Month: July 2018

Cop Assaulted, Head-Butting, And A Bloody Nose After Another Brawl At Trump’s Hollywood Star

President Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame has emerged as an unlikely battleground between Los Angeles Trump supporters and his detractors. There have been fights, shouting matches, and men dressed as Russian cops “protecting” the star – while two separate videos of men destroying it with pickaxes have gone viral. 

Despite efforts by the LAPD to separate pro and anti-Trump groups, yet another scuffle broke out Sunday evening between a man in a MAGA hat speaking into a megaphone and two anti-Trump protesters. 

A group of pro-Trump supporters said the man was not with them as he shouted, “We got America great again’” and other pro-Trump slogans.

His red MAGA had seemed to be a target from some in the anti-Trump crowd.

“[This guy] came up and said he was going to pull his hat off, and I was like [makes a negative sounding noise] went up and pulled the Make America Great Again hat off and after that everything just went crazy. They started fighting,” said one woman.

“The kid’s father came and said hey that’s my son. Don’t be going after my son.  Got up in his face. Starts pushing him. Then the guy with the megaphone head-butted him,” said Louie Martinez. –CBS Los Angeles

The father ended up with a bloody cut on his nose, while a man in a burgandy shirt believed to be his son was wrestled to the ground as he assaulted a police officer. Police are reportedly looking for the father. 

From another angle: 

Meanwhile, some recent happenings on Hollywood Boulevard: 

These guys have never been busier:

Meanwhile, things got musical during a heated debate in Granite City, Illinois. No blood however. 

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Trump Threatens a Government Shutdown If Border Wall Isn’t Funded

|||MARY F. CALVERT/REUTERS/NewscomAn impending fight over President Donald Trump’s proposed southern border wall could result in another government shutdown.

Since the House has already adjourned for the summer, representatives will have 11 legislative days in September to avoid a government shutdown prior to the midterm elections. The House of Representatives approved a spending package recently that would allocate $1.6 billion to the wall; the vote was mostly split along party lines. The Senate has yet to vote on the question.

Trump tweeted Sunday morning that he was “willing” to shut down the government if the Democrats blocked spending for his immigration policies:

As usual with Trump’s tweets, it is unclear whether this was a serious threat or just a passing thought while his phone was handy.

Trump made the border wall a pillar of his presidential campaign, but at the time insisted that Mexico would foot the bill for the project. Just weeks before his inauguration in 2017, Republican leaders in Congress revealed that the wall would actually be paid for by U.S. taxpayers, not the Mexico. This prompted Trump to tweet a slight revision to his campaign promise, asserting that the funds would actually be “paid back by Mexico later.”

One report says the wall would require an estimated $18 billion over the next 10 years. Maintenance costs would eat up an additional $48.3 billion during that decade decade. And these estimates largely depend on what the Cato Institute has called “unrealistically cheap construction costs.”

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New Gallup Poll Shows Only 2% Of US Investors Own Bitcoin, But 26% Are “Intrigued”

Authored by Maxwell William via CoinTelegraph.com,

The results of a Wells Fargo/Gallup poll published July 27 finds that only two percent of U.S. investors own Bitcoin, but 26 percent are intrigued by it.

image courtesy of CoinTelegraph

The online survey was conducted May 7-14, 2018 among U.S. investors with more than $10,000 in stocks, bonds or mutual funds. The results show that the overwhelming majority of investors who have already heard of Bitcoin will not be investing in the leading cryptocurrency any time soon, with 72 percent saying they “have no interest in ever buying Bitcoin.”

According to the data from the poll, even though 96 percent of investors had heard of Bitcoin, “only about three in 10 investors (29%) say they know something about digital currencies,” with 67 percent saying they have heard of them but don’t know much about them.

Even though the initial intention behind Bitcoin involves its use as a means of payment, or “electronic cash”, it’s high volatility has made it “more popular as a high-risk/high-reward investment than as an online currency — although acceptance of Bitcoin for electronic payments is growing.” The results of the survey show that 75 percent of respondents view an investment in Bitcoin to be “very risky,” with 23 percent saying it was “somewhat risky.”

The statistics on gender and age show that young men are the most likely demographic to “say they know something about bitcoin or other digital currencies.” The report also states that “[r]elated to the age differences, investors with less than $100,000 in investments (who tend to be younger) are more likely to be familiar with the innovation than those with higher asset levels.”

A study on Americans and cryptocurrencies commissioned by Finder.com in February showed that 8 percent, or around 26 mln, of Americans have already purchased cryptocurrency.

A recent report on the top ten crypto projects that raised a minimum of $1 million in 2017 revealed that on average each showed a return on investment of over 136,000 percent.

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The Commerce Department’s Tariff Waiver Process Encourages Cronyism, Creates Shortages

Cronyist steel manufacturers are helping to guide the Commerce Department’s opaque system for determining which American companies get exemptions from a 25 percent tariff on imported steel. In the process, they are creating potential shortages and hiking prices along the supply chain.

Steel-consuming businesses are worried about the influence being exerted by domestic manufacturers such as U.S. Steel and Nucor, which have an economic incentive to limit the number of exemptions granted by the Commerce Department. The department allows steelmakers to comment on waiver applications but does not give steel-consuming businesses an opportunity to rebut those claims or to challenge the department’s final decisions in court. With little transparency or due process, the entire waiver procedure is open to abuse.

“The current exclusion process is broken—it’s opaque, unfair, and breathtakingly inconsistent,” says Rep. Jackie Walorski (R-Ind.), whose office has conducted a review of the waiver applications granted and denied by the Commerce Department.

After the Trump administration imposed a 25 percent tariff on imported steel and a 10 percent tariff on imported aluminum, the Commerce Department began accepting applications from American businesses seeking exemptions from those tariffs, which can be granted if domestic supply is insufficient to meet a company’s needs. When a company applies, there is a 30-day comment period that allows anyone, including competitors, to argue for or against the waiver. More than 20,000 waiver applications have been filed, but the department has made decisions on only about 1,100 of them.

Of the applications where decisions have been made, the Commerce Department has yet to approve a single application that prompted U.S. Steel or Nucor to raise an objection, according to Walorski.

In the 550 applications that have been denied, the department routinely provides no explanation for its decisions beyond stating that there is sufficient quantity and quality of domestic supply, or that the application was incomplete. The department provides no explanations of how it reached its decisions and it does not disclose its analysis, Walorski says.

The whole process seems to deliberately favor steelmakers over steel-consuming businesses. That shouldn’t be surprising, since that’s exactly what Trump’s tariff policy does: punish anyone who buys steel in order to prop up domestic steel manufacturers. In more than 5,000 public comments reviewed by Walorski’s office, U.S. Steel and Nucor were the two most prolific commenters.

Steel-consuming businesses believe those manufacturers are manipulating the process to limit exemptions.

“It’s hard not to interpret that the Commerce Department wants domestic suppliers to have an edge,” Daniel Shackell, vice president of Crown Cork & Seal, a Philadelphia-based manufacturer of metal packaging, tells the Associaed Press. The company has made 70 waiver requests to the Department of Commerce; so far, eight have been granted and 12 denied.

In testimony to the House Ways and Means Committee last week, the executive of a Texas-based pipeline builder said the process did not allow adequate time for businesses to respond to objections raised by U.S. Steel and other manufacturers. Once an application is submitted, there is little interaction between the government and the applicant, and there is no opportunity for businesses to “state their case,” said Willie Chiang, vice president of Plains All American GP.

Those are “due process flaws that do not exist with respect to most other government procedures,” Chiang complained.

Out of more than 5,700 objections submitted in response to steel and aluminum exclusion requests, only 54 were posted before the end of the comment period, leaving businesses no opportunity to respond.

“There are major structural issues that are causing uneven outcomes,” says Walorski. “The deck seems to be stacked toward one side right now and it needs to be rebalanced.”

The confusion and cronyism on display in the tariff waiver process is not exactly unexpected. Shortly after the applications started coming in, an unnamed Commerce Department official told The Washington Post that the review process was “going to be so unbelievably random, and some companies are going to get screwed.”

The companies getting screwed include more than just those that have waiver applications denied. With imported steel suddenly much more expensive, domestic suppliers are being overrun with orders and cannot meet demand. That’s causing delays, shortages, and other supply chain problems.

“For us to get the raw plate material to fabricate it used to be we would order steel today and get the steel two months later. Now, it’s five to six months,” said Evan Morrison, vice president of Ohio Structures, Inc., tells the Akron Beacon Journal. The paper reports that these tariff-caused delays are affecting public projects, such as a major highway renovation near Columbus.

And so the Commerce Department is quite literally picking winners and losers. It’s not all that different from what’s happening to American farmers: Many of them stand to lose from a trade war with China, and some of those many are now supposed to receive a $12 billion bailout. Trump’s tariffs are distorting the economy and extending the government’s authority to decide which businesses succeed and which fail. Once upon a time, conservatives would have protested that.

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Manafort Readies For Explosive Tuesday Trial In Russia Probe

Former Trump aide Paul Manafort, 69, will go on trial Tuesday, accused of bank and tax fraud by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team of investigators. 

While the trial will focus on financial crimes that have nothing to do with Trump or his 2016 campaign, it should nonetheless provide fireworks as Manafort is accused of a wide variety of crimes, including laundering $30 million through offshore entities, doctoring financial documents, defrauding banks and lying to tax preparers – much of which was done while working for a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party along with lobbyist Tony Podesta. 

Manafort and Podesta made millions together in Ukraine without registering as foreign agents – except Podesta had the uncanny foresight to retroactively file as a foreign agent last April, while Manafort did not as noted in the original 12-count indictment handed down last October.

“My guess is you will see O.J.-type frenzy at this court event,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump aide and longtime Manafort associate, referring to the 1995 O.J. Simpson murder case. “I really hope the president continues to watch and make public comments about this case.” –Reuters

Caputo says that Trump’s comments will help the public to understand what’s at stake in the Mueller probe – which Trump and his supporters refer to as a “witch hunt” aimed at ending his presidency. 

The special counsel is planning to call 35 witnesses in the case, including his former right-hand man Rick Gates – Mueller’s star witness who pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the investigation.

Gates, who pleaded guilty and is cooperating with Mueller, is expected to be the prosecution’s star witness. He will guide jurors through bank records and other financial documents as prosecutors try to prove that Manafort earned millions of dollars as a political consultant in Ukraine, failed to disclose his income and offshore accounts to U.S. tax authorities and lied to lenders in borrowing $20 million. –Bloomberg

Another witness will be Bernie Sanders’ chief strategist, Tad Devine, who worked with Manafort in Ukraine and revealed on Thursday that he is cooperating with Mueller’s investigation after his name appeared in an itemized list of evidence in the Manafort trial on Wednesday. 

Manafort has pleaded not guilty in what has grown to an 18-count indictment. The nine bank fraud and conspiracy charges alone carry 30-year maximum sentences each, meaning a conviction could send Manafort behind bars for the rest of his life – an observation pointed out by Judge T.S. Ellis. 

While Ellis rejected Manafort’s motion to dismiss due to the fact that the charges against him are outside the scope of Mueller’s Russia investigation, the 78-year-old Judge is known to be tough on prosecutors, and has openly said that the politically charged climate increases the chance of a hung jury. 

Mueller’s team – which says it will not present any evidence about possible Trump campaign collusion with Russia, estimates that Manafort’s trial could take 8 to 10 days to present its case to the jury, while the trial itself may last at least three weeks. And w​​​​hile Mueller won’t broach potential Trump ties to Russia, prosecutors may dig deeper into Manafort’s Russian connections – such as an alleged $10 million loan from Oleg Deripaska – a businessman known to have ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“It seems to me we’re seeing deeper ties that Manafort has had financially with his business deals in the Ukraine and with Russia,” said Shanlon Wu, a former lawyer for Manafort associate Rick Gates, who pleaded guilty in February and is aiding Mueller’s probe. “He could expose himself to further criminal culpability if he has to expose the full extent of those ties.” –Reuters

Pardon? 

Some legal experts have speculated that Manafort may be counting on an eventual pardon from President Trump – who has called his former aide and short-term campaign chairman a “nice guy” who has been treated unfairly. 

Manafort was fired within 48 hours of Trump’s first national security briefing as a candidate, which suggests that he was informed of ongoing investigations against the lobbyist. 

Rudy Giuliani, while not ruling out a pardon, said that nobody facing trial should expect one. 

Giuliani said he and Jay Sekulow, another Trump lawyer, had told the president: “This would be a very bad thing to do now.”

But once Mueller’s Russia investigation ends, Giuliani told Reuters, “he has a right to consider it … It’s his power.” –Reuters

Tomorrow’s jury pool was narrowed from 73 to 43, with jury selection starting first thing in the morning.

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How the Free-Range Kids Movement Can Save Parenthood

KidsOn a cool Virginia day in 2011, Kim Brooks let her son wait in the car for 5 minutes while she ran into the store. Someone saw this, called 911, and got Kim arrested.

But had she literally put her son in harm’s way? No. This was a thought crime—the cops thought up scary scenarios that could happen, no matter how unlikely. That’s all it took.

Now, Brooks has this weekend’s most-read piece in The New York Times: “Motherhood in the Age of Fear.” She writes:

The police seemed to think it was child abuse or neglect — that someone could have hurt or kidnapped my son while I was gone.

When I tried to explain this to my outraged father, he said: “Last I checked, kidnapping is a crime. Someone could break into my house and shoot me in the head, but the police aren’t showing up to arrest me if I forget to lock my door.”

“I don’t think they see it the same way when kids are involved,” I told him.

“The same way,” he said. “You mean rationally?”

Yo go, Dad. And you go, Kim.

In her fantastic new book, Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear, Brooks eventually moves from shame to anger as she starts digging into this obsession we have with child kidnapping, predators, and all sorts of worst-case scenarios that we use as an excuse to hector moms who dare take their eyes off their kids. After all, she writes:

Statistically speaking, a child is far more likely to be killed in a car on the way to a store than waiting in one that is parked. But we have decided such reasoning is beside the point.

…I was beginning to understand that it didn’t matter if what I’d done was dangerous; it only mattered if other parents felt it was dangerous. When it comes to kids’ safety, feelings are facts.

This decision to act on our fears as if they are real—the definition of panic—has changed both childhood and parenting. If kids are no longer allowed any freedom, parents aren’t either.

The result, for kids, is a childhood where they are monitored, shuttled, and kept inside like prisoners. No wonder childhood diabetes, anxiety, and even suicide are up.

But if children must be guarded, parents must be guards. That means that parenting has gone from teaching kids independence—”Be home by dinner!”—to stunting it.

It also means getting screamed at, or arrested, if you dare to trust your kid and your community.

Brooks argues that moms bear the brunt of this, because when the definition of caregiver becomes “Person whose job is to protect children from ever-looming death,” any distraction is tantamount to endangering a precious child.

But Brooks also thinks we might just be getting sick of this histrionic terror in these safest of times, and that things are beginning to change:

In March, Utah became the first state to pass a law protecting “free-range” parents. Other states may soon follow. Lenore Skenazy, the founder of the Free-Range Kids movement, is the president of Let Grow, a nonprofit that helps parents, teachers and organizations find ways to support childhood independence and resiliency. And among mothers I know, there seems to be a slow-brewing backlash to the idea that we should let our lives be ruled by the twin fears of danger and of disapprobation.

When more states pass Utah-like laws declaring there is a difference between taking your eyes off your kids and neglect, more parents will be able to breathe a little freer. Which means kids will be able to breathe freer. Which means we will all enjoy a freer country, where we can’t arrest parents just because we’ve lost our minds.

You can find an info packet on the Free-Range Parenting law here.

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‘Bigfoot Erotica’ Stimulates Intense Congressional Debate

A Virginia Democrat running for the U.S. House of Representatives is going after her Republican opponent’s alleged fascination with Bigfoot erotica.

Democrat Leslie Cockburn, a longtime journalist and progressive activist (and sister-in-law of the late Alexander Cockburn), is facing off against Republican Denver Riggleman, a former Air Force intelligence officer who owns a distillery. The candidates are running in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District.

On Sunday, Cockburn posted screenshots from Riggleman’s Instagram page of two nude illustrations of Bigfoot. The legendary creature’s genitals are censored and Riggleman’s head is superimposed onto the second image. In the captions, Riggleman teased the release of a book titled Mating Habits of Bigfoot and Why Women Want Him and suggested the illustrations would be “cover art.”

Cockburn blasted Riggleman as “a devotee of Bigfoot erotica”—and accused him of “campaigning with a white supremacist” too:

Riggleman says the illustrations are nothing more than a joke. As the Charlottesville Daily Progress reports:

According to Riggleman the posts do not originate from “Bigfoot erotica,” but are a joke his military friends played on him. When he posted the images, Riggleman said, he never thought they would be used against him politically and described the tweets from Cockburn as “absurd.”

Riggleman does have an interest in Bigfoot, having co-authored a book titled Bigfoot Exterminators Inc.: The Partially Cautionary, Mostly True Tale of Monster Hunt 2006. According to the Cook Political Report, Riggleman only recently deleted a Facebook author page promoting his “Mating Habits” book.

But it seems more likely that Riggleman has a weird sense of humor than that he’s actually a “devotee of Bigfoot erotica.” After all, the bio on his Instagram page, which has been set to private, suggests he doesn’t take himself too seriously:

Own a distillery, consult on DoD matters and had a fun run for Governor. Love whiskey, hate tyranny and embrace liberty. Whiskey Rebellion always!

It’s not the first time that monster porn has influenced a political race. Paul Evans, a Democratic candidate for Oregon’s state legislature, was criticized in 2014 for writing a vampire erotica novel. Voters must not have cared too much, as Evans defeated his Republican opponent in the general election.

Cockburn’s line of attack seems especially curious. As she mentioned, Riggleman has been accused of campaigning with white supremacist Isaac Smith. If Riggleman sympathizes with white supremacists (he says he doesn’t), then voters have a legitimate reason to reject him in November.

But Riggleman’s interest or lack thereof in Bigfoot erotica has no bearing on how he’ll represent his district on Capitol Hill. Surely it’s time for us to grow as a society and put these dark days of sasquatch-shaming behind us.

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Here’s What We’ve Lost In The Last Decade

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

The confidence and hubris of those directing the rest of us to race off the cliff while they watch from a safe distance is off the charts.

The past decade of “recovery” and “growth” has actually been a decade of catastrophic losses for our society and nation. Here’s a short list of what we’ve lost:

1. Functioning markets. Free markets discover price and assess risk. What passes for markets now are little more than signaling devices to convince us the economy is doing spectacularly well. It is doing spectacularly well, but only for the top .1% of 1% and the class of managerial/technocrat flunkies and apologists who serve the interests of the top .1%.

2. Genuine Virtue. Parading around a slogan or online accusation, “liking” others in whatever echo-chamber tribe the virtue-signaler is seeking validation in, and other cost-free gestures–now signals virtue. Genuine virtue–sacrificing the support of one’s tribe for principles that require skin in the game–has disappeared from the public sphere and the culture.

3. Civility. As Scientific American reported in its February issue (The Tribalism of Truth), the incentive structure of largely digital “tribes” rewards the most virulent, the most outrageous, the least reasonable and the most vindictive of the tribe with “likes” while offering little to no encouragement of restraint, caution, learning rather than shouting, etc.

The cost of gaining tribal encouragement is essentially zero, while the risk of ostracism from the tribe is high. In a society with so few positive social structures, the self-referentially toxic digital tribe may be the primary social structure for atomized “consumers” in a dysfunctional system dominated by a rigged “market” and a central state that no longer needs the consent of the governed.

Common ground, civility, the willingness to listen and learn–all lost.

4. Trust. Few find reason to trust corporations, the corporate media, the tech monopolies or the government. This distrust is reasonable, given these institutions have squandered the public trust to protect the swag being skimmed by insiders and elites.

Rather than earn our trust with true transparency and accurate reporting of data, these institutions spew a false form of transparency that’s doubly opaque, as it’s rigged to mask the skims of the insiders. Transparency: lost. Accountability: lost.

Do you really trust Facebook, Google, and the agencies that are supposed to provide oversight of these monopolies? If you said, “yes,” you’re joking, right?

5. Social mobility for the masses. You’ve undoubtedly read reports about the stagnation of wages for the bottom 90% and the soaring wealth and income of the top 5%, which is concentrated in the top .1%. The old adage–go to college, you’ll be guaranteed a secure, well-paying job– no longer works, as we’ve over-produced elites (college graduates) for decades.

Starting your own business was once a ladder of social mobility, but the layers of bureaucratic costs and compliance are now so heavy that few have the resources or appetite for risk to start a business.

The only business model that’s worth trying now is to start a digital company that can be sold for a couple of million dollars to a tech monopoly (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc.) within a matter of months, two years max. By that time, some corporate behemoth will have purchased a competitor and eaten your lunch.

6. Federal law enforcement and national security agencies that were above partisan politics. Now these agencies and their leadership are nothing but political agendas hiding behind a long-extinct reputation for apolitical professionalism. The political impact now guides what’s made public, and how that “information” is gamed, spun or fabricated to drive a political agenda.

7. A democratizing Internet. A handful of corporate cartels and quasi-monopolies now control what we see in web searches, news feeds, our “friends” postings, and what’s available on user-generated content networks such as YouTube. Under the banner of “fake news” and “hate speech,” mass surveillance and censorship are now the status quo.

8. National purpose. Arguably lost long ago, but the loss has become painfully apparent in the past decade. Does anyone still think the Empire is spreading freedom and liberty? Everyone can see that what we’re spreading is destruction and disorder.

The society and culture have degraded to an abject worship of greed and private gain. The “national purpose” is to maximize one’s personal gain by whatever means are available, including fraud, racketeering, embezzlement, lying, cover-ups, punishing whistleblowers, gaming the system to maximize overtime, etc.

The rationalization is always the same: everyone else is doing it.

Here’s a shorthand way to summarize America’s “purpose” now: a medication that costs $8 per vial in Europe costs $38,892 in the U.S.

9. Perspectives on entitlement. Everyone’s entitled to everything now–to sex, a secure income, the “right” to abuse/accuse online without restraint or blowback, the “right” to demand everyone treat you in whatever way you reckon is your “right,” and so on in an infinite expansion of entitlements that require no sacrifice, virtue or even civility of the entitled.

10. Humility. How often do you find someone who publicly expresses caution about their own righteousness, or presents a healthy hesitation about the rightness of their positions, i.e. that they might be wrong? How many are publicly skeptical of their own views and not just of everyone else’s views? How many admit to having a poor understanding of complex issues?

The confidence and hubris of those directing the rest of us to race off the cliff while they watch from a safe distance is off the charts.


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Denver Man Returns From Congo, Isolated For Possible Ebola

Is the Ebola scare, which ravaged markets – however briefly – in late 2014, coming back?

Overnight, Colorado health officials rushed to determine if a man who recently worked with sick people in eastern Congo and became suddenly ill Sunday in Denver had contracted the deadly Ebola virus. 

According to the Denver Post, officials from Denver Health and Hospitals were waiting on Sunday night for test results from a state health lab but said that, based on an initial test in a special isolated unit, they do not believe the man has Ebola. A Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) bulletin late Sunday said testing “is negative for Ebola.”

The man had been working with sick and dead people in an area of eastern Congo where a recent outbreak of Ebola had largely dissipated with no new Ebola cases reported over the past 45 days. However, on Sunday morning he reported sudden severe symptoms at his residence in Denver, Denver Health chief medical officer Connie Price said.

Connie Savor Price M.D., from the Infectious Disease Department of Medicine at Denver Health

The man told health officials he felt ill Sunday morning, reported having worked recently as medical missionary in eastern Congo, and arrived at the hospital at about 8:30 a.m. by ambulance. Doctors set up a special isolation unit and were assessing his condition.

“The patient’s symptoms could represent a variety of common illnesses,” Denver Health spokeswoman Jennifer Hillmann said. “The patient in question had reported being in an area of the Congo on a medical missionary trip, but he was in a location where the Ebola outbreak had been officially declared over, with no cases reported for 45 days, according to the CDC.”

“We felt that, if he had Ebola, then he could be very communicable … We had no wiggle room to be wrong,” Price said adding that the man “became ill very suddenly this morning,” she said, declining to specify his exact symptoms but saying they could mimic illnesses including flu and appendicitis. “He is getting better, so that is good.”

Hospital officials said they were “on normal operations” and that “there is no threat or concern for patient, staff or visitor safety.” Denver Department of Public Health and Environment officials couldn’t be reached late Sunday.

* * *

The good news is that it appears this was a fale alarm, and at the hospital Sunday afternoon, staffers called the situation “under control.”

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