Seattle rioters seen damaging, looting stores; 2 arrests, 12 police injured

At least two people were arrested in Seattle and a dozen police officers were injured--including one who was hospitalized-- Sunday after a march through downtown devolved into property damage and looting, police say.
Police said the demonstrators had broken out several windows of the East Precinct, then threw a device into the lobby that ignited a small fire.
The fire was later extinguished and no injuries were reported, police said.
The demonstration started between 2 and 3 p.m. near the intersection of 3rd Avenue and Pine Street. A photo posted on Seattle’s DOT traffic channel showed crowds blocking an intersection.
Around 2:30 p.m., Seattle journalist Katie Daviscourt tweeted a video of a crowd of people outside an Amazon Go building. Several people were seen spray-painting the building while others tried to smash the windows.
“Antifa Militants and Black Lives Matter rioters are breaking into Amazon Go Downtown Seattle,” Daviscourt tweeted. “This protest has turned into a riot.”
Seattle police tweeted shortly before 5 p.m. that the crowd had continued to march on Pike Street from downtown and two people had been arrested outside of the West Precinct.
Police said demonstrators had thrown rocks, bottles, and other items at officers.  A dozen police officers were injured, including one who was hospitalized with neck injuries, KOMO reported.
A video clip posted on Twitter by Elizabeth Turnball shows the smashed doors to a Walgreens on Pine before Broadway.
Seattle police were working to block off the entrance to Interstate 5 so protesters could not enter, Seattle’s KING-TV reported.
Police said demonstrators had gone from Westlake Park to the Municipal Courthouse and then headed back north to the West precinct "leaving behind a trail of property destruction."
"These are criminal acts, not peaceful protests," police said.
The demonstration came amid ongoing police protests nationwide sparked by the police custody of George Floyd, a Black Minneapolis man, in late May.
Seattle drew national attention after activists set up an “occupied” zone dubbed “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” or CHOP, that occupied several blocks around a park for about two weeks after police abandoned a precinct station following standoffs and clashes. They later changed its name to the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” or CHAZ. Seattle’s mayor ordered the zone cleared after two deadly shootings.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Welfare Chain Cartoons

Fox’s Harris Faulkner is used to people making presumptions

NEW YORK (AP) — As a Black journalist who works at Fox News Channel, Harris Faulkner is accustomed to people who presume to know where she stands on issues.

She’s motivated more than bothered by that.

“When anybody looks at you and looks at your position and think they know who you are, you have the advantage of being able to surprise them,” said Faulkner, centerpiece of two weekday hours at Fox and host of a special on America’s racial reckoning that airs at 10 p.m. Eastern on Sunday.

Faulkner is the most prominent Black personality at Fox as moderator on “Outnumbered” at noon each weekday, reaching an audience that is overwhelmingly white and conservative during a season of racial unrest over police brutality and calls for a more equitable society.

She sees it as an opportunity to involve them in a conversation they’re not often part of.

“To be Black and on the air at Fox News presents a greater challenge than if you’re working on any other traditional news network,” said Roland S. Martin, host of the digital news show “Unfiltered.” “It is difficult. It is a minefield you have to walk.”

Faulkner schooled President Donald Trump on racial issues in an interview that earned her plaudits last month. She also sometimes asks questions on “Outnumbered” that hew closely to a conservative line.

The 54-year-old Faulkner’s father is a former U.S. Army officer who passed on a love of country to his daughter despite experiencing the segregated South. “He used to tell me, ‘I’d rather fight for what I believe in and know that America will catch up and get through the struggle than fight for any other nation on Earth.’” she said.

She worked local news jobs in Greenville, N.C., Kansas City and Minneapolis, joining Fox News in 2005.

Faulkner met Byron Pitts, co-anchor of ABC News’ “Nightline,” when they both covered the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

“She’s a very smart journalist,” Pitts said. “She’s the real deal ... I respect her.”

What Faulkner seeks, both Sunday and on “Outnumbered,” is to discuss issues brought up in the wake of George Floyd’s death from many vantage points.

Faulkner knows that police treatment of Blacks is an issue; she’s been pulled over for “driving while Black,” At the same time, she holds deep respect for civil servants like police.

“Funding of police is a conversation that needs to have everybody at the table, not just the people shouting in the streets,” Faulkner said.

When discussing Black Lives Matter in an interview with The Associated Press, Faulkner brings up violence in cities like Chicago, killings of children and wonders why demonstrators aren’t marching in the streets to protest Black-on-Black crime.

Many supporters of the movement consider that a deflection, akin to answering Black Lives Matter with “all lives matter.” Of course, all lives matter, they say. The point is to draw attention to times when officials with a duty to serve and protect seem to value Black lives less.

Told that no one is arguing that the lives of young people caught up in street violence don’t matter, Faulkner said, “But nobody is saying they do, and that’s the problem.”

In her view, “everybody’s race counts.

“My husband is white,” she said. “His faith is Judaism. When we talk about these issues, we don’t get into a discussion of how my life matters more than his, or his life matters more than mine. We get at it from, ‘how do we both rise in this situation?’”

When Joe Biden told a radio host in May that “you ain’t Black” if you can’t figure out whether to support him or Trump for president — a remark the Democrat quickly apologized for —it drew an unusually personal response from Faulkner. She publicly said that Biden’s statement was hurtful.

“It especially hit home to me because I am in a biracial community in my home,” she said, “and talking about somebody’s blackness based on how they think or how they look is insulting. And it keeps us back as people of color.”

Trump retweeted her statement about Biden, adding that she was “a great American.”

One moment from “Outnumbered” last year became fodder for discussion on Martin’s show. Jessica Tarlov, usually the lone Democrat on “Outnumbered” was listing racist incidents involving Trump when Faulkner interrupted with a plea for civility. It led to questions about whether she’s as hard on Trump on the topic of race as she was on Biden.

Tarlov, in an interview, said she did not think Faulkner cut her off or that it should be viewed that she was protecting Trump. “We’re all human and things hit us in certain ways,” she said.

Faulkner recalled being tough on the air about how Trump initially responded to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017.

It’s in that moment,” she said. “I can’t speak to every single moment, but when it hits me, I’m as hard as can be.”

Tarlov said she had no idea who Faulkner supported for president in 2016, despite working with her for three years.

Asked whether she supported Trump, Faulkner said people can think whatever they want. “I don’t discuss how I vote with anybody,” she said. “I’m a journalist. We shouldn’t do that. Some do. But I’m not proselytizing any particular point of view, faith or otherwise, and if they want to think what they think, go right ahead.”

She added, “I challenge anybody to guess where I’m coming from. And, in fact, if they have answers, can they tell me?”

When Faulkner teamed with Bill Hemmer in the spring for a coronavirus town hall with Trump, they were criticized for going soft. But that wasn’t the case when Faulkner sat down with Trump in June during the protests following Floyd’s death.

When Trump appeared to question some of Abraham Lincoln’s achievements, Faulkner responded, “Well, we are free, Mr. President.”

And when she asked about Trump’s tweeting, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” Faulkner came prepared with an explanation of where the phrase originated and why many found it disturbing.

That showed the importance of having an African American journalist with presence do the interview, Martin said.

“Guess what?” he said. “Maria Bartiromo wouldn’t have done that. Sean Hannity wouldn’t have done that. Laura Ingraham wouldn’t have done that.”

Bill Grueskin, a Columbia University journalism professor, praised Faulkner in Columbia Journalism Review. He wrote that “she was neither antagonistic nor admiring. She put herself into the interview, framed in her roles as a Black woman and parent, in a way that journalists rarely do with her skill and care.”

While you could argue that Faulkner could have pressed harder on some questions, “Trump usually gets more defensive,” Grueskin wrote. “Faulkner’s methodical approach has its own power.”

Faulkner said her role is not to play “gotcha,” but to listen to the president’s answers and follow up.

“It doesn’t bother me that people assume,” she said. “But it is an opportunity to show them. You don’t know until you watch and listen.”

___

This story has been corrected to show Faulkner is 54, not 56.

Fires set, fences moved: Police call Portland protest a riot

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Protesters broke into a building, set it on fire and started dumpster fires late Saturday night in Oregon’s largest city, police said, as demonstrations that have been taking place since the death of George Floyd intensified for another night in Portland.

The fire at the Portland Police Association building was put out a short time later, Portland police said on Twitter. The department declared the gathering a riot, and began working to clear the downtown area.

Tear gas was deployed, according to pictures and video from the scene. Fencing that had been placed around federal courthouse had also been removed by protesters and made into barricades, police tweeted.

President Donald Trump has decried the demonstrations, and Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf blasted the protesters as “lawless anarchists” in a visit to the city on Thursday.

Before the aggressive language and action from federal officials, the unrest had frustrated Mayor Ted Wheeler and other local authorities, who had said a small cadre of violent activists were drowning out the message of peaceful protesters in the city. But Wheeler said the federal presence in the city is now exacerbating a tense situation and he has told them to depart.

“Keep your troops in your own buildings, or have them leave our city,” Wheeler said Friday.

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum late Friday sued Homeland Security and the Marshals Service in federal court. The complaint said unidentified federal agents have grabbed people off Portland’s streets “without warning or explanation, without a warrant, and without providing any way to determine who is directing this action.”

Rosenblum said she was seeking a temporary restraining order to “immediately stop federal authorities from unlawfully detaining Oregonians.”

The administration has enlisted federal agents, including the U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and an elite U.S. Customs and Border Protection team based on the U.S.-Mexico border, to protect federal property.

But Oregon Public Broadcasting reported this week that some agents had been driving around in unmarked vans and snatching protesters from streets not near federal property, without identifying themselves.

Tensions also escalated after an officer with the Marshals Service fired a less-lethal round at a protester’s head on July 11, critically injuring him.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Oregon, issued a joint statement Saturday denouncing the Trump administration’s actions.

“We live in a democracy, not a banana republic. We will not tolerate the use of Oregonians, Washingtonians — or any other Americans — as props in President Trump’s political games. The House is committed to moving swiftly to curb these egregious abuses of power immediately,” they said.

Hundreds of people had gathered Friday night for a vigil outside the downtown Justice Center, which is sandwiched between two federal buildings, including a courthouse, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. Across the street, dozens of other protesters entered two recently closed city parks after dismantling chain-link fencing that blocked access.

Federal agents emerged from an office building next door and used impact munitions, stun grenades and tear gas to clear the area, the news organization reported. It said its journalists did not observe any incident that might have prompted the use of the weapons.

Federal officers deployed tear gas again just before midnight after a few protesters placed dismantled fencing in front of plywood doors covering the entrance of the federal courthouse.

Early Saturday, Portland police declared the gathering unlawful, saying protesters had piled fencing in front of the exits to the federal courthouse and the Multnomah County Justice Center and then shot off fireworks at the Justice Center.

Federal officers and local police then advanced simultaneously on the demonstrators to clear the streets, making arrests as protesters threw bottles and pieces of metal fence at police, the Portland Police Bureau said. Portland Police Chief Chuck Lovell told reporters Friday that his officers are in contact with the federal agents, but that neither controls the others’ actions.

The overnight action by Portland’s police was condemned Jo Ann Hardesty, a prominent member of the City Council. Hardesty said Saturday that local police “joined in the aggressive clampdown of peaceful protest.”

Hardesty also slammed Wheeler, telling the mayor he needed to better control local law enforcement. Hardesty, who oversees the city’s fire department and other first-responder agencies, said in an open letter to Wheeler if “you can’t control the police, give me the Portland Police Bureau.”

In a statement Saturday, Portland Police said as they responded to the overnight protests — which included people throwing projectiles at them — some federal agencies took action “under their own supervision and direction.” Portland Police said city officers arrested seven people, and one officer sustained a minor injury.

The statement said the city’s police supports peaceful protests, and beginning Saturday night Department of Homeland Security police wouldn’t work in the Portland Police incident command center.

As pandemic surges, election officials seek poll workers

CHARLESTON, W.Va. (AP) — Wanted: Poll workers willing to brave a global pandemic in November.

Governments across the country are scrambling to find people to staff polling places for the presidential election this fall as the coronavirus sows doubt about how safe it will be to cast a ballot in person and thins out an already scarce pool of workers.

Recruitment efforts are increasingly targeting younger people, who are less at risk of developing serious illness from the virus, as officials and advocates aim strategies toward professional associations, students and sports teams to make sure election sites stay open. Still, a big unknown remains.

“Everything having to do with this election will be determined by where we are with the virus, and obviously, indicators are not very encouraging,” said Neil Albrecht, former executive director of the Milwaukee election commission, which had worker shortages and was forced to shutter all but five of the city’s 180 polling places earlier this year.

Expert say finding enough poll workers is always difficult, even when there isn’t a pandemic killing thousands of people, forcing widespread shutdowns and spawning a series of evolving safety rules. Normally, long hours, low pay and lots of stress might keep folks away. Now add face shields, protective barriers and fears of getting sick.

More than two-thirds of poll workers are over age 61, putting them at higher risk of the COVID-19 disease. Scores of workers dropped out during this year’s primary season, taking with them decades of experience as the pandemic stifled efforts to train replacements.

Richard Dayton, 68, has been a poll worker for five years in Columbus, Ohio, but decided not to work the state’s primary over concerns about the pandemic. He’s not yet certain whether he’ll be staffing an election site in the fall.

“I’m not a young man anymore, and I have to look out for my health,” he said.

State and local elections officials hope to have their recruiting and polling place staffing in place well before Election Day in November. In primaries held during the initial coronavirus outbreak, some polling places were late to open after poll workers failed to report.

“If on Election Day morning people just weren’t showing up for work, that would be among the worst case scenarios,” said Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

Local governments are typically responsible for recruiting poll workers, but states have been stepping in as the pandemic exacerbates an already fragile system. Some states are partnering with professional organizations such as real estate commissions and state bar associations to have their members staff the polls in exchange for continuing education credits. Ohio has a program to encourage high schoolers to work election sites.

In Georgia, local election officials and the Atlanta Hawks have announced they will use the NBA team’s arena as an early voting site for a primary runoff in August, and will train stadium and team staffers to be election workers. Other sports teams are moving forward with or are considering similar measures.

West Virginia Secretary of State Mac Warner has urged young people to work the polls as a call-to-arms similar to joining the military after the 9/11 terror attacks.

“What that poll worker effort does is it keeps those options to vote open,” he said, adding that officials have been reaching out to county clerks, civic groups, rotary clubs, athletic teams and other groups.

Kayleigh Bergh, a 23-year-old recent college graduate from Haverhill, Massachusetts, plans to work a polling place this November. She said her decision to do so was about stepping up during a pandemic and getting politically engaged. Plus, she said, it doesn’t look bad on a resume.

“I want to help the state and make everything better since I know my generation is going to take over at some point,” said Bergh, adding that she’s been trying to recruit friends who have been furloughed from their jobs.

Advocacy groups also are mobilizing.

Scott Duncombe of Power the Polls, a newly-formed poll worker recruitment group that includes Comedy Central, Levi Strauss & Co., the Fair Elections Center, Uber and several other organizations, said it plans to flood digital media, offer incentives for poll workers and have companies encourage staffers to volunteer. Duncombe said the group will gear a lot of its campaign toward young people, hoping that it can harness the nation’s recent political activism into civic duty.

“This is really the first step to make sure the government and civic life looks like us and feels like us,” he said of becoming a poll worker.

Election officials said making sure poll workers feel safe on the job is key to the recruitment effort. Mary Cringan is a 65-year-old retired school principal in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, who has worked the polls in just about every election over the last five years. She plans to wear a mask when she staffs a polling place later this year.

“I would just hate to have the scare of health not allow people to go out and exercise their right to vote,” she said. “The clerks in all the cities and towns have their work cut out for them.”

___

The Associated Press produced this coverage with the support of the Carnegie Corp. of New York.

House Dems move forward with measures responding to Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone

House Democrats

Friday announced plans to move forward with measures in response to President 

Trump’s commutation of Roger Stone's sentence last week, with one top Democrat saying, “In this country, no one is above the law.”
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said his committee planned to hold a markup on Thursday on two measures.
“The first, H.R. 1627, the Abuse of the Pardon Power Prevention Act, will allow us a measure of transparency into the President’s power to pardon federal crimes and commute federal sentences,” Nadler said. “If the president uses the powers of his office to shield himself and his family from federal investigations, then the investigators at the Department of Justice should provide us with the materials related to the underlying offense.”
The other bill involves a statute of limitations for possible crimes committed by a president.
“The second bill we will consider, H.R. 2678, the No President is Above the Law Act, is also straightforward,” Nadler said. “While the president is in office, we should pause the clock on the statute of limitations for any crimes he may have committed. Re-election should not be a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
The White House announced this month that Trump signed an executive grant of clemency commuting the "unjust sentence" of Roger Stone, just days before the longtime political operative was slated to report to prison to serve more than three years for charges stemming from former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.
Stone was set to report to prison on July 14 to serve 40 months. He was sentenced in February to more than three years in prison after being convicted in November 2019 on seven counts of obstruction, witness tampering and making false statements to Congress. Stone, however, has appealed his conviction and continues to deny any wrongdoing.
In a statement Friday, Nadler said: “Stone misled federal investigators, intimidated a witnesses, and was convicted for obstruction of justice—but would not testify to the President’s wrongdoing. In exchange, President Trump made sure that Stone will never spend a day in prison. This quid pro quo is unacceptable. Congress must act.”

Reparations Cartoons

North Carolina city approves ‘reparations,’ apologizes for role in slavery

The City Council of Asheville, North Carolina

The City Council of Asheville, North Carolina has apologized for slavery and unanimously approved ‘reparations,’ which will come in the form of community investments to help Black residents.

North Carolina’s Asheville City Council apologized for its role in slavery and racial discrimination, voting unanimously to provide reparations in the form of community investments to help Black residents.
The council voted 7-0 on Tuesday night on the measure to mitigate racial disparities. The reparations will not provide direct cash payments, as some have suggested, but will provide investments in housing, health care and career growth in Black neighborhoods.
Councilwoman Shaneika Smith, who is Black, said the council had gotten emails from those "asking, 'Why should we pay for what happened during slavery?'"
"[Slavery] is this institution that serves as the starting point for the building of the strong economic floor for White America, while attempting to keep Blacks subordinate forever to its progress," said Smith, as reported by the Asheville Citizen Times.
The resolution calls on the city to create a Community Reparations Commission to make concrete recommendations of where to funnel programs and resources.
"The resulting budgetary and programmatic priorities may include but not be limited to increasing minority home ownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice," the resolution reads.
"Hundreds of years of Black blood spilled that basically fills the cup we drink from today," said Councilman Keith Young, who is one of two African-American city council members and spearheaded the proposal.
"It is simply not enough to remove statutes. Black people in this country are dealing with issues that are systemic in nature," Young continued.
Councilman Vijay Kapoor, who is known to split with Smith and Young on police and budget issues, said he supported the resolution for moral reasons, but urged skeptics to look at the “practical reason” — data showing large disparities between African-Americans and other Asheville residents.
“We don't want to be held back by these gaps," Kapoor said. "We want everyone to be successful."

Biden tweets that Obama WH left Trump ‘playbook’ on pandemics, Grenell responds

Joe Biden, the likely Democrat challenger to face President Trump in 2020, took to Twitter late Thursday to criticize the White House’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
“President Obama and I left a playbook for President Trump on how to fight pandemics. He flat-out ignored it. And we’re all paying the price every day,” Biden tweeted.
The tweet was noticed by Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting Director of National Intelligence, who responded, “You knew how to stop a virus that started in China and didn’t yell up from the basement?”
Record numbers of confirmed coronavirus infections and deaths emerged again in states in the South and West, with hospitals stretched to the brink and fears worldwide that the pandemic’s resurgence is only getting started.
More than 13.5 million infections have been confirmed worldwide and over 588,000 have died, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.
Democrats and the Biden campaign have been working to describe the Trump White House as woefully unprepared to respond to the pandemic. Trump has said that he inherited a broken system and has called Barack Obama “grossly incompetent.”
Mark Meadows, White House chief of staff, on Thursday dismissed a new poll that showed most Americans believe Biden would handle the coronavirus pandemic better than Trump.
"What has he done in the basement for Americans?" Meadows asked host Martha MacCallum rhetorically after she cited a Quinnipiac poll that showed 59 percent of registered voters believe that Biden would do a better job dealing with the outbreak than Trump.
"I'm just telling you what the numbers are," MacCallum responded.
Fox News' Charles Charles Creitz and the Associated Press contributed to this report

Chicago's Lightfoot calls White House's McEnany a 'Karen' after reported 'derelict mayor' slight

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot called White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany a "Karen" on Twitter Thursday, after reportedly being mentioned as a "derelict mayor" during a press briefing.
White House correspondent for Time Magazine Brian Bennett originally mentioned the slight on his Twitter account, before the message was picked up by Lightfoot.
"White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany just called Lori Lightfoot 'the derelict mayor of Chicago' and said she should request federal help to secure the city," he had initially written.
Lightfoot, a Democrat, then followed up with her own Tweet which referred to McEnany as "Karen" -- a pejorative term that has come to prominence to label a demanding, middle-aged white woman who displays a sense of overbearing entitlement in various societal confrontations.
"Hey, Karen. Watch your mouth." she wrote.
Fox News reached out to the White House press office but did not receive a response to the request for comment.