Middleboro Review 2: 04/26/20

Sunday, April 26, 2020

RSN: Paul Krugman | McConnell to Every State: Drop Dead

26 April 2020

The Financial Situation is Turning Dire Once Again

It’s late in the month and we are a long way from making our budget for April. The situation should not be nearly this bad. We have more than enough prospective donors.

We need your help folks. A few have responded, most have not.

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Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News

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26 April 20

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YESTERDAY NO ONE DONATED, WE GOT KILLED - Yesterday was a total disaster for donations. Barely a handful of donations and very little money. Let’s focus on today. Who can make a $30. donation? / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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Paul Krugman | McConnell to Every State: Drop Dead

Economist Paul Krugman. (photo: Getty Images)

Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "Covid-19 has killed tens of thousands of Americans, and will clearly kill many more. The lockdown needed to contain the coronavirus is causing an economic slump several times as deep as the Great Recession."

EXCERPT:

Yet this necessary slump doesn’t have to be accompanied by severe financial hardship. We have the resources to ensure that every American has enough to eat, that people don’t lose health insurance, that they don’t lose their homes because they can’t pay rent or mortgage fees. There’s also no reason we should see punishing cuts in essential public services.

Unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly likely that tens of millions of Americans will in fact suffer extreme hardship and that there will be devastating cuts in services. Why? The answer mainly boils down to two words: Mitch McConnell.

Medical workers transporting a coronavirus patient into an isolation ward in Fuyang, China, on Saturday. Experts fear a coronavirus pandemic, but its severity is uncertain. (photo: Chinatopix/AP)

Coronavirus FAQs: Does a Bigger Dose Make You Sicker? Can You Go to the Dentist?
Laurel Wamsley and Pien Huang, NPR
Excerpt: While there is a lot we don't know about SARS-CoV-2, experts believe they can answer this question with confidence: Yes - the amount of virus a person is exposed to makes a difference in whether they get sick and how sick they get."
READ MORE

Voting by mail. (photo: Don Ryan/AP)

New York and Kentucky Just Made It Easier to Vote by Mail
Anya van Wagtendonk, Vox
van Wagtendonk writes: "New York and Kentucky announced new programs on Friday aimed at improving access to mail-in ballots, as both states work to find ways to limit interaction at the polls during upcoming elections amid the Covid-19 pandemic."
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The Teamsters Port Division, in collaboration with Labor Community Services and the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, hosts a food distribution for port truck drivers impacted by the coronavirus shutdown measures at the Port of Los Angeles on April 22, 2020. (photo: Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

The Left Must Seize This Moment, or Others Will
Alfredo Saad-Filho, Jacobin
Saad-Filho writes: "The COVID-19 pandemic will transform our world. Massive state intervention is essential to head off an unprecedented slump. We must come out of this crisis with a better society."
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WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (right), flanked by World Health Organization (WHO) Health Emergencies Programme head Michael Ryan. (photo: AFP)

Trump Administration Is Preventing the US From Participating in Global Effort to Speed Development of Covid 19 Vaccine
Stephanie Nebehay, Reuters
Nebehay writes: "The United States will not take part in the launching of a global initiative on Friday to speed the development, production and distribution of drugs and vaccines against COVID-19, a spokesman for the U.S. mission in Geneva told Reuters."
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Inside of one of Hong Kong's 'cage homes.' (photo: Society for Community Organization/CNN)

Hong Kong's Cage Homes Are Almost Impossible to Self-Isolate In
Joshua Berlinger, CNN
Berlinger writes: "Cage homes are usually smaller than 100 square feet, only 25 square feet larger than most of the city's prison cells."
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Caged civet cats in a wildlife market in Guangzhou, China. (photo: Liu Dawei/AP)

'We Did It to Ourselves': Scientist Says Intrusion Into Nature Led to Pandemic
Phoebe Weston, Guardian UK
Weston writes: "The vast illegal wildlife trade and humanity's excessive intrusion into nature is to blame for the coronavirus pandemic, according to a leading US scientist who says 'this is not nature's revenge, we did it to ourselves.'"
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RSN: FOCUS: Jeffrey Toobin | Did John Bolton Outfox Himself on His Own Tell-All Book?

26 April 20

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THREE DAYS WITHOUT A TRIPLE DIGIT DONATION - It been three days since we have seen a donation in the triple digit donation range. Not everyone can afford that kind of donation, we understand. But if someone can it would really help. Sincere thanks in advance. / Marc Ash, Founder Reader Supported News

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FOCUS: Jeffrey Toobin | Did John Bolton Outfox Himself on His Own Tell-All Book?

John Bolton. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)

Jeffrey Toobin, The New Yorker
Toobin writes: "During the impeachment investigation, John Bolton, President Trump's onetime national-security adviser, played a cagey game with Congress."

EXCERPT:

He dropped hints suggesting that he knew a great deal about the President’s dealings with Ukraine—information that would have been highly relevant to the investigation. He also had a big deal with Simon & Schuster for a tell-all about his time in the Trump Administration, and the book had a tantalizing title: “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” Bolton dodged testifying before either the House or the Senate, thus preserving his news-making disclosures for the book-buying public.

But Bolton may have outfoxed himself. Like anyone with access to classified information, he signed a prepublication-review agreement. Each government agency that allowed Bolton access to its information—and, in the case of a national-security adviser, that would have been virtually all of them—has the right to review his manuscript and to excise purportedly improper disclosures. Bolton left the government on bad terms with Trump, and it looks like the Administration may be taking revenge through the review process. Charles Cooper, Bolton’s lawyer, has already complained about how the Administration is delaying and revising Bolton’s book, and his publication date has already slipped from March to May. But there’s no guarantee that the review process will even be finished by May, either. (Cooper and a spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster declined to comment.)

House investigators asked Bolton to testify last year, but he said he would do so only if a court ordered him to. The Democrats leading the probe declined to enter into lengthy court battles with witnesses, so the House voted for impeachment without hearing his testimony. At the last moment, Bolton said that he would comply with a subpoena to testify before the Senate trial, but the Republican majority refused to call any witnesses. So Bolton made it through the Ukraine investigation without having to reveal what was in his book. Still, if he had testified, most of his story would already be out in the open, and the Administration would have no grounds to claim that it was still classified since he had already revealed it in testimony to Congress. In other words, by ducking public testimony, Bolton protected the commercial value of his book, but he left himself at the mercy of the prepublication-review process. That may turn out to have been a bad bet.

The key legal precedent involving prepublication-review agreements involves the book “Decent Interval,” by Frank Snepp, who was a strategy analyst for the C.I.A. at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon when that city fell to the North Vietnamese. Snepp had signed a contract allowing the agency to review any of his books for classified information prior to their release, but in 1977 he went ahead and published “Decent Interval,” a devastating critique of the agency’s handling of the end of the war, without doing so. In 1980, the Supreme Court ruled that the government could not withdraw Snepp’s book from circulation, but it could impose a “constructive trust” on his earnings from the book. The Snepp case established the law as it remains today. If you publish a book in violation of a prepublication-review agreement, even if it turns out that the book includes no improper disclosures, the government will take your publisher’s advance and any other revenue you earn from the book. (For example, the government has sought to obtain Edward Snowden’s book revenues, because he, too, failed to comply with a prepublication-review agreement.)

I have firsthand experience with this rule. From 1987 to 1990, I worked as a prosecutor in the Iran-Contra investigation, a complicated scandal involving the secret sale of American weapons to the government of Iran, and the use of the proceeds to help anti-Sandinista rebels in Nicaragua. I signed two prepublication-review agreements: one with the C.I.A. and one with my boss, Lawrence Walsh, the independent counsel. When I wrote a book about my experiences, I submitted it to both the agency and Walsh for review. The C.I.A. promptly approved it, without any changes, but Walsh refused to either approve or disapprove the manuscript. If I had gone ahead and published without his approval, I risked the loss of my advance and future earnings from the book. So Penguin Books, my publisher, and I, who were represented by Robert Baron , Aaron Marcu, and Martin Garbus, sued Walsh in federal court in New York for a declaratory judgment that we had a right to publish. Judge John Keenan ruled in our favor, finding that I made no improper disclosures, and my book, “Opening Arguments: A Young Lawyer’s First Case—United States v. Oliver North,” was published in 1991. (Here is a good primer on prepublication-review agreements. )

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Sentient Horizons

This whale survived the cuts it received from a cruiser propeller in 2001. The kit today bears the name "Blade Runner".

Image may contain: ocean, water and outdoor

Image may contain: possible text that says 'I'M SO TIRED OF PEOPLE TELLING ME WHAT TRUMP "REALLY MEANT TO SAY". IF He CAN'T SPEAK FOR HIMSELF THEN He SHOULDN'T SPEAK FOR A NATION. H/T:@H_COMBS left'

Cape Cod Women for Change

This didn't go over well - backfired. Course)this is the area of CA that elected Devin Nunes (not sure if it's his district._
“As required by the morons that run our city we are posting this sign to remind you that due to the media driven panic of Covid-19 you are required to stay 6 feet away from each other,” one of the signs reads.

“Please stay on the red X or don’t, we don’t care but you have been warned about the Kung-Flu!”

The sign also featured a photo of the cartoon character Homer Simpson making an awkward sign with his hands.

Owners of a different restaurant with the same name as the Fresno location had some strong words and reached out to their attorney.