I can’t believe Fauci hasn’t been sacked yet
Fauci says US death toll ‘going to be very disturbing’ and fears 100,000 daily cases
America First.
Was always going to happen considering the US pays around 7 to 10 times as much for drugs than the EU for the same medicines (and why a similar level of health care coverage that we receive on the NHS would cost a family of 4 around $2000 a month + co=pays on certain treatments… and thats not even a highest level tarif)… oh and Trump is an electioneering cunt so what’s new
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You’d want to be at least 24 hours away.
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You ancient cunt. 
Does any of this sound familiar?
Boom.
BBC News - Five shocking passages in Mary Trump’s tell-all book
Republicans Against Trump
July 9, 2020 (Thursday)
Today was a big news day, so this is longer than usual. Sorry about that.
The day began with three Supreme Court decisions.
The first is a major victory for indigenous peoples. In a 5-4 decision in McGirt v. Oklahoma, the court upheld the claim of the Creek Nation that a large chunk of Oklahoma, including much of Tulsa, remains a reservation for the purposes of criminal prosecutions. This means that natives on the land cannot be tried by state court; they must be tried in tribal or federal courts. While this will affect state convictions of Creeks, tribal leaders say it will have little impact on non-natives.
Oklahoma had argued that while Congress had initially established a reservation for the Creeks, it had ended that reservation when it pushed Creek individuals onto their own farms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Congress had never explicitly gotten rid of the reservation. Neil Gorsuch joined the majority and wrote the decision, saying “Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of federal criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”
The decision details the history of U.S. and Creek interactions, and notes that the federal government often went back on the promises it made to the Native Americans. The decision holds the federal government to the treaties it negotiated with the Creeks, and as such, the decision has the potential to affect a number of other conflicts in which federal agreements were overruled by other state or federal actions, but were never explicitly ended. The decision certainly has the potential to apply to four other reservations in eastern Oklahoma whose histories mirror that of the Creek lands.
The other two decisions handed down today concerned whether or not Congress and a New York prosecutor could gain access to Trump’s financial records from before he became president. Trump’s lawyers had argued that a president could not be investigated while in office, no matter what crimes he might have committed. A 1973 Department of Justice memo established that presidents could not be indicted while in office, but Trump’s lawyers have pushed this concept to say that a president cannot be investigated, either.
The Supreme Court disagreed. By a vote of 7-2, in Trump v. Vance, the Supreme Court upheld a criminal subpoena issued by Cyrus Vance, Jr. of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office on behalf of a grand jury that wanted financial records to look into hush money paid to adult film actress Stormy Daniels and a Playboy model Karen McDougal. In an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court rejected the argument that a president cannot be investigated for a crime. “In our judicial system,” Roberts wrote, “’the public has a right to every man’s evidence.’ Since the earliest days of the Republic, ‘every man’ has included the President of the United States.” Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.
The decision left room for Trump to challenge the subpoenas on specific grounds, and it is likely he will do so, but he has lost the main point.
Trump v. Mazars USA, LLP, involved whether Congress had a right to investigate the president. Three House committees-- the House Committee on Financial Services, the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, and the House Intelligence Committee-- issued subpoenas to Trump’s accountants and bankers for financial information relating to money laundering and foreign interference in U.S. elections. Trump had sued Mazars to stop the firm from handing over the information.
Again by a 7-2 vote, with Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissenting, the court decided that Congress did, in fact, have the right to subpoena information from the president, but because Congress had to observe the separation of powers, the conditions under which Congress subpoenaed presidential information must be limited to legitimate lawmaking needs rather than attempts at law enforcement. The court sent the case back to lower courts for further review to consider whether the subpoenas met the criteria required to preserve the separation of powers.
The Supreme Court noted that Congress and the president had always in the past found a way to resolve their differences over issues of subpoenas, and that “this dispute is the first of its kind to reach the Court,” so the justices wanted to be careful not to mess up a system that had worked well for 200 years (and yes, it sure seems like there’s a dig at Trump there).
Curiously, the decisions give more leeway to state prosecutors than to Congress in investigating a president.
It is not clear that either case will force the production of Trump’s financial documents before the election, although that production is not impossible if the lower courts, which will now see reworked subpoenas, move quickly. Law professors and former government lawyers Neal Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer argued in the Washington Post today that such speed was both possible and likely.
Still, the decisions are huge. Trump has argued that the president is untouchable. The Supreme Court, including two of Trump’s own appointees, has repudiated his argument entirely.
After the decisions were announced, Trump melted down on Twitter. “The Supreme Court sends case back to Lower Court, arguments to continue. This is all a political prosecution. I won the Mueller Witch Hunt, and others, and now I have to keep fighting in a politically corrupt New York. Not fair to this Presidency or Administration!.. Courts in the past have given “broad deference”. BUT NOT ME!” He took shots at South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, a key supporter who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, for not prosecuting members of the Obama administration for allegedly committing crimes against him.
Former federal prosecutor and legal commentator Renato Mariotti responded: “No court has ever held that a president was ‘immune’ to a grand jury subpoena or Congressional subpoena. Your lawyers raised absurd arguments that were soundly rejected by seven out of the nine Supreme Court justices, including two justices you appointed.”
Phew! But that was not all that happened today.
Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman testified today before the House Judiciary Committee about the circumstances surrounding his firing. Berman said that Attorney General William Barr had pressured him to resign on June 18, offering him a number of other government positions and warning him that if he did not take one of the other jobs, he would be fired and his career wounded. When Berman refused, in the interests of continuing the cases on which his office was working, Barr simply announced on June 19 that Berman had resigned. Barr seemed desperate to install a new U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and Democrats in Congress will want to know why.
Also today, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, appeared before the House Armed Services Committee and took a stand against the Confederate flag, Confederate statues, and Confederate names on U.S. Army bases, in strong opposition to Trump. Talking of those Confederate generals whose names are now on U.S. bases, Milley said, “those officers turned their back on their oath…. It was an act of treason, at the time, against the Union, against the Stars and Stripes, against the US Constitution."
At the same hearing, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper confirmed that he had, in fact, been informed that Russia had offered money to Taliban fighters to kill American and allied troops in Afghanistan, so it was not a “hoax,” as the president has insisted. While Esper tried hard to speak carefully enough that he did not antagonize the president, defense officials have told CNN that both Esper and Milley are worried that Trump is politicizing the military, and are determined not to let him drag it into the election campaign.
It appears Trump’s position is weakening. This week, a number of Republican senators announced they were taking a pass on the Republican National Convention in Jacksonville, Florida, next month, and this afternoon, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested that he, too, might skip it. Earlier this week, his spokesman had said that McConnell “has every intention” of attending the convention, but last week, a Republican source told Reuters that unless Trump’s performance improved by August, McConnell might have to advise Republican Senate candidates to keep their distance from Trump in order to try to hold on to the Republican majority in the Senate.
It seems that McConnell might be making that call earlier than expected.
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sigh
July 10, 2020 (Friday)
Tonight’s news dump felt different to me, as if Trump has realized that he is in trouble in the upcoming election, and rather than trying to court the independent voters he needs to win reelection honestly, is focusing instead on doing all he can to protect himself from indictments and to charge up his base.
First, though, while there is much political news, the biggest story remains the coronavirus. Today the U.S. had more than 68,000 new coronavirus cases in a single day, the seventh single-day record in the last 11 days. Yesterday’s number—also a record—was 59,886. Our death toll has topped 136,000, but Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a top advisor to the president on the coronavirus, says he hasn’t briefed the president in two months, and is not being allowed on television because of his dire warnings about the pandemic.
The Republican governors of Florida, Arizona, and Texas, where infections are spiking, are caught between the reality of the virus and Republican ideology.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has been refusing to release data on hospitalizations, but the state today revealed that there are almost 7000 Floridians in Florida hospitals, sick with Covid-19. Florida is now one of the world’s epicenters for the disease, but DeSantis says he will not slow the state’s reopening.
In Arizona, now leading the U.S. in the growth of new Covid-19 cases with 4,221 new cases today, Governor Doug Ducey has ordered bars, movie theaters, gyms, and water parks closed to stop the spread of the virus. Bar owners are suing him.
And in Texas, where Houston hospitals have run out of room for more patients and are turning them away, county Republican parties have voted to censure Governor Greg Abbott for requiring face masks to slow the spread of the virus. They say such an order is government overreach.
Now politics: Today Attorney General William Barr, who is packing the Department of Justice with his own loyalists, announced the appointment of a new U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. Seth D. DuCharme will take over for Richard P. Donoghue, who will move to the main Justice Department to oversee investigations around the country. Both men are close to Barr. DuCharme has been working with John Durham, whom Barr has tapped to try to undermine the evidence in the Mueller Report. The EDNY has been investigating irregularities in the financing of Trump’s inauguration festivities.
In any normal era, this unusual change would be the day’s major story, but it was eclipsed today by the news that Trump has commuted the sentence of his friend and associate Roger Stone, who was supposed to surrender on Tuesday to serve a 40-month sentence. A jury convicted Stone of obstructing Congress, lying to investigators, and tampering with a witness. When Trump insisted that Stone was being persecuted for his politics, the judge in his case, Amy Berman Jackson, answered that Stone “was not prosecuted for standing up for the president; he was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”
Nonetheless, Trump continued to attack Stone’s conviction. First, Barr’s Department of Justice abruptly reduced its recommended sentence for Stone against the wishes of the career prosecutors who handled Stone’s case. That led to a crisis in the DOJ, as the four prosecutors quit the case.
When Jackson handed down a 40-month sentence, Trump turned against the jury that had convicted Stone, insisting without evidence that the forewoman was a biased anti-Trump activist who had tainted the jury. The judge shot down that argument, pointing out that Stone’s lawyers had not challenged her status when they could have, but, identified by Trump supporters, the forewoman—who had, after all, been doing her civic duty-- became a target.
Stone’s legal troubles stemmed from his attempt to be the go-between who funneled stolen emails from Wikileaks, a front for Russian intelligence, to the 2016 Trump campaign. But his connection to Trump is much longer and deeper: the men have known each other for many years, and it was Stone who brought his former associate Paul Manafort onto Trump’s campaign in summer 2016. Manafort was fresh from advising the political career of a Russia-linked oligarch in Ukraine, and was present at the Trump Tower meeting on June 9, 2016 when Donald Trump, Jr., and Jared Kushner met with Russian agents. Manafort turned the flagging campaign around, and if there are skeletons in the campaign closet, it is likely that Stone would know of at least some of them.
This afternoon, before the announcement, NBC news correspondent Howard Fineman tweeted “Just had a long talk with [Roger Stone]. He says he doesn’t want a pardon (which implies guilt) but a commutation, and says he thinks [Trump] will give it to him. ‘He knows I was under enormous pressure to turn on him. It would have eased my situation considerably. But I didn’t.’”
This statement indicates, of course, that Trump is hiding criminal behavior, and that his commutation of Stone’s sentence is a bribe to keep him quiet. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) sure saw it that way: “This is, like, super simple, right? Stone had info that would have put Trump in jail. He told Trump he’d obstruct justice if he got clemency. Trump agreed. If you think it went down another way, you haven’t been paying attention to the last 40 years of Donald Trump,” he tweeted.
It is interesting that Trump did not pardon Stone, but rather commuted his sentence. A presidential pardon takes away a person’s right to stay silent in court under the right established by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution not to self-incriminate. It does so because there is no need to worry about conviction: you’ve been pardoned. A commutation does not take away that right, so Stone now cannot be compelled to testify.
There is widespread condemnation of this commutation, and yesterday even the DOJ said it supported Stone’s imprisonment. But Trump clearly doesn’t care. His long statement upon issuing the grant of clemency was a rehash of his usual accusations about “the Russia Hoax that the Left and its allies in the media perpetuated for years in an attempt to undermine the Trump presidency.”
It was red meat for his base, and that appears to be what’s on the menu these days. Today Trump hit at educators, a traditional target of the right: “Too many Universities and School Systems are about Radical Left Indoctrination, not Education. Therefore, I am telling the Treasury Department to re-examine their Tax-Exempt Status… and/or Funding, which will be taken away if this Propaganda or Act Against Public Policy continues. Our children must be Educated, not Indoctrinated!” he tweeted.
And yesterday we learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is planning to offer a six-day “citizens academy” course to train people in what ICE does, including the arrest of immigrants. “You have been identified as a valued member of the community who may have interest in participating in the inaugural class of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) Chicago Citizens Academy,” read a letter from ICE Chicago Field Office Director Robert Guadian. The program will “serve as a pilot for nationwide implementation,” it said. The course will include training in “defensive tactics, firearms familiarization and targeted arrests,” according to the letter, although when asked about it, ICE spokeperson Nicole Alberico said “The goal is to build bridges with the community by offering a day-in-the-life perspective of a federal law enforcement agency.”
Finally, there was news about one of Trump’s favorite Fox News Channel shows, “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Today, Carlson’s chief writer, Blake Neff, had to step down when it came out that for years he had been posting vile racist, homophobic, and sexist language on an online forum of like-minded fellow-travelers.
It appears there was at least some overlap between what Neff posted on the forum and what appeared on Carlson’s show.
There is a lot in here today.
Virus Data.
Contracts.
Campaigns
Communications/Twitter hack
July 15, 2020 (Wednesday)
As the coronavirus continues to ravage the country, the way the government will collect data about Covid-19 cases changed today. On March 29, Vice President Mike Pence asked hospital administrators to report data about coronavirus through three different systems: the network provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC), HHS Protect, and TeleTracking. Last Friday, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that, beginning today, hospitals should report daily information about coronavirus cases not through the CDC system, which has been in place for 15 years, but rather through the other two.
This move has met with widespread condemnation as observers worry that Trump is trying to take control of information about the coronavirus in order to conceal it. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has hidden information this way, and Trump has made it clear he believes that if only he downplays the numbers, he can convince people to go back to work and resurrect the economy.
But there is another angle to this change that seems to me likely to be at least as attractive to the president as control over data information. That primary issue is money.
HHS Protect is developed by Palantir Technologies, a data-mining firm that works with the Pentagon and law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Peter Thiel, a billionaire Trump supporter, co-founded the company, which last week confidentially filed paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. An initial public offering (IPO) would have made bucketloads of money in any case, but a federal contract to compile coronavirus information is a sweet addition to its portfolio.
The TeleTracking system also raises suspicions of a financial deal. On June 3, Chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) wrote to the director of the CDC, Dr. Robert Redfield and the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Robert P. Kadlec, to ask why HHS had awarded a $10 million no-bid contract to create this data system that duplicated the one the CDC already had. Why indeed?
There is, in the letter shifting data collection, a peculiarly nasty stick. Underlined on the first page of the instructions is that “We will no longer be sending out one-time requests for data to aid in the distribution of Remdesivir or any other treatments or supplies. This daily reporting is the only mechanism used for the distribution calculations, and the daily [sic] is needed daily to ensure accurate calculations.”
Remdesivir is one of the two drugs proven effective at combatting Covid-19. Two weeks ago, the Trump administration bought up almost all of the world’s supply of the drug for the next three months.
The rest of the world was outraged at this purchase, but at the time HHS Secretary Alex Azar defended the move by saying “To the extent possible, we want to ensure that any American patient who needs remdesivir can get it. The Trump administration is doing everything in our power to learn more about life-saving therapeutics for Covid-19 and secure access to these options for the American people.”
Now, it appears, in order to get access to it, hospitals will need to use the private data systems the administration supports.
There were two other big stories today.
First, Trump announced tonight he is replacing his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, less than four months before the election. A replacement at this stage of the game indicates trouble for the campaign. Parscale has borne the brunt of Trump’s anger at his dropping polls, which today showed Trump behind the presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by double digits. The debacle of the Tulsa rally, in which Tik Tok users and K-pop fans so badly polluted the data the campaign was harvesting from the event it almost certainly could not be used, appeared to seal his fate. This is a tad awkward for the campaign, since Kimberly Guilfoyle, Donald Trump, Jr.’s girlfriend, and Lara Trump, Eric Trump’s wife, have been receiving $15,000 a month through Parscale’s company to avoid disclosure on Federal Elections Commission reports.
Parscale will stay on the campaign as an adviser for data and digital operations.
Bill Stepien, a political operative who worked for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, will replace Parscale. Stepien got embroiled in the 2013 Fort Lee Lane Closure scandal that snarled traffic on the George Washington Bridge for four days. Intended to punish the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee for opposing Christie, the scandal instead hurt Christie’s national ambitions. Emails and texts show that Stepien knew of the scheme before it happened. Christie fired him when the communications came to light, but Stepien was never indicted in the case.
Second, this afternoon, Twitter was hacked. Some of the nation’s most prominent politicians and entertainers lost control of their accounts, which mysteriously posted messages sounding like a giveaway. They told readers that if they sent Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, the Twitter user attacked would double the money. Eventually, Twitter was forced to shut down all verified accounts for two hours, silencing official voices on the platform Americans increasingly use to stay on top of breaking news. The attack interrupted tweets from the National Weather Service about a tornado in Illinois, for example, when the verified account providing information was shut down.
The attack was a dramatic illustration of how vulnerable our communications systems are to hackers. Casey Newton, who writes about social media and democracy at The Interface, noted that this hack was a sign of what could come: the incitement of “real-world chaos through impersonation and fraud.” Alex Stamos, director of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the former chief security officer at Facebook, told the New York Times: “This demonstrates a real risk for the elections. Twitter has become the most important platform when it comes to discussion among political elites, and it has real vulnerabilities.”
The Chris Wallace (Fox news) interview with Trump is very good. Worth digging out if you get the chance. He is pretty strict with him, more than most journalists have been. The interview really highlights trump’s insanity/stupidity
That’s a grilling from a Fox presenter.
It was pretty heavily edited though. Couldn’t find the entire interview.
Must have been hot as Trump’s sweating like a…Corona sufferer/Crook?
You can find the whole thing in chunks on the fox on Sunday Twitter feed, I just can’t be arsed posting it. Watch the whole thing, not this shit
Edit: here you go
There is an element of truth in that more test will reveal higher numbers… but what they should be be showing is the percentage of positive tests within that total…
The guardian do a bit of a summary
Donald Trump v Fox News Sunday: extraordinary moments from a wild interview
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Nothing odd about this at all
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