THE OWLS' NEST - Mostly U.S. Politics
South Korea and the United States discovered their first cases on the same day. South Korea now has 183 dead — or 4 deaths per 1 million people. The U.S. death ratio (25 per 1 million) is six times worse — and rising quickly.
Booting from a recovery USB drive allows you to perform basic troubleshooting and repairs, and to use Windows’ automatic troubleshooter utility. If you include the Windows 10 system files on your recovery drive, you can boot from that drive and re-install Windows 10 if necessary.
A basic recovery drive needs only 512 MB of space, but if you plan to copy the system files to the recovery drive it should have at least 16 GB of total space. The USB drive will be formatted during creation of the recovery drive, so move any data you wish to preserve.
Enter “Create a recovery drive” in the Search box to find the shortcut that leads to the recovery media creator tool. When the tool starts, the option “Back up system files to the recovery drive” will be checked. Uncheck it if you want just a basic recovery drive. Then insert a USB drive in a port and click Next in the tool’s window. Follow the prompts and soon you will have a recovery drive. Label the flash drive and keep it in a safe place.
If you don't have an OEM (vendor-supplied) recovery partition, you can add Windows 10 installation files to the recovery drive by downloading the Windows 10 Media Creation tool, using it to create an ISO file, double-clicking to mount the ISO file in Explorer, and then dragging the complete contents of the mounted drive to your recovery drive.
You won’t miss your recovery drive until it’s desperately needed, and then it will be too late. So take the time to make one while you don’t need it. If your Windows 10 system somehow gets borked, insert your recovery drive, reboot your computer, and follow the prompts to recover.
"The President of the United States is gaslighting you, and you deserve to know."Later on, the article says:
LEMON: Like I said, this is gaslighting pure and simple. The President of the United States has been making demonstrably false statements from the beginning of all of this at a time when real leadership could have saved lives.Here's omething from the article that I found shocking:
He caused a lot of people to think that this virus wasn't a serious threat. We now know it is. He suggested that it was less dangerous than the flu, not true. He claimed it was a hoax by Democrats, not true. He claimed it was well under control, not true.
He made fun of it at rallies. He went to CPAC, there was a person there who had it. Caused Republican lawmakers and others to have to self-quarantine. They made fun of it. They wore gas masks.
Causing all kinds of people to believe that it was a media hoax and not take it seriously. All of that caused a lot of people to think the virus wasn't a serious threat. Caused us to lose a lot of precious time while our government wasn't taking the threat seriously.
The sad fact is the president is the one who has been politicizing this. Don't get it twisted, and don't fall for that whole thing about everyone is politicizing this. Don't politicize this, Don. Stop politicizing this.
That is why I get so angry because the president is the one who's politicizing this, and then trying to do that whole okey-doke blaming the media and saying the media is politicizing it. No, we're just giving you the information, and he doesn't like it so he's politicizing it. That is dangerous.
The latest NPR/PBS/Marist poll show the partisan divide is growing. Seventy-six percent of Democrats say coronavirus is a real threat. Fifty percent of independents feel the same way, but only 40 percent of Republicans agree.This can have disastrous consequences. An article in The Washington Post by Dana Milbank entitled "Trump’s late conversion to reality leaves out his supporters" says:
Naturally, they’re not so inclined to cooperate with efforts to slow the virus’s spread. Only 30 percent of Republicans plan to avoid large gatherings (vs. 61 percent of Democrats), a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found just before Trump proposed such limits. Republicans were half as likely to say they were rescheduling travel and a third as likely to stop eating out at restaurants.
Key Trump allies aren’t cooperating, either. West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice (R) recommended on Monday: “If you want to go to Bob Evans and eat, go to Bob Evans and eat.”
Also Monday, Ron Paul, the former presidential candidate and father of Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), said, “People should ask themselves whether this coronavirus ‘pandemic’ could be a big hoax, with the actual danger of the disease massively exaggerated.”
On Sunday, former New York City police commissioner Bernard Kerik — recently pardoned by Trump — speculated that “this hysteria is being created” to “destroy” Trump’s economic success. And Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), a key Trump ally, said “it’s a great time to just go out, go to a local restaurant. … Go to your local pub.” (He later tried awkwardly to recant that advice.)
Then there’s Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt (R), who tweeted (and later deleted) a photo of him and his children at a “packed” food hall (Trump expressed his disagreement); Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), tweeting a photo of a freshly poured Corona beer at a restaurant and the message “Be smart. Don’t Panic”; and former Milwaukee County, Wis., sheriff David Clarke, once considered for a senior Trump administration job, who speculated that George Soros may be behind the virus panic and suggested: “GO INTO THE STREETS FOLKS. Visit bars, restaurants, shopping malls … ”
"But the presser didn’t go zooming off the rails until a “reporter” named Chanel Rion from One America News, the outlet that the president* watches when Fox News gets too Chomsky for him, chimed in from the izonkosphere.Charlie points out that the problem is that someone insists on telling Trump the place and time the briefing is to be held.
On that note, major left-wing media, including some in this room, have teamed up with Chinese Communist Party narratives and they're claiming you’re a racist for making these claims about Chinese virus. Is it alarming that major media who just oppose you are consistently siding with foreign state propaganda, Islamic radicals, and Latin gangs and cartels, and they work right here in the White House with direct access to you and your team?"
Don’t just blame President Trump. Blame me — and all the other Republicans who aided and abetted and, yes, benefited from protecting a political party that has become dangerous to America. Some of us knew better.Stevens says the Republican party has become anti-intellectual:
But we built this moment. And then we looked the other way.
Many of us heard a warning sound we chose to ignore, like that rattle in your car you hear but figure will go away. Now we’re broken down, with plenty of time to think about what should have been done.
The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party.
"... somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise. We began to distrust the experts and put faith in, well, quackery. It was 2013 when former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said the Republican Party 'must stop being the stupid party.' By 2016, the party had embraced as its nominee a reality-TV host who later suggested that perhaps the noise from windmills causes cancer."Anti-education:
The Republican Party has gone from admiring William F. Buckley Jr., an Ivy League intellectual, to viewing higher education as a left-wing conspiracy to indoctrinate the young. In retribution, we started defunding education. Never mind that Republican leaders are among the most highly educated on the planet; it’s just that they now feel compelled to embrace ignorance as a cost of doing business. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, as an example, denounces “coastal elites” while holding degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and having served as a Supreme Court clerk.Anti-science:
The GOP’s relationship with science has resembled some kind of Frankenstein experiment: Let’s see what happens when we play with the chemistry set! Conservatives have spent years trying to cut funds for basic science and research, lamenting government seed money for nearly every budding technology and then hoping for the best. In the weeks ahead, it’s not some fiery, anti-Washington populist with an XM radio gig who is going to save folks’ lives; it is more likely to be someone who has been studying this stuff for decades, almost certainly at some point with federal help or outright patronage.So what's happened?
What is happening now is the inevitable result of a party that embraced fear, weaponized xenophobia and regarded facts as dangerous, left-wing landmines that must be avoided.
“The Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog division has been so weakened under the Trump administration that it is failing to provide basic oversight of the government’s third-largest federal agency, according to whistleblowers and lawmakers from both parties,” Nick Miroff reports. “DHS’s Office of the Inspector General is on pace to publish fewer than 40 audits and reports this fiscal year, the smallest number since 2003 and one-quarter of the agency’s output in 2016, when it published 143 … The audits and reports cover everything from contracts and spending to allegations of waste and misconduct. …
“Inspector General Joseph Cuffari ducked requests to appear on Capitol Hill for routine testimony, a decision congressional staffers describe as unprecedented. Adding to the turmoil, the office’s second-in-command and former acting director, Jennifer Costello, was placed on administrative leave last month for alleged ethical violations, three current DHS officials said. An attorney for Costello said her client was not given a reason for her removal, but Costello believes she has been retaliated against for trying to denounce Cuffari’s mismanagement and wrongdoing.”
U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman criticizes the five conservative justices on the Roberts Supreme Court in an upcoming Harvard Law & Policy review article. The article begins, brutally:The article says:
By now, it is a truism that Chief Justice John Roberts’ statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a Supreme Court justice’s role is the passive one of a neutral baseball “umpire who [merely] calls the balls and strikes” was a masterpiece of disingenuousness. Roberts’ misleading testimony inevitably comes to mind when one considers the course of decision-making by the Court over which he presides. This is so because the Roberts Court has been anything but passive. Rather, the Court’s hard right majority is actively participating in undermining American democracy. Indeed, the Roberts Court has contributed to insuring that the political system in the United States pays little attention to ordinary Americans and responds only to the wishes of a relatively small number of powerful corporations and individuals.
[Adelman's] article brings into clear relief the court’s systemic attack on voting rights for minority and other marginalized communities, by way of striking down a key section of the Voting Rights Act, as well as repeated blessing of voter suppression and decisions not to adjudicate political gerrymandering. He notes that the court privileges the wealthy and corporate interests at the expense of the public. He lays out in detail the rise of the conservative legal movement, starting with the infamous 1971 Lewis Powell memo that served as a right-wing call to arms and tracing its progress through the current well-funded effort to reverse the New Deal in the courts. The article ultimately portrays the slow movement of the Supreme Court to the right—and then the far right—through a long line of cases that reversed the Warren court’s protections for minority groups and poor and working-class Americans. It shows how the court has undermined unions and boosted corporate interests. The court, he notes, has greatly contributed to income inequality, health care inequality, and the hollowing out of the American middle class.Adelman says:
We are thus in a new and arguably dangerous phase in American history. Democracy is inherently fragile, and it is even more so when government eschews policies that benefit all classes of Americans. We desperately need public officials who will work to revitalize our democratic republic. Unfortunately, the conservative Justices on the Roberts Court are not among them.The article continues:
Judge James Ho, a Trump appointee to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, has assumed the role of robed Fox News commentator. He disparages women who get abortions, as well as judges who uphold their right to do so. He claims that we can stop mass shootings by shielding police from lawsuits when they accidentally murder innocent people. He intentionally misgenders transgender litigants—as does his colleague, Kyle Duncan, a fellow Trump appointee. Another judge on the 5th Circuit, Edith Brown Clement (a George W. Bush appointee), penned a partisan attack on her colleagues. And, under the influence of Trump’s judges, the 5th Circuit as a whole has begun defying Supreme Court precedent in a series of blatantly political decisions.The U.S. courts have been steadily drifting to the right since Lewis Powell's memo in 1971, and in recent years the drift has become much stronger. The nightmare scenario is Trump somehow being reelected; it's possible, if that were to happen, that Trump would get to replace a couple of liberal Supreme Court justices, presenting the country with a 7-2 conservative majority: disaster.
A startling number of Trump judges appear to believe that, like Ho, their job is mainly to own the libs in print. Neomi Rao, a Trump judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has created a cottage industry out of writing preposterous Trump-friendly polemics. On the same morning that South Texas College of Law Houston professor Josh Blackman expressed his outrage at Adelman’s article, Rao issued yet another dissent that would protect Trump, this time by denying the House of Representatives access to the unredacted Mueller report. Rao’s position is so extreme that Thomas Griffith, a conservative George W. Bush appointee, penned a separate concurrence just to shred it. It is impossible to ignore the fact that Rao keeps running interference for the Trump administration, making arguments that are promptly shunned. And it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that her lengthy, contorted dissents begin with the proposition that Trump must triumph and work backward from there.
On February 21, sheriff's deputies discovered the body of DHS (Department of Homeland Security) employee in a roadside pull-over area. Cause of death was determined to be a gunshot wound that was "self-inflicted." Unsurprisingly, deranged right-wing conspiracy theorists pounced on this incident as being a murder committed by "Deep State operatives" in order to silence explosive information Haney had been about to reveal about the Obama administration. It's been alleged that Haney wore a thumb drive around his neck that was filled with incriminating information.Basis for these allegations? Zero. It's just a poisonous idea, another diseased product of the right-wing fever swamps that target the dead, who are unable to confirm or deny allegations about them (do a Google search for "Seth Rich").
“I’m standing on the floor here saying, Madame Speaker, I don’t believe that Phil Haney committed suicide,” King said. “I expect that we’re going to get a thorough investigation. The evidence that is coming to me indicates that he was murdered.”I like a tweet on the subject from commenter Paula Duffy:
Haney had briefly become a right-wing personality in the last years of the Obama administration, appearing on Fox News and Glenn Beck’s radio show to push his allegations that the government was ignoring radical Muslim groups. More recently, he’d claimed to be on a mysterious “special covert assignment” against Muslim-American politician Keith Ellison, now Minnesota’s attorney general.
In a nearly 30-minute speech, Gohmert claimed he had a pact with Haney to reveal unspecified secrets about the government in case either of them was murdered in a crime posed as a suicide. Gohmert claimed Haney was working on a book that would “name names of people that put this country at risk.”
"Gohmert claimed Haney was working on a book that would “name names of people that put this country at risk.”
We already have that. It's called the Mueller Report.
Erik Prince [of Blackwater fame], the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.For example:
One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.
Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.
Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.
