Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

Yes, Trump nearly fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper last week for not putting troops in America's streets but he was talked out of it.

President Trump reportedly wanted to dismiss Defense Secretary Mark Esper last week over conflicting views on the use of active-duty troops to quell nationwide protests but was talked out of it by advisers and lawmakers.

Officials told The Wall Street Journal that Trump — angry with Esper for not backing his threats to use active-duty forces to quash unrest in Washington, D.C., Minneapolis and other cities — was focused on sacking the Pentagon chief last Wednesday.

But when Trump asked several advisers for their opinions on the matter, he was reportedly counseled to shelve such a plan.

Esper at the same time had started to prepare a letter of resignation, as he was aware of Trump’s anger, but he stopped after aides and other advisers recommended against it, some of the officials told the Journal.

Earlier that day, Esper had said he did not support invoking the Insurrection Act — an 1807 law that allows the president to use the military for domestic law enforcement — over protests following the police killing of George Floyd, unarmed black man, in Minneapolis on May 25. He said such a move should be done only as a “last resort” and that the protests did not warrant such a response.

The stance was a break in messaging from Trump, who had urged governors to deploy National Guard troops to “dominate the streets” and stop any unrest, threatening to dispatch U.S. military forces to states and cities that did not meet his demands.

The Pentagon declined to comment, and the White House failed to respond to requests for comment.

So yes, Trump has no problem with open tyranny.  And eventually, people will stop talking him out of it.

The Country Goes Viral, Con't

Memorial Day reopenings and the end of social distancing over the last two weeks has led to, surprise, a major spike in new COVID-19 cases in over a dozen states including here in Kentucky.

As rates of coronavirus infections ease in places such as New York and Illinois and onetime hot spots move into new phases of reopening, parts of the country that had previously avoided being hit hard by the outbreak are now tallying record-high new infections.

Since the start of June, 14 states and Puerto Rico have recorded their highest-ever seven-day average of new coronavirus cases since the pandemic began, according to data tracked by The Washington Post: Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Florida, Kentucky, New Mexico, North Carolina, Mississippi, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Utah.

If the pandemic’s first wave burned through dense metro hubs such as New York City, Chicago and Detroit, the highest percentages of new cases are coming from places with much smaller populations: Lincoln County, Ore., an area of less than 50,000, has averaged 20 new daily cases; the Bear River Health District in northern Utah has averaged 78 new cases a day in the past week, most of them tied to an outbreak at a meat processing plant in the small town of Hyrum.

The increase of coronavirus cases in counties with fewer than 60,000 people is part of the trend of new infections surging across the rural United States. Health experts worry those areas, already short of resources before the pandemic, will struggle to track new cases with the infrastructure that remains.

Adding to the disparity in health-care support, residents in states such as Mississippi, Florida and South Carolina are living under only minor-to-moderate restrictions — even as their average daily infection rate is rising.

The past two weeks of protests against police brutality will be yet another variable in how the virus spreads in the country. Protesters flooded the streets of major cities but gathered in small towns across the country, too. Though the widespread protests are a boon for the movement, health officials have warned about the impact so many people closely packed with one another could have on transmission rates.

As of Monday, at least 109,000 people in the United States have died of covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, with more than 1.95 million cases of the virus reported.

In other words, we're almost guaranteed a massive rise in COVID-19 cases by the end of the month, and in rural areas without the infrastructure to contain the spread or to handle a lot of ICU patients at once, especially in states like Texas.

Texas reported a record number of coronavirus hospitalizations Monday — weeks after Gov. Greg Abbott took the lead among governors in easing social distancing measures to help bring jobs back.

There are currently 1,935 Covid-19 patients in hospitals across the state, topping the previous hospitalization record of 1,888 patients on May 5, according to new data from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Texas was among the first states to relax its statewide stay-at-home order, allowing it to expire April 30 and some businesses to resume operations May 1.

The coronavirus has infected more than 75,400 people in Texas, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. The positivity rate for Covid-19 tests in Texas reached a low of 4.27% toward the end of May but has since jumped to 7.55%, according to the state’s health department.

While hospitalizations are increasing, there are more than 1,600 open intensive-care beds and more than 5,800 ventilators available for critically ill patients.

Some infectious disease experts say hospitalization numbers could be a better way to track a state’s reopening performance since it’s more difficult to skew than testing data, which fluctuates depending on how many tests are being run.

Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, and San Antonio represent most of that capacity.  Rural Texas, not so much.

110,000 dead and rising daily, COVID-19 hasn't gone away just because the news has focused on police brutality and Black Lives Matter protests worldwide.

Be careful out there, folks.

It's Unsound And They're Police

Whoop Whoop! That's the sound of the beast!

Two law enforcement agencies acknowledged Monday that officers patrolling Minneapolis during the height of recent protests knifed the tires of numerous vehicles parked and unoccupied in at least two locations in the midst of the unrest.

Video and photo images posted on the news outlet Mother Jones show officers in military-style uniforms puncturing tires in the Kmart parking lot at Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue on May 30.

Images from S. Washington Avenue at Interstate 35W also showed officers with knives deflating the tires of two unoccupied cars with repeated jabs on May 31. Department of Public Safety spokesman Bruce Gordon confirmed that tires were cut in "a few locations."

"State Patrol troopers strategically deflated tires … in order to stop behaviors such as vehicles driving dangerously and at high speeds in and around protesters and law enforcement," Gordon said.

Gordon said the patrol also targeted vehicles "that contained items used to cause harm during violent protests" such as rocks, concrete and sticks.

"While not a typical tactic, vehicles were being used as dangerous weapons and inhibited our ability to clear areas and keep areas safe where violent protests were occurring," he said. As in all operations of this size, there will be a review about how these decisions were made."

Deputies from Anoka County followed state orders and joined the patrol and also cut the tires on vehicles on Washington Avenue, said Anoka County Sheriff's Lt. Andy Knotz.

Knotz said the deputies got their directions from the state-led Multiagency Command Center [MACC], which was coordinating law enforcement during the protests connected to the death on May 25 of George Floyd.

Towing the vehicles was not an option, Knotz said, because "you could not get any tow trucks in there" because of the mass of people in the area.

Val Ebertz, who was at the protests, witnessed police slashing tires in the Kmart parking lot at Lake Street and Nicollet Avenue in the midst of protests on May 30.

She added these were the same officers who "were tear-gassing and shooting us with rubber bullets to try to push us farther back into the Kmart parking lot."

To recap, cops knifed tires of protesters, got caught on video, turns out they were told to do it.

Who was going to hold them responsible for that, the goddamn cops?  It's all games to them, and we're all the bad guys to abuse freely.

Long before former officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, the Third Precinct in south Minneapolis had a reputation for being home to police officers who played by their own rules.

One officer kicked a handcuffed suspect in the face, leaving his jaw in pieces. Officers beat and pistol-whipped a suspect in a parking lot on suspicion of low-level drug charges. Others harassed residents of a south Minneapolis housing project as they headed to work, and allowed prostitution suspects to touch their genitals for several minutes before arresting them in vice stings.
These and more substantiated incidents, detailed in court records and police reports, help explain a saying often used by fellow cops to describe the style of policing practiced in the Third: There’s the way that the Minneapolis Police Department does things, and then there’s the way they do it “in Threes.”

Between 2007 and 2017, the city paid out $2.1 million to settle misconduct lawsuits involving Third Precinct officers. Judges have thrown out cases for “outrageous” conduct of the officers, and prosecutors have been forced to drop charges for searches found to be illegal, according to court records.

The brand of aggressive policing on display in the Floyd video has long been standard practice for some Third Precinct officers when dealing with suspects of nonviolent, low-level crimes, often involving people of color, said Abigail Cerra, a commissioner for Minneapolis’ Police Conduct Oversight Commission.

“My clients were constantly getting anal searches,” said Cerra, who also has been a public defender. “Not at the hospital. At the Third Precinct.”

Professional bullies with badges, and the bad cops get enabled by the "good cops". who cover for them.

Yes, maybe their funding needs to be cut and the bad cops need to go.