President Donald Trump told officials from the Department of Homeland Security to get their marching orders by listening to Fox Business host Lou Dobbs “every night,” former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor told Anderson Cooper on Friday.
Dobbs, an effusive supporter of Trump, was basically the “shadow chief of staff” for the department, Taylor said in the CNN interview.
“The president would call us and … he would say, ‘Why the hell didn’t you watch Lou Dobbs last night? You need to listen to Lou. What Lou says is what I want to do,’” Taylor said.
“So if Lou Dobbs peddled a conspiracy theory on late-night television or made an erroneous claim about what should be done … at the border … the president wanted us to be tuning in every night,” he added.-
Taylor said he didn’t have time to watch Dobbs while the 250,000-person DHS was “trying to guard against some of the most severe threats to this country.”
“We can’t be watching Lou Dobbs and taking our orders from him, but this happened on a regular basis,” Taylor said.
Analysts have been having a chicken or the egg discussion about Fox and Trump from the beginning. Does Fox follow Trump or does Trump follow Fox? I settled on the idea that it’s a feedback loop, in which they each influence the other.
The scary part of that is that Fox News’ looniest are the ones who influence the president on policy and the president is so brain damaged that he actually thinks they know what they are talking about.
Fox has a lot to answer for. They are as responsible for the death and destruction we are experiencing as the GOP and Trump. Maybe more.
For most Republicans, America is a nation where the economy is still fairly good, where the effort to handle the coronavirus is going at least somewhat well and the president is doing a very good job on it. For them, the virus elicits less concern in the first place. They believe the 170,000 fatalities is an overstated count and one which, for many, can so far be considered acceptable. And it is a nation where, for an overwhelming number of Republicans, there has been too much focus on racial discrimination of late.
And this is just….
Tens of millions of our fellow Americans are members of a dangerous Death Cult. I’m not talking about QAnon. I’m talking about the Republican Party.
The extent of US isolation at the UNhas been driven home by formal letters from 13 of the 15 security council members opposing Trump administration attempts to extend the economic embargo on Iran.
Under that deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), comprehensive UN sanctions on Iran would be restored 30 days after the declaration. But almost every other council member has issued letters saying that the US has no standing to trigger this sanctions “snapback” because it left the JCPOA in May 2018.
The US has said it is still technically a participant because it is named as one in a 2015 security council resolution endorsing the JCPOA. The argument was rejected by France, the UK and Germany even before Pompeo made his declaration.
Since then, Reuters reported that it had seen letters from Russia, China, Germany, Belgium, Vietnam, Niger, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, South Africa, Indonesia, Estonia and Tunisia, all rejecting the US position.
Only the Dominican Republic has yet to issue a formal letter on the subject. Last week the Caribbean state was the only security council member to back the USwhen it tried to extend an arms embargo on Iran. Pompeo visited the island two days after that vote.
Council members who normally consider themselves US allies on most issues said they would have supported Washington if a compromise had been found, in which the arms embargo could have been extended for a limited time period. The defeat of the US resolution on the embargo led directly to Pompeo’s legal gambit to try to snap back UN sanctions.
Diplomats at the UN said the depth of US isolation was in part a reflection of the abrasive style used by Pompeo, who accused Europeans of choosing to “side with the ayatollahs”, and the US ambassador to the UN, Kelly Craft, a political appointee.
“The Americans were actually being over the top in their ridiculousness,” one diplomat said.
“The underlying point here is that most countries on the security council basically agree with the US that Iran is not a nice country and it having nuclear weapons and more arms is not a good thing,” the diplomat said. “But the Americans misplayed their hand so often, so aggressively, that they isolated themselves from people not on policy, but on just being unpleasant.”
Election Day is still over two months away. A presidential campaign challenging an incumbent must already be planning for a transition in government that, if it loses, might never come. This election, both campaigns will be planning moves and counter-moves for winning a chaotic outcome. They are not the only ones.
The Transition Integrity Project ran a series of war games in June to simulate what might happen after Election Day. About 100 bipartisan players from former Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta to former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, plus pundits and academics participated.
“The inability to imagine Trump has always been his greatest advantage,” Stuart Stevens (“It Was All a Lie“) told Politico last week. TIP’s players imagined quite a lot. They ran four post-election scenarios: an ambiguous outcome (think Bush-Gore 2000), a narrow Trump victory, a narrow Biden victory, and a big Biden win.
“We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides,” explains the post-simulation report. (TIP did not attempt to game out the intricacies of the legal actions themselves.) “The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.”
In the first scenario, the results from three states—North Carolina, Michigan, and Florida—remained too close to call for more than a week. On Election Night, Trump’s campaign called on Biden to concede, citing in-person-voting returns, which looked good for the President. But as the absentee ballots in these states were counted, the numbers swung toward Biden. This was “blue shift,” a phenomenon observed by Foley and other academics in recent elections, wherein in-person-vote totals have tended to skew Republican, while absentee voting has skewed Democratic. Blue shift is what kept the Democratic House wave in 2018 from being immediately apparent on Election Night—the mail votes cast in California that fall took weeks to count, an outcome that former House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, described at the time as “bizarre.” This year, with Trump explicitly making mail voting a partisan issue, the blue shift is likely to be especially pronounced. And Trump is, in turn, expected to denounce this easily explainable phenomenon as nefarious.
As the votes were being tallied in the game, Trump pounced. The team playing as his campaign called on the Justice Department to use federal agents to “secure” voting sites and tried to enlist state Republican officials to stop the further counting of absentee ballots. The Biden team, in response, called for every vote to be counted and urged its supporters to attend rallies calling for the same. During subsequent turns, Trump tried to federalize the National Guard, and both parties sought to block or overturn results in key states. Eventually, North Carolina was declared for Biden and Florida was declared for Trump, leaving Michigan as the deciding state—there, a “rogue individual” destroyed ballots believed to be favorable to Biden, leaving Trump with a narrow lead. Michigan’s Republican-led legislature certified Trump’s victory, but the state’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, refused to accept the result, citing the sabotage, and sent a separate certification to Congress.
It was 1876 all over again, Lach writes, citing the chaotic aftermath of the race between Samuel Tilden of New York and Rutherford B. Hayes.
“If there’s a contested result, the only way that either Trump or Biden, for that matter, can effectively contest a result that goes against them is if they create a plausible narrative that is backed up by their media factions that they actually were the legitimate winners of the election. That the seeming results that went against them in fact, in some ways, are not legitimate,” Nils Gilman, TIP co-founder, told Politico. Gilman is vice president of programs at the Berggruen Institute in Los Angeles.
The first “move” by each team was often decisive:
These war games were hypothetical imaginings of extraordinary circumstances. But an election in a pandemic year with a President declaring in advance that the vote will be rigged are extraordinary circumstances. “One big takeaway is that leaders really need to know what exactly their powers are, and what the powers of others are, and think through some of these options in advance,” Rosa Brooks, a law professor at Georgetown University who helped convene the Transition Integrity Project, told me recently. “Because if things go bad, they’ll go bad very quickly, and people will have to make decisions in an hour, not in a week.”
The incumbent has the advantage in the powers department, TIP cautions, such as “the President’s ability to federalize the national guard or invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active duty military domestically; his ability to launch investigations into opponents; and his ability to use Department of Justice and/or the intelligence agencies to cast doubt on election results or discredit his opponents …. Participants noted that additional presidential powers subject to misuse include the ability to the freeze assets of individuals and groups the president determines to be a threat, and his ability to restrict internet communications in the name of national security.”
The Biden campaign might attempt to organize mass protests to demonstrate public commitment to “legitimate” process, but more likely activists groups would do this independently of the Democratic Party — harder to organize and coordinate should the internet “go down” in the wake of Nov. 3.
Voting by mail in numbers never seen means “election night” as game night “is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous” TIP finds. But delays in absentee/by-mail vote-counting, counting errors, ballot rejection rates, legal and street battles are not the only risks.
There are other nightmare scenarios beside Portland or Lafayette Square-style deployment of a camouflaged Praetorian Guard to seize ballot boxes in Broward or Milwaukee or Maricopa Counties. In a close contest, delaying certification of enough electoral votes into mid-December could throw the final decision to the House of Representatives where Republicans are in the minority, but where voting is not by member but by delegation. States get one vote each for one of the top three contenders. Republicans control the majority of House delegations.
Republicans ended up with Trump, Stevens says, through inability to imagine Trump. “So the other 15 candidates running all killed each other to try to get one-on-one with Trump,” he says, “because obviously Republicans weren’t going to nominate a failed casino owner, a maxed-out donor to Anthony Weiner, who talked about having sex with his daughter. Are you crazy?” But they did, and here we are.
What you think cannot happen has happened with regularity over the last few years. Trump won. He separated families at the border and put children in cages. He declared a national emergency on the southern border in February 2019 and diverted Pentagon funds for building his border wall. Wasn’t that illegal? Yes. But he doesn’t care. The Supreme Court let him spend the money while litigating the case. By the time a court ruled the move unconstitutional in June 2020, it was a fait accompli.
Imagine Trump. Hope for the best but plan for the worst. Vote as if the fate of the republic depends on it.
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I recall my excitement when I was finally eligible to vote in a Presidential election. I was all of 20 and cast my ballot for Jimmy Carter. I confess I was not the political junkie I am now. Entering young adulthood in the Watergate era, I had reflexively teetered Left, and for reasons I could not articulate at the time, identified as a Democrat. I was savvy enough to glean the incumbent candidate’s pardon of Nixon smelled funny and I could not look at Ford without thinking of Chevy Chase’s SNL parodies. My horse won, and I was happy (beginner’s luck-as I have since learned “results may vary”).
Despite shifting appraisals as to whether Carter was a “good”, “bad” or “meh” President, I feel that I backed the right horse in 1976. In hindsight, whoever ended up occupying the Oval Office at that point in time was destined to face formidable challenges: “stagflation” of the American economy, a looming energy crisis, the Cold War…that’s just for starters.
However, the most defining crisis of Carter’s presidency began on November 4, 1979:
In April 1980, President Jimmy Carter sent the Army’s Delta Force to bring back fifty-three American citizens held hostage in Iran. Everything went wrong. The fireball in the Iranian desert took the Carter presidency with it.
Washington, D.C., April 11, 1980, Noon
The meeting began with Jimmy Carter’s announcement: “Gentlemen, I want you to know that I am seriously considering an attempt to rescue the hostages.”
Hamilton Jordan, the White House chief of staff, knew immediately that the president had made a decision. Planning and practice for a rescue mission had been going on in secret for five months, but it had always been regarded as the last resort, and ever since the November 4 embassy takeover, the White House had made every effort to avoid it. As the president launched into a list of detailed questions about how it was to be done, his aides knew he had mentally crossed a line.
Carter had met the takeover in Iran with tremendous restraint, equating the national interest with the well-being of the fifty-three hostages, and his measured response had elicited a great deal of admiration, both at home and abroad. His approval ratings had doubled in the first month of the crisis. But in the following months, restraint had begun to smell like weakness and indecision. Three times in the past five months, carefully negotiated secret settlements had been ditched by the inscrutable Iranian mullahs, and the administration had been made to look more foolish each time. Approval ratings had nose-dived, and even stalwart friends of the administration were demanding action. Jimmy Carter’s formidable patience was badly strained.
And the mission that had originally seemed so preposterous had gradually come to seem feasible. It was a two-day affair with a great many moving parts and very little room for error—one of the most daring thrusts in U.S. military history. It called for a nighttime rendezvous of helicopters and planes at a landing strip in the desert south of Tehran, where the choppers would refuel before carrying the raiding party to hiding places just outside the city. The whole force would then wait through the following day and assault the embassy compound on the second night, spiriting the hostages to a nearby soccer stadium from which the helicopters could take them to a seized airstrip outside the city, to the transport planes that would carry them to safety and freedom. With spring coming on, the hours of darkness, needed to get the first part of this done, were shrinking fast.
Sounds like a Hollywood pitch, but it was a very real plan, and the stakes were high. What could possibly go wrong? Sadly, as painstakingly detailed in Barbara Kopple’s new documentary Desert One everything that could go wrong went horribly wrong.
Using previously inaccessible archival sources (including White House recordings) two-time Academy Award winner Kopple (Harlan County USA, American Dream, Shut Up and Sing) offers a fresh historical perspective, and (most affectingly) an intimate glimpse at the human consequences stemming from what transpired. She achieves the latter with riveting witness testimony by hostages, mission personnel, Iranians, and former President Jimmy Carter.
There are nearly as many moving parts in Kopple’s film as in the original mission plan and she assembles it all beautifully, like a tightly scripted thriller. She also captures the emotional trauma that still haunts many participants some 40 years on.
Kopple maintains a neutral political tone and injects some Rashomon-worthy moments (e.g. hostage and hostage-taker accounts of some events do not reconcile). Still, like any good documentary filmmaker she does not judge but leaves it up to the viewer to parse.
You could say Kopple had her work cut out for her. There is an oft-repeated cliché that “history is written by the winners”. That may be true in many cases, but there do not appear to be any clear “winners” in this instance. At the very least, it begs questions.
Yes, the hostages were eventually freed, and President Reagan certainly did not pass up a politically advantageous opportunity to position it as a “victory” for his new administration. But when you consider the Iranians purposely held off initializing the transfer until literally moments after Reagan was sworn into office, expressly so they could taunt departing President Carter…was it really a “victory” for Reagan?
Likewise, the Iranians have preserved the location of the failed 1980 mission to commemorate what they annually celebrate as their “victory” against a U.S. “invasion”. But considering there was no military engagement nor any awareness of the incursion until after the Americans had skedaddled, and the fact that Delta Force suffered its “defeat” due to bad luck and weather-can Iran claim it as a true “victory”?
It is way above my pay rate to answer such questions; you will have to watch this excellent, thought-provoking documentary and decide for yourself.
Today, Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney, the Chairwoman of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, released new internal Postal Service documents warning Postmaster General Louis DeJoy about steep declines and increasing delays nationwide over the last two months as a result of his drastic operational and organizational changes.
“After being confronted on Friday with first-hand reports of delays across the country, the Postmaster General finally acknowledged a ‘dip’ in service, but he has never publicly disclosed the full extent of the alarming nationwide delays caused by his actions and described in these new documents,” said Chairwoman Maloney. “To those who still claim there are ‘no delays’ and that these reports are just ‘conspiracy theories,’ I hope this new data causes them to re-think their position and support our urgent legislation today. We have all seen the headlines from every corner of our country, we have read the stories and seen pictures, we have heard directly from our constituents, and these new documents show that the delays are far worse than we were told.”
The new documents being released by the Committee today are part of a “PMG Briefing”—a presentation prepared directly for the Postmaster General last week, on August 12, 2020. They provide a detailed assessment of service performance trends over the past year.
According to these documents, there has been a significant drop in service standards across the board since the beginning of July—including in First-Class, Marketing, Periodicals, and Priority Mail.
The Postmaster General and his top aides have never admitted to the sweeping delays and reductions in service caused by his actions and detailed in these new documents.
Instead, the Postmaster General acknowledged in testimony on Friday before the Senate only: “We all feel bad about what the dip in the level of service has been.” DeJoy and Postal Service leadership have also downplayed the delays as “temporary service impacts” and “unintended consequences.”
On Friday, the top Republican on the Oversight Committee, Rep. James Comer, testified repeatedly before the House Rules Committee that there are “no delays” with the mail and “no data” proving the delays are real.
Two days earlier, Comer and House Republican leaders Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise sent a letter to Chairwoman Maloney and Speaker Nancy Pelosi arguing that nationwide reports of delays are nothing but “conspiracy theories” being “manufactured” by Democrats to “undermine President Trump” and support “an unnecessary bailout plan.”
So Trump is going through with his threat to hold the Republican Convention at the White House. And it appears that the Republican party is all in and it’s going to be treated as perfectly normal by the press. They will be making partisan pitch after partisan pitch, asking for money, extolling the Republican party, basically turning the people’s house into even more of a Republican whorehouse than it already is.
You cannot make this stuff up, you really can’t.
I’m so old I remember when Republicans had full-blown hissy fits when Bill Clinton invited big money supporters to sleep over in the White House. They demanded an independent prosecutor, saying “Very clearly, it is wrong to use government property, government assets for political purposes.”
“Using the White House and Camp David for sleepovers has tarred the presidency and cheapened institutions that should be above political advantage.”
Of course, George W. Bush did the same thing, but nobody said anything because … terrorism, I guess. Now we have Trump literally holding his political convention at the White House. And there’s no doubt the taxpayers will be picking up some of the tab. How could we not? It’s his house and we just pay for it.
In early February, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin invited two Republican members of the Postal Service’s board of governors to his office to update him on a matter in which he had taken a particular interest — the search for a new postmaster general.
Mr. Mnuchin had made clear before the meeting that he wanted the governors to find someone who would push through the kind of cost-cutting and price increases that President Trump had publicly called for and that Treasury had recommended in a December 2018 report as a way to stem years of multibillion-dollar losses.
It was an unusual meeting at an unusual moment.
Since 1970, the Postal Service had been an independent agency, walled off from political influence. The postmaster general is not appointed by the president and is not a cabinet member. Instead, the postal chief is picked by a board of governors, with seats reserved for members of both parties, who are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate for seven-year terms.
Now, not only was the Trump administration, through Mr. Mnuchin, involving itself in the process for selecting the next postmaster general, but the two Democratic governors who were then serving on the board were not invited to the Treasury meeting. Since the meeting did not include a quorum of board members, it was not subject to sunshine laws that apply to official board meetings and there is no formal Postal Service record or minutes of what was discussed.
Nearly six months later, that meeting, along with other interactions between Mr. Mnuchin and the postal board, has taken on heightened significance as the Trump administration confronts allegations it sought to politicize the Postal Service and hinder its ability to handle a surge in mail-in ballots in November’s election. In interviews, documents and congressional testimony, Mr. Mnuchin emerges as a key player in selecting the board members who hired the Trump megadonor now leading the Postal Service and in pushing the agenda that he has pursued.
Mr. Trump’s animus toward the agency dates to at least 2013, but his criticism of its finances escalated once he took office and found new focus in late 2017, when he first bashed it for essentially subsidizing Amazon, another target of his ire. Amazon’s founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, owns The Washington Post, whose coverage has often angered Mr. Trump.
“This Post Office scam must stop. Amazon must pay real costs (and taxes) now!” the president wrote on Twitter on March 31, 2018, one of several such attacks over the years.
Twelve days later, he issued an executive order putting Mr. Mnuchin in charge of a postal reform task force. But it was not until earlier this year that the administration found a way to enforce its postal agenda — one that has now collided with the pandemic and the approaching election.
A few weeks after the February meeting with Mr. Mnuchin, one of the attendees, Robert M. Duncan, the chairman of the board of governors, who was appointed by Mr. Trump in 2017, threw a new name for postmaster general into the mix: Louis DeJoy.
Mr. DeJoy, a longtime logistics executive, was known for his hard-charging leadership style and his ability to convert disorganization into efficiency, as well his generous donations to the Republican Party, including to Mr. Trump. In October 2017, Mr. DeJoy had hosted a fund-raiser for the president’s re-election campaign at his North Carolina home.
His résumé was far different than recent postmasters general, most of whom had risen through the Postal Service ranks. Megan J. Brennan, who had announced in October 2019 her intention to retire as postmaster general at the end of January, began her career as a letter carrier in Pennsylvania.
Mr. DeJoy, who ran New Breed Logistics before selling it to XPO Logistics in 2014, would be coming from the private sector to assume control of a highly unionized, sprawling bureaucracy with more than half a million employees. His companies had experience working with the Postal Service, moving bulk shipments of packages from fulfillment centers and ferrying them to local Postal Service centers. But both companies had fewer than 10,000 employees, none of them unionized, and he had never worked in the public sector.
The companies were also the subject of a litany of complaints from workers, including more than a dozen lawsuits accusing managers — but not Mr. DeJoy personally — of presiding over a hostile environment rife with sexual harassment and racial discrimination and where workers were fired for getting sick or injured.
The board’s vice chairman at the time, David C. Williams, raised concerns about Mr. DeJoy’s candidacy and Mr. Mnuchin’s involvement, telling lawmakers during sworn testimony this week that he “didn’t strike me as a serious candidate.” Mr. Williams, a Democratic appointee, resigned before the vote as it became clear that Mr. DeJoy would be the pick.
The article goes on to show just what a “joy” it was to work for DeJoy’s company. His history of worker exploitation is simply appalling.
Loyal henchman Mnuchin and his accomplices on the board knew a corrupt Trumper when they saw one.
Is there any part of government these criminals have not corrupted?
Robert O’Neill, the retired Navy SEAL credited with killing terrorist Osama Bin Laden, said Friday he would like the opportunity to speak with Delta CEO Ed Bastian Bastian to reach a resolution after the airline banned him for removing his face mask during a recent flight.
O’Neill said during an appearance on FOX Business Network’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” that he only removed his mask to eat and drink during the flight and his actions did not constitute a violation of Delta’s policy. The veteran added that he was not “anti-mask.”
“If someone felt uncomfortable, I’ll put the mask on,” O’Neill said. “I don’t have a problem with that. I do have a problem being ordered to do it. I don’t think I violated the policy. I’d love to talk to the CEO, Mr. Bastian, about it. I’d like to help them because their image right now isn’t very good and I have a million miles on Delta.”
Delta declined to comment on O’Neill’s remarks.
Bastian, last week, spoke to FOX Business about the slow recovery the airlines are experiencing due to the pandemic.
O’Neill revealed Thursday night that Delta had banned him shortly after he posted a mask-less selfie with the caption, “I’m not a [expletive].” Later, he said the now-deleted picture was a joke and that he had his mask in his lap when it was taken.
Delta’s current policy requires passengers to wear masks or appropriate face coverings “throughout their travel” with the airline. A company spokesperson confirmed the ban shortly after O’Neill announced it on Twitter.
“Part of every customer’s commitment prior to traveling on Delta is the requirement to acknowledge our updated travel policies, which includes wearing a mask,” a Delta spokesman told FOX Business. “Failure to comply with our mask-wearing mandate can result in losing the ability to fly Delta in the future.”
The ex-Navy SEAL participated in the famous raid on Bin Laden’s compound in 2011 and is credited with firing the shots that killed the terrorist leader. He left the Navy in 2012.
O’Neill said Delta has an “image problem,” adding that he would “hate to add anti-American to it.” He also accused the airline of caving to pressure from various media outlets that ran stories on his dispute with the airline.
“I posted it as a peaceful protest to my Twitter followers and I’m pretty sure that’s still protected by a few of the amendments,” O’Neill said. “Then the New York Post picked it up, the New York Times picked it up and put pressure on Delta.”
He sounds like a real pip, saying that he was unfairly targeted because he just took the mask off to eat and drink and also saying that he was staging a “peaceful protest” by tweeting a picture of himself saying “I’m not a pussy.”
“China told you to wear a mask. Look down… you’re wearing a mask. I’m not,” he wrote in a series of tweets — also insisting, “Make no mistake.. this ‘pandemic’ was sent to you by China.”
“Do you remember the complete, incompetent morons buying all of the toilet paper? They’re the ones telling you to wear masks now,” he insisted in his online tirade.
“I know more about biological warfare than most of you. We were trained. These dumb ass masks do nothing. Nothing,” he insisted, adding that wearing a bandanna “does more harm than good.”
“I’m not being rude… I’m just telling you facts,” he insisted.
The airline industry and all of American business has a problem because people like me will not fly as long as scumbags like this are determined to spread this virus for no good reason.
If this man is willing to abide by the laws that say he’s not allowed to walk around without covering his dick, he can abide by the rules that say he can’t sit on an airplane without covering his nose and mouth. If businesses don’t enforce those rules, then they will lose the business of people who don’t feel like dying for Trump worshippers’ right to be a fucking idiot.
By the way:
Minnesota announced that more than a dozen people who attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in neighboring South Dakota have tested positive for the coronavirus, making it the third state to link cases of the virus to the massive rally.
One confirmed case linked to the rally, which drew 460,000 vehicles, was identified Thursday and 14 additional ones on Friday, said the Minnesota Department of Health’s infectious disease division director, Kris Ehresmann.
Ehresmann said during a conference call with news outlets, including NBC affiliate KARE in Minneapolis, that 14 of those found to be infected were attendees at the rally and one was a volunteer who worked “in a temporary bar situation.”
“We’re expecting that we’re going to see many more cases associated with Sturgis,” she said. “Thousands of people attended that event, and so it’s very likely that we will see more transmission.”
One person who tested positive has been hospitalized, according to Ehresmann.
The rally that ran from Aug. 7 to Aug. 16 in Sturgis, about 30 miles northwest of Rapid City, drew attendees on more than 460,000 vehicles, the South Dakota Department of Transportation said.
That was down nearly 8 percent from the roughly 500,000 vehicles at last year’s rally, but significantly higher than the 250,000 people who had been expected to gather for the event this year amid the pandemic.
Minnesota is the third state to report coronavirus cases linked to the huge gathering.
In North Dakota, the health department has urged residents who attended Sturgis to monitor for symptoms of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus.
“Did you return to ND from the 2020 motorcycle rally in Sturgis this week? Be advised: surrounding states, including South Dakota & Minnesota, are reporting positive cases from the rally. Monitor yourself closely for symptoms; if you develop any, isolate until you can be tested,” the agency tweeted Friday.
First of all, I don’t know why the Attorney General would be having provate meetings with media moguls in their homes about policy, which is what Barr was supposedly doing at this meeting with Rupert Murdoch. But he had a private demand from Dear Leader as well:
The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network.
Stelter’s in-depth look at Fox News, its fortunes under Trump and its links to his White House will be published on Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy.
In early 2019 it was reported that Napolitano, a New Jersey superior court judge who joined Fox News in 1998, told friends he had been on Trump’s shortlist for the supreme court. But he broke ranks later in the year, labeling Trump’s approaches to Ukraine, seeking political dirt on rivals, “both criminal and impeachable behavior”.
“The criminal behavior to which Trump has admitted,” Napolitano wrote, in a column dated 3 October, “is much more grave than anything alleged or unearthed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and much of what Mueller revealed was impeachable.”
Citing an unnamed source, Stelter writes that Trump “was so incensed by the judge’s TV broadcasts that he had implored Barr to send Rupert a message in person … about ‘muzzling the judge’. [Trump] wanted the nation’s top law enforcement official to convey just how atrocious Napolitano’s legal analysis had been.”
Though Barr’s words to Murdoch “carried a lot of weight”, Stelter writes, “no one was explicitly told to take Napolitano off the air”. Instead, Stelter reports, Napolitano found digital resources allocated elsewhere, saw a slot on a daytime show disappear, and was not included in coverage of the impeachment process.
If Trump is defeated in November, what will Fox do? If I had to guess, I’d guess they will be forced to stick with Trump as the president in exile for at least some time. Their audience is so dependent on Trump lovers that they won’t have any choice. It’s not as if there’s a Republican Party distinct from him anymore.
