Here was Florida
Governor Ron DeSantis a month ago puffing out his chest about
'successfully' ignoring public health experts. pic.twitter.com/f2epgxe4lI
—
Matt Rogers 🎙️ (@Politidope) June
26, 2020
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) responded to the brief by saying there is “no moral excuse for the Trump Administration’s disastrous efforts to take away Americans’ health care." Dismantling the ACA would leave more than 23 million people without healthcare plans, according to a recent analysis by the liberal-leaning think tank Center for American Progress.
“President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty,” Pelosi, who on Wednesday filed a bill to expand the ACA, said in a statement.
The Trump brief is about what you'd expect -- pure chewy, malicious wingnut. But don't just take our word for it:The administration’s brief was filed in support of a challenge to the ACA by a coalition of Republican attorneys general, following through on Trump’s pledge last month to overturn President Obama’s landmark healthcare legislation.
Here’s the DOJ plea just filed in SCOTUS urging immediate invalidation of the entire ACA. It’s legally crazy, morally indefensible, and politically bizarre. In other words, pure Trumpian BS.https://t.co/UcJsvwPLnm— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) June 26, 2020
While failing in his response to the pandemic, the Trump is fighting to take away people's health insurance. When he says there are no cases of COVID-19 if you don't test for the virus, it's not a figure of speech. It's his Supreme Court brief. https://t.co/wcBYXKdsFa— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) June 26, 2020
The Trump administration just filed a brief with the Supreme Court calling for the ACA to be overturned. The president has not proposed a replacement plan. Trying to repeal the ACA, along with the response to COVID-19, will define President Trump on health care in the election.— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) June 26, 2020
The Supreme Court won't hear the case challenging the existence of the health law until next term (probably before the election but there's no date yet) Here's what the case is about: https://t.co/t2lI4ObfvG 2/— julie rovner (@jrovner) June 26, 2020
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| (Source: Washington Post, 6/26/20) |
... [P]hysicians, public health experts, advocates and local officials say the crisis was predictable in Arizona, where local ordinances requiring masks were forbidden until Gov. Doug Ducey (R) reversed course last week. State leaders did not take the necessary precautions or model safe behavior, these observers maintain, even in the face of compelling evidence and repeated pleas from authoritative voices.
“We have failed on so many levels,” said Dana Marie Kennedy, the Arizona director of AARP, who said her organization has yet to receive a response to four letters outlining concerns to the governor. She is working on a fifth. [snip]
At critical junctures, blunders by top officials undermined faith in the data purportedly driving decision-making, according to experts monitoring Arizona’s response. And when forbearance was most required, as the state began to reopen despite continued community transmission, an abrupt and uniform approach — without transparent benchmarks or latitude for stricken areas to hold back — led large parts of the public to believe the pandemic was over.
Arizona, like Texas and Florida and other states in the Sun Belt, has its share of loud Trump- led Covidiots, willing to politicize a health emergency:And now, Arizona is facing more per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even by hard-hit Brazil. Among states with at least 20 people hospitalized for covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, no state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day. (our emphasis)
...[R]esistance to health precautions remains pronounced. At an anti-mask rally Wednesday, a member of the Scottsdale City Council, Republican Guy Phillips, shouted the dying words of George Floyd — “I can’t breathe” — before ripping off his mask, enlisting a rallying cry of the nationwide protests against racial injustice to inveigh against face coverings that reduce airborne transmission of tiny droplets. Hours later, he issued an apology “to anyone who became offended.” (our emphasis)
Ducey’s original order reopening the state — and preventing local officials from setting their own rules despite mounting evidence about the benefits of masks and social distancing — was in keeping with a top-down approach to governance that critics say has characterized his tenure. In 2017, he signed a bill approved by the Republican-controlled legislature that allowed any state legislator to direct the Arizona attorney general to investigate a local regulation for a possible violation of state law. Consequences included potentially losing revenue from the state.
The full article is a good read and, with minor variations, tells a story that could be told of late closing and too- early opening blunders by Republican governors in other states now seeing spikes.“The biggest challenge has been Governor Ducey tying the hands of mayors and county health departments,” said Regina Romero, the Democratic mayor of Tucson, who said she weighed an emergency proclamation mandating masks in mid-March but was advised against it by her city attorney. Her city’s budget is about $566 million, Romero said, more than a fifth of which comes from the state. (our emphasis)
Don't bothsides this pandemic. America's epic, lethal fail was driven by the fecklessness of an anti-science party that didn't want to face reality https://t.co/mYAz77G3IJ— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 26, 2020
New independent GAO report on Trump admin response to COVID is out. Lemme break it down for you:
Trump f*cked up bad.
He is still doing so.
And he will continue to do so as long as he is in office.
My biggest takeaway? Vote!https://t.co/9wH4woaHgr— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) June 26, 2020
Eight months ago yesterday. https://t.co/1XzAvx7daa— Bill Russo (@BillR) June 26, 2020
One month ago, I asked epidemiologist Tara Smith if she was worried about states loosening their stay-at-home orders, despite most not meeting the government’s criteria for doing so.
“I am really fearful that by June 1 or June 15, after we’ve seen a couple weeks to a month of [state reopenings], that our cases are going to be climbing,” said Smith, a professor at the Kent State University College of Public Health.
Well, here we are. It’s June 12, and Covid-19 hospitalizations are rising in Arizona, the Carolinas, Utah, Arkansas, Texas, Tennessee, and perhaps Florida. Those states are also seeing higher numbers of positive Covid-19 tests, as well as increases in the percentage of tests that come back positive. This indicates that the higher case counts aren’t simply due to more widespread testing finding milder cases.
Call it a reopening backfire. But really: No expert thought that reopening this quickly was going to work in the first place. [snip]
Many states opened up in early May, hoping the economy would recover while a winning battle against Covid-19 continued apace.
Unfortunately, it’s now clear that in the areas where the virus has come roaring back, few gains against it were made in the last month.
Bunker Boy walked away from the battle with his impeccable lack of courage, judgement and accountability, and most states were hard pressed to resist the pressure. So, here we are with the virus still not contained."We managed to disrupt our economy [and] skyrocket unemployment, and we didn’t control the damn virus,” said Jeff Shaman, an infectious disease modeler at Columbia University. (our emphasis)
Peabody (formerly Peabody Energy) is by far the largest coal producer in the United States, according to the federal Energy Information Administration. With mines throughout the country, the company suffered under the anti-coal policies of the Obama administration and entered bankruptcy in 2016.* Trump was speaking Peabody’s language when he pledged to end “the war on coal.” Under the new administration, the reorganized company roared out of bankruptcy and back into the Fortune 500.
Initially, things looked good. By June 2018, Peabody’s stock was selling for nearly $47 per share. But now that Trump has had more time to work his magic, Peabody is hemorrhaging, and its share price has plunged to less than $3.50.
Arch Coal is the next largest outfit, with 13 percent of the U.S. market in 2018. Its share price has fared better than Peabody’s, despite losing more than 60 percent of its value during Trump’s time in office.
The No. 3 and No. 4 producers in the EIA rankings, Cloud Peak Energy and Murray Energy, are both in bankruptcy. Fifth on the list is Alliance Resource Partners (ARP), headquartered in Tulsa, where Trump plans to hold his first covid-era rally on June 19 [now 20th]. ARP chief executive Joe Craft is a product of impoverished Eastern Kentucky who bootstrapped his way into the billionaire class. He donated $1 million for the Trump inauguration festivities, and his wife, Kelly Craft, is now U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Not that any of that matters to the "economically anxious" voters in Coal Country, who continue to support him. It's much more important that they hate the same people Bunker Boy does than that they're the continuing victims of his lies. [*Ed.-- see comments by Mart.]Craft’s company has not fared well, either.
As long as there was violence associated with the protests, there was a segment for “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” By last weekend, however, the clashes and violence had diminished.
A change of gears, accordingly, was in store for “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” On Monday, he denounced the growing cultural influence of the Black Lives Matter movement: “America went insane over the weekend. ... This was without precedent in the modern era, a small group of highly aggressive, emotionally charged activists took over our culture. They forced the entire country to obey their will. It all happened so fast and with such ferocity that virtually no one resisted it.”
That's when Mothertucker went for the "they're coming for you" racist bullhorn and the sponsors started bailing.As the host decried this new and “insane” America, he himself sounded more and more unhinged. Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah had taken part in a D.C. protest and declared that we need to find "a way to end violence and brutality and to make sure that people understand that black lives matter.” Carlson couldn’t handle it: “Mitt just wants to make sure that Americans understand, get through their thick heads that black lives matter, as if Americans didn’t know that.”
Former Marine Paul Whelan was sentenced to 16 years of hard labor in a Russian prison for espionage Monday, the conclusion to a case that has added tension to already strained relations between the United States and Russia.
As these games are played, an exchange with a Russian asset held in the U.S. is expected. May we suggest Bunker Boy for Whelan?Whelan, 50, said throughout the trial that he was framed. His lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, said his client was unwittingly handed a flash drive containing “state secrets” while visiting Russia for a wedding in late 2018. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Whelan was caught “red-handed.”
A diseased tree with three infected and intertwined branches that each must be lopped off. The worst, by far, is systemic racism in police departments nationwide — and here perhaps the arboreal metaphor fails, and the disease is in the trunk itself, if not in the soil of our national history. The second is the embedded culture of brutality and tolerance of brutality among police officers. The third, connected to the second, is the militarization of police departments, with combat-style equipment designed for battlefields and heedlessly deployed in American streets, that reinforces this culture of violence and, as Trump would have it, “domination.”
Meanwhile in Minneapolis, the City Council is moving forward to defund the police department and replace it with a new model:Those who were inclined, who had the distance — and, yes, the privilege — to be inclined to give officers and departments the benefit of the doubt can no longer soothe themselves with the illusion that these are random, unrepresentative incidents. Technology in the form of omnipresent video cameras has conclusively ended that debate. Those who are white can no longer rest comfortably in the fiction that this is a problem confined to the other. The affected communities will no longer tolerate the murderous knee on the neck, nor should they; the ensuing outrage consumes us all. As it should. As it must.
Nine members of the Minneapolis City Council said Sunday that they are planning to disband the police department. The veto-proof majority said they want to replace the police department with a community-based model of public safety. “Our commitment is to end our city’s toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department, to end policing as we know it, and to re-create systems of public safety that actually keep us safe,” Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender said.
If they succeed, Minneapolis won't be the first city to disband its police department and replace it with a community- based system. Camden, NJ, might offer a good model:The council members made the announcement that they were committed to disband the Minneapolis Police Department through the budget process at a rally Sunday afternoon. “It is clear that our system of policing is not keeping our communities safe,” Bender said. “Our efforts at incremental reform have failed, period.” Jeremiah Ellison blankly said what the goal was: “This council is going to dismantle this police department.”
The entire force of cash-strapped Camden was disbanded a few years ago and reconstituted with a new mentality drilled into its officers: community service.
Out went the urban-warrior attitude. In came the guardians. The new departmental policy said officers would no longer be judged by their number of arrests and tickets.
Instead, they were told to patrol on foot, mingle with residents, and build a reservoir of trust to draw upon in a crisis.
Residents of Camden, located near Philadelphia, say it's been successful. Murders are down by two-thirds since the year before the police reform, and overall violent crime is down nearly half.
The new police chief didn't just participate in a Black Lives Matter protest last month. He helped lead it.Today in Houston, private funeral services will be held for George Floyd, and Joe Biden is offering support in a decent and sensitive way:
Democratic US presidential candidate Joe Biden will travel to Houston on Monday and meet with the family of George Floyd, two weeks after Floyd’s death in police custody triggered nationwide protests over racial injustice, aides said.
Biden is expected to offer his sympathies to Floyd’s relatives and record a video message for the private funeral service scheduled to take place on Tuesday in Floyd’s hometown of Houston, two aides said. He is not expected to attend the service to avoid any disruption to mourners that could be caused by his Secret Service protective detail.Meanwhile, Bunker Boy is meeting with police officials today. 'Nuff said.