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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.

— Stephan

SCHWARTZ REPORT PODCAST

Schwartz Report Episode 52: Secrets of Happiness

Republicans Are Planning to Spend $20 Million So You Won’t Vote

Stephan:  Republicans don't like democracy, and they are willing to put their money where their mouths are. If you are an urban woman, a person of color, a young voter, they don't want you to vote. It's that simple.
AP Photo/Morry Gash

The Republican Party is building a program to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers in over a dozen states to conduct anti-”voter fraud” efforts, which means monitoring polls and challenging votes and voter registrations, according to the New York Times.

The party, backed by President Donald Trump, is spending $20 million on its efforts, which intends to recruit up to 50,000 volunteers in 15 states to “monitor polling places and challenge ballots and voters deemed suspicious,” the Times reports. The money is also intended to fight Democratic-backed lawsuits against alleged voter suppression efforts on the part of Republicans.

The GOP appears to be capitalizing on a 2018 federal court decision allowing a decades-long consent decree to expire, which had barred the Republican National Committee from pursuing certain “ballot security” measures. In that effort in New Jersey in 1981, the RNC started a “ballot security task force” of armed, off-duty police officers to patrol minority-majority precincts in Newark and Trenton.

The court decree had been violated by the GOP […]

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Betsy DeVos openly admits she’s ‘absolutely’ using the pandemic to impose her ‘faith-based schools’ agenda

Stephan:  Republicans also don't like educated peasants. They want them indoctrinated with the usual willfully ignorant christofascist racism, so they can be easily manipulated and inflamed. And the agent Trump has appointed to carry out this task is Betsy DeVos. She doesn't even hide it anymore.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos

Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos admitted that she was trying to use the ongoing coronavirus crisis to push through her private school choice agenda during a Tuesday radio interview.DeVos made the comments during an interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan, the archbishop of New York, on his Sirius XM show. The interview was first flagged by the nonprofit education news outlet Chalkbeat.

Dolan asked the secretary whether she was trying to “utilize this particular crisis to ensure that justice is finally done to our kids and the parents who choose to send them to faith-based schools.”Defend democracy. Click to invest in courageous progressive journalism today.

“Am I correct in understanding what your agenda is?” he asked.

“Yes, absolutely,” DeVos replied. “For more than three decades, that has been something that I’ve been passionate about. This whole pandemic has brought into clear focus that everyone has been impacted, and we shouldn’t be thinking about students that are in public schools versus private schools.”

Department of Education spokeswoman Angela Morabito said […]

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GOP House candidate demeans Muslims and compares Dreamers to pedophiles

Stephan:  Here is something else pulled from the racist christofascist sewers to run for Congress as a Republican.
Republican congressional candidate Ted Howze is running in a central California district.
Credit: Howze for Congress/AP
 

Republican congressional candidate Ted Howze said earlier this month he had nothing to do with social media posts from his personal accounts that demeaned Muslims, accused prominent Democrats of murder and mocked a survivor of the Parkland school shooting.

The “negative and ugly ideas,” he asserted, were penned by others whom he’d given access to his accounts, but he declined to name them.

In the weeks since his denial, new questions have emerged about that explanation.

At least a dozen additional posts from Howze’s account over a two-year period espouse conspiracy theories, suggest Hillary Clinton and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) are responsible for murder, ordenigrate Dreamers, Islam and the Black Lives Matter movement. As of Tuesday afternoon, they were accessible on his personal Facebook account.

Howze, his party’s nominee in a competitive central California district, is endorsed by the National Republican Congressional Committee and House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy. He explicitly signed his name to one of these posts and tags […]

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Nearly Half of All Tweets on Coronavirus Likely Came From a Bot, Study Says

Stephan:  Half the tweets you read about the Coronavirus are bot-generated and, as this report states: "The Bot Sentinel analysis also concluded that most of the tweets from coronavirus-based bots were favorable to the president." This is the first time in history, that I can think of, that a pandemic sickening 1.6 million, and killing nearly, as of today, 100,000 people has been managed not with healthcare in mind but to support the re-election of a man who let it happen in the first place.
The novel Coronavirus

If you’ve read a recent social media posting that offers some questionable advice or dubious news about COVID-19, you’re not alone. In fact, users on Twitter have, on average, about a 50 percent chance of reading information regarding the disease that most likely came from a bot, according to findings from a recent study.

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University delved into 200 million tweets that have been authored since January about coronavirus. Of those examined, 45 percent were issued out by accounts that behaved more like “bots” than human users of the social media site.

Bots are “automated user accounts that interact with Twitter using an application programming interface” to tweet, retweet and even message human users online, according to consumer software company Symantec. They can sometimes be used for good reasons — such as providing information on weather or earthquakes to relevant users — but they can be used for iniquitous purposes, too, like interfering in the political process or waging disinformation campaigns on topics their developers want to promote. Some research suggests that as many as 15 […]

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Trump Claimed Arms Sales Would Provide a Massive Jobs Boost. A New Report Shows How Wrong He Was.

Stephan:  Saudi Arabia, one of the most regressive nations on the planet, whose ruler ordered the killing of an American journalist, and whose record about women is somewhere in the 11th century was supposed to be one of Donald Trump's big geopolitical victories. I am afraid not. Like everything else Trump touches reality and his bombast about it have very little correlation. Here is the latest.
MBS and Trump

President Donald Trump has become a relentless booster for weapon sales to Saudi Arabia, despite the kingdom’s increasing authoritarianism under the rule of its de-facto leader Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The president has bragged at times that arms deals with the country would create anywhere from 500,000 to “over a million” jobs. Even after the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi put pressure on the United States to reconsider its alliance with the country, Trump released a lengthy statement defending the kingdom, noting specifically that its commitment to buy US weapons “will create hundreds of thousands of jobs, tremendous economic development, and much additional wealth for the United States.”

Well, according to a new report, those claims haven’t come close to panning out, despite the Trump administration fast-tracking $8 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates last year. (In an interesting confluence of news, we now know this move was being investigated by the State Department inspector general who Trump fired last week.)

report from the left-leaning think tank Center for International Policy looks at […]

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Oregon Republicans pick QAnon conspiracy theorist as U.S. Senate candidate

Stephan:  I started to write and say where do they find these people? But, as I did so, I realized there is nothing special about this woman's tacky craziness. This is the Republican Party; she got nearly 50% of the vote. The Republican Party of Dwight Eisenhower, Everett Dirksen, Margaret Chase Smith, and Nelson Rockefeller is gone, replaced by Devin Nunes, Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Rand Paul, and Martha McSally. The United States has reached such a level of tribalism that The Great Schism Trend I have been writing about since Obama's first campaign is reaching a level where I don't see how it reconciles. I am not sure these people will accept Joe Biden and a woman, particularly a Black woman without violence.
Joe Rae Perkins | Man holding a Q sign waits in line with others to enter a campaign rally 
Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

Oregon Republicans voted on Tuesday to nominate a QAnon conspiracy theorist to challenge incumbent Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., in November.

Jo Rae Perkins, the former chair of the Linn County Republican Party, defeated three other candidates in Tuesday’s Republican primary with nearly 50% of the vote.

Perkins took to Twitter to celebrate her victory and pledge her allegiance to “Q.”

“Where we go one, we go all,” she said, reciting the QAnon slogan in a video that has since been deleted. “I stand with President Trump. I stand with Q and the team. Thank you Anons, and thank you patriots. And together, we can save our republic.”

The QAnon conspiracy theory began on the far-right message board 4chan, where an anonymous poster who calls himself “Q” writes clues to followers. QAnon supporters believe that a secretive network of deep state officials and liberal elites are running a global child sex trafficking ring and trying to […]

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Asian American doctors and nurses are fighting racism and the coronavirus

Stephan:  I held this article a couple of days to see if other media picked up on it. Very few did. This is naked racism stirred up amongst the Magas by their "Dear Leader" Trump. But it is even worse. As you have probably noticed in all the television interviews what a large percentage of the doctors and nurses are Asian. These are people risking their own lives trying to save the lives of others regardless of race. And this is how the Magas treat them. All because of Trump.
Lucy Li outside her home in Boston on May 14. A man shouted a racist rant at Li after she left work one night during the coronavirus pandemic.
Credit: Olivia Falcigno/For The Washington Post

Lucy Li tries not to let fear dictate her interactions with patients as she makes the rounds in the covid-19 intensive care unit. But the anesthesiology resident at Massachusetts General Hospital cannot erase the memory of what happened after work at the start of the pandemic.

A man followed the Chinese American doctor from the Boston hospital, spewing a profanity-laced racist tirade as she walked to the subway. “Why are you Chinese people killing everyone?” Li recalled the man shouting. “What is wrong with you? Why the f— are you killing us?”

Stunned at first, then relieved she was not physically attacked, Li is now saddened and angered by the irony that she spends her days and nights helping save lives. Her work inserting tubes in patients’ airways has grown riskier since the coronavirus emerged — each procedure releasing droplets and secretions that could carry […]

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36,000 lives could have been saved in the US if social distancing measures began a week earlier, model shows

Stephan:  Donald Trump is a mass murderer; that is how I believe history will characterize him. As this story lays out if, instead of going golfing and blowing off the scientific advice he had received about the Coronavirus, Trump had listened and directed the nation to go into self-quarantine a week earlier than he did, 36,000 dead American men, women, and children would be alive today. If he had done it when he should have, two weeks earlier, 54,000 would not have had to die. To give you a sense of scale. The Vietnam Conflict Data File of the Defense Casualty Analysis System (DCAS) reports that over 19 years of that war there were 58,220 U.S. military fatalities. Quite apart from all his other failings as the U.S. President, Trump for this failure has become one of history's villains.

If the United States had begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the coronavirus outbreak, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers.

And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83% — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.

Under that scenario, about 54,000 fewer people would have died by early May.

The enormous cost of waiting to take action reflects the unforgiving dynamics of the outbreak that swept through American cities in early March. Even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth, which by April had subsumed New York City, New Orleans and other major cities, the researchers found.

It’s a big, big difference. That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia and the leader of […]

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