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brooklynite's JournalBREAKING: U.S coronavirus deaths top 100,000
Source: NBC News
COVID-19 has killed thousands of Americans from Guam to the continental United States to the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The disease, which has shuttered businesses nationwide and sent the economy into a tailspin, has claimed the lives of more than 100,000 people since the end of February. New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts have seen the most deaths.
The map below tracks the number of coronavirus related deaths in each state, U.S. territory. It will be updated daily between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. ET and again between 6 p.m. and 7. You can see charts and data on the number of coronavirus deaths in the U.S. here.
Read more: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-deaths-u-s-map-shows-number-fatalities-compared-confirmed-n1166966
We've DONE it, Ladies and Gentlemen!
https://twitter.com/MeetThePress/status/1265692509008773121Trump press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has voted by mail 11 times in 10 years
Source: Tampa Bay Time
For a week, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany has defended President Donald Trump’s assault on vote-by-mail, insisting, like her boss, that it invites election fraud.
But, also like her boss, McEnany has taken advantage of its convenience time and time again.
In fact, the Tampa native has voted by mail in every Florida election she has participated in since 2010, according to a Tampa Bay Times review of her voting history. Most recently, she voted by mail in the state’s March 2020 presidential primary, just as Trump did after he made Florida his new permanent home.
Read more: https://www.tampabay.com/florida-politics/buzz/2020/05/27/trump-press-secretary-kayleigh-mcenany-has-voted-by-mail-11-times-in-10-years/
Boeing to cut nearly 10,000 jobs in Washington, more than 12,000 overall
Source: Seattle Times
Boeing announced to employees Wednesday a first batch of almost 7,000 involuntary layoffs in the U.S., which added to more than 5,500 voluntary layoffs means it will cut almost 12,300 jobs company-wide.
Washington state takes the biggest hit, with 9,840 jobs cut before July 31 in a combination of voluntary and involuntary layoffs.
This is the first and largest cut, but there is more to come. Boeing had earlier said it plans to cut about 16,000 jobs total due to the dramatic falloff in airline business.
A company spokesman said Wednesday that “it will take some time for the company to reduce our workforce by the approximately 10% we announced.”
Read more: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/boeing-to-cut-nearly-10000-jobs-in-washington-more-than-12000-overall
House Proxy voting
https://twitter.com/CraigCaplan/status/1265477971697111040https://twitter.com/CraigCaplan/status/1265638661875531783
'Why are you not burying him?': Trump allies fret over rising Biden threat
PoliticoSome of President Donald Trump‘s political allies and donors are starting to get antsy.
With only five months until the November general election, several Trump advisers, campaign veterans and prominent Republicans see the Trump campaign’s efforts to define and damage former vice president Joe Biden falling short.
These Trump supporters worry the campaign’s myriad lines of attack on Biden this spring — from his age to his work with China as vice president to the Obama economic record — are failing to dent the presumptive Democratic nominee. Recent polling shows Trump trailing Biden in key swing states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, with the Republican control of the Senate increasingly up for grabs due to a depressed economy and nationwide angst about the coronavirus pandemic.
The poor results from the all-over-the-map approach is spurring consternation across the field of Republican advisers, donors and conservative groups who want the Trump campaign to dramatically ramp up its efforts to tear down and pigeonhole Biden — much the way former president Barack Obama cast Mitt Romney as a plutocrat during the 2012 campaign, a framing from which Romney was never able to escape.
Grassley says White House 'failed' on watchdog firings
Source: Politico
White House counsel Pat Cipollone told a top Republican senator on Tuesday that President Donald Trump acted appropriately when he fired two independent government watchdogs.
The long-awaited response, which Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) demanded after Trump fired the inspectors general for the intelligence community and the State Department, comes after lawmakers on both sides of the aisle expressed concern with the president’s actions and asserted that he did not comply with a statute requiring a detailed explanation for those firings.
In a subsequent statement, Grassley said Cipollone’s response “failed to address” that requirement, which was codified in a 2008 law that Grassley co-authored.
“I don’t dispute the president’s authority under the Constitution, but without sufficient explanation, it’s fair to question the president’s rationale for removing an inspector general,” Grassley said. “If the president has a good reason to remove an inspector general, just tell Congress what it is. Otherwise, the American people will be left speculating whether political or self interests are to blame.”
Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/26/grassley-watchdog-white-house-283324
Rahm Emanuel: "It's not enough for Democrats to oppose hasty reopening. We should offer a plan"
Washington PostAnd in politics, you can’t beat something with nothing. Rather than centering our agenda on resistance to the reopening he intends to trumpet, Democrats should respond by explaining how we intend to rebuild America.
To be clear, the issue here isn’t policy — or even economics. It’s culture. Democrats are so aligned with data, science and logic that we’ve lost sight of why so much of the country is skeptical of expertise. It was the elites who claimed we’d be welcomed as liberators to Iraq, where we would find weapons of mass destruction. It was the elites who talked up collateralized mortgages, and then bailed out Wall Street while Main Street suffered. In too many cases, the elites have gotten the big ones wrong and never paid any price.
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Partly as a result, Trump’s insistence that the country reopen resonates. Set aside that he’s substantively responsible for the carnage: This is the first national crisis that hasn’t received a national response — and the consequences are obvious to everyone. Trump is keen to pose as the lone voice sticking it to the haughty, know-it-all institutional experts, but he doesn’t have any idea how to get us out of the current economic and medical morass.
Democrats need to move beyond resistance, reluctance and mere relief. Americans are hurting today — and many fear, quite understandably, that the millions of jobs and small businesses destroyed by the pandemic may never come back, even when the lights come back on. Reopening the economy isn’t going to bring back all the jobs lost at both the big chain outlets such as J.C. Penney and at all the neighborhood retail storefronts. Maybe most pointedly, reopening the economy won’t do anything to protect the Michiganders whose lives were destroyed when obsolete dams burst, flooding huge swaths of Midland County.
A Trump-Friendly, Anti-AOC Democrat Is Poised to Win a New York House Seat
NewsweekThat Democrat is Reverend Ruben Diaz Sr., a flamboyant, cowboy hat-wearing New York City councilman who immediately distinguished his views when he announced his run in 2019, saying "I am the opposite of AOC in the South Bronx."
And that has national Democrats, opponents and progressives like Planned Parenthood and LGBT groups in a panic because the 77-year-old minister has a history of making inflammatory statements about homosexuals and strongly opposes abortion because of his religious beliefs.
"He would instantly become Donald Trump's favorite New York congressman," strategist Eric Koch of anti-Diaz super PAC Bronx United told Newsweek, adding that Diaz Sr. would be an unreliable Democratic vote in the House caucus.
To complicate matters, he has a son, Ruben Diaz Jr., who is his namesake and a Bronx borough president many call the most popular politician in the borough. Diaz Jr. is regularly asked to comment on his father's actions, as he did disapprovingly when Diaz Sr. invited Senator Ted Cruz to visit the Bronx, but the consensus is that his son is a political plus for the reverend.
The 15th district is the poorest and most diverse district in the country—more than 97 percent of its residents are minorities and the median household income was estimated to be $28,042 in 2017. It is also comfortably Democrat. Barack Obama took nearly 97 percent of the vote there in 2012. It borders the district Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents.
New York City is extremely Democratic but not extremely liberal. It's happy to elect political hacks like Diaz (or Yvette Clarke in Brooklyn) and keep re-electing them indefinitely.
Frustrated and struggling, New Yorkers contemplate abandoning the city they love
Washington PostNEW YORK — It was laundry that broke Mary Shell. Or rather, the lack of an in-unit washer and dryer in her Brooklyn apartment where Shell, 37, a field producer for reality television, could barely afford her half of the rent before the novel coronavirus pandemic because work had been slow for months. Times are even tougher now that her roommate, also unemployed, has had to move back in with her parents.
Shell was so financially strapped that she began inquiring about various night-life gigs, only to see covid-19 close all the bars and clubs. (“So that’s another job you can’t do in a pandemic.”) Still, her situation might have been bearable if the nearest laundromat wasn’t four blocks away.
“I just want to be able to do laundry without having to drag it up and down a four-story walk-up or pay someone $40 or $50 to do it for me,” said Shell — echoing a gripe of New York City’s apartment-dwellers so timeless that “Seinfeld,” “Friends,” “Living Single” and “Broad City” all have episodes about the indignities of shared laundry facilities. But throw in a pandemic and Shell said the stress has been “exhausting,” noting how she recently showed up to her laundromat to find that someone had handled all the clothes she had just washed.
“Everyone deserves space and basic amenities,” she said, lamenting how, in New York, many landlords deem a washing machine a “luxury” item. “It’s just insulting to come at us and be like, ‘We’re going to charge you an extra thousand dollars a month for this standard appliance that’s been in American households since the 1970s.’ ”
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