Tag Archives: Donald Trump

Pelosi says postmaster general has no plans to restore mail cuts despite public outcry

PBS News Hour / AP, Aug 19, 2020

Mailboxes in Omaha, Neb., Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2020. (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)

WASHINGTON (AP) — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday that President Donald Trump’s postmaster general has no intention of restoring mail equipment or funding overtime hours he cut, despite public outcry that operational changes are undermining service before the November election.

Pelosi, D-Calif., said she told Postmaster General Louis DeJoy in a phone call that his decision to temporarily pause any further postal operations changes is “wholly insufficient and does not reverse damage already wreaked.”

She said DeJoy “frankly admitted that he had no intention of replacing the sorting machines, blue mailboxes and other key mail infrastructure that have been removed and that plans for adequate overtime, which is critical for the timely delivery of mail, are not in the works.”

Her statement comes as the Postal Service faced more questions and concerns and a federal lawsuit Wednesday over mail delivery disruptions after DeJoy’s abrupt decision to postpone any further changes until after the Nov. 3 election.

Rosemary King, right, holds a sign as a few dozen people gather in front of the United States Post Office to protest recent changes to the USPS under new Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, Tuesday, Aug. 11, 2020 in Midland, Mich. (Katy Kildee/Midland Daily News via AP)

The delays have stunned Americans and led to warnings that Trump is trying to undermine the Postal Service before a surge of mail-in ballots as voters avoid polling places during the coronavirus pandemic.

Civil and voting rights organizations said Wednesday they are suing to immediately return postal operations to normal.

“We never imagined that we would be in this position with one of the oldest and most trusted institutions in our country,” said Virginia Case of the League of Women Voters.

Case said there was no choice but to sue, even with the reversal by DeJoy on Tuesday. “The damage has been done,” she said. “We need guarantees in place that this will not happen again, prior to the election.”

At the White House, Trump’s team has insisted the president has no intention of disrupting mail delivery now or before Election Day.

But Trump leveled more attacks on absentee voting. “IF YOU CAN PROTEST IN PERSON, YOU CAN VOTE IN PERSON!” the president tweeted.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who spoke to DeJoy late Tuesday, asked for a written explanation of exactly what changes he was reversing.

Schumer, D-N.Y., called on the service’s board of governors to provide “answers on why Mr. DeJoy was selected” for the job.

DeJoy, who is set to testify Friday before senators, ignited an uproar over operational cutbacks and service changes he swiftly put in place since taking the helm in June. With mounting public pressure and a crush of state lawsuits, he hit pause Tuesday, saying he would hold off on any further changes until after the election.

Nonetheless, there are concerns that mail delivery of from routine goods and the millions of mail-in ballots expected are still potentially at risk because of the changes pushed by DeJoy. Managers and workers have been let go, and mailboxes and machines have already been removed.

One initiative that DeJoy didn’t single out in his announcement was the newly imposed constraints on when mail can go out for delivery — a change postal workers have said is fueling delays.

DeJoy, a former supply chain CEO, is a Republican donor and Trump ally, and the first postmaster general who did not come from the ranks of the Postal Service. He has pledged to revamp the Postal Service, which has struggled financially ever since 2006, when it was saddled with a costly new requirement to pre-fund its employee retiree healthcare benefits.

On Tuesday, he said he was halting those initiatives until after the election “to avoid even the appearance of impact on election mail.”

“We will deliver the nation’s election mail on time,” DeJoy said in a statement.

DeJoy said he is halting the planned removal of mail-processing machines and blue collection boxes, as well as an initiative to change retail hours at post offices. He also said no mail processing facilities will be closed and said the agency has not eliminated overtime.

The statement did not specify whether the agency would restore mail-sorting machines that have recently been taken offline. A Postal Service spokesman declined to comment beyond DeJoy’s statement.

Pelosi is gaining support from Republicans on Saturday’s House vote on legislation that would prevent election-year mail changes and provide emergency postal funds.

“I don’t, frankly, trust the postmaster general,” Pelosi said in San Francisco.

More than 20 states, from New York to California, announced they would be suing to stop the changes. Several vowed they would press on, keeping a watchful eye on the Postal Service ahead of the election.

Trump made clear last week that he was blocking $25 billion in emergency aid to the Postal Service, acknowledging he wanted to curtail election mail operations, as well as a Democratic proposal to provide $3.6 billion in additional election money to the states to help process an expected surge of mail-in ballots.

Those funds are tangled in a broader coronavirus aid package that was approved in the House but stalled in the Senate.

While the House is expected to approve the $25 billion as part of Saturday’s vote, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said he’s not interested in a separate postal bill. He is eyeing a new virus aid package that would provide $10 billion for the Postal Service.

Mark Dimondstein, president of the American Postal Workers Union, welcomed DeJoy’s decision but said the Postal Service needs COVID-related financial relief. “It’s time for Congress to deliver,” he said.

Pelosi is calling lawmakers back to Washington for the “Delivering for America Act,” which would prohibit the Postal Service from implementing any changes to operations or the level of service it had in place on Jan. 1. The package would include the $25 billion the House has already approved as part of the COVID-19 rescue that is stalled in the Senate.

Postal workers say they are increasingly worried about their ability to deliver for the fall election.

Izaguirre reported from Charleston, West Virginia. Associated Press writers Matthew Daly, Kevin Freking, Darlene Superville, Jill Colvin and Alan Fram in Washington, Bruce Schreiner in Frankfort, Kentucky, Gene Johnson in Seattle and Ron Harris in Atlanta contributed to this report.

2020 Presidential campaigns, California Sen. Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, President Joe Biden

Today’s funnies – Go Joe and Kamala!!

August 13, 2020 Roger Straw

Here in Benicia we LOVE Kamala Harris!! …and oh, yeah, Joe Biden!

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KAMALA HARRIS PICK

BY ADAM ZYGLIS, THE BUFFALO NEWS, NY

NASTY KAMALA

BY STEVE SACK, THE MINNEAPOLIS STAR-TRIBUNE, MN

TRUMP EXECUTIVE ORDERS

BY NATE BEELER, COUNTERPOINT

EVICTION NOTICES

BY DAVE GRANLUND, POLITICALCARTOONS.COM

Coronavirus, Covid 19, Donald Trump, Trump administration, United States of America

In countries keeping the coronavirus at bay, experts watch U.S. case numbers with alarm

June 20, 2020 Roger Straw

Washington Post, By Rick Noack, June 19, 2020

As coronavirus cases surge in the U.S. South and West, health experts in countries with falling case numbers are watching with a growing sense of alarm and disbelief, with many wondering why virus-stricken U.S. states continue to reopen and why the advice of scientists is often ignored.

“It really does feel like the U.S. has given up,” said Siouxsie Wiles, an infectious-diseases specialist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand — a country that has confirmed only three new cases over the past three weeks and where citizens have now largely returned to their pre-coronavirus routines.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like having to go to work knowing it’s unsafe,” Wiles said of the U.S.-wide economic reopening. “It’s hard to see how this ends. There are just going to be more and more people infected, and more and more deaths. It’s heartbreaking.”

Visitors to the River Walk pass a restaurant that has reopened in San Antonio. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, File) — Visitors to the River Walk pass a restaurant that has reopened in San Antonio. (Eric Gay, File)

China’s actions over the past week stand in stark contrast to those of the United States. In the wake of a new cluster of more than 150 new cases that emerged in Beijing, authorities sealed off neighborhoods, launched a mass testing campaign and imposed travel restrictions.

Meanwhile, President Trump maintains that the United States will not shut down a second time, although a surge in cases has persuaded governors in some states, including Arizona, to back off their opposition to mandatory face coverings in public.

Commentators and experts in Europe, where cases have continued to decline, voiced concerns over the state of the U.S. response. A headline on the website of Germany’s public broadcaster read: “Has the U.S. given up its fight against coronavirus?” Switzerland’s conservative Neue Zürcher Zeitung newspaper concluded, “U.S. increasingly accepts rising covid-19 numbers.”

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“The only thing one can say with certainty: There’s nothing surprising about this development,” a journalist wrote in the paper, referring to crowded U.S. beaches and pools during Memorial Day weekend in May.

Some European health experts fear that the rising U.S. caseloads are rooted in a White House response that has at times deviated from the conclusions of leading scientists.

“Many scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on [in the United States], but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” said Thomas Gerlinger, a professor of health sciences at the University of Bielefeld in Germany. For instance, it took a long time for the United States to ramp up testing capacity.

Whereas the U.S. response to the crisis has at times appeared disconnected from American scientists’ publicly available findings, U.S. researchers’ conclusions informed the actions of foreign governments.

“A large portion of [Germany’s] measures that proved effective was based on studies by leading U.S. research institutes,” said Karl Lauterbach, a Harvard-educated epidemiologist who is a member of the German parliament for the Social Democrats, who are part of the coalition government. Lauterbach advised the German parliament and the government during the pandemic.

Despite its far older population, Germany has confirmed fewer than 9,000 coronavirus-linked deaths, compared with almost 120,000 in the United States. (Germany has about one-fourth of the United States’ population.)

Lauterbach cited in particular the work of Marc Lipsitch, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard University, whose research with colleagues recently said that forms of social distancing may have to remain in place into 2022. Lipsitch’s work, Lauterbach said, helped him to convince German Vice Chancellor Olaf Scholz that the pandemic will be “the new normal” for the time being, and it impacted German officials’ thinking on how long their strategy should be in place.

Regarding the effectiveness of face masks, Lauterbach added, “we almost entirely relied on U.S. studies.” Germany was among the first major European countries to make face masks mandatory on public transport and in supermarkets.

Lipsitch said Thursday that he was not previously aware of the impact of his research on German decision-making, but he added that he has spoken to representatives of several other foreign governments in recent weeks, including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and officials or advisers from Canada, New Zealand and South Korea.

Even though Lipsitch cautioned it was impossible for him to say how or if his conversations influenced foreign governments’ thinking, he credited the overall European response as “science-based and a sincere effort to find out what experts in the field believe is a range of possible scenarios and consequences of decisions.”

Lipsitch said he presented some of his research to a White House group in the early stages of the U.S. outbreak but said the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic did not reflect his conclusions. “I think they have cherry-picked models that at each point looked the most rosy, and fundamentally not engaged with the magnitude of the problem,” he said.

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European researchers dispute that the U.S. government’s reliance on scientists to inform decision-making comes anywhere near the degree to which many European policymakers have relied on researchers.

After consulting U.S. research and German studies, for instance, German leaders agreed to make reopening dependent on case numbers, meaning restrictions snap back or reopening gets put on hold if the case numbers in a given region exceed a certain threshold.

Meanwhile, several U.S. states have reopened despite rising case numbers.

“I don’t understand that logic,” said Reinhard Busse, a health-care management professor at the Technical University of Berlin.

Lauterbach said that even though most Germans disapproved of Trump before the pandemic, even his staunchest critics in Germany were surprised by how even respected U.S. institutions, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, struggled to respond to the crisis.

The CDC, for instance, initially botched the rollout of test kits in the early stages of the outbreak.

“Like many other aspects of our country, the CDC’s ability to function well is being severely handicapped by the interference coming from the White House,” said Harvard epidemiologist Lipsitch. “All of us in public health very much hope that this is not a permanent condition of the CDC.”

Some observers fear the damage will be difficult to reverse. “I’ve always thought of the CDC as a reliable and trusted source of information,” said Wiles, the New Zealand specialist. “Not anymore.”