Ignore the liars and WEAR YOUR MASK

The pandemic numbers are rising again, and this is the kind of phenomenon responsible leadership could have checked. We lack responsible leadership, though.

Dr. Robert Redfield, who leads the CDC, suggested in a conversation with a colleague Friday that Dr. Scott Atlas is arming Trump with misleading data about a range of issues, including questioning the efficacy of masks, whether young people are susceptible to the virus and the potential benefits of herd immunity.

“Everything he says is false,” Redfield said during a phone call made in public on a commercial airline and overheard by NBC News.

Atlas is a Trump appointee in charge of the federal coronavirus task force. It’s an ongoing failure, obviously.

What could we do, though? Redfield has an optimistic prescription.

Redfield testified before Congress this month that he suspects that a face covering could protect him from Covid-19 better than any future vaccine. Most public health officials share the view that masks are essential to stop the spread of the virus. Still, Trump has repeatedly cast doubt on how useful wearing them may be.

“If every one of us did it, this pandemic would be over in eight to 12 weeks,” Redfield said before offering a stark warning that contradicted the president’s assertion that the country is “rounding the corner” on the pandemic.

I don’t know about the specific timeline, but facemasks do reduce the rate of infection, and would definitely help. What do we have going on now, though? Paranoia and misinformation, emanating from the very top, that lead to people encouraging people to oppose simple, basic mask use fanatically. One parallel: the way propaganda was used to encourage people to smoke cigarettes, generating all kinds of opposition to regulation and control. Now we’ve got mobs of people opposing basic hygiene and health information.

Is it too much to hope this is Trump’s Doom?

As I’m sure you’ve heard by now, the New York Times managed to get their hands on Trump’s tax returns, and we finally learn why, unsurprisingly, he refused to release them willingly. He’s a tax cheat, a fraud, and a loser.

Donald J. Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency. In his first year in the White House, he paid another $750.

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

As the president wages a re-election campaign that polls say he is in danger of losing, his finances are under stress, beset by losses and hundreds of millions of dollars in debt coming due that he has personally guaranteed. Also hanging over him is a decade-long audit battle with the Internal Revenue Service over the legitimacy of a $72.9 million tax refund that he claimed, and received, after declaring huge losses. An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

I pay more in taxes than this “billionaire” — and you probably do, too — which I’m sure his supporters will claim is an example of his canny business acumen. Harder to rationalize with that excuse, though, is that his way out of paying taxes is to lose so much money in the businesses he runs that he is sitting in his office with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, much of which will come due in the next few years. Poor man. I thought I was struggling with a mortgage and legal debts. His daughter is also implicated in the shenanigans, in which he paid her tens of millions of dollars (and paid himself!) that he then declared as losses he could deduct from his taxes.

I’d like to know who he is beholden to, which would have been information we should have had prior to the last election.

And right now, he’s desperate to hold onto the presidency, not for the good of the country, but to escape the financial obligations that are going to splat his griftin’ ass into putrid slimy gibs in the near future. Unless, that is, a lot of bankers see him as representing their just fate and try to shelter him.

Rural Minnesota is problematic

Minnesota was trying to carry out a COVID-19 testing survey — a smart move, because what we desperately need is more information, and doing good sampling and determining what the frequency of infection in the state is will help us design good, evidence-based policy. I say was, though, because the state just called it all off.

A door-to-door COVID-19 testing survey has been halted due to multiple incidents in outstate Minnesota of residents intimidating and shouting racial and ethnic slurs at state and federal public health survey teams.

The CDC pulled its federal surveyors out of Minnesota this week following reports of verbal abuse and intimidation, including an incident in the Iowa border town of Eitzen, Minn., in which a survey team walking to a house was blocked by two cars and threatened by three men, including one who had a gun.

Jesus christ but I despise that kind of ignorant yahoo. They were being offered free testing, and they react with guns and blockades, and then they’ll probably go off to a Trump rally and will vote Republican. We are so fucked by our fellow citizens.

In other news, Minnesota’s pandemic status has been downgraded to “uncontrolled”.

Minnesota has dropped into the “uncontrolled spread” category of the COVID-19 Exit Strategy website, joining neighbors Wisconsin, Iowa and the Dakotas that had been at that lowest rating of pandemic progress for weeks due to rising novel coronavirus infections.

I wonder if these two stories are somehow related?

The most tin-eared neo-lib proposal yet

Matt Yglesias, the latest sign that you are talking out of your ass ought to be that Glenn Beck agrees with you.

He has a new book out titled One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger, in which he proposes that we set a goal of pumping out more babies to give us an edge in international competition.

From one of our foremost policy writers, One Billion Americans is the provocative yet logical argument that if we aren’t moving forward, we’re losing. Vox founder Yglesias invites us to think bigger, while taking the problems of decline seriously. What really contributes to national prosperity should not be controversial: supporting parents and children, welcoming immigrants and their contributions, and exploring creative policies that support growth—like more housing, better transportation, improved education, revitalized welfare, and climate change mitigation. Drawing on examples and solutions from around the world, Yglesias shows not only that we can do this, but why we must.

The book has a website where you can find out more, but it’s rather unpersuasive. It has a section on praise which includes endorsements from billionaire Mark Cuban, his Vox co-founder Ezra Klein, Catholic creep Ross Douthat, and David Leonhardt (who?). Douthat’s blurb is about as empty as you can get:

“Trump-era bestseller lists are dominated by ‘exposes’ that tell us the same things, and (esp. under pandemic conditions) better books can’t get oxygen. So if you enjoy an excerpt or interview, buy the book!”

Gosh. An author has to be desperate to include that.

I have not read the book, nor do I feel at all compelled to read it. It just sounds dumb.

  • Why is tripling the population of the country even a goal? I mean, the description says some good things: supporting parents and immigrants, better housing, transportation, education, and welfare, and working to reduce the impact of climate change. Those are the goals we ought to aim for. Maybe a population increase would follow, but that would be a side effect of building a better, stronger nation. Why are you making the side effect primary, especially when it can conflict with your path to achieving that better nation?
  • How, Mr Policy Guy, how? Was an alternate title for your book Make More Babies NOW, Women!? Because that’s what it sounds like. A major obstacle to that goal right now is the deep gender inequities in this country — women bear the brunt of child-rearing responsibilities, so you’ve set a goal that falls mainly on the child-bearing hips of half the country. You don’t even mention correcting the unequal distribution of labor in your list of uncontroversial improvements.
  • The biggest economic factor limiting the United States is the immense, and growing, wealth inequality here, driven by raging unchecked capitalism. This is a country where the rich have grown richer during a pandemic that has harmed the well-being of the majority of the population. Spawning more children is not the path to prosperity for individuals, although it sure does swell a hungry workforce that can be exploited to the advantage of the corporate class. Somehow, I suspect that dismantling capitalism isn’t one of your uncontroversial contributions to national prosperity.
  • A colossal increase in population is going to involve equally colossal shifts in the economy. We’re going to require far more appreciation of child care and teaching, positions that are currently undervalued and underpaid. It’s going to lead to a booming number of retirees and the elderly, with a concomitant need for more advanced health care (unless, as an alternative, we’re going to just let them die).

OK, maybe the book is a staggering work of genius that includes eye-opening revelations about how we can accomplish everything all at once and reach a utopia full of happy families facing a bright future, but somehow I think that would inspire more interesting conversation than a couple of vague, bland reviews from a friend, a billionaire, the New York Times, and a terrible conservative op-ed writer whose endorsement ought to be reader-repellent. Reviewers who have read the book describe it as a mish-mash of shallow ideas only loosely connected to its central thesis. But sure, go ahead and collect those endorsements from Glen Beck, Mr Yglesias!

If you want to see socialism in action, just visit your library

I just discovered this marvelous thread by a librarian on what she has learned on the job. Really, libraries are the best part of any town, and we ought to support them fully. A taste:

Free public wi-fi is a big one, especially for people who can’t afford internet access otherwise.

The thread was pre-pandemic, though, and I’d like to see an update on how the pandemic has disrupted the essential services the library performs. I know our local library was closed for a while, and has reopened with special hours for at-risk individuals and now provides curbside pickup, so you can check out books without going inside.