He’s as corrupt as they come

Joan McCarter of Daily Kos reported that NBC News unearthed a Postal Service audit from 20 years ago of contracts for mail equipment transport. The audit shows that there were multiple contracts without competitive bids awarded to a company previously owned by Louis DeStroy. An estimate figures the USPS paid $53 million more than if they were competitively bid.



Michael Caputo is the assistant secretary of public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. Several news outlets reported that Caputo with his aide Paul Alexander and others have been watering down the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports. They have battling scientists because they want the reports to reflect the nasty guy’s rosy claims of the pandemic. In the process they have been putting out hit pieces on the scientists. Hunter of Kos reports they delve so much into conspiracy questions are raised for their fitness for the job. One hit was a Facebook video

in which Caputo accuses CDC scientists with "sedition" for the content of their reports, claims an anti-Trump "resistance unit" is operating inside the CDC, claims he is in real personal danger of being killed by anti-Trump forces, and launched into a string of off-the-rails conspiracy theories that culminated in him urging Trump supporters to "buy ammunition" in preparation for a Biden attempt to seize the presidency from Trump.
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It's not that Caputo and Alexander have been challenging the science, based on science. They have been repeatedly and systemically challenging CDC science based on false claims and assertions of anti-Trump conspiracies by scientists who present numbers that contradict the administration's dismissals of virus dangers.

Congressional Democrats have announced there will be an investigation.

Leah McElrath tweeted:

Trump DHS appointee Michael Caputo spun conspiracy theories about left-wing hit squads being trained for insurrection and accused CDC scientists of “sedition” on Facebook Live last night.

Caputo is a former Kremlin advisor.
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When I say Michael Caputo is a former Kremlin advisor, I mean he literally did PR for Vladimir Putin.

He also worked to support Oliver North’s illegal activities in Central America.

He’s as corrupt as they come.

Trump appointed him to a top spot at Health and Human Services.
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Fwiw, Caputo’s Twitter account is now reportedly been either deactivated or deleted.

Georgia Logothetis, in her pundit roundup for Kos, quoted Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times

Trump has repeatedly sent American law enforcement the message that members of antifa are terrorists who should be treated with extreme violence, and that protests against racial injustice and his administration are dominated by antifa.

There are many ways the presidential election could go sideways, leading to mass demonstrations over ballot counting. In the same Fox News interview in which he gloated over Reinoehl’s death, Trump was asked what he would do if his opponents “riot” on election night.

“We’ll put them down very quickly,” he said. All those who’ve demonstrated against this president should know that what’s done to antifa today can be done to them tomorrow.

Laurie Marhoever, a history professor at the University of Washington, wrote The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Gay Rights Movement in WWI for The Conversation. In 1915 a gay German soldier (most definitely closeted) wrote home to his boyfriend that he had been severely injured. He soon died. The boyfriend, known only as “S.” told their story to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the leading homosexual emancipation group, who published the letter in April 1916.

That letter and others like it changed the way gay rights were discussed. Before the war the focus was on scientifically proving homosexuality was natural. It shifted to saying gay people are upstanding citizens – they sacrificed in the war – and deserve to have full citizenship rights.

Though tolerance increased through the 1920s they did not achieve the goal or repealing sodomy laws. And when the Nazis came to power they used those sodomy laws to murder thousands of men. The law remained on the books in Germany until the 1990s (and until 2003 in the US).



NBC News has an interactive map of sixteen large fires in the West. Alas, it doesn’t show one map with all the fires. What one can do, to get a sense of the size of the burned area, is to superimpose it on a city you know well. For example, the Claremont-Bear Fire in California has burned 408 square miles. That area is three times the size of Detroit (which covers a large 138 square miles). The burned area would stretch from Romulus to Mt. Clemens, Taylor to Farmington Hills. The August Complex Fire in California has burned 787 square miles (5.7 times Detroit). That would stretch from Canton to downtown Detroit and Romulus to Clarkston. Or I can adjust the map a bit and show this fire’s burn area would include both Flint and Saginaw.