Sunday July 12
‘Blood on his hands’: In scathing obituary, woman blames governor for her father’s covid-19 death
Passionate truth telling
Ducey, R Gov of Arizona, lifted restrictions too soon.
Roger Stone - sentence commuted by Trump
Stone says he has the dirt to dish
Why this Roger Stone commutation is not as controversial as some think
Jonathan Turley
Turley advocates normalizing this behavior
The Roger Stone Commutation Is Even More Corrupt Than It Seems
By Quinta Jurecic, Benjamin Wittes
... the capstone of an all-but-open attempt on the president’s part to obstruct justice in a self-protective fashion over a protracted period of time.
Roger Stone isn’t just Trump’s confidante or friend. According to newly unsealed material in the Mueller report, he’s also a person who had the power to reveal to investigators that Trump likely lied to Mueller—and to whom Trump publicly dangled rewards if Stone refused to provide Mueller with that information. Now, it seems, the president is making good on that promise.
In Rare Public Comments, Mueller Defends Prosecution of Roger Stone
The special counsel’s article was remarkable in that it was the first time he had offered an extended defense of his two-year investigation after an endless barrage of attacks by Mr. Trump, who refers to it as a “hoax” and a “witch hunt.” Even when he appeared before Congress to testify about his conclusions last July, Mr. Mueller was largely restrained and avoided any appearance of confrontation with the president.
Robert Mueller: Roger Stone remains a convicted felon, and rightly so
The work of the special counsel’s office — its report, indictments, guilty pleas and convictions — should speak for itself. But I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office. The Russia investigation was of paramount importance. Stone was prosecuted and convicted because he committed federal crimes. He remains a convicted felon, and rightly so.
Russia’s actions were a threat to America’s democracy. It was critical that they be investigated and understood. By late 2016, the FBI had evidence that the Russians had signaled to a Trump campaign adviser that they could assist the campaign through the anonymous release of information damaging to the Democratic candidate. And the FBI knew that the Russians had done just that: Beginning in July 2016, WikiLeaks released emails stolen by Russian military intelligence officers from the Clinton campaign. Other online personas using false names — fronts for Russian military intelligence — also released Clinton campaign emails.
Top Experts: DOJ’s Bureau of Prison Blocking Michael Cohen Book about Trump Violates First Amendment
Despite initial headlines, however, the news reports explained a very different and more ominous set of facts. As the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman described, “Cohen imprisonment wasn’t related to NY Post photo of him at restaurant. When he went to switch from furlough to home confinement, he had to sign papers saying no media or publishing a book, which he refused to sign.”
Perhaps due to the flurry of news in the past forty-eight hours or perhaps due to the misperception of why Cohen returned to prison, there has been little to no significant analysis of this development (setting aside stray tweets and the like). That’s despite the availability of the peculiar agreement that Cohen was asked to sign committing not to publish a book. How peculiar is the agreement? Very peculiar. As David C. Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project told Just Security, “I have never heard of such a spectacularly overbroad restriction on speech as a condition of probation or supervised release.”
Paul Waldron, St Johns County Commissioner who voted against mask orders, has covid-19 and is hospitalized in critical condition
https://www.facebook.com/paul.waldron.735
https://floridapolitics.com/archives/348101-covid-sjc-waldron
The once-mocked ‘Never Trump’ movement becomes a sudden campaign force
https://twitter.com/kelly2277/status/1281919488749981697 Two of Trump’s former fixers were disbarred- Roy Cohn and Michael Cohen. Is AG Barr next
Absentee ballots didn't get counted because of late delivery, misdelivery and bad postmarks, post office says
NYMPHOMANIAC' Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell ‘filmed powerful people having sex with underage girls’
In an exclusive interview with The Sun, the ex-criminal turned writer tells how he was shown footage involving two high-profile US politicians having sex with minors and two high society figures having a threesome with an under-age girl.
Steel — who is not being paid for this interview — also branded Maxwell, 58, who was arrested last week in connection with trafficking young girls, a wild “nymphomaniac” who would try “everything and anything in bed”.
It’s the duty of the White House press secretary to hold briefings. But not like this.
“This vision is not a culture war, as the media seeks to falsely proclaim,” McEnany said. The very next day, in an interview with RealClearPolitics, the president said: “We are in a culture war.”
Although the president had written “That & Flag decision has caused lowest ratings EVER!” McEnany denied that the president had criticized NASCAR’s decision to ban the Confederate flag at its events. (For the record, Trump was wrong, and NASCAR’s ratings rose after its ban.)
Hate group that took as much as $1 million in pandemic relief appears to have no income or employees
The organizations include the anti-Muslim hate group Center for Security Policy; two anti-immigrant hate groups, the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform; and three organizations designated as anti-LGBTQ hate groups, the American Family Association (AFA), Liberty Counsel and the Pacific Justice Institute.
Wayfair is supplying beds to Texas detention centers for children — and its employees are protesting
Wayfair employees on Friday sent a letter to company executives asking that they cease all business with contractors that operate detention camps for immigrants. Nearly 550 Wayfair employees signed the letter.
'I thought this was a hoax': Patient in 30s dies after attending 'COVID party'
"This is a party held by somebody diagnosed by the COVID virus and the thought is to see if the virus is real and to see if anyone gets infected," Dr. Appleby said.
"Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said 'I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it's not,'" Appleby said.
To DeVos, the virus is an excuse to strip public money from public schools
The policy is in line with conservative goals of converting public dollars into private K-12 scholarships.
Trump then threatened that if schools don’t reopen for in-person instruction in the fall, the federal government might withhold the billions and billions of dollars it sends to primary and secondary education each year. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos later clarified that the federal government would not withhold public education funding entirely but instead convert grants to schools and districts that don’t open sufficiently into private education vouchers for families.
DeVos has been obsessed with this specific policy idea, often referred to as making public education funds “portable,” throughout her tenure. “We should be funding and investing in students, not in … school buildings, not in institutions, not in systems,” she told “60 Minutes’” Lesley Stahl in 2018. Since taking office, she’s searched for ways to push federal funding for public schools away from public schools. Last spring, DeVos joined Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) to propose a new Education Freedom Scholarships tax credit that would allow individuals to shift their federal tax dollars toward scholarships they could use at private schools.
Florida sheriff wins battle with DeSantis administration over coronavirus data
July 9
Just two days after a Florida sheriff announced the state had abruptly cut him off from data about local cases of coronavirus infections, state health authorities have reversed course, agreeing on Thursday morning to continue providing the information.
“As this pandemic is growing, why are we giving less information?” Chitwood wondered. “That’s not healthy.” He told Yahoo News that he was unaware of any other Florida sheriff who was providing similar coronavirus updates.
The development comes as Florida confronts not only a burgeoning caseload but also persistent questions about how forthcoming state leaders have been with the public. Officials from the same state health department who appeared to be cutting off Chitwood have also been accused of telling Rebekah Jones, formerly a data scientist for the state, to alter statistics in some counties; of telling coroners not to report coronavirus deaths; and, most recently, of hiding information about hospitalizations.
County health department spokeswoman Holly Smith, whose office was also providing Chitwood with new infection data, told Yahoo News on Wednesday that a “statewide directive” against any further sharing had been put in place.
State officials told Yahoo News they would provide an explanation, but did not.
Chitwood’s message of distress on Tuesday evening was shared by Jones, the geographer who created Florida’s coronavirus dashboard and who was fired because, according to her allegations, she refused to change data in order to further the narrative of DeSantis, an ally of President Trump, that Florida was defeating the disease.
That narrative is now in tatters, but the severity of the crisis appears to have made the DeSantis administration even less forthcoming than it had previously been.
“When there’s trouble getting the information, it’s because the information is troubling,” Chitwood told a local outlet on Wednesday, recalling a lesson he’d learned when he began as a Philadelphia police officer at the devastating height of crack cocaine’s grip on American cities during the late 1980s.
Chitwood told Yahoo News he still supports DeSantis: “I endorsed him, I voted him,” he said of the ambitious 41-year-old who some believe will run for president in 2024. Chitwood said his decision to publish coronavirus data had nothing to do with scoring political points and was rooted only in his desire to keep his deputies safe.
Back in mid-March, Chitwood decided to rectify what he saw as shortfalls in the information being provided to Floridians by their elected officials, specifically DeSantis, who has consistently received among the lowest approval ratings of any governor in the nation for his coronavirus response.
“Since I’m the chief law enforcement official in Volusia County, I think it’s my responsibility to provide more transparency than has been provided so far,” Chitwood vented on his Facebook page on March 13. Twice a day, he explained, the state health department was sending him data about suspected coronavirus cases around the country, with the specific address for each case.
While he had no intention of making public the addresses of potentially sickened Floridians, Chitwood did want Volusia County residents to know if they were living in a potential mini hot spot. His post provided the first of what would be dozens of informal but data-informed public health reports, detailing where cases were suspected — four in Daytona County, three in Port Orange and so on —while also explaining that a suspected case was not necessarily a positive one.
Chitwood told Yahoo News that he was so concerned about privacy that he would not even release address-specific data to other authorities in the county. “We never, ever, ever, ever published an address or a name,” he said with vehemence. Chitwood explained that for small communities across the county, his updates provided a consistent, easy-to-follow overview of the pandemic’s progress.
“I know this isn’t a lot of information, but it’s more than has been made available to this point,” he wrote in his inaugural post back in March. The next morning, he explained to a local outlet that if “you don’t put info out there you are creating a panic.” Chitwood added that “they were adamant against anybody knowing what they were doing,” a reference to health officials in the state Capitol in Tallahassee.
For four months, Chitwood provided Volusia County with daily updates. Each day, Laura Jewell, a data specialist in the sheriff’s office, would receive a spreadsheet from the state with the addresses of suspected infections. She would also receive a call from county officials with a similar update, allowing her to check the two data sets against each other.
Jewell explained to Yahoo News that the address-specific information was especially helpful to first responders, including police officers, firefighters and emergency medical personnel. Shortages of personal protective equipment, she went on to say, meant it was critical for those first responders to be aware that they were entering a household where someone might be infected with a highly contagious disease.
At the same time, that information could be pooled to give the public a sense of where across this county of 550,000 people infections were rising or falling. “The public was very grateful,” Jewell told Yahoo News. “I personally didn’t get any kind of pushback.”
Chitwood would share the updates on his personal social media accounts. The updates included both confirmed individual cases and monitored households for cities and towns across the county. Chitwood would also add a narrative, offering insights into what was happening in nursing homes or how many tests had been administered.
While those posts were not masterworks of Silicon Valley data visualization, they provided a clear, unvarnished sense of what was happening in Volusia County. Yet Chitwood’s frustration with the lack of transparency was never far below the surface. Even as he disseminated the statistics provided by the state, he wondered if they were accurate.
“Do I believe these numbers are completely accurate? No,” he wrote on April 24. “We can’t put our faith in incomplete numbers. But some information is better than no information, so I’m giving you what I have.”
But then the flow of information from Tallahassee abruptly ended on Tuesday, just as Florida appears to be on the cusp of letting the coronavirus run rampant through the state.
“I was just informed that effective immediately the DOH will no longer be providing addresses to flag,” Jewell wrote to Chitwood and others in the sheriff’s office. “They advised that due to the amount of time it is consuming and the fact that there is such a large community spread that first responders should be utilizing PPE anytime they are in contact with the public.”
A clearly outraged Chitwood then took to social media, denouncing failed leadership and lamenting “so many failures to effectively confront this crisis at every level of government.”
The outrage clearly got the attention of Tallahassee. Chitwood told Yahoo News on Thursday that the state would resume sending him data. “I think this is a win for all first responders,” he wrote on Twitter, “and for every resident of Volusia County.”
Florida's COVID-19 data is unreliable, confusing and hazardous to our health
USA TODAY Opinion
Rebekah Jones, Opinion contributor
,USA TODAY Opinion•July 11, 2020
A few weeks later, on the day Gov. Ron DeSantis announced the full reopening of K-12 schools in August, Scott Pritchard, the lead epidemiologist for Florida’s COVID-19 response since January, abruptly quit after 15 years of service. The Miami Herald cited a former health department employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity, who said Pritchard was afraid DeSantis would use him as a scapegoat once cases “started exploding."
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