When asked about calls for an investigation into DHS police tactics in Portland, Oregon, Acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli tells NPR not only are they not going to stop but they want to take the tactics nationwide.
Well, we are – we welcome – the more investigations, the better. With as much lawbreaking is going on, we’re seeking to prosecute as many people as are breaking the law as it relates to federal jurisdiction. That’s not always happening with respect to local jurisdiction and local offenses. But, you know, this is a posture we intend to continue not just in Portland but in any of the facilities that we’re responsible for around the country.
Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) has died.
Some thoughts on Lewis’s life from last December.
Here are a couple more articles worth your time to read if you’re trying to make sense of the federal deployment in Portland. One is from The Nation and details a memo from Customs and Border Protection detailing the operation and how to discuss it with the public. The other is from the Times and provides an overview and range of details about the operation. (A bigfoot news organization can break facts free.) The upshot is that we should see this deployment in Portland and other cities as a continuation of the incident in Lafayette Park more than six weeks ago.
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It seems increasingly clear that President Trump is trying to use the most politicized and violent agencies of federal law enforcement to provoke confrontations in American cities to push his ‘law and order’ campaign message. Zoë Richards gave us an overview this morning of what we know so far.
There are on-going protests in Portland focused especially around the Mark O. Hatfield Federal Courthouse and a faction of people committing low-level acts of vandalism tied to those protests. Local police say they are trying to separate the two groups. Tim Dickinson has a deep dive here in Rolling Stone on how this is proving difficult for a number of reasons, not least of which is deep-seated suspicion of the city police force in what is after all a very progressive city.
JoinYou have likely seen the growing clinical evidence that COVID is not only a respiratory disease but frequently strikes at the brain and nervous system. A group of new studies out of Spain provide more detailed evidence. Our Spanish correspondent TPM Reader SH sent me this article in El Pais (English language version). The headline is that over half of COVID patients in Spain developed neurological problems of one sort of another.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s remarks about human rights yesterday are among the most disturbing utterances I’ve heard come out of this administration thus far.
JoinYes, we are wondering what’s going on in Portland too. Here’s where to start. We’ll try to bring you more tomorrow.
You saw Gov. Kemp’s (R-GA) order prohibiting cities and counties in Georgia from requiring people to wear masks. Look at this chart – apologies in advance that it’s a bit messy.
Let me direct your attention to this very important photo:
JoinCongratulations to Dr Fauci on his @InStyle cover???? pic.twitter.com/eaoFzMf8Hx
— Priyanka Aribindi (@priaribi) July 16, 2020
This is a remarkable statistic I had not seen. 31.1% of Florida children (people under 18) who have been tested for COVID have been positive. That is about three times higher than the rest of the population.
It’s not entirely clear what to make of this statistic. Only about 50,000 people under the age of 18 have been tested, out of about 2.8 million tests in the state. So it seems quite possible that the percentage is so high because the kids who are being tested are either clearly symptomatic or living with parents who are positive. In other words, an artifact of the testing protocol itself. Still, it’s a high number. And the public health director in Palm Beach County is warning that we simply don’t know what kind of long term damage these infections could be doing.