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FOCUS: They're All in on This, Top to Bottom |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Saturday, 21 November 2020 11:37 |
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Pierce writes: "The visit to Camp Runamuck by the Republican leaders of both houses of the Michigan legislature has set off the storm sirens. This is understandable, especially to those of us who quit asking the question, 'He wouldn't do that, would he?' around about the night of the Indiana primary in 2016."
Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey. (photo: Nick Manes/Michigan Advance)
They're All in on This, Top to Bottom
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
21 November 20
That includes the Republican leaders in the Michigan state legislature.
 he visit to Camp Runamuck by the Republican leaders of both houses of the Michigan legislature has set off the storm sirens. This is understandable, especially to those of us who quit asking the question, "He wouldn't do that, would he?" around about the night of the Indiana primary in 2016. From Politico:
It is unclear how many GOP legislators will visit the White House, but the group is expected to include Michigan state Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey and House Speaker Lee Chatfield. Jason Wentworth, who is succeeding Chatfield as speaker, was also spotted at the D.C. airport.
Shirkey and state Sen. Tom Barrett were met by a throng of protesters and reporters outside Reagan National Airport upon their arrival Friday. The pair passed through the airport without talking to the media. Earlier this week Shirkey told Bridge Michigan, a nonprofit news outlet, that the idea the legislature would defy the voters is "not going to happen."
Local dog refuses to hunt.
No one from the Trump's campaign staff will be at the meeting, according to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany — who herself has doubled as a campaign surrogate, blurring the line between the two — and she downplayed the significance of the president summoning the state legislators. "He routinely meets with lawmakers from all across the country," McEnany said at a press briefing on Friday, her first since Oct. 1. "This is not an advocacy event."
I may be way out on a limb here, but I think the president* was associated with his campaign and, anyway, his personal lawyer was going to be stopping by.
However Rudy Giuliani, who recently took over the campaign's legal battles, told a New York City Fox affiliate Friday morning that he would be on hand at the meeting to answer any questions from Trump or the state lawmakers about the situation in Michigan "because I probably know the case better than anyone else." "I’m there just to answer any questions they have," he said on "Good Day New York."
The Michigan delegation was met at the airport in D.C. by reporters and demonstrators, some of the latter carrying big letters spelling out, "SHAME." Leader Shirkey finally resorted to singing a hymn to fend off a persistent reporter and Speaker Chatfield tweeted out that he was only doing his patriotic duty.
"No matter the party, when you have an opportunity to meet with the President of the United States, of course you take it," he tweeted. "I won’t apologize for that. In fact, I’m honored to speak with POTUS and proud to meet with him."
When the president* whistles, Chatfield rolls over. Good Speaker. Good boy.
They're all in on this, top to bottom and stem to stern. Shun them all if this ever ends.
Oh, hi there, Senator David Perdue. How're you doing? Getting by, are yez? From the New York Times:
Senator David Perdue, one of two Republican senators from Georgia facing runoff elections in January, began making large and ultimately profitable purchases of shares in a Navy contractor in 2018 just before taking over as chair of a Senate subcommittee overseeing the Navy fleet. The disclosure, first reported Wednesday by The Daily Beast, comes as both Mr. Perdue and Georgia’s other senator, Kelly Loeffler, have been under fire for their stock trades. Mr. Perdue, a millionaire and formerly a prolific trader of individual stocks, announced in May that he would divest from his large individual stock holdings after questions were raised about his well-timed purchases of Pfizer stock in February, after senators were briefed on the coronavirus threat.
This is the guy that Jon Ossoff called a "crook" to his face during their last debate. (Which really will be their last debate, since Perdue has, ahem, chickened out on debates before their January runoff election.) And, with all the money sloshing around the doubleheader run-offs in Georgia, his attitude towards profiteering in office is certainly a driving issue.
In the six weeks before the January 2019 announcement that Mr. Perdue was taking over as chair of the Senate Armed Services SeaPower subcommittee, he bought a total of $40,000 to $290,000 worth of BWX on dates when prices averaged about $40 per share, according to a Times analysis of Senate filings. The filings give only a value range for stock transactions, making it impossible to know how many shares are bought and sold. In the month after his appointment, the stock jumped more than 25 percent. Mr. Perdue sold his stock on dates from February to July 2019 when prices averaged more than $50 per share. In June of that year, he announced that he had helped push through additional funding for the Navy in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2020, including money for an extra submarine.
Not that this kind of arrangement is against the rules of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body or anything.
While not officially prohibited, individual stock trades by members of Congress have long raised questions, according to Kedric Payne, general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan watchdog group. “This is just a perfect example of why many members of Congress have decided on their own to not trade individual stocks, even though there is no evidence of insider trading. It still begs the question of whether his official actions are somehow motivated by personal interest.”
The real corruption is what's legal. Somebody said that once.
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: "Got My Whiskey" (Mel Walters): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: This week marked the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Nuremberg Tribunals. (I am not hinting at anything here. Honest. I'm not, as Kayleigh is my witness.) The play-by-play dude is very helpful in identifying the defendants. (Julius Streicher was "judged sane," which was a comfort to that thug, I'm sure.) Goering gets gaveled. History is so cool.
My old friend—and Marquette J-School idol—Jacqui Banaszynski writes the Nieman Storyboard newsletter which never fails to put a shine on my Fridays. This week, she spoke with one of my sportswriting heroes, Dave Kindred, about how he has transitioned onto writing narrative on Facebook. That, as the late Guy Clark put it, is a pair to draw to.
I always have been happy that Rachel Maddow is my friendly acquaintance. But, after her monologue about how the pandemic hit home for her, I am proud to know her as a fellow human. Good on yez, Doc.
Blog Official Cowtipping Columnist Friedman of the Plains sends us...bonus Oklahoma! From Newsweek:
Victory Church in Tulsa posted on Facebook that it was hosting a "Friendsgiving" on November 22 and encouraged people to "come share a meal with us & BRING A NEIGHBOR." "We always looking forward to this meal with you," the church wrote. "All of our campuses will be participating at their facility." Footage said to be from a recent service held by Victory Church, which boasts a 13,000-strong membership, appeared to show people not wearing masks or socially distancing.
It doesn't matter how Christian you are. Your immune system is agnostic.
Is it a good day for dinosaur news, National Geographic? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!
For more than a decade, paleontologists have speculated about a single fossil that preserves skeletons of two of the world’s most famous dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex and Triceratops. Not only are the bones arranged as they once were in life, but the dinosaurs are practically intertwined. Each specimen is among the best of its kind ever found. Together, the pair—nicknamed the “Dueling Dinosaurs”—present a paleontological mystery: Did the beasts just happen to be entombed together by chance, perhaps as carcasses caught on the same river sandbar? Or had they been locked in mortal combat? Nobody has been able to study the fossil to find out.
How the fossil has come now to be available for scientists to study is a saga in itself. An accidental discovery. A stint in a Long Island warehouse. A failed auction. A decade of litigation. And now, finally, an arrival in a museum, which is where it belonged all along. We will know whether or not this is a relic of dino-MMA from millennia past. That's the way I'm rooting, anyway, because that would make me happy now, knowing that they lived back then.
I'll be back Monday with whatever chunk the president* decides to take out of democracy over the weekend. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, and wear the damn mask.
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Lindsey Graham's Alleged Attempt to Toss Georgia Ballots Is Felony Election Fraud |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=51672"><span class="small">Mark Joesph Stern, Slate</span></a>
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Saturday, 21 November 2020 09:20 |
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Stern writes: "Since narrowly losing Georgia to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump has promoted baseless claims of voter fraud in a desperate effort to overturn the results of the election. So far, however, the only individual credibly accused of a fraudulent effort to steal the election is South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham."
Lindsey Graham. (photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Lindsey Graham's Alleged Attempt to Toss Georgia Ballots Is Felony Election Fraud
By Mark Joseph Stern, Slate
21 November 20
If he weren’t a senator, Graham might be facing years in prison, according to legal experts in Georgia.
 ince narrowly losing Georgia to Joe Biden, President Donald Trump has promoted baseless claims of voter fraud in a desperate effort to overturn the results of the election. So far, however, the only individual credibly accused of a fraudulent effort to steal the election is South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham. On Monday, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—who, like Graham, is a Republican—told the Washington Post that Graham asked him if he could throw out all mail ballots from counties with a high rate of signature mismatch. Raffensperger later clarified that he believed Graham wanted his office to throw out valid, legally cast ballots. The senator has contested this account.
Graham’s alleged request is unseemly and corrupt. But is it criminal? In short, yes, according to multiple Georgia election law experts. If Raffensperger’s account is true, there is virtually no doubt that Graham committed a crime under Georgia law. The more difficult question is whether Graham will suffer any consequences for his alleged offense. Because he is a Republican and a sitting U.S. senator, Graham likely won’t face an investigation, let alone prosecution, for conduct that would get almost anyone else arrested. It might be tempting to dismiss Graham’s alleged interference as unscrupulous strategizing blown out of proportion. But Georgia has a sordid history of prosecuting putative voter fraud involving far more innocent conduct. Graham does not deserve a pass simply because he is a wealthy white senator.
To understand why Graham’s alleged conduct was criminal, we have to look at what, exactly, he asked Raffensperger to do. He says Graham wanted him to toss out thousands of perfectly valid mail ballots, omitting them from the official count, because they were mailed from a county with unusually high rates of signature mismatch. (That means the signature on the ballot envelope doesn’t match the signature on file.) Signature mismatch disproportionately affects racial minorities, who lean Democratic overall, and Georgia is required to let voters cure a mismatched signature under a federal court order.
Had Raffensperger followed through with this request, he would’ve run afoul of several state laws. In Georgia, it is a crime for anyone, including election officials, to destroy a ballot. It is also a crime for anyone to falsify any records or documents used in connection with an election, or to place any false entries in such records. Another law explicitly criminalizes such conduct by elected officials, prohibiting the falsification of any document related to their public office.
Raffensperger did not follow through; instead, he blew the whistle. That doesn’t mean Graham is off the hook. Cathy Cox, the dean of Mercer University’s School of Law who previously served as Georgia’s secretary of state, told me that at least two other state laws encompass the senator’s alleged actions. The first bars “attempts to interfere with” an election official’s “performance of any act or duty.” By allegedly asking Raffensperger to falsify the vote count, Graham plainly sought to interfere with the secretary of state’s truthful certification of the election. The second law targets “criminal solicitation to commit election fraud.” An individual is guilty of this offense when he “solicits, requests, commands, importunes, or otherwise attempts to cause” another person to commit an election-related offense. Destroying ballots and falsifying voting records, Cox noted, both fall into that category. An individual is culpable regardless of whether they succeeded in inducing fraud.
These offenses carry serious consequences. Attempting to interfere with the performance of election duties is a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year’s imprisonment. Solicitation of election fraud in the first degree—which Graham allegedly committed by asking Raffensperger to falsify the vote count—is a felony. The minimum sentence is one year in prison; the maximum is three. In sum, Graham could face several years in prison if convicted of these crimes.
But will he be? Charlie Bailey told me he’s skeptical. Bailey served as senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County, the largest in the state, and narrowly lost Georgia’s 2018 attorney general race. He pointed out that Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, has a legal obligation to safeguard free and fair elections in the state. “At the very least,” Bailey said, Carr “should stand up and say: ‘We’re going to investigate this. This kind of conduct will not be tolerated.’ ” (There is at least one obvious place to start such an investigation to determine if criminal conduct occurred: One of the secretary of state’s top staffers was also on the call and has tried to hedge in the press without contradicting either Graham or his boss.) But Bailey fears that Carr will decline to probe Graham’s conversation with Raffensperger, bowing to political pressure from the president and his party.
Suparna Malempati, a professor at Atlanta’s John Marshall Law School, agreed. “A courageous prosecutor would launch an investigation in order to ensure that wrongdoing around elections is not taking place,” Malempati told me, “and to send the message that those types of communications are illegal and unacceptable.” But Malempati doubts any state prosecutor will look into the conversation given the high stakes and political ramifications of investigating a sitting U.S. senator, especially since Graham has disputed Raffensperger’s story.
At most, Malempati said, Graham might be the subject of a congressional investigation. (A federal probe is extremely unlikely given the paucity of evidence, the lack of a federal statute that is clearly on point, and the fact that Raffensperger never actually meddled with the results.) But if the Senate remains in Republican hands, it seems improbable that the GOP would support a serious look at this episode. Aside from Raffensperger, no elected Republicans currently in office have condemned Graham’s alleged behavior. The GOP has spent years spreading false claims of mass voter fraud, and many of its members insisted, without proof, that the 2020 election was also tainted by cheating. Now a Republican secretary of state has accused a sitting GOP senator of seeking to commit felony election fraud—and the rest of the party has decided to look the other way.
Republicans are not always so lenient toward those accused of election-related crimes. In 2012, a GOP district attorney charged Olivia Pearson, a Black woman, with voter fraud after she helped someone use a voting machine. She was acquitted after two trials, avoiding a five-year prison sentence. In October, she was arrested again for trying to help someone else cast their vote. State officials have also launched an ongoing investigation into voter fraud with the intention of prosecuting individuals who made mistakes that did not affect the outcome of any election. Graham’s phone call with Raffensperger might seem like a relatively minor offense. But if he weren’t a white Republican senator, he may well be facing years in prison.
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Emily Murphy Needs to Do Her Damn Job, Just Like Brad Raffensperger Has |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Friday, 20 November 2020 13:32 |
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Pierce writes: "This means handing over the keys to the president-elect, whose margin of victory looks more decisive by the day."
Emily Murphy, head of the General Services Administration. (photo: Bill Clark/Getty)
Emily Murphy Needs to Do Her Damn Job, Just Like Brad Raffensperger Has
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
20 November 20
The means handing over the keys to the president-elect, whose margin of victory looks more decisive by the day.
here is no better illustration of how deeply perverse is the Republican denial of the reality of the 2020 presidential election than this inexcusable whitewashing from CNN of the performance of Emily Murphy. As the boss of the General Services Administration, Murphy is single-handedly gumming up the transition, as well as the efforts by the gathering Biden administration to hit the ground running on any issue, most notably the pandemic.
Sources who spoke to CNN could not say whether Murphy has been in touch with the White House on the issue. "She absolutely feels like she’s in a hard place. She’s afraid on multiple levels. It’s a terrible situation," one friend and former colleague of Murphy’s told CNN. "Emily is a consummate professional, a deeply moral person, but also a very scrupulous attorney who is in a very difficult position with an unclear law and precedence that is behind her stance..."
Democrats are furious with Murphy for playing into Trump’s false fantasies that the election was stolen from him. At the same time, Republicans are pressuring her to stand firm and not sign the ascertainment. Previous colleagues of Murphy told CNN that despite being a political appointee, she was not an avid Trump supporter or loyalist. "She’s going to be really thoughtful about both the letter of the law, any guidelines, explicit guidance, any precedence, as well as the overall intent. She comes out of contracts, where that is the whole nature of the work," the friend and former colleague said.
What the hell? On the one hand, we have Murphy's clear duty, which is to hand over the keys to the president-elect so he can get on with the business of the nation, a duty that is as important this year as it ever has been. On the other hand, we have...what? Mean tweets? A presidential tantrum? The sad, pathetic thrall in which a vulgar talking yam still holds alleged public servants in the national legislature? Do your job, as Bill Belichick once said. If Murphy needs inspiration, she can call Brad Raffensperger down in Georgia, who's taking unspeakable heat because he insists on Doing His Job. Then, there's this.
Former Republican Missouri Sen. Jim Talent told CNN he has known Murphy 25 years and that she worked for him when he chaired the House Small Business Committee during the Clinton administration. Talent praised Murphy's integrity, blaming the law for putting the onus on the GSA. "Something is wrong with the system where the responsibility for declaring the winner of a Presidential election seems to devolve upon the General Services Administration -- it's the Government's landlord. They buy furniture," Talent said. "I understand people's frustration, but the problem is an electoral system that cannot come to a finality. It's not Emily or the GSA."
The electoral system has achieved finality. Joe Biden is the president-elect because he won by a margin that looks more decisive by the day. Soon, he will assume the presidency of a country in which citizens are dying by the carload. I don't know what Talent is talking about here, or what Murphy thinks she's doing, but public service seems pretty far from the reality of it.
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FOCUS: Rudy Giuliani's Hair Dye Melting off His Face Was the Least Crazy Part of His Batshit-Crazy Press Conference |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44994"><span class="small">Bess Levin, Vanity Fair</span></a>
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Friday, 20 November 2020 12:36 |
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Levin writes: "It was possibly the most insane 90 minutes Giuliani's ever been involved in, and that includes his scene in the new Borat movie."
Rudy Giuliani. (photo: Drew Angerer/Getty)
Rudy Giuliani's Hair Dye Melting off His Face Was the Least Crazy Part of His Batshit-Crazy Press Conference
By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
20 November 20
It was possibly the most insane 90 minutes Giuliani‘s ever been involved in, and that includes his scene in the new Borat movie.
 hen Donald Trump tasked Rudy Giuliani with spearheading his legal effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, it was obviously the final nail in the coffin of this extremely sad attempt to overthrow democracy. While Giuliani started his career as a federal prosecutor, of late his professional activities have involved trying and failing to take Joe Biden down via hard drive, appearing in a Sacha Baron Cohen movie with his hands down his pants, and unironically holding a postelection press conference between a crematorium and a sex shop running a sale called “DILDO MADNESS.” This is not the person you turn to when you need help getting out of a parking ticket, let alone convincing federal courts to give you a second term despite decisively losing the presidential election. Unfortunately for Trump, no reputable law firm wants anything to do with him. Also unfortunately for Trump, both he and Giuliani became untethered from reality several decades ago. So despite the fact that their odds of success are on par with those of Biden nominating Jared Kushner as Secretary of State or replacing Kamala Harris with Ivanka Trump on the 2024 ticket, they’re apparently intent on not only dragging this thing out as long as possible, but doing so in the most unhinged, mortifying fashion possible.
Which brings us to the press conference held by Giuliani on Thursday, an appearance that seemingly had no chance of topping his performance in court earlier this week but somehow did, by leaps and bounds. And that’s not just because, at one point, sweaty beads of what appeared to be hair dye dripped down the side of his face as though they were trying to flee the scene:
Hair and makeup malfunctions aside, the first thing you need to know about this press conference, in which Giuliani and company alleged they have evidence of mass, coordinated voter fraud, is that despite such claims, they told reporters they can’t actually provide any evidence of them at this time. “It’s not a singular voter fraud in one state,” Giuliani said, speaking from the Republican National Committee headquarters. “This pattern repeats itself in a number of states, almost exactly the same pattern, which any experienced investigator prosecutor, which suggests that there was a plan—from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud, specifically focused on big cities, and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats, and particularly if they focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption.” He added: “I know crimes, I can smell them. You don’t have to smell this one, I can prove it to you, 18 different ways. I can prove to you that he won, Pennsylvania, by 300,000 votes. I can prove to you that he won Michigan, probably 50,000 votes,” Giuliani continued. And yet, he didn’t prove anything, not 18 different ways or even one way. He did, however, act out a scene from My Cousin Vinny:
Later, he claimed that more than 600,00 ballots in Pennsylvania weren’t inspected, rendering them “null and void,” which is false; that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito had said ballots coming in Pennsylvania after 8 p.m. couldn’t be opened, which is also false; and that votes have not been certified in Wayne County, Michigan, which, you guessed it, is also false.
Incredibly, the award for the most batshit-crazy portion of the presser didn’t even go to Giuliani. Instead, it was clinched by attorney Sidney Powell. Taking over from the former mayor, Powell, who previously represented disgraced National Security Adviser Mike Flynn, told reporters she was here to talk about “Massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China and the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems…were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he didn’t want it to come out.”
Then she remembered to work in George Soros and the Clintons, like any conspiracy theorist worth her salt:
And in a feat no one thought possible, she made Giuliani sound lucid.
Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser for the Trump campaign, took to the podium to yell at the press assembled, telling them: “This is basically an opening statement so the American people can understand what the networks have been hiding and what they refuse to cover because all of your fake-news headlines are dancing around the merits of this case and are trying to delegitimize what we are doing here.”
Also, at one point Powell told reporters, “this is the 1775 of our generation and beyond,” which definitely sounds like a threat of revolution involving muskets and bayonets, though one truly never knows.
Anyway, as a reminder, Giuliani reportedly wants $20,000 a day for his legal services.
Correction: it might not have been hair dye:
The New York Times is on the case:
Many online commenters assumed that Mr. Giuliani was the victim of a bad dye job that was now seeping out under the bright lights of television. But several Manhattan hairdressers said that what was dripping down the face of the president’s lawyer was likely not hair dye. “Hair dye doesn’t drip like that, unless it’s just been applied,” said David Kholdorov of the Men’s Lounge Barbershop and Spa, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
He explained that hair dye is typically mixed with peroxide during the dyeing process, and that once the solution oxidizes, the color adheres to the hair. No one, he said, would leave the solution in place in its raw form, he said, because the solution would irritate the scalp and could burn the hair or cause it to fall out.
Mirko Vergani, the creative color director at the Drawing Room, a salon in downtown Manhattan, said it was far more likely that Mr. Giuliani had used mascara or a touch-up pen to make sure his sideburns matched the rest. “Sideburns are more gray than the rest of the head,” he said. “You can apply mascara to touch the gray side up a bit so it looks more natural.”
Still, one colorist wasn‘t convinced. Gene Sarcinello told reporter Jonah Engel Bromwich that in his professional opinion, the offending brown blob was the result of a bad dye job. “If it’s not washed out properly, that’s what’s going to happen,” he said, adding that the dye could have been spray-on. “Not knowing exactly what he has on his hair, it’s hair-color related definitely…. In some of the pictures I’m seeing, it looks glossy. Which looks like a product in his hair.”
Trump invites GOP legislators to the White House to explain why they should help him overthrow Democracy
“This is the Lincoln bedroom and hey, what if we invalidate the results of the 2020 election?” Per the New York Times:
After failing repeatedly in court to overturn election results, President Trump is taking the extraordinary step of reaching out directly to Republican state legislators as he tries to subvert the Electoral College process, inviting Michigan lawmakers to meet with him at the White House on Friday. A source with knowledge of the trip said that Mr. Trump would meet with Michigan’s Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, and speaker of the House, Lee Chatfield, late Friday afternoon. Both lawmakers are Republicans who have said that whoever has the most votes in Michigan after the results are certified will get the state’s 16 electoral votes.
The White House invitation to Republican lawmakers in a battleground state is the latest—and the most brazen—salvo in a scattershot campaign-after-the-campaign waged by Mr. Trump and his allies to cast doubt on President-Elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decisive victory. It comes as the Trump campaign and its allies have been seeking to overturn the results of the election in multiple states through lawsuits and intrusions into the state vote certification process, often targeting cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta with large and politically powerful Black populations.
After Trump reached out to the two Republicans on the four-member canvassing board in Wayne County on Wednesday night, the individuals said they wanted to “rescind” their votes to certify the county’s results, wherein Biden won 70% of the vote. So it’s not clear what Trump thinks he’s going to accomplish on Friday, though he presumably hasn’t ruled out trying to to “win” the election by giving away portraits of George Washington or the Oval Office’s Resolute Desk.
Tyson foods manager has a COVID pool: lawsuit
There are P.R. disasters, and then there’s this:
Tyson Foods said on Thursday that it had suspended the employees named in a lawsuit that alleged the manager of a Tyson pork plant in Waterloo, Iowa, organized a betting pool among supervisors to wager on how many workers would get sick. The lawsuit, filed by the son of Isidro Fernandez, a meatpacking worker who died in late April, said the betting pool was a “cash buy-in, winner take all.” The plant was the site of a deadly coronavirus outbreak this spring.
Those accused of being involved in the betting pool have been suspended without pay, Dean Banks, the president and chief executive of Tyson Foods, said in a statement on Thursday. Tyson also enlisted the law firm Covington & Burling to conduct an independent investigation, which will be led by Eric H. Holder Jr., the former U.S. attorney general. “If these claims are confirmed, we’ll take all measures necessary to root out and remove this disturbing behavior from our company,” Mr. Banks said.
At the time of Fernandez’s death, the Waterloo plant was a virus hot spot, with workers being told to continue coming in even if they were showing symptoms, and one reportedly being told to stay on the production line after he vomited, the lawsuit alleges. In all, roughly 1,000 workers, or one third of the workforce, ended up testing positive for the coronavirus, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise given that in late April Trump signed an executive order declaring the meat supply “critical infrastructure” and shielding companies from liability.
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