Donald Trump has announced he will pardon Susan B Anthony, who was arrested in 1872 for voting, in violation of laws permitting only men to do so.
The act of executive clemency was announced at a White House ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment to the US constitution, which expanded the right to vote to women.
Anthony was fined $100 for her illegal act, a half-century before the expansion of the franchise.
“Signing a full and complete pardon for Susan B Anthony,” Trump said. “She was never pardoned.”
Trump had announced his intention of pardoning someone “very, very important” in a conversation with reporters on Monday.
In the past, Trump has exercised the power of executive clemency in favor of friends, such as the political strategist Roger Stone and the former police commissioner Bernie Kerik, or Republican favorites, such as the commenter Dinesh D’Souza and Lewis “Scooter” Libby, former aide to vice-president Dick Cheney.
Trump has also extended clemency to historical figures such as Jack Johnson, the boxing champion convicted in 1913 of traveling with a white girlfriend.
The selection of Anthony for a posthumous pardon could be meant to address Trump’s yawning popularity gap among women voters. Women voters express a preference for Biden by a margin of 56%-42%.
One of history’s best-known suffragists, Anthony became the first woman to appear on US currency when dollars with her likeness were minted in 1979. During the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton supporters took “I voted” stickers from polling places and stuck them to Anthony’s gravestone.
Trump’s pardon induced a backlash from critics who said defiance of a corrupt law was Anthony’s point and that the president had no business pardoning her.
“As the highest-ranking woman elected official in New York and on behalf of Susan B Anthony’s legacy we demand Trump rescind his pardon,” tweeted Kathy Hochul, the state’s lieutenant governor.
“She was proud of her arrest to draw attention to the cause for women’s rights, and never paid her fine. Let her Rest In Peace.”
Anthony was a resident of New York state for much of her life.
She is also regarded as a hero by some evangelical anti-abortion campaigners, a stance which many pro-choice campaigners contest. Members of the Susan B Anthony List, an anti-abortion group, were at the White House on Tuesday.
Though Anthony never publicly spoke for or against abortion, some have attributed to her anti-abortion writing from a writer who went by the letter “A”. Experts deem Anthony’s connection to the writing dubious at best.
In conversation with the Guardian in 2018, meanwhile, David Blight, a Pulitzer-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass, noted the “brutal racism” Anthony and other campaigners displayed when black men won the vote in 1870.
Trump’s focus on a key advocate in the expansion of voting rights comes as he tries to undermine the franchise by attacking mail-in voting and encouraging Republican legislators to make it harder for people to vote.
“The committee obtained some information suggesting that the Russian intelligence officer, with whom Manafort had a longstanding relationship, may have been connected to the G.R.U.’s hack-and-leak operation targeting the 2016 U.S. election,” Democrats wrote. “This is what collusion looks like.”
The assertion was a sign that even though the investigation was carried out in bipartisan fashion, and Republican and Democratic senators reached broad agreement on its most significant conclusions, a partisan divide remained on some of the most politically sensitive issues.
The Senate report said that the unusual nature of the Trump campaign — staffed by Mr. Trump’s longtime associates, friends and other businessmen with no government experience — “presented attractive targets for foreign influence, creating notable counterintelligence vulnerabilities.”
The Senate investigation found that two other people who met at Trump Tower in 2016 with senior members of the Trump campaign — including Mr. Manafort; Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law; and Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son — had “significant connections to Russian government, including the Russian intelligence services.”
The report said that the connections between the Russian government and one of the individuals, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, “were far more extensive and concerning than what had been publicly known.”
Since the release of Mr. Mueller’s report, Attorney General William P. Barr and numerous Republican senators have tried to discredit the special counsel’s work — dismissing the investigation into the 2016 election as “Russiagate.”
Releasing the report less than 100 days before Election Day, lawmakers hope it will refocus attention on the interference by Russia and other hostile foreign powers in the American political process, which has continued unabated.
Cuomo had said last month that he was thinking of a book, commenting during a radio interview on WAMC that he wanted to document the “entire experience, because if we don’t learn from this then it will really compound the whole crisis that we’ve gone through.”
In an excerpt from “American Crisis” that Crown shared with The Associated Press, Cuomo emphasized the importance of confronting fear.
“The questions are what do you do with the fear and would you succumb to it,” he wrote. “I would not allow the fear to control me. The fear kept my adrenaline high and that was a positive. But I would not let the fear be a negative, and I would not spread it. Fear is a virus also.”
Financial terms for “American Crisis” were not disclosed. Cuomo was represented by Washington attorney Robert Barnett, whose other clients include former President Barack Obama and former President George W. Bush. Cuomo is also the author of “All Things Possible: Setbacks and Success in Politics and Life,” which came out in 2014.
Cuomo, currently serving his third term, has been praised for his blunt, straightforward press conferences, and for a time was even mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. His style has differed notably from the more erratic approach of President Trump, a Republican with whom he has clashed often. Cuomo has said that Trump is “in denial” about the severity of the pandemic and has faulted him for ignoring advice from scientists. Trump has blamed Cuomo’s “poor management” for New York’s tens of thousands Covid-19 fatalities.
Cuomo has received some of his strongest criticism for the thousands of virus-related deaths at New York nursing homes. A recent AP investigation found that the state’s death toll of nursing home patients, already among the highest in the nation, could be significantly more than reported. Unlike every other state with major outbreaks, only New York explicitly says that it counts just residents who died on nursing home property and not those who were transported to hospitals and died there.
So far, Cuomo’s administration has declined to release the number. The governor has called criticism of nursing home deaths politically motivated.
GALLIPOLIS, Ohio – For 30 years, Michael Miller has delivered mail on the same rural route in southern Ohio’s Gallia County.
It’s 51 miles of country roads, gravel driveways and one-lane cow paths. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and it’s always loud as he rumbles around in his mail truck, a hand-me-down from a retired city fleet that he got five years ago.
And yet, every morning at 7:30 sharp, Miller is at the Gallipolis Post Office sorting parcels for delivery. He sports a navy blue shirt that reads “Postal Workers Deliver For You.”
“When I go out and someone asks what I do, I’m proud to say I work for the Postal Service,” said Miller, 56, of Gallia County. “Somebody always knows someone who works at the post office.”
Neighbors have come and gone, but not much has changed on Miller’s route during the past three decades.
Mail carriers in many ways are a lifeline for rural residents.
For one, Miller said, elderly customers are still dependent on the Postal Service. More than 1 in 5 older Americans live in rural areas, according to the Census Bureau.
Rural carriers shoulder deliveries for USPS competitors such as FedEx, UPS and Amazon. Every morning at the post office, Miller sorts through the five pallets Amazon delivers from Kentucky. A few more pallets will show up from FedEx and UPS throughout the week.
Because most major delivery companies won’t deliver to rural areas, postal workers carry their packages for what they call “the last mile.”
The lack of reliable broadband internet in parts of Gallia County only add to the importance of mail service.
“They’re more reluctant to go online. They’re still writing a check for their electricity,” he said. “If we went away, we’d have to be 100% dependent on the internet. … That’s just not a commodity we have.”
Miller’s biggest concern about the Postal Service’s future? Delivering medication.
Some days, Miller delivers as many as 30 packages of lifesaving medication, everything from blood pressure pills to cholesterol medicine. If mail delivery is reduced, Miller fears what might happen to one of his customers should a prescription runs out.
“Just last week, I was delivering a package and the guy said to me, ‘Oh, thank God, I just took my last pill this morning.’”
Carolyn Casey and her husband, Bill, know that feeling well. They’ve lived in their Gallipolis home for 49 years and have been customers on Miller’s route for most of that time.
Carolyn, 69, gets medical supplies and testing equipment sent straight to her door multiple times a month. Without the Postal Service, she would have to drive to Columbus to pick up her supplies and pay more for FedEx or UPS to deliver her test results to New York.
“When my immune system is down, I don’t want to be in big crowds,” Carolyn said.
“It’s life or death. That’s it.”
To Carolyn and Bill Casey, the Postal Service isn’t about the bottom line. It’s central to their community, and carriers such as Miller are an important part of their lives.
“Mike is more like family,” Carolyn said. “He’d help you with anything.”
“Except mowing the lawn,” Bill, 71, joked.
Massive losses projected
The USPS employs more than 600,000 workers. Of that number, more than 97,000 are military veterans, and minorities make up about 40% of the workforce. The Postal Service is consistently polled as one of the most-trusted and beloved government agencies.
The USPS receives zero tax dollars for operating expenses, relying instead on the sale of postage, products and services. For years that was enough, and the Postal Service operated in the black.
But with the rise of the internet and email, a congressional mandate to prefund its retirement benefits programs, the 2008 financial crisis and competitors including Amazon creating their own delivery fleets, financial troubles have mounted. The USPS lost $9 billion last year.
The coronavirus pandemic only worsened its problems. Businesses drastically cut back on the mailers and advertisements that make up the bulk of the Postal Service’s bottom line. Mail volume was down by nearly a third this spring compared with the same time last year.
The Postal Service projects it will lose $13 billion in revenue this fiscal year because of COVID-19. In April, then-Postmaster General Megan Brennan told Congress that the USPS could run out of money by the end of September. Postal officials asked lawmakers for $89 billion in relief, but President Donald Trump’s administration refused.
Privatizing the Postal Service, Miller said, would spell trouble for rural Americans.
Some fear that Trump might continue to thwart any funding to the Postal Service as Election Day approaches because of his opposition to mail-in voting. Widespread cutbacks, including a significant loss of sorting and processing machinery at Columbus-area post offices, led Postal Service officials to warn Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose that Ohioans who request their absentee ballots near the deadline likely won’t receive them in time for their votes to be counted.
Miller is already anticipating a spike in political mailings.
“We are solely responsible for taking care of those ballots,” Miller said.
There is a certain irony in delivering parcels to his customers who display “Trump 2020” signs in their yards, that those who might need consistent mail delivery the most support a president who wants to change it.
But Miller said it never sways him.
“I’ll deliver to every mailbox regardless of who they’re for,” Miller said. “Every mile, every day.”
Follow reporter Sheridan Hendrix on Twitter: @sheridan120
WASHINGTON – Top Latino activists and politicians are criticizing the lack of representation during this week’s Democratic National Convention.
Only three Latino speakers have their own speaking slot in the Democratic National Convention’s primetime lineup: Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada.
The four-night convention begins Monday with a 2-hour primetime program.
Julián Castro, the only Latino to run for president in 2020 and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, was a keynote speaker at the 2012 DNC and this year will be speaking on a panel with other 2020 presidential candidates. However, other presidential contenders also will be speaking during the primetime event, including Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Mike Bloomberg and Sen. Cory Booker.
“I’d be lying to you if I said that I’m not disappointed that there aren’t more Latinos and Latinas generally speaking on that program,” Castro told MSNBC Saturday, adding that he’s also disappointed that there isn’t someone who is Native or Muslim American speaking during this primetime hour.
“You think about the beautiful coalition that has become the Democratic Party over the last few years, I’m not sure right now that it’s fully represented on that stage,” he added.
Several progressive echoed Castro’s disappointment.
“How much does the Democratic Party care about Latinos? So much they will rather include Republicans & Bloomberg in the #DNC speaker lineup & not Julian Castro & other Latino leaders,” Cristina Jiménez, co-founder of United We Dream, wrote in a tweet. “And no don’t tell me that giving AOC 60 secs is enough.”
Cristóbal Alex, a senior Biden adviser, addressed some of these concerns Friday in a Twitter thread. He noted that several local Latino politicians – Nevada state Sen. Yvanna Cancela, Long Beach, California, Mayor Robert Garcia and Texas state Rep. Victoria Neave – will also be among 17 “rising stars” that are slated to give a keynote address.
“There has been a lot of excitement & questions about the upcoming convention. I’m here to share that Latinos will represent, with important voices from around the nation that showcase our community’s strength & resilience. But, this isnt like a typical convention,” he wrote. “For starters, we aren’t going to have 10 hours of speeches per day. This is 2 hours per night with a goal of reaching voters across the nation, including Latino voters. Thats why @JulianCastro has a role.”
Monday night’s event was also emceed by a top Latino celebrity and activist.
Eva Longoria Bastón was the face of the convention Monday, where she introduced speakers and kept the conversation of the convention going. The actress has been a long time political activist and co-founded Latino Victory, which helps to elect Latinos to state and national public office.
A new survey, which comes on the heels of the criticism, also shows that two-thirds of Latinos say they haven’t seen any outreach from political campaigns or groups for the 2020 election.
The survey also shows that 66% of Latino voters back Biden, while President Donald Trump gets 24% support with Latino voters. Latinos will make up the largest minority group of the electorate for the first time this year.
Janet Murguia, president of UnidosUS, said Monday that while she understand that there is a lot of competition for time, there was “some disappointment to be honest about not seeing more Latinos or Latinos in primetime at the convention.”
“You’ve got to really make sure that representation is not just seen, but is felt. And for us, we need to be seeing that representation,” Murguia said.
Dana Perino, Chris Wallace, Juan Williams, Brit Hume and Donna Brazile join Martha MacCallum and Bret Baier with reaction to former first lady Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic National Convention.
Former first lady Michelle Obama raised eyebrows Monday night when her remarks to conclude the first night of the Democratic National Convention made no mention of Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., the first Black woman to appear on a major party ticket.
However, a Biden campaign official told Fox News late Monday that Obama’s speech was recorded before the former vice president announced on Aug. 11 he had chosen Harris as his running mate.
Former Democratic National Committee interim chairwoman Donna Brazile, a Fox News contributor, said she was “disappointed” that there was no mention of Harris in the former first lady’s remarks.
“She kept talking about Joe Biden, and she knows Joe Biden very well, but she also knows Kamala Harris, [who was] one of the first to endorse Barack Obama when he ran [for president in 2008], so I was disappointed,” said Brazile, who later added, “”I just heard that perhaps she taped the speech before the announcement, but I am disappointed that we did not hear about Kamala Harris.
“The first Black first lady of the United States did not mention the first Black female ever to be on a major party ticket,” she emphasized. “So I am a little disappointed that I did not hear that.
Last week, however, Michelle Obama cheered Harris’ selection as Biden’s running mate in a series of lengthy posts on her personal Instagram page.
“You get used to it, even as a little girl — opening the newspaper, turning on the TV, and hardly ever seeing anyone who looks like you,” Obama wrote. “You train yourself to not get your hopes up. And sometimes it’s a battle just to keep telling yourself that you might deserve more. Because no matter how much you prepare, no matter what grades you get or even how high you rise at work, it always feels like someone is waiting to tell you that you’re not qualified. That you’re not smart enough. That you’re too loud or too bossy. That there’s just something about you…you’re just not quite the right fit.
“Change can be slow and frustrating, but signs of progress are all around us. This week Senator @KamalaHarris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, became the first Black woman and first Asian-American woman on a major party’s presidential ticket. I’ve been thinking about all those girls growing up today who will be able to take it for granted that someone who looks like them can grow up to lead a nation like ours. Because @KamalaHarris may be the first, but she won’t be the last.
“I am here for it all,” Obama added. “Let us embrace and celebrate this moment. Go get ‘em girl. 💪🏾”
The United States will not consent to Israeli annexations in the occupied West Bank for “some time”, preferring to focus on the Israel-UAE normalisation deal and wider regional peace efforts, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner said on Monday.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cast the annexation plan – already dogged by disagreements within his governing coalition on the proposed timing – as temporarily on hold. But Israeli officials have signalled they want approval from Israel’s main ally – the US – first.
“Israel has agreed with us that they will not move forward without our consent. We do not plan to give our consent for some time,” Kushner told reporters in a telephone briefing.
“Right now, the focus has to be on, you know, getting this new peace agreement implemented,” he said.
“We really want to get as much interchange between Israel and the United Arab Emirates as possible and we want Israel to focus on creating new relationships and new alliances.”
The US-UAE-Israel joint statement on the normalisation deal said Israel had agreed to “suspend” the annexation plan.
“What you’re saying as suspension, we’re seeing as stopping,” UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash told reporters shortly after the deal was announced.
Israel’s president on Monday invited the de facto UAE leader to visit Jerusalem, praising his role in achieving a “noble and courageous” normalisation pact, only the third between Israel and an Arab country in more than 70 years.
A pedestrian looks at a sign posted on the door of a hardware store during a citywide power outage in San Francisco, Calif. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
While California braced for another round of rolling blackouts Monday night, the state’s grid operator held off for a second straight night.
SACRAMENTO — The exact root of California’s rolling blackouts is still unclear as more power outages loom, and that’s allowed everyone to point fingers.
Energy experts Monday cited a litany of potential causes for the rotating outages that affected hundreds of thousands of California residents Friday and Saturday nights: ballooning demand, inadequate transmission, an overreliance on renewable energy and the incursion of new energy providers that don’t have the same obligation to maintain reserves as traditional utilities do.
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While California braced for another round of rolling blackouts Monday night, the state’s grid operator held off for a second straight night, citing cooler than expected weather and widespread conservation. It also came as Gov. Gavin Newsom questioned all of the state’s electricity players about why the outages occurred and faced blowback from frustrated residents.
California has endured planned blackouts in recent years as a wildfire prevention measure. But it was the Golden State’s first round of rolling blackouts related to supply since 2001, when Enron and other energy traders manipulated California’s market.
Earlier Monday, the California Independent System Operator blamed Friday’s outages on “high heat and increased electricity demand.” Yet some energy experts noted that demand wasn’t particularly higher than normal, as is typical for weekends, and CAISO had predicted it would have adequate reserves on hand for the 80 percent of California’s grid that it manages.
“What’s weird about what happened is they were adequate until they weren’t,” said Michael Wara, director of Stanford University’s climate and energy program and a member of the state’s Catastrophic Wildfire Cost and Recovery Commission. “It seems as if certain power plants for some reason were not able to deliver on the commitments to supply reserves and also supply energy.”
Because the Friday outage started around 6:30 p.m., when solar is ramping down and gas-fired plants are ramping up, gas is the likely immediate culprit, Wara said. “The timing of all this strongly suggests problems with gas plants,” he said.
California could raise maximum wholesale prices or increase penalties for non-performance as a way to encourage plant maintenance, he said.
CAISO CEO Steve Berberich said Monday that a power plant of unspecified fuel and size on Friday “tripped,” which caused the facility to go offline. While the details weren’t revealed, certain types of natural gas power plants can struggle under hot conditions, and gas units are typically the only ones with that much capacity.
Business groups, in turn, were quick to pin the blame on renewable energy suppliers; Saturday’s outage happened after 1,000 megawatts of wind power and a 470-megawatt gas plant briefly went offline.
“Hot weather and a cloudy day should not be able to shut down the fifth-largest economy in the world,” Lance Hastings, president of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association, said in a statement. “While we support California’s renewable energy goals, we absolutely need system redundancy that allows us to continue to operate and manufacture products for our residents and the world.”
Others were more explicit about their support for gas, including an executive at NRG, an owner of gas plants and other energy resources in states across the country — including 4,000 megawatts of gas and solar in California.
Travis Kavulla, a former member of CAISO’s western energy market governing body and NRG’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said the ability of gas to consistently provide power around the clock “proves the point that, at least for now, it’s an essential resource.”
Meanwhile, PUC spokesperson Terrie Prosper suggested CAISO mismanaged the situation. She said neither investor-owned utilities nor community choice aggregators were at fault. Both “procured the resources that were required to meet the forecasts,” she said. “The question we’re tackling is why certain resources were not available.”
And former PUC President Loretta Lynch, who served as the agency’s president during the 2000-01 electricity crisis, slammed CAISO on Monday for not being transparent about what ultimately led to the rolling blackouts. She argued that utilities did have enough capacity, including reserves, to meet demand. Lynch and Kavulla both said not all CAISO data is archived, leading observers to screenshot pricing and other webpages for preservation.
CAISO is the ultimate decisionmaker on matters of running the grids of investor-owned utilities, as the operator has visibility into their combined infrastructure and how electrons are transported throughout California and across state lines. CAISO is one of several independent system operators and regional transmission organizations across the country, which follow reliability standards set by a nonprofit governing body related to reserve margins and other criteria.
“The ISO doesn’t know how to manage the grid. They can’t keep the lights on when there’s plenty of power,” Lynch said. She suspected that like during the Enron-driven crisis of her day, so-called electricity “schedulers” — or middlemen between utilities and generators — don’t always submit accurate logs of when and how much electricity will be delivered, which has sometimes resulted in market manipulation. In an extreme example, Enron traders in the late 1990s and early 2000s forced plants offline and created artificial supply shortages.
“What about the grid operator doing its job and running a market that doesn’t get manipulated, running a grid that doesn’t get blacked out because they won’t call on the reserves? The question is, why didn’t they?” Lynch asked. She said investigations directed by Newsom on Monday of CAISO and the state’s energy agencies should be conducted by an entity independent of market players with subpoena power to fully publicize the grid operator’s data.
A renewables advocate said the PUC should be doing more to promote voluntary conservation programs, which he said have fallen by half over the last five years.
“I don’t think we know enough about all the details, but we do know what we have is a shortage of demand response — that is a direct PUC responsibility — and a shortage of new procurement, which is on them,” said V. John White, executive director of the Center for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Technologies.
The head of a trade group representing all types of generators pointed to multiple factors, including the general issue of solar’s intermittency, but also concurrent heat waves across the West that prevented California from importing power.
“There’s just less energy in the system to divvy up amongst the different regions,” said Jan Smutny-Jones, CEO of the Independent Energy Producers Association. “That’s not normally a problem, but when it’s hot then it is.”
One of the casualties of California’s last round of rolling blackouts said Newsom needs to prioritize reliability but that he doesn’t have to sacrifice the state’s clean-energy goals. He could boost energy storage, for example, in addition to keeping gas-fired peaker plants.
“The bottom line is, people don’t want lights to go down,” said former Gov. Gray Davis. “People also want a carbon-free future. Sometimes those two aspirations come into conflict. A smarter approach, in my judgment, is to have the power you need in reserve, even if it’s somewhat carbon-based, to keep the lights on.”
Newsom launched an inquiry Monday and avoided pointing the finger at any one factor in particular, pledging to continue pursuing the state’s low-carbon goals while improving reliability.
“We are not backing off on that commitment; quite the contrary,” he said. “But in the process of the transition, in the process of shutting down, understandably, the desire and need to shut down polluting gas plants, in a desire to go from the old to the new in that transition, and the need to shut those down, comes the need to have more insurance.”
Still, a political strategist who advised former Davis in his handling of the 2000-01 energy crisis said he should ramp up his rhetoric against the oft-blamed Pacific Gas & Electric, despite the lack of any evidence the utility played a role in the weekend’s outages.
PG&E emphasized over the weekend that the shutoffs were at the direction of CAISO, and took pains to distinguish them from wildfire-related shutoffs. “These outages are not Public Safety Power Shutoffs, which are called during specific high fire threat conditions, and they are not related to any issues with PG&E’s equipment or its ability to deliver energy locally,” the company said in a statement.
“I’ve seen this movie before, and I just think Newsom has to continue to talk about how we restructure that delivery system up in the PG&E territory,” said Garry South, who was Davis’ political adviser. “One of the ways he buys himself some time on this is by going back to the theme that PG&E is a proven bad player and the state has to seriously consider what we do with that utility and what we do in that service area to protect consumers and, frankly, protect people’s lives.”
“His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump,” Urquiza said.
“Donald Trump may not have caused the coronavirus, but his dishonesty and his his irresponsible actions made it so much worse,” she added.
.@kdurquiza, who lost her father to COVID-19: “My dad was a healthy 65-year-old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump. And for that he paid with his life.”
Urquiza’s obituary for her father, Mark Anthony Urquiza, which went viral in July, blistered Ducey and other state leaders for “carelessness” she said exacerbated the COVID-19 outbreak.
“Mark, like so many others, should not have died from COVID-19,” she wrote. “His death is due to the carelessness of the politicians who continue to jeopardize the health of brown bodies through a clear lack of leadership, refusal to acknowledge the severity of this crisis, and inability and unwillingness to give clear and decisive direction on how to minimize risk.”
“Mark’s daughter Kristin Danielle and daughter-in-law Christine are channeling our sadness and rage into building an awareness campaign so fewer families are forced to endure this. We honor Mark’s life by continuing this fight for others, even in these darkest moments,” the obituary continued.
Ducey is considered a top ally of the president among state governors and resisted calls from other state officials to institute a statewide order requiring masks to be worn in public even as the state has approached 200,000 total confirmed cases of the coronavirus.
As the largely virtual Democratic National Convention launched from Milwaukee on August 17, 2020, President Donald Trump made his second stop of the summer in Wisconsin.
In an appearance in Oshkosh, he ran through many of his favorite talking points, mocking the “fake news” while touting his record on the economy, the coronavirus pandemic and trade. Here’s a rundown of some of his main claims.
“We gave $28 billion to the farmers, and the farmers are doing well”
Deep in dairy country, Trump tried to make the case that his presidency has been good for farmers.
“Any farmers here, did I do a good job for you please?” he said, a comment followed by little crowd reaction. “I don’t hear any farmers complaining. We did a good job.”
The federal government under Trump has indeed given billions to farmers, as we noted in a July 2020 fact check. The Market Facilitation Program paid out more than $14 billion in 2018 and 2019 to mitigate impacts from trade wars, and the Coronavirus Food Assistance Program — announced in April — is intended to provide up to $19 billion for farmers affected by the pandemic.
But even before the pandemic, farmers in Wisconsin were hardly “doing well.”
In 2019 alone, Wisconsin lost 818 dairy farms, part of an accelerating decline in which about one-quarter of the state’s dairy farms have gone out of business since 2014. And farmers are struggling here more than elsewhere — Wisconsin led the nation with 57 bankruptcy filings in 2019, the highest level in a decade, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation.
“Before the virus … unemployment in Wisconsin had reached the lowest rate ever recorded”
This is close to true.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows the Wisconsin unemployment rate dipped as low as 3% in 2018, before rising slightly to 3.5% in the months before the pandemic hit in early 2020.
The agency has data online back to 1976, and there was just one period with numbers that low. Wisconsin posted 3% unemployment for several months in mid-1999, part of an extended stretch under 4% from 1995 to 2000.
So the lowest rate under Trump is equal to the lowest rate in recent history. But the rate had risen somewhat by the time the pandemic started.
“Our (COVID-19) numbers are better than almost all countries”
This is ridiculous.
There are plenty of metrics by which to compare the U.S. and the rest of the world, and the U.S. fares very poorly in just about all of them.
The U.S. has the most cases in the world — 5.6 million, or more than 2 million more than second-place Brazil — and is among the highest in cases per capita, according to data compiled by WorldoMeter.
Trump often says the U.S. only has more cases because it tests more (a claim PolitiFact has rated False and Pants on Fire in various iterations), but even removing testing from the equation shows the U.S. in a bad place.
In July 2020, PolitiFact National rated Trump False for claiming the U.S. has one of the lowest mortality rates in the world.
“We created 15,000 Wisconsin manufacturing jobs”
This number is in the ballpark if we’re only talking about the pre-coronavirus period. Amd even then, the trick is who should get credit for the trend.
The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics reports Wisconsin gained 18,000 manufacturing jobs from Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 until January 2019. That tally then dropped slowly until a recovery in December 2019 and the sharp drop as the pandemic took hold in April 2020.
But as it stands today, amid the pandemic, Wisconsin is currently down 16,000 manufacturing jobs from when Trump took office.
In Wisconsin, manufacturing jobs had been trending steadily up since 2010. So it’s not as if Trump oversaw a dramatic reversal.
Experts have told PolitiFact Wisconsin the manufacturing trends — up early in Trump’s term, then downward for a time before the pandemic — are impacted by any number of factors, including foreign competition, trade uncertainty, lack of clarity over Brexit and the political situations in Venezuela and Iran.
Dennis Winters, chief economist with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development, warned in November 2019 against giving Trump too much credit given that manufacturing jobs typically trend up and down with the economy and Trump took office during an “expanding business cycle.”
“We gave you the biggest tax decrease in the history of our country”
We’ll lean on a fact-check from PolitiFact National that examined a largely identical claim. Here’s what they wrote in January.
Trump says this often, but it’s False. Trump is referring to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which is projected to cut about $1.5 trillion in taxes over 10 years, or about $150 billion a year.
Several bills since the 1980s have provided larger tax cuts, according to a Treasury Department list of the biggest tax bills between 1940 and 2012, measured not only by contemporary dollars but also by inflation-adjusted dollars and as a percentage of the gross domestic product.
In inflation-adjusted dollars, the 2017 tax bill is the fourth-largest since 1940. And as a percentage of GDP, it ranks seventh.
Says U.S. Farmers were “really being taken advantage of with Canada charging you 287% tariff”
Touting the new United States-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, Trump circled back to a claim he made frequently in 2018 — though he usually used a 270% number then. PolitiFact National rated that figure Mostly True in 2018, assessing it this way:
After a small fixed quota of U.S. exports is reached, Canada imposes a tariff on any dairy products brought into the country, with the level varying a bit depending on the specific product. For instance, fluid milk is 241 percent, cheese is 245.5 percent, ice cream is 277 percent, cream is 292.5 percent, and butter is 298.5 percent.
Experts said Trump’s tweet is a reasonable mid-range estimate, and given the scale of these tariffs, “Trump’s complaints have some basis in fact,” said Munroe Eagles, director of Canadian studies at the State University of New York-Buffalo. …
That said, the United States has recently run a sizable trade surplus with Canada in dairy products, driven by a strong business in a milk product that was unaffected by the high tariffs. Trump also glosses over the fact that the United States imposes its own trade barriers on certain American-made products.
Miles Taylor, who served as chief of staff to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in the Trump administration from 2017 to 2019, on Monday backed the former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee.
Taylor, who called the president “dangerous” for America and accused Trump of repeatedly using the powers of his office for political purposes, exclusively told Fox News that “this won’t be the last the president hears from me.”
Taylor, a longtime Republican who served as an adviser to the then-GOP controlled House Homeland Security Committee before heading in 2017 to the Department of Homeland Security as a political appointee, announced his endorsement in a video released by the group Republican Voters Against Trump.
“What we saw week in and week out, for me, after two and a half years in that administration, was terrifying. We would go in to try to talk to him about a pressing national security issue — cyberattack, terrorism threat — he wasn’t interested in those things. To him, they weren’t priorities,” Taylor said in the video.
Taylor charged that “the president wanted to exploit the Department of Homeland Security for his own political purposes and to fuel his own agenda.”
“Given what I have experienced in the administration, I have to support Joe Biden for president and even though I am not a Democrat, even though I disagree on key issues, I’m confident that Joe Biden will protect the country and I’m confident that he won’t make the same mistakes as this President,” he emphasized.
Taylor claimed in the video that the president directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to withhold disaster funding following devastating wildfires in California because the state overwhelming voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
“He told us to stop giving money to people whose houses had burned down from a wildfire because he was so rageful that people in the state of California didn’t support him and that politically it wasn’t a base for him,” Taylor charged.
The White House shot back, saying that California did receive federal disaster money to assist with wildfire recovery and that the president was very clear about why he was concerned with sending additional disaster dollars to California. They explained it was “because of the state’s inability to mitigate wildfire risks due to their radical environmental policies.”
In an opnion piece in the Washington Post headlined, “I saw firsthand how dangerous Trump is for America,” Taylor spotlighted an Oval Office meeting in March of last year where he charged that the president “told us to close the California-Mexico border.”
Taylor added that Trump argued that “it would be better for him politically, he said, than closing long stretches of the Texas or Arizona border – or to “dump” illegal imimgrants in Democratic-leaning sanctuary cities and states to overload their authorities, as he insisted several times.”
The White House responded, saying that the president “was very public about his threat to closing the border with Mexico” and noted that the threat “is what got Mexico to the table to negotiate a deal. No border was ever closed but it was the President’s leadership who achieved success.”
White House deputy press secretary and special assistant to the president Judd Deere told Fox News that Taylor “is another creature of the D.C. Swamp who never understood the importance of the president’s agenda or why the American people elected him and clearly just wants to cash-in.”
And he described Taylor as among a group of “government bureaucrats who are only out for themselves, not the forgotten men and women of this country.”
Taylor’s endorsement of Biden comes on the same day that a number of high profile former Republican leaders speak at the Democratic convention. The list includes former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate and a vocal voice in the never-Trump movement, as well as former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, former Rep. Susan Molinari of New York, who gave a keynote address at the 1996 Republican convention, and 2010 California GOP nominee Meg Whitman, who also advised Mitt Romney’s presidential campaigns. Whitman is currently CEO of Quibi, a streaming platform that generates content for mobile devices.
WASHINGTON — Amid rising concern about the health of the U.S. Postal Service ahead of the Nov. 3 election, David Williams, who resigned in April as vice chair of the USPS Board of Governors, is scheduled to give a private briefing to a group of House Democrats on Thursday, two people familiar with the plan told NBC News.
The two people said Williams, who will appear before the House Progressive Caucus, had stepped down amid what he considered President Donald Trump’s undue influence over the USPS independent Board of Governors and the process of selecting the new postmaster general.
“Williams was very concerned about the politicization of the postal service. He was someone we looked to to stand up and protect the postal service,” a senior Democratic aide told NBC News.
Williams, a former Postal Service inspector general with a long career in public service and government oversight, could help Democrats seeking answers about how Louis DeJoy, a prolific Republican fundraiser and Trump campaign donor, was chosen to be Postmaster General. DeJoy’s financial disclosures also raise questions about potential conflicts of interest.
The briefing was being organized Monday night in coordination with House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Trump for years has criticized the Postal Service, calling it a “delivery boy” for Amazon and other private retail delivery services that he says have weakened the publicly funded agency.
Recently, Trump has suggested without evidence that the expected huge increase in mail-in ballots ahead of the election due to the coronavirus pandemic will lead to widespread voter fraud.
DeJoy’s tenure has coincided with a slowdown in mail service and widespread operational problems, including the removal of public mailboxes and sorting machines at postal centers around the country.
Williams issued his resignation days before DeJoy was named to the position in May. His briefing with the Democrats will take place ahead of a House Oversight Committee hearing on the Postal Service next week where DeJoy is scheduled to appear.
Stephen Crawford, a former USPS Board member under President Barack Obama, told NBC News that at the time it happened, Williams’s departure was a concern for the Postal Service, which has struggled financially for years even before the coronavirus pandemic due to a decrease in letter mail volume and a costly pension plan for its retirees.
“When David Williams resigned, I knew we were in serious trouble,” he said, adding that Williams “knew postal service in and out.”
Williams declined comment when contacted by NBC News.
The USPS board of governors was designed to operate much like a private company’s board of trustees. The board is supposed to consist of nine members, but only six of the slots are currently filled and all of them by Trump appointees — two Democrats and four Republicans. Two of the three unfilled spots are Democratic positions.
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Democrats are stepping up their scrutiny of the board itself, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sending a letter reminding members that they have the authority to reverse decisions by the Postmaster General.
Crawford told NBC News that he had reviewed a 10-year plan devised last summer by a White House postal task force to make the USPS solvent. Crawford said he had been willing to testify if members of Congress were to schedule hearings on the matter but none had materialized.
Crawford acknowledged that efforts had been underway long before DeJoy’s appointment to streamline some USPS functions in light of its financial challenges, including closing some mail processing centers. But Crawford said it was still DeJoy’s responsibility to ensure the Postal Service is able to carry out its responsibilities.
“If you were independent, you’d say ‘hold it, we’re in the middle of coronavirus and trying to move to voting by mail to allow an election to take place and so old folks and all sorts of people who are vulnerable can vote,’” Crawford said. “Why wouldn’t you make some extraordinary measures the way you do for a Christmas rush?”
In March, as part of the CARES Act, Congress approved up to $10 billion in loan funds for the Postal Service to offset losses related to the coronavirus. Yet it wasn’t until July that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and USPS finally agreed to terms for the loan.
One notable requirement as part of the deal: The Postal Service had to disclose to Treasury its proprietary, negotiated service agreements with companies including Amazon, Fedex and UPS.
California’s power grid operator delivered a blistering rebuke Monday to the state’s Public Utilities Commission, blaming the agency for rotating power outages — the first since the 2001 energy crisis — and warning of bigger blackouts to come.
In their first public comments since the blackouts began Friday evening, officials at the California Independent System Operator described a “perfect storm” of conditions that caused demand to exceed available supply: scorching temperatures in California and across the western United States, diminished output from renewable sources and fossil-fueled power plants affected by the weather, and in some cases plants going offline unexpectedly when electricity was needed most.
But Stephen Berberich, the grid operator’s president, said the state could have been prepared for that perfect storm if only the Public Utilities Commission had ordered utility companies to line up sufficient power supplies.
During the grid operator’s board meeting Monday, Berberich faulted the commission for failing to ensure adequate power capacity on hot summer evenings, when electricity from the state’s growing fleet of rooftop solar panels and sprawling solar farms rapidly drops to zero but demand for air conditioning remains high. It’s a challenge that will only intensify as California adds more solar panels and wind turbines to meet its targets of 60% renewable electricity by 2030 and 100% emissions-free power by 2045.
“For many years, we have pointed out to the [Public Utilities Commission] that there was inadequate power available during the net peak,” Berberich said, referring to the evening period when solar production dries up but cooling demand remains high. “The situation we are in could have been avoided.”
He added, “It’s near certain that we will be forced to ask the utilities to cut off power to millions today to balance supply and demand — today, tomorrow and perhaps beyond.”
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Asked about the grid operator’s criticism, commission spokeswoman Terrie Prosper said the agency is “working with our sister agencies to better understand why this occurred.”
“The question we’re tackling is why certain resources were not available,” she said in an email.
Blackouts were ultimately avoided Monday evening, with the grid operator crediting lower-than-expected temperatures and energy conservation by homes and businesses. But additional outages could still come later in the week.
Customers of Southern California Edison, Pacific Gas & Electric and San Diego Gas & Electric had their power briefly shut off Friday and Saturday. Several municipal electric utilities that operate their own systems have not been affected, including the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which has been able to share excess power with the rest of the state.
So much solar power is generated during the afternoon that California sometimes pays other states to take its excess supply. But there are fewer gas-fired power plants than in past years to pick up the slack each evening. And coal plants have been shutting down across the West because of competition from cheaper natural gas and renewables, meaning there may be less energy available for California to import in a pinch.
All of those changes are manageable, experts say. Several studies have shown that running a large power grid using mostly renewable energy is technically possible and could save money because solar and wind power have gotten so cheap.
“We’re moving forward with a low-carbon grid,” Mary Leslie, a member of the Independent System Operator’s board of governors, said during Monday’s meeting. “I think the direction is really clear, and we’re not going backward. We’re going to move forward.”
But this week’s energy emergency dramatizes the urgency of filling the evening gap.
Last year the Public Utilities Commission ordered Edison, PG&E and other utilities to buy thousands of megawatts of new power capacity. Most if not all of those resources are expected to be four-hour lithium-ion batteries that can store solar energy during the afternoon and distribute it when the sun goes down.
But none of those batteries are online yet — and the need will only grow when the massive Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant begins shutting down in 2024.
Jim Caldwell, a former assistant general manager at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, said the Public Utilities Commission should be acting much more aggressively to bring new supplies online. He echoed the grid operator’s call to look beyond batteries, and to build enough additional solar power to keep those batteries charged.
“Knowing what we know and where we’re going as a state, knowing that we’re going to need a lot of investments in renewables in order to meet the climate goals, what the hell’s going on?” Caldwell asked. “We know it’s cheaper, we can get the [federal] tax credits now. We … need the economic activity.”
The Independent System Operator, which runs the power grid for most of the state, warned in September that California could face evening power shortages as early as summer 2020, with much larger shortfalls coming in later years as several Los Angeles-area coastal gas plants retire. One of the system operator’s top officials said at the time that the summer 2020 gap could probably be resolved by importing power from other states, “as long as it’s not hot across the West.”
Coupled with stay-at-home orders necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, the heat wave could be even deadlier than usual for people stuck at home without air conditioning — a dynamic that may be worsened by California’s rotating power outages.
In this week’s Boiling Point newsletter, we’re talking fossil fuel divestment, the California coastline and Joshua trees.
Officials at the Independent System Operator described a mad dash to secure any available power supplies and reduce demand. Berberich said utilities in the Pacific Northwest have agreed to export some excess electricity to California, and the Department of Defense and other major energy users have agreed to consume less during peak periods.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation warned over the weekend that it was releasing emergency flows through Glen Canyon Dam on the Utah-Arizona border in part to generate more electricity for California, and that boaters on the Colorado River should prepare for rapid changes in river flow.
Utility companies, meanwhile, could do little except ask their customers to conserve power as much as they could from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m., when electricity demand is typically highest. On Sunday, the Independent System Operator preemptively called a “flex alert” for every day through Wednesday.
“It’s 3 pm. That means it’s time to set the thermostat to 78°, avoid using large appliances, and turn off unnecessary” lights, Southern California Edison tweeted Monday afternoon, linking to a page with more detailed advice on saving energy.
Although the rotating blackouts have been disruptive, they’re not wildly outside the realm of what power grid operators typically consider acceptable — at least so far.
It would be exorbitantly expensive to build enough power plants to ensure the electricity never goes off — and some of those plants might sit idle for years at a time. So instead, the U.S. utility industry has long followed a standard of having enough power on call to ensure this type of outage doesn’t happen more than once every 10 years.
The last time California was forced to implement rotating blackouts because of insufficient energy supply was nearly 20 years ago, during the 2001 energy crisis, as opposed to more recent intentional outages because of fire safety.
But these blackouts may strike a raw nerve for many PG&E customers after the utility’s decision last year to shut down power to millions of people in an effort to prevent its aging and poorly maintained transmission lines from igniting wildfires.
Wildfire-prevention outages by PG&E and Southern California Edison have thrown the reliability of the power grid into doubt.
In a letter to his own top energy officials Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom described the blackouts as “unacceptable and unbefitting of the nation’s largest and most innovative state.” He instructed them to investigate what had gone wrong and take several steps to better prepare for future heat waves.
“Energy service shutoffs are simply too disruptive, and we must do more to prevent them in the future,” Newsom wrote.
Berberich said the Independent System Operator accepted responsibility for failing to give Californians more notice about the power supply emergency before rolling blackouts began this weekend.
“We thought there would be adequate power to supply the demand. We were wrong,” he said.
Not everyone accepted the Independent System Operator’s explanation for what’s going wrong on the grid.
Loretta Lynch, who served as president of the Public Utilities Commission during California’s early-2000s energy crisis, said she suspects but can’t yet prove that this week’s power supply shortages are a result of collusion among energy marketers — the same type of illegal activity that forced California to implement rolling blackouts two decades ago. She blamed the Independent System Operator for a history of failing to penalize power-plant owners who game the system to jack up prices.
“Their job one is to manage the damn grid, and they couldn’t do it,” Lynch said.
Berberich disagreed with that assessment, saying he’s seen no evidence that plant owners are withholding electricity.
Juan William discusses expectations for the Democratic National Convention
All eyes will be trained on former first lady Michelle Obama‘s remarks on the first night of the Democratic National Convention Monday, when she will join a lineup of influential party leaders offering support for the party’s presumptive nominee, Joe Biden.
“Tonight is about Michelle Obama,” “The Five” co-host Juan Williams told his fellow panelists.
“That’s what we will be talking about in the morning, Michelle Obama with her 37 million Instagram followers, with her 67% approval rating, obviously bipartisan. You don’t get those numbers unless [it’s] women on both sides, and that’s the point. The target audience here are people who listen to Michelle Obama.”
Michelle Obama and Joe Biden chat during a Veteran’s Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery in 2013. (JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images)
Obama is expected to speak between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET. Milwaukee had been preparing to host the convention, which was expected to draw 50,000 guests before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic.
Her appearance Monday comes just weeks after the former first lady revealed she was suffering from “some form of low-grade depression” tied to the lockdown measures as well as racial tensions in the U.S., Williams noted.
“When she talks about the virus, when she talks about race relations, when she … [says that] the whole atmosphere with the quarantine and the politics is just … depressing, she is speaking on a level that resonates,” he told co-host Dana Perino.
“It penetrates with a lot of Americans.”
Fox News’ Evie Fordham contributed to this report.
Mr. Kasich, 68, was an unlikely featured speaker at a Democratic convention. As a onetime brash young House Budget Committee chairman, he embarked with maniacal energy on a budget-cutting mission as part of Newt Gingrich’s Republican revolution in the 1990s and later clashed with labor unions as a governor allied with the conservative Tea Party in the 2010s. But he has moved away from the sharper edge of politics in recent years, focusing on issues of poverty and mental illness and even breaking with conservatives to expand Medicaid as part of President Barack Obama’s health care law.
Mr. Kasich insisted that his opposition to the president is not driven by sour grapes. “I don’t have any personal anger or anything toward him, I just don’t,” Mr. Kasich said. “It’s nothing to be taken personally. I just fundamentally disagree with the whole approach, and I’m deeply worried about our nation. I think if we continue this, I worry about how we ever will recover.”
The president, on the other hand, had no compunctions about making it personal. “He was a loser as a Republican and he’ll be a loser as a Democrat,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Air Force One several hours before Mr. Kasich’s speech. “Major loser as a Republican. I guess you can quote me on that. John was a loser as a Republican. Never even came close. And as a Democrat he’ll be an even greater loser.”
Not all Democrats welcomed Mr. Kasich either. To some on the left, the party was abandoning its principles by showcasing a Republican whose positions on abortion, Social Security, labor and other issues have been at odds with Democratic orthodoxy. Among Democrats surveyed by CBS News, only 38 percent wanted to hear Mr. Kasich speak at the convention, compared with 72 percent for Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and 63 percent for Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, two liberal champions who will also get airtime.
“The party should be focused on energizing Democratic voters rather than using their convention to reassure billionaires, corporate donors and Republican lobbyists that they won’t actually try to challenge the status quo,” said David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who is also speaking Monday night.
Mr. Biden and his allies argued that Democrats should welcome anyone to their battle to remove Mr. Trump from the White House, and that a purity test would be self-destructive.
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