A lot of people are being quite unfair to Mike Pence by claiming he hasn’t the experience with pandemics and virus based illnesses to have been appointed the Corona virus Tzar.

But, he has had experience dealing with illnesses and what he has done in that area must be remembered..

He has had experience with public health issues. That cannot be denied

In 2013, Pence’s first year as governor of Indiana, Scott County’s one Planned Parenthood clinic, the county’s only HIV testing center, closed as a result of his congressional actions that led to defunding Planned Parenthood.  24,000 residents had no place to get tested, and, considering that 20% of them live below poverty level and Injection drug  use is a major problem, the risk of HIV outbreak increased.

By 2015 reports of increased HIV cases linked to intravenous prescription opioid use in Scott County were coming in, but worse, people were not getting tested.

With those who were getting tested, there were 20 new cases being diagnosed each week implying there were a number of additional people exposed to HIV who did not know it.

Considering the connection between exposure to HIV and the reuse of needles, a smart move would have been a needle exchange program, but Pence had an objection to such a program on the grounds that they supported drug abuse.

The sheriff of Scott County contacted Pence as the number of cases in the county reached 90, and, although he himself was no supporter of needle exchanges, told him,

 “I believe the only thing we can do to stop or slow this thing is to get clean needles out there.”

Preventing those with an addiction from getting new needles forces them to reuse and share needles. Making clean needles won’t entice people to start injecting drugs, but it can help control a virus that could affect those far away from users.

It took Pence four months to look at the situation medically and not politically or religiously, and a temporary needle exchange program was finally allowed, and as a result the situation was brought under a certain degree of control.

In that four months, however, 200 people contracted HIV.

Basically, during the time he was governor, 2013 to 2017, Pence oversaw what he had created, the worst HIV outbreak in Indiana’s history.

This makes Trump’s words when crowning Pence the Corona Virus Tzar,

“I’m going to be putting our vice president, Mike Pence, in charge. And Mike will be working with the professionals. Mike is going to be in charge, and Mike will report back to me… He’s got a certain talent for this,”

somewhat ironic.

Even a Fox News contributor saw this saying,

“Mike Pence is not a scientist, he’s not a doctor, he’s not someone who believes really in science. And I don’t believe that he should be in charge of this of anywhere near the forefront and that is a big concern.”

According to the GOP House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Donald Trump mostly avoids rich people, AND would much rather hang out with blue-collar workers than wealthy people.

“If you ever go on a project with him, where he’s building a building, he is more in contact with those who are building it than who’s buying it. That’s the uniqueness about him. He’d rather hang out with everyone who builds the building than whoever buys the room from him.”

Apparently, perhaps, never having been to a building site, McCarthy is unaware that while a hotel, office building, apartment building, or even a simple house is being built, the people who will be there are the people building it, not the people who are going to buy or rent it. Those people show up later when the builders aren’t there anymore.

To join Mar-a-Lago it costs $200,000 and then comes a required annual dues of $14,000.

Recently he attended a fund raiser as the guest of honor at the Palm Beach home of billionaire investor Nelson Peltz that cost more than A case in point is the medication that inhibits the enzyme phosphodiesterase 5 (PDE-5) that brings to failure during sexual viagra generika intercourse. It is possible only with order cialis online over here online. The discounts can further reduce the cost of any item. lowest viagra price http://raindogscine.com/?attachment_id=31 Web chemists give plenty of options cialis generika to choose from. $580,000 per couple, and was attended by his rich friends.

These are the people he pals around with, and although there are workers at Mar a Lago and there were workers at the fundraiser, who did Trump most likely speak with?

How many working class people can join Mar a Lago, or could have attended the fund raiser?

How many blue collar, working class people does he hang out with at his golf outings?

At one of the biggest gatherings of working class people, NASCAR, he might have been driven around the track in his limo waving at the crowd, but only if those people could get in, they would have been at his rally that night where he could speak at them not with them.

While we are being distracted by our fixation on how much Trump spends on his golf outings ($129,621,903 as of 02/15/2020), we have not been watching the real scandal—cheesecake.

Now, I love cheesecake.

Not the ones that have fancy flavors, are smothered with various types of berries, or are somewhat just too light and creamy, but the solid type with the slightest hint of a merely dusted on Graham Cracker crust, with no frills or those “drizzles” that are supposed to make things Gourmet.

My favorite was Baby Watson that you could get for a while at the Quincy Market in Boston. They were the size and shape of a pound cake, had no crust, came in a foil pan, were thicker than peanut butter, and weighed a ton.

Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer also loves cheese cake, and it was recently discovered that over a 10 year period he has spent roughly $9,000 on them.

The Federal Election Commission filings revealed Chuckie Cheesecake Schumer spent $8,600 on cheesecake from Junior’s, a restaurant in Brooklyn.

He unabashedly admitted his miscreant abandon with a full throated, “Guilty as charged,” attempting to excuse his behavior by claiming,

 “I love Junior’s cheesecake so much. It’s the best cheesecake in the world. It is made in Brooklyn. I’ve been going to Junior’s since I’ve been a little boy. And it’s my guilty pleasure.” 

Schumer even bore down on by further admitting that he sometimes gives the cheesecakes out as gifts or to settle bets.

 Cheese pro quo.  

FEC filings show that Schumer’s political action committee had 93 entries for Junior’s cheesecake from 2009 to 2016 with payments ranging from $46 to $516.45, and listed as “supporter acknowledgments.” 

The “Original NY Plain Cheesecake”, the top seller at Junior’s, goes for $43.95, which means that, according to the amount he admitted to have spent, Schumer bought 197 cheesecakes.

That makes a splurge of 19 cheesecakes a year on average

And the deep state only tells us about golf trips

In response to the discovery that two years ago the anti-immigrant, build-the-wall, look-at-me-Mr. President sheriff of Bristol County, Massachusetts,Thomas Hodgson, had sent emails to Steven Miller about information on a table at the entrance of the church he attends, if standing at the back of the church with the ushers can be called attending mass, letting anyone stopped by ICE how to interact with agents, many faith leaders in the county wrote a letter to the local newspapers defending the presence of the information cards, and objecting to the sheriff’s spying on their churches, as he claimed two years ago he intended to do.

Their main objections were to his suggestion that church leaders of any faith were doing something illegal that warranted suspicion and possible surveillance, since advising members of a congregation on their rights and obligations before the law is legal, and doing this was based on their sacred texts that encourage them to “give shelter to those fleeing persecution, disasters and famine”, and “to nurture the sick, the indigent, the homeless, the poor, the wayfarer, the imprisoned, and to give succor to those who ask for forgiveness and pardon”.

They made it clear that they do not encourage illegal behavior, and that their places of worship are sacrosanct, and their houses of worship, as has been the case throughout the millennia, can also be sanctuaries for those in need.

They also expressed gratitude and admiration for those congregations which offer hospitality, accommodation and tolerance for those who are fleeing real danger and persecution.

Then, reaffirming the inviolability of their houses of worship, they declared their “right to be safe in our faith.”

This reliance on their religious freedom did not sit well with the sheriff, and his response was in character.

He responded in a letter to the same paper beginning with his mantra, “As Sheriff of Bristol County, my No. 1 charge is public safety,” claiming that this was his motivation behind communicating with a White House official about literature relative to “ICE and Immigration”.

As he usually does, he misrepresented the information on the cards as “literature regarding law enforcement and immigration” when in reality it advised all immigrants, legal and otherwise in a county with a large number of immigrants, how to respond to a knock on their door, being in a place that ICE raids, or simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time so as not to complicate a simple encounter because of uncertainty or panic.

     The problems with the Bristol County Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s February 19, 2020 response to the letter of the faith leaders who objected to his secretly reporting churches to the White House for following the tenets of their religions are many and troubling.

      Although he likes to throw out that his job is the safety of the county, he would be best at doing that by running his jails properly, and doing his real job without the spotlight seeking.  Local law enforcement keeps us safe, not his attempts to create an adversarial relationship between local law enforcement and their communities by ICE posing as the police, and spreading cartoonish stereotypes of immigrants to create division in the county between residents.  He states his email was just to inform while he omits that in his email he not only speculates about how widespread such legal information is made available, but that his “undercover units” are prepared to investigate.

     As he stated, “My undercover units are poised and ready for whatever we can do to identify and expedite the arrest and removal of criminal illegal alien. Our discussion regarding a hotline is clearly relevant.”

     Why does a county sheriff have an undercover unit when his job is to run his jails, not patrol streets, pursue suspects, or arrest the same?

How has he been using this unit he claims he has?

    He asks in his letter, “Did I ask the White House to spy on my or any other church? No. Did I say the literature was suspicious? No.”

     He might not have asked the White House “to spy on my or any other churches”, but he certainly volunteered his “undercover unit” to do it.

    In his email, dated August 7, 2017, and sent at 12:41 p.m., he wrote,

“Stephen [Miller], thought you might like to see samples of cards I discovered in a holder at the back of St. Julie’s Church in Dartmouth, MA. While attending mass last Sunday, I noticed a holder on a table near the entrance marked, ‘ICE-Immigration’ and noticed the three stacks of colored cards. Trying to determine if this is an isolated situation or a common occurrence in other parish churches.  I thought it was appropriate to make Washington aware when these things were happening. If these kinds of things are going on in churches, then we should be aware of it.”

     If he didn’t say the literature was suspicious, he certainly acted as if it were, writing to Steven Miller without first talking to the pastor of the church and only then after his emails were uncovered two years later.

     And, once again he promoted the idea that Sanctuary communities across the United States are commonly known as places where illegal immigrants are committing serious crimes, yet, he does not cite statistics, nor does he explain how this applies to Bristol County.

    This is what he always does. He makes statements whose strength is merely that he makes them. Why bother with fact?

     He claimed that it is harder for the undocumented to be apprehended by law enforcement, but this could be because they are not doing anything that warrants it. If a person is here illegally, staying in the shadows would protect them from deportation, something that committing crimes would make difficult.

    And if it is all about places where illegal immigrants are committing serious crimes, why are most places raided by ICE places where people are working legitimate jobs during work hours?

  Are we to assume, without his citing statistics, not individual, isolated incidents, and usually the same ones, that invisible crime is being committed among us, but in spite of their number and severity, we just don’t notice them?

     Some of the safest cities in the country are in Massachusetts like Newton, Northhampton, and Orleans, and they are sanctuary communities,.

Finally his misrepresenting what his job actually is, and how desperate he is to make it something it is not is encapsulated in this gem from his letter,

“Like our faith leaders, I too have an obligation to save and protect souls, but in a different way as a law enforcement professional.”

     No, his job is to run his jails, the majority of inmates in which have yet to have their day in court and are, therefore, innocent until proven guilty. He is not some anointed faith leader doing the Lord’s work.

    When a county sheriff whose job is to run two jails has an undercover unit, spreads falsehoods about people in the county to promote a political agenda and himself, makes broad statements without facts to back them, reports churches to Steven Miller for following the tenets of their religious beliefs , and then goes so far as to present his job in religious terms where he claims his obligation is to save souls, it is time for change.

These are the final names from my crew lists. According to an ancient Egyptian belief, a person is immortal as long as someone can say their name. I have read each of these names as I typed them, and now you have read some or, perhaps, all of them, thereby helping to keep these mostly unknown people alive. This list exists in cyber-space on my blog, in my original file, and, eventually, on the international whaling history site. And you can read them just by going to my blog whenever you want to.

All together the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s Digital Initiative Team has so far transcribed almost 1,000 whaling crew lists sailing out of New Bedford in the first third of the 19^th Century.

Of them, I transcribed 380 lists, or approximately 40%, some with an all Black crew, and some with no Black men at all. I found 889 Black men whose details may contain clues that might indicate that they were self-emancipated former slaves. These might include a place of origin being a slave state or that space simply left blank, or the residence at the time of sailing being left blank, perhaps either because the person was so newly arrived as to not have a local residence, or noting a residence or place of origin could be helpful for bounty hunters.

The terms used for skin color were the terms at the time, with certain ones, like “Sambo”, while being offensive today, at that time was a specific term used if the Black Man came from any country in the Western Hemisphere, other than the United States, that had slaves.

Also of interest is that within the same crew list, “Black” and “BLK” were used, sometimes one after the other as if this indicated something beyond skin color.

Not all the crewmen returned to New Bedford. I did not include my notes or those of the person writing the original list because of space, but a number who did not return from a voyage were not listed as having deserted or having died at sea or fallen overboard, so their leaving the ship might imply that the further they got from the Southern states the better, and of these, the majority were under 21.

Some men from Massachusetts, especially some on the earlier ships were born in slavery, but with the ratification on the State Constitution in 1781 were free.

The lists were transcribed faithfully, so even if somewhere on the way to inclusion on www.whalinghistory.org, the lists are modified for uniformity and all those who have some ideation of skin color are listed as “Black”, the original transcriptions will be available for researchers to get a more specific picture as to who these men were.

The average number of Black crew members on my ships was 2, again, some ships having none while others had many if not all crew members being Black, which would mean that if this held true for all ships at the time that the team transcribed, there is a total of 1,876, and we only transcribed a small number of the existing lists, while some have yet to be photographed, or some were transcribed at other locations.

In 1843 Massachusetts passed General laws: Part 1:Title XV: Section 102. Which states “(a) All persons within the commonwealth, regardless of sex, race, color, creed or national origin, shall have, except as is otherwise provided or permitted by law, the same rights enjoyed by white male citizens,and to the full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of persons and property.

Before this law, which is still the books, self-emancipated former slaves often would arrive in New Bedford, sign on to a whaling ship, and either spend time at sea until they considered it safe to stay on land, or jumped ship somewhere along in the voyage and live freely elsewhere.

With passage of this state law, staying on land became safer, and the number of Black men on whaling ships declined while their participation in land employment increased.

However, with the Congress enacting the Fugitive Slave Laws in 1850, Black men returned to the sea in large numbers.