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TODAY'S HEADLINES:
Federal forces deploy in Democratic cities across the United States, as Donald Trump says parts of America look like a war zone. That would be his fault.
Meanwhile, coronavirus cases continue to rise as more state and local authorities -- and even large corporate chains – require masks. But new federal reporting rules for hospitals are said to actively harm pandemic response efforts.
And lastly: Twitter faces the worst hack in its history. For a brief while, the bots and the unverified Berniebros built a utopia free of the navel-gazing media controversies du jour.
THESE ARE THE STORIES YOU NEED TO KNOW:
A disturbing online video showed men in green camoflauge tactical uniforms grabbing a person off the street in Portland, Oregon, and taking them away in an unmarked minivan with Florida plates. The uniformed men did not respond to shouted comments and questions from witnesses on the street. Portland’s mayor this week asked federal agents to stay inside their offices or leave the city, after armed feds severely injured a protester by shooting him in the head. Separately, the New York Times reported that the Border Patrol, acting on Trump’s orders, deployed tactical agents to select sanctuary cities. Those cities included New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, Boston, New Orleans, Detroit and Newark, New Jersey. The deployment includes units from BORTAC, described as essentially the Border Patrol’s SWAT team. They receive Special Forces-type training and were intended to capture the most dangerous criminals. Now, apparently, they are operating among the general public. Trump appeared from the White House with Attorney General Bill Barr yesterday. The president described some American cities as warzones and said he was deploying federal forces to quell violence because liberal, left-wing Democrats could not. Clearly he and his forces are causing the violence.
A new review by the Times of recent NYPD use of force cases conclusively proved that the police made brutal and completely unwarranted attacks on protesters. And, an analysis by The Intercept of leaked police information showed that whatever Trump, Barr, or anyone in
power says, police at all levels know that right-wing extremists, not anti-fascists, are the real pressing violent threat. The NYPD arrested thirty-seven people on the Brooklyn bridge yesterday. Prosecutors in Kentucky charged eighty-seven people with felonies after a peaceful sit-in on the state attorney general’s lawn. We are getting a taste of Trump’s so- called law and order. It’s foul.
Federal Rules Impede Hospitals
More jurisdictions, including Alabama and Montana, are instituting mandatory mask orders as coronavirus cases continue to rise in at least forty-one states. Businesses, too, are filling in the gap in public health policy. That gap was left by Donald Trump when he decided the federal government would do absolutely nothing helpful in regards to this pandemic. Walmart will require masks for all shoppers in all its stores across the country.
New federal reporting rules route COVID-19 through political middlemen before it is delvered from the Health and Human Services Administration to the Centers for Disease Control. Hospital officials told the Washington Post that this additional bureucratic step could impede the distribution of critical medicines.
Virginia became the first state to institute workplace safety rules in response to the pandemic. According to the Post, an emergency temporary standard adopted by the state health codes board requires businesses to implement safety measures to protect people from catching the coronavirus at work. Violators could face fines of over $100,000.
Oklahoma’s Republican governor, Kevin Stitt, became the first state leader to report a positive test result for COVID-19. And Brazil’s fascist ruler Jair Bolsonaro was said to test positive for coronavirus for at least the second time.
Twitter Hacked Big Time
Some called it the Twitter Rapture. Users of the social media service were spared from seeing new messages by verified accounts for several hours, as company engineers struggled to get a handle on a major cyber attack. Verified accounts with millions of followers, including Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos were compromised. At least some of the hacked accounts posted links to a Bitcoin scam. Security experts with the BBC said the fact that so many top accounts were hacked at once suggested the social media platform was compromised at the highest level. Vice News reported that Twitter was removing images of a purported administrator panel for the website, a software feature that may have been related to how the verified accounts got hacked. The Verge, a tech news site, called it the most catastrophic security breach in company history.
But for a time, Twitter users enjoyed an absence of almost all discussion about the Harper’s Letter (or Letters), the New York Times Opinion section, Hamilton, and other obsessions of elite mainstream journalists. Hopefully nobody lost any money buying crypto-currencies.
AND NOW FOR SOME QUICKER QUICKIES:
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg is back home after being discharged from the hospital, the court said. She had to have a blockage from a bile duct stent that doctors fitted her with during a previous hospital stay.
After agreeing to settle a lawsuit brought by advocates for the homeless, California’s Transportation Department will have to reimburse people whose belongings were taken or destroyed by work crews. The class-action lawsuit was filed in 2016 but covers a period of time between 2014 and 2019 when the department chose to deprive homeless people of their only belongings. Payouts will range from $200 to $5,500. It’s not enough for what these people have endured thanks to our miserly and cruel society.
NPR News reports that at least four states have agreed to share drivers license and other identifying information to the Trump administration. Trump officials want to figure out the citizenship status of every adult living in the country. The states that are cooperating are Iowa, South Carolina, South Dakota, Nebraska. We will keep you posted if more are confirmed.
Sebastian Gorka is back in federal office after Trump named him to the National Security Education Board. Gorka, currently a failing talk show host, is most famous for wearing the pin of a definitely not-Communist European militia. But this is the proper occassion to recall that he submitted a PhD dissertation that was widely mocked by his professional peers in the field of national security education. Congratulations, Doctor Gorka!
That’s all for the AM Quickie. Join us this afternoon on the Majority Report.
July 16, 2020 - AM Quickie
HOSTS - Sam Seder & Lucie Steiner
WRITER - Corey Pein
PRODUCER - Dorsey Shaw
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Brendan Finn