When Biden took office, one of his first acts was the elimination of our border security. Like a power-hungry dictator, Biden simply decided to ignore our immigration laws. His catastrophic border policy resulted in untold millions of unidentified foreign citizens from around the world pouring into our country. Its impact is now being felt in cities across the country. The worst is yet to come. PETER LEMISKA - AND WE'RE ALREADY THERE!!!
Tuesday, May 26, 2020
W.H.O HALTS HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE DUE TO HIGHER RISK OF DEATH - LET US ALL SEND A CRATE TO ORANGE BABOON TRUMP
The Post's coronavirus coverage linked in this newsletter is free to access from this email.
The latest
The World Health Organization is warning that countries could face a second peak in covid-19 cases, even before we enter a second wave of infections. North America, Southeast Asia and Europe could be scaling back restrictions too quickly, WHO emergencies program head Mike Ryan said, which could result in a rapid acceleration in the emergence of case clusters. “We need to be also cognizant of the fact that the disease can jump up at any time," Ryan said. "We cannot make assumptions that just because the disease is on the way down now that it’s going to keep going down.”
Former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Scott Gottlieb linked the increase in covid-19 hospitalizations to states lifting restrictions. “We now see a trend in an uptick in hospitalizations. It’s a small uptick, but it is an uptick, and it is unmistakable, and it is probably a result of reopening,” he said Tuesday morning in an interview on CNBC. “I’m concerned that there are people who think that this is the all-clear.”
The number of Tyson Foods employees with covid-19 has exploded from less than 1,600 a month ago to more than 7,000 today, according to a Washington Post analysis. Meat companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on protective gear, paid leave and ventilation systems. Despite the safety precautions, the industry has still seen a significant surge in cases, showing how difficult it is to get back to normal, even in essential fields such as food processing.
Trump Is Smearing Joe Scarborough Because Republicans Reward His Bullying
The United States is in the midst of its worst economic catastrophe in 90 years, and its deepest public-health crisis in more than 100, and the president is laser-focused on the co-host of a morning cable-news talk show whose audience, about 1.1 million daily viewers, equals less than one third of one percent of the population.
Indeed, to put the matter more precisely, the president is focused on investigating a 20-year-old death that Trump wishes to falsely pin on Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough. Trump has tweeted about the case four times since the beginning of Memorial Day weekend. It is, to say the least, a strange issue to focus on given the circumstances. Even if his claims were true, there are far more important issues before him.
This is not a shrewd messaging gambit. It does, however, follow a certain logic.
Obviously a wise and strategic president would not be doing this. The sane strategy for maximizing Trump’s reelection odds would be to manage the public-health response to the pandemic while taking advantage of a Democratic Congress willing to spend almost unlimited sums to pump stimulus into the economy.
But “sane” left the building a long time ago, and Trump is left in a world of second- and third-best strategies. In place of effective governance, he is counting on partisanship to polarize the race, keeping it close enough that he can eke out another win by demonizing his opponent. A crucial element of Trump’s polarization method is to suppress all internal dissent.
This is why Trump relentlessly claims (without any basis, of course) that his approval ratings among Republicans have risen to 95 percent or 96 percent. It is why he devotes so much energy to defining “Never Trumpers” as a hostile clique to be distrusted, and why he lobbed gratuitous insults at Mitt Romney rather than try to patch up his relationship with a man who solicited his endorsement in 2012. Scarborough is dangerous to Trump because he is a Republican, and his criticism undermines Trump’s message that all real Republicans support Trump. And while Trump could choose to ignore Scarborough, he believes in intimidating his critics into silence.
Trump is not a political genius, but he does grasp the power of audacious lies. His most devoted cultists believe everything he says, even the things that contradict other things he says. Perhaps more vital to his success is the political allies who go along with the lies even if they see through them.
On occasion Trump will make a claim so outrageous and offensive to conservatives that some of them will pipe up with a factual correction. After yet another smear of Scarborough, Brit Hume scolded the president for sharing a “discredited” charge:
National Review published a brief editorial noting that Scarborough did not, in fact, murder his former staffer. The editorial, headlined “Trump’s Grotesque Tweets,” falls into a familiar niche of criticism largely centered on the president’s style. He is lamentably undisciplined, rude, distractible, and undignified. “It’s unworthy of a partisan blogger, let alone the president of the United States,” lament National Review’s editors. It is a line of criticism that even many strong Trump supporters feel free to share: Trump is doing a good job, but he really ought to stop tweeting.
They might combine the critique of his performative shortcomings with the occasional fact-check. What they won’t do is draw the obvious conclusion that Trump not only lies from time to time but is a liar. The severity and frequency of Trump’s lies so far surpass other major national figures that no comparison can be drawn. No intelligent person could grant any presumption of truth to any claim Trump makes.
But while some conservatives may wish to dissent from a handful of discrete claims that Trump makes — Joe Scarborough’s alleged murderousness is one, Jeff Sessions’s service as attorney general is another — they do not wish to discredit him writ large. They need Trump to remain a credible platform from which to launch attacks against Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and other enemies.
If conservative elites conceded that Trump is not merely a boor who occasionally goes too far, but a habitual and remorseless liar, they would gravely damage his ability to discipline fellow Republicans by smearing them. To do so would gravely undercut their own party and an administration that continues to serve the conservative movement faithfully. So, they will not.
It is because Trump retains his presumption of credibility with Republicans that he can threaten to target them with his abuse and lies if they cross him. He called Lindsey Graham “a disgrace,” a “nut job,” “one of the dumbest human beings I’ve ever seen,” and read his cell-phone number on television to invite harassment from his fans. He bullied Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz. Notably, his harassment of the latter two also took the form of spurious murder charges. Trump claimed Cruz’s father may have plotted to kill President Kennedy, and he called Carson “pathological.” (“He hit his mother over the head with a hammer, he hit a friend in the face with a lock, he tried to kill somebody with a knife … If you’re pathological, there’s no cure for that, folks. If you’re a child molester, a sick puppy, there’s no cure for that.”)
Now those targets count as Trump’s most faithful servants. As he gazes down at the likes of Graham, Cruz, Rubio, and Carson nestled comfortably at his feet, why wouldn’t Trump conclude that his bullying works?
“Our entire crony capitalist system, Democrat and Republican alike, has become a kleptocracy approaching par with third-world hell-holes. This is the way a great country is raided by its elite.” Karen McQuillan
Flouting Norms, Trump Seeks to Bring
Independent Watchdogs to Heel
David E. Sanger and Charlie Savage
WASHINGTON — Congress had a clear idea of the role it expected inspectors general to play when it created them in 1978 after the Watergate scandals. They were to be dispersed in the agencies and departments of the federal government not as compliant team members but in-house referees, charged with rooting out corruption, waste, malfeasance and illegality.
As their numbers increased in the four decades since, inspectors general have played that role in bureaucracies as vast as the Pentagon and as tiny as the Denali Commission, charged with developing infrastructure in Alaska. It was an inspector general who in 2003 discovered that the CIA was using unauthorized techniques to torture detainees and an inspector general who brought to light billions of dollars wasted in reconstruction projects in Afghanistan.
But President Donald Trump has made clear that he has little use for this kind of independent oversight, which he sees as yet another form of resistance from the so-called Deep State. “I think we’ve been treated very unfairly by inspector generals,” he said this week.
And now he has launched a full-fledged — and at moments quite innovative — attack on the ability of inspectors general to investigate his administration.
Trump’s effort began last month with a sudden flurry of Friday-night firings and demotions. It has escalated with an attempt to bypass legal requirements that he give reasons to Congress 30 days before removing an inspector general. He has forged new ground by replacing them with political appointees who hold on to their old jobs, keeping them under the control of the cabinet secretaries they are supposed to be policing.
The president’s moves have hardly been subtle. When Steve A. Linick, the State Department’s inspector general, was fired last Friday, he was immediately locked out of his office and his email. His replacement is an associate of Vice President Mike Pence’s and remains in a politically appointed post that is subordinate to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who complained this week that Linick was not willing to live up to the secretary’s slogan, “one team, one mission.”
The message to the 74 inspectors general scattered around the government was unmistakable: If they unearth damaging information, especially in these crucial months before a presidential election, they are inviting retaliation.
“Trump is replacing independent inspectors general with unqualified political allies, which is inconsistent with statutory requirements,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written about the watchdog system. “The bottom line is he is removing independent officials who protect the public and help ensure the law is followed.”
When President Jimmy Carter signed the 1978 law creating the inspectors general system, few imagined a president so determined to undercut it. Carter hailed the “harmony and the partnership being established between the executive and legislative branch of government to root out fraud and corruption and mismanagement.”
President Ronald Reagan replaced all Carter-appointed inspectors general when he took over in 1981, but he later rehired some of them and, since then, the tradition has held that they remain in place when a new president takes office, a sign of respect for their nonpartisan status. Presidents may remove them, but Congress required an explanation of the reasons and, in 2008, put in an additional safeguard by imposing a 30-day waiting period.
Trump, who likes to brag that he has total authority over the executive branch, has shown that he has no intention of playing by those rules. In removing Linick, for example, the president immediately stripped him of authority and told Congress he no longer had full confidence in him, but did not say why.
Trump later told reporters that he did so only because Pompeo asked him to.
“I’ve said, ‘Who appointed him,’ and they said, ‘President Obama,’” the president said. “I said, look, ‘I’ll terminate him.’ I was happy to do it,” Trump later said. Pompeo added on Wednesday that he “should have done it some time ago.”
A replacement was announced immediately: Stephen J. Akard, who also will keep his current political appointment, subordinate to Pompeo, as director of the State Department’s Office of Foreign Missions.
Among other things, Linick had been investigating whether Pompeo and his wife, Susan Pompeo, inappropriately used a taxpayer-paid government employee to run personal errands, and whether Pompeo acted legally last year when he circumvented Congress on selling arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This week, Pompeo denied that he knew about what Linick was investigating other than the arms deal and said it was “patently false” that he asked Trump to fire him as retaliation. But he also refused to say what his reason was.
At the same time Trump removed Linick, he abruptly installed Howard “Skip” Elliott, a political appointee inside the Transportation Department, to serve as the acting inspector general for that department.
Elliott replaced Mitch Behm, the deputy inspector general who had been leading the office since its longtime head, Calvin L. Scovel III, retired in January for health reasons. It put Elliott, who remains subordinate to the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, in control of investigations into her work — including an inquiry into whether the department has shown favoritism in steering taxpayer grants to Kentucky, where Chao’s husband, Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Republican and the majority leader, is running for reelection.
In a letter this week to Trump, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, a supporter of the inspectors general system, objected to “obvious conflicts of interest” created by Trump’s installation of current political appointees to control watchdog offices, saying the problems went beyond independence.
“It means that while still reporting to the agency secretary, they will have oversight of and access to all confidential inspector general information, including whistleblower complaints and identities,” he wrote.
Grassley has also been pushing the president to provide a more detailed official explanation to Congress for his ouster last month of Michael Atkinson, the inspector general of the office of the director of national intelligence. As with Linick, Trump had put Atkinson on leave rather than waiting 30 days, and told Congress only that he had lost confidence in him.
But in remarks to reporters, the president clearly remained angry at Atkinson for trying to alert Congress to the whistleblower complaint about Trump’s attempt to pressure Ukraine’s leader into announcing a criminal investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.
There is some precedent for one of Trump’s tactics: In 2009, President Barack Obama abruptly ousted Gerald Walpin, the inspector general of the Corporation for National and Community Service, and also put him on leave and initially told Congress only that he had lost confidence in the official.
But lawmakers of both parties objected to the move amid suspicions that it was connected to Walpin’s criticism of how a political ally of Obama’s had spent an AmeriCorps grant. The Obama White House quickly sent a detailed explanation claiming that Walpin was incompetent and had behaved bizarrely and made no similar move for the rest of the administration.
While administrations of both parties have periodically clashed with inspectors general, Trump’s campaign to intimidate and subjugate watchdogs to political control is without parallel.
In late March, after the president signed a $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill, he issued a signing statement claiming a right to override a key safeguard: its creation of an inspector general empowered to police $500 billion in corporate bailout funds. It required the inspector to tell Congress if Treasury Department officials balked at providing information on how the money was spent.
In the statement, Trump said he alone determined what information lawmakers got. And on April 3, he announced his intent to nominate Brian D. Miller, his own White House aide, for the position, leading critics to charge that he was too close to the White House to provide aggressive and independent oversight.
Later that evening, Trump fired Atkinson.
On April 6, Trump ripped into the acting inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services, Christi Grimm, after she issued a report on equipment shortages at hospitals. He accused Grimm of being politically biased against him. Three weeks later, he nominated a potential replacement, although she remains in place while that nomination is pending.
On April 7, Trump demoted Glenn Fine as the longtime acting inspector general for the Defense Department. The move disqualified Fine, who has a reputation for aggressiveness and independence, from continuing to serve as the just-named leader of a committee of inspectors general that Congress created to coordinate oversight of the administration’s spending of trillions of taxpayer dollars related to the pandemic.
Trump also replaced Fine as the acting Pentagon watchdog with Sean O’Donnell, the sitting inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency who had clashed with Andrew Wheeler, the head of the EPA. By requiring O’Donnell to split his time, critics said, the administration undercut his ability to perform oversight at both agencies.
“It’s impossible to do them both,” said David C. Williams, who served as inspector general of six federal agencies over the course of a government career that spanned from the Carter administration to the Trump administration.
But Trump’s latest twist — installing political appointees controlled by agency heads to run inspectors offices — was a further escalation.
“If you are supposed to take direction from the secretary who is your boss, and also to have professional skepticism of their job performance, it’s hard to reconcile those two roles,” said Andrew M. Wright, a former ethics and oversight lawyer for Congress and in the Obama White House. “You risk being under direct control by political appointees in a way that is not contemplated by the inspector general statute, and unable to have the institutional distance to be able to scrutinize political appointees’ work.”
Another Private Jet Company Owned by a Trump Donor Got a Bailout — This One for $20 Million
The two private jet companies are among the first 96 airline companies disclosed as recipients of taxpayer funds under the CARES Act.
by Jake Pearson
A Jet Linx aircraft on Sept. 25, 2019, in Teterboro, New Jersey. The private jet company, whose owner was an early Trump donor, received $20 million in taxpayer aid.
An Omaha, Nebraska-based private jet company whose principal owner donated generously to Donald Trump and Republicans ahead of the 2016 election received $20 million in taxpayer aid from the federal bailout package passed in March.
Jet Linx Aviation, which caters to well-to-do CEOs and executives, was the second private plane company founded or owned by Trump donors to receive federal funds designated for the airline industry under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. CNBC reported on Thursday that Clay Lacy Aviation, a Van Nuys, California-based private jet company whose founder has given nearly $50,000 to the Republican National Committee and Trump, got $27 million in federal funds.
Jet Linx Management Company Vice Chairman John Denny Carreker and his wife, Connie, gave $68,100 to Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Trump Victory Committee between October 2015 and November 2016, Federal Election Commission filings show. Connie Carreker gave an additional $1,000 to the Trump campaign in November 2018, according to the FEC.
Most of the CARES Act money for the airline industry has gone to commercial or regional carriers. American, Delta, United and Southwest collectively were allotted almost $19.5 billion, more than three-quarters of the total reserved for the passenger airline industry.
But private charters haven’t been left out.
About 70 such companies received CARES Act funds as of April 27, according to the first round of disclosures to 96 recipients published this week. That represents just a fraction of the roughly 2,000 private jet companies operating in the U.S., as compiled by Private Jet Card Comparisons, an independent buyer’s guide. In total, they received about $157 million in taxpayer aid, less than a percent of the more than $23 billion disbursed so far for the passenger airline industry.
in the industry: Last year, the flight tracking firm Argus Traqpak ranked them fifth and 11th, respectively, in hours logged, according to a list of the top 25 private air charter operations. No other top 10 private jet company received federal grants. The average grant amount for the 70 private jet companies to receive aid was $2.2 million, about a tenth of what Jet Linx and Clay Lacy each received.
A number listed for the Carrekers at their Dallas home wasn’t in service, and a press representative for the company hasn’t responded to emails seeking comment. A Treasury Department spokeswoman said campaign contributions play no role in determining which companies received federal funds, requirements that were set by Congress.
CNBC reported that Clay Lacy did not respond to a request for comment on its reporting.
Lawmakers set aside $25 billion for passenger airlines in the coronavirus relief bill. Companies that earned at least half their revenue last year by flying people from place to place could apply for grants from a special program within the CARES Act designed to cover payroll and benefits for workers. The size of the grants companies received is supposed to be based on how much they paid their employees in salary and benefits between April and September last year. The law restricts how much executives are allowed to take in compensation.
The Treasury Department declined to say how many total companies applied for the payroll grants, how many were private plane companies or how many applicants were deemed ineligible for funds. A spokesman for the Transportation Department said officials verified that applicants held up-to-date “certificates and authorizations” before the Treasury distributed them money.
It wasn’t clear when the other passenger airline companies granted payroll aid would be publicly disclosed.
Jet Linx claims an 112-aircraft fleet that flies out of 18 cities where it operates its own private terminals. The company says it has 450 workers, who serve as flight crew and operations, maintenance and support staff.
Jet Linx offers well-heeled customers membership packages that give them access to luxury plane rides for a fee. On its website, Jet Linx offers members who pay $5,000 up front access to any size jet for pay-as-you-fly costs. Hourly rates can run up to $4,500 per hour.
Do you work for a company that was denied CARES Act funds? If so, or if you were laid off from a company that received the federal aid, email Jake Pearson at jake.pearson@propublica.org
Doris Burke contributed research.
Another Private Jet Company Owned by a Trump Donor Got a Bailout — This One for $20 Million
The two private jet companies are among the first 96 airline companies disclosed as recipients of taxpayer funds under the CARES Act.
A Jet Linx aircraft on Sept. 25, 2019, in Teterboro, New Jersey. The private jet company, whose owner was an early Trump donor, received $20 million in taxpayer aid. (Sylvain Gaboury/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
An Omaha, Nebraska-based private jet company whose principal owner donated generously to Donald Trump and Republicans ahead of the 2016 election received $20 million in taxpayer aid from the federal bailout package passed in March.
Jet Linx Aviation, which caters to well-to-do CEOs and executives, was the second private plane company founded or owned by Trump donors to receive federal funds designated for the airline industry under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act. CNBC reported on Thursday that Clay Lacy Aviation, a Van Nuys, California-based private jet company whose founder has given nearly $50,000 to the Republican National Committee and Trump, got $27 million in federal funds.
Jet Linx Management Company Vice Chairman John Denny Carreker and his wife, Connie, gave $68,100 to Trump’s campaign, the Republican National Committee and the Trump Victory Committee between October 2015 and November 2016, Federal Election Commission filings show. Connie Carreker gave an additional $1,000 to the Trump campaign in November 2018, according to the FEC.
Most of the CARES Act money for the airline industry has gone to commercial or regional carriers. American, Delta, United and Southwest collectively were allotted almost $19.5 billion, more than three-quarters of the total reserved for the passenger airline industry.
But private charters haven’t been left out.
About 70 such companies received CARES Act funds as of April 27, according to the first round of disclosures to 96 recipients published this week. That represents just a fraction of the roughly 2,000 private jet companies operating in the U.S., as compiled by Private Jet Card Comparisons, an independent buyer’s guide. In total, they received about $157 million in taxpayer aid, less than a percent of the more than $23 billion disbursed so far for the passenger airline industry.
in the industry: Last year, the flight tracking firm Argus Traqpak ranked them fifth and 11th, respectively, in hours logged, according to a list of the top 25 private air charter operations. No other top 10 private jet company received federal grants. The average grant amount for the 70 private jet companies to receive aid was $2.2 million, about a tenth of what Jet Linx and Clay Lacy each received.
A number listed for the Carrekers at their Dallas home wasn’t in service, and a press representative for the company hasn’t responded to emails seeking comment. A Treasury Department spokeswoman said campaign contributions play no role in determining which companies received federal funds, requirements that were set by Congress.
CNBC reported that Clay Lacy did not respond to a request for comment on its reporting.
Lawmakers set aside $25 billion for passenger airlines in the coronavirus relief bill. Companies that earned at least half their revenue last year by flying people from place to place could apply for grants from a special program within the CARES Act designed to cover payroll and benefits for workers. The size of the grants companies received is supposed to be based on how much they paid their employees in salary and benefits between April and September last year. The law restricts how much executives are allowed to take in compensation.
The Treasury Department declined to say how many total companies applied for the payroll grants, how many were private plane companies or how many applicants were deemed ineligible for funds. A spokesman for the Transportation Department said officials verified that applicants held up-to-date “certificates and authorizations” before the Treasury distributed them money.
It wasn’t clear when the other passenger airline companies granted payroll aid would be publicly disclosed.
Jet Linx claims an 112-aircraft fleet that flies out of 18 cities where it operates its own private terminals. The company says it has 450 workers, who serve as flight crew and operations, maintenance and support staff.
Jet Linx offers well-heeled customers membership packages that give them access to luxury plane rides for a fee. On its website, Jet Linx offers members who pay $5,000 up front access to any size jet for pay-as-you-fly costs. Hourly rates can run up to $4,500 per hour.
Do you work for a company that was denied CARES Act funds? If so, or if you were laid off from a company that received the federal aid, email Jake Pearson at jake.pearson@propublica.org
Sessions re-emphasizes his loyalty to Trump, while Trump says Sessions failed the loyalty test that mattered
Jeff Sessions talks with the media in Mobile, Ala., after voting in Alabama's primary election on March 3.
Associated Press
Even as he was subjected to three years of disparaging remarks by and expressions of disappointment from President Donald Trump, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions held out hope of a Trump endorsement of his bid for a Senate seat from Alabama. He was, after all, the first senator and one of the first sitting members of Congress to endorse Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, and the first two congressmen to back Trump, Chris Collins of New York and Duncan Hunter of California, have ended up with prison sentences.
Sessions is even believed to have brought influential adviser Stephen Miller into the Trump fold.
Though he knew, as did even the most casual of political observers, that Trump resented Sessions’s recusing himself from the investigation into Russia’s alleged efforts to sabotage the 2016 election and any coordination with the Trump campaign, paving a path for the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel, Sessions might have hoped when he announced he would seek to be returned to the Senate by Alabama voters this fall that the Trump team would reward his long-standing loyalty.
Earlier this week, leading Sessions in the polls and less than two months from the runoff, and likely cognizant that the runoff would be decided by voters who’d picked neither of the top two finishers the last time they’d cast ballots (as well as Trump’s +28 net approval in the state, according to the latest Morning Consult data), Tuberville sought to burnish his Trump bona fides by commemorating on Twitter the third anniversary of Sessions’s recusal, referring to that action as throwing Trump to the wolves.
If Tuberville had been seeking a reaffirmation of Trump’s endorsement, the president, by Friday evening, obliged:
Sessions, remaining cordial toward the president (using, for example, the term “exoneration” in regard to the Mueller investigation’s result when Mueller, and his report, explicitly said Trump would have been exonerated if the facts permitted, and that they did not) even after being accused of letting the country down, responded in a measured tone with this brace of tweets:
Then, on Saturday, Sessions reminded the president of his support of Trump’s fledgling political career:
It did not spark nostalgia from the president’s Twitter feed, which observed that Sessions had failed the loyalty test that mattered most to him, going on to take shots at the incumbent in the seat for which Sessions and Tuberville are vying, Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, and the Democratic leaders of the House and Senate:
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