Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Losing Land to Suburban Sprawl: The Coalition For Farmland Preservation
Farmland disappearing in Arizona
Here Ya Go > Everything is Great
Gross Domestic Product by State, 3rd Quarter 2020 Increases in All States and the District of Columbia in the Third Quarter
Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in the third quarter of 2020, as real GDP for the nation increased at an annual rate of 33.4 percent, according to statistics released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The percent change in real GDP in the third quarter ranged from 52.2 percent in Nevada to 19.2 percent in the District of Columbia (table 1).
Healthcare and social assistance; durable goods manufacturing; and accommodation and food services were the leading contributors to the increase in real GDP nationally (table 2). Accommodation and food services was the leading contributor to the increase in Nevada.
The increase in third quarter GDP reflected continued efforts to reopen businesses and resume activities that were postponed or restricted due to COVID-19. The full economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be quantified in the GDP estimate for the third quarter of 2020 because the impacts are generally embedded in source data and cannot be separately identified.
Other highlights
- Healthcare and social assistance increased 75.1 percent nationally and contributed to the increases in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This industry was the leading contributor to the increases in 26 states, including Tennessee and Idaho, the states with the second and fourth largest increases.
- Durable goods manufacturing increased 80.3 percent nationally and contributed to the increases in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This industry was the leading contributor to the increases in 16 states, including Michigan, the state with the third largest increase.
- Accommodation and food services increased 344.5 percent nationally and contributed to the increases in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This industry was the leading contributor to the increases in five states.
- Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas decreased 14.4 percent nationally. This industry moderated increases in real GDP in 49 states. This industry was the leading offset to the increase in Wyoming, the state with the smallest increase in real GDP.
Next release: March 26, 2021 at 10:00 A.M. EDT
Gross Domestic Product by State, 4th Quarter and Year 2020 (Preliminary)
Ammon Bundy (A Devout Mormon) and The "Anti-Masker Rebellions"
How Ammon Bundy Helped Foment an Anti-Masker Rebellion in Idaho
Last spring, Idaho’s Brad Little was among the country’s first conservative governors to impose public-health orders. On March 20th, the state quarantined Blaine County, where the virus had spiked to what was briefly the highest infection rate in the country; the following week, Little ordered a statewide stay-at-home order, mobilized the Idaho National Guard, and reallocated nearly forty million dollars from the state budget for medical and testing equipment. By the time Little extended the stay-at-home order, on April 15th, Representative Heather Scott, of northern Idaho, had already referred to him as “Little Hitler.”
> Forcing people to stay home was “no different than Nazi Germany,” Scott said, where “nonessential workers got put on a train.”
Judy Boyle, a representative from Midvale, about sixty-five miles northwest of Boise, upped the Nazi ante, calling mask requirements “too similar to not allowing Jews to shop when they were ‘required’ to wear the yellow star!!!”
Even as Little earned high approval ratings on the crisis from average Idahoans, ranking members of his own party turned on him, with Lieutenant Governor Janice McGeachin and the former U.S. congressman Raúl Labrador (who is expected to challenge Little in 2022) kicking off the mutiny.
. . . Little, who makes a point of wearing a mask in public, tried to balance calls for statewide mandates against the insurrection in his own party. Under pressure from Republicans in the statehouse to roll back any statewide orders, he ultimately deferred to the state’s seven public-health districts to decide what was right for their own communities. That decision kicked off months of messy public debates on district health boards, which are composed largely of elected county commissioners, many of whom doubt the efficacy of masks and the threat of the virus. Some jurisdictions, unwilling to wait for the health boards to act, passed their own mandates, replicating within the state the same policy patchwork at play nationwide. (Little’s office did not respond to questions for this story.)
In the first week of Little’s initial stay-at-home order, Ammon Bundy began coördinating his first protests, as did Health Freedom Idaho and the Idaho Freedom Foundation (I.F.F.), a dark-money-funded libertarian policy shop and the state’s center of gravity for right-wing advocacy. . .If Idahoans complied with mask mandates and business shutdowns, Bundy warned protesters in the spring, “then they will go further until we are lined up naked facing a mass grave being shot in the back of the head.” . . Together with Health Freedom Idaho and the Idaho Second Amendment Alliance, the I.F.F. staged a joint rally in mid-April, which brought about a thousand protesters to the capitol with rifles and homemade signs: “Faith Over Fear,” “Liberty or Death,” “Brad Little Is Non-Essential.” That month, Bundy brought protesters to a police officer’s home in Meridian, after the officer arrested a young mother who refused to leave a closed playground; in July, protesters shut down a public-health district meeting in Caldwell.
By the time of the August spectacle at the state capitol, Bundy and the health-freedom activists had spent four months staging increasingly bold protests. Inside the chamber that week, several legislators embraced the activists’ world view. . Two months before President Trump took the myth mainstream, Barbieri accused hospitals of “making up statistics” about COVID-19 for profit. “N95 masks are of no value,” he added. The former representative Tim Remington, a pastor who represented the same district, suggested that the virus was not as contagious as reported. “I’ve actually laid hands on people that have COVID and prayed for them. I never got COVID,” he said. . .
“The government has no right to tell a person what they can put over their mouth,” Bundy told me. “The government has no right to tell a person they have to stay in their home. That’s called freedom. That belongs to the individual.” The real story from August, Bundy said, is the amount of force that the state is prepared to bring down on citizens exercising their right to free speech. “When you see a hundred or more police officers surrounding the capitol, when never once did we do anything threatening, that was very revealing to people.” . .
Bundy, who was arrested twice in twenty-four hours during the August protests, doesn’t doubt that the coronavirus is contagious or that people are dying from COVID-19. Instead, he points to the pandemic’s pervasive rules and the state’s COVID-19 fatality rates, which remain similar to its annual combined deaths from flu, pneumonia, and chronic lung diseases, as evidence of overreach. The locked doors and social-distancing rules of the special legislative session, he said, were violations of the state’s 1974 Open Meeting Law
> On November 18th, hundreds of protesters surrounded a city-council meeting in Rexburg, shouting, “We will not comply!,” until officials shelved the mask question and broke up the meeting.
> In Boise, on November 23rd, a few dozen members of Bundy’s People’s Rights organization, the digitally organized social-activism network that he launched in April, protested in front of Mayor Lauren McLean’s home with tiki torches, shouting their discontent . . .Bundy drove to his parents’ ranch in southern Nevada for Thanksgiving, which the family celebrated indoors with, he estimated, about seventy relatives and friends. He came down with a mild cold and slight cough afterward, but it cleared up in a few days, and the virus remains low on his list of worries. . .
> I asked Bundy about the increasing aggression of health-freedom activists in Idaho. On the afternoon of December 8th, the same day that Boise’s Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial was vandalized with stickers bearing swastikas and the words “WE ARE EVERYWHERE,” about four hundred protesters surrounded Boise’s Central District Health office during a virtual board meeting intended to discuss tightening current restrictions. At the same time, two more groups arrived outside the homes of two board members, Dr. Ted Epperly and the Ada County commissioner Diana Lachiondo, where armed protesters shouted, fired air horns, and played loud sound clips from the film “Scarface.” Lachiondo’s two sons, who are eight and twelve years old, were home alone, calling their mother. Lachiondo left the call in tears to go to her children, and the city’s mayor and police chief ended the meeting moments later. .
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