April, 2020

Maybe the ordinary people will say 'Why should we drink Australian wine? Eat Australian beef?'

Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights group... These are real worries, since, as the foundation notes, “life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, [tend] to outlive their urgency”... The practices that American tech platforms have undertaken during the pandemic represent not a break from prior developments, but an acceleration of them... As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China.
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We are about to find out how this trade-off will be managed in the United States. The surveillance and speech-control responses to COVID-19, and the private sector’s collaboration with the government in these efforts, are a historic and very public experiment about how our constitutional culture will adjust to our digital future.

You wouldn't know it, but if you read the rest of the article by The Atlantic, they seem to somehow justify China-style digital authoritarianism.

Between April 28 to May 4, teams of public health professionals will visit randomly selected homes in different areas of Fulton and DeKalb counties. Household members will be asked to answer survey questions and provide a blood sample to be tested for antibodies for SARS-CoV-2...

That’s why I want to just confront the topic that is top of mind: And those are the images we saw over the weekend. Images, down in Orange County and Ventura County, on our beaches. Those images are an example of what not to see – [for] people, what not to do – if we’re going to make the meaningful progress that we’ve made in the last few weeks extend into the next number of weeks... This virus doesn’t take the weekends off. This virus doesn’t go home because it’s a beautiful, sunny day around our coasts... [Until we have a vaccine], we have to manage risks. We have to manage and augment our behavior...

“On July 24th, 2019, the Mueller prosecutors offered my lawyers a deal,” said Stone. “If Stone will fess up, if he will re-characterize thirty phone conversations between myself and candidate Trump, which they had phone records of, but no tapes of. If I would correctly remember the way they wanted me to, they would recommend no jail time for me and I refused. That’s what this whole atrocity has been about.”

In the memo, Barr says "I am directing each of our United States Attorneys to also be on the lookout for state and local directives that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens." Of course, now that New York, the hardest hit state in the country, has said it plans to start reopening parts of the state on May 15, it's going to be increasingly difficult - politically speaking - for governors to drag their feet on releasing their strategies, including specific dates, for much longer.

"Some of you might start thinking about school openings. Because a lot of people are wanting to have the school openings. It's not a big subject, young children have done very well in this disaster that we’ve all gone through," Trump told governors, according to a recording of the call obtained by ABC News. "So a lot of people are thinking about the school openings." The president added the governors should "seriously consider" it and "maybe get going on it."

JUST IN: Texas @GovAbbott announces plan to allow state stay-at-home order to expire April 30 amid the novel coronavirus pandemic.https://t.co/FRjrPdgb25

"We will open in a way that uses safe standards." pic.twitter.com/nuwW58zPwQ

— ABC News Live (@ABCNewsLive) April 27, 2020

They’re being represented by prominent attorney Mark Geragos, who is asking a federal judge to strike down the orders and have state and county governments pay for losses.

“Just because you can cite that people have died from this does not mean you get to suspend the constitution,” Geragos said.

Steele met with Perkins Coie partners Michael Sussmann and Marc Elias, he testified. Steele said that Sussmann provided him with the now-debunked tip that a Russian bank had a secret communications channel with the Trump Organization.

Bailey did not immediately return a call seeking comment, but told reporters outside the courthouse in Louisville that civil liberties can be infringed when citizens don’t challenge government power.

“We continue now to do what we do best: Live safely, respectfully and … to take certain precautions, but not to be limited by government,” Bailey said.

What’s more concerning is what the Fed might do next. Proposals are floating up for four very corrosive measures:

• negative interest rates;
• directly subsidizing bonds;
• writing Fed checks for corporate equity or for a universal basic income up to $72,000 per year;
• and letting poor countries effectively print their own US dollars.

All four may be bonkers, but they carry significant political risk, because they enjoy support not just from the redistributionist left, but also “business conservatives” happy to raid our future to make their pain stop.
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It's still possible for us to get out of this relatively economically intact, but only if we reign in the empire-builders in Washington now.

#FISA Newly declassified transcript FBI 2016 Russia probe, first reported @CBSNews showed recorded conversation between @GeorgePapa19 and FBI confidential human source (CHS) on 10/23/2016 turned up no evidence coordination between Trump campaign and Russia. Transcript now public. https://t.co/FDPDTI9RRn

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) April 27, 2020

Investors are happy to see states starting to reopen or think about reopening. The markets started off this week on a high note with the Dow Jones Industrial up 300 points.