The House Armed Services Committee has voted against limiting presidential authority under the Insurrection Act, the law President Trump threatened to invoke to deploy active-duty troops in response to protests against racial injustices. The amendment, offered by Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), failed largely along party lines in a 25-31 vote. Several moderate or vulnerable Democrats voted against the amendment: Reps. Kendra Horn (Okla.), Xochitl Torres Small (N.M.), Jared Golden (Maine), Elaine Luria (Va.), Anthony Brindisi (N.Y.) and Gil Cisneros (Calif.). Last month, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act at the height of the protests, saying he would deploy active-duty troops if governors did not “dominate” demonstrators. The 1807 act creates an exception to the general prohibition on using the U.S. military to enforce domestic laws. It was last used by former President George H.W. Bush at the request of California’s governor to quell the 1992 Rodney King riots. Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act despite his threat, but Democrats are still pushing changes to the law after federal law enforcement used force to clear protesters from Lafayette Square outside the White House. Trump also deployed thousands of National Guardsmen to Washington, D.C., and the administration ordered active-duty soldiers to deploy to outside D.C. and be ready to enter the city if ordered. Escobar’s amendment would have required a president to make a certification to Congress that a state is unwilling or unable to suppress an unlawful obstruction or rebellion before invoking the Insurrection Act. It would also have given Congress the power to pass a resolution to terminate a president’s use of the act. The debate over the amendment was the most heated of the House Armed Services Committee’s National Defense Authorization Act markup Wednesday. Tempers flared as Reps. Anthony Brown (D-Md.) and Bradley Byrne (R-Ala.) attempted to talk over each other, and Committee Chairman Adam Smith (D-Wash.) attempted to intervene. Byrne first attempted to talk over Brown, but stopped after Smith took control of the proceeding and told Byne “you know the rules … don’t act aggrieved.” When it was Byrne’s turn, Brown attempted to talk over him, and when Smith tried to stop that, Brown did not yield. When Byrne implored Smith to intervene, Smith told him to “chill.” After repeatedly saying Brown’s name, Smith shouted, “Mr. Brown” and struck his gavel three times. “Anthony,” an exasperated Smith said as Brown kept talking. “Are you kidding me, Anthony? Anthony, please suspend.” Brown then asked Smith to treat him the same as Byrne, saying he “didn’t hear a first name admonition” against Byrne. Smith replied that was because Byrne stopped talking. Smith then turned back to Byrne, who yielded time to Brown. Brown used that time to apologize. “What I’m going to do is use my 30 seconds to make a very sincere, genuine apology to you, to the chairman and to this committee,” Brown said. Smith said later in the markup he and Brown spoke to each other and that “we’re all good.” Nick Note: This is more dangerous then you think. If Trump evokes the Insurrection Act he can put troops on the streets. And he would love to do it. these are very dangerous times.
Internal Messages Reveal Crisis at Houston Hospitals as Coronavirus Cases Surge
Texas was one of the first states in the nation to ease social distancing mandates. In Houston, the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has quadrupled since Memorial Day. “It’s time to be alarmed,” one expert said
HOUSTON — At Lyndon B. Johnson Hospital on Sunday, the medical staff ran out of both space for new coronavirus patients and a key drug needed to treat them. With no open beds at the public hospital, a dozen COVID-19 patients who were in need of intensive care were stuck in the emergency room, awaiting transfers to other Houston area hospitals, according to a note sent to the staff and shared with reporters. A day later, the top physician executive at the Houston Methodist hospital system wrote to staff members warning that its coronavirus caseload was surging: “It has become necessary to consider delaying more surgical services to create further capacity for COVID-19 patients,” Dr. Robert Phillips said in the note, an abrupt turn from three days earlier, when the hospital system sent a note to thousands of patients, inviting them to keep their surgical appointments. And at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, staff members were alerted recently that the hospital would soon begin taking in cancer patients with COVID-19 from the city’s overburdened public hospital system, a highly unusual move for the specialty hospital. These internal messages highlight the growing strain that the coronavirus crisis is putting on hospital systems in the Houston region, where the number of patients hospitalized with COVID-19 has nearly quadrupled since Memorial Day. As of Tuesday, more than 3,000 people were hospitalized for the coronavirus in the region, including nearly 800 in intensive care. “To tell you the truth, what worries me is not this week, where we’re still kind of handling it,” said Roberta Schwartz, Houston Methodist’s chief innovation officer, who’s been helping lead the system’s efforts to expand beds for COVID-19 patents. “I’m really worried about next week.”
What’s happening in Houston draws eerie parallels to New York City in late March, when every day brought steep increases in the number of patients seeking care at overburdened hospitals — though, so far, with far fewer deaths. But as coronavirus cases surge in Texas, state officials here have not reimplemented the same lockdown measures that experts say helped bring New York’s outbreak under control, raising concern among public health officials that Houston won’t be able to flatten the curve. “The time to act and time to be alarmed is not when you’ve hit capacity, but it’s much earlier when you start to see hospitalizations increase at a very fast rate,” said Lauren Ancel Meyers, a professor of integrative biology who leads the University of Texas at Austin COVID-19 Modeling Consortium. “It is definitely time to take some kind of action. It is time to be alarmed.” “The hospitalizations you see today, they’re not just going to linearly increase in the next two weeks,” said Dr. Clay Johnston, dean of the Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re going to accelerate. When you overwhelm the hospitals, you’re in big trouble. That to me is the impossible task that the governor faces. It’s like steering a giant tanker through a tiny strait without any maps.”
Trump: We will have COVID-19 vaccine soon
President Trump predicted Thursday during a “Hannity” town hall in Green Bay, Wis. that “before the end of the year, we’ll have a vaccine” for the coronavirus. Trump told host Sean Hannity that vaccines and therapeutics “are coming along great.” “I think we’re going to have an answer very soon. Very soon indeed … ” the president said. “We have great companies and we’re totally mobilized. You know, the military is doing it, we’re ready to go. As soon as we have it, we’ll be ready to distribute it all over the country.” Earlier Thursday, the governors of Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico announced that they had put their states’ reopening process on hold as the number of cases continued to surge. The U.S. reported 34,500 COVID-19 cases Wednesday, slightly fewer than the day before but still near the high of 36,400 reached April 24, according to a count kept by Johns Hopkins University. Several states set single-day case records this week, including Arizona, California, Nevada, Texas and Oklahoma. “When you do tests, you have cases,” said Trump, who touted that the U.S. had carried out “almost 30 million coronavirus tests.” “But, what they don’t say is that there are fewer deaths than there have been,” the president went on. “Way, way down and our mortality rate is among the best in the world.” According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), hospital visits were six times higher among patients with underlying conditions, and those same patients were 12 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than their counterparts without medical conditions. The five most prevalent underlying conditions in coronavirus patients are hypertension, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, obesity, and chronic lung disease. Nick Note: Let me ask you a very important question, Are you willing to bet your life YOU wlil get a working vaccine? WELL THAT IS WHAT TRUMP WANTS YOU TO DO!
Wirecard drops 26%, ex-COO reportedly on the run
Wirecard shares plunged over 25% on Wednesday as Munich prosecutors raided its offices and widened the probe into the company’s executives over the recent accounting scandal. Meanwhile, media reported that former COO Jan Marsalek, who is under investigation, is on the run. According to the reports, German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Marsalek but he traveled to the Philippines last week and is believed to have left the country for China in the meantime.
Workers getting laid off for second time as virus’s surge closes businesses
Millions of American workers are suffering from economic whiplash, thinking they were finally returning to work only to be sent home again because of the coronavirus’s latest surge. Stores, restaurants, gyms and other businesses that reopened weeks ago are shuttering again, and this time Congress appears less inclined to provide additional aid. Other businesses that had banked on customers returning and restrictions lifting – such as hotel chains, construction firms and movie theaters – are seeing hours cut and reopening dates pushed back indefinitely as consumer demand stalls. And many governors, including some who had drawn scrutiny for initially playing down the virus’s risks, are issuing new safety restrictions, in some cases just weeks after the first round of guidelines had begun to lift. In recent weeks, three states – California, Florida and Texas – have implemented policies that partly restrict restaurant or bar service. Nine others – Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico and North Carolina – have postponed or slowed reopening plans. Thousands of workers are caught in these rapidly shifting seas, many of them hourly and low-wage service employees, and are now facing unemployment for a second time. They say the past few months have been jarring: navigating unemployment in March, preparing to go back to work in April or May, and now confronting the prospect of what could be another long stretch without a paycheck. This time, many say they’re on even shakier financial ground as they topple into yet another period without a job. They face what experts have begun calling a “fiscal cliff”: the July end date for the $600 in weekly supplemental aid that has helped keep so many families afloat. For many restaurant and bar owners and workers, the past few weeks have brought an onslaught of bad news. Some said they watched wearily as infections began to tick up, just as they were starting to reopen after months of being closed. Then came all the new cases. In Phoenix, more than a dozen restaurants closed in early June after customers or employees were found to have been infected with the virus. In Jacksonville, Fla., restaurants began closing after cases rose there – in one outbreak, 16 friends tested positive for the coronavirus after dining at an Irish pub, where seven employees later tested positive. In Houston, restaurant owners are warning that they may not survive the new round of closures. In California, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered bars closed in seven counties, including Los Angeles. The food-service and bar industry – which employed more than 8 million people, or about 5% of the workforce before the pandemic – has been devastated by the virus, losing more than 6 million jobs in March and April. But a strong rebound of 1.4 million jobs in May had helped drive down the country’s unemployment rate, sending hopes soaring that an economic recovery was underway. This new round of closures points to the significant challenges that will exist until a treatment or vaccine is developed. The fresh round of closures is raising fears that the already challenged recovery could stall. The country has been processing about 1.5 million new unemployment insurance applications a week for most of June – an alarmingly high rate that remains well-above pre-pandemic records – although it has come down from a peak of more than 6 million in March. According to a preliminary study by two Harvard University researchers, limitations at restaurants, bars and nonessential businesses amounted for 4.4% to 8.5% of the significant increase in unemployment in mid-March. Public health experts said the threat of a new wave of closures is why stringent public health measures have been needed to prevent the virus’s spread. “It’s an impossible choice,” said Emily Timm, an executive director at the Texas-based Worker’s Defense Project, a nonprofit organization that helps immigrant and undocumented workers. “People don’t want to risk their family’s health. But it’s not a choice if you don’t have access to the safety net or you were living paycheck to paycheck before the coronavirus hit.” There are some indications that factors beyond the shutdowns weigh more heavily on the economy. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis issued a recent report show that businesses said declining demand from consumers was the top constraint on their recovery, ahead of social distancing requirements and concerns about their workers’ health. “The pace of business reopening has to be completely in sync with the amount that demand is going up,” one of the authors, Charles Gascon, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank in St. Louis, said in an interview. “It’s not like there’s an on or off switch in the economy that you flip and things go back to normal. Things have to get back up to whatever the new normal is.” Nick Note: Tomorrow we get the pie in the sky heavily doctored unemployment report. I have started laughing already……
Fed’s Kashkari: Headline unemployment rate deeply flawed as measure of joblessness
The headline unemployment rate is deeply flawed as a measure of joblessness, Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari said on Tuesday. “It’s not clear that something like black unemployment rate could be targeted to improve racial equity but the Fed should be open-minded on the issue.” Meanwhile, Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic noted that bias is seen as a drag on the economic potential and said the Fed’s growing attention to the economic equity issues will not change. “The Fed can only do so much to improve economic outcomes across race, will require work by multiple parts of the government.” Nick Note: Hear me well i do not care how much V bottom bullshit they want to blow up your ass. This is not even close to being over. KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY. Wait to you see the white in their bankruptcy eyes before you shoot your wand. 10 cents on the dollar from today’s prices. The fed cannot save the day. You will see massive starving in the streets of America.
GM Q2 sales drop 34% YoY, sees signs of recovery
(RTTNews) – General Motors (GM) said Wednesday that it delivered 492,489 vehicles in the second quarter of 2020, a decrease of about 34 percent from last year, reflecting Covid-19 pandemic’s effect on demand and tight inventories. The company stated that the industry experienced significant declines due to the outbreak of COVID-19, but full-size pickup truck sales performed exceptionally well, and overall sales showed signs of recovery, especially deliveries to retail customers. Retail sales were off by about 24 percent in the quarter. Retail sales in April were down the most in the quarter, off by about 35 percent compared to last year, but recovered significantly in May and June with year-over-year declines of around 20 percent or less. The majority of GM’s U.S. plants, including all truck and SUV plants, will continue to operate during the traditional two-week summer shutdown. In, the majority of GM’s increasing output will be devoted to restocking retail channels with capacity made available by lower rental volumes. Nick Note: 33% drop in sales is a BIG deal. To get a slight increase in sales off the bottom they are giving them away. Wait even bigger bargains are coming.
2020 Election Odds: Donald Trump Has Only 33% Probability of Beating Joe Biden
As COVID-19 cases continue to surge throughout the United States while the country confronts issues of systemic racism, Donald Trump’s odds to be re-elected continue to fall. Trump is now a +175 betting underdog, giving him only a 33% implied probability of winning the election compared to Joe Biden’s 59.3% implied probability. The latest polling backs it up: According to FiveThirtyEight’s average of national polls, Biden has an average +9.6 edge over Trump — that’s tied for Biden’s second-biggest edge over Trump in FiveThirtyEight’s average since late February. Trump’s implied probability has steadily declined since outrage over George Floyd’s death swept the nation, falling from 45.2% on June 2 to 33% on June 30. Trump hits this new low just days after The New York Times released new polling that showed him falling six to 11 points behind in six battleground states that helped deliver his 2016 victory. Nick Note: What a humiliation. Knowing Trumps ego I would not be surprised if things get much worse to see him withdraw from the election or worse. WORSE IS him declaring a national Pandemic emergency. Freedom is won by a guy and lost by decree.
From pandering to Putin to abusing allies and ignoring his own advisers, Trump’s phone calls alarm US officials
https://youtu.be/wKCMREZa2to
CNN)In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations.
The calls caused former top Trump deputies — including national security advisers H.R. McMaster and John Bolton, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and White House chief of staff John Kelly, as well as intelligence officials — to conclude that the President was often “delusional,” as two sources put it, in his dealings with foreign leaders. The sources said there was little evidence that the President became more skillful or competent in his telephone conversations with most heads of state over time. Rather, he continued to believe that he could either charm, jawbone or bully almost any foreign leader into capitulating to his will, and often pursued goals more attuned to his own agenda than what many of his senior advisers considered the national interest. Nick Note: I regard this story as factual and timely. You damn straight you should be worried. If Trump gets a second term their will be no America as you know it. Its a long article. Its well worth your time to read this report to the end.
Fauci warns U.S. could see 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day
Anthony Fauci testified to a Senate committee Tuesday that he would “not be surprised” if the U.S. begins reporting as many as 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day, adding, “I’m very concerned and not satisfied with what’s going on because we’re going in the wrong direction.”
The big picture: The country is currently seeing about 40,000 new cases daily, but that number will rise rapidly “if this does not turn around,” Fauci said. He added that the outbreaks in various parts of the country put “the entire country at risk” and “clearly we don’t have this under control.”
- Earlier in the hearing, Fauci warned that some states are “skipping over” checkpoints in the federal reopening guidelines and that this is leading to new hotspots in states like Texas, Florida and Arizona.
- He added that even states and localities that “did it right” regarding reopening still have individuals who engaged in an “all or none phenomenon” — disregarding social-distancing measures and face mask usage while out socially.
What he’s saying:
“I can’t make an accurate prediction, but it is going to be very disturbing, I will guarantee you that, because when you have an outbreak in one part of the country even though in other parts of the country they’re doing well, they are vulnerable. I made that point very clearly last week at a press conference. We can’t just focus on those areas that are having the surge. It puts the entire country at risk.”
“We are now having 40,000+ new cases a day. I would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 a day if this does not turn around. And so I’m very concerned.”
— Anthony Fauci at a Senate Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearingNick Note: Its getting ugly out ther. GOD helps all. Their is NO leadersip..