Watsonville Nonprofit Owner Says She Was Scammed By Tara Reade

Lynn Hummer, founder and president of the Watsonville-based Pregnant Mare Rescue, remembers a woman named Tara McCabe emailing her in 2014 and asking if she could help out and volunteer with her nonprofit.

Things started out fine, but Hummer says the relationship frayed after two years—once her volunteer had taken more than a combined $2,000 from Hummer herself and from her organization. Hummer grew to believe that the woman was constantly playing the angles or looking to run a scam. “She was always in crisis, always looking for money,” Hummer says.

That woman, Tara McCabe, is better known these days as Tara Reade.

Reade is the former Joe Biden aide who has accused her former boss, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, of sexually assaulting her in 1993. Hummer told her story to Ed Krassenstein, one half of the Krassenstein brothers, who posted a story about Hummer’s experiences to the site Medium. Hummer has since learned that the pro-Biden Krassenstein brothers duo has a less-than-stellar reputation, having been banned from Twitter last year for operating fake accounts. None of that changed how Hummer felt about their finished product—the details in their post, she says, were all correct. “They did a good job,” Hummer says of the Krassensteins. “They got the facts right, and they got the timeline right.”

https://goodtimes.sc/santa-cruz-news/watsonville-nonprofit-owner-says-she-was-scammed-by-tara-reade/

In late February, when the stock market was beginning to fall over coronavirus fears, President Donald Trump held a briefing at the White House to reassure people that there was little chance of the virus causing significant disruption in the United States.

“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it,” he said. “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year. That was shocking to me.”

His point was to suggest that the coronavirus was no worse than the flu, whose toll of deaths most of us apparently barely noticed.

The 25,000 to 69,000 numbers that Trump cited do not represent counted flu deaths per year; they are estimates that the CDC produces by multiplying the number of flu death counts reported by various coefficients produced through complicated algorithms. These coefficients are based on assumptions of how many cases, hospitalizations, and deaths they believe went unreported. In the last six flu seasons, the CDC’s reported number of actual confirmed flu deaths—that is, counting flu deaths the way we are currently counting deaths from the coronavirus—has ranged from 3,448 to 15,620, which far lower than the numbers commonly repeated by public officials and even public health experts.