Tag: White House

How the White House plans to keep power during “the Apocalypse”

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U.S. Dept of Energy

Just because a disaster disrupts the federal government doesn’t mean the White House won’t try to stay in charge. Since the 1950s, the White House has drafted and maintained Pres­id­en­tial Emer­gency Action Docu­ments (PEADS) — a list of secret plans meant to be implemented in the wake of an apocalyptic disaster. Thanks to a new document dump and some clever information requests, we’re finally learning a little bit about how Washington would seek to stay in power should the worst occur.

As first reported by the New York Times, the PEADs documents come courtesy of the Brennan Center for Justice, which obtained the bulk of the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests. The documents cover a period from the Eisenhower presidency all the way to Trump…

A 2016 House Committee Appropriations Hearing gives us an explanation of what PEADs are and what, exactly, they do.

“PEADs are pre-coordinated legal documents designed to implement a Presidential decision or transmit a Presidential request when an emergency disrupts normal governmental or legislative processes,” it said. “A PEAD may take the form of a Proclamation, Executive Order, or a Message to Congress…”

Every President tweaks the PEADs in their own way and every era reflects the different concerns of the different presidents. Until 9/11, the documents were obsessed with ensuring a continuity of government in the aftermath of a surprise nuclear attack on the United States…

The Reagan era plans are similarly obsessed with nuclear war and its aftermath. It isn’t until the 9/11 era and George W. Bush that things change radically…

And so the plot to the White House soap opera wends its merry way through the head-of-state killer klown show. And we all know you can’t have a soap opera without a proper script.

America’s COVID Dead May Equal 9/11 Every Day by Xmas

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With COVID infections surging across the U.S. and Thanksgiving celebrations expected to have given the coronavirus more opportunities to spread, experts fear the country will soon experience a record number of deaths from the disease—something equivalent to the 2,977 people killed on 9/11 per day—by Christmas.

In the past week alone, 10,288 people died of COVID in the U.S., with the current death toll of 267,302, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control website that was updated Tuesday. On average in the past week, 1,469 people died of COVID each day…

The CDC, which pools data from a number of models to create what is known as an ensemble forecast, sets its mid-range estimate for COVID deaths per day by December 19 at around 2,200, and its higher range at just over 3,000.

Same as it ever was – when we’re governed by a complete incompetent in the White House and a majority of the toy politicians in Congress too scared of their shadow to stand up to this idjit.

Trump government’s response to pandemic: “chaos, pandemonium and confusion”

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This isn’t the interview I watched Sunday afternoon…and haven’t yet been able to retrieve from BloombergTV. But, it ain’t bad. Most places, e.g., local TV, OTA TV channels, your friendly neighborhood local newspaper, don’t have the backbone to publish an interview as clinically critical by someone with the standing of Dr. Haseltine.

Bloomberg did, Sunday afternoon.