Lite News Dump

Pramila Jayapal, Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair, endorses Joe Biden
https://twitter.com/pramilajayapal/status/1254774503948705794

San Francisco Mayor London Breed (D) said Friday that her city’s orders for personal protection equipment (PPE) have been diverted to other U.S. cities and foreign countries. "We’ve had issues of our orders being relocated by our suppliers in China,” she said at a press conference. “For example, we had isolation gowns on their way to San Francisco and they were diverted to France. We’ve had situations when things we’ve ordered that have gone through Customs were confiscated by FEMA to be diverted to other locations. “We know everyone is dealing with a serious challenge," she continued. "Through Customs, we’ve had situations where those items have been taken and put out on the market for the highest bidder, putting cities against cities and states against states." Breed said San Francisco has purchased 15 million pieces of PPE and received other tools from the federal government but still does not have the equipment necessary to adequately combat the coronavirus outbreak in the city.
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/494623-san-francisco-mayor-says-citys-ppe-orders-have-been-diverted-confiscated
https://www.youtube.com/watch?2573&v=G-RqQhnk_-k

Yikes: New York Board of Elections Cancels Democratic Presidential Primary.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/us/politics/democratic-primary-canceled-coronavirus.html

Yikes^infinity: The New York State Board of Elections removed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) from the primary election ballot on Monday, disappointing Sanders and activists who called on the board to give New Yorkers a chance to cast symbolic votes for him.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-removes-bernie-sanders-from-primary-ballot_n_5ea6f77ec5b6e6ceb6831786

I mean he ended his campaign and endorsed Biden but Sanders voters should be allowed to vote for him. Insanely dangerous decision. Cuomo already authorized postage-paid mail-in ballots sent to voters who had not yet requested an absentee ballot. That should have been done.

Yep: “Suppressing the Sanders vote in New York will again lead to attacks on the Party across the nation and harm the volunteer effort that our group and others are building for Joe Biden,” the group’s chair, Larry Cohen, said before the vote, suggesting he would challenge the New York delegation on the floor of the convention.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/us/politics/democratic-primary-canceled-coronavirus.html

Despite arrangements to encourage absentee voting, polling places are expected to remain open in about 42 counties for down-ballot races. | Andrew J. Spano, the other board member who voted in the unanimous decision, said the chance a primary could spread coronavirus to both the public and poll workers counterbalanced the wishes of Mr. Sanders’s supporters. | Some progressives had expressed worries that canceling the election would reduce turnout, particularly among younger voters, and affect down-ballot candidates running as challengers against sitting incumbents. One of them was Jamaal Bowman, a middle school principal in the Bronx who is challenging Representative Eliot Engel in the 16th congressional district race. “I’m worried that this could depress turnout among younger voters in my primary challenge,” Mr. Bowman said in a statement Monday. “This is terrible for our democracy and our party. My heart goes out to all the organizers who were part of the Bernie campaign and movement.” | Elections officials had said it cost more than $300,000 for a medium-sized county to hold a primary — an amount that does not include sending pre-stamped absentee ballot applications to voters — estimating that the cost savings of not holding a primary would range in the millions of dollars. The chairman of the state Democratic Party, Jay Jacobs, had supported the move, saying that he had actively pushed to cancel the presidential primary in the state while still holding the congressional, State Senate, assembly and other local races. “The more we can do to reduce the risk factor of running the primary, the smarter I think that it is,” said Mr. Jacobs. | “The D.N.C. has been very clear: the D.N.C. does not want to do anything that looks like we’re being unfair,” said Mr. Jacobs. “And we’re not being unfair, we’re just reacting to a global pandemic which happens to be centered in New York at the time.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/us/politics/democratic-primary-canceled-coronavirus.html

Sanders is still on the ballots for Super Tuesday 2.0; there are many more states left to vote and many more delegates to be earned.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/june-2-shaping-up-to-be-a-new-super-tuesday/

Supreme Court: Trump administration must pay health insurers for Affordable Care Act program
https://www.axios.com/supreme-court-affordable-care-act-risk-corridors-insurers-b839a24d-73b0-413d-b43c-f4fafcb36331.html

‘Filthy bloody business:’ Poachers kill more animals as coronavirus crushes tourism to Africa. In Botswana, at least six rhinos have been poached since the virus shut down tourism there. In the northwest South Africa, at least nine rhinos have been killed since the virus lockdown.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/24/coronavirus-poachers-kill-more-animals-as-tourism-to-africa-plummets.html

Releasing bison, reindeer and horses into the Arctic would slow warming, say scientists. A computerised simulation of conditions at the polar region found that with enough wildlife, 80 per cent of the world’s permafrost soils could be saved, preventing a vicious circle of environmental catastrophe.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-global-warming-arctic-permafrost-tundra-bison-reindeer-horses-a9484901.html

Silence is golden for whales as lockdown reduces ocean noise
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/27/silence-is-golden-for-whales-as-lockdown-reduces-ocean-noise-coronavirus

Trump cancels daily coronavirus press briefing
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-cancels-press-conference-coronavirus-briefing-white-house-today-a9486381.html
https://www.axios.com/white-house-cancels-coronavirus-press-briefing-4a1069da-66d1-4efa-8f4a-f0d9b89cfcec.html

He deleted all of his ridiculous tweets from saturday and sunday. Trump himself literally retweeted a twitter account called "Trump & Biden Are Rapey"

According to the article her plan is to use the tried and true “fake news” defense: Republican Conservative Kentucky House Candidate Monteia Mundy was arrested Saturday night and charged with leaving the scene of an accident, driving under the influence, and failure to wear a seat belt, according to her arrest citation. She was later released on bond, according to the Madison County jail. | Mundy is a Republican candidate running to represent the state’s 88th district, which includes southern Fayette County. The office is currently held by Democrat Cherlynn Stevenson, who is running for re-election. Another Republican, Aaron Yates, is also running for the seat and is set to go up against Mundy in the primary this summer. | “Upon making contact with the subject mentioned above she was in the driver’s seat not wearing her seat belt,” the arresting Kentucky State Police trooper wrote in the citation. “Local civilians advised me that they witnessed her driving on the wrong side of the road against oncoming traffic on Lexington Road before crashing into the ditch.” The arresting trooper wrote in the citation that Mundy was “incoherent” and did not follow field sobriety test instructions.
https://www.kentucky.com/news/state/article242307211.html

These Uighur Journalists Are Investigating the Fate of 1 Million Muslims in China: Some of the most crucial reporting on Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang comes from the U.S. government-funded Radio Free Asia channel.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dm74q/these-uighur-journalists-are-investigating-the-fate-of-1-million-muslims-in-china

As of today Mahmoud Abbas is 15 years, 3 months, 18 days into his 4 year term of office. Where is the international condemnation of Abbas dictatorship? | Abbas was elected on 9 January 2005 to serve as President of the Palestinian National Authority until 15 January 2009, but extended his term until the next election in 2010, citing the PLO constitution, and on 16 December 2009 was voted into office indefinitely by the PLO Central Council. | The international biases against the Israeli state are extremely obvious even to a casual observer. Israel's a successful and wealthy democracy in a part of the world defined by tyrants and autocrats and terrorists, Israel deserves much more positive attention then it gets.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Abbas#2005_Presidential_election

Supreme Court Throws Out Gun Rights Case — In a 6-3 decision, the justices dismissed a challenge from gun rights groups over an old New York City gun control law.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/supreme-court-gun-rights-case_n_5ea6eb53c5b6a30004e59f35

How in the hell does Carnival, a cruise ship company that pays virtually no federal income taxes, receive a bailout, but the Postal Service, the most popular government agency in America, does not? The Post Office is essential. Cruise ships are not.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-fed-intervention-saved-carnival-11587920400

Mental health care is a human right, now more than ever. Trauma On The Pandemic's Front Line Leaves Health Workers Reeling
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/04/23/840986735/trauma-on-the-pandemics-front-line-leaves-health-workers-reeling

$282,000,000,000. That's by how much America’s billionaires increased their wealth in less than a month, while over 22 million lost their jobs. This system of unfettered greed is morally obscene. It’s time to put working families first—not billionaires.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-billionaire-wealth-increased-since-trump-became-president-2020-4

Leader of ReOpen NC tests positive for coronavirus | One of three North Carolina mothers who said they started the ReOpen NC protest movement has tested positive for COVID-19. According to WRAL in Raleigh, Audrey Whitlock wrote on Facebook she was in a two-week quarantine that ended Sunday, April 26 and was asymptomatic. It's unclear if she attended the protest that brought hundreds to the Capitol in downtown Raleigh last week since she was under quarantine.
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/health/coronavirus/leader-of-reopen-nc-tests-positive-coronavirus/275-6a3d64c0-b08f-486b-9406-843a4f2975e4
https://www.wral.com/coronavirus/nc-coronavirus-live-updates-april-27/19073293/
https://abc11.com/health/reopen-nc-administrator-says-she-tested-positive-for-covid-19/6132539/

"The unborn" are a convenient group of people to advocate for. They never make demands of you; they are morally uncomplicated, unlike the incarcerated, addicted, or the chronically poor; they don't resent your condescension or complain that you are not politically correct; unlike widows, they don't ask you to question patriarchy; unlike orphans, they don't need money, education, or childcare; unlike aliens, they don't bring all that racial, cultural, and religious baggage that you dislike; they allow you to feel good about yourself without any work at creating or maintaining relationships; and when they are born, you can forget about them, because they cease to be unborn...    You can love the unborn and advocate for them without substantially challenging your own wealth, power, or privilege, without re-imagining social structures, apologizing, or making reparations to anyone. They are, in short, the perfect people to love if you want to claim you love Jesus but actually dislike people who breathe. Prisoners? Immigrants? The sick? The poor? Widows? Orphans? All the groups that are specifically mentioned in the Bible? They all get thrown under the bus for the unborn.

Meteorologists say 2020 on course to be hottest year since records began
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/27/meteorologists-say-2020-on-course-to-be-hottest-year-since-records-began

Removing 1 Million Homes from Flood Zones Could Save $1 Trillion
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/removing-1-million-homes-from-flood-zones-could-save-1-trillion/

New York has paid $116 billion more to the feds than it's received in federal spending.
https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/epgyye/andrew-cuomo-has-some-important-receipts-to-show-trump-and-mitch-mcconnell

Given the situation in NY and the reality of the election, I think the decision makes a lot of sense. At the same time I think Sanders base has a right to be upset. Rock / hard place situation. I wanted Biden to pick up more delegates. I wanted all the voters to have a chance to vote.

Barr orders DoJ to sue states and localities for their stay-at-home orders
https://www.justice.gov/opa/page/file/1271456/download

Trump is having a covid-19 briefing after  Republicans claimed they cancelled the briefings

We've had two days in a row where death counts are closer to 1K than 2K. That's good, but Sundays and Mondays are typically low days for reporting. Tomorrow will likely be worse. Still, these numbers are down from previous Sundays/Mondays.
https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1254883761705095172

Admin prepping for orderly transition in case Trump loses reelection. Setting up White House Transition Coordinating Council and timetable for agencies to name points of contact to assist with transition efforts and succession plans. Required by Presidential Transition Act.
https://twitter.com/JenniferJJacobs/status/1254882112941051917

Trump acted faster against the imaginary threat of caravans than the actual threat of covid-19

Death-count 4/27/20 in countries that took prompt, aggressive action:
South Korea: 243
Japan: 372
Hong Kong: 4
Taiwan: 6
New Zealand 19
The US where Trump called covid-19 a hoax and ignored it for 70 days: 55,415

Italy, UK explore possible COVID-19 link to child inflammatory disease (this is what happens when you feed your kids shit instead of feeding them healthy food. go vegan already)
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-britain-syndrome/italy-uk-explore-possible-covid-19-link-to-child-inflammatory-disease-idUSKCN2292JM

Attorney General Sees Too Much Secrecy in Epstein Estate | The top prosecutor in the U.S. Virgin Islands says the estate needs to provide more detail about Jeffrey Epstein’s finances and is insisting on clauses that could protect others from wrongdoing. | Some of the same furtive techniques that Jeffrey Epstein employed in life are showing up in the litigation over dividing up the wealth he left behind when he died. There are mysterious companies, lingering nondisclosure agreements and contractual clauses that some lawyers fear could protect anyone who took part in Mr. Epstein’s wrongdoing. The estate’s lawyers say they have a plan to fairly distribute money to dozens of women who have accused Mr. Epstein of sexually abusing them as teenagers. But the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Mr. Epstein built a complex web of corporate entities, says Mr. Epstein’s money is still buying silence. And in the middle is a fortune estimated at well over a half-billion dollars. | Ms. George filed a civil forfeiture lawsuit against the estate in January, roughly five months after Mr. Epstein committed suicide while being held in federal custody in Manhattan after his arrest on sex trafficking charges. She said she sued to protect the interests of Mr. Epstein’s accusers and recoup some of the money that Mr. Epstein made during his two decades in the Virgin Islands. The estate has insisted it is acting in the best interest of Mr. Epstein’s accusers. But it has also provided an incomplete accounting of his finances, according to records reviewed by The New York Times. | Much of the fighting between the estate and Ms. George’s office involves a plan to establish a victims’ compensation fund, which would allow accusers to receive payments from the estate without a potentially costly court case. The estate’s representatives say the proposed fund — which would be set up with the help of the specialist who ran the compensation program for victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — would allow accusers to receive money quickly and privately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/business/jeffrey-epstein-estate-secrecy.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/15/nyregion/jeffrey-epstein-virgin-islands.html

Fox News has cut ties with MAGA vlogging superstars Diamond & Silk after pushing absolutely bonkers conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic
https://www.thedailybeast.com/fox-news-cuts-ties-with-diamond-and-silk?via=twitter_page

Confirmed coronavirus toll now exceeds US combat deaths in the First World War
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6

Trump seems to have dropped his false claim that we have tested more than all other major countries combined. Instead says its "more than double" any other country.

U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for Trump in January and February, months during which he continued to play down the threat, according to current and former U.S. officials. The repeated warnings were conveyed in issues of the President’s Daily Brief, a sensitive report that is produced before dawn each day and designed to call the president’s attention to the most significant global developments and security threats. For weeks, the PDB — as the report is known — traced the virus’s spread around the globe, made clear that China was suppressing information about the contagion’s transmissibility and lethal toll, and raised the prospect of dire political and economic consequences. But the alarms appear to have failed to register with the president, who routinely skips reading the PDB and has at times shown little patience even for the oral summary he now takes two or three times per week, according to the officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified material.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/presidents-intelligence-briefing-book-repeatedly-cited-virus-threat/2020/04/27/ca66949a-8885-11ea-ac8a-fe9b8088e101_story.html

"By far the most recurring utterances from Mr. Trump in the briefings are self-congratulations, roughly 600 of them, which are often predicated on exaggerations and falsehoods"
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/26/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-briefings-analyzed.html

Sanders campaign’s Jeff Weaver in the NY primary canceling, asking DNC to overturn it: “No one asked New York to cancel the election. The DNC didn’t request it. The Biden campaign didn’t request it. And our campaign communicated that we wanted to remain on the ballot.”
https://twitter.com/IsaacDovere/status/1254887103457968128

Trump spoke of mourning and grieving for a few seconds from prepared remarks, then he launched into a list of company names that would overload a stock ticker and started inviting corporate executives to speak from the podium in the Rose Garden again.

The accuser repeatedly praised Biden publicly over the years. She's had many many name changes. People who know her, don't believe her.
https://twitter.com/loisromano/status/1248995941329371137

He Found One of Stalin’s Mass Graves. Now He’s in Jail. The discovery by Yuri Dmitriev, after years of searching, “has clearly made some people very uncomfortable,” his daughter says.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/27/world/europe/russia-historian-stalin-mass-graves.html

Republicans eliminate U.S. research on bat-human virus transmission during GLOBAL PANDEMIC OF BAT-TO-HUMAN VIRUS. Republicans should QUADRUPLE THE FUNDING.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/27/trump-cuts-research-bat-human-virus-china-213076

We're almost four months into the pandemic, and the US is at last beginning to test on a large scale. But the point of testing is tracing. The point of tracing is isolation. There are no national plans to do either of *those* things. The plan is to reopen because Republicans want as many people to die as possible.

YEP: Sorry to be a TV bore, alway repeating the same thing. My only defense: it's true. The Trump plan today remains what it was last week: take the punch, ride it out, count on most of the casualties being non-Trump voters.
https://crooksandliars.com/2020/04/david-frum-provides-chilling-reason-why

Trump angrily brushes aside a question from @BrianKarem about his disinfectant injections remarks and the ensuing rise in control to poison control hotlines
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1254898175267295233

Rudy W. Giuliani·Apr 26: Why did the US (NIH) in 2017 give $3.7m to the Wuhan Lab in China? Such grants were prohibited in 2014. Did Pres. Obama grant an exception?
https://twitter.com/RudyGiuliani

Obama wasn't President in 2017. TRUMP AND REPUBLICANS WERE AND STILL ARE. A portion of $3.7 million in grants awarded between 2014 and 2019 by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to EcoHealth Alliance, a global environmental health nonprofit organization, helped fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. That means Trump and Obama made exceptions because Democrats and some Republicans understood the importantance of fighting bat-to-human viruses.

Tomorrow is two months since then WH chief of staff Mick Mulvaney told a crowd at CPAC the press was only covering coronavirus because “they think this is going to be what brings down the President."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/02/28/mick-mulvaney-says-media-hopes-coronavirus-bring-down-trump/4907058002/

Kansas official says man drank cleaner after Trump floated dangerous disinfectant remedy
https://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article242326966.html

'I can't imagine why': Trump says he takes no responsibility for people ingesting disinfectant despite telling them to
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-coronavirus-ingest-disinfectant-cases-us-white-house-conference-today-a9487106.html

GA men drink disinfectants in attempts to stop coronavirus
https://www.ajc.com/news/state--regional/men-drink-disinfectants-attempts-stop-coronavirus/uRsz2zLLhpqqOX2SjpEfjL/

Arizona Republican chair tells those protesting coronavirus lockdown to dress in scrubs and masks
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/494901-arizona-gop-chair-tells-those-protesting-coronavirus-lockdown-to-dress

We believed Ford b/c she reluctantly came forward, and her story was told consistently. We disbelieve Tara b/c she shopped her story to rival campaigns/partisan media rather than police, exhibited opportunism, and repeatedly changed her story. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
https://twitter.com/KerrAvon4/status/1254780826140590080

I personally don't believe any of the accusations against Trump or Kavanaugh (Ford is a lying sack of shit) or the one against Biden. I pretty much dismiss almost all the accusations against Weinstein, Cosby (yep.... quid-pro-quo sex-for-money is not rape or sexual assault....), Franken, Spacey, etc, as malicious lies (Spacey aggressively flirted, that's normal, flirting is encoded in our DNA, male and female alike....), the "me too" movement is a lie created by Democrats to win back voters, no different than Black Lives Matters (criminals were killed, not innocent people, I'm a minority saying 100% of the "victims" trotted out by BLM were criminal trash)