In an interview on “Fox & Friends,” Trump referenced proposals from Democrats in the coronavirus stimulus negotiations that would have vastly increased funding for absentee and vote-by-mail options. The final package included $400 million for the effort, which was far less than what Democrats had sought. “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again
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Anonymous2020-07-01 20:20
Reverse sexism does not exist. Saying „kill all men” does not mean anything since it is physically impossible to do so.
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Anonymous2020-07-02 5:56
>>121 The phrase "reverse sexism" itself hints that we live in a society where discrimination against males is legalized as "reversal of" past order. There of course wasn't ever any "kill all women" movement or program, as it would be ridiculous.
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Anonymous2020-07-02 8:33
>>120 How does it contain China, who has trade with every single country in the world? It was another powergrab for corporate power in guise of free trade and cooperation.
How does it contain China, who has trade with every single country in the world?
You dropped the word "influence". It was aimed at containing chinese influence through quite similar means to how China has aggressively spread it through Belt and Road since the Pea-brainOTUS withdrew from the TPP. It set the US up as the hub through which regional cooperative projects would be coordinated, a position that gives you the kind of positive influence that cannot be obtained by dotting the map with military bases or perferming freedom of navigation exercises. This is not something Trump has the temperament or the mental capacity to understand. Separately, of course the TPP would have been immensely improved by cutting out all ISDS type provisions.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down.”
There isn't such thing in the treaty, unless you somehow insert the petrodollar dependence scheme here. There isn't any concrete requirement for US arbitration, in fact it subsumes US authorities in favor of broad ISDS powers that are staffed by globalists & megacorporation stooges.
There isn't any concrete requirement for US arbitration, in fact it subsumes US authorities in favor of broad ISDS powers
Superficially this may appear to be true. However, you need to remember that arbitration decisions do not magically become reality if the parties do not want them to. They need to be enforced. For example, Ecuador is unlikely to get billions of Exxon's assets no matter how many arbitration decisions it wins. The TPP parties agreed to group enforcement by the signatories, which means de facto US enforcement. It would not have come to that anyway in most cases since US good will is usually much more valuable to countries than getting one over the US in an arbitration hearing.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down.”
Trump Panned for 'Campaign of Hate,' Saying He Called for Less Covid-19 Testing
"Once again the president is revealing that he seems to see this primarily as a public relations crisis, not as a deadly pandemic."
As coronavirus cases continue to increase nationwide, President Donald Trump is drawing criticism for his Saturday rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma from a number of angles, including his suggestion that he encouraged officials to slow down testing for Covid-19 and his unauthorized use of a song to promote "a campaign of hate."
Trump said at the rally that the nation has tested 25 million people. "When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people, you're going to find more cases."
"So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.' They test and they test," said Trump.
CNN's Jake Tapper said Sunday that "the president is revealing that he seems to see this primarily as a public relations crisis, not as a deadly pandemic," and took a jab at what he framed as the Trump's "glib indifference and a myopic focus on bad headlines" rather than efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro claimed to Tapper on CNN that the comments about testing were "tongue and cheek."
A tweet Saturday night from Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.) suggests that damage control may not be enough. "In case there's any question: Congress will be pursuing answers on this because the American people deserve to know if their president sabotaged efforts to detect and contain Covid-19 because he didn't like the results," wrote Krishnamoorthi. "The result he needs to focus on is the lives we can save."
Trump's comment came in the midst of continued grim figures about the virus's spread and human toll.
An ABC News analysis published Friday found that hospitalizations for Covid-19 were increasing in 17 states. One of those states is Florida, which on Saturday reported another record-high one-day increase in the number of cases. But Florida isn't alone, as the Washington Post reported:
Eight states on Saturday reported their highest single-day case counts since the pandemic began, and daily new infections nationwide exceeded 30,000 on both Friday and Saturday. The country has not seen daily totals that high in more than seven weeks.
The family of late rocker Tom Petty also sharply rebuked the Trump administration late Saturday when they announced that they issued a cease and desist notice to the campaign for its use of the song "I Won't Back Down" at the Tulsa rally.
"Trump was in no way authorized to use this song to further a campaign that leaves too many Americans and common sense behind," the family said in a statement posted on Twitter. As Rolling Stone noted, the statement is signed by Petty’s estate and rights holders—his daughters Adria and Annakim, his ex-wife Jane, and his widow Dana.
“Both the late Tom Petty and his family firmly stand against racism and discrimination of any kind. Tom Petty would never want a song of his used for a campaign of hate," they said.
"We believe in America and we believe in democracy. But Donald Trump is not representing the noble ideals of either," the statement adds. "We would hate for fans that are marginalized by this administration to think we were complicit in this usage."
Trump's campaign event was the subject of mockery as well.
As Heather Cox Richardson noted at BillMoyers.com,
[Trump's] campaign manager, Brad Parscale, along with the president himself, has spent days crowing that almost a million tickets had been reserved, and the campaign had built an outside stage for overflow crowds.
But far fewer than the 19,000 people Tulsa's BOK Center could hold showed up: the local fire marshal said the number was just under 6,200. Young TikTok users and fans of Korean pop music (so-called “K-Pop stans”), along with Instagram and Snapchat users, had quietly ordered tickets to prank the campaign. The technological savvy of their generation has turned political: they knew that the Trump campaign harvests information from ticket reservations, bombarding applicants with texts and requests for donations. So they set up fake accounts and phone numbers to order the tickets, then deleted the fake accounts. They also deleted their social media posts organizing the plan to keep it from the attention of the Trump campaign.
The poor turnout after such hype was deeply embarrassing for the campaign.
The social media users' action drew applause from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who told Parscale that the activists "tricked you into believing a million people wanted your white supremacist open mic enough to pack an arena during Covid."
"Shout out to Zoomers," she tweeted. "Y'all make me so proud."
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Anonymous2020-07-09 19:52
Senators Find $14 Billion in Unspent Funds After Trump Admits to Ordering Slowdown in Covid-19 Testing
"This administration will put our country at grave risk if it tries to declare an early victory, leave lifesaving work undone, and leave resources our communities desperately need sitting untouched." Published on Monday, June 22, 2020
Following President Donald Trump's admission during a campaign rally in Oklahoma over the weekend that he ordered administration officials to "slow the testing down" in response to the recent surge in Covid-19 cases, two leading Democratic senators on Sunday slammed the Health and Human Services Department for failing to spend $14 billion in funds Congress approved in April to expand coronavirus testing and tracing.
"While it has been months since these funds were first appropriated, the administration has failed to disburse significant amounts of this funding, leaving communities without the resources they need to address the significant challenges presented by the virus," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) wrote in a letter (pdf) to HHS Secretary Alex Azar on Sunday.
"Since the start of the coronavirus crisis in our country the President has ignored experts, denied facts, and put his self-interest ahead of Americans' lives—and here he is saying so." —Sen. Patty Murray "The United States is at a critical juncture in its fight against Covid-19, and now is the time for an aggressive and fast response," wrote Murray and Schumer. "This administration will put our country at grave risk if it tries to declare an early victory, leave lifesaving work undone, and leave resources our communities desperately need sitting untouched."
The senators' letter notes that the Trump administration has yet to spend more than $8 billion of the $25 billion Congress appropriated for coronavirus testing in April. The administration has also failed to spend $4 billion in funds for Covid-19 contact tracing and nearly $2 billion to provide free testing for the uninsured, according to Murray and Schumer.
"We call on you to immediately disburse the remainder of the $25 billion in funds to ramp up testing and contact tracing capacity," the senators wrote, "as well as to make sure providers are aware of and able to easily access the $2 billion that Congress appropriated to provide testing for the uninsured."
The letter was sent a day after Trump, during his first campaign rally since the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered much of the U.S. in March, declared that he ordered a slowdown in coronavirus testing in the face of rising cases across the U.S. More than two dozen states on Sunday reported that their seven-day average of new coronavirus cases increased last week.
"You know testing is a double-edged sword," Trump said at the event in Tulsa, claiming the U.S. has tested 25 million people. "When you do testing to that extent, you're going to find more people. You're going to find more cases. So I said to my people, 'Slow the testing down, please.'"
The comment, which two White House officials insisted was a joke, was met with swift backlash from lawmakers and public health experts who have repeatedly emphasized that a robust, nationwide testing system is necessary to stem the spread of Covid-19 and reopen the economy safely.
"Looking at it as a scoreboard is the wrong way to think about it," Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told the Washington Post. "To think of it as something you can manipulate or slow down based on what the numbers look like speaks to a complete misunderstanding of what an infectious-disease response should be."
Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), whose father died last week of complications from the coronavirus, condemned Trump's remarks in a tweet on Sunday.
"This man is reprehensible, my father and so many Americans lost their lives and this is what he has to say," said Omar. "I pray for our country to find a way to recover from the destruction of his presidency and heal all wounds. This presidency is without a shred of humanity and dignity."
>>131 That's because Trump's competence is imaginary so "a search for a solution to the voter halting problem on a Trumping Machine" is a complex value.
“When you do testing to that extent, you’re gonna find more people, you’re gonna find more cases. So I said to my people slow the testing down.”
In a new study from the University of Chicago that manages to be both shocking and grimly unsurprising, legal researchers found police in 20 of America's big cities fail to meet even the most basic international human rights standards governing lethal force - a level of brutality across the country that fits the deadly definition of “state-sanctioned violence.” Looking at cities including Chicago, L.A., Houston, San Diego, Seattle and Indianapolis, the law clinic found not a single police department operating under state guidelines lthat are compliant with the minimum standards laid out under international human rights laws, from mandating lethal force be used only when facing an immediate threat to constraining police to use only proportionate force to requiring independent external investigations when things go wrong. Hence, Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Atatiana Jefferson, Laquan McDonald, Eric Garner, etc etc ad nauseum. Of the 20 cities, Chicago and L.A. rank at the top for at least some compliance with human rights laws; at the bottom is Indianapolis, because thanks Mike Pence. In Europe, where chokeholds have been banned for years, the U.S. is seen as a racist, barbaric outlier in the realm of human rights when it comes to police brutality. Speaking with The Guardian, Agnès Callamard, the UN monitor on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, said she was "horrified" seeing U.S. police in savage action: "We are watching people dying in public at the hands of those who are supposed to protect us.”
For anyone who hasn't been hunkered in a cave for weeks, months, decades - Oscar Grant was killed in 2009 - the only real stunner is the list's failure to include Columbus, Ohio, where for weeks rioting police have been covering their badges and so indisputably, indiscriminately gassing with chemical agents people exercising their Constitutional rights that the mayor and city council passed a ban on teargassing "peaceful protesters" - a move that enraged police union thugs. Still, Sunday night police were filmed violently shoving their bikes into crowds of peaceful protesters - "Weaponizing bikes: a recruiting tools for sadists" - and wildly gassing protesters. In a universally deemed "new level of abhorrent," their victims included a young, double amputee who, struck and then maced, hit the ground, whereupon police ghouls seized his prosthetics. A grisly, surreal scene ensued: The kid (because he looks like a kid) crawled away from police as a few protesters tried to grab back the legs; when police sprayed them too, several more ganged up and eventually got hold of the legs; in the aftermath, filmed by a professor at Columbus College of Art & Design and reposted to Reddit, the young man twists on the ground in agony as a fellow-protester frantically screams, "Medic! Medic!" His prosthetics lie sprawled nearby. The spectacle caused horrified city officials to call for the de-militarization of police: “The presence of police should never look and feel to residents like we are at war...The word 'peaceful' has a definition when you look it up." On Reddit, a disgusted u/meanmrbadger was more forthright about cops assaulting "an unarmed, no legged" resident: "Bravo, you heroes."
>>137 Who doesn't want to be peed on by russian prostitutes?
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Anonymous2020-07-23 9:51
>>139 Anyone who has a healthy appreciation of vaginas instead of a manchild worship of vaginas caused by not getting any in their youth.
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Anonymous2020-07-23 14:04
>>140 And it's hard to imagine something more sexy than a dense autist.
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Anonymous2020-07-23 20:18
>>141 Clapping at his own speech during the clapping breaks of his first SOTU address because he had no concept of what clapping is for was a marvellous demonstration. It caused appropriate amounts of ridicule around the world, and his aides had to explain the meaning of clapping to him to avoid the same ridicule during subsequent SOTU speeches.
"It's imperative that we listen to the experts... the president is barring them from the room."
The Democratic chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee revealed Friday that the Trump administration is blocking Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials—including agency director Dr. Robert Redfield—from testifying at a congressional hearing next week on school reopenings as the White House continues its efforts to force the resumption of in-person classes in the fall.
"It is alarming that the Trump administration is preventing the CDC from appearing before the committee at a time when its expertise and guidance is so critical to the health and safety of students, parents, and educators," Rep. Bobby Scott (D-Va.) said in a statement. "This lack of transparency does a great disservice to the many communities across the country facing difficult decisions about reopening schools this fall."
"The administration's strategy of prioritizing politics over science has had a devastating impact on our country throughout this pandemic," Scott added. "It should not make that same mistake when it comes to reopening schools."
The White House confirmed its decision to block the testimony of Redfield and other CDC officials, saying the director "has testified on the Hill at least four times over the last three months."
Educators and public health experts have denounced as reckless the Trump administration's push to reopen schools as Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations surge across the United States. The White House, say teachers and parents, has failed to present a sensible plan to resume in-person classes without threatening the health of students and faculty.
"Without a comprehensive plan that includes federal resources to provide for the safety of our students and educators with funding for personal protective equipment, socially distanced instruction, and addressing racial inequity, we could be putting students, their families, and educators in danger," six groups representing millions of U.S. teachers and parents said in a joint statement on July 7.
Instead of working with teachers and experts to decide the best way forward, President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have publicly threatened to withhold federal funding from schools that refuse to reopen in the fall. Earlier this month, Trump complained on Twitter that the CDC's school reopening guidelines—which encourage face coverings and social distancing in classrooms—are too "tough" and "expensive."
"It's imperative that we listen to the experts," tweeted Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), a member of the House Education and Labor Committee. "It's alarming, but sadly not surprising, that the president is barring them from the room."
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Anonymous2020-07-30 10:03
Republican congressman charged with felonies related to illegal voting
Steve Watkins changed voter registration address to a UPS store in Topeka, Kansas, in 2019, the Topeka Capital-Journal reported Wed 15 Jul 2020 19.17 BST
Steve Watkins, a Republican congressman in Kansas, was charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor on Tuesday related to illegally voting in a 2019 local race. The charges came in a state where Republicans have for years made claims of widespread non-citizen voting, with little evidence.
Prosecutors did not provide details of the charges, but said they were related to a 2019 local election. The Topeka Capital-Journal previously reported that Watkins changed his voter registration address to a local UPS store in Topeka in August 2019. He made the change to hide that he was living with his parents at the time, according to the Kansas City Star. Watkins also allegedly lied to a detective about the matter in February, according to court documents obtained by the Star.
Watkins’ change of address was significant because it placed him in a city council district different than the one he was actually living in. The city council district race Watkins voted in was decided by just 13 votes in November 2019, according to the Capital-Journal.
Watkins, a first-term congressman who represents the eastern part of Kansas, was charged with voting without being qualified, marking/transmitting more than one advance ballot, and obstructing law enforcement. He was also charged with a misdemeanor for failing to notify the state of a change of address.
Watkins’ chief of staff told the Capital-Journal the congressman made a mistake in registering at the UPS address. But Bryan Piligra, a spokesman for Watkins’ re-election campaign also noted the charges were announced just before Watkins was set to participate in a primary debate.
“They couldn’t have been more political if they tried,” he said in a statement. “Just like President Trump, Steve is being politically prosecuted by his opponents who can’t accept the results of the last election.”
Voting without being qualified is punishable with between 15 and 17 months in prison for a first-time offender, according to the Kansas City Star. The other two felonies are punishable by seven to nine months in prison.
The charges come as Donald Trump and other Republicans have stirred fears that the 2020 election will be tainted by significant voter fraud, though several studies have shown that voter fraud is extremely rare and isolated. The most high-profile election fraud case in recent years involved another Republican running for Congress in 2018 who hired an operative who illegally collected mail-in ballots.
Prosecutors across the US have used cases in which people vote while ineligible, even by mistake, to set an example. In Texas, Crystal Mason, an African American woman, didn’t know she was ineligible to vote but was sentenced to five years in prison for attempting to vote in 2016 while on supervised release for a felony conviction (an appeal is ongoing). In North Carolina, prosecutors have also filed criminal charges in recent years against people with felony convictions and non-citizens who voted.
In Kansas, the former secretary of state Kris Kobach, a Republican, built his national profile by suggesting there were a significant number of non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. His signature achievement was getting the legislature to pass a law requiring voters to provide documents proving their citizenship when they register to vote. But a federal court struck down the law, saying it placed an unlawful burden on voters and noting just 67 non-citizens had either attempted to register or had registered over nearly two decades.
Bob Salera, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the campaign arm of House Republicans, said the group was aware of the charges and seeking more information.
On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday morning, host Margaret Brennan gave viewers an unusual peek behind the booking curtain. “We think it’s important for our viewers to hear from Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Centers for Disease Control,” she said to the camera. “But we have not been able to get our requests for Dr. Fauci approved by the Trump administration in the last three months, and the CDC not at all. We will continue our efforts.” CBS isn’t the only media outlet with this issue: Fauci and other key health-policy figures on the administration’s coronavirus task force have been largely pulled from the airwaves in recent weeks while cases surge nationwide. Their absence makes sense, though, when you realize that even in the midst of this deadly pandemic, the administration’s top priority is the president’s image. With new coronavirus cases at 50,000 for four straight days, a normal administration would be flooding news programs with medical experts to tell Americans to wear masks, practice social distancing and otherwise fight the virus’s spread. But the Trump White House is doing the opposite. As CNN reported Friday, Fauci hasn’t been on U.S. television in three weeks, even though the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is one of the few leaders that most Americans trust right now. Deborah Birx, coordinator of the administration’s coronavirus response, and Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have also been conspicuously absent. What clips Americans have seen of Fauci & Co. have come from congressional hearings, which the administration has less control over.
Instead, this Sunday, the administration dispatched Stephen Hahn, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, to represent the White House. It was a telling choice: Hahn can point to decades of experience as an oncologist and cancer researcher — and many donations to GOP causes — but unlike other recent FDA heads, Hahn has no background in health policy. Yet the politically savvy Hahn no doubt understood that his job Sunday was to deal with the president’s claim on Saturday that “99 percent” of coronavirus cases are “totally harmless.” Not surprisingly, Hahn dealt with such a gobsmacking claim by dodging it entirely. When ABC’s Martha Raddatz asked for “any evidence that is an accurate statement,” Hahn immediately pivoted to case numbers. When CNN’s Dana Bash pointed out that the CDC estimates that “only about a third of coronavirus cases are asymptomatic” and the World Health Organization estimates that 20 percent need hospital care or oxygen, Hahn said, “I totally support the CDC and the information that they’re putting out with respect to this pandemic.” And when Bash directly asked whether the president was wrong, Hahn said, “I’m not going to get into who is right and who is wrong.” In explaining Fauci’s absence from television, an administration source told CNN that Fauci’s interviews had too much “doom and gloom” to fit the Trump view that everything is fine. And it seems even other public health experts such as Birx and Redfield, who have more often toed the president’s line, have also deferred to reality too many times for the administration’s liking. So it’s not hard to imagine why this White House wouldn’t want them commenting on the president’s latest irresponsible statements. This White House’s goal, after all, is not public safety but to avoid making the president look bad — no matter the cost.
Police say a man captured on surveillance video breaking windows at a south Minneapolis auto parts store in the days after George Floyd’s death is suspected of ties with a white supremacist group and sought to incite racial tension.
The man’s actions soon led to an arson fire, the first of several that transformed peaceful protests into chaos, police say. He has been dubbed “Umbrella Man” for dressing in an all-black outfit that included hood, gas mask and black umbrella.
“This was the first fire that set off a string of fires and looting throughout the precinct and the rest of the city,” Erika Christensen, a Minneapolis police arson investigator, wrote in a search warrant affidavit this week, the Star Tribune reported.
Police identified the 32-year-old suspect through an emailed tip last week, Christensen said, and he is understood to be a Hell’s Angels member who was bent on stirring up social unrest.
Minneapolis police declined to confirm the name of the suspect.
Despite the bulk of protests in Minnesota being peaceful, some rioting spread to other parts of Minneapolis and St Paul.
Floyd was killed on 25 May after a white Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee against Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. A livestreamed video two days later, on 27 May, showed “Umbrella Man” walking along the front of an AutoZone store and breaking out the windows with a sledgehammer. Some protesters confronted the man and asked him to stop.
Before that, the man, who was carrying a black umbrella, spray painted on the front doors, police said. The AutoZone fire was the first that firefighters responded to during the civil unrest, Bryan Tyner, the assistant Minneapolis fire chief, said on Tuesday.
In the affidavit, Christensen wrote that she watched “innumerable hours” of videos on social media platforms trying to identify the suspect with no luck.
Finally a tipster emailed the Minneapolis police department identifying the man as a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang who “wanted to sow discord and racial unrest by breaking out the windows and writing what he did on the double red doors”, according to the affidavit.
An investigation found that the man was also an associate of the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a white supremacist prison and street gang.
1:14 And they lifted up their voice, and wept again: and Orpah kissed her mother in law; but Ruth clave unto her. 1:15 And she said, Behold, thy sister in law is gone back unto her people, and unto her gods: return thou after thy sister in law. 1:16 And Ruth said, Intreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God: 1:17 Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried: the LORD do so to me, and more also, if ought but death part thee and me. 1:18 When she saw that she was stedfastly minded to go with her, then she left speaking unto her. [...] 4:15 [...] for thy daughter in law, which loveth thee, which is better to thee than seven sons [...]