Following up on a theme that dominated MSNBC's "Morning Joe" on Friday morning that Donald Trump is giving every indication that he is giving up on being re-elected, contributor John Heilemann suggested that the president looks like he is now intentionally trying to throw the election.
Noting that the president wants to stop federal funding for COVID-19 testing in Texas at the end of the month over the objections of both of the state's Republican senators as well as eliminate the Affordable Care Act at a time when the pandemic is growing once more, Heilemann said the president's actions are not the ones of a man who wants to remain in office.
"If we stay on the current trend this is the month we'll look back and not say this was the month that Donald Trump lost the presidency," the MSNBC contributor began. "I think that was really the spring of 2020 phenomenon. This was the month when reality for everybody else set in in the sense we've now seen a succession of national polls -- and they have been the market leader in some sense and bringing up the rear have been the battleground state polls -- we know that Donald Trump is worse off at the national level than he is in the battleground states that's how he won in 2016,"
"I'm not saying Donald Trump can't turn it around. I'm not saying it's impossible. -- I'll never say that, never," he continued. "I will say right now we have a comprehensive, thorough, incredible picture of a national and battleground state electorate that has rejected Donald Trump and this is the month that the reality has set in for everyone it seems like except Donald Trump. I think he's not just lost touch with his base and the political reality, he seems to have lost touch with reality -- full stop."
"I go to a comment you made at the top at 6:00, it raises questions," he added. "No one is going to say this is true, he's going to drop out of the race, but it raises the question: does he want to win? Everything he is doing is what you would do if you were trying to throw an election."
A San Francisco man was blocked from entering his own apartment building by a white couple who called him a "criminal."
Michael Barajas, a Berkeley graduate and community educator for a biopharmaceutical company, said he used his remote key fob to open the garage door to SOMA Residences after coming home Tuesday evening from buying fruit, but a white SUV pulling in ahead of him purposefully blocked the entrance to the garage, reported KGO-TV.
"His immediate reaction was, 'Hey, you f*cking criminal, you're not coming in here,'" Barajas said.
Barajas, who recorded the encounter, said he was wearing black and his tattoos were visible, and he thinks the other man, later identified as William Beasly, decided he posed a threat.
"You don't have a right to come in here!" Beasley says.
Beasley then asks Barajas to show his key fob, and their dispute escalates until bystanders jump in.
"Dude, pull into your space and go!" says one man.
Barajas said the dispute continued for about 20 minutes, and he said Beasley threatened to shoot him and the video shows Beasley shove one of the bystanders.
"You don't touch my car bro!" Beasley says. "I'm protecting my f*cking place!"
SOMA Residences told the TV station they're working to resolve the situation, and Beasley was fired from his tech job with APEX Systems.
One of the station's photographers encountered Beasley, who said the situation could have been avoided if Barajas used his key fob -- which Barajas said he did -- and he denied that his behavior in the video was motivated by racism.
"Completely not true, why are you attacking me?" Beasley told the photographer.
In her latest column, Noonan observes that even the 6,000 or so people who did manage to attend Trump's rally in Tulsa last week didn't seem nearly as excited to be there as they did four years ago.
"The real picture at the Tulsa rally was not the empty seats so much as the empty faces—the bored looks, the yawning and phone checking, as if everyone was re-enacting something, hearing some old song and trying to remember how it felt a few years ago, when you heard it the first time," she writes.
Noonan also believes that Trump is uniquely ill-suited for the current moment, and he cannot credibly run a Nixonian "law and order" campaign when he behaves so chaotically on a daily basis.
"A sense that things have gone out of control under your watch does not help incumbents," she writes. "A sense that he cannot calibrate his actions but will do any crazy thing to bolster his position will not help him. He is a strange man in a strange time, the old rules don’t necessarily apply."
Florida is on the way to becoming the next epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic, and voters are losing faith in Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The state keeps setting daily records for new cases after DeSantis reopened the economy, and the new outbreak has cut into his approval rating and potentially makes President Donald Trump vulnerable in November's election, reported The Daily Beast.
“If you look around the country most governors, regardless of party, saw their numbers rise,” said Democratic political consultant Jeff Garcia, who pointed to DeSantis' approval rating dropping from 58 to 51 in April, while many other governors saw their numbers rise. “DeSantis is in a rare category. He is not overwhelmingly disliked, but he has seen a precipitous drop in his approval rating.”
DeSantis may be ready to tap the brakes on the reopening with 5,000 new cases daily, but a spokesman for the governor declined to comment on whether his handling of the pandemic hurt the president.
“We are where we are,” DeSantis said this week. “I didn’t say we’re going to go on to the next phase.”
DeSantis had made gains with voters before the pandemic after his narrow election win in 2018, but the coronavirus has cut into his support.
“I thought he was also making strides in solar power energy and increasing teachers’ salaries,” said Miami voter Rod Deal, who backed Democrat Andrew Gillum two years ago. “I thought he was putting the people’s needs first. From what I saw, I thought I will vote for him next time.”
But he said DeSantis had lost his trust, and his vote, during the pandemic.
“It was only in the last three months that I started wondering, ‘What the hell is up with this dude?” Deal said. “Opening up the entire state with the COVID numbers going up was horrible.”
That will almost certainly hurt the president's re-election chances in a state he needs to win, according to experts.
“If he has to own that and if people are looking to DeSantis as a role model for the state and he doesn't look good," said J. Edwin Benton, a political science professor at the University of South Florida, "then by implication it's going to have a similar if not equal effect on Donald Trump's chances of winning the state in November."
A hot desert wind is carrying a massive cloud of Saharan dust into the southern United States this week. Dust plumes from the Sahara routinely blow westward across the Atlantic at this time of year, but this event is a doozy – by some measures, the biggest in decades. And a second plume appears to be forming about a week behind the big one.
Across the southeastern U.S., from the Gulf Coast to the Carolinas and potentially as far north as Indianapolis and Cincinnati, dust effects will likely be visible in the coming days. Trillions of dust grains will reflect sunlight in every direction, creating milky white skies. The dusty haze reflects some sunshine back to space, cooling the surface a bit where the plume is thickest.
Longer waves of red and orange light tend to penetrate the dusty haze, so sunrises and sunsets are likely to be especially beautiful. On the downside, where the plume mingles with showers or thunderstorms, downdrafts may carry desert dust to Earth’s surface. This will impair air quality and could trigger allergic reactions and asthma attacks. The more dust reaches an area, the more pronounced the effects will be.
For atmospheric scientists like me, this huge dust plume is more than a cool event – it also shows how the Earth’s physical geography creates weather and climate patterns. Here’s what causes these plumes to form.
Earth’s rotation and uneven heating create climate zones
Our planet’s climate and weather systems start with motion in the atmosphere – swaths of air rising and falling, or moving horizontally from high-pressure areas to low-pressure areas.
Earth’s rotation and the fact that the planet is warmer near the equator than at the poles create circulation patterns in the atmosphere. At higher latitudes, toward the poles, winds blow faster and move from west to east. Near the equator, winds blow more slowly and travel from east to west. These are the trade winds that blew ships toward the New World during the age of exploration.
In the deep tropics, rising air expands and cools. The water vapor in it condenses and falls, producing rainforests that are the most productive ecosystems on the planet in the Amazon, the Congo, parts of Southeast Asia, Indonesia and the Philippines.
Atmospheric circulation – the movement of air through Earth’s atmosphere – helps create the planet’s weather patterns and climate zones.
In the subtropics of both hemispheres, sinking air compresses and warms, vaporizing every little wisp of cloud to produce the world’s arid regions: the Gobi, Atacama, Sonoran, Namib and Australian deserts. The largest desert is the belt of searing aridity that stretches across the Sahara and Arabian Peninsula and reaches deep into Central Asia. This is where trans-Atlantic dust plumes form.
Wavy winds and lofting dust
The Sahara is so hot and dry that North Africa is hotter than the equator at this time of year, although it lies thousands of miles farther north. This is the only place on the planet where the gradient of hot to cold runs backward – from the subtropics to the equator.
In the space of 1,000 miles, from the Atlantic coast of Ghana to the deep interior of Mali, the landscape changes from dripping jungle to searing sand. Evaporation keeps the rainforests cooler than the deserts to their north. This reversed thermal gradient affects the predominant trade winds, causing them to undulate back and forth and up and down in gigantic easterly waves from June through October.
The combination of a huge expanse of roasted land and an upside-down thermal pattern allows billows of high wind to free sand and dust from the Sahara’s hot surface, lofting it high on buoyant thermals and carrying it far to the west. As the air acquires a heavier and heavier burden of dust, it becomes even more erosive, sandblasting the arid landscape ever more thoroughly.
The largest dust plumes are ejected westward across the tropical Atlantic. Much of this desert dust is deposited in the ocean, but some of it reaches the Americas.
Fertilizing rainforests and short-circuiting hurricanes
Over the ocean, African easterly waves gobble up water vapor from the warm sea surface and can blow up into tropical storms. Nearly all Atlantic hurricanes start out as undulating breezes over the reversed thermal regime of West Africa.
Big Saharan dust plumes interfere with the formation of Atlantic hurricanes in at least three ways. First, their very dry air dilutes the humidity whose condensation forms the fuel of tropical storms. Second, upper-level winds that carry these plumes blow more strongly than winds at the surface. This variation in wind speed, known as wind shear, blows the tops off of thunderstorms before they can become organized into bigger systems. Third, dust plumes reflect and scatter tropical sunlight, reducing the tropical sun’s evaporating power and starving storms of their moisture.
For all of these reasons, tropical depressions, storms and hurricanes are less likely when big Saharan dust plumes are active over the Atlantic. That’s good news for coastal residents in the U.S. but bad news for surfers, since tropical storms are the main generators of waves in summer.
And dust plumes provide other benefits. Desert dust is an important source of nutrients for downwind ecosystems, both in the ocean and on land. Soluble iron in the dust helps some species of algae in surface waters to thrive. These tiny organisms form the foundation of food webs that sustain thousands of other species.
The dust also contains phosphorus, which is critical to the growth of tropical forests in Central and South America. These rich ecosystems get some phosphorus by dissolving local rocks at their roots but need more, which they receive from desert dust wafted thousands of miles westward by African easterly waves.
If you’re in an area affected by a dust plume, don’t forget to look up. You may see odd-looking skies or stunning sunsets, created by interlocking chains of cause and effect that link vast regions on both sides of the tropical Atlantic and sweep us into the drama of our spinning planet.
Saying the Donald Trump "fears losing more than he cares about winning," MSNBC's Joe Scarborough suggested the president might step aside rather than go down in a historic defeat in November's election.
With co-host Mika Brzezinski noting several normally Republican states showing the president losing to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Scarborough and "Morning Joe" regular Donny Deutsch agreed that -- for the moment -- it appears that the President has given up on trying to win the election.
"Does this guy want to be re-elected?" Scarborough asked. "Does he want to be there? There's nothing logical, I understand, about how Donald Trump acts, but he did know in 2016 when to be quiet, how to operate to at least keep himself in the game. He's not acting that way now. We'll be talking about how he's trying to abolish the Affordable Care Act at the height of, you know, the rise in pandemic deaths at a time when Americans are more scared of their healthcare>
"Even [Texas Republican senators} Ted Cruz and John Cornyn are writing him a letter telling him he can't do that as the Texas governor is telling Texas residents stay at home," he continued. "This is getting worse. It's getting worse in Arizona. It's getting worse in Florida. This guy that you and I have known for many years, he's -- not only is he not acting like he doesn't want to get re-elected, he's acting like he really wants to lose badly and take the Republican Party down with him."
Later in the segment the MSNBC host suggested Trump may attempt to bow out.
Stating the Biden might be the recipient of "375, possibly even 400, electoral votes." Scarborough added. "Donald Trump does not want to carry that around the rest of his life. He wants to carry around the fact that he scored one of the greatest political upsets of all time. He's known when to leave the stage before -- again, I'm the only one saying this -- I would not be surprised if he left the stage again. And again, I'm the only person saying it. Don't think it'll happen, but it's a possibility."
During the panel, CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser argued Trump's defenders can no longer brush off the pandemic as a problem for blue states now that is burning through the rest of the country.
"We're talking about states like South Carolina, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, and Texas, which are among the leading growth states right now for the pandemic," she said. "His advisers must be extremely alarmed when they see where this disease is headed."
CNN's John Berman then pointed out that the Trump administration this week asked the Supreme Court to overturn the entire Affordable Care Act, which would throw health insurance markets into chaos during the worst public health crisis faced in more than a century.
Guest Errol Louis then jumped in to argue that this shows how the Trump White House has completely lost the plot politically.
"The strategy from the White House and the re-election team of the president has not adapted to reality," he said. "Everything that they have planned to do has changed, or I should say, everything that they need to do has changed. The ground has shifted underneath them. They're running plays for a game that doesn't exist anymore."
A company created by a former Pentagon official who describes himself as a White House volunteer for Vice President Mike Pence won a $2.4 million dollar contract in May — its first federal award — to supply the Bureau of Prisons with surgical gowns.
Mathew J. Konkler, who worked in the Department of Defense during the George W. Bush administration, formed BlackPoint Distribution Company LLC in August 2019 in Indiana, state records show, but had won no federal work until May 26. The Bureau of Prisons chose the company with limited competition for a contract to supply surgical gowns to its facilities.
It is at least the second contract awarded to a company formed by an individual who had worked in or volunteered for the Trump administration; a company formed by Zach Fuentes, a former White House deputy chief of staff, won a $3 million contract just days after forming to supply face masks to the Indian Health Service. The masks did not meet FDA standards for use in health care settings, and an IHS spokesman said this week that the agency is trying to return the masks to Fuentes. Members of Congress called for investigations into the contract, and the Government Accountability Office now plans to review the deal “in the coming few months, as staff become available,” spokesman Charles Young said last week.
A lawyer for Fuentes’ company said the firm fulfilled all of its obligations to IHS under the contract.
BlackPoint Distribution’s website does not mention Konkler but describes its work as “locating, verifying and successfully delivering vital products and equipment in the midst of extremely challenging environments.” The domain name was registered on April 9, 2020. In its incorporation documents, Konkler is listed as the CEO of BlackPoint Distribution. The only contact information on the site is a web form and an email address. Emails sent to it were returned as undeliverable, and Konkler did not return multiple phone calls and messages seeking comment.
On the website for BlackPoint Creative LLC, another Indiana firm where Konkler serves as managing partner, his bio says that “since 2018, Mr. Konkler has also served as a volunteer at the White House on the staff of the Vice President, Michael R. Pence.”
In a 2018 interview with an Indiana business publication, Konkler said that another of his companies, BlackPoint Strategies was a “full-service consulting firm offering a variety of other advisory services, which focus on strategic marketing, digital marketing and crisis communications,” but also assisted Indiana companies in selling products in international markets. A search of Indiana state contracts yielded no previous or current government contracts for BlackPoint Distribution or other firms that Konkler is involved in.
A spokesman for Pence said that Konkler previously had helped coordinate some of the vice president’s travel but was not currently a volunteer.
“Mr. Konkler is not nor ever has been a member of Vice President Pence’s staff,” said Devin O’Malley in an email. “Mr. Konkler has previously helped in a volunteer capacity doing advance on trips, but has not done so since June 2019. No one in the Office of the Vice President was aware of or had any role in Mr. Konkler receiving this contract.”
Researchers at American Bridge 21st Century, a Democratic opposition research group, identified Konkler’s role.
White House volunteers are not uncommon, and typically they are involved in specific projects such as the correspondence office, which reads and answers messages sent to the administration, or in holiday decoration efforts.
Government ethics experts said that conflict of interest rules do apply to volunteers but depend on the kind of work being done. “I’m worried about conflicts of interest but also about someone who isn’t a government employee knowing the [vice president’s] travel plans,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight. Konkler’s online biography states that he has held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance.
“The Bureau of Prisons took a risk awarding a $2.5 million contract to a new company,” Amey said. “Let's hope this ends up as a success story and not another example of a pop-up contractor trying to profit from an emergency situation.”
The contract itself was awarded under urgent circumstances. The Bureau of Prisons did not issue a request for proposals because the pandemic “resulted in the need to limit competition due to compelling urgency,” Justin Long, a spokesman for the bureau, wrote in an email. The contract originally stated June 3 as the date for gown delivery to six different federal prisons, but Long said in an email that the final shipment was delivered on June 25.
BlackPoint’s contract is the largest of all federal contracts that specifically mention “surgical gowns,” according to federal contracting data.
Records show that the agency received three offers and that the contract was awarded under what are known as “simplified acquisition procedures,” a process typically used for contracts involving smaller amounts of money. Because of the national emergency declared in response to the pandemic, the threshold for using simplified procedures was raised to $13 million when purchasing commercial items such as surgical gowns. BlackPoint Distribution’s bid was the lowest, Long said.
BlackPoint Distribution is one of more than 445 first-time federal contractors awarded contracts during the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, according to a ProPublica analysis of federal contracting data. These new contractors have received more than $2 billion in federal spending as of June 25, often without competitive bidding or direct experience in the areas they won deals in.
After declaring a national emergency on March 13, the federal government relaxed procurement rules to allow federal agencies to skip competitive bidding at times in favor of a more streamlined process that could deliver personal protective equipment and other products quickly. But in doing so, it also has made deals with vendors who were unable to fulfill orders or who have provided inadequate equipment.
MSNBC's Joe Scarborough revealed why White House aides can't stop President Donald Trump from shooting himself in the foot.
Trump's increasingly unpopular actions on coronavirus and police reform, the two biggest crises he's faced so far during his presidency, made the "Morning Joe" host wonder whether he even wanted to be president anymore.
"Talking to people inside the White House and you ask why does he do A or B, instead of C or D, they will say, because if we go and try to reason with him, if we tell him not to do something because it hurts his cause, then we put it in his mind and he will immediately tweet on it," Scarborough said. "They have absolutely no control of him, and they don't give him good advice on restraining from certain destructive behaviors that would hurt his campaign, hurt his White House, hurt the country, because -- and they're right, if they put that thought in his head of not doing something that's destructive, then it's in his head and he will immediately do it."
"They have no control over this candidate who, again, continues to pick the wrong side of a poll issue and pick being on the wrong side of history every day," he added.
Scarborough wondered why Republican senators were letting the president drag them down with him.
"Republican senators don't have to go along with this," he said. "They don't have to lose by 10, 15, 20 points, they don't have to. One other thing, too. It would only take a couple of Republican senators to stop this madness. It's not like Republicans have a 10-point vote margin in the United States Senate. It would only take a handful of Republican senators saying, enough."
There's no question that President Donald Trump is a serial, inveterate, unrepentent liar. But now his lies are costing lives, many, many lives – so many lives some are starting to accuse him of genocide, and others are asking, "how do we not label Trump a killer of American citizens by negligence, ignorance and incompetence?"
Just before midnight on Thursday President Trump dropped a huge lie on the American public, a lie designed to make those who don't know and won't bother to check, feel "safer," and go out into their cities and towns thinking the coronavirus pandemic isn't that bad, or that deadly.
It is.
Some might call his actions "depraved indifference," but whatever you'd like to call it, there's no getting around the fact that Trump is playing Russian roulette with Americans' lives. He's pointing the gun, pulling the trigger, and doesn't care if there's a bullet in the chamber or not.
The United States ranks number nine in coronavirus mortality – where number one is the worst in the world. Out of 215 countries and territories, we're number nine. There are 206 nations where statistically you would have a better chance of not dying from coronavirus if you were infected.
The truth: In the United States, the coronavirus mortality rate is one of the highest in the world.
Here's proof.
Worldometers offers one of the best interactive, continuously updsted charts for tracking the coronavirus pandemic.
Here's a screenshot, taken just before midnight on Thursday, sorted by per capita coronavirus deaths, or deaths from coronavirus for each one million people in the population.
In the United States the number is 383, as of the time this was taken.
For those who prefer Johns Hopkins' statistics, the U.S. also ranks ninth in mortality rate, where number one is the worst. Johns Hopkins also offers a "case mortality" rate, meaning of those diagnosed with coronavirus, how many die. There the U.S. ranks 34th. Again, number one is the worst, and there are 215 countries. No matter how you look at the numbers, there is no way the mortality rate in the U.S. is "one of the lowest in the World."
US telecoms giant Verizon joined the growing list of brands vowing to stop buying advertising on Facebook on Thursday over its perceived failure to crack down on hate speech and incitements to violence.
"We're pausing our advertising until Facebook can create an acceptable solution that makes us comfortable and is consistent with what we've done with YouTube and other partners," said John Nitti, Verizon chief media officer.
Multiple companies -- most recently Ben & Jerry's -- have announced they will halt advertising purchases in July after the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) called for the boycott as part of the "Stop the Hate for Profit" campaign.
Facebook's "hate speech, incitement, and misinformation policies are inequitable," ADL chief executive Jonathan Greenblatt said in a letter Thursday.
Greenblatt noted the social media giant's "haphazard" placement of advertising, pointing to an example in which a Verizon ad appeared next to "a video from the conspiracy group QAnon drawing on hateful and anti-Semitic rhetoric."
Facebook is under increasing pressure for its hands-off approach to misinformation and inflammatory posts, particularly by US President Donald Trump.
The social media company made an estimated $70 billion annually from ads, the coalition -- which includes the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) -- behind #StopHateForProfit claimed in a statement on the ADL website.
"We respect any brand's decision, and remain focused on the important work of removing hate speech and providing critical voting information," said Facebook's Carolyn Everson, vice president of global marketing solutions.
Sporting goods makers Patagonia, North Face and REI, as well as the freelance staffing agency Upwork have all said they would boycott Facebook.
In a stinging op-ed, the editors argue that the president has failed to articulate a message for his second term in office, and has instead chosen to rail against his own personal grievances.
This course of action, they argue, has left Trump with his Fox News-loving base and almost no one else.
"Mr. Trump’s base of 35 percent or so will never leave, but the swing voters who stood by him for three and half years has fallen away in the last two months," they write. "This includes suburban women, independents, and seniors who took a risk on him in 2016 as an outsider who would shake things up. Now millions of Americans are close to deciding that four more years are more risk than they can stand."
The editors advise Trump that there's still time to get his act together, but warn that time is running short.
"He should understand that he is headed for a defeat that will reward all of those who schemed against him in 2016," they conclude. "Worse, he will have let down the 63 million Americans who sent him to the White House by losing, of all people, to 'Sleepy Joe.'"
The Trump administration in the dead-of-night late Thursday filed a motion asking the U.S. Supreme Court to void, or invalidate, the complete Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare. The stunning move comes on the day coronavirus cases hit yet another all-time high, the second day in a row.
"In a late-night filing, Solicitor General Noel Francisco said that once the law's individual coverage mandate and two key provisions are invalidated, 'the remainder of the ACA should not be allowed to remain in effect,'" CNN reports.
President Donald Trump repeatedly has told voters he will protect their healthcare, including for people with pre-existing conditions. The Affordable Care Act mandates that no one with pre-existing conditions can be charged more. But the Trump administration, especially his Dept. of Justice, has actively worked to eliminate ObamaCare and protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
Here is President Trump, just five days ago, promising to protect people with pre-existing conditions.
This is a breaking news and developing story. Details may change. This story will be updated, and NCRM will likely publish follow-up stories on this news. Stay tuned and refresh for updates.
