Denver Mayor Michael Hancock tweeted a plea when he was just minutes from boarding a plane at his city’s airport. “Pass the potatoes, not COVID… Stay home as much as you can, especially if you’re sick… Host virtual gatherings instead of in-person dinners. Avoid travel, if you can.” Hancock then flew off to Houston, with a connecting flight to Meridian, Mississippi. His wife, Mary Louise Lee, […]
Michael Daly
30 posts
In the wake of a superspreader motorcycle rally and other nearly maskless mass gatherings such as a buffalo roundup, South Dakota has itself become a superspreader. And at a press conference this week, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz held South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem partly responsible for a COVID-19 surge in his state that is now forcing him to impose new restrictions. He pointedly cited this summer’s […]
The emergency dispatchers in El Paso, Texas, were assigning ambulances on one COVID-19 call after another. “Respond to a sick patient, a COVID patient… Difficulty breathing, COVID… Confirming it is a COVID patient… Be advised positive COVID… COVID patient getting CPR…This is going to be a positive COVID situation… Patient was at local care physician when patient fainted, COVID symptoms…” In amongst those calls, the operators […]
President Trump began the first of his three rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday with just more of the usual shameless lies and groundless attacks. The Thug-in-Chief then uttered a threat that proved he can still outdo himself. And it was all the more disturbing because the people likely to suffer the consequences most keenly if Trump followed through on it included the thousands who were cheering […]
As COVID-19 deaths in the United States approached 200,000, the toll among health-care workers came to include a 28-year-old doctor who had gone about with a toy stethoscope as a youngster in upstate New York. Dr. Adeline Fagan had grown up to become an OB-GYN resident at HCA Healthcare in Houston. A photo shows her in scrubs, holding a swaddled newborn. She has the incandescent smile […]
As we come to the 19th anniversary of 9/11, the New York City Fire Department has renamed its highest award for bravery from that of an avowedly racist newspaper publisher who supported slavery to that of the chief who died while directing operations at the World Trade Center. After he nearly perished in the collapse of the South Tower, Chief Peter Ganci remained in harm’s way […]
The roar of Harleys announced the determination of 460,000 people to ignore public health warnings and attend the 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in August, largely without masks or social distancing. The silent pings of their cell phones enabled a team of economists to trace these reckless souls back to their home counties and statistically link the rally to at least 250,000 COVID-19 infections. The results are […]
The Trump campaign did not likely pick Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for Thursday night’s rally because it is the hometown of Fred Rogers, beloved icon of children’s television. Rogers died in 2003, but his cardigan-clad legacy remains, revitalized when Tom Hanks played him in a 2019 movie. Few people could have been more different than Rogers and Trump in matters of honesty and trust and kindness to others […]
The largely maskless crowd on the South Lawn of the White House for President Trump’s speech accepting the Republican nomination happened to number about the same as the new COVID-19 cases that day in the state with one of the highest infection rates. Iowa reported a record 1,289 new cases on Thursday. But any comparison between that and the 1,000 plus supporters arrayed before Trump was […]
Little Skylar Herbert was so precociously bright and engaging that her kindergarten teacher predicted she would become the first Black female president of the United States. But Skylar was only 5 when she instead became the first child in Michigan to die from COVID-19. This daughter of a police officer and a firefighter is now a heartbreaking marker of history as it is being made in […]
Winning is everything in Trump world, and the winner in the border wall fundraising scandal is a contractor who has ended up with more than $1.7 billion in federal contracts. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon is said by prosecutors to have pocketed only a relatively modest $1 million. Brian Kolfage, who launched the “We Build the Wall” effort on GoFundMe allegedly got less than half that. […]
A south Texas butterfly conservationist has a message for Steve Bannon and three others arrested on Thursday for fraud and money laundering in what the feds describe as a border wall fundraising scheme. “I just wish them well in their cavity searches,” says Marianna Treviño-Wright, executive director of the National Butterfly Center. Treviño-Wright was targeted by We Build the Wall late last year, when she sought […]
The hot dog left on Cris Dosev’s front step in northwest Florida was laced with toothpicks. The first assumption many folks made on seeing his photo of the boobytrapped frankfurter on Facebook last month was that it was an attempt to harm the family pooch, Maverick. And since Dosev was in a truly down and dirty campaign to unseat incumbent Florida state Rep. Alex Andrade in […]
The mass gathering at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally amid the pandemic is too crazy even for the company whose name is all but synonymous with the annual event. The Harley-Davidson company has been associated with the rally in the South Dakota town of Sturgis since its inception decades ago. The big, throbbing Harley “hog” is the rally’s official motorcycle. The town’s main intersection is Main Street […]
Anybody but the most irresponsible mayor in America would have been horrified by the video showing maskless concertgoers packed with no regard for social distancing at Shady Gators in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, on Saturday night. The sight should have been all the more disturbing to Mayor Gerry Murawski of Lake Ozark, because video from Memorial Day caused an uproar with images of swimsuited young […]
Twenty-three days after 4-year-old LeGend Taliferro of Kansas City was killed by a stray bullet while asleep in his bed, his mother was invited to address a White House event announcing an anti-crime initiative named after him. Also invited to speak was the husband of 55-year-old Jacqueline Vigil of Albuquerque, who was shot to death in her driveway while on the way to the gym. President […]
In a screed against cancer doctors, “men’s rights” attorney Roy Den Hollander saved some venom for a particular woman judge. “All of this was a nice stressful addition since it occurred in the middle of preparing for oral argument in a federal case before a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama,” he wrote. Den Hollander did not name the judge, but he might as […]
Emergency Executive Proclamation 2020-005 in Jacksonville, Florida mandates masks at all indoor gatherings, but not really. Anybody who thinks it will make folks safe at the upcoming Republican National Convention should consider the case of Florida state Rep. Cord Byrd. Call it a bare-faced truth. Source link
Nobody howled louder than Texas Lt. Gov Dan Patrick when Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner barred the state GOP from holding its convention there amid a COVID-19 explosion. “This is nothing but a political hack job by Mayor Turner,” Patrick told Laura Ingraham on Fox News. Patrick failed to mention that he and Gov. Greg Abbott and various other GOP elected officials had earlier opted out of […]
Unless a plea for sanity prevails, thousands of Texans will be gathering for the state GOP convention in a COVID-19 epicenter later this month. To make it completely nuts, party officials have said they do not plan to require masks at the July 16-18 event in Houston. “We do not intend to mandate mask wearing at the Convention,” Texas GOP chairman James Dickey said at a […]
Meet the grim reaper of Texas. Not that state Attorney General Ken Paxton outwardly resembles the hooded, scythe-wielding spectre from the time of the Black Death. But 14th century Europe had no figure quite like this Lone Star politician from the present pandemic. Here is a guy who is actively opposing measures to keep a deadly contagion from spreading even as he leads an effort that […]
Devil love is propelling the deep state to stomp on the U.S. Constitution and deprive us of our God-given oxygen along with our inalienable rights by making us wear face masks on orders from those who are poised to defund the police. And those officials who follow the devil’s law and mandate masks the way the Nazis once mandated yellow stars for Jews will be subject […]
Three-year-old Mekhi James had just gotten his first barbershop haircut when he became one of 104 people shot in Chicago on Father’s Day weekend. “It hurts! It hurts!” Mekhi cried out after a bullet struck him in the back. The gunfire had come from another car as the boy’s stepfather was driving him home on Saturday. The stepfather sped instead to Western Suburban Medical Center. Mekhi […]
Tommy Valva was an 8-year-old who was battered and starved and terrorized for a quarter of his life before a surveillance camera recorded his final hours freezing to death in the unheated garage where his father consigned him. “Tommy shivering and shaking in the garage, and holding himself, because he needed to use the bathroom, looking into the… camera with pleading eyes for someone to help […]
On the same day President Trump is scheduled to give his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination at the big arena in Jacksonville, Florida, another group will meet in a nearby park where Klansmen in Confederate uniforms handed out ax handles for a racist rampage exactly 60 years before. The permit for the Aug. 27 gathering at Hemming Park was secured by one of that murderous […]
Surveillance video released by police suggests that beloved Louisville barbecue chef David McAtee fired a gun before cops and National Guard soldiers shot and killed him early Monday morning. “The video appears to show Mr. McAtee firing a gun outside of his business door as officers who are using pepper balls… were approaching,” interim Louisville Police Chief Robert Schroeder said. “The video does not provide all […]
Cristina Monet Zilkha. Fatima Schmidt. Dez-Ann Romain. Elvester McKoy. Alonzo Garza-Salazar. Idris Bey. Those were among the dozens of names written on paper cutouts and posted on the wrought iron fence outside Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery as the national COVID-19 death toll approached 100,000. The tombstones and mausoleums and statuary in the 478 acres beyond the fence were made of materials meant to defy time and preserve the memory of […]
The Wisconsin Supreme Court made sure it was not exposed to COVID-19 as it heard arguments regarding the safer-at-home order intended to slow the spread of the virus that had already infected 11,000 in the state and killed more than 400 of them. “Arguments will be conducted with all participants making appearances via Zoom,” Chief Justice Patience Roggensack decreed before the May 5 hearing. Nobody risked […]
The family would have held a traditional Buddhist funeral for 80-year-old Tam Mai, but the same virus that killed him prevented all but four family members from gathering in a Nebraska funeral parlor on Friday morning “A brief viewing, just the four of us,” his 22-year-old granddaughter, Vy Mai, told The Daily Beast. “I guess it was just goodbye. That was it.” When the hospital reported […]
President Trump might have been welcomed to Arizona on Tuesday by the fellow truther once known as his political soul mate. But Joe Arpaio had trouble explaining misspent millions and hundreds of uninvestigated sex crime cases, and numerous civil rights violations during his long tenure as Maricopa County sheirff. Arpaio was voted out the same day Trump was voted in. The new Maricopa sheriff is Paul […]