"GAO: Trump boosts deregulation by undervaluing cost of climate change" by Lisa Friedman New York Times, July 14, 2020
WASHINGTON — A federal report released Tuesday found that the Trump administration set a rock-bottom price on the damages done by greenhouse gas emissions, enabling the government to justify the costs of repealing or weakening dozens of climate change regulations.
Critics described the Trump administration’s move as turning a deliberate blind eye to the dangers of climate change. Some critics likened it to President Trump downplaying the risks of the coronavirus, hoping it would “go away” but instead leaving the country unprepared for the pandemic.
“Climate change is a massive threat to our economy. That threat will only grow in years to come, even if we take the action necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, one of eight Democrats who requested the review.
He voted to stay in Afghanistan, and these guys have spouting that gaseous and noxious spew for years now as the climate has cooled.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the report.
Every ton of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere imposes a cost on the economy, whether from damage to infrastructure from sea level rise and heat waves or harm to public health, but calculating the price of that damage has been economically challenging and politically contentious.....
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In this companion piece, Biden is in bed with the globali$ts:
"Biden announces $2 trillion climate plan" by Katie Glueckand Lisa Friedman New York Times ,July 14, 2020
Joe Biden revealed on Tuesday a new plan to spend $2 trillion over four years to significantly escalate the use of clean energy in the transportation, electricity, and building sectors, part of a suite of sweeping proposals designed to create economic opportunities and build infrastructure while also tackling climate change.
The proposal is the second plank in Biden’s economic recovery plan. His team sees an opportunity to take direct aim at Trump, who has struggled to deliver on his pledges to finance major improvements to American infrastructure. Even before Biden spoke, Trump’s allies denounced the plan as a costly threat to jobs in the energy sector, and his campaign sought to link the proposal to the Green New Deal, the far-reaching climate plan that Biden has not fully endorsed; nevertheless, the new plan does appear to have made some inroads with a different key constituency: the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which had long been skeptical about the scope of Biden’s ambitions on climate.
“This is not a status quo plan,” said Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, a prominent environmentalist who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination on a platform of combating climate change and later endorsed Biden. He added: “It is comprehensive. This is not some sort of, ‘Let me just throw a bone to those who care about climate change.’” Inslee called the proposal “visionary.”
That disgusting excuse for a governor is all on board with globalist evil, as are most leaders.
Biden’s plan outlines specific and aggressive targets, including achieving an emissions-free power sector by 2035 and upgrading 4 million buildings over four years to meet the highest standards for energy efficiency. The plan also calls for establishing an office of environmental and climate justice at the Justice Department and developing a broad set of tools to address how “environmental policy decisions of the past have failed communities of color.”
It's all the Global Reset garbage, and as always, the war machine will be exempted from the emissions part.
Environmental justice, a movement that tries to address pollution and other toxic harms that disproportionately affect communities of color, plays a key role in the plan. In it, Biden set a goal for disadvantaged communities to receive 40 percent of all clean energy and infrastructure benefits. He also made explicit references to tribal communities and called for expanding broadband access to tribal lands.
F**king pre$$ turns everything into a race issue these days, stirring up the Blacks telling them they are getting the $hort end of the $tick while it is rammed up whitey's butt.
Biden’s original plan called for spending $1.7 trillion over 10 years with a goal of achieving net-zero emissions before 2050. The new blueprint significantly increases the amount of money and accelerates the timetable to four years.
Paying for it, campaign officials said, will come from a mix of raising the corporate income tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent, “asking the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share” and some still undetermined amount of stimulus dollars. Campaign officials added that more details would be released “in the weeks ahead.”
I gue$$ they will be able to kick in some chump change since this whole designed transformation of life on Earth is going to make the billionaire class a nrillionaire class and rich beyond their wildest dreams of avarice while we all eat dirt.
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Related:
"Burger King is staging an intervention with its cows. The chain has rebalanced the diet of some of the cows by adding lemon grass in a bid to limit bovine contributions to climate change. By tweaking their diet, Burger King said Tuesday that it believes it can reduce a cow’s daily methane emissions by about 33 percent. Cows emit methane as a by-product of their digestion, and that has become a potential public relations hurdle for major burger chains."
PFFFFFFFFT!
Pretty soon you won't know what you are eating, if anything.
Speaking from recent experience, the shelves at the supermarkets are partially stocked. Nothing like before COVID, and there are holes in every aisle now.
Wait until the shit really hits the fan this winter!
Bad time to starve!
"US consumer prices increased 0.6 percent in June, after three months of declines, with a big jump in gasoline prices accounting for over half of the gain. The Labor Department reported Tuesday that the increase in its consumer price index followed declines of 0.4 percent in March, 0.8 percent in April and 0.1 percent in May as the hit to demand caused by the widespread shutdowns of the economy kept a lid on prices. The June report showed that energy prices jumped 5.1 percent with gasoline costs surging 12.3 percent; however, even with that gain gasoline pump prices are 23.4 percent below where they were a year ago."
You know, one has to wonder why there would be a big jump in gasoline prices when demand is way down and the world is still awash in oil.
Does that make $en$e?
What could account for the discrepancy in the law of supply and demand?
Well, when you have printing pre$$es whirring away at War $peed, the money is worth less and less.
Good luck buying food this winter -- if you can find it.
Of course, the Lisa Friedman of the New York Times is more concerned about Trump weakening major conservation laws to speed construction permits and the other species that may be affected in their typical misanthropic psychosis.
Former Mass. Clean Energy Center chief returns as CEO of hydroelectric company
She is Alicia Barton, who previously led New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's renewable energy initiatives (like a sloth deserting a sinking ship?), and oh, what a wonderful world!
Of course, this radioactive situation is minimized:
"Officials at one of the nation’s premier nuclear labs are investigating the potential exposure of employees to plutonium. Los Alamos National Laboratory confirmed Monday that 15 workers were being evaluated after a breach involving a gloved box that was being used to handle the material. The incident happened in June. The area inside the plutonium facility was secured and there was no risk to public health or safety, lab officials said in a statement. It’s unknown how long the review will take and what changes might be made to ensure another breach does not happen. Los Alamos is preparing to resume and ramp up production of the plutonium cores used to trigger nuclear weapons. It’s facing a 2026 deadline to begin producing at least 30 cores a year — a mission that has the support of the most senior Democratic members of New Mexico’s congressional delegation as the work is expected to bring jobs and billions of federal dollars to update buildings or construct new factories. The June 8 incident at the lab’s plutonium facility was recently made public in a weekly report by inspectors with an independent safety board that monitors activities at federal labs around the country....."
Another Silkwood, and WHY in the FUCK would they be wanting to ramp up that?
".... The effort has drawn much criticism from nuclear watchdog groups that long have been concerned about the lab’s safety record and missed deadlines and repeated cost overruns. State officials also have voiced concerns about the federal government’s ability to clean up existing contamination from decades of bomb making and nuclear research at the lab while generating new waste. To meet a mandate set by the federal government to replace the nuclear stockpile’s aging plutonium cores, the work is being shared by Los Alamos and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Congress is hashing out how much money will be funneled to the two sites as part of ongoing negotiations on the latest defense budget bill. Los Alamos began as a secret city in the mountains of northern New Mexico where government scientists and the military gathered as part of the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. Since the 1940s, it has grown into a massive complex. The mission of producing the plutonium cores has been based at Los Alamos for years but none have been manufactured since 2011 as the lab was dogged by a string of safety lapses. According to the report, air monitors sounded when an employee pulled out of the glove box’s gloves after weighing and packaging plutonium oxide powder. Significant contamination was noted on his protective clothing, hair, and skin. Nasal swabs were positive, and airborne radioactivity was documented in the room. The inspector reported that radiation protection personnel successfully decontaminated the worker and that 14 other workers also were being monitored."
Related:
Death toll from flooding in Japan reaches 55, dozen missing
Nothing about the ongoing leaking of radioactive water into the Pacific day after day, nor a word about COVID in that article (must be because Japan shut down late, opened early, and has pretty much avoided a society-destroying lockdown).
{@@##$$%%^^&&}
Of course, you kids don't learn anything about that at school:
"Here’s what coronavirus testing on college campuses in Massachusetts might look like this fall" by Kay Lazar and Laura Krantz Globe Staff, July 16, 2020
As colleges and universities finalize high stakes plans for reopening amid the pandemic, wide scale, frequent testing for coronavirus on campus has emerged as central to their strategy.
Thousands of college students on campuses across the state this fall will be required to swab their noses as often as twice a week, with samples shuttled to laboratories where the results will be quickly delivered back to campuses.
Look, you will be learning all about medical tyranny and the New World Order!
Many schools, including Harvard University, Wellesley College, Emerson College, and Clark University in Worcester, plan to send their samples to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which has promised to process thousands of the tests daily.
Other schools, like Boston University, are forging ahead building their own high-capacity labs to regularly test their campus communities, but whether there is enough laboratory capacity in Massachusetts to regularly test tens of thousands of college students is an open question. So, too, is the prospect of persuading hordes of students to regularly submit to nasal swabbing and to dutifully adhere to social distancing.
It's in your hands, kids.
Is this the kind of world you want to live in?
Sick mon$ters poking and prodding you forever while limiting your freedom of movement?
Forget Greta; you walk out of class over this!
The higher education plans are being firmed up as waiting times grow for test results in Massachusetts and nationwide. Plentiful and timely lab results are crucial to quickly contain future clusters of COVID-19 on college campuses and beyond, and to prevent clusters from mushrooming into larger outbreaks, health experts say.
“If we are going to [use] testing to control outbreaks, you have to get results back in one to two days, even three days is too slow,” said Samuel Scarpino, a Northeastern University disease tracker. “If I were ... anyone setting policy, I would have that on my daily dashboard and would make a lot of decisions about reopening based on that number.”
These agenda-pu$hing $cient$ts the Globe continuously cites make me sick.
Testing is just one facet of the complex plans colleges are developing this summer that they believe will make it safe to welcome students back to campus this fall.
The Broad Institute, known for cutting-edge biomedical research, has become a pivotal player for college coronavirus testing, recently negotiating testing contracts with several schools. In addition to Harvard and Clark, the institute is working with Emerson College, Tufts University, the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Wellesley College.
There is $$$ in COVID, huh?
When you signed up for school did you know you consented to be the subject of an experiment?
The Broad recently expanded its daily capacity to 35,000 tests and can turn them around in less than 24 hours, a spokesman said in a statement. The lab has the ability to ramp up to 100,000 daily if needed, the spokesman said, but declined to comment further on its new college testing program.
The Broad, which opened its testing lab in March, has so far not processed more than 7,000 tests in a day, according to the website where it posts its daily output.
Dr. Ashish Jha, a global health professor at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said it is imperative that schools have a substantial amount of testing because relying on students to consistently practice social distancing is not practical, and although this might be an unruly demographic, he said, students will likely submit to tests.
There is another one, and we can only hope so.
Anthony Monaco, the president of Tufts University who was a member of the higher education task force, said Tufts is developing an app that will let students know when they are scheduled to be tested and send reminders. The details are not finalized, he said, but there would likely be repercussions for missing a test, such as not being able to participate in a campus activity.
The testing will be a significant investment for schools, he said, on top of other adjustments like extra housing they are building to quarantine students.
I hate to say it, but you may may never see your boy or girl again.
“They all add up, but for one semester, perhaps two, it’s an investment we need to make,” Monaco said.....
That comes from an evil f**k who has thrown in with this whole $cam, kids. Grain of salt.
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The Globe says just keep it simple:
"Citing educational risks, scientific panel urges that schools reopen" by Apoorva Mandavilli New York Times, July 15, 2020
NEW YORK — Wading into the contentious debate over reopening schools, an influential committee of scientists and educators Wednesday recommended that, wherever possible, younger children and those with special needs should attend school in person.
Then do the exact opposite.
I was for that until I realized all our beloved children would be congregated in an area where a 5G flip-on could cause immense trauma and tragedy.
Home-school your kid, and hold them close.
Tell them the truth and tell them you love them.
Their report — issued by the prestigious National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, which advises the nation on issues related to science, emphasized common-sense precautions, such as hand-washing, physical distancing, and minimizing group activities, including lunch and recess, but the experts went further than guidelines issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other groups, also calling for surgical masks to be worn by all teachers and staff members during school hours and for cloth face coverings to be worn by all students.
The f**kers just adopted a position that is HARMFUL to HEALTH!
So much for the "prestige."
Regular symptom checks should be conducted, the committee said, and not just temperature checks. In the long term, schools will need upgrades to ventilation and air-filtration systems, and federal and state governments must fund these efforts, the report said.
Yeah, that is easy for the $cientific fa$ci$ts to say after the schools have been neglected for decades and now we have no money
Online learning is ineffective for most elementary school children and special-needs children, the panel of scientists and educators concluded.....
Too late now!
--more--"
Whatever they do, the mascot must be changed as the Globe agonizes over it!
So how did you do on the quiz?
Related:
"Vice President Mike Pence insisted Tuesday the country’s schools should reopen to in-person instruction for students, making the point in Louisiana as the state has reemerged as one of the nation’s hot spots for the coronavirus only months after signs pointed to a successful outbreak response. Appearing at Louisiana State University, the Republican vice president described the nation as “in a much better position today to deal with the pandemic” even as virus cases surge across much of the country. He and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos called for students at every level from elementary school through college to return to classrooms, with Pence calling that critical to reopening the country. “It’s the right thing to do for our children. It’s also the right thing to do for families,” Pence said at Tiger Stadium, where he met with Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, members of the congressional delegation and state higher education officials. Louisiana’s confirmed coronavirus caseload is among the fastest growing per capita across the country, and its infection and hospitalization rates are surging, worrying public health experts in a state that previously seemed to be successfully flattening the curve of infections....."
They must not have been in touch with the Academy, then!
Yeah, somehow the four-month lockdown didn't work and yet our livelihoods were demoli$hed!
F**king pre$$ $hell game!!
"Rep. H. Morgan Griffith, a Virginia Republican and Freedom Caucus member who days ago urged schools to reopen in the fall, announced Tuesday that he has tested positive for the novel coronavirus. On Thursday, Griffith stood in the middle of a group of fellow Freedom Caucus members at a news conference outside the Capitol as they called for schools to reopen. Griffith, standing shoulder to shoulder with the others, wore a pink mask but removed it while speaking. Others in the group were maskless....."
Of course!
Any public figure that dares challenge this fraud gets put in place immediately.
Speaking of fraud:
"A Weston man who formerly ran an international student recruitment firm has agreed to plead guilty to wire fraud for allegedly pocketing over $5 million in tuition and fees from families, money that was owed to private high schools that partnered with his company, legal filings show....."
Also see:
23 AGs sue DeVos over student loan forgiveness policy
Even the Globe is starting to complain about Healey's grandstanding, to the point where they have a revolt on their hands:
"Boston superintendent facing revolt among high school headmasters; Leaders urge Cassellius, school committee to halt 'deeply flawed' reform plan" by Malcolm Gay Globe Staff, July 16, 2020
One year into her tenure leading Boston Public Schools, Superintendent Brenda Cassellius is facing open rebellion from the city’s high school leaders who are publicly attacking one of her signature initiatives, calling it “deeply flawed” and “a top-down exercise in poor planning.”
In a scathing letter delivered to Cassellius and school committee members Thursday, the Boston High School Heads Association called on them to halt the superintendent’s plan that would fundamentally transform the city’s struggling high schools as soon as the fall of 2021, overhauling the curriculum while adding seventh and eighth grades.
The association, which represents the leaders of Boston’s more than 30 high schools, said they were left out of planning for the redesign, resulting in a proposal that is “divorced from any authentic analysis of data, lacks major details ... [and] ignores years of studies about BPS high schools and the complex issues they face.”
In addition, the school leaders — dismayed after Cassellius removed several high school headmasters during the spring shutdown — said the overhaul is altogether too ambitious to be carried out in the middle of a crippling pandemic.....
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{@@##$$%%^^&&}
My favorite class used to be politics:
"Mary Trump says the U.S. has devolved into a version of her ‘incredibly dysfunctional family’" by Ashley Parker Washington Post, July 16, 2020
Mary Trump, President Trump’s niece, said that watching the country’s leadership devolve into ‘‘a macro version of my incredibly dysfunctional family’’ was one of the factors that compelled her to write her book, ‘‘Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.’’
In an interview Wednesday with The Washington Post, Mary Trump said she blames ‘‘almost 100 percent’’ her grandfather, Fred Trump — the family patriarch whom she describes as a ‘‘sociopath’’ in her 214-page memoir of sorts — for creating the conditions that led to Trump’s rise and, ultimately, what she views as his dangerous presidency.
Much like in her extended family, Mary Trump said, a similar dynamic is now playing out on the national stage, with Trump simultaneously possessing ‘‘an unerring instinct for finding people who are weaker than he is,’’ while also being ‘‘eminently usable by people who are stronger and savvier than he is’’ and eager to exploit him.
Her book — which was published Tuesday and became an instant bestseller based on advance orders alone — so worried her family that the president’s brother unsuccessfully tried to block its publication in court. Unlike the bevy of other books critical of Trump, this is the only one written by a family member with firsthand knowledge of the Trump clan, and Mary Trump, who earned a doctoral degree in psychology, uses that background to analyze her uncle and his pathologies.
Has she had him on the couch, because this looks like bitter armchair analysis to me?
Assessing the current moment, in which Trump has amplified racism and stoked the flames of white grievance and resentment, Mary Trump said that the president is ‘‘clearly racist,’’ but that his behavior stems from a combination of upbringing and political cynicism.
Mary Trump said that growing up in her family, her experience was one of ‘‘a knee-jerk anti-Semitism, a knee-jerk racism.’’
‘‘Growing up, it was sort of normal to hear them use the n-word or use anti-Semitic expressions,’’ she said.
I find that hard to believe seeing as they were immersed in Jews!
Mary Trump, who is gay, added dryly, ‘‘Homophobia was never an issue because nobody ever talked about gay people, well, until my grandmother called Elton John’’ a slur.
Within the Trump family, Fred Trump was the chief enabler, but now, Mary Trump said, in the White House the blame starts with Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared Kushner — both senior advisers — but expands more broadly to include his ‘‘chiefs of staff who went along thinking that they could have some kind of influence, only to find that they didn’t,’’ and even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is ‘‘perfectly willing to put up with all sorts of egregious behavior to get his own agenda through.’’
Yeah, and he rarely comes in for pre$$ or Congre$$ional scrutiny as he takes another call from his father.
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Related:
"Presidential adviser and first daughter Ivanka Trump posted a photo of herself on social media late Tuesday holding up a can of Goya black beans, prompting concerns that she was using her government position to endorse a private business. Goya, which bills itself as America’s largest Hispanic-owned food company, has faced boycott calls in the days since its chief executive officer, Robert Unanue, praised President Trump at a White House event, saying that ‘‘we’re all truly blessed’’ to have him as a leader. In an apparent show of support for the company, Ivanka Trump posted the photo of herself along with the slogan, ‘‘If it’s Goya, it has to be good.’’ She also included the Spanish translation in postings on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Ethics laws prevent federal employees from using their positions ‘‘to endorse any product, service, or enterprise.’’ Critics pounced overnight. Joyce White Vance, a former US attorney in Alabama, tweeted: ‘‘You’re kidding me, right? No ethics left in this White House on issues big or small.’’
Whatever happened to her e-mails, WaCompo?
I guess they are giving her a pass as they throw them away in order to protect her.
Complete silence from Biden, too, as the political terrain begins to get rough:
"Joe Biden raised tens of millions of dollars in the last three months from major donors who gave more than $100,000, relying on some of the Democratic Party’s deepest pockets to sharply shrink President Trump’s financial advantage, according to federal filings. Biden’s biggest benefactors in the second quarter of 2020, when he became the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, represent a who’s who of billionaires and influencers in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street. Among those who gave at least $500,000 were Laurene Powell Jobs, the philanthropist and widow of Steve Jobs; Meg Whitman, a former GOP candidate for governor of California and now chief executive of streaming company Quibi; George Soros, the billionaire progressive financier; Jeffrey Katzenberg, the Hollywood producer; and Dustin Moskovitz, a cofounder of Facebook....."
With that ca$t of characters, it won't matter who is his running mate or what happens at the GOP convention:
"Sitting in what appears to be a lounge chair, with noise crackling in the background, a reluctant Jeffrey Farmer stares into his smartphone’s camera and details — in a profane rant — the various reasons he won’t be voting for President Trump a second time. In less than 24 hours, Farmer’s video had been viewed on Twitter more than 2 million times. It was also shared by several accounts with large followings, including Jennifer Horn, cofounder of the Lincoln Project, a group of current and former Republicans strategists vying to “defeat President Trump and Trumpism” in the upcoming election. “Jeffrey from #MA speaks for America when he says he just can’t take anymore,” wrote Horn, whose own group — which includes George Conway, a Trump critic and husband to Kellyanne Conway, the president’s adviser — has launched a series of damning advertisements aimed at Trump....."
Despite the objections, he is dead meat come November (his only ally is Iran).
Time to count the ballots:
"Postal Service memos detail ‘difficult’ changes, including slower mail delivery" by Jacob Bogage Washington Post, July 14, 2020
The new head of the US Postal Service established major operational changes Monday that could slow down mail delivery, warning employees the agency would not survive unless it made ‘‘difficult’’ changes to cut costs, but critics say such a philosophical sea change would sacrifice operational efficiency and cede its competitive edge to UPS, FedEx, and other private sector rivals, according to internal USPS documents obtained by The Washington Post and verified by the American Postal Workers Union and three people with knowledge of their contents, but who spoke anonymously to avoid retribution.
That's how you PRIVATIZE the greatest thing this government ever did.
The memo cited US Steel, a one-time industry titan that was slow to adapt to market changes, to illustrate what is at stake. ‘‘In 1975 they were the largest company in the world,’’ the memo states. ‘‘They are gone.’’
No more USPS soon, or it will will be a slick corporate operation that looks nothing like what you see now.
Analysts say the documents present a stark reimagining of the USPS that could chase away customers — especially if the White House gets the steep package rate increases it wants — and put the already beleaguered agency in deeper financial peril.
They are in peril because Congre$$ onerously mandated they fund health and pensions for 75 years into the future, something neither the government or other businesses must do.
Congress authorized the USPS to borrow an additional $10 billion from the Treasury Department for emergency operations in an early coronavirus relief bill, but postal leaders have yet to access the money over disagreements with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who attached terms on the loan that would turn over operations of much of the Postal Service to his department. The Postal Service’s governing board appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor and seasoned logistics executive, in the middle of that back-and-forth.
He da' man!
Steep drop-offs in first-class and marketing mail, the Postal Service’s most profitable items, have exacerbated the USPS’s cash crisis. Skyrocketing package volume, up 60 to 80 percent in May as the coronavirus pandemic pushed consumers toward e-commerce, has propped up the Postal Service’s finances and staved off immediate financial calamity, but the packages also have intensified the USPS’s competition with Amazon, FedEx, and UPS, industry leaders looking to capitalize on enduring changes in consumers habits brought on by shelter-in-place orders.
Those changes are to endure, huh?
The Trump administration has consolidated control over the Postal Service, traditionally an apolitical institution, during the pandemic. The Postal Service’s future needs to be as a low-cost package carrier, industry analysts contend, as parcels make up a growing portion of the agency’s volume and profits, and paper mail volumes continue to decline as coupons and bills increasingly move online.
The changes also worry vote-by-mail advocates, who insist that any policy that slows delivery could imperil access to mailed and absentee ballots. It reinforces the need, they say, for Congress to provide the agency emergency coronavirus funding.....
That's so if Biden loses as he should, they can wail voter suppression and fraud!
--more--"
Did you know the president of the American Postal Workers Union is Mark Dimondstein?
And your primary winners:
"Ronny Jackson, ex-White House doctor, wins Texas House runoff" by Annie Karni New York Times, July 15, 2020
Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, the former White House physician with no political experience who ran a campaign based on his close relationship with President Trump, won a Republican runoff election for a House seat in Texas on Tuesday night, effectively stamping his ticket to Congress next year.
Jackson’s victory in the 13th Congressional District over Josh Winegarner, a lobbyist who had the backing of the cattle industry he represented and the man he’s seeking to replace, was hailed by the Trump campaign as a triumph for the president who endorsed him and for the Trump reelection campaign that propped him up.
Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign’s communications director, called the victory “a clear testament to the power and value of President Trump’s endorsement and support.”
It was something of a comeback for Jackson, a retired Navy rear admiral who is now likely to represent one of the most conservative districts in the country. He left the West Wing in December after becoming Trump’s unlikely choice to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs, but he had to withdraw his name from consideration amid allegations related to his professional conduct.
He was known as Obama's pill pusher. If you wanted a prescription, he was the man you saw.
After serving for 25 years in the military and moving home to Texas, Jackson hoped to leverage his Washington connections to win elected office and make a fresh start, running in a crowded Republican primary to replace Representative Mac Thornberry, who announced last fall he would not seek reelection after holding his seat for more than a quarter of a century, but Jackson made a series of novice mistakes that could have derailed any congressional campaign.
Jackson relied on a “horse doctor” with a full-time job to run his campaign. The candidate’s wife, Jane, doubled as his chauffeur, driving him around the Panhandle-encompassing district, and she even took on the job of putting up lawn signs and replacing them after they were defaced. Before the coronavirus put a stop to face-to-face campaigning, the couple wasted hours knocking on doors during work hours, when no one was home, and they agreed to attend events where the majority of the crowd was from neighboring Oklahoma and couldn’t vote for Jackson even if they were impressed with his pitch about his rare access to the Oval Office, but after Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, and Kimberly Guilfoyle, his girlfriend and a top fund-raising official for the president’s reelection campaign, realized that Jackson’s campaign was in trouble, they asked two senior members of the president’s reelection campaign, Justin Clark and Bill Stepien, to step in.
Trump just hired those guys for his own campaign.
Clark and Stepien, two former White House officials who now run the nuts and bolts of the president’s reelection bid, set Jackson up with an online fund-raising operation and helped him hire a Washington-based fund-raiser, who channeled Jackson’s Rolodex into donations. In the primary campaign, Jackson raised just $280,000. Since making the runoff in March against Winegarner, Jackson has raised about $788,000 from more than 10,000 donors, according to the campaign.
Donors to Jackson’s campaign now include Ronald S. Lauder, the cosmetics billionaire and one of Donald Trump’s oldest acquaintances, who gave Jackson $2,800 for the runoff race and another $2,800 for his general election campaign, according to campaign finance reports. Others who donated to Jackson’s campaign included former West Wing colleagues of his like Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House press secretary; Hope Hicks, a senior adviser to the president; Raj Shah, a former top White House spokesman; and Clark.
The Trump operatives also helped Jackson hire Jeremy Sheftel, a Florida-based operative with field experience, to run the campaign, and they worked with the White House to ensure that Trump endorsed Jackson, even inviting him aboard Air Force One when the president visited Dallas last June, and Jackson benefited from the runoff election’s being delayed by a month because of the coronavirus, giving him more time to catch up.
Do jou see what they have in common with Biden's donors?
His opponent, Winegarner, however, tried to diminish Jackson’s interest in the district, to which he had only recently returned. He aired an ad that told voters, “We are Ronny’s backup plan,” a reference to his dashed hopes of becoming the secretary of veterans affairs.
Jackson’s advisers, in turn, framed his campaign as another example of a Trump-backed candidate seeking to drain the swamp, depicting Winegarner, who used to work for Thornberry, as part of a broken system in which a lobbyist and former Capitol Hill staff member becomes the immediate favorite to take his old boss’s job.
He's had three+ years top do that and all he did was let it stagnate and stink -- and which is now the cause of all his problems.
Playing into the role of marauding outsider, and aided by the political advice of Clark and Stepien, Jackson also leaned into national political controversies. Despite serving as President Barack Obama’s physician before Trump took office, he backed a conspiracy theory promoted by Trump that his predecessor had spied on his campaign — an accusation Trump has made while offering no evidence to back it up.
There is plenty of evidence; the Times either obfuscates or omits it.
“President Obama weaponized the highest levels of our government to spy on President Trump. Every Deep State traitor deserves to be brought to justice for their heinous actions,” Jackson tweeted in May, drawing a rebuke from former Obama administration officials who called his statement “truly shameful” and an example of his “lying for Trump” in order to win a congressional primary.
When are the Durham indictments, and why are they taking so long?
--more--"
Looking upskirt:
"House Committee unanimously clears Rep. Lori Trahan of ethics violations; First term representative was accused of improper loans, use of husband's money" by Andrea Estes Globe Staff, July 16, 2020
The House Ethics Committee announced Thursday that it was dismissing charges that Representative Lori Trahan violated campaign finance laws in her 2018 upset election victory when her campaign borrowed hundreds of thousands of dollars of her husband’s money, then allegedly covered it up.
What more is there to say, really?
It's a criminal Congre$$!
In a unanimous decision, the committee found that although the Westford Democrat did use her husband’s money to make several large loans, she had a prenuptial agreement that gave her and her husband joint ownership of all money earned during their marriage.
Under federal election law, no one, not even a candidate’s spouse, is allowed to donate more than the individual limit, then $2,700.
Got off on a technicality they had to reach for.
“The respected House Ethics Committee — made up of Democrats and Republicans — investigated this matter thoroughly and has now unanimously confirmed what I’ve always maintained: that my campaign acted ethically and that these baseless accusations were just politics,” wrote Trahan in a statement.
“Serving the people of the Third Congressional District continues to be the greatest honor of my life,” Trahan continued, “and I will continue to focus on addressing the needs of the people I represent.”
She is disgusting, as are those that cleared her.
The Globe in March 2019 raised questions about the source of a late infusion of cash to Trahan’s campaign in a hotly contested 10-way race in 2018. That included a $200,000 loan made in late August that allowed her to launch a last-minute advertising blitz before the September primary.
Questions were raised after the watchdog called for an investigation, and the poor girl ran up big legal bills during the probe.
Later, a group called the Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust, or FACT, called for a federal investigation, saying Trahan may have received illegal donations from her husband.
A preliminary investigation was conducted by the Office of Congressional Ethics, an independent, nonpartisan entity charged with reviewing allegations of misconduct against members of Congress, officers, and staff. It’s governed by an eight-person board, which is made up of private citizens who are not members of Congress or employees of the federal government.
Who would they be?
Investigators with the Office of Congressional Ethics found that her husband donated $300,000 to her campaign — far in excess of the $2,700 allowed — and her campaign appeared to have “intentionally misreported” the days some donations were made as part of potential financial maneuvering.
The intentional deception is proof of guilt!
In their 16-page report released in December, congressional ethics investigators concluded that Trahan’s husband was the “true source” of the funds even though Trahan said the funds were from her income at her consulting company, Concire.
The investigators forwarded their findings for further investigation by the lawmaker members of the Ethics Committee, chaired by Democrat Theodore Deutch of Florida, which released its final report Thursday.
In the 23-page report, the committee concluded that under the terms of a 2007 prenuptial agreement with her husband, David, all wages, salary, and income earned or received by husband or wife during their marriage became marital property.
“Each party shall have equal rights in regards to the management of and disposition of all marital property,” the report said.
The committee found no evidence the mistakes were “knowing and willful.”
What a defense that is, huh?
I didn't mean it and I didn't know!
Hope I can use that one someday!
--more--"
She is running unopposed for a second term in November, unlike Maine Senator Susan Collins, who has at least not incurred Trump’s wrath.
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Collins' claim to fame now is pushing Kavanaugh through to the Supreme Court:
Supreme Court deals blow to felons in Florida seeking to regain right to vote
One of the justices has suffered a blow recently (it's actually the Chief Justice, and that explains a lot regarding the decisions coming down lately):
Ginsburg hospitalized for possible infection
She has been diagnosed with cancer and been released.
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She is shadowed with sickness as Trump is with COVID:
"The Trump administration has ordered hospitals to bypass the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and send all Covid-19 patient information to a central database in Washington beginning on Wednesday. The move has alarmed health experts who fear the data will be politicized or withheld from the public. The new instructions were posted recently in a little-noticed document on the Department of Health and Human Services website. From now on, the department — not the C.D.C. — will collect daily reports about the patients that each hospital is treating, the number of available beds and ventilators, and other information vital to tracking the pandemic. Officials say the change will streamline data gathering and assist the White House coronavirus task force in allocating scarce supplies like personal protective gear and remdesivir. “The C.D.C. is the right agency to be at the forefront of collecting the data,” said Dr. Bala N. Hota, chief analytics officer at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Public health experts have long expressed concerns that the Trump administration is politicizing science and undermining its health experts, in particular the C.D.C.; four of the agency’s former directors, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations, said as much in an opinion piece published Tuesday in The Washington Post. The data collection shift reinforced those fears. “Centralizing control of all data under the umbrella of an inherently political apparatus is dangerous and breeds distrust,” said Dr. Nicole Lurie, who served as assistant secretary for preparedness and response under former President Barack Obama. “It appears to cut off the ability of agencies like C.D.C. to do its basic job.” The shift grew out of a tense conference call several weeks ago between hospital executives and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator. After Dr. Birx said hospitals were not adequately reporting their data, she convened a working group of government and hospital officials who devised the new plan, according to Dr. Janis Orlowski, the chief health care officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, who participated in the group’s meetings, but news of the change came as a shock at the C.D.C., according to two officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter. The change exposes the vast gaps in the government’s ability to collect and manage health data — an antiquated system at best, experts say....."
The experts who have politicized flawed data are worried we might find out the truth, why is the health system still antiquated after all these years and Obummercare, and what is up with the flip-flop by Birx?
"..... In its new guidance, Health and Human Services said that going forward, hospitals should report detailed information on a daily basis directly to the new centralized system, which is managed by TeleTracking, a health data firm with headquarters in Pittsburgh; however, if hospitals were already reporting such information to their states, they could continue to do so if they received a written release saying the state would handle reporting. Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate health committee, has raised questions about the TeleTracking contract, calling it a “noncompetitive, multimillion-dollar contract” for a “duplicative health data system.” Both the C.D.C. network and the TeleTracking system set up by Health and Human Services rely on so-called push data, meaning hospital employees must manually enter data, rather than the government tapping into an electronic system to obtain the information. “The whole thing needs to be scrapped and started anew,” said Dr. Dan Hanfling, an expert in medical and disaster preparedness and a vice president at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit strategic investment firm focused on national security. “It is laughable that this administration can’t find the wherewithal to bring 21st-century technologies in data management to the fight.” Dr. Hanfling and others agree that information does need to be centralized, but they disagree on how that should happen. Dr. Hanfling called for a new “national data coordination center” that would be used for “forecasting, identifying, detecting, tracking and reporting on emerging diseases.” Representative Donna E. Shalala of Florida, who served as health secretary under former President Bill Clinton, said the C.D.C. was the proper agency to gather health data. If there were flaws in the C.D.C.’s systems, she said, they should be fixed. “Only the C.D.C. has the expertise to collect data,” Ms. Shalala said. “I think any move to take responsibility away from the people who have the expertise is politicizing.” Hospitals say the previous reporting requirements were cumbersome, partly because they frequently changed. “It has been an administrative hassle and confusing to constantly be shifting gears on reporting while hospitals are on the front lines during a pandemic,” Carrie Williams, a spokeswoman for the Texas Hospital Association, wrote in an email, but while Dr. Hota said he supported streamlining the process and the involvement of state and local agencies in reporting, he was also concerned that months into the pandemic, the United States still did not have an established system of collecting the kind of information it needed to seamlessly move patients from a full hospital to one with available beds. The C.D.C. has been criticized for its data collection, however. In May, the agency acknowledged that in tracking the spread of the virus, it had been combining tests that detect active infection with those that detect recovery from Covid-19. That system muddied the picture of the pandemic but raised the percentage of Americans tested as President Trump was boasting about the number of tests the United States was conducting. Similar complaints about coronavirus data have bubbled up around the country. In Florida, a former data manager for the Health Department accused one of her superiors of directing her to “manipulate” data used in the state’s plan to lift stay-at-home orders this spring. Ms. Shalala said the mayor of Miami-Dade County “was so concerned about the state data that he has the hospitals reporting their data directly to him as well,” and Arizona ended its partnership with a university modeling team whose projections showed a rising caseload, prompting pushback from Will Humble, the executive director of the Arizona Public Health Association and a former director of the state’s Health Services Department. “Trust and accountability and transparency — all three go together,” Mr. Humble said. Of the federal government’s new system, he said: “They’d better keep it transparent, or else people are going to think that it was an ulterior motive.”
The reality is the exact opposite regarding the manipulation of data, and it is too late for transparency regarding the motive when the Military-Industrial Complex and the Clinton Crime Family are all up in it!
Related:
White House backs away from attacks on Fauci days after promoting them
Trump cut Navarro loose.
That's loyalty for you.
"Brett Giroir, a prominent member of the White House coronavirus task force, declined to say during a television interview Tuesday whether it was problematic that President Trump had retweeted a former game show host’s accusation that government health officials are lying about the pandemic. Appearing on NBC’s “Today” show, Giroir was pressed about a tweet that Trump shared with his more than 83 million followers in which Chuck Woolery accused the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, among others, of lying to the American people regarding the coronavirus. “So look, I’m a physician, I’m a scientist, I’m not a Twitter analyst, and to be quite honest, I don’t spend time looking at any of that on Twitter because who knows what it means and how it’s interpreted,” Giroir said. Pressed by host Savannah Guthrie, Giroir said that CDC officials and others on the White House task force do not lie. “We may occasionally make mistakes based on the information we have, but none of us lie,” he said. “We are completely transparent with the American people.” Woolery’s game-show credits include “Wheel of Fortune” and “Love Connection.” He also works as a conservative political commentator. On Monday, Trump retweeted Woolery saying: “The most outrageous lies are the ones about Covid 19. Everyone is lying. The CDC, Media, Democrats, our Doctors, not all but most, that we are told to trust. I think it’s all about the election and keeping the economy from coming back, which is about the election. I’m sick of it.”
Woolery is woke, and it's amazing that the news flak even asked Giroir if they lie before he goes on to tell a lie in the very next sentence!
Transparent indeed, and it looks like he failed the quiz as cases and deaths are on the rise across United States in what has become the perfect storm:
"The number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus has hit 3 million, according to the count kept by Johns Hopkins University, but US health officials say the real number of infections is probably 10 times higher, or close to 10 percent of the population. The numbers have been surging in recent weeks amid a rapid expansion in testing, but specialists say the rise cannot be explained as just the result of more testing. They say the outbreak is worsening, as shown by such warning signs as an increase in the percentage of tests coming back positive for the virus. The number of tests per day in the United States is up to about 640,000 on average, an increase from around 518,000 two weeks ago, according to an Associated Press analysis. Newly confirmed infections per day in the country are running at more than 50,000, breaking records at practically every turn. In an especially alarming indicator, the percentage of tests coming back positive for the virus is on the rise across nearly the entire country, hitting almost 27 percent in Arizona, 19 percent in Florida, and 17 percent in South Carolina. As more people are tested, an increase in the raw number of positive tests is to be expected, but if the virus is being brought under control, then the percentage of positive results relative to the total number of tests should be coming down."
The grim projection is 200,000 dead by Election Day after a serious reassessment by forecasters, who now see no end in sight for coronavirus crisis.
Doctors in Houston attempt to save the life of a coronavirus patient. | AP Photo/David J. Phillip
Is that a person or a mannequin?
That was as Texas passed 10,000 new virus cases in single day as they results come back fast now:
"Researchers around the world are working on the next generation of coronavirus tests that give answers in less than an hour, without onerous equipment or highly trained personnel. The latest so-called point-of-care tests, which could be done in a doctor’s office or even at home, would be a welcome upgrade from today’s status quo: uncomfortable swabs that snake up the nose and can take several days to produce results. The handful of point-of-care devices now on the market are frequently inaccurate. The up-and-coming tests could yield more reliable results, researchers say, potentially leading to on-the-spot testing nationwide, but most of the new contenders are still in early stages, and won’t be available in clinics for months. Some of the tests in development swap brain-tickling swabs for plastic tubes that collect spit. Others dunk patient samples into chemical cocktails that light up when they detect coronavirus genes. Another type of test identifies coronavirus proteins in minutes, using a cheap device that’s easy to produce in bulk and deploy in low-resource settings. “To combat this virus, we need to test widely and frequently, and get the results back quickly,” said Dr. Zev Williams at Columbia University, who is developing a coronavirus spit test that can run in about 30 minutes. “That requires a genuine paradigm shift in the way we go about testing for it.”
Another medical fascist who wants to cause jou pain.
"New York on Tuesday started requiring travelers from 19 states flagged for high coronavirus spread to share personal information and travel plans at airports — or face a $2,000 fine. With average new cases of the virus trending upward in dozens of states, New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo (D) and other leaders in the tri-state area have been worried that travelers could upend their progress in what was once the biggest national hot spot. Transmission of the virus there has slowed significantly, but New York is not a “hermetically sealed bubble,” Cuomo said Monday. The updating list of states subject to coronavirus-driven travel restrictions has expanded from eight to 19 since Cuomo and the governors of New Jersey and Connecticut last month told people coming in from problematic areas to self-quarantine for 14 days. New York threatened violators with hefty fines, while the other states did not create an enforcement mechanism. The states singled out include Florida, which made headlines early on in the pandemic for ordering anyone flying in from New York to self-quarantine — a reflection of the way the coronavirus’s threat has shifted geographically in the United States. Although New Jersey and New York continue to lead the country in total covid-19 deaths, Florida has led in new cases over the past week, followed by Texas, California and Georgia."
Who would ever want to visit that stinking state or city?
Meanwhile, the Globe will tell you of the power of stories in the coronavirus pandemic that involve breathtaking recoveries over one-hundred days now as the world went whizzing by.
