TALLAHASSEE, Fla. —Gov. Ron DeSantis said most of Florida will be able to enter phase one of reopening as of May 4, except for in three counties with the most cases in South Florida.
“We need to focus on facts and not fear,” DeSantis said in a news conference discussing his plan for reopening Florida Wednesday evening.
He said the state needs to reopen gradually with all but Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties moving to phase one on May 4.
“We will get Florida back on its feet by using an approach that’s safe, smart and step-by-step,” he said.
DeSantis said phase one means elective surgeries can resume, and restaurants can do outdoor seating with 6 feet between tables and 25% capacity indoors with 6-foot spacing.
He said retail can reopen as well with 25% capacity.
DeSantis said in phase one schools, bars, gyms and personal services will remain closed.
Amy Wright’scoffee business has five locations and about 120 workers, all of whom have intellectual or developmental disabilities. When the Coronavirus pandemic struck, she had to close her stores and temporarily lay off these hardworking employees.
For most of them, Bitty & Beau’s Coffee is their first job. It offers a source of stability and meaningful wages to help them save for the future. Like many Americans these past few months, they felt fear and uncertainty about when the next paycheck would come.
This month, Wright’s small business was approved for a Paycheck Protection Program loan. As a result, “all of our employees are back on the payroll today,” she says.
“At Bitty & Beau's,we like to use the phrase called ‘not broken,’” employee Michael Heup said today. “I know the great country of the United States isn't broken, either.”
The Paycheck Protection Program(PPP) officially relaunched yesterday. After distributing $350 billion in loans to 1.6 million small businesses earlier this month, the program ran out of funds in just 14 days. Thanks to pressure from President Trump, Congressional Democrats eventually agreed to replenish the popular program.
White House staffers said the president works around the clock and can make five dozen work-related calls a day during the pandemic. “I can tell you that the biggest concern I have as a new chief of staff is making sure he gets some time to get a quick bite to eat,” White House chief of staff Mark Meadows told The Post.
“I get phone calls from him early in the morning and at the end of the day,” said Peter Navarro, director of the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. “I think I work hard. I put in probably 12 hour days seven days a week and he runs circles around all of us,” Navarro said. “He never seems to tire."
Officials don’t dispute that Trump often has a TV screen on during the day, but said that’s a reasonable thing to do. They also do not deny that the president powers through the day on Diet Coke. Trump monitoring TV news coverage “is like a linebacker watching tape,” the first official said. “How else are we going to know what’s being said and what’s being reported out there?”
Trump’s schedule generally is grueling for reporters and officials whose personal lives are tied to his activities. On Easter, for example, Trump was working in the Oval Office to broker an oil production agreement between Saudi Arabia and Russia.“ We watch him work and work and work, and we get frustrated by the inaccurate coverage, which does not reflect the hard work and leadership we witness every day,” the second official said.
said that sustained damage to the economy and the lives of over 20 million recently unemployed Americans may not heal after implementing "draconian" measures.
Hume added that, to his knowledge, there is not "really powerful evidence" that the shutdown is "making any difference at all."
"I think it's time to consider the possibility that this lockdown – as opposed to the more moderate mitigation efforts – is a colossal public policy calamity," he stated. "That the damage to the economy, businesses that I see, businesses are closing. Many may not reopen. Those jobs will be lost. Those businesses will be lost. Those incomes will be lost."
"So, the question then becomes, 'What to do about the draconian lockdown? And, that is where I think people who are complaining have a real point ... these protesters have a just cause."
Peter Navarro emphasizes the threat China poses to the United States
"This is a war. It’s a war that China started by spawning the virus, by hiding the virus, by hoarding personal protective equipment during the time it hid the virus. And now it’s ironic, in my view, disgusting that they’re profiteering from that. So, this is — that’s the big picture as I see it.”
“This is the most dangerous adversary we have ever faced.”
US Troops' Retirement Savings Are Funding the Chinese Military
Congressman Waltz said in a video he tweeted earlier this week:
"Every month, me included as a National Guardsman, we contribute to this 401K-style plan. Well guess what? Billions of dollars from it are going over to Beijing and funding Chinese shipbuilding, plane building and all types of companies. Many of which are close to the Chinese Communist Party, some of which are even on the U.S. sanctions lists."
He added:
"We cannot have the American military who’s out on the frontlines retirement account funding their biggest adversary in the 21st Century. America, we need to wake up. We are in a Cold War with China, they are certainly in one with us. And we would be no more funding their industry through our retirement than we would the Soviet Union and companies in Russia years ago. We need to think about this differently and this has got to stop."
Everyone who has been paying attention knows that the epidemiological models on which the current shutdown mania is based have been proved to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet, zombie-like, they continue to influence our ill-informed policymakers.
Empty hospitals during a pandemic?? Evidence that the disease may not be another Spanish Flu? The huge extent to which the disease is a bane of the very old, especially those in nursing homes, not of the whole American population? How many stories have you seen about the death rate in different age categories, as in the data shown in the tables in this analysis?
The American people are terrified, but all media seem to do is fan the flames of more terror, even though there is encouraging news out there on the health front (albeit not on the economic front).
"Unscientific coronavirus hysteria is a matter of sheer political power"
CNN’s Don Lemon directed his -"Who the hell do you think you are?" question to armed protesters who, despite the nation’s lockdown and stay-at-home orders, had gone public to demand their constitutional rights to assemble, to lodge their grievances with their government and to arm themselves. That would be the First and Second Amendments, respectively.
It would be good for Mr. Lemon to use his free time, confined to his home by government like the rest of us, to brush up on the Constitution, how it was arrived at and the price paid to provide it.
Those rights, the Founders who put them in writing knew, aren’t permissions granted by governments or by rulers. Or even by nightly newscasters. They are rights of all people endowed by their Creator.
“I never did draconian orders here like you see in some of these other states where a dad would get arrested for, or get cited for, taking his daughter to the park. That doesn’t work. We’ve never done that.”
“You go back six weeks, everybody was saying Florida was going to be worse than New York,” DeSantis said. “Obviously, we have a very elderly population. It was constant, people saying that. If you look at what’s happened, that’s not true. You know, New York, for example, has about 25 times the number of fatalities of Florida, even though we have 2 million more people.”
Beaches in the Sunshine State are starting to reopenas the state begins taking steps to get residents back to work in a sensible fashion. DeSantis said days ago that he will use President Trump’s plan to reopen the economy as a “baseline.”
"But when Democrat governors and mayors suspend religious freedom, prohibit the sale of things like hardware and seeds and arrest people for surfing or fishing hundreds of yards from anyone, while at the same time insisting that abortion clinics, lottery and cigarettes are necessary, as well as emptying the jails, then the collective BS Detector of the citizenry just pinned into the red zone."
Monday, and another grim milestone of yet another day and week of America held hostage. Whether you are of the belief as I am that the unprecedented locking down of the citizenry and concomitant strangulation of the entire economy was a wild overreaction or not, there is growing discontent among said citizenry and calls for a lifting of the siege.
Despite the lack of reliable information and massive disinformation coming from the source of the Peking Pulmonary Pox, and the ginning up of fear by the Democrat-Media Complex to keep people cowering in their homes, the numbers just don't add up to the Andromeda Strain Black Death this is being sold as.
From the original computer model estimates that are revised downward by orders of magnitude on a daily basis, to healthcare workers and hospitals sitting around idle waiting for waves of mass casualties that have yet to materialize to the juicing of the stats by politicians and the pseudo-scientists in service to them to list deathwithChinese Coronavirus as deathfromChinese Coronavirus, this entire thing stinks on ice. And people know it.
This is why you are seeing the protesters who defy the loathsome dictatorial pronouncements of scum like Gretchen Whitmer being smeared by the Democrat-Media Complex. President Trump has nothing but praise for people who, rather than helplessly watch as their lives and futures are destroyed, rise up in protest.
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FromCareer politicians, both in Washington and around the world, have one instinct during an emergency: to grab power. It’s rarely temporary, and it often has little to do with the situation at hand. Instead, politicians create more agencies and more red tape, claiming that Bigger Government will prevent the next great threat.
President Trump’s response is unprecedented for another reason, too—one that most Americans won’t see covered in the news. “Throughout history, national emergencies have led to a more powerful and centralized federal government,” Hudson Institute Distinguished Fellow Christopher DeMuth writes in The Wall Street Journal.
Until now. “For the first time in U.S. history, an administration is responding to a crisis with deregulation and decentralization”
Mnuchin Reveals How Long He Believes It'll Take the Economy to Recover
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is optimistic about the United States' economy recovering quickly .. "I think it will be months. I definitely don't think it will be years. We are going to conquer this virus. We are going to have terrific breakthroughs."
IT'S TIME
Fox News senior political analyst Brit Hume
Read More
Career politicians, both in Washington and around the world, have one instinct during an emergency: to grab power. It’s rarely temporary, and it often has little to do with the situation at hand. Instead, politicians create more agencies and more red tape, claiming that Bigger Government will prevent the next great threat.
The Morning Report - 4/20/20
Mnuchin Reveals How Long He Believes It'll Take the Economy to Recover
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