Sarah Palin has tested positive for COVID-19, and she’s urging others to continue taking the pandemic seriously.
The former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee-turned-TV personality confirms in a statement to PEOPLE that she contracted the coronavirus as did some of her family members, including 12-year-old son Trig.
Palin, 57 — who is a mom to five children with ex-husband Todd — says her case is proof that “anyone can catch this.”
“As confident as I’d like to be about my own health, and despite my joking that I’m blessed to constantly breathe in the most sterile (frozen!) air, my case is perhaps one of those that proves anyone can catch this,” she says.
Of her diagnosis, Palin explains that it began when “one of my daughters awoke to having lost her sense of taste and smell [and] immediately had a positive COVID test, then was quarantined in isolation.
“I then observed symptoms in my son Trig, who curiously is the most enthusiastic mask-wearer, and after our numerous negative tests over the year, he tested positive,” Palin says. “Children with special needs are vulnerable to COVID ramifications [Trig was born with Down syndrome], so with a high fever he was prescribed azithromycin, which really seemed to help, and I increased amounts of vitamins I put in his puréed food.”
Palin says she and her son “buckled down in isolated quarantine” and she “still tested negative.” However, “symptoms started overnight with a slight fever and sore muscles.”
She adds that she had some of the “bizarre” symptoms characteristic of the virus, like a loss of taste and smell, leading her to assume it was “unmistakable COVID caught me.”
“That day I finally tested positive — like millions of other Americans,” she says.
Palin tells PEOPLE that COVID-19 can “really knock you down,” encouraging everyone to remain vigilant about public health amid the ongoing pandemic.
I strongly encourage everyone to use common sense to avoid spreading this and every other virus out there,” she says in her statement. “There are more viruses than there are stars in the sky, meaning we’ll never avoid every source of illness or danger … But please be vigilant, don’t be frightened, and I advise reprioritizing some personal time and resources to ensure as healthy a lifestyle as you can create so when viruses do hit, you have at least some armor to fight it.”
She still speaks like English is her second language but at least she advises people to be careful and wear a mask. That makes her smarter than at least half the Republicans in this country.
I don’t know if Trump’s financial majordomo will ever turn on him but it sure looks as though the Manhattan DA is working on him:
State prosecutors in Manhattan investigating former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Organization have subpoenaed the personal bank records of the company’s chief financial officer and are questioning gifts he and his family received from Mr. Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
In recent weeks, the prosecutors have trained their focus on the executive, Allen H. Weisselberg, in what appears to be a determined effort to gain his cooperation. Mr. Weisselberg, who has not been accused of wrongdoing, has overseen the Trump Organization’s finances for decades and may hold the key to any possible criminal case in New York against the former president and his family business.
Prosecutors working for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., are examining, among other things, whether Mr. Trump and the company falsely manipulated property values to obtain loans and tax benefits.
It is unclear whether Mr. Weisselberg would cooperate with the investigation and neither his lawyer, Mary E. Mulligan, nor Mr. Vance’s office would comment. But if a review of his personal finances were to uncover possible wrongdoing, prosecutors could then use that information to press Mr. Weisselberg to guide them through the inner workings of the company. The 73-year-old accountant began his career working for Mr. Trump’s father.
Separately, the prosecutors are also seeking a new round of internal documents from the Trump Organization, including general ledgers from several of its more than two dozen properties that the company did not turn over last year, according to the people with knowledge of the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive details.
The ledgers offer a line-by-line breakdown of each property’s financial situation, including daily receipts, checks and revenues. The prosecutors could compare those details against the information the company provided to its lenders and local tax authorities to assess whether it fraudulently misled them.
Mr. Vance’s office has also subpoenaed records from several banks where Mr. Trump or his company had accounts, including JPMorgan Chase and Capital One, according to people with knowledge of subpoenas served on the banks.
The previously unreported developments underscore the escalation of the investigation after Mr. Vance’s office obtained Mr. Trump’s tax records and other underlying financial documents in February. They were released over Mr. Trump’s objections after a lengthy legal battle that culminated in a ruling from the United States Supreme Court.
I remain pessimistic that this will get Trump. It seems almost inevitable that he must have broken the law but it’s very possible that they managed to skirt it legally. Much of the law that affects rich people like Trump is designed to protect them rather than the public or the government. And real estate is just filled with ridiculous loopholes. But you never know. Trump is a sloppy guy and maybe Weisselberg is too.
Meanwhile, a judge rules yesterday that some of Trump’s former employees who have been muzzled by NDAs are not bound by them. That opens up a whole other line of legal liability on the woman front. We know that he’s guilty of harrasment and assault, without question. He confessed to it on tape.
“President Trump should pardon Flynn, the Thanksgiving turkey, and everyone from himself, to his admin, to Joe Exotic if he has to,” Mr Gaetz tweeted on Tuesday.
“The Left has a bloodlust that will only be quenched if they come for those who fought with @realDonaldTrump to deliver for the American people.”
Mr Gaetz also appeared on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle on Tuesday. In the clip, he said that the Democrats’ ravenous “bloodlust” will only be satisfied “if they come after the people who worked so hard to animate the Trump administration with the policies and the vigour and the effectiveness that delivered for the American people”.
He added: “And so I think that the president ought to wield that pardon power effectively and robustly.”
I guess we now know why Matt Gaetz was agitating for Trump to pardon all of his allies before he left office. In case you haven’t been able to follow this story, here’s a good write up of the Tucker Carlson interview last night from Josh Kovensky at TPM:
Gaetz began the interview by repeating his earlier statement denying the New York Times article reporting that federal prosecutors are investigating the congressman over a possible relationship with a 17-year old girl, including whether he paid her to travel with him across state lines.
Gaetz invited anyone to “look at my travel records and see that that was not the case.”
He then launched into a timeline: on March 16, Gaetz said, a former DOJ official texted Gaetz’s father “demanding a meeting wherein a person demanded $25 million” in order to make “horrible sex trafficking allegations against me go away.”
Gaetz then said that he approached the FBI, who had his father “wear a wire” while with the supposedly extortionate former DOJ official. He then demanded that the FBI “release the recordings” to prove, once and for all, that the allegations were untrue.
The Florida congressman added that the article, published on Tuesday, came too early: it was tomorrow, Gaetz maintained, that Gaetz’s father had planned to contact the former DOJ official for instructions to wire $4.5 million as a “down payment on this bribe.”
“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that somehow, tonight, the New York Times is smearing me and ruining the investigation that would likely result in one of the former colleagues of the DOJ being brought to justice,” he said. Gaetz later elaborated that the money transfer was supposedly part of a secret, QAnon-esque FBI plot to take down the extortionist only to be foiled by a New York Times bent on disrupting the investigation.
Throughout this, Carlson maintained his standard bewildered glare. He then asked who the former DOJ employee was.
Gaetz named the person as David McGee, a Florida attorney. McGee did not immediately return a request for comment from TPM. Gaetz accused McGee of offering a pardon from Biden in exchange for the bribe, bringing the absurdity of the story to a level not seen at least since Trump’s departure from office.
There is no evidence to substantiate anything that Gaetz is saying. The interview left Carlson visibly perturbed as he tried to have Gaetz elaborate further, particularly after the Florida congressman repeatedly claimed that Carlson had been accused of sexual wrongdoing.
“I’m not the only person on screen right now who has been falsely accused of a terrible sex act,” Gaetz said. “You were accused of something you did not do so you know what this feels like.”
Carlson, grimacing and nodding, replied: “You just referred to a mentally ill viewer who accused me of a sex crime 20 years ago, and, um, of course it was not true — I never met the person.”https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?creatorScreenName=TPM&dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1377081093376081920&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Ftalkingpointsmemo.com%2Fnews%2Fgaetz-implodes-in-surreal-tucker-carlson-appearance&siteScreenName=TPM&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e1ffbdb%3A1614796141937&width=550px
The Fox News host then directed Gaetz to “return to the investigation,” at which point the vocal Trump supporter returned to bear-hugging Carlson.
He recounted a dinner Gaetz had had with Carlson, Carlson’s wife, and a “friend” of his two years before.
“She was actually threatened by the FBI,” he said. “I do believe that there are people at the DOJ who are trying to smear me.”
“Providing flights and hotel rooms for people you are dating of legal age is not a crime,” Gaetz added, fuming.
Carlson, grimacing agin, replied: “I don’t remember the woman you’re speaking of or the context at all.”
Carlson then asked who the person was that Gaetz was accused of dating while she was underage. Gaetz denied that she existed or was underage, but then, when Carlson asked when Gaetz was first informed of the DOJ probe, the Florida congressman delivered the coup de grâce: denying that the 17-year old existed, while also denying furiously that there were photos taken of him with child prostitutes.
“People were talking about a minor, that there were pictures of me with child prostitutes, thats obviously false, there will be no such pictures because no such thing happened,” Gaetz said.
There have been no public allegations to date of Gaetz being photographed with child prostitutes.
“It’s a more interesting and complicated story than I knew from reading about it,” Carlson concluded, in possibly the most hilarious instance of understatement this year.
Update: It get’s weirder. And former FBI and other government officials are skeptical.
Eric Boehlert’s latest Press Run (which you should subscribe to at the special Digby Discount) asks a question you’d think someone at the NY Times or the Washington Post would ask the Republicans about. I really would like to see how they answer it:
Joe Biden is a riddle that Fox News can’t solve — at least not during the Democrat’s first two months in office.
Forced by Trump’s seven million-vote loss to go on the offensive against the new president — after playing defense every day for the Republican — Fox News ought to easily open up its well-worn playbook for a Democratic administration and seamlessly make the partisan transition. It’s the same outline the network used while Barack Obama was in office — relentlessly depict the center-left Democratic president as a dangerous, socialist interloper determined to overturn the American way of life.
Key to whipping up that national frenzy in the spring of 2009, was the emergence of the supposedly grassroots Tea Party movement. With Murdoch’s network providing free, nonstop marketing and promotion, soon thousands of people took to the streets to protest Obama’s policies, just weeks into his presidency.
Today though, Fox News can’t seem to muster the same anger and excitement to consistently denounce Biden, who to many viewers probably looks like their brother, uncle, or father — a built-in advantage of being a white man in American politics. Obsessed with fighting cultural wars while Biden enjoys solid public support after signing the widely popular Covid relief bill into law, Fox News remains adrift in the Biden era, as Trump remains mostly in seclusion in Palm Beach, Florida. (Trump insurrectionists have shown no interest in protesting Biden in the streets.)
Instead of leading a large scale revolt against Biden and his sweeping legislative proposals, Fox News prefers to play small ball. “Less than two months have passed since Joe Biden’s inauguration, and the network is already responding to the country’s new era by obsessing over similarly absurd and imaginary battlefronts,” Vanity Fair noted this month. “The network spent an hour and nine minutes of airtime on the supposed cancellation of Dr. Seuss on Tuesday—more than twice as long as its coverage of the coronavirus vaccination effort on the same day.”
Meanwhile, Biden plays it cool, refusing to provide any oxygen for partisan brawls. Over the weekend, when a reporter excitedly asked Biden what he thought of the news that Trump might go down to the border to basically stage a “crisis” photo-op, the bemused president said simply, “I don’t care what the other guy does.”
As Oliver Willis noted, “Biden isn’t jumping when they collectively demand he do so. He is not playing by the approved rules, where the right and the media set the agenda and the Democrats careen from crisis to crisis.”
A huge programming hurdle for Fox News this year has been the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, which passed without a single Republican vote of support, despite the fact it was arguably the most popular spending bill in the last half century. Even a majority of Republican voters — i.e. Fox News viewers — support the legislation, which distributed $1,400 relief checks to tens of millions of families, pumped billions into the pandemic vaccination rollout, and is helping school districts across the country re-open. The bill represents a big huge political win for the Democratic president.
The contrast is remarkable with how Fox News downplayed and tried to ignore the Covid bill’s historic passage in Congress, compared to eight years ago when the network relentlessly hyped and attacked both Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the administration’s $787 billion stimulus bill, and then the following year, Obamacare. Neither of those measures enjoyed as much public support as does the Covid relief bill passed this year. Fox News spent countless hours/weeks/months ripping both those Obama initiatives to shreds — the stimulus became a “bailout,” and Obamacare was anchored by morbid “death panels.”
Amidst that right-wing hysteria about looming socialism came the Tea Party, a media-made invention from day one. It was born on CNBC, when reporter Rick Santelli started ranting about Obama on the floor of the Chicago stock exchange, warning viewers the new Democratic president was steering the country toward a Cuban Castro-like economy. CNBC then boosted the clip incessantly, while NBC led its evening newscast that night of the rant with a clip of Santelli, announcing his rant had struck a “populist” chord.
Fox News quickly went all in, provided attendance and organizing information. In early April, as a large Tax Day event approached, the network announced that four hosts – Glenn Beck, Neil Cavuto, Greta Van Susteren, and Sean Hannity — would appear live at Tea Party sites across the country and broadcast the protests throughout the day.
By then, Fox News referred to the anti-Obama Tea Parties as “FNC Tax Day Tea Parties,” and the Fox Nation also hosted its own “virtual tea party,” Media Matters reported. One Fox News producer was even caught coaching a crowd to cheer during one Tea Party Express event.
From April 6 to April 15, 2009, less than three months into Obama’s first term in office, Fox News aired more than 100 on-air promotions for their coverage of the GOP protests, providing the movement with tens of millions of dollars in free marketing.
All of the Tea Party noise, which the mainstream media loved to amplify, made it difficult for Obama and his team to communicate, unobstructed, to the American people. The good news is that, so far, Biden’s not facing that same Fox News obstacle.
This is important history. Fox did not turn into a tool for the GOP when Trump took over. They always were. In fact, in many ways, they invented him.
Donald Trump hired crazy, incompetent boobs for his administration and this is what happened when they had to perform:
A top adviser privately urged President Donald Trump to acquire critical medical supplies in the early days of the coronavirus outbreak — and after the warning was ignored, pursued his own ad hoc strategy that committed more than $1 billion in federal funds andhas since prompted multiple probes, according to newly released documents from congressional investigators.
Peter Navarro, who served as Trump’s trade adviser, warned the president on March 1, 2020, to “MOVE IN ‘TRUMP TIME’” to invest in ingredients for drugs, handheld coronavirus tests and other supplies to fight the virus, according to a memo obtained by the House’s select subcommittee on the coronavirus outbreak. Navarro also said that he’d been trying to acquire more protective gear like masks, critiquing the administration’s pace.
“There is NO downside risk to taking swift actions as an insurance policy against what may be a very serious public health emergency. If the covid-19 crisis quickly recedes, the only thing we will have been guilty of is prudence,” Navarro wrote to the president. At the time, there were about 100 confirmed cases of coronavirus in the United States and just two deaths linked to the outbreak. President Trump on April 7 said he didn’t see White House trade adviser Peter Navarro’s January memo on the coronavirus but said he still had confidence in him. (The Washington Post)
But after Trump ignored Navarro’s recommendations, the trade adviser embarked on his own strategy to acquire supplies with little oversight, Democrats said. Navarro subsequently steered a $765 million loan to Eastman Kodak to produceingredients for generic drugs, a $354 million sole-source contract for pharmaceutical ingredients to a start-up called Phlow, and a $96 million sole-source contract for powered respirators and filters from AirBoss Defense Group.
The administration’s loan to Kodak, which had never previously manufactured drugs and is best known for its former photography business, was paused last year amid probes by multiple congressional committees. House investigators also learned that Kodak executives had warned federal officials in March 2020 that the company would need a waiver from the Food and Drug Administration’s current good manufacturing practices — federal standards intended to ensure that firms have the necessary equipment, facilities and other components needed to produce safe and effective drugs.
Meanwhile, leaders of Phlow — a company that had never previously manufactured drugs and was only incorporated in January 2020 — strategized with Navarro’s office on its proposal to produce pharmaceutical ingredients in Virginia. Company leaders had previously won Navarro’s favor by making the argument the United States was too dependent on Chinese manufacturing — a big concern of Navarro’s. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) subsequently awarded a $354 million contract to the firm with an additional $458 million in contract options, amid pressure from Navarro, who urged officials to “please move this puppy in Trump time.”
House investigators also obtained documents where retired Gen. Jack Keane, a Trump ally who was a paid AirBoss consultant, touted the company to Navarro on March 22, 2020, and helped arrange an immediate conversation between its leaders and White House officials. The company the next day submitted a $96.4 million proposal, and Navarro assured AirBoss leaders to “consider it done.” Navarro’s team subsequently pressured the Federal Emergency Management Agency to finalize an updated version of the contract within a week.
Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), the subcommittee chair, on Wednesday urged Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and other senior officials to release further information about Navarro’s arrangements. Clyburn said his prior requests had been stalled by the Trump administration last year and he raised questions about other contracts that he said Navarro may have been involved in.
“These documents provide further evidence that the Trump administration failed to react quickly to the coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020 despite urgent warnings, failed to implement a national strategy to alleviate critical supply shortages that were putting American lives at risk, and pursued a haphazard and ineffective approach to procurement in which senior White House officials steered contracts to particular companies without adequate diligence or competition,” Clyburn and fellow Democrats wrote in letters shared with The Washington Post.
I’m sure it was all on the up and up and nobody was getting any kickbacks or favors. The Trump administration was as honest as the day is long.
Update — Whoa:
He's this close to ripping his clothes off and running around in circles singing, "My ding-a-ling" https://t.co/8saMF5k9fv
As Lester Holtdelivered the keynote address Tuesday night at the 45th Murrow Symposium, in which he accepted the Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism, the NBC News anchor delivered a sharp critique of bothsidesism. “The idea that we should always give two sides equal weight and merit does not reflect the world we find ourselves in,” Holt said. “That the sun sets in the west is a fact. Any contrary view does not deserve our time or attention.”
“Decisions to not give unsupported arguments equal time are not a dereliction of journalistic responsibility or some kind of agenda,” Holt added. “In fact, it’s just the opposite. Providing an open platform for misinformation, for anyone to come say whatever they want, especially when issues of public health and safety are at stake, can be quite dangerous. Our duty is to be fair to the truth.”
That’s from CNN’s Brian Stelter’s newsletter.
This is meaningful coming from the NBC Evening News anchor.
In our cynical political world, presidential commissions, like Senate Select Committees or on occasion Joint Congressional Committees convened for a specific purpose, are generally considered graveyards for controversial issues the political leadership just wants to sweep under the rug. Blue Ribbon Commissions, which tend to be manned by outsiders with specific expertise, have a little bit more credibility because of their independence although they don’t have any authority of their own. But on the whole, because various presidents and congressional leaders have created so many commissions which led nowhere or resulted in little change, the people don’t put much stock in them.
There are exceptions, however. The most recent example is the 9/11 Commission, established by congressional legislation and signed by President George W. Bush to investigate the circumstances that led to the terrorist attacks and offer recommendations for change. It was staffed by former officials and experts of both parties and was chaired by former Governor Thomas Keane, a Republican from New Jersey, and Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. They issued a report that resulted in some major changes (for better and worse) in the federal government.
The investigation’s most memorable moment came in 2004, during a public hearing, in which commission member Richard Ben-Veniste questioned the National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice about whether the administration had any advance warning. And this came out:
BEN-VENISTE. Isn’t it a fact, Dr. Rice, that the Aug. 6 P.D.B. warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that P.D.B.
RICE. I believe the title was “Bin Laden Determined To Attack Inside the United States.”
9/11 was one of the worst catastrophes to ever befall our country and everyone understood that there had to be some come kind of independent investigation into what went wrong. There were legitimate criticisms of the report the commission produced and there were many questionable actions taken by the government that were not adequately addressed, but for the most part, the report was taken seriously. There were too many lives lost and too much fear and trauma to sweep it under the rug. The results of that failure by the government and the subsequent debacle of the Iraq War still haunt us 20 years later.
So what are we going to do about the latest debacle at the hands of yet another Republican president who couldn’t seem to take the warnings of impending disaster seriously?
The country had already been through an ongoing political crisis with the election of the manifestly unfit Donald Trump and his bizarre and incompetent administration for three long years when we were hit with a deadly crisis of epic proportions. The COVID-19 pandemic is not over yet, of course, and we will not know the true scope of the carnage for quite some time. But we already know that the U.S. response to the crisis during its first year was atrocious. What we don’t yet know is just how much of the illness and death can be attributed to the Trump administration’s ineptitude and reflexively hyper-political decisions.
According to Dr. Deborah Birx, the Trump administration’s COVID task force coordinator, the number of needless deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.
Birx is a flawed messenger, of course. I wrote about her conflicts and unsuitability for the job before. But her testimony in this recent CNN special hosted by Dr. Sanjay Gupta, along with that of other top doctors who worked on the administration’s task force, painted a picture of dysfunction that was shocking even for those of us who followed the story in detail as it was unfolding. The Trump administration was the leakiest in history, but the point of view from these particular players offered a different angle. Even if it was mostly an attempt to make themselves look better — and there was certainly an element of that — it was still stunning.
For instance, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the former CDC director said that Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and his staff pressured him to alter scientific reports, specifically those that reported mortality rates. The former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Stephen Hahn, described his relationship with Azar as “strained” after the secretary unilaterally revoked the FDA’s power to regulate COVID tests. Trump’s testing czar, Admiral Brett Giroir, admitted that the administration lied when they said there were millions of tests. Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said he knew they were in trouble when he saw that Trump had tweeted “liberate Michigan!” in contravention of everything they were trying to do. And Birx said that Trump told her in April that he would never allow the country to be shut down again.
But it wasn’t just President Trump’s self-serving focus on “optics” and magical thinking. The fact is that despite years of predictions of a coming plague from scientists, the U.S. was totally unprepared. Dr. Robert Kadlec, former U.S. assistant secretary of Health and Human Services under Trump explained: “When we started the pandemic in January, we really didn’t know what the status of the supply chain was. We didn’t know what hospitals had on hand. We didn’t know what the state supplies were. We didn’t even know what the commercial distributors had on their shelves.”
Clearly, the systems for dealing with a national public health emergency simply didn’t exist. And there certainly was no plan. When you add this to all we know about the potential corruption of Jared Kushner’s involvement, the Fox News quack doctors like Scott Atlas who were brought in by Trump to tell him what he wanted to hear as well as dozens of other revelations about how the government dropped the ball, if there was ever a situation that required a Blue Ribbon Commission, this would be it.
It’s not just about the death toll from this disaster, although that would be enough reason to do it. A full “autopsy” is necessary so that the government can prepare for the next one, which every one of those doctors insists is inevitable.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to imagine how such a thing could be put together considering our divided nation and the ongoing devotion of the Republican Party to Donald Trump. The 9/11 Commission called upon respected elder statesmen from both parties who all saw the job as an important mission for the good of the country. It is impossible to imagine any Democrats who would be acceptable to the Republicans or any Republicans who would be willing to buck the party to criticize Donald Trump. So I’m afraid it’s likely that this massive tragedy will pass into history without any official reckoning from the American government. We’ll just have to hope that when the next pandemic hits our shores we’ll have better luck than we did this time. Don’t throw away your masks.
A homeless man on lifetime parole after serving time for killing his mother has been arrested in the brutal attack Monday on a 65-year-old Asian woman in midtown Manhattan. Police say Brandon Elliot, 38, was apprehended in a hotel where he was staying that’s being used as a homeless shelter. It’s near the site of the attack.
He was charged early Wednesday with two counts of felony assault as a hate crime, attempted assault as a hate crime, assault and attempted assault.
The Asian American woman was walking to church Monday about noon when she was the victim of the assault outside an apartment building. The attacker made anti-Asian statements and told her “You don’t belong here” before running off. The woman was transported to the hospital with serious injuries where she was reported in stable condition.
Thanks to assistance from the public and excellent investigative work by @NYPDHateCrimes Detectives, the individual wanted for Monday’s assault of a 65 year-old Asian female, at 360 West 43rd St, was arrested and charged with Felony Assault as a Hate Crime. pic.twitter.com/ZQRVGZEAb2
It was the second such attack in New York City against members of the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community in a week. The first victim on Saturday was an Asian man in a Manhattan-bound subway train in Brooklyn. Bystanders did nothing to stop either attack (except record the first incident for TikTok). Surveillance video from inside an apartment building showed three men inside who took no action:
The Brodsky Organization, which manages the apartment building, released a statement saying a staff member who witnessed the attack has been suspended while the incident is under investigation.
The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Unit is still searching for the perpetrator of the Brooklyn attack.
We need the public's help. The NYPD is aware of this video and is investigating. Anyone that has information regarding this incident is urged to call or DM @NYPDTips 1-800-577-TIPS and provide additional details including the date and time of occurrence. @NYPDTransit@NYPDnewshttps://t.co/fJmZC1QJac
Granted, two people died and another was seriously wounded after trying to intervene during a racist knife attack on a Portland light rail train in 2017. It might give anyone pause. Still we hope we would do better (Washington Post):
“This is absolutely vile. These attacks against Asian-American New Yorkers must end,” New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson (D) said on Twitter, linking to a video of the attack on the woman. “Hate has no place here and we must always call it out when we see it.”
In recent weeks, Asian Americans in New York have reported being punched in subway cars, spit on and pummeled with metal pipes — an ugly echo of a national trend that activists say gained traction as former president Donald Trump has used racist terms to tie the coronavirus pandemic to China.
The Biden administration announced new actions Tuesday to try to combat the rise in violence against the AAPI community. They include reinstating the White House initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, establishing a COVID-19 equity task force, and a Justice Department initiative to respond to anti-Asian violence.
According to the organization Stop AAPI Hate, roughly 3,800 hate crimes against Asian Americans have been reported in the U.S. from March 2020 to April 2021. A recent study showed that former President Trump’s use of the phrase “Chinese virus” to refer to COVID-19 increased the use of anti-Asian hashtags on Twitter.
Locked out of social media sites for such hate-mongering, El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago just set up a website “committed to preserving the magnificent legacy of the Trump Administration.” And to lavishing undeserved praise upon Himself.
Jamie Ross’s take at Daily Beast is headlined: ‘Magnificent Legacy’: Trump Blows Smoke Up His Own Ass on New Website.
A tweet from Monday popped up first thing this morning in between stories about Trumpublican Rep. Matt Gaetz. This report on the ultimate costs of gun violence from Mother Jones is more important even if it is less timely.
The report predates the mass slayings in Las Vegas (October 2017), El Paso and Dayton (August 2019), and in Atlanta and Boulder this month. It predates the NRA’s filing bankruptcy this year. It predates Sen. Lindsey Graham telling Fox News he keeps an AR-15 to protect his home against imagined marauders prowling his neighborhood after a natural disaster.
Here’s the data the NRA doesn’t want you to see: The average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is about $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day. https://t.co/l9lMO6Z0gBpic.twitter.com/D8KfnccNwH
Black men are 10 times more likely to be shot and killed than white men. Black women are 3 times more likely to be shot and killed than white women. https://t.co/iPXKLyqcGipic.twitter.com/J1sDN9hjFw
Getting at the true cost of gun violence is hampered by the gun lobby’s efforts to prevent the government from collecting them. Plus, researchers fear collecting and studying them will make them political targets:
David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, describes the chill this way: “There are so many big issues in the world, and the question is: Do you want to do gun research? Because you’re going to get attacked. No one is attacking us when we do heart disease.”
Reporters Mark Follman, Julia Lurie, Jaeah Lee, and James West in 2015 compiled the costs to the country of the ongoing plague of gun violence with the help of Ted Miller at the independent nonprofit Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation:
Miller’s approach looks at two categories of costs. The first is direct: Every time a bullet hits somebody, expenses can include emergency services, police investigations, and long-term medical and mental-health care, as well as court and prison costs. About 87 percent of these costs fall on taxpayers. The second category consists of indirect costs: Factors here include lost income, losses to employers, and impact on quality of life, which Miller bases on amounts that juries award for pain and suffering to victims of wrongful injury and death.
In collaboration with Miller, Mother Jones crunched data from 2012 and found that the annual cost of gun violence in America exceeds $229 billion. Direct costs account for $8.6 billion—including long-term prison costs for people who commit assault and homicide using guns, which at $5.2 billion a year is the largest direct expense. Even before accounting for the more intangible costs of the violence, in other words, the average cost to taxpayers for a single gun homicide in America is nearly $400,000. And we pay for 32 of them every single day.
This is the sobering truth from which America has yet to sober up (using data available in 2015):
At $229 billion, the toll from gun violence would have been $47 billion more than Apple’s 2014 worldwide revenue and $88 billion more than what the US government budgeted for education that year. Divvied up among every man, woman, and child in the United States, it would work out to more than $700 per person.
And those figures are incomplete. Lifelong medical and disability expenses, including the costs of pain medication and mental health treatments, are difficult to quantify. Thanks to industry efforts to suppress such research, the data are just not there.
Most gun deaths are the work of amateurs. To kill a man … slowly … on a public street … with only your knee … as he cries out for his mama? That takes a professional.
In a rare appearance on the morning show he used to co-host, Fox News’ prime time host Tucker Carlson made clear his position on a government-managed Covid-19 vaccine passport, citing HIPAA regulations and Bill Gates-related conspiracies. The moment came as a new fight is brewing in the political media realm — or rather, a very old fight with a new front.
At issue? Should the local, state, or federal government oversee the management of a digital “vaccine passport” that would allow citizens to prove they are safe to attend public events? Or is that a gross overstepping of the government’s role and susceptible to massive technology companies to exploit, as they have proven to with database marketing over the past decade or so?
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, on Monday, dismissed the idea of a vaccine passport, a clip of which aired on Fox & Friends Tuesday. Carlson then delivered his response.
“It’s completely unacceptable for the government or the private sector to impose upon you the requirement that you show proof of vaccine to just simply participate in normal society,” DeSantis said. “You want the fox to guard the henhouse? I mean, give me a break, I think this has huge privacy implications. It is not necessary to do.”
“Why is it left to the governor of Florida to say that?” Carlson asked rhetorically, before condemning the silence of GOP members of Congress. “Aren’t there 50 Republicans in the Senate? Why aren’t they standing in a line with Mitch McConnell in the center saying ‘No, we’re not doing this, I’m sorry, you’re not allowed.’”
Carlson followed by noting how HIPAA regulations keep medical records confidential, saying “You are not allowed to know if your kid has a sex change, and now your private information.—whether you are vaccinated or not —that information in the hands of the tech companies and that will determine whether you can participate in American life?”
He then argued that this is the exact sort of discussion that is keeping the “vaccine-hesitant” away from getting vaccines. “If you’re trying to calm people down about the idea of vaccines, and make them less vaccine-hesitant, and convince them it is not a conspiracy run by Bill Gates, then you won’t consider doing something like this.” Carlson was referencing a strange and ill-begotten viral conspiracy that the coronavirus pandemic was planned so that the Microsoft founder could implant a chip into vaccine recipients. That is not true.
“The amount of paranoia, and fear and distrust and social division this policy will engender is impossible to calculate,” Carlson concluded. “If you want to divide American society even further, would go ahead and do something Orwellian like this.”
ID to vote, on the other hand, is absolutely necessary.
You can see how this is working, right? They lie and create all kinds of insane conspiracy theories which their voters scarf up like M&Ms. And then everyone else has to do whatever they say in order to soothe the fears. Trump creates the Big Lie about the election. So now we have to restrict Democratic voters in order to make the Republican dupes feel more comfortable. Republican mouth pieces like Tucker Carlson create a paranoid conspiracy about vaccines so the rest of us have to put our health at risk so they are reassured that they aren’t being injected with tracking devices.
We really should be more careful not to upset these people. By winning elections or making scientific advances. They are very delicate and might just turn into fascists.
By the way: Vaccine cards have been common since vaccines were invented. I had one when I was in school and later when I traveled around the world. I still have the scar from the mandatory smallpox vaccine I received as a child. It’s not a big deal.
Here are a couple of forms I found just by googling vaccination forms. They are required all over this country for hundreds of reasons for adults and children alike:
