work out too well. They could not do it. They tried the impeachment hoax.”
Then Trump called the coronavirus “their new hoax.”
He also tried to link the virus to immigration. The Guardian:
Donald Trump attempted to link the coronavirus outbreak to Democratic immigration policies, labeling Democratic attacks on his handling of the crisis a “new hoax” in a rambling speech in South Carolina, the night before the state’s crucial Democratic primary….
“Whether it’s the virus that we’re talking about, or the many other public health threats, the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and wellbeing of all Americans.”
Trump cited no evidence to link the virus with migration at the southern border, where he has focused much of his anti-immigration policy. The first case of coronavirus in the US with no known origin was diagnosed in northern California on Wednesday night, hundreds of miles from the border. Additional such cases in California and Oregon were confirmed on Friday.
About the new cases, The New York Times reports: New Unexplained Cases Reported in Oregon and California.
Two new and unexplained cases of coronavirus emerged in Northern California and in Oregon on Friday, and health officials in both states quickly moved to contact people who might have been exposed. Experts warned that the cases could indicate signs of spread within the United States.
The Furry Night, Vincent Van Gogh
Oregon health officials said they had identified a school employee in the Portland area who appears to have contracted the coronavirus more than a week ago. The patient, who had not recently traveled to China, has had symptoms since Feb. 19 and may have exposed students and staff at a school in Clackamas County, officials said.
Oregon’s announcement followed one earlier Friday in Santa Clara County, Calif., where officials said a patient with no known risk factors had tested positive for the virus.
The findings hint that the coronavirus may already be circulating locally in the United States, passing from person to person.
According to OregonLive, the elementary school where an employee tested positive for the disease has been closed temporarily while the health authorities investigate.
More details from The Washington Post: Coronavirus is spreading through three more communities on the West Coast.
California reported its second case of community transmission of the coronavirus Friday, and Oregon and Washington announced others just hours later, providing fresh evidence that the deadly virus is circulating in the United States.
Authorities in Santa Clara County, Calif., said a 65-year-old woman had come down with the covid-19 disease without traveling to any countries hit hard by the outbreak or coming in contact with anyone known to have the infection.
In Oregon, officials said a person from Washington County, in the northwest part of the state, had tested positive under similar circumstances. The positive test was conducted by the state’s laboratory and is considered “presumptive” until it is confirmed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Love is Gold, Gustav Klimt
The unnamed Oregon individual spent time in an elementary school outside Portland and may have exposed students and staff there, state health authorities said. The school was ordered closed through Wednesday for cleaning, a local television station reported.
In Washington, state health officials said a high school student in Snohomish County, just north of Seattle, received a “presumptive” positive test in another case of unknown origin.
The Jackson High School student was not in school most of this week, but was on campus briefly Friday morning, according to a statement from Everett Public Schools. Students who were in contact with the patient will remain home for 14 days while health authorities monitor their symptoms, and the school will close for three days, the school district said.
The developments mean the virus is spreading in at least four separate communities — two of them about 90 miles apart in California, and two others farther up the West Coast.
This is just the beginning folks. And the Trump administration enabled the spread of the virus with its ho hum response to a health crisis. Michael Daly at The Daily Beast: Trump Didn’t Just Botch the Coronavirus Response. He Enabled Its Spread.
Even as China was announcing that its deaths from the novel coronavirus had surpassed its toll from SARS, President Donald Trump released a proposed budget for 2021 that slashed funding for our chief defender against epidemics by 18 percent.
Within the overall proposed cuts detailed on Feb. 10 for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was a reduction in spending to guard against “emerging and zoonotic diseases” from $635,772,000 to $550,464,000.
‘Three Graces’ by Peter Paul Rubens
Zoonotic diseases are those that have crossed from animals to humans, as the novel coronavirus is believed to have done….
We might have had earlier warning of the outbreak, but previous budget cuts caused the CDC to end its global security program in China in 2017.
In another failure of foresight two years ago, the White House eliminated the National Security Council’s position for combating global health crises. The NSC’s Senior Director for Global Health Security and Biothreats post was held by the highly regarded Rear Admiral Tim Ziemer—whose sudden departure in May of 2018 happened to coincide with a new Ebola outbreak in Africa.
Also check out this piece at ProPublica: Key Missteps at the CDC Have Set Back Its Ability to Detect the Potential Spread of Coronavirus.
As the highly infectious coronavirus jumped from China to country after country in January and February, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost valuable weeks that could have been used to track its possible spread in the United States because it insisted upon devising its own test.
The federal agency shunned the World Health Organization test guidelines used by other countries and set out to create a more complicated test of its own that could identify a range of similar viruses. But when it was sent to labs across the country in the first week of February, it didn’t work as expected. The CDC test correctly identified COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. But in all but a handful of state labs, it falsely flagged the presence of the other viruses in harmless samples.
As a result, until Wednesday the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration only allowed those state labs to use the test — a decision with potentially significant consequences. The lack of a reliable test prevented local officials from taking a crucial first step in coping with a possible outbreak — “surveillance testing” of hundreds of people in possible hotspots. Epidemiologists in other countries have used this sort of testing to track the spread of the disease before large numbers of people turn up at hospitals.
Read the rest at ProPublica.
Lady with an Ermine’ by Leonardo da Vinci
That’s not all, of course. The Trump administration decided–against the advice of the CDC–to bring back Americans who had been exposed to the virus cruise ship in Japan and then they sent HHS workers with no protective clothing and no training to receive these people at U.S. air bases in California. Some of those workers then went out into the community, to hotels, and even commercial flights.
From today’s Washington Post: DHS employee told to report to work in Newark after China travel, in violation of coronavirus quarantine, complaints say.
A Department of Homeland Security employee who returned from travel to China was told by her supervisor to report to her workplace in early February in apparent violation of a mandatory 14-day coronavirus quarantine period, according to complaints filed Friday by the union that represents the woman’s co-workers.
The DHS employee, who was not identified, works for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in Newark, according to the complaint. After arriving from China, she called a supervisor to ask if she should remain at home under quarantine, but she was told to report to work Feb. 10, according to Ward Morrow, an attorney for the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents USCIS employees.
Can you tell I’m obsessed with the coronavirus story? There’s also a primary today in South Carolina. I’ll be keeping an eye on that too.
What stories are you following today? This is a wide open thread.
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Posted: November 25, 2013 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: Affordable Care Act (ACA), Barack Obama, Congress, Foreign Affairs, Hillary Clinton, Iran, Israel, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: California, Denver Broncos, football, John Kerry, New England Patriots, Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, weather |
Good Morning!!
Don’t blame Dakinikat for the lateness of this post. I volunteered to fill in for her today and then I ended up oversleeping.
I stayed up too late watching the New England Patriots come from behind to beat the Denver Broncos on Sunday Night Football. I had pretty much given up on the Pats at halftime when they were down 24-0. But once again Patriots quarterback Tom Brady rallied his team and once again showed Peyton Manning who’s boss.
Cindy Boren sums up what happened at The Washington Post:
For most of the country, Sunday night was cold. It’s the gateway to a big holiday week and, with the Denver Broncos blowing out the hapless New England Patriots on Sunday night, why not just turn in early?
Suckers.
Here’s the abbreviated version of what happened while you were sleeping: Trailing 24-0 at halftime, Tom Brady and the Patriots scored 31 points in the second half, the Broncos scored to tie it and, with Bill Belichick making another of his unusual coaching decisions, the Patriots won 34-31 on a field goal that came off a turnover on a muffed punt with time running out in overtime. But it was a decision by Belichick that set up the Patriots. After winning the OT coin toss, he chose to take the wind — a stiff, brutally cutting wind — in a move that even his captains questioned.
There was a fierce wind blowing in the Boston area all day yesterday. It was coach Bill Belichick’s decision to give the ball to the Broncos, forcing Manning to either throw into the wind or and the ball off. It worked, and the Pats ended up winning on a field goal. It was incredible–only the fifth time in history a team has come back from 24 down at the half to win a game.
So, that’s my excuse for being late with the morning post. I know you’re probably not impressed . . .
Of course the weather here in New England is just a minor annoyance compared to much of the rest of the country. CNN reports: Nasty weather wallops much of U.S. just before Thanksgiving.
The wicked wintry weather that pummeled the West Coast is now barreling across the country, threatening to wreck millions of holiday travel plans just before Thanksgiving.
The storm has already contributed to at least 10 traffic fatalities.
Nearly 400 flights have been canceled in the Dallas-Fort Worth area — not exactly a bastion for snowstorms. Sleet and freezing rain will keep blanketing parts of the Southern Plains and Southern Rockies on Monday.
New Mexico may be hit with 8 inches of snow!
And it’s headed our way next:
And after the storm deluges parts of the South with rain Monday evening, it’ll start zeroing in on the Northeast, the National Weather Service said. And that could spell more travel nightmares….
An Arctic air mass will probably keep temperatures 15 to 20 degrees below normal along the East Coast through Thursday. But even if the system fails to deliver heavy snow, fierce winds could still hamper air travel, forecasters said….
Heavy rain is expected to fall from Texas to Georgia on Monday and over the Carolinas on Monday night, with some sleet and snow mixed in for northern parts of that swath. The heaviest rain is expected across parts of Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.
So be careful out there–especially you Sky Dancers in the southern half of the country.
In political news, the big story is the deal that the Obama administration has struck with Iran. Israel doesn’t like it one bit, and that means there will be objections in Congress. From Bloomberg via the SF Chronicle:
Israel’s rejection of the accord reached in Geneva by Iran and six leading nations over the weekend was swift. The agreement is a “historic mistake” that leaves the world “a much more dangerous place, because the most dangerous regime in the world has taken a significant step toward attaining the most dangerous weapon,” Netanyahu said.
The first accord since the Iranian nuclear program came under international scrutiny in 2003 eases sanctions on Iran in return for concessions on its atomic work. Its six-month timetable is meant to give negotiators time to seek a comprehensive deal to halt Iranian nuclear work that they, like Israel, think is a cover to build weapons.
Israel will now focus on influencing the final deal as much as they possibly can.
“What Israel can do during this period is push the international community toward making the final deal as tough as it can, though it should do so far more quietly than it has in the past,” said Eilam, a retired brigadier-general.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told CBS News in Geneva that the agreement doesn’t take the threat of force off the table and rejected Israel’s position, articulated yesterday by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, that the U.S. capitulated to Iranian deceit.
The agreement is “not based on trust. It’s based on verification,” with mechanisms in place to confirm whether Iran is in compliance, he said.
Kerry actually used many Congresspeople’s opposition to loosening sanctions on Iran to push the Iranians to make a deal. From Bloomberg Businessweek:
When Secretary of State John Kerry joined the nuclear negotiations at the Intercontinental Hotel in Geneva last Saturday, he employed the oldest negotiating trick in the book, evoking Congress as the bad cop to the Obama administration’s good cop. Kerry told Iranian foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif that if they failed to reach an agreement that day, the Obama administration would be unable to prevent Congress from passing additional sanctions against Iran. Less than 24 hours later, Kerry and Zarif walked into the hotel lobby to announce that they had struck a deal to temporarily freeze Iran’s nuclear program.
In the face of criticism from members of Congress and the U.S.’s allies in the Middle East, Administration officials have insisted that the Geneva agreement is just the first step toward a more far-reaching disarmament deal. But such a deal will require that the Obama administration promise not just to forestall the imposition of new sanctions, but to dramatically reduce the sanctions already in place. And that depends on the cooperation of a Congress that has been singularly uninterested in assuming the role of good cop in the showdown with Iran.
The White House has some discretion to rescind the Iran sanctions without Congress’s approval. The method for removing any given set of sanctions depends on how those sanctions were passed in the first place. If they’re the product of an executive order, as many of the existing sanctions against Iran are, removing them requires only that the White House decide to stop enforcing them. That’s exactly how Obama will be making good on its promise to Iran, as part of last week’s interim agreement, to restore access to $7 billion held in foreign bank accounts….Removing sanctions that have been passed into law by Congress, however, is a much more difficult challenge. Despite the partisan gridlock in gridlock in Washington over the last several years, bipartisan majorities have managed to cooperate on three separate rounds of sanctions since 2010, including measures targeting Iran’s central bank, which Iran will undoubtedly want rescinded. Removing those laws from the books will force the White House to go through Congress all over again. That will require overcoming the partisanship and procedural hurdles that have consumed Congress in recent years.
I have to say, Obama is once again showing he has guts. If only he would use some of that to stand firm on domestic policies. The BBC reports that the Obama administration has been working toward this agreement for months through secret negotiations that SOS John Kerry was involved in while he was still chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
I’m really curious to know what role Hillary Clinton played in these negotiations and whether she supports the deal, but I can’t find any information about that so far. Meanwhile, here’s a positive review from Mark Fitzpatrick of the International Institute for strategic studies (IISS): The surprisingly good Geneva deal.
The deal reached in the early hours of the morning in Geneva on 24 November was better than I had expected, and better than would have been the case without France’s last-day intervention at the previous round two weeks earlier. I spent much of Sunday making the rounds of TV studios and fielding print-media interviews, explaining why opponents in Israel, the Gulf and US Congress should overcome their scepticism. The more I studied the deal, the more apparent it became to me that those who knock it probably did not want any agreement at all – at least not any deal that was within the realm of possibility.
The Geneva agreement is a good deal because Iran’s capabilities in every part of the nuclear programme of concern are capped, with strong verification measures. The terms require that for the next six months, no more centrifuges can be added, none of the advanced models that were previously installed can be turned on, the stockpiles of enriched uranium cannot increase, and work cannot progress on the research reactor at Arak, which is of concern because of the weapons-grade plutonium that would be produced there. Going well beyond normal verification rules, inspectors will be able to visit the key facilities on a daily basis and even have access to centrifuge production and assembly sites.
Moreover, the most worrisome part of the programme is being rolled back. Iran is suspending 20% enrichment, which is on the cusp of being weapons-usable, and neutralising the existing stockpile of 20% product, half through conversion to oxide form and half through blending down. Although the P5+1 had earlier asked for the stockpile to be exported, these measures will virtually accomplish the same purpose by eliminating the stockpile. Reversing these measures would take time.
Time is the essential variable of this deal. The net effect of the limits Iran has accepted is to double the time it would take for it to make a dash to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons. Without a deal, the break-out time might instead soon be halved.
Read the rest at the link.
Paul Krugman has a column up about some positives on the rollout of Obamacare and California as a “test case” for the program.
Now, California isn’t the only place where Obamacare is looking pretty good. A number of states that are running their own online health exchanges instead of relying on HealthCare.gov are doing well. Kentucky’s Kynect is a huge success; so is Access Health CT in Connecticut. New York is doing O.K. And we shouldn’t forget that Massachusetts has had an Obamacare-like program since 2006, put into effect by a guy named Mitt Romney.
California is, however, an especially useful test case. First of all, it’s huge: if a system can work for 38 million people, it can work for America as a whole. Also, it’s hard to argue that California has had any special advantages other than that of having a government that actually wants to help the uninsured. When Massachusetts put Romneycare into effect, it already had a relatively low number of uninsured residents. California, however, came into health reform with 22 percent of its nonelderly population uninsured, compared with a national average of 18 percent.
Finally, the California authorities have been especially forthcoming with data tracking the progress of enrollment. And the numbers are increasingly encouraging.
Krugman says that about 10,000 people are signing up per day, and the enrollment numbers show a balance between younger, healthier enrollees and those who are older and more likely to need health care.
So . . . it’s a somewhat slow news day as we head into the holiday season, but the Iran deal will give us something to talk about while the folks in Washington take their extra long vacations. I don’t even want to think about what will happen when they get back and start clashing over the debt ceiling again.
What interesting stories are you finding out there today? Please post your links in the comment thread and have a good day despite the weather!
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