All posts by nedhamson

Activist, writer, researcher, addicted to sharing information and facts.

The President Says He “Can’t Get Enough” of His Supporters Harassing the Press

what is it about having your thumb up your butt and thumbing your nose at so-called elites that makes it ok for your elders to needlessly die?

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On Thursday, Kevin Vesey, a TV reporter for News12 Long Island, visited a local protest against the remaining restrictions put in place by New York to stem the spread of the coronavirus, filing a studiously restrained segment for broadcast.

But on Twitter, he decided to share a small piece of raw footage showing how he was harassed by the demonstrators as he went about his job of capturing their demands and relaying them to a wider audience. The footage circulated widely among journalists on Thursday and Friday, often accompanied by laments about the protesters’ targeting of Vesey. In under a minute, the video captures him being called “traitor,” “hack,” “disgusting,””the enemy of the people,” and, inevitably, “fake news.” All are, of course, phrases President Donald Trump has deployed against journalists who cover his administration.

“FAKE NEWS IS NOT ESSENTIAL!”https://t.co/5286zgRVWQ

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 16, 2020

On Friday night, the President himself retweeted the video, mimicking a chant the protestors had shouted: “Fake news is nonessential.” On Saturday morning, he retweeted it again, endorsing his supporters’ harassment by calling them “great people” and claiming that “people can’t get enough of this.” 

Vesey shared the footage with his Twitter followers because it made him alarmed. Trump shared the footage with his Twitter followers because it made him proud. 

H.R. 6878: To direct the Secretary of Health and Human Services to develop and implement improved, transparent processes for the use and distribution of supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile, and for other purposes.

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Introduced: Sponsor: Rep. Elissa Slotkin [D-MI8]

This bill was referred to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce which will consider it before sending it to the House floor for consideration.

Coronavirus US live: House to vote on $3tn stimulus package opposed by Trump and Senate

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4.06pm BST

An editorial in the prominent medical journal, The Lancet, called for Americans to vote Donald Trump out of the White House in November because of his response to the coronavirus crisis.

The editorial highlighted how the the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the country’s premier public health agency, has been sidelined in the response:

The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort.

The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.

3.38pm BST

Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said he was wrong earlier this week when he claimed Barack Obama’s administration did not leave a plan for Donald Trump on how to handle a pandemic.

“I was wrong — they did leave behind a plan. So I clearly made a mistake in that regard,” McConnell said in an interview with Fox News’ Brett Baier on Thursday.

The maddening thing is Obama left them a WH office for pandemics, a literal playbook, a cabinet-level exercise, and a global infrastructure to deal with “something like this” https://t.co/zUSysamqVC

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Does the justice department work for the Trump campaign now? Barr thinks so | Austin Sarat and Dennis Aftergut

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The US attorney general seems determined to turn the DoJ into a fully fledged arm of the Trump re-election team

It was enough that last week, the US Department of Justice did something completely unheard of: it moved to dismiss the guilty plea of a cabinet level officer, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, for lying to the FBI. The department’s argument was so preposterous that within days, nearly 2,000 former department officials signed a letter in protest of William Barr’s “assault on the rule of law”.

Related: Welcome to William Barr’s America, where the truth makes way for the president | Lloyd Green

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