BEWARE...SOME DAYS ARE NOT VERY PRETTY. I GET CRABBY LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE DO. AND I DO SPEAK MY MIND.
DO NOT READ IF YOU ARE SENSITIVE TO TRUE, REAL, EVERYDAY FEELINGS LIKE MINE.(But I think you would enjoy it)
DON'T FORGET...FREEDOM OF SPEECH !
Friday, November 6, 2020
USPS's handling of mail-in ballots was 'gross negligence': Fmr. USPS Board of Governors Chair
Former
USPS Board of Governors Chair David Fineman joins Yahoo Finance's
Kristin Myers to discuss the postal service's handling of mail-in
ballots.
“The assumption that there are unaccounted
ballots within the Postal Service network is inaccurate. These ballots
were delivered in advance of the election deadlines. We employed
extraordinary measures to deliver ballots directly to local boards of
elections." - USPS
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) said about 1,700 ballots had
been identified in Pennsylvania at processing facilities during two
sweeps Thursday and were being delivered to election officials.
In
a court filing early Friday, USPS said 1,076 ballots, had been found at
the USPS Philadelphia Processing and Distribution Center. About 300
were found at the Pittsburgh processing center, 266 at a Lehigh Valley
facility and others found at other Pennsylvania processing centers.
Ballots
must be received by Friday evening in Pennsylvania in order to be
counted. The vote for the U.S. president remains extremely close and
Pennsylvania is one of the states that remains undecided.
About 500 ballots were also discovered in North Carolina during sweeps, USPS said on Friday.
U.S.
District Judge Emmet Sullivan on Thursday had ordered twice daily
sweeps at USPS facilities serving states with extended ballot receipt
deadlines as votes were still being counted in U.S. election
battleground states.
Some states, including Nevada and North
Carolina, are counting ballots that are received after Election Day as
long as they were postmarked by Tuesday.
Lawyers said at a court hearing on Thursday that USPS had delivered about 150,000 ballots on Wednesday.
"The vast majority were destined for postmark states and would be delivered on-time under state election law," USPS said.
Sullivan
said the processing centers must perform morning sweeps and then
afternoon sweeps "to ensure that any identified local ballots can be
delivered that day."
Sullivan issued a separate order requiring
USPS to "coordinate with all local county Boards of Elections in North
Carolina or Pennsylvania" in order to deliver all ballots "before 5:00
PM local time in North Carolina or Pennsylvania" on Friday.
Ballots
were still being counted by election officials in battleground states
after polls closed Tuesday in one of the most unusual elections in U.S.
history because of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
Democratic
candidate Joe Biden was cutting sharply into Republican President Donald
Trump's leads in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The former vice president
retained slim margins in Nevada and Arizona.
(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Christian Schmollinger, Robert Birsel)
Two of basketball’s biggest stars have been chipping in to help Florida felons vote in this year’s election.
LeBron
James and Michael Jordan helped join Michael Bloomberg’s $27 million
effort to help clear fines and fees for about 40,000 felons in the state
so that they can vote in Tuesday’s election, according to the Tampa Bay Times.
It’s not clear how much they contributed. Spokespeople for both Bloomberg and James’ “More Than A Vote” organization did not return the Times’ requests for comment.
Bloomberg enlists celebrities to help Florida felons
James and Jordan are just the latest to help pitch in and assist Florida felons vote in this year’s election.
About
1.4 million Floridians had their right to vote restored in 2018 thanks
to Amendment 4, which allowed convicted felons who have served their
sentences to vote again — with the exception of murder or sexual abuse.
Last
year, however, Republican lawmakers and the governor passed a law that
required ex-felons to pay back court fines and fees before regaining
their right to vote — which is essentially a poll tax and was found to
be unconstitutional in May.
An appeals court ruling earlier this
year overturned that unconstitutional ruling. Five of the six votes that
overturned that ruling, according to The New York Times, came from judges who were appointed by President Donald Trump.
About
75 percent of former felons owe court debt, and about 70 percent of
them are unable to pay. There is no central database used in the state,
either, making paying those fees extremely difficult if not impossible.
According to the Tampa Bay Times,
about 32 percent of the 4,700 felons who had their rights restored
through Bloomberg’s foundation in the states four biggest counties had
registered to vote.
A
$27 million effort led by Michael Bloomberg, LeBron James, Michael
Jordan and others helped Florida felons vote on Tuesday. (Mike
Ehrmann/Getty Images)
Local Police Say Biden Staffer May Have Been ‘At Fault’ in ‘Trump Train’ Highway Incident
Mairead McArdle
Local police in Texas
said over the weekend that the vehicle of a Joe Biden staffer may be
“at fault” in a minor collision that occurred during an incident where
Trump supporters in trucks surrounded and followed a Biden campaign bus.
The
incident occurred on I-35 in Hays County and involved a Biden staffer’s
white SUV making contact with a Trump supporter’s black truck.
The San Marcos Police Department, which is handling any potential police reports on the crash, said it has researched the collision and watched footage of the incident online.
“The
at-fault vehicle may be the white SUV and the victim appears to be the
black truck,” the police department said in a statement.
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“Calls
to the driver of the white SUV have gone unanswered and SMPD has not
been contacted by the driver of the black truck. Since SMPD has not
spoken to either driver at this time, additional investigation would be
required to fully ascertain who was at fault,” the department said.
The
police department also said the Biden bus requested a police escort,
but due to traffic police were not able to reach the campaign bus before
it exited the jurisdiction.
Katie Naranjo, chair of the Travis
County Democratic Party said in a tweet that Trump supporters followed
the Biden bus through central Texas “to intimidate Biden supporters.”
“They ran into a person’s car, yelling curse words and threats. Don’t let bullies win, vote,” she wrote.
The Biden campaign also condemned the group of Trump supporters, accusing them of endangering those close to the campaign.
“Rather
than engage in productive conversation about the drastically different
visions that Joe Biden and Donald Trump have for our country, Trump
supporters in Texas instead decided to put our staff, surrogates,
supporters, and others in harm’s way,” said Tariq Thowfeek, the Biden campaign’s Texas communications director.
President
Trump on Saturday tweeted a video that appears to show his supporters
surrounding the bus along with the words “I LOVE TEXAS!”
The
nonpartisan Cook Political Report on Wednesday moved the presidential
race in Texas from “lean Republican” to “toss up.” Trump is up by one
point in the state as of Tuesday, a day before the election, according to the Real Clear Politics average of polls.
Across
the country, cases of COVID-19 are increasing at an alarming pace. In
the last seven days, more than 500,000 people were diagnosed with
COVID-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And a growing number of people have no idea how they contracted the virus, doctors say.
“It’s
increasingly becoming common” for patients to not know how they got
COVID-19, Dr. Amesh A. Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins
Center for Health Security, tells Yahoo Life. Dr. Richard Watkins, an
infectious disease physician and professor of internal medicine at the
Northeast Ohio Medical University, agrees. He tells Yahoo Life that
“lately, most of” his patients don’t know where they contracted the
virus. The same is true for Dr. Rajeev Fernando, an infectious disease
expert in Southampton, N.Y. For many of his patients, “it’s because
people tell me they’ve not been wearing masks as they should,” he tells
Yahoo Life.
This trend says a lot about the virus and where things
are headed, Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist and
professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, tells Yahoo
Life. “The virus can spread from people who have no symptoms or who are
asymptomatic,” he says. “It’s now spreading in a way that people
experience when they get the common cold. They wonder, ‘Where did I get
that?’ and it can be difficult to really know the answer. This is an
indication of how widely spread the virus has become in our
communities.”
An
attendant talks to a person in line at a coronavirus testing site at
Ascarate Park on Saturday in El Paso, Texas. Doctors say a growing
number of people have no idea how they contracted the virus. (Cengiz
Yar/Getty Images)
Henry F. Raymond,
associate professor and epidemiologist at the Rutgers School of Public
Health, tells Yahoo Life that the increase in people who don’t know how
they contracted COVID-19 indicates that “there are a lot of asymptomatic
spreaders.”
“It’s no longer obvious, like you were with a friend,
they looked bad and they sneezed on you,” he says. “We’re definitely
seeing a lot of younger people who are asymptomatic, carrying the virus
and spreading it.”
At the same time, “many people don’t understand
how contagious the coronavirus is,” Watkins says, adding, “this,
combined with the high number of asymptomatic infected people, is what
is driving the pandemic, which is not showing signs of slowing. We are
definitely not ‘turning a corner.’”
Not knowing how you caught the
virus can make it difficult for contact tracers to figure out patterns
in transmission, Raymond says. It’s not entirely cut and dry, though.
“In
some ways it’s easier, in some ways it’s harder,” Adalja says. “If you
don’t know who you got the virus from, it’s hard to find patterns with
contact tracing.” But people are increasingly spending time in smaller
groups, which can make it easier for contact tracers to know who to
contact next, he says. “If you have only been around three people, it’s
easier to know who are your contacts,” Adalja says.
The rise of contact tracing apps like New York’s COVID Alert NY and Pennsylvania’s COVID Alert PA
may help, but it’s too soon to know how much they can contribute,
Raymond says. “It’s too early to tell how many people are actually going
to download them and activate them to see what impact it might have,”
he says.
The trend toward people hosting others in their own homes
as the weather cools is concerning to Adalja. “It’s harder to intervene
in what people are doing in their own homes versus in mass gatherings
or at a restaurant. It’s much more difficult to come up with a plan for
people to follow.”
That’s why Adalja recommends that people remain
“really vigilant” about how they’re acting when they’re around others.
In addition to following the CDC’s guidelines
for preventing the spread of the virus, like wearing masks, practicing
social distancing and washing hands regularly, Adalja urges people to
think about their potential exposure at home. “If you can see other
people outdoors instead of indoors and keep your distance, that’s
better,” he says. “I suspect that people are not going to be wearing
face coverings in their own home.”
Raymond stresses that people
should be aware that current case counts of the virus are “just the tip
of the iceberg,” adding, “in general, the amount of virus in the
community is much higher than people realize.” There are “probably
thousands who are, on some level of the spectrum — maybe they feel achy
but they don’t get a test, or they don’t feel bad at all but they’re
spreading the virus — and they’re not being counted,” Raymond says.
Raymond
urges people to be aware that the pandemic is still ongoing, and that
it’s getting worse. “We are in this for a longer time than we ever
hoped,” he says. “Now is not the time to think that the fight is over.”
Wolves G Malik Beasley charged with pointing assault rifle at family on parade of homes tour
Malik Beasley faces multiple felony charges after an alleged incident with an assault rifle. (David Berding/Getty Images)
Minnesota
Timberwolves guard Malik Beasley was arrested after police say he
pointed an assault rifle at a family of three that approached his rental
home during a parade of homes tour in the Minneapolis suburb of
Plymouth.
Beasley and his girlfriend, Montana Yao, are also facing
drug charges after the incident led to a search of their home and the
seizure of nearly two pounds of marijuana, according to a statement from the Hennepin County Attorney's Office.
Felony charges against Beasley, girlfriend
Beasley
is charged with fifth-degree drug possession and felony threats of
violence while Yao is charged with fifth-degree drug possession. Both
are 23. They have a 1½-year-old son together. The alleged incident took
place on Sept. 26.
“We
are aware of the charges involving Malik Beasley,” the statement reads.
“We take these allegations seriously and will let the legal process run
its course.”
What allegedly happened
According to the charges,
a couple and their 13-year-old daughter pulled up to the shoulder of
the road in front of Beasley’s home in their SUV while touring the
parade of homes. Beasley’s house was roped off. As the family sat in the
SUV, Beasley allegedly approached the vehicle with an assault rifle and
tapped on a window.
He pointed the gun at the vehicle and told the family to “get the f--- off” his property, according to prosecutors.
The criminal complaint described the weapon as an “all-black assault
rifle with a forehand grip” and a scope. He kept the gun pointed at the
vehicle as it drove away, according to the complaint.
Police search allegedly led to more guns, pot
The
alleged incident prompted multiple 911 calls and led police to search
Beasley’s home for the rifle. When they entered the home, they say they
detected an “overwhelming odor” of marijuana and found 1.8 pounds of the
drug in the home. They claim they found a rifle matching the one
described in the report in addition to a 12-gauge shotgun and a handgun.
Police
say they also seized surveillance footage from the home showing Beasley
grabbing his rifle and taking it outside around the same time the
family reported the confrontation.
Beasley averaged 20.7 points per game in 14 games with the Timberwolves last season after a midseason trade from the Denver Nuggets. He has a court appearance scheduled for Nov. 19. Yao is due in court on Dec. 29.
Farmington Hills man charged with unemployment fraud showboated lavish lifestyle on social media
A Farmington Hills man is facing several
charges accused of stealing from the unemployment insurance agency, then
showboating his lavish lifestyle on social media with stacks of cash,
luxury cars and appearing to brag to law enforcement.
(WXYZ) — A Farmington
Hills man is facing several charges accused of stealing from the
unemployment insurance agency, then showboating his lavish lifestyle on
social media with stacks of cash, luxury cars and appearing to brag to
law enforcement.
This is a brazen crime spree that started back in
April. US Attorney Mathew Schneider says if you think you can steal
from the government and not get caught, you’d better think again.
“This unemployment fraud could be the largest fraud against the taxpayers in a generation,” Schneider said.
Andre
Taylor Jr., 27, of Farmington Hills, is charged with three counts of
wire fraud, three counts of aggravated identity theft and four counts of
mail fraud after he allegedly defrauded the Michigan unemployment
insurance agency, credit card companies and stole identities of area
residents.
“It’s stunning the amount of money that is being taken away from people who are unemployed,” Schneider said.
Taylor
is accused of filing unemployment claims in Michigan and other states.
It’s alleged he had the state unemployment agencies send him $600 in
prepaid credit cards, an additional weekly benefit during the pandemic
for people out of work, and spent those gifts cards an Meijer, Kroger
and other stores. He would even allegedly mail some of the cards to his
house and relatives.
“When you’re unemployed and you need that
money for yourself that goes to feed your family, there’s only so much
money available and when people like this steal that money away, it
really hurts the people of Michigan,” Schneider said.
US Attorney
Mathew Schneider says Taylor would then post pictures of mounds of cash,
luxury cars and more on social media. Schneider says it wasn’t the feds
who brought them this case, it was the USPS who say Taylor would bribe
mail carriers to steal debit and credit cards along their routes.
“In
this case it was the US postal service. The postal inspection service.
Those postal workers are doing a great job and now in our country we
hear people talking bad things about the postal service; they’re the
ones bringing us these cases,” Schneider said.
Schneider says it’s
disgusting to see people stealing from people who need the money the
most, but promises they’re not done yet.
“So, whether or not
you’re going to brag about it on social media or not, we are going to
follow the money trail until we track you down,” he said.
This
investigation is still in the early stages. Schneider says they are
still counting the money but says he expects the amount to be enormous.
Copyright 2020 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or
redistributed.
The claim: Joe Biden told a factory worker 'I don’t work for you'
A viral social media post claims Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden isn’t the public servant he’s made out to be.
The meme, shared on Facebook,
depicts an encounter between Joe Biden and a person wearing a helmet
who is turned away from the camera. There’s a speech bubble over Biden’s
head which reads “I don’t work for you!” as Biden points at the person,
insinuating he said that to the person.
“Remember this on Election Day 2020,” the text on the image reads.
The person who posted the meme, which has been shared 63,000 times, did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment.
In March, Biden got into a heated exchange over gun rights with a factory worker at an auto plant in Detroit, USA TODAY previously reported.
“You’re working for me, man,” the worker told Biden.
“I’m not working for you,” Biden said. “Give me a break, man. Don’t be such a horse’s a--.”
But the conversation between the two before those words were exchanged provides additional context to the quote in the meme.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden clashes with a worker in Detroit on March 10, 2020.
As
Biden was making his way through a crowd of workers at the Fiat
Chrysler plant, one person stopped him and accused him of “actively
trying to end our Second Amendment right” and “take away our guns.”
The
former vice president told the worker that he wasn't accurately
describing his stance on gun control, calling him "full of s---." An
aide seemingly attempted to curb the conversation, at which point Biden
appeared to shush him, as seen in a video of the encounter recorded by CBS News.
Biden
explained his stance on the Second Amendment, comparing its limits to
those on the First Amendment right of free speech. He also said he owned
shotguns and that his sons hunt.
The exchange continued to grow
more tense as the man repeated his accusation that Biden pledged to take
away peoples’ guns. The worker fired back that he'd seen a "viral
video" of the former vice president saying he'd take away peoples'
guns.
Biden said the videos the worker was referring to were "simply a lie." A number of manipulated videos of Biden
have circulated on social media. He denied again the notion that he
would confiscate guns, and argued back that there's no plausible need
for semi-automatic rifles, mistakenly calling them "AR-14s."
More
words were said between the two, which cannot be heard clearly on the
video. The next clear language was the exchange between Biden and the
worker about who works for whom.
We
rate the claim that Biden told a factory worker “I don’t work for you”
as MISSING CONTEXT because it may mislead some without additional
information. The worker and Biden argued over gun control and Second
Amendment rights before the statement was made. The encounter took place
on March 10 at an auto plant in Detroit.
Two Chicago sisters were denied bail after allegedly stabbing a store clerk 27 times over the request to wear a mask
A man was stabbed multiple times after asking two women to wear masks.
Two
sisters entered a small shop in Chicago on Sunday when they were
approached by a worker who asked them to wear a mask and to use hand
sanitizer to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 according to Karie James who is a police spokesperson, the Chicago Sun Times reported. They refused and began to argue with the man at the store located on the 3200 block of West Roosevelt Road.
The argument escalated and the women Jessica Hill, 21, and Jayla Hill,
18, are accused of attacking the man. Jessica pulled a knife out of her
back pocket and began stabbing the 32-year-old man. Jayla held the man
in place by his hair while the victim was stabbed 27 times.
Jessica and Jayla Hill (Credit: Chicago Police)
Jessica
allegedly taunted the employee as a “b- – – -” and said he had gotten
“f- – – – – up” by the sisters. Jayla recorded the incident on her
phone.
The Hill sisters were both treated for minor wounds at St.
Anthony Hospital while the victim was treated at Mount Sinai Hospital.
The women were arrested at the scene and appeared in court for a bail hearing on Tuesday as their lawyer insisted they’d been overcharged and only acted in self-defense. A judge denied bail for the sisters. They are due in court again on Nov. 4.
This isn’t the first time requesting a customer to wear a mask went very wrong. In June, a Walmart employee in Florida was shoved after they asked a customer to wear a mask. Also, in May, a Target worker found themselves in the middle of a brawl after requesting that two customers wear their mask.
According to The New York Times,
retail employees are often the ones enforcing the rule to wear a mask
indoors, and far too often they are being injured over it. During an
intense exchange between a Trader Joes employee and a customer, the
customer said they should not be forced to wear a mask.
“We are in
America here land of the free. Look at all of these sheep that are
here, all wearing this mask that is actually dangerous for them,” a
woman refused according to NYT.
Have you subscribed to theGrio’s podcast “Dear Culture”? Download our newest episodes now!
We drove around last night and you would not beleive all the people in and out of houses and apts.
You are complaing about 1 in 5 black people getting the virus... keep your ass at home and wear the mask over your nose too dumb ass. They are getting it because they won't stay home and stop iviting the whole neighborhood into their home.
