From the press release this is an interesting, and oddly colloquial, way for the United States Dept of Justice under AG Bill Barr to define the first amendment.

…”Social distancing, while difficult and unfamiliar for a nation that has long prided itself on the strength of its voluntary associations, has the potential to save hundreds of thousands of American lives from an imminent threat.”…

I never quite thought about the first amendment as being so casual.  Let’s all attend our ‘voluntary associations’ on Sunday.  Alrighty then… Though, well, I do wonder what an involuntary association would be. I digress; I’m being petty.

[DOJ] “Today, the Department filed a Statement of Interest in support of a church in Mississippi that allegedly sought to hold parking lot worship services, in which congregants listened to their pastor preach over their car radios, while sitting in their cars in the church parking lot with their windows rolled up. 

The City of Greenville fined congregants $500 per person for attending these parking lot services – while permitting citizens to attend nearby drive-in restaurants, even with their windows open.[1]  The City appears to have thereby singled churches out as the only essential service (as designated by the state of Mississippi) that may not operate despite following all CDC and state recommendations regarding social distancing.

(more…)

National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow appears on Fox Business to discuss the administration plans to re-open the U.S. economy.  Something is going to need to happen prior to May 1st, or the long-term economic challenge is going to be much more difficult.

Kudlow again notes a ‘bring back manufacturing’ proposal with 100% tax deduction (expensing) for U.S. manufacturers to relocate their manufacturing supply chains out of China and back to the U.S.  The Beijing lobbyists would go bananas.

(more…)

In an effort to keep the Daily Open Thread a little more open topic we are going to start a new daily thread for “Presidential Politics”. Please use this thread to post anything relating to the Donald Trump Administration and Presidency.

This thread will refresh daily and appear above the Open Discussion Thread.

President Trump Twitter @POTUS / Vice President Pence Twitter @VP

Stephanie Grisham Twitter @StephGrisham45

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. THY WILL BE DONE, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but DELIVER US FROM EVIL.

For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen †

•Phase One was retail. •Phase two was distribution. •Phase three was the space between processing/manufacturing and distribution. •Phase four was raw material supply to manufacturing. •Phase five is consumer packaging capacity, and bulk storage inventories.

Most Americans were not aware food consumption in the U.S. was a 60/40 proposition. Approximately 60% of all food was consumed “outside the home” (or food away from home), and 40% of all food consumed was food “inside the home” (grocery shoppers).

Food ‘outside the home’ included: restaurants, fast-food locales, schools, corporate cafeterias, university lunchrooms, manufacturing cafeterias, hotels, food trucks, park and amusement food sellers and many more. Many of those venues are not thought about when people evaluate the overall U.S. food delivery system; however, this network was approximately 60 percent of all food consumption on a daily basis.

The ‘food away from home‘ sector has its own supply chain. Very few restaurants and venues (cited above) purchase food products from retail grocery outlets. As a result of the coronavirus mitigation effort the ‘food away from home’ sector has been reduced by 75% of daily food delivery operations. However, people still need to eat. That means retail food outlets, grocers, are seeing sales increases of 25 to 50 percent, depending on the area.

♦ Phase Five – The retail consumer supply chain for manufactured and processed food products includes bulk storage to compensate for seasonality. As Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue recently noted “there are over 800 commercial and public warehouses in the continental 48 states that store frozen products.”

Here is a snapshot of the food we had in storage at the end of February: over 302 million pounds of frozen butter; 1.36 billion pounds of frozen cheese; 925 million pounds of frozen chicken; over 1 billion pounds of frozen fruit; nearly 2.04 billion pounds of frozen vegetables; 491 million pounds of frozen beef; and nearly 662 million pounds of frozen pork.

(more…)

This story is so far beyond predictable that the light from where predictable exists wouldn’t catch up for a year….  The LA Sheriff released the inmates fearing the Wuhan virus, now he worries he may have put the public at risk….. you just can’t make this up.  Save the criminals, destroy the community.

“We were faced with a choice, if we left the jail system overpopulated, the pandemic would have swept through easily.”

[LINK]

(more…)

This guy is sketchy.  Sometimes within a 24 hour period Fauci will make a statement, then contradict the initial assertion, then attempt to cloud his own conflict with obtuse and wordy explanations.  After watching for several weeks, we first called it out HERE.

Yesterday Fauci told CNN if the country had been shut down in February lives could have been saved.  Today Fauci is in the contradiction and wordy explanation phase.  Obviously, reversing course on any issue while the media is in a frenzied attack against the president is like removing a bloody carcass from the piranha pool before the frenzy is over.

To wit Fauci saddens the media and makes himself a target; the media immediately focus their anger toward him. Fauci was good, now bad. Spontaneous anger leads the media to question Fauci if he was being forced to reverse himself.  Quite remarkable. WATCH:

(more…)

It seemed clear several weeks ago this was going to happen.  East coast blue state governors and West coast blue state governors are uniting to begin the economic civil war planning to block any White House effort to re-open the U.S. economy.  The founders planned for this in Article I, Sec 10 (paragraph 3):

“No state shall, without the consent of Congress, … enter into any agreement or compact with another state”..

The three step plan seems predictable: (1) Get out ahead of President Trump. (2) Defy the ‘all clear’ and shape economic benefit to their political allies. (3) Then use Fauci’s upcoming dossier to hit the administration for heartlessly opening the economy too early.

♦ On the East Coast the governors of New York (Cuomo), New Jersey (Murphy), Connecticut (Lamont), Pennsylvania (Wolfe), Delaware (Carney) and Rhode Island (Raimondo) have started assembling their economic war council with the intent to keep the northeast region shut down.  Controlling critical ports and infrastructure is a key part of their strategy.

EAST COAST — Six Northeast governors will form a working group to come up with a plan to restart [control] the regional economy, they announced on Monday. (link)

(more…)

Unfortunately, with President Trump effectively communicating the latest information on the federal efforts to mitigate COVID-19, more corporate U.S. resistance media have decided not to carry the live broadcasts from the White House task force briefings.

Today at 5:00pm ET the White House will hold a briefing for the public and media on the latest mitigation efforts against the coronavirus. [Livestream Links Below]

White House Livestream Link – Fox News Livestream Link – CSPAN Livestream

(more…)

The resistance appears to be coming together.  In a stunning and historic change of protocol the United States Supreme Court will hold teleconference hearings and will actually live-stream broadcast the oral arguments and questions. Two elements are remarkable.

First, that the Supreme Court would permit a livestream broadcast of any hearing is historic. The purposeful controls of the Court, never allowing video, cameras or live audio broadcasting for their hearings, was always justified around the court never wanting to allow politics and media to shape the serious legal issues being debated.

Secondly, and perhaps not coincidentally, during this live-stream session, the Supreme Court is going to be hearing legal arguments after they consolidated a series of cases targeting the financial and business records of President Donald Trump.  The various lawsuits against President Trump are not only going to be heard, they are going to be broadcast.   It doesn’t get much more political than that.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court said Monday it will hold arguments by teleconference in May in key cases, including President Donald Trump’s bid to shield his tax and other financial records.

The court will make live audio of the arguments available for the first time. It had previously postponed courtroom arguments for March and April because of the coronavirus.

(more…)