Täällä seurataan Trumpin presidenttikautta (osa 2)

[Valkoinen cishetero kapitalisti]

Tossa on sotapelisuunnittelija hahmotellu neljä skenaariota vaaleihin, joku muu voi poimia parhaat palat, mut karua settiä kummiskin.

Like many people, I’m stuck on this as the likely outcome of our situation:

We’re facing a civil war. ...

https://medium.com/@mikeselinker/a-warg ... 5b2e980099

Näistä sisällissodan huutelijoiden skenaarioista aina vaan jää ne osapuolet pois. En jaksa uskoa, että demokraattien kannattajat saisivat koottua yhtäkään armeijaa taistelemaan Bidenin puolesta. Sissisotaa korkeintaan alkavat muutamat hulluimmat käymään. Tietysti fantasioissaan voi leikitellä ajatuksella, että Yhdysvalloissa alkaisi verinen vallankumous.

[Pipo]

En jaksa uskoa, että demokraattien kannattajat saisivat koottua yhtäkään armeijaa taistelemaan Bidenin puolesta. Sissisotaa korkeintaan alkavat muutamat hulluimmat käymään.

Joo tuskinpa sen enempää kuin armeijaa saisi MAGA-spedeistäkään kasattua.

[Valkoinen cishetero kapitalisti]

En jaksa uskoa, että demokraattien kannattajat saisivat koottua yhtäkään armeijaa taistelemaan Bidenin puolesta. Sissisotaa korkeintaan alkavat muutamat hulluimmat käymään.

Joo tuskinpa sen enempää kuin armeijaa saisi MAGA-spedeistäkään kasattua.

Eli mitkä ne sisällissodan osapuolet sitten ovatkaan?

[Ingmar Bergmanin kuolema]

Tossa on sotapelisuunnittelija hahmotellu neljä skenaariota vaaleihin, joku muu voi poimia parhaat palat, mut karua settiä kummiskin.

Like many people, I’m stuck on this as the likely outcome of our situation:

We’re facing a civil war. ...

Republicans now have a three-and-a-half-month window to install an unbreakable 6–3 majority on the Supreme Court. If they do, abortion rights, voting rights, and gay rights—actually, just all civil rights in general—are doomed.
But it’s worse than that, because we expect this election to be contested. If they have that majority before then, it doesn’t matter who wins the election, because a 6–3 court will kit-bash some reason to hand Trump a second term. So the Democrats are threatening that filling Ginsburg’s seat means they will create two to four more seats right after they win the Senate, if that happens. They might add D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, or even change the rule of apportionment. They might, as my friend Cyndi calls it, “act Ruthlessly.” This is the stuff that wars are made of.

We find ourselves in a country where both sides can’t imagine their loss would be legitimate. If Biden loses, his supporters will blame GOP trickery and voter disenfranchisement. If Trump loses, his supporters will blame voter fraud and riots. It doesn’t matter that the first one of those is real and the second isn’t. We are heading toward a reckoning.

https://medium.com/@mikeselinker/a-warg ... 5b2e980099

Karua luettavaa...

En jaksanut lukea loppuun, kun oli niin kikkeli pystyssä kirjoitettua fantasiaa. Melko paranoidi täytyy maailmankuvan, jos marraskuun vaalien positiivisin lopputulema on sellainen pieni sisällissota ja muuten mennään kohti Venäjän sisällissotaa ja Ruandaa. Naurattaa suorastaan nojatuolikenraalin vastuuvapauslauseke, että "en tietenkään toivo tämmöistä tapahtuvaksi (vaikka piimin housuuni pelkästä ajatuksesta tässä nojatuolissa)".

[Nahkanuijan nuupauttaja]

Täällä(kin) on tainnut mennä ohi, että Trumpia käsiksi käymisestä syyttävien naisten joukko on jälleen kasvanut.

Another woman says the president assaulted her. Is anyone listening?

News articles from last week can tell you precisely where Amy Dorris was 23 years ago, on the day she claims Donald Trump forcibly kissed her and grabbed her breasts and buttocks. What she was wearing, even: There are photos of the former model in her casual top and belted jeans.

The articles can ascertain that she was indeed with the future president: He’s in the photographs, too, sitting next to her at the tennis tournament she attended with her boyfriend, putting his arm around her in a VIP box.

The articles include the kind of corroboration we’ve come to require of credible accusers: Dorris told her mother and friends about the incident years ago, before such an allegation would have had political consequences.

Does it have political consequences now?

Because it seems like the answer is no.

The president of the United States has been accused of sexual misconduct by many, many women. He has denied all allegations, including this latest one by Dorris. Four years ago, accusations from 11 women — mostly, unwanted touching and kissing — were not fatal to his campaign, but they were at least widely discussed.

Four years ago, the public was still shocked by Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he admitted to exactly the genre of “grabbing” and “kissing” behavior described by Dorris. Sitting Republican members of Congress said they were “sickened.” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) called the tape “repugnant”; Sen. John Thune (S.D.) tweeted that Trump should “withdraw” from the campaign and allow Mike Pence to take his place.

Trump didn’t withdraw. He won. He won the presidency, and he won the battle of mathematics: No amount of women, added together, could offer testimonies equaling more than this one powerful man. Natasha Stoynoff claiming he’d forcibly kissed her when she tried to interview him for People magazine didn’t matter. Jessica Leeds claiming he’d tried to put his hand up her skirt on a flight didn’t matter. E. Jean Carroll describing an alleged rape didn’t matter. (Location: a dressing room at Bergdorf’s, wearing a black coatdress she could never stand to put on again. Corroboration: two friends.)

Since then, the number of Trump’s accusers has grown, and the attention paid to them has waned.

Spoiler:

Dorris’s allegation was reported by the Guardian, then by additional news organizations. Her name was briefly all over Twitter. But was the revelation accompanied by a bipartisan avalanche of elected officials demanding serious investigation into the matter, saying that it raised questions about the president’s fitness for office? No.

AD

On Thursday, Thune did not tweet about Amy Dorris, though he did tweet about a woman he thought was being victimized. The woman was Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). The perpetrator was the New Republic, which had published a profile that Thune found “shameful.” McConnell tweeted a Wall Street Journal article about the economy.

One person you’d expect would be talking about this allegation is Trump’s opponent. But Joe Biden’s campaign didn’t release a statement about the allegation, and if the candidate has said anything, it’s hard to find. Perhaps that’s because, by this point, another Trump accusation is de rigeuer. Perhaps it’s because he felt he had plenty else to talk about: Trump’s irresponsible handling of the novel coronavirus, Trump’s alleged contempt for war dead and POWs, Republicans’ vow to seat a new Supreme Court justice despite their refusal to do the same during President Barack Obama’s last year in office — all topics that have never been more consequential than now.

The more jaded read: Biden has also been accused of sexual assault, by a staffer who worked for his Senate office in the 1990s. He’s vehemently denied it, but the allegation still opens the former vice president up to a battle of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I, where the goal isn’t to prove you assaulted no women but to prove your foe assaulted more.

Politicians talk about what they think matters. Not just what matters to the fate of their political allies and opponents but also what matters to the country, its values and its culture. That’s why many politicians, Democrat and Republican, spoke up after “Access Hollywood.” You couldn’t not talk about it, because how the president treats women matters.

Except, apparently, it really doesn’t. Not enough, not in 2020, an election year in which Amy Dorris is likely to end up a footnote on a footnote.

Three years post-#MeToo, I find myself repeatedly unable to wrap my brain around this state of not-mattering, this sense that a parade of women have come forward, opening themselves up to scrutiny, threats and ridicule, when by now they must know that it doesn’t matter.

I have had a hundred discussions about the mechanics of the not-mattering: Is it because Trump’s defenders believe all of the women are lying (All of them, together, really?)? Or is it because they believe that rich and famous men often have to fend off advances from groupies or hangers-on — and that’s what these women probably were? Do they believe this was all a long time ago, and so there’s no need for an apology or even an acknowledgment? Or do they believe the women are telling the truth, they just don’t think it’s as important as, say, another shot at another appointee to the Supreme Court?

AD
Which of these options are you most comfortable explaining to your daughter?

There is a dull sameness to the way these allegations land now. A sense of being on a roller coaster, grinding up to a crest, wondering if this time you might see something new — but no. You’re on a set track, so it’s just going to be the same loop-de-loop, until maybe you lean over the side and throw up your cotton candy.

No fewer than half a dozen friends texted me last week to express dismay and grief over the arrest of Jerry Harris, a star of Netflix’s “Cheer,” who was charged with soliciting sex acts from teenage boys. They couldn’t believe it; they were shocked. But as for Dorris’s allegations, which became public the same day? Shock-free. The allegation couldn’t make the friends who hate the president hate him any more. And it couldn’t make those who love the president love him any less.

If there are more allegations, those probably won’t matter, either. If a woman came to me with a story, it’s hard to imagine encouraging her to come forward publicly. It would be a lie to promise her that her story would change anything.

The most she could hope for would be a reckoning in the future, and a willingness to suffer public scorn to be counted. That way, in three or four decades, when historians try to piece together this era and how it got like this, they would have an accurate tally of things: Back in 2020, 12 women, or 18 women, or 26 women had all come forward to say they had been abused by the same powerful man, and the country decided none of it mattered.

[Pipo]

En jaksa uskoa, että demokraattien kannattajat saisivat koottua yhtäkään armeijaa taistelemaan Bidenin puolesta. Sissisotaa korkeintaan alkavat muutamat hulluimmat käymään.

Joo tuskinpa sen enempää kuin armeijaa saisi MAGA-spedeistäkään kasattua.

Eli mitkä ne sisällissodan osapuolet sitten ovatkaan?

Ei mitkään, noi sisällissotajututhan on ihan hassuttelua jotka lienee ehkä enemmän jatkumoa jostain länsimaisen kulttuurin taipumuksesta maailmanloppufantasiointiin.

[Valkoinen cishetero kapitalisti]

Täällä(kin) on tainnut mennä ohi, että Trumpia käsiksi käymisestä syyttävien naisten joukko on jälleen kasvanut.

Another woman says the president assaulted her. Is anyone listening?

News articles from last week can tell you precisely where Amy Dorris was 23 years ago, on the day she claims Donald Trump forcibly kissed her and grabbed her breasts and buttocks. What she was wearing, even: There are photos of the former model in her casual top and belted jeans.

The articles can ascertain that she was indeed with the future president: He’s in the photographs, too, sitting next to her at the tennis tournament she attended with her boyfriend, putting his arm around her in a VIP box.

The articles include the kind of corroboration we’ve come to require of credible accusers: Dorris told her mother and friends about the incident years ago, before such an allegation would have had political consequences.

Does it have political consequences now?

Because it seems like the answer is no.

The president of the United States has been accused of sexual misconduct by many, many women. He has denied all allegations, including this latest one by Dorris. Four years ago, accusations from 11 women — mostly, unwanted touching and kissing — were not fatal to his campaign, but they were at least widely discussed.

Four years ago, the public was still shocked by Trump’s “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he admitted to exactly the genre of “grabbing” and “kissing” behavior described by Dorris. Sitting Republican members of Congress said they were “sickened.” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) called the tape “repugnant”; Sen. John Thune (S.D.) tweeted that Trump should “withdraw” from the campaign and allow Mike Pence to take his place.

Trump didn’t withdraw. He won. He won the presidency, and he won the battle of mathematics: No amount of women, added together, could offer testimonies equaling more than this one powerful man. Natasha Stoynoff claiming he’d forcibly kissed her when she tried to interview him for People magazine didn’t matter. Jessica Leeds claiming he’d tried to put his hand up her skirt on a flight didn’t matter. E. Jean Carroll describing an alleged rape didn’t matter. (Location: a dressing room at Bergdorf’s, wearing a black coatdress she could never stand to put on again. Corroboration: two friends.)

Since then, the number of Trump’s accusers has grown, and the attention paid to them has waned.

Spoiler:

Dorris’s allegation was reported by the Guardian, then by additional news organizations. Her name was briefly all over Twitter. But was the revelation accompanied by a bipartisan avalanche of elected officials demanding serious investigation into the matter, saying that it raised questions about the president’s fitness for office? No.

AD

On Thursday, Thune did not tweet about Amy Dorris, though he did tweet about a woman he thought was being victimized. The woman was Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa). The perpetrator was the New Republic, which had published a profile that Thune found “shameful.” McConnell tweeted a Wall Street Journal article about the economy.

One person you’d expect would be talking about this allegation is Trump’s opponent. But Joe Biden’s campaign didn’t release a statement about the allegation, and if the candidate has said anything, it’s hard to find. Perhaps that’s because, by this point, another Trump accusation is de rigeuer. Perhaps it’s because he felt he had plenty else to talk about: Trump’s irresponsible handling of the novel coronavirus, Trump’s alleged contempt for war dead and POWs, Republicans’ vow to seat a new Supreme Court justice despite their refusal to do the same during President Barack Obama’s last year in office — all topics that have never been more consequential than now.

The more jaded read: Biden has also been accused of sexual assault, by a staffer who worked for his Senate office in the 1990s. He’s vehemently denied it, but the allegation still opens the former vice president up to a battle of I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I, where the goal isn’t to prove you assaulted no women but to prove your foe assaulted more.

Politicians talk about what they think matters. Not just what matters to the fate of their political allies and opponents but also what matters to the country, its values and its culture. That’s why many politicians, Democrat and Republican, spoke up after “Access Hollywood.” You couldn’t not talk about it, because how the president treats women matters.

Except, apparently, it really doesn’t. Not enough, not in 2020, an election year in which Amy Dorris is likely to end up a footnote on a footnote.

Three years post-#MeToo, I find myself repeatedly unable to wrap my brain around this state of not-mattering, this sense that a parade of women have come forward, opening themselves up to scrutiny, threats and ridicule, when by now they must know that it doesn’t matter.

I have had a hundred discussions about the mechanics of the not-mattering: Is it because Trump’s defenders believe all of the women are lying (All of them, together, really?)? Or is it because they believe that rich and famous men often have to fend off advances from groupies or hangers-on — and that’s what these women probably were? Do they believe this was all a long time ago, and so there’s no need for an apology or even an acknowledgment? Or do they believe the women are telling the truth, they just don’t think it’s as important as, say, another shot at another appointee to the Supreme Court?

AD
Which of these options are you most comfortable explaining to your daughter?

There is a dull sameness to the way these allegations land now. A sense of being on a roller coaster, grinding up to a crest, wondering if this time you might see something new — but no. You’re on a set track, so it’s just going to be the same loop-de-loop, until maybe you lean over the side and throw up your cotton candy.

No fewer than half a dozen friends texted me last week to express dismay and grief over the arrest of Jerry Harris, a star of Netflix’s “Cheer,” who was charged with soliciting sex acts from teenage boys. They couldn’t believe it; they were shocked. But as for Dorris’s allegations, which became public the same day? Shock-free. The allegation couldn’t make the friends who hate the president hate him any more. And it couldn’t make those who love the president love him any less.

If there are more allegations, those probably won’t matter, either. If a woman came to me with a story, it’s hard to imagine encouraging her to come forward publicly. It would be a lie to promise her that her story would change anything.

The most she could hope for would be a reckoning in the future, and a willingness to suffer public scorn to be counted. That way, in three or four decades, when historians try to piece together this era and how it got like this, they would have an accurate tally of things: Back in 2020, 12 women, or 18 women, or 26 women had all come forward to say they had been abused by the same powerful man, and the country decided none of it mattered.

Onneksi länsimaissa syyte ei ole sama kuin tuomio, tiedäthän, syytön kunnes toisin todistetaan. Tuomioita lienee vieläkin tasan nolla?

[Nahkanuijan nuupauttaja]

Pentagonille kaadettiin rahaa pandemianpysäytykseen tarvittavien tarvikkeiden hankintaan. Pentagon pisti rahat saman tien sotateollisuuteen. Ja tietenkin paraatiformuihin.

Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor

Shortly after Congress passed the Cares Act, the Pentagon began directing pandemic-related money to defense contractors.

A $1 billion fund Congress gave the Pentagon in March to build up the country’s supplies of medical equipment has instead been mostly funneled to defense contractors and used to make things such as jet engine parts, body armor and dress uniforms.

The change illustrates how one taxpayer-backed effort to battle the novel coronavirus, which has killed more than 200,000 Americans, was instead diverted toward patching up long-standing perceived gaps in military supplies.

The Cares Act, which Congress passed earlier this year, gave the Pentagon money to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to coronavirus.” But a few weeks later, the Defense Department began reshaping how it would award the money in a way that represented a major departure from Congress’s intent.

The payments were made even though U.S. health officials think major funding gaps in pandemic response still remain. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Senate testimony last week that states desperately need $6 billion to distribute vaccines to Americans early next year. Many U.S. hospitals still face a severe shortage of N95 masks. These are the types of problems that the money was originally intended to address.

Spoiler:

“This is part and parcel of whether we have budget priorities that actually serve our public safety or whether we have a government that is captured by special interests,” said Mandy Smithberger, a defense analyst at the Project on Government Oversight, a watchdog group.

DOD officials contend that they have sought to strike a balance between boosting American medical production and supporting the defense industry, whose health they consider critical to national security. The Pentagon, which as of 2016 employed more than 156,000 people working in acquisitions alone, also has lent its expertise to the Department of Health and Human Services as it seeks to purchase billions of dollars in needed medical equipment.

“We are thankful the Congress provided authorities and resources that enabled the [executive branch] to invest in domestic production of critical medical resources and protect key defense capabilities from the consequences of COVID,” Ellen Lord, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for acquisition and sustainment, said in a statement. “We need to always remember that economic security and national security are very tightly interrelated and our industrial base is really the nexus of the two.”

This article is based on a review of public records, individual contract announcements, congressional testimony, and interviews with people involved in the spending decisions. After the Washington Post reported the funding changes in an online article Tuesday, two House Democrats called for an investigation and public hearings on the matter, questioning the legality of how the money was used and calling it “unacceptable."

The $1 billion fund is just a fraction of the $3 trillion in emergency spending that Congress approved earlier this year to deal with the pandemic. But it shows how the blizzard of bailout cash was — in some cases — redirected to firms that weren’t originally targeted for assistance. It also shows how difficult it has been for officials to track how money is spent and — in the case of Congress — intervene when changes are made. The Trump administration has done little to limit the defense firms from accessing multiple bailout funds at once and is not requiring the companies to refrain from layoffs as a condition of receiving the awards.

Some defense contractors received the Pentagon money even though they had already dipped into another pot of bailout funding, the Paycheck Protection Program.

Congress, at President Trump’s urging, is debating whether to pass another massive stimulus package, and the Pentagon and defense contractors have called for an additional $11 billion to be directed toward their programs.

The $1 billion fund was allocated under the Defense Production Act, which allows Trump to compel U.S. companies to manufacture products in the nation’s interest.

Trump has described the law as a “tremendous hammer” and boasted in August that he has “used the DPA more comprehensively than any president in history.” His administration was under intense pressure this spring to use the law to address dire shortages in medical-grade masks and other supplies.

But in the months after the stimulus package was passed, the Pentagon changed how the money would be used. It decided to give defense contractors hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund, mostly for projects that have little to do with the coronavirus response. Defense Department lawyers quickly determined that the money could be used for defense production, a conclusion that Congress later disputed.

Among the awards: $183 million to firms including Rolls-Royce and ArcelorMittal to maintain the shipbuilding industry; tens of millions of dollars for satellite, drone and space surveillance technology; $80 million to a Kansas aircraft parts business suffering from the Boeing 737 Max grounding and the global slowdown in air travel; and $2 million for a domestic manufacturer of Army dress uniform fabric.

The Democratic-controlled House Committee on Appropriations has made clear that the Defense Department’s decision to funnel the DPA funding to defense contractors went against its intent in that section of the Cares Act, which was to spur the manufacturing of personal protective equipment.

“The Committee’s expectation was that the Department would address the need for PPE industrial capacity rather than execute the funding for the [defense industrial base],” the committee wrote in its report on the 2021 defense bill.

Pentagon officials counter that they have been fully transparent with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress about their plans for the money.

Defense officials say the Pentagon’s funding priorities were influenced heavily by an industry study drawn up in 2018. The study, prompted by an early executive order from Trump and by economic adviser Peter Navarro and carried out in close consultation with defense industry associations, pointed to several hundred supply chain shortfalls that could hamper the U.S. military’s ability to compete with China.

The Pentagon receives funding under the Defense Production Act each year to shore up companies it deems critical, but in much smaller amounts — the 2020 allocation was about $64 million. The money is disbursed by the Pentagon’s industrial policy office under the law’s Title III, which gives the president broad authority to mobilize domestic industry.

The pandemic funding “became an opportunity for the Department to take what is almost a windfall and use it to try and fill what are some very critical industrial base needs … but that are only tangentially related to COVID,” said Bill Greenwalt, a visiting fellow with the conservative American Enterprise Institute who oversaw defense acquisitions in the George W. Bush administration.

The virus-related funding came at a time when U.S. military spending was already near all-time highs. The $686 billion defense budget for fiscal 2019 is comparable to a typical year during the Cold War or the period shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, although it has declined somewhat as a percentage of the economy. Major defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman have remained financially healthy despite some pandemic-related disruption, and have continued to pay stock dividends to investors.

[Nahkanuijan nuupauttaja]

Loput Pentagon jutusta.

Spoiler:

Defense industry groups argue that the DOD awards are crucial to ensuring that important niche manufacturers don’t wither away during the economic shock caused by the pandemic. Companies that sell aircraft parts for both military and commercial jets, for example, have been financially wrecked by a global slowdown in air travel.

“As you lose some of these capabilities, some of them are gone forever, and it comes at a very high price to reconstitute them,” said Wes Hallman, vice president for policy at the National Defense Industrial Association, a trade group.

More than a third of the awards were for less than $5 million and went to smaller firms such as the American Woolen Co. in Connecticut, which received $2 million to help make Army dress uniforms. Executives at the company did not return voice mails and emails. A batch of small awards went to companies working on drone technology.

“At the root of this was an enormous unprecedented crisis we were facing, and the need for government to move quickly, which it did,” said Eric Fanning, a former Army secretary who is president of the Aerospace Industry Association.

But hundreds of millions of dollars also flowed to several large, established companies, such as GE Aviation, a subsidiary of General Electric, which received two awards worth $75 million in June. A subsidiary of Rolls-Royce received $22 million to upgrade a Mississippi plant.

Rolls-Royce did not respond to specific questions about the award.

“This funding pulled planned work on existing signed contracts between GE Aviation and the U.S. Government forward and is an important way to help ensure our engineering activities and supply chain, which includes many small and medium-sized companies, can continue to deliver for the Armed Forces, sustain jobs and support the economy,” said Perry Bradley, a GE Aviation spokesman.

Critics say it’s unclear why the defense industry should have gotten what amounts to a dedicated bailout fund when few other sectors of the economy got the same treatment.

And government data shows that at least 10 of the approximately 30 companies known to have received the Defense Department DPA funds also received loans through the Paycheck Protection Program, another relief package created by the Cares Act. That program, overseen by the Small Business Administration, offered millions of firms forgivable loans if they used the lion’s share on payroll.

For instance, Weber Metals, a California-based subsidiary of German firm Otto Fuchs, received between $5 million and $10 million through PPP in April to support 412 jobs, and then got an extra boost through a $25 million DOD relief award in June. Weber officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Defense Department spokeswoman Jessica Maxwell said the two bailout programs are not “in conflict or duplicative,” because a PPP loan does not make any directive with respect to supporting national defense.

ModalAI, a small California company that builds drone flight controllers and computing platforms, received $3 million through the Pentagon program for an 18-month effort to develop a new flight controller. In April, it received a PPP loan of between $150,000 and $350,000.

Chad Sweet, chief executive and co-founder of ModalAI, said the company’s proposal was long-planned — it started applying for the Pentagon funding last summer, several months before the pandemic hit. The process gained steam in March and April.

The Defense Department asked ModalAI for documentation on how its business was affected by the pandemic, as well as information on other relief funding it has received. The Pentagon then made the decision unilaterally that ModalAI’s award would come out of the Cares Act funding.

“I don’t know how they made that decision,” Sweet said. He said his firm has been able to hire about five to seven employees as a result of the DOD award.

The Pentagon did initially plan to spend the bulk of the $1 billion fund on medical supplies. In April, Lord told reporters that three-quarters would go toward medical resources, and the rest to defense contractors.

But in June, she told lawmakers during a congressional hearing that the department soon realized that defense contractors had “critical needs as well.”

So DOD lawyers approved an arrangement whereby some $17 billion in HHS funding would be used for the medical industry instead, freeing up more money for defense contractors.

“So it expands the pool, and allows us to use even more money while taking the balance of the $1 billion that came through for DPA Title III, and use a portion of that for the defense industrial base,” Lord said at the hearing. Ultimately, in the spending plan that the Pentagon presented to Congress in June, it set aside $688 million for the defense industry.

Thomas Spoehr, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense, said Pentagon officials contend that they have thrown all the money they can at the effort to produce the medical supplies needed to combat the pandemic.

“Their belief is that any investment that could be made to increase the production of covid-19 items has been made,” he said.

One midsize company that benefited from the DOD awards was SolAero Technologies, an Albuquerque firm that makes satellite solar power systems and employs about 320 people.

When the pandemic hit, the firm was squeezed between the huge companies it supplies, which slowed down production, and the smaller, often cash-based businesses that make up its own suppliers, which it was trying to support, chief executive Brad Clevenger said.

Around March, the company heard from Lord’s office, which was contacting defense contractors to understand how the pandemic was affecting them. SolAero worked with the Pentagon to find out whether the company was eligible for other relief programs, which it was not, Clevenger said.

In late May, the Pentagon announced a $6 million award to SolAero to expand production. Clevenger praised the process, which he said involved multiple layers of review but still delivered needed help in two months.

In its news release announcing the deal, the Defense Department said the funding would “enable SolAero to retain critical workforce capabilities throughout the disruption caused by COVID-19 and to restore some jobs lost because of the pandemic.” Clevenger estimated that the award saved the jobs of 25 SolAero employees.

But the Pentagon did not impose any requirement that SolAero refrain from layoffs as a condition of receiving the money, only that it deliver on the agreed project, Clevenger said.

“How we do that, with what workforce, is up to us,” he said.

[Jesse Python]

varsinainen Who Cares Act

[Nahkanuijan nuupauttaja]

Täällä(kin) on tainnut mennä ohi, että Trumpia käsiksi käymisestä syyttävien naisten joukko on jälleen kasvanut.

Onneksi länsimaissa syyte ei ole sama kuin tuomio, tiedäthän, syytön kunnes toisin todistetaan. Tuomioita lienee vieläkin tasan nolla?

Trump on viivyttänyt asioiden etenemistä yhtään mihinkään niin paljon kuin lähtee (ja osa on vanhentuneet oikeuden näkökannalta). Viaton mies kun on, hän on myös sitkeästi kieltäytynyt antamasta DNA-näytettä jutussa mainittuun raiskaus syytökseen liittyen, raiskattu kun oli säilyttänyt päällään olleen vaatteen ja siitä saatiin DNA:ta.

[Mahdollisimman yleistäi]

Tossa on sotapelisuunnittelija hahmotellu neljä skenaariota vaaleihin, joku muu voi poimia parhaat palat, mut karua settiä kummiskin.

Like many people, I’m stuck on this as the likely outcome of our situation:

We’re facing a civil war. ...

https://medium.com/@mikeselinker/a-warg ... 5b2e980099

Näistä sisällissodan huutelijoiden skenaarioista aina vaan jää ne osapuolet pois. En jaksa uskoa, että demokraattien kannattajat saisivat koottua yhtäkään armeijaa taistelemaan Bidenin puolesta. Sissisotaa korkeintaan alkavat muutamat hulluimmat käymään. Tietysti fantasioissaan voi leikitellä ajatuksella, että Yhdysvalloissa alkaisi verinen vallankumous.

Kaipa se näin on, mutta pidetään mielessä, että presidentinvaalien perseän vaalitavan lisäksi kaikkein kohtuuttomin vallanjaon epäkohta on senaatti, jossa reput enemmistössä ja Trumpin mahdollistajana tällä hetkellä n. 15 miljoonaa ääntä demokraatteja pienemmällä kannatuksella. Demokraatit ovat keskimäärin nyhveröä sakkia, mutta jossain on varmasti epäoikeudenmukaisuuden raja (vähemmistöpresidentti, vähemmistösenaatti, vähemmistöoikeus...), jonka jälkeen demokraattivetoiset osavaltiot haistattavat paskat ja alkavat tosissaan irtautumaan liittovaltiosta. Veikkaisin, että jos Trumpin nimittelemä korkein oikeus vahvistaa epämääräisten vaalien ja postiäänien joukkohylkäämisen jälkeen Trumpin voiton, niin ollaan lähellä tuota rajaa. Repujen ongelma ilman fyysistä kapinaakin on, että vastoin oikeistomantraa USA:n taloutta pyörittävät pääosin demokraattialueet ja yhdessä toimiessaan näillä olisi melkoinen vipuvarsi liittovaltiota vastaan.

Kunnon sotimisen suhteen merkitystä on sitten vaan armeijalla, ja jos/kun se valitsee puolensa, niin tuskinpa kukaan sitä vastaan alkaa itseään murhauttamaan edes 100% Trumpistaniassa. Tietysti jos armeija jotenkin jakaantuisi, niin sitten voisi olla vauhtia ja vaarallisia tilanteita. Mutta ei tule tommosta tapahtumaan.

[Valkoinen cishetero kapitalisti]

Täällä(kin) on tainnut mennä ohi, että Trumpia käsiksi käymisestä syyttävien naisten joukko on jälleen kasvanut.

Onneksi länsimaissa syyte ei ole sama kuin tuomio, tiedäthän, syytön kunnes toisin todistetaan. Tuomioita lienee vieläkin tasan nolla?

Trump on viivyttänyt asioiden etenemistä yhtään mihinkään niin paljon kuin lähtee (ja osa on vanhentuneet oikeuden näkökannalta). Viaton mies kun on, hän on myös sitkeästi kieltäytynyt antamasta DNA-näytettä jutussa mainittuun raiskaus syytökseen liittyen, raiskattu kun oli säilyttänyt päällään olleen vaatteen ja siitä saatiin DNA:ta.

Taitaa syytteet olla samaa tasoa, kun korkeimman oikeuden Kavanaughin, eli ei kovin vakuuttavat. Nuo valesyytökset vain vaikeuttavat oikeiden uhrien tapauksia, mutta eipä se taida "oikealla" asialla olevia haitata.

[Jesse Python]

Mä en kyllä usko mihinkään sisällissotaan tuolla, kaikennäköistä sekopääammuskelua tulee tapahtumaan mutta se on ollut ihan "normaalia" viimeiset parikymmentä vuotta.

[kärkiteema]

Täällä(kin) on tainnut mennä ohi, että Trumpia käsiksi käymisestä syyttävien naisten joukko on jälleen kasvanut.

Onneksi länsimaissa syyte ei ole sama kuin tuomio, tiedäthän, syytön kunnes toisin todistetaan. Tuomioita lienee vieläkin tasan nolla?

Trump on viivyttänyt asioiden etenemistä yhtään mihinkään niin paljon kuin lähtee (ja osa on vanhentuneet oikeuden näkökannalta). Viaton mies kun on, hän on myös sitkeästi kieltäytynyt antamasta DNA-näytettä jutussa mainittuun raiskaus syytökseen liittyen, raiskattu kun oli säilyttänyt päällään olleen vaatteen ja siitä saatiin DNA:ta.

Taitaa syytteet olla samaa tasoa, kun korkeimman oikeuden Kavanaughin, eli ei kovin vakuuttavat. Nuo valesyytökset vain vaikeuttavat oikeiden uhrien tapauksia, mutta eipä se taida "oikealla" asialla olevia haitata.

Jaa, oot hyvin tutustunu näihin juttuihin?