Tuesday, June 16, 2020
Dozens of Attendees at Donald Trump's Tulsa Rally Could Turn Up Infected With COVID-19
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-rally-tulsa-oklahoma-coronavirus-cases-covid-19-1511021
Peter Drobac, a physician and an infectious diseases specialist at
the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, pointed to alarming
facts that highlight the risks of holding the Tulsa rally.
New
COVID-19 cases are surging in Oklahoma. On Friday the state reported its
highest single-day increase in new cases to date. Neighboring states,
from which rally attendees may travel, are also reporting spikes in new
infections.
"If you tried to design a superspreader event for COVID-19, it would look a lot like one of these rallies," Drobac told Newsweek.
"It's perfectly designed to foster the spread of a respiratory virus. I
worry about the risk to attendees, to their loved ones, and to the
president."
Seattle's mayor and police chief diverge on autonomous zone
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/12/seattle-protests-autonomous-zone-315149
The mixed messages from Mayor Jenny
Durkan and Police Chief Carmen Best come amid wall-to-wall coverage on
the zone on conservative news outlets and a barrage of tweets from
President Donald Trump blasting the city’s response to what he says is
an “anarchist takeover.”
“These Liberal Dems don’t have a clue,” Trump tweeted
on Friday morning. “The terrorists burn and pillage our cities, and
they think it is just wonderful, even the death. Must end this Seattle
takeover now!”
Trump continued his criticism of Seattle in an interview that aired Friday afternoon with Fox News' Harris Faulkner.
"You can look at a couple of places
that are in such great shape, but then you look at Seattle," Trump said.
"What's that all about? How did they allow that to happen? That's just a
bad philosophy."
Michael Solan, the president of the
Seattle Police Officers Guild, also told Faulkner that the situation in
the city was out of control.
Trump excoriates Inslee, Seattle mayor over autonomous zone
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/502828-trump-excoriates-inslee-seattle-mayor-over-autonomous-zone
Trump has fixated over the past week on demonstrators living in what
has been dubbed the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in downtown Seattle,
ridiculing the movement as a group of radical anarchists. He has focused
his ire on Inslee, a former Democratic candidate for the White House
who has previously tussled with Trump, and Durkan, accusing the two
leaders of being weak.
But when pressed for specifics, the president demurred. He suggested
he could do "about 10 different things" to disperse the gathering, then
launched into a diatribe accusing the news media of failing to give the
protest adequate attention.
Lockdown Versus Freedom
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-philosophers-diaries/202005/lockdown-versus-freedom
The question is, what level of risk do those actions pose, and is
imposing that risk impermissible. What we have here is a conflict
between the right to act freely, on the one hand, and the duty not to
endanger the life and health of others, on the other. Where freedom ends
and the duty to keep others safe even at a cost to oneself begins is by
no means obvious.
The alternative is to forgo analysis and insist – via protests and
social media campaigns – that one’s preference becomes public policy.
That's hardly a way to sound decision making. (In
addition, the alternative has costs of its own. For instance, protests –
being large gatherings – may involve high levels of risk, indeed,
higher than the risks associated with going back to work or engaging in
any of the other activities protesters would like to engage in.)
Whose Freedom Counts?
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/freedom-liberty-hierarchy.html
The words freedom and liberty have been invoked
breathlessly in recent weeks to bolster the case for “reopening.”
Protesters of state public safety measures readily locate in the Bill of
Rights the varied and assorted freedom to not be masked, the freedom to
have your toenails soaked and buffed, the freedom to open-carry weapons
into the state capitol, the freedom to take your children to the polar
bear cage, the freedom to worship even if it imperils public safety, and
above all, the freedom to shoot the people who attempt to stop you from
exercising such unenumerated but essential rights. Beyond a profound
misunderstanding of the relationship between broad state police powers
and federal constitutional rights in the midst of a deadly pandemic,
this definition of freedom is perplexing, chiefly because it
seems to assume not simply that other people should die for your
individual liberties, but also that you have an affirmative right to
harm, threaten, and even kill anyone who stands in the way of your
exercising of the freedoms you demand. We tend to forget that even our
most prized freedoms have limits, with regard to speech, assembly, or
weaponry. Those constraints are not generally something one shoots one’s
way out of, even in a pandemic, and simply insisting that your own
rights are paramount because you super-duper want them doesn’t usually
make it so.
The very idea that it doesn’t matter what happens to the larger
community, so long as the individual has unfettered freedom to do as he
pleases, is not just a vestige of the slaveholder ethos. As Charlie Warzel points out this week,
this has been the core animating theory behind the American gun rights
movement: reduce the debate to an absolutist fight about freedom
that eventually narcotizes an entire population into believing that the
cost of true liberty is tens of thousands of avoidable gun deaths each
year. Any effort to regulate anything within the vast space between
“assault weapons for everyone on demand” and “reasonable gun safety” is
cast as a dire step toward tyranny. As Warzel puts it, this leads to
another version of freedom to, in this case, the freedom to either do mass harm or the freedom to insist that nothing be done about it:
KKK 'leader' charged for attack on Black Lives Matter protesters
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52973398
A self-described Ku Klux Klan leader
has been arrested for allegedly driving his car into a group of Black
Lives Matters protesters gathered on Sunday in the US state of Virginia.
Jewish Ohio health official resigns after anti-Semitic backlash to virus orders
https://www.timesofisrael.com/jewish-ohio-health-official-resigns-after-anti-semitic-backlash-to-virus-orders/
Amy Acton, state’s Department of Health Director, faced armed protesters, Nazi comparisons, anti-Jewish slurs after supporting stay-at-home orders to stem coronavirus outbreak
Don’t Listen to Fox. Here’s What’s Really Going On in Seattle’s Protest Zone.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/15/dont-listen-to-fox-heres-whats-really-going-on-in-seattles-protest-zone-321507
It seems I live
in a city undergoing a “totalitarian takeover” that will lead to
“fascist outcomes” and could “metastasize across the country.” Its
government “has handed over an entire portion of the city to domestic
terrorists.” This “group of rogue protesters” is attempting “to get a
stranglehold on the city.” This radical “army” of “conquistadors” has
“rolled over the police like Cortez rolling over the Aztecs.”
Welcome to our world, out here in
Seattle—at least according to the hosts and commentators of Fox News.
Lesser voices on the digital right have announced even
more dire supposed developments: “Rapper-turned-warlord rules commune
streets with the iron fist of a privatized police force.” But it’s Fox
that has been all over the story of the so-called Capitol Hill
Autonomous Zone or CHAZ (which its Black Lives Matter organizers on
Saturday renamed
the Capitol Hill Organized Protest, CHOP): four-plus blocks of street
and sidewalk in Seattle’s traditional gay and bohemian nightlife
district, surrounding a boarded-up police precinct headquarters that the
mayor ordered vacated last Monday to dampen a week-and-a-half of
escalating confrontations between police and protesters. From there, the
fluid protests, spearheaded by BLM but involving a wide spectrum of
activists and ordinary citizens, coalesced with surprising rapidity into
something like a provisional government.
Donald Trump’s iron grip on the GOP: Why Republicans stick with him
https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-06-12/republican-officials-fear-trump
“Members of Congress are not afraid of Trump; they are afraid of
their voters and constituents,” said Buck. “As long as he has a
stranglehold on them and is able to communicate directly with them, this
is not going to change.”
Report: Trump peace plan could leave Jewish heritage sites under Palestinian control
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/281933
Currently, the overwhelming majority of antiquities sites in Judea
and Samaria suffer from constant vandalism and looting, with a sorely
understaffed and underfunded department of the Civilian Administration
responsible for law enforcement and prevention measures. To make matters
worse, the Palestinian Authority has recently stepped up its activities
in this area, dedicating tremendous effort and resources to re-writing
and re-defining the history of these sites, turning them into
"Palestinian heritage sites" and erasing or obscuring Jewish history,
while curtailing access to the sites for Israeli tourists,
archaeologists and other visitors.
DeSantis defies critics as coronavirus spreads in Florida
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/16/trump-florida-coronavirus-321600
DeSantis’ moves to return his state to
normal have been as aggressive as any governor, but there’s one
inconvenient fact: Florida’s coronavirus cases are rising to record
levels and the percentage of positive tests has been steadily climbing
ever since the state fully implemented the first phase of its reopening May 18.
On Friday, when DeSantis first spoke
to reporters about the GOP convention moving to Florida in August, the
state was setting new records for the number of coronavirus cases
reported each day. But he downplayed the severity of coronavirus’s
spread, partly because hospitalization and death rates remained
relatively low and stable. And he framed the convention as an economic
shot in the arm, rather than a petri dish of infection as some
detractors contended.
Members of Congress took small-business loans — and the full extent is unknown
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/06/16/congress-small-business-loan-320625
And
there are almost certainly more, according to aides and lawmakers. But
only the Small Business Administration and Treasury Department have that
information, and the Trump administration is refusing to provide any
details. That leaves it entirely up to business owners — including
elected officials — to decide whether to come forward about a loan,
which can be as large as $10 million.
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