Posts on Sunday, March 15, 2020
Starbucks to close some stores, eliminate
seating in all others to slow spread of
coronavirus replies
seating in all others to slow spread of
coronavirus replies
In a bid to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, Starbucks will temporarily close some of its North American locations and will shift to a “to-go” model at the rest of its more than 10,000 North American stores.
The closures, which were announced and implemented Sunday afternoon, will last at least two weeks and will affect company-operated stores in high-risk areas such as Seattle and New York, with a high number of cases of COVID-19, (snip) In these areas, stores will either shut down or move to reduced hours. (snip) The closures reportedly include 22 locations in downtown Seattle,
A police department in Oregon is urging people that if they’ve run out of toilet paper, it’s not worth calling 911. The Newport Police Department posted the surprising message on its Facebook page as shoppers across the country have flocked to supermarkets to stock up on supplies amid the coronavirus pandemic that has put much of the world on edge. “It’s hard to believe that we even have to post this. Do not call 9-1-1 just because you ran out of toilet paper. You will survive without our assistance,” NPD wrote. (Facebook) The department then offered numerous alternatives if people
Economic forecaster Lakshman Achuthan is seeing an encouraging market pattern that indicates the economy may avoid a recession.
He boils it down in a chart of how commodity prices are doing. [Graphic]
The red line shows easy to speculate commodities, which includes oil and copper. The blue line follows hard to speculate groups such as rubber, benzene and some textiles.
Achuthan, who’s co-founder of the Economic Cycle Research Institute, contends both groups would be falling simultaneously during an economic downturn.
However, the only drop he’s seeing is in very speculative commodities. It suggests, according to Achuthan,
Former Vice President Joe Biden committed to picking a woman as his running mate during Sunday’s Democratic debate.
“I commit that I will in fact pick a woman to be vice president,” Biden said.
When moderators asked whether he was guaranteeing that he will choose a woman to be his vice president, Biden said “yes.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders was less firm on picking a female running mate. When he was asked whether he would name a woman to be his vice president, Sanders said: “In all likelihood, I will.”
Amazon says it is out of stock of household
items and deliveries are delayed due to
coronavirus demand replies
items and deliveries are delayed due to
coronavirus demand replies
Amazon warned it’s experiencing Prime delivery days and running out of stock of popular household items amid the coronavirus outbreak.
The issues are a result of a “dramatic increase in the rate that people are shopping online,” Amazon said in a blog post that was updated on Saturday. Some popular brands and items in the “household staples” categories were out of stock, while Amazon said some of its “delivery promises are longer than usual.”
“In the short term this is having an impact on how we serve our customers,” Amazon said in the blog post.
The Los Angeles Times reports that gun stores are one aspect of the economy seeing a surge in business as Californians react to coronavirus news.According to the LA Times, the line of customers at the Martin B. Retting Gun Shop in Culver City stretched out the front door and around the block on Saturday. Many of those in line waited five hours for their opportunity to buy a gun. A doctor who wanted to buy a gun at the store said, “I want to buy a handgun, I think they call it a Glock, but I’m not sure. I have a house and a family, and they’ll need protection
President Trump has declared Sunday a “National Day of Prayer” amid the worldwide outbreak of the novel coronavirus and said he will monitor a church service online.Trump made the declaration Friday, the same day he also declared a national emergency over COVID-19, which has killed thousands of people worldwide. “It is my great honor to declare Sunday, March 15th as a National Day of Prayer,” Trump tweeted Friday. “We are a Country that, throughout our history, has looked to God for protection and strength in times like these.” “No matter where you may be, I encourage you to turn towards prayer in an act of faith.
Luxury goods giant LVMH will start manufacturing hand sanitiser to be donated to French health authorities in an effort to combat the spread of Covid-19. The Parisian group, which owns brands including Louis Vuitton and Christian Dior, has instructed its perfumes and cosmetics division to begin making "substantial" quantities of alcohol hand gel from Monday.
The sanitiser will be delivered free of charge to French health authorities, prioritising hospitals in Paris. “Through this initiative,
COLUMBUS – Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced that he will be issuing an order to close all restaurants and bars beginning at 9:00 p.m. Sunday night. “I’m aware that this will impact many, many good workers,” he said in a tweet. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but we will work to mitigate the suffering. It is our goal to get everyone through this. The order will shut down in-person dining. Restaurants and bars will still offer carryout and delivery. (Snip)The order will remain in effect indefinitely.
The Federal Reserve lowered its interest rate target to zero and announced large purchases of goverment bonds Sunday to protect the economy against the coronavirus pandemic."The effects of the coronavirus will weigh on economic activity in the near term and pose risks to the economic outlook," the central bank's monetary policy committee said in an unscheduled statement. The Fed will also purchase $700 billion in goverment-backed bonds in the "coming months," a move it said was meant to ensure the functioning of financial markets. The statement said that the central bank would leave short-term interest rates at a range of between zero and 0.25% until "it is confident that
The two leading Democrat presidential candidates, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (VT), will participate in a debate Sunday night on CNN set with no audience while standing at podiums set six feet apart because of the Wuhan coronavirus scare. Remaining candidate Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI) did not make the cut for the party’s threshold for the debate. While the lack of an audience to play to with applause, laugh lines and zingers might be a hindrance, Biden and Sanders have decades of experience speaking in the Senate where reactions are generally not allowed.
The White House on Sunday reassured Americans that it was “unnecessary” to hoard grocery items in the wake of the coronavirus.“Supply chains in the United States are strong, and it is unnecessary for the American public to hoard daily essentials,” the White House said in a statement announcing that President Donald Trump spoke with over two dozen grocery store and supply chain executives. The president spoke to the executives about the importance of keeping the shelves stocked and thanked them for their efforts to keep the public supplied around the country. “The President reminded the participants that this is an all-of-America approach
Americans normally hear from President Donald Trump when he is on Twitter, riffing from a rally stage or otherwise improvising. This past week was different as he sat in the Oval Office with a script laid out for him to read on a matter grave enough for a prime-time address to the nation. (snip) TRUMP: "We will be suspending all travel from Europe, except the United Kingdom, for the next 30 days." — Oval Office address.
THE FACTS: He inaccurately described his own plan.
Aspen Skiing Company, a certifiable progressive and green company affectionately called “SkiCo” by the prog locals of Aspen, boasts of their concern for people over profits, even as they uncannily make lots of the later at the expense of the former.
SkiCo operates the four ski mountains on National Forests around Aspen, where they charge people $175 a day for transporting them up the mountainsides on lifts powered by electricity generated by burning fossil fuels (elsewhere, of course) so that the people can slide back down. They do so while simultaneously decrying the use of fossil fuels by others, in order to buy indulgences from the global warming priests.
The coronavirus outbreak is expected to have the worst impact on the black and Hispanic populations.
Donald Trump has enforced a travel ban and declared COVID-19 a national pandemic, banning gathering of more than 500 people and leading to the cancellations of major events, as more than 3,000 cases of have been confirmed in the US.
With self-quarantining actions in place, low-wage workers in the industries that rely on tips or have zero-hour contracts, are being forced to decide between immediately cutting their income by missing shifts without sick leave, or showing up to work and risking infection.
The travel and leisure and hospitality industries are suffering due to the outbreak,
Mayor de Blasio admitted that the city doesn’t have an immediate backup plan if he closes the city’s public schools amidst the coronavirus outbreak. “A variety of contingencies are being set up. They are far from perfect,” de Blasio said on CNN Sunday morning after a growing number of teachers, local elected officials and parents called for the closure. “The difference between a functioning school system for over 1 million kids versus creating alternative centers for feeding or for the kids of health care workers, that kind of thing, if we got to that point we would improvise anything and everything,” de Blasio said.
President Trump said he is seriously considering a pardon for former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn.
“So now it is reported that, after destroying his life & the life of his wonderful family (and many others also), the FBI, working in conjunction with the Justice Department, has 'lost' the records of General Michael Flynn. How convenient. I am strongly considering a Full Pardon!” Trump tweeted on Sunday. Flynn, 61, pleaded guilty in December 2017 for lying to investigators about his conversations with then-Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak and faces possible prison time.
After swapping legal teams, Flynn changed his tune, telling the U.S. District Court in Washington
With thousands of movies to choose from, and a navigation system and algorithm that don’t always make the right choice easy to find, it can be difficult to know what to watch on Netflix. That’s why we’re here, breaking down the 100 best movies on the service at this minute, with regular updates for titles that have been removed and when new ones are added. We’ve done the hard work, so now the only thing you have to do is sit back and, uh, watch all 100 movies. (And if you’re more of a TV person, check out the 50 best TV shows on Netflix.)
Gun rights supporters are suing Connecticut officials over part of a 2013 state gun control law passed after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, saying it unconstitutionally bans people from loading more than 10 rounds of ammunition into their firearms.
The lawsuit filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court cites the Second Amendment right to bear arms and the ability of people to better defend themselves with more bullets in their guns.
“Law abiding gun owners in Connecticut are left more susceptible to harm or death by being limited in their means of self-defense,” Holly Sullivan, president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League, said in a written statement.
Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., addressed the reliance that the U.S. currently has on China when it comes to key pharmaceutical ingredients, as medical professionals are hoping to stave off the coronavirus pandemic.
Blackburn told "Fox & Friends" Sunday morning that even before the current outbreak, she was pushing legislation to reduce that dependency and increase production in the U.S. "Many of the pharmaceuticals that are necessary for treating some of these viruses," Blackburn said, "they’re made only in China and we are dependent on them for these -- they’re called APIs, active pharmaceutical ingredients."
On Saturday morning, deranged anti-Trumper George Conway took to Twitter in hopes of having a real gotcha moment by showing a screenshot of a memo from White House Physician Sean P. Conley, which indicates that he is not an M.D.
"So the White House physician isn’t an M.D.," he tweeted. "Good Lord. Someone sneeze on me now and just get it over with." (Snip) After this initial tweet, Conway probably googled what a DO is before making the follow-up tweet, "Betcha the first patient, who fancies people with the best degrees (until they tell him he doesn’t know what he’s talking about), doesn’t know, and doesn’t know what a DO is."
This follow-up to my March 12 coronavirus piece comes with the same important caveats, important enough that I’m stating them up front: I’m not here to alarm anyone, and I am not here to scoff. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I do know what our experts are saying, and this is me reporting what the experts are saying. Andrew Slavitt, Barack Obama’s former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), is quoting experts who say more than one million Americans are already doomed because the “virus was not contained.”
The surge of coronavirus cases throughout the United States and around the world has brought countries to a practical standstill.
While countries like Italy, Spain and China have declared complete lockdowns in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, life in the United States also has dramatically changed in just a week.
From work to entertainment to even worship, several aspects of American life have been reordered as health officials encourage the public to carry out "social distancing" to prevent the spread of the infection.“The less public gatherings we have now the better. It’s a new virus. We don’t have immunity to it. We don’t have a vaccine
China's CGTN, or China Global Television Network, is pretty much the RT News of China. It's the state propaganda and disinformation operation most aggressively active, and watched, by spies, of any nation that pays attention to China. Last February 2019, it was forced to register as a foreign agent.
So what weird stuff it is to read that one of its reporters has been caught at the White House gate with a high fever, which is a symptom of the highly contagious coronavirus. The fever was in the 100-degree range. You'd know if you had such a fever. Yet the person was clamoring to get into a closed-quarters press briefing
Michael Bloomberg made a stunning admission last month during his second appearance in a Democratic presidential primary debate. Speaking in defense of his new identity as a member of the Democratic Party, he said, “All of the new Democrats that came in, put Nancy Pelosi in charge, and gave the Congress the ability to control this president, I b . . . bought . . . I got them.”Indeed he did. He bought them.
Bloomberg bought congressional seats in 2018, spending an estimated $110 million to help Democrats win. This included $28 million through his super PAC Independence USA, which backed 22 Democratic congressional candidates, 19 of whom won.
The coronavirus is a threat that the U.S. -- and the entire world -- is facing at the moment. This problem is much broader than a public-health issue; from our perspective, it is above all a political, social, and economic issue that demands resolute action. From an overall perspective, I do believe that President Trump has dealt well with this unfortunate event which the Chinese Communist Party offered to all of us. The most relevant aspect to stress is that President Trump decided according to the mandate he received from the American people – first and foremost, all the measures to be taken aims to protect the people;
Chicago bars were packed Saturday afternoon into the evening as revelers celebrated St. Patrick's Day a few days early and ignored warings about the coronavirus pandemic.
"If you are young and healthy, listen up. We need you to follow social distancing guidelines too. You can have the unintended tragic effect of spreading COVID-19 to others who may be more vulnerable," said Gov. JB Pritzker, noting with exasperation that he saw a lot of people out and about on Saturday afternoon in Chicago. (Snip)"You know, we're trying not to think about it and just have fun regardless," Lauren Anthony told Fox 32 News as she was out barhopping.
Since we’re all settled in now for The Great Hunkering and looking for things to do, you might want to spend four minutes watching Slow Joe Biden from his “virtual town hall” in Illinois a few days ago. The opening section of this clip shows his propensity for sheer confusion and befuddlement, but then in response to a question about the Endangered Species Act he goes off in into full Biden Loghorrea Mode.
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a four-time cancer survivor, turns 87 on Sunday. That’s it. That’s all you really need to know for the 2020 presidential election if you’re a Democrat or left-leaning moderate. “RBG is 87” is the slogan to emblazon on the buttons, bumper stickers, ball caps and other campaign merch in your effort to win the votes of sulky progressives now threatening to sit out the election since their favorite candidate is unlikely to get the party’s nomination for president. Liberal icon Ginsburg is not only by far the oldest justice now serving, she’s also the
Tom Hanks thanked his carers at the Gold Coast University Hospital on Sunday, where he and wife Rita Wilson are being treated for coronavirus. But the 63-year-old actor's Twitter post grabbed the attention of fans for all the wrong reasons - namely the very thick spread of Vegemite Tom applied to his toast.
In the photo accompanying his tribute, the Forrest Gump actor showcased his breakfast, featuring a tube of Vegemite, with a kangaroo toy nearby.
An Obama-appointed federal judge blocked a Trump administration rule that would have tightened work requirements for food stamps, citing the coronavirus pandemic as the reason she made her decision.
D.C. District Court Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell granted a preliminary injunction blocking the recent Trump administration rule on food stamps, which the USDA estimates would have reduced federal spending by $7.9 billion over five years and gradually weaned 755,000 people off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the government program in charge of food stamps.
“Especially now, as a global pandemic poses widespread health risks,
A golden retriever puppy who lost one of her ears due to an accident at birth is becoming Instagram famous as the “Golden Unicorn.”
Rae, a 12-week-old golden retriever puppy with a unique look that has earned her the nickname @GoldenUnicornRae, lost her left ear not too long after birth when her mother accidentally ripped her ear off while trying to tear at her amniotic sac, People reported.
Rae was rushed to a veterinary hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to treat the injuries. She had to get stitches from the top of her head and down the left side of her face and neck.
The owner of the mother dog and her litter
Joe Biden has just named the former Beto O’Rourke campaign manager as his new campaign manager.Do you remember before Beto dropped out, he started making some wildly radical claims about guns and gun confisctation?This woman was Beto’s manager at the time and she shares some of those views. The Washington Free Beacon reports: Biden Taps Campaign Manager Who Advocated for AR-15 Confiscation. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is hiring the architect of
Israeli scientists at the MIGAL Galilee Research Institute had worked for four years and had successfully developed a Coronavirus vaccine for chickens which passed clinical trials. When they saw the genetic sequencing of the COVID-19 virus, they realized that they could quickly adapt their chicken vaccine to the human virus. Ella Dagan, a spokesman for MIGAL told europorter:
When the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus COVID-19 was published, the researchers realized that the two viruses have the same infection mechanism similarities so they can use it, with small amount of adaptation, to achieve an effective human vaccine in a very short period of time.
Screwtape Revisited
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Remember C. S. Lewis’ great novel The Screwtape Letters? As a senior demon, Screwtape writes mentoring letters to his nephew instructing him in the ways of screwing up (pun intended) human beings. Uncle Screwtape writes calm, encouraging missives to poor Wormwood. Such tutoring must be trickier these days -- evil has come so far, and yet human beings still keep fighting back. The demonic board of directors must be grasping at tridents as time keeps getting shorter.
Have they scared you yet? Me neither. Not for want of trying, though. Project Fear is ramping up, and it’s only going to get worse. The Democrats and the global establishment class do not care how many lives are lost or how much financial damage results. They have only one concern: removing President Trump from power, silencing us, and bending the arc of history back toward the plutocratic governing elite. For them, that is the only moral universe that can exist.
All of us have known this was coming. From the moment on November 8, 2016, when we looked at each other and smiled,
We're all going to be spending a lot more time on the internet as long as the informal COVID-19 sequestration remains in place. That means that our unoccupied attention will be subject to more inane opinions than normal, but hey, at least irascible Joe Biden gets a break from buffaloing inquisitive voters and threatening to give them the back of his liver-spotted hand.
As Netflix stock rises and Charmin Ultra Soft supplies run low, some public officials are using the forced downtime to excrete whatever thought forms in their woolgathering state. Most are shtuss; some are inadvertently insightful.
Take liberal senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut.
This makes the second week that I have been unable to purchase toilet paper. At first, I was mind-boggled that anyone thought it was necessary to buy every roll in sight, then that so many people think it is essential to buy out the shelves. I try to keep around enough reserves that I don't need to worry if I can't buy for two weeks, but yes, I'm running out.
I understand that people fear being in quarantine for two weeks or a month over WuFlu fears, and wanting their personal supply to last. That weighs on their minds — not the alleged lethality of the current coronavirus,
My online friend Jeffrey Satinover compared the President to an ultrasonic whistle “that cause all of the vermin to rush frantically out of their hiding holes, and you suddenly realize how infested the place is.” This week’s presser was a masterstroke that exposed the lie of socialism versus capitalism, central power versus federal systems with its diffusion of power and responsibility, and the effects of a dynamic leader versus conventional ones. In the process, we can see how Trump’s fight against open borders, bureaucratic red tape, and globalized production is a critical part of national health and security.
On Sunday evening, the remaining candidates with a real shot at the Democratic nomination will meet in Washington amid a pandemic to state why they should be chosen to lead the nation. In many ways, the debate will vary from all others held since last summer. Instead of a large and diverse field of candidates, only two old, white men remain. And instead of testing their styles and one-liners in front of a crowd, this meeting will lack an audience. With so much stripped away, the candidates will either shine or fail.
At this moment, it seems that the nomination is former Vice President Joe Biden's to lose.
That journalism is dead has been a punchline for so long that we’ve forgotten how that fact has real world consequences. We’re now paying the price for the failure of that profession to hold itself to any semblance of standards. As worry and straight-up panic sweep large swaths of the country, causing irrational toilet paper hoarding and runs on canned goods, there is no outlet and no journalist worthy of trust when it comes to conveying truthful information to the public or to hold anyone in power accountable.
Eight years of sycophantic, throne sniffing coverage under President Barack Obama gave way to four years of nitpicking, hostility, and conspiracy theories.
In 2018, Mark Janus convinced the Supreme Court that mandatory government union dues violate the First Amendment. Now he wants his money back.
After his triumph at the High Court, Janus asked a federal trial judge to require the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) pay out about $3,000 in agency fees the union collected from his paycheck between 2013 and 2018. The judge declined and Janus lost on appeal, prompting a new petition to the Supreme Court.
So-called right-to-work cause lawyers including the Liberty Justice Center and the National Right to Work Foundation are litigating some 30 cases
Steve Wynn Vindicated
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In 2018, the “me too” movement claimed casino owner Steve Wynn as one of its most famous victims. The Associated Press obtained a police report showing that a woman named Halina Kuta had accused Wynn of raping her in the early 1970s. The AP ran with the story, and it was repeated by other news outlets. This is the New York Times version:
The fallout for Mr. Wynn and his empire has been swift since the first allegations were disclosed. He resigned as finance chairman of the Republican National Committee, and his name was stripped from buildings and programs at various universities.
If you are feeling the aches and pains of what you think is the flu, a trendy diet may be the culprit instead, a new study confirms.
Researchers took a dive into what's become known as "keto flu" -- the fatigue, headache, nausea and mental fog that some people develop soon after starting a ketogenic diet.
The keto diet, which is loaded with fat and skimpy on carbs, has become a popular way to lose weight. By depriving the body of carbs -- its main source of fuel -- the diet pushes it to burn fat instead.
Walmart cuts hours at 24-hour stores
and other locations nationwide
starting Sunday due to coronavirus replies
and other locations nationwide
starting Sunday due to coronavirus replies
Walmart is cutting store hours starting Sunday at its locations across the U.S. due to COVID-19. Stores normally open 24 hours will be open from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. until further notice, the company said late Saturday. Other stores, which are typically open until midnight, will also have reduced hours. "This will help ensure associates are able to stock the products our customers are looking for and to perform cleaning and sanitizing," Dacona Smith, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Walmart U.S., wrote in a blog post.
Despite telling a Michigan auto worker to his face that he was ‘full of shit’ about gun rights and lampooning some weapon called an AR-14 (which is an assault rifle used by fake country the Republic of Surea and not the beloved, American semi-automatic sporting rifle, the AR-15) earlier Tuesday while campaigning, Joe Biden soared ahead in the Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders in states Sanders swept from under Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Michigan, and Biden’s victory there, is perhaps the only interesting primary story we’ll see this election cycle and reveals more about the 2016 election than it does 2020. Voters in exit polls,
The Bernie Bros are vowing revenge.
As the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders continues to crash and burn, the socialist’s most hard-core supporters are vowing they will never vote for Joe Biden at the ballot box — even if that means handing Trump a second term.
“We will never – NEVER boost or support Joe Biden or defend his abysmal record and terrible policy positions,” Henry Williams, executive director of The Gravel Institute, told The Post. “We will tell people, as we always have, to vote their conscience and to make decisions based on the interests of all the world’s oppressed people …
Amid all the coronavirus worries, here’s a positive development: NASA this month began taking applications for new astronauts.
You probably won’t qualify: Candidates must have STEM backgrounds, and the odds of being accepted in the last round were 50 times worse than those for Harvard applicants.
Plus NASA’s at least four years away from getting anyone to the moon — though that’s far from the only manned mission now on the planning boards. On the other hand, firms like Axiom Space and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are starting to offer regular commercial trips that are (literally) out of this world — and you don’t need to be a real astronaut.
SALT LAKE CITY -- As ski resorts across the United States grappled with how to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus without having to close, industry giant Vail Resorts decided Saturday it would shutter all of its North American resorts for at least one week.
After earlier in the day announcing their resorts would remain open with added measures to prevent the spread of the virus, Vail Resorts changed course and said it would shut down 34 resorts starting Sunday through March 22 before reassessing, according to the company's news release.
In retrospect, Florida dodged a bullet.
Andrew Gillum, the corruption-tinged left-wing mayor of Tallahassee, who less than two years ago darn near got elected goveror of Florida, based on a glowing 'making history' press narrative, has been caught naked, in a hotel room with a gay "escort," barfing over a toilet, and too inchoate to answer questions from cops, who were called in to hose out a $220 a night Miami hotel room of meth baggies. The self-described porn star in the room had a profile on "Rent Men" and being that he was with Gillum and another guy, naked, was in what cops reportedly suspected was a orgy.
Wille Brown appointee Rodrigo Santos, now in private practice, allegedly took checks made out to the Department of Building Inspection (DBI) and hand-scrawled them to be made out to ‘RoDBIgo Santos.” A lawsuit claims he got away with it 200 times. It’s a scheme so ridiculous Saul Goodman wouldn’t even try it, except it allegedly worked 200 times. Willie Brown-appointed Department of Building Inspection commissioner from 2000-11 Rodrigo Santos, who knows the ins and outs of that department pretty thoroughly and is now in the private sector, tells his clients to write their checks to “DBI.” He then takes those checks and manually changes the “Pay to the Order Of”