Reverend reveals what evangelicals say privately about Trump

#TrumpIsNotWell

John Bolton's "Tell-All" Book and Bill Barr's "Do-All-For-Donald" Agenda

White House Steps Up Efforts to Downplay Ongoing Coronavirus Concerns

https://time.com/5854657/white-house-downplay-coronavirus-concerns/

The Trump administration’s push to diminish concerns about the virus comes as the president looks to resume his reelection campaign in earnest. Trump has seen his support erode over his handling of the pandemic and nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, the African American Minneapolis man who died after a white policeman pressed his knee onto Floyd’s neck.

 

Portugal finally recognises consul who saved thousands from Holocaust

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53006790

Eighty years ago, a middle-aged, mid-ranking diplomat sank into deep depression and watched his hair turn grey in days, as he saw the streets of Bordeaux filling with Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis.

The KKK Is a Terrorist Organization

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/04/the-kkk-is-a-terrorist-organization-105717

With time, it’s become even clearer that the alleged perpetrator is a terrorist. As founder of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and the White Patriot Party, Frazier Glenn Miller has a long history of militant anti-Semitism. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as a “raging anti-Semite” known for posting online rants, like “No Jews, Just Right.” The Institute for Research & Education on Human Rights has also noted, “His worship for Hitler and Hitlerism is real.” According to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, Miller is “one of the pioneers in the modern hate world, he’s been entrenched in the hate movement his entire adult life.”

 

And yet, the word terrorism wasn’t mentioned “in a single bit of news coverage,” as one observer noted. Why?

Drug Proven to Reduce Virus Deaths, Scientists Say

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/world/coronavirus-live-updates.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Scientists at the University of Oxford said on Tuesday that they have identified what they called the first drug proven to reduce coronavirus-related deaths, after a 6,000-patient trial of the drug in Britain showed that a low-cost steroid could reduce deaths significantly for hospitalized patients.

The steroid, dexamethasone, reduced deaths by a third in patients receiving ventilation, and by a fifth in patients receiving only oxygen treatment, the scientists said. They found no benefit from the drug in patients who did not need respiratory support.

Shas candidate gives up Knesset following lewd modesty comment

https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/new-shas-mk-dressing-immodestly-causes-breast-cancer-miscarriages-631657

  Rabbi Baruch Gazahi, who was set to enter the Knesset thanks to the Expanded Norwegian Law that passed on Monday night, was forced to resign from the Shas list on Tuesday after it was revealed that he said in a Torah class four years ago that women miscarry and get breast cancer due to immodesty.

 Shas leader Arye Deri said he spoke to Gazahi, who told him his words were part of a two-hour lecture and were taken out of context. Deri said he told Gazahi his words were unacceptable and do not represent Shas.

‘No cop-free zone’: Seattle police chief says officers are responding to CHOP with caution

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/crime/no-cop-free-zone-police-chief-says-officers-are-responding-to-chop-with-caution/?utm_source=marketingcloud&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Morning+Brief+6-16-20_6_16_2020&utm_term=

Though CHOP has been described over the past week as a cop-free zone, Best said that is not the case and officers have written multiple police reports for crimes reported in that area in the past 48 hours. Dispatchers and officers are coordinating with crime victims or callers to meet police on the edges of the CHOP boundaries, she said, adding officers will go into the CHOP area if there are threats to life safety — for instance, if someone is injured or there’s a report of shots being fired.

Sweden, the jury returns

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.

 

Why Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch protected LGBTQ rights

Americans Learn First-Hand The Burdens Of Post-Policy Politics | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

Fox News runs digitally altered images in coverage of Seattle’s protests, Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/

The image was actually a mashup of photos from different days, taken by different photographers — it was done by splicing a Getty Images photo of an armed man, who had been at the protest zone June 10, with other images from May 30 of smashed windows in downtown Seattle. Another altered image combined the gunman photo with yet another image, making it appear as though he was standing in front of a sign declaring “You are now entering Free Cap Hill.”

 

Fox News Removes Digitally Altered, Misleading Photos of Seattle 'Autonomous Zone' From Website

https://time.com/5853408/fox-news-altered-photo-seattle/

As of Saturday, Fox News included an editors note posted at the top of at least three stories on its website covering the protest zone, saying it replaced a “home page photo collage” because it “did not clearly delineate between these images” and that it mistakenly included a St. Paul, Minnesota, photo in a slideshow about Seattle.

The Seattle Times reports Fox News’ website featured at least two photos on Friday that inserted an image of a man standing with a military-style rifle, and that there were no disclaimers on how they were manipulated when featured on the network’s website for most of the day Friday.

The image of the gunman is from a Getty Images photo that was taken on June 10 at what is known as the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” protest area. The original photo showed an unidentified man wearing a green mask who was carrying a weapon while standing in front of a car.

 

Treasury Sec. Mnuchin plays Hide and Seek with taxpayer dollars

Trump's wish for an end to the pandemic contradicts reality

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/16/politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-politics-oklahoma-election-2020/index.html

Despite pleas from health authorities in Oklahoma to postpone his upcoming rally to avoid spreading the novel coronavirus, the President is doing the opposite -- talking about organizing a second mass rally indoors to showcase what his campaign says is an overwhelming response to the event. Trump's campaign said it will test temperatures of rallygoers and offer masks and hand sanitizer. But thousands of people are set to be crammed together in a hot arena for hours in conditions that are ideal for the spread of the virus.