The FDA pushed back against Trump’s effort to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine:
The Food and Drug Administration on Friday cautioned against prescribing hydroxychloroquine to COVID-19 patients outside of hospital settings or clinical trials. The drug, an antimalarial, was repeatedly touted by President Donald Trump as a possible treatment for the coronavirus.
[Quote above is from NBC News]
[…] While the FDA noted that research will continue, the agency pointed to reports of serious side effects, “including heart rhythm problems, severely low blood pressure and muscle or nerve damage.”
As we’ve discussed, Trump didn’t just express tacit support for hydroxychloroquine; he effectively became an infomercial pitch-man in support of an unproven medicinal treatment. Based on “a feeling” he said he had, Trump publicly encouraged Americans to start taking the medication — “Take it,” he said, adding, “I really think they should take it” — adding that he personally was prepared to start himself on the drug.
What’s more, Trump suggested it was harmless. “The nice part is, we know that if things don’t go as planned, it’s not going to kill anybody,” the president told the public a month ago. He added in early April, “It may work, and it may not work. But if it doesn’t work, it’s nothing lost by doing it. Nothing.”
The FDA, however, made the opposite conclusion.
[Trump] urged Americans to start taking the medication, creating a run on pills that some people actually needed. What’s more, Politico reported that some health officials were “pulled away from other potential projects to address the president’s hunch.” The article quoted an HHS official who lamented the “time and energy being soaked up by a potential wild-goose chase.”
[…] career health officials had raised behind-the-scenes warnings about hydroxychloroquine, but they’d been “warned not to publicly speak out and potentially contradict Trump.”
There were also literal investments, as the administration put millions of doses of the drug into an emergency stockpile.
This week, a top vaccine researcher at the Department of Health and Human Services said he was removed from his job for resisting the president’s preferred course. […]
Postscript: NBC News reported yesterday that Trump’s medicinal campaign came in the wake of a conversation with Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison, one of the president’s billionaire political allies.
On Monday, Trump told the public the pandemic death toll could be as low as 50,000. We crossed the 50,000 threshold today, and the total keeps climbing.
What Trump said:
We did the right thing, because if we didn’t do it, you would have had a million people, a million and a half people, maybe 2 million people dead. Now, we’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people.
From Steve Benen:
[…] As of Monday, roughly 42,000 Americans had died from COVID-19. By suggesting the overall death toll could be as low as 50,000, Trump was effectively raising the possibility of a miraculous collapse in coronavirus fatalities.
So why in the world would the president tell the public that a death toll of 50,000 to 60,000 would be as bad as the crisis gets? Could he not see where the trajectory was headed? […]
[In February] he assured the public that “within a couple of days,” the number of coronavirus cases in the United States would drop “to zero,” as a result of the “good job” he said Team Trump was doing. […]
Asked a couple of weeks ago to defend his spectacular error, Trump told reporters, “[Y]ou have to understand, I’m a cheerleader for this country…. I think a president has to be a cheerleader for their country.”
[…] even if the claims are somehow well intended, the fact that they’re wrong means the assertions have the opposite effect.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump defended the projection of 50,000 fatalities the same way: he was simply being “a cheerleader for the country.” But the public doesn’t need a cheerleader; it needs a leader who provides reliable information.
Well here’s a surprise. It turns out that SAGE, the committee supposed to give the UK government scientific advice free from political interference, has included Dominic Cummings – Johnson’s pet supergenius (at least in his own estimation), and a “Vote Leave” chum and fellow political adviser who has links with Peter Thiel:
it is the inclusion of two Downing Street political advisers that will raise questions over whether the structure of the government’s scientific advisory process is free from political interference.
A source in Downing Street said that in March Cummings was playing a commanding role in responding to the Covid-19 outbreak. Cummings is understood to be close to Warner, whose brother, Marc, runs Faculty, an artificial intelligence company that the Guardian revealed is involved in an “unprecedented” data-mining operation as part of the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak.
An accomplished data scientist, Ben Warner previously worked at his brother’s AI company, which has teamed up with with Palantir, the US data firm founded by the rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel, to consolidate UK government databases to help ministers respond to the pandemic.
The two were apparently attending the committee – as participating members, not observers – at least from February.
The Navy captain who was relieved of command after ringing the alarm bell over coronavirus infections on an aircraft carrier should be given his job back, Navy officials recommended on Friday.
But the final decision on reinstating of Capt. Brett Crozier’s command of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt rests with Defense Secretary Mark Esper. And per The New York Times, which first reported the Navy officals’ recommendation to Esper Friday, the Pentagon chief has asked for additional time to consider whether to sign-off on Crozier’s reinstatement.
…
Esper’s decision not to make an announcement about Crozier’s fate Friday afternoon interrupted the Pentagon’s plans.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Gilday and Esper were scheduled to meet for 30 minutes midday Friday, after which the Pentagon had planned a congressional briefing on the Defense secretary’s decision. Esper’s own spokesperson said before the meeting that the secretary trusted the Navy’s judgment and would likely back its conclusion about Crozier, the Journal reported.
But ultimately, Gilday and Esper met for two hours, the Journal reported, and the Pentagon chief still has not made a decision.
The Times noted that at the time Crozier rang the alarm about the spread of COVID-19 on Roosevelt, just more than 100 sailors had tested positive for the disease. The number now stands at 840. On April 13, a sailor on the Roosevelt died of COVID-19-related complications.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court issued a 5-4 decision in Barton v. Barr, upholding a restrictive reading of a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act that offers relief to noncitizens facing removal proceedings… for those anticipating detailed engagement with the arguments advanced by the parties, the majority opinion will likely disappoint.
[…]
Briefs submitted by the parties and amici were rife with complex arguments rooted in statutory interpretation. Yet the majority opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, engages with only a few of these arguments, and downplays the complexity by stating that “the analysis here is straightforward.”
No surprise here, Kavanaugh started with a goal in mind and spun his opinion to meet that goal. Detailed analysis at the link.
Links back to the previous chapter of this thread.
Comment 498, details about the FDA pushback against Trump’s effort to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine.
Comment 497, about Trump’s comments suggesting that doctors look into the use of disinfectants injected, or somehow otherwise used, inside the human body to kill the coronavirus: Trump is now claiming that he was speaking sarcastically to reporters. No, he wasn’t.
SC’s comment 496, which provides details related to “Brazil Justice Minister Resigns Over Bolsonaro’s Interference in Investigations — and Impeachment Talk Ramps Up”
From Laura Clawson: “Donald Trump is spending a deadly pandemic watching TV and stewing over negative coverage.”
[…] Trump is a lonely, angry, bitter man adrift without the usual ego-feeding he relies on. Which we already knew, but is confirmed by a New York Times story based on information from “more than a dozen administration officials and close advisers.” The story is short on direct quotes but long on delicious, pathetic details.
Trump watches cable news for hours on end and “is angry even with Fox, an old security blanket, for not portraying him as he would like to be seen.” He dwells on his slide in the polls and takes calls from his campaign manager Brad Parscale to talk about it. […]
Ego-feeding is the reason for the daily press briefing, too. Trump enjoys it, so it continues “although even Republicans say that the two hours of political attacks, grievances and falsehoods by the president are hurting him politically,” […] Does he bother to attend actual task force meetings? Rarely. Mostly, he takes his talking points right before the briefing starts, gives them short shrift during the briefing, and then runs his mouth about things like injecting disinfectants.
Having started his day with hours upon hours of television, Trump typically returns to it after the briefing, this time with company: “Assorted aides who are still around will join him to rehash the day and offer their assessments on the briefings. Comfort food—including French fries and Diet Coke—is readily available.” […]
Donald Trump had well over a month to keep us from this place, with an already horrific death toll that keeps climbing, an economy in shambles, and people around the country suffering. And still all he cares about is the fallout for his political future and the bad press coverage and the lack of opportunities to have his ego stroked in person.
Other news reports say that Trump also occasionally rage-watches MSNBC.
KGsays
ARIDS@492,
Yes, I’m sure that’s part of McConnell’s calculation. The situation is much the same in the UK. As I tell the young people of today, in a fake Yorkshire accent: “Ee, we ‘ad it easy when I were a lad!”
On Thursday evening, the maker of Lysol disinfectant spray issued a warning that “under no circumstances” should anyone drink or inject their their product to kill coronavirus. This warning did not come as a result of a anonymous Instagram post or from a tragic experiment by a fourth grader. Lysol was forced to warn people not to guzzle or inject cleaning fluid because that was exactly the cure that Donald Trump suggested during his Thursday coronavirus press rally.
On Thursday, Donald Trump at first seemed to have made a simple mistake. He mixed up the coronavirus and vampires. Having learned that ultraviolet light can be used to disinfect surfaces, a fact that was apparently new to Trump, he went on to ponder—live, in front of the nation—whether exposing people to “ultraviolet or just a very powerful light” might cure COVID-19, especially if there was a way to get the light “inside the body.” But before sunbed salesmen could even start digging up the promo material, Trump had an even better idea. He genuinely suggested that people should be injected with “disinfectant.”
Honestly, this isn’t a stupid question … if you’re six. At some point, everyone probably makes this kind of association between “if this is good there, is it also good there?” That stage of development in which children build on concepts such as object permanence and the development of symbolic thought to engage in constructing a mental model of how the world operates usually happens around the age of seven. It’s part of why children at that age tend to be full of questions as they fill in the gaps in their model. Part of this process also involves pulling together a moral framework. So … Trump obviously missed the entire step.
This is, of course, not the first time that Trump has used his coronavirus self-love session to pass along worse-than-dubious medical advice. […]
Then there was the point where Trump suggested that maybe we should just give Americans “a really strong flu vaccine.” Because Trump clearly doesn’t understand how vaccines work. That one also came live during the daily coronavirus show, while actual medical experts sat back and kept their lips sealed. […]
On Friday, the United States had already passed 50,000 dead, and will hit 900,000 cases by day’s end. Not all of that illness and death could have been prevented by having someone in the White House who operated above a six-year-old level, but a hell of a lot of them could. Even so, it’s probably worth running a separate tally—one that just records the number of people directly killed by taking Trump’s “medical advice.” […]
Here are the tactics Republicans are suggesting as the 2020 candidates continue to campaign as best they can: “GOP memo urges anti-China assault over coronavirus.”
The Senate Republican campaign arm distributed the 57-page strategy document to candidates.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has sent campaigns a detailed, 57-page memo authored by a top Republican strategist advising GOP candidates to address the coronavirus crisis by aggressively attacking China.
The memo includes advice on everything from how to tie Democratic candidates to the Chinese government to how to deal with accusations of racism. It stresses three main lines of assault: That China caused the virus “by covering it up,” that Democrats are “soft on China,” and that Republicans will “push for sanctions on China for its role in spreading this pandemic.”
“Coronavirus was a Chinese hit-and-run followed by a cover-up that cost thousands of lives,” the April 17 memo states.
The document urges candidates to stay relentlessly on message against the country when responding to any questions about the virus. When asked whether the spread of the coronavirus is Trump’s fault, candidates are advised to respond by pivoting to China. […]
The NRSC memo shows that Republicans are also eager to make China an issue in down-ballot races. It was distributed by the Senate GOP campaign arm, though it was not explicitly drafted by or for the committee. It was authored by the political consulting firm of Brett O’Donnell, a veteran Republican strategist who has advised Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton. […]
The memo includes guidance on what Republican candidates can say when asked whether blaming China for the pandemic incites racism. Candidates are urged to respond by saying that, “No one is blaming Chinese Americans. This is the fault of the Chinese Communist Party for covering up the virus and lying about its danger. This caused the pandemic and they should be held accountable.”
“No one has suffered more from the murderous Communist Chinese Party dictatorship than the people of China,” the memo adds. “We stand with them against their corrupt government that caused this pandemic.”
The GOP’s planned China-focused assault, however, is complicated by Trump’s occasional praise for President Xi Jinping. The liberal organization American Bridge recently launched a commercial which plays a clip of the president praising Xi […]
About the increasing cases of coronavirus in states with more rural areas, and with fewer large urban centers:
[…] Now, more than half the counties showing signs of rapid growth are outside metro areas.
While the confirmed case counts remain highest in states like New York, New Jersey and Massachusetts, confirmed cases are growing at faster rates in smaller, more rural states. In just the last three days, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico and Wisconsin have all recorded their highest daily case counts.
Epidemiologists said the spread from urban cores to rural regions is typical of an infectious disease like influenza, which usually lands in big cities with busy hub airports. Viruses tend to fan out across cities, but expand more slowly — though no less dangerously — in rural areas. […]
The virus can take any number of routes from big cities to small towns. Prisons and jails have become epicenters of coronavirus outbreaks in rural parts of Indiana and Ohio in recent weeks. So too have meat processing plants in South Dakota and Iowa. […]
Epidemiologists are worried that the slow spread of the virus into rural America means it is only now arriving in communities that have been on lockdown for weeks. In conservative enclaves, many may see the virus’s slow spread in their areas as evidence that Trump was right, and that the virus poses little risk to them or their community.
Put another way: […] It is now spreading to voters who backed Trump. […]
Some worry that Trump’s early attempts to downplay the virus, amplified by Fox News hosts for months, coupled with the coronavirus’s slow arrival, have made conservative rural voters skeptical that it poses a real threat. Trump’s own remarks may have lulled his base voters into a false and dangerous sense of security.
“The early messaging out of the White House was extremely dangerous. And I think a lot of people heard early on that this did not have to be taken seriously, and I think that sentiment was hard to unseat in people’s minds,” Bharti said. “Part of the feedback loop is that they heard that this pandemic was no big deal, they didn’t see that many first hand cases. A lot of rural residents didn’t really see a lot of preparation and planning in their towns.” […]
“Some of those places may be medically underserved, there may be more chronic conditions,” Adalja said. “Those rural areas may end up having disproportionate numbers of people who need to be hospitalized.”
Yesterday, Donald Trump, […] suggested during a press conference that maybe COVID-19 could be cured by injecting people with UV rays or Lysol or bleach. Some people (us) reacted to this in horror. Others (you, maybe?) compared him to Jim Jones and speculated that if he suggested his followers drink bleach, they would probably do that. Although in defense of the members of Jim Jones’s church, most of them were forced at gunpoint to drink the poison.
Then there were those (not us! and not actual doctors or the Lysol company!), like Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit and Joel Pollak at Breitbart, who declared that everyone who said Trump speculated on ingesting bleach as a potential cure for COVID-19 was lying, and that Trump was just “speaking generally about new information about sunlight, heat, and disinfectant killing the virus.”
Here’s a particularly aggravating quote from Breitbart’s “fact check”:
“Trump used the word ‘inject,’ but what he meant was using a process — which he left ‘medical doctors’ to define — in which patients’ lungs might be cleared of the virus, given new knowledge about its response to light and other factors.” You almost have to admire it. Wait. No you don’t.
And as of just a few minutes ago, the president of the United States says he was being “sarcastic.”
This will be sad news to those who are celebrating, who are ecstatic over Trump recommending drinking bleach to cure COVID-19, because it is something they have been doing all along.
Are they QAnon idiots? You bet they are! Since the beginning of the pandemic, QAnon people and other conspiracy theorists have been promoting “Miracle Mineral Solution” as a cure for COVID-19 and pretty much everything else in the world. Is this the stuff that turns you blue? Like Jim Bakker’s silver solution? It is not. It’s chlorine dioxide (otherwise known as “bleach”), a popular poison/snake oil supplement frequently touted to cure a number of ills — like autism, HIV, cancer and malaria. It will probably not surprise you to learn that people have died from taking it, on account of it being poison. It will likely also not surprise you to learn that Jim Humble, the “inventor” of MMS, is a former Scientologist who claims to be a billion-year-old alien god who arrived on Earth as part of “the space navy.”
Just last week, a federal judge ordered Genesis 2, the church Humble founded to promote the use of MMS, to stop promoting it as a cure for COVID-19. […]
Among those very excited about what they perceive as Trump’s “endorsement” of MMS is QAnon “researcher” Jordan Sather. “One of the most censored subjects online is discussion of using chorine dioxide (“MMS”), an oxygenating disinfectant, for health reasons. Big Pharma & the fake news are shitting themselves over POTUS mentioning testing “disinfectants” on COVID. They don’t want him to name what!”
[…] Several of Sather’s tweets have been nuked by Twitter, but he’s still going on about it, as are several other adherents. It’s almost as if there was some sort of correlation between being the kind of person who thinks that Hillary Clinton and Tom Hanks eat babies and being the kind of person who thinks drinking bleach is a good idea.
Many of those advocating for MMS today, including Sather, claim that chlorine dioxide is safe because it is sometimes added to tap water to disinfect it… “Chlorine Dioxide is a “bleaching disinfectant” that’s often added to municipal water systems to make water SAFE to drink. And here the fake news media and the “medical experts” they work with are telling you that you may die from drinking something like it. That one’s a doozie” […]
However — Sola dosis facit venenum, the dose makes the poison. There are lots of things that are safe — even beneficial! — in small doses, and yet lethal in larger ones. Tylenol, for instance. Two can help a headache, a whole bottle will kill you. Or digitalis! Digitalis (foxglove) can be used to treat heart conditions or it can be used to murder people in Agatha Christie books. […]
Compared with some other things they’re doing, at least the only people they hurt by drinking bleach are themselves.
A reminder to all Americans- PLEASE always talk to your health provider first before administering any treatment/ medication to yourself or a loved one.
Your safety is paramount, and doctors and nurses are have years of training to recommend what’s safe and effective.
From FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn:
I certainly wouldn’t recommend the internal ingestion of a disinfectant.
From Judy Melinek M.D.:
Oh FFS please don’t do this. I don’t need the extra work. If you are sick call your doctor. Don’t self medicate.
From Kashif Mahmoud:
As a physician, I can’t recommend injecting disinfectant into the lungs or using UV radiation inside the body to treat COVID-19. Don’t take medical advice from Trump.
From Jonathan Spicer MD PhD:
No joke – we had a patient swallow Lysol as a #disinfectant a couple of weeks ago to prevent COVID19 infection. He made it out of the hospital after his gastrectomy…
This kind of nonsense is absolutely mind blowing.
What would happen if you did act on Trump’s rambling speculations?
[…] intravenous injections of large quantities of bleach can cause acute kidney injury and thrombosis, or blood clots. Bleach causes red blood cells to rupture, thus preventing them from carrying oxygen to essential organs and other parts of the body, which could possibly bring about a slow death.
The chemical would inflame the lining of the veins, causing the blood clots along with an intensely painful burning sensation at the injection site and sometimes near the chest. The chlorine in bleach can also alter the pH of one’s blood, possibly triggering cardiac arrhythmias and kidney damage. The kidney also filters the body’s blood, putting it in more direct contact with contaminants like bleach. There’s a good chance that the bleach will lead to death, though the extreme pain involved usually stops people from injecting large quantities of the chemical, which is why drinking it may be more fatal.
Injecting isopropyl alcohol would similarly cause irritation of the blood vessels, rupturing of cells, and blood clots. Alcohol toxicity is also a danger, though the body does tend to break down alcohol quickly, so it would need to be present in fairly large quantities. Drinking isopropyl alcohol can cause internal bleeding and depletion of stomach lining.
Not much has been documented about the exact effects of injecting disinfectants because it would be unethical to conduct such a lab experiment, and because it’s much more common for people to consume them orally, which usually leads to bleeding and perforations in the stomach lining and burns in the esophagus. Emergency rooms do sometimes treat intravenous drug users who have injected disinfectants because of urban myths that it reverses opioid overdoses or cleans one’s blood of impurities from the narcotics. These patients usually experience blood clots and inflammation at the injection site.
If you have been infected by COVID-19, you technically could kill it by injecting disinfectants, since you might die and the virus would no longer have a host. […]
Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller told White House supporters in a private call this week that the president’s new executive order curbing immigration will usher in the kind of broader long-term changes to American society he has advocated for years, even though the 60-day measures were publicly characterized as a “pause” during the coronavirus pandemic.
Miller, the chief architect of the president’s immigration agenda and one of his longest-serving and most trusted advisers, spoke to a group of Trump surrogates Thursday in an off-the-record call about the new executive order, which had been signed the night before. […]
Miller told the group that subsequent measures were under consideration that would restrict guest worker programs, but the “the most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor,” he said, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. Miller indicated that the strategy is part of a long-term vision and not seen only as a stopgap.
“As a numerical proposition, when you suspend the entry of a new immigrant from abroad, you’re also reducing immigration further because the chains of follow-on migration that are disrupted,” said Miller, one of the executive order’s main authors. “So the benefit to American workers compounds with time.” […]
Although Trump described his order this week as a temporary “pause,” he also said it is an open-ended move that will remain in place until he decides the U.S. labor market has sufficiently improved once the coronavirus crisis subsides. He said he will reevaluate it after 60 days and might extend the immigration restrictions to help Americans find jobs when states reopen their economies. […]
Stacey Abrams made her case for selecting her a Joe Biden’s running mate:
[…] “We have to win the election. And I would point out that I ran the most successful campaign to engage the communities we need to build the broadest coalition necessary in 2020, because what we are going to see on the ground is that this is going to be a campaign unlike anything that’s been run before,” Abrams told The Atlantic in an interview published Friday. […]
“If you look at what we were able to accomplish in Georgia, the growth of the numbers and the composition of the voters, I would put my capacity to win an election as the VP running mate alongside anyone’s,” she said. […]
Mark Grenon wrote to Trump saying chlorine dioxide can rid the body of Covid-19 days before the president [sic] promoted disinfectant as treatment
The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a miracle cure for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.
In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide — a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk — is a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body. He added that it can rid the body of Covid-19.
A few days after Grenon dispatched his letter, Trump went on national TV at his daily coronavirus briefing at the White House on Thursday and promoted the idea that disinfectant could be used as a treatment for the virus. To the astonishment of medical experts, the US president [sic] said that disinfectant knocks it out in a minute. One minute!
He went on to say: Is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that.
If the numerous clews haven’t already clewed you in, this is miracle cure is MMS (Miracle Mineral Supplement), one of the most lethal quack garbage being hocked today, “a toxic chemical that in ‘high oral doses’ can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and life-threatening low blood pressure due to dehydration.” It, and the quacks / religion who are pushing for this method of mass genocide, have been discussed / referenced before in this series of poopyhead threads.
[… T]he Guardian has learned that peddlers of chlorine dioxide — industrial bleach — have been making direct approaches to the White House in recent days.
Grenon styles himself as archbishop of Genesis II — a Florida-based outfit that claims to be a church but which in fact is the largest producer and distributor of chlorine dioxide bleach as a miracle cure in the US. He brands the chemical as MMS, miracle mineral solution, and claims fraudulently that it can cure 99% of all illnesses including cancer, malaria, HIV/Aids as well as autism.
Since the start of the pandemic, Genesis II has been marketing MMS as a cure to coronavirus. It advises users, including children, to mix three to six drops of bleach in water and drink it.
In his weekly televised radio show, posted online on Sunday, Grenon read out the letter he wrote to Trump. He said it began: Dear Mr President, I am praying you read this letter and intervene.
Grenon said that 30 of his supporters have also written in the past few days to Trump at the White House urging him to take action to protect Genesis\ II in its bleach-peddling activities which they claim can cure coronavirus.
On Friday, hours after Trump talked about disinfectant on live TV, Grenon went further in a post on his Facebook page. He claimed that MMS had actually been sent to the White House. He wrote: Trump has got the MMS and all the info!!! Things are happening folks! Lord help others to see the Truth!
[…]
Last week the US Food and Drug Administration obtained a federal court order barring Genesis II from selling what was described as “an unproven and potentially harmful treatment for Covid-19”. The FDA also ordered a disciple of Genesis II, Kerri Rivera, to remove claims that MMS cured coronavirus from her website.
Last August the FDA issued an urgent warning urging Americans not to buy or drink MMS, which it said was a “dangerous bleach which has caused serious and potentially life-threatening side effects”. Drinking MMS can cause nausea, diarrhea and severe dehydration that can lead to death, the federal agency said.
[…]
On Friday Trump claimed he was being sarcastic in his remarks but there is no evidence to back up that claim and he appeared entirely serious as he made them.
The current occupant of Wacko House fancies himself as a quack & final solution implementator, but he can’t even pretend do that convincingly. All teh bestingerest peoplesdaleks…
A member of the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force bragged Friday night about violating the “stay-at-home” rules that his public health colleagues have said are crucial to slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Larry Kudlow, the White House economic adviser, let the story slip during an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham.
“I’m also going to confess, I had a hair trim yesterday,” Kudlow told Ingraham. […]
“It was kind of a special deal,” Kudlow told Ingraham. “Friends of ours — you know this person, but I’m not gonna mention any names. She got her hairdresser to come in and open up her barbershop, and the guy gave me a pretty good trim.”
“I don’t have much to work with,” the White House adviser acknowledged. “But it looks much better because I wanted it to look good on the Laura Ingraham Show. That was the key point and here I am. I had no temperature this morning coming into the White House, I tested negative last week, I feel fine.” […]
Early on in the COVID-19 crisis, Kudlow repeatedly downplayed the severity of the disease in his capacity as a White House official, advertising stock opportunities amid the economic downturn that accompanied the pandemic.
He was also a source of misinformation about the disease: “We have contained this,” he said in late February. “I won’t say airtight, but pretty close to airtight.”
Around the same time, the White House adviser falsely said that the World Health Organization director-general had urged the public not to overreact to the disease. In reality, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom said the coronavirus disease “absolutely” had the potential to become a global pandemic.
Trump is congratulating himself this morning, while claiming that other people are congratulating him.
[…] Trump was up early Saturday morning taking credit for sending a few ventilators to Colorado and thanking all the people in the state who allegedly sent him “thank you” notes for his benevolence. He also tagged Sen. Cory Gardner, a Republican up for a tough reelection race this year, who he has previously credited for helping with the ventilator acquisition.
But as the Denver Post has pointed out, thanks to Trump, the state actually got 400 fewer ventilators than it would have if the administration hadn’t meddled in its procurement process.
In early April, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, had arranged for the state to buy 500 ventilators when the Federal Emergency Management Agency grabbed the shipment instead. Polis complained to the Post that the federal government was leaving the state high and dry. “We can’t compete against our own federal government,” Polis said. “So either work with us, or don’t do anything at all. But this middle ground where they’re buying stuff out from under us and not telling us what we’re going to get, that’s really challenging to manage our hospital surge and our safety of our health care workers in that kind of environment.”
A few days later, Trump tweeted that he was sending Colorado 100 ventilators thanks to a request from Gardner, despite the fact that Polis had been begging the feds for weeks for more medical supplies. The move was among the first of many indicating that the Trump administration was playing politics with medical supplies during the pandemic. As the Denver Post editorial board wrote:
The federal government should be procuring medicine, masks, and ventilators and distributing them to states on a set formula based on population, rate of infection and need. Instead, Trump’s messaging makes it feel as though he will watch with glee from the White House as people suffer in states being led by his enemies.
Members of Congress have demanded more information from FEMA about such order seizures and whether the distribution of masks and ventilators has been dictated by political considerations rather than need. But Trump doesn’t seem too worried about appearances. On Saturday morning, he doubled down on his earlier comments, claiming that Coloradans were so grateful they were showering him with thank you notes for the ventilator delivery: “Thank you to the people of Colorado for the warm and gracious notes and letters sent to me for all of the Ventilators we got for you. It was my great honor!”
It says there is “currently no evidence” that someone cannot be reinfected.
The World Health Organization (WHO) released a scientific brief on Saturday recommending countries refrain from issuing certificates of immunity to people who have been infected with the novel coronavirus, warning there is “currently no evidence” that someone cannot be reinfected.
Countries like Germany and Chile are looking into giving residents “immunity passports” that would allow people who have recovered from Covid-19 to be excluded from restrictive protection measures and to work outside the house. Public health officials would use tests that detect antibodies to the virus to determine if someone has previously had the virus.
[…] reinfection cannot be ruled out based on antibodies alone. […]
The report went even further, suggesting immunity passports could backfire and unwittingly accelerate the spread of the virus. “People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice. The use of such certificates may therefore increase the risks of continued transmission,” the report says. […]
What do we know about immunity?
The brief is a reminder that although scientists and public health experts have made great strides in their understanding of the new virus in a relatively short period of time, there’s still a lot unknown about both the coronavirus, and the disease it causes, Covid-19. One of the largest outstanding questions is whether humans can develop immunity to coronavirus and what immunity would look like.
[…] for some infections, your immunity never wanes. People who are immune to smallpox, for example, are immune for life: Antibodies that protect against smallpox have been found as long as 88 years after a vaccination.
Less reassuring here is that scientists have observed antibody levels to other coronaviruses (there are four coronavirus strains that infect people as the common cold) can wane over a period of years. […]
Part of the reason a loss of antibodies doesn’t always result in a loss of immunity is because the body stores antibody blueprints — when exposed to a virus a person already has antibodies for, the body can use those blueprints to quickly restart antibody production. Whether this would happen with antibodies effective at fighting Covid-19 isn’t known.
It is known, however, that those who have recovered from Covid-19 have a range of antibodies in their systems — some have more, others have less. The reason why isn’t yet fully understood. […] The body tends to have the greatest number of antibodies four to eight weeks after infection, meaning someone tested in that period may have more antibodies than someone given an antibody test later on. It could also be the case, as the WHO noted in its brief, that immune responses outside of antibodies play a key role in fighting the virus. […]
From Wonkette: “Right-Wing ‘Boogaloo Boys’ Spend Pandemic On Facebook, Plotting To Kill Us All In A Civil War”
People have been picking up all sorts of hobbies during the COVID-19 pandemic. We’re making sourdough starters, we’re knitting […]
Others, however, are planning a Civil War. […]
While the whole “Let’s do another Civil War and call it ‘Boogaloo’ thing started last year in response to people considering gun control measures to curb the near-constant mass shootings, it’s really picked up steam during the last few months — both because people have a lot of time on their hands and because they have “mounting frustrations” over being told to stay home so that other people don’t get sick.
A recent study conducted by the Tech Transparency Project found 125 “Boogaloo” Facebook groups, nearly 60 percent of which were created since February. While most of the public pages mostly post memes, members in private groups “discussed tactical strategies, combat medicine, and various types of weapons, including how to develop explosives and the merits of using flame throwers.” Many of them, it should come as no surprise, are virulent white supremacists.
The name and the proliferation of memes on the public “Boogaloo” pages make the whole idea seem like a viral internet joke that no one is taking seriously, but that is a calculated move. While there may be participants who do think of it as a joke, many of them take it extremely seriously. Earlier this month, 36-year-old Aaron Swenson was arrested after recording himself on Facebook Live driving around looking for a lone police officer to kill. […]
The documents they share in their groups are also pretty damned serious.
Via Tech Transparency Project:
The most concerning document is one entitled Yeetalonians, a reference to the boogaloo. At over 133 pages, the document provides an in-depth look at preparing for the boogaloo and offers advice on what weapons should be used, what propaganda to distribute, and how to psychologically win over civilians to the cause.
The document mentions “target selection,” noting that assassinations of figureheads are “overrated” but “some people have to go.” It discusses how to disrupt U.S. government supply lines, noting that “national guard depots, police stations and factories that produce munitions are all very solid targets.” On propaganda, meanwhile, the document notes that the most important job is “to make the enemy (government forces) see that they are not fighting terrorists, they are fighting their own countrymen who simply love liberty.
Oh how I despise this use of “liberty” to excuse this civil war nonsense.
That particular propaganda angle has become part of the Second Amendment debate over the last few years. […]
I’ve never even been in a bar fight, so it is highly unlikely that I will be taking up arms in order to keep a bunch of 4chan losers and wannabe Timothy McVeighs from “seceding.” Who the hell is gonna do that? Who would bother? And if they try to Civil War us and we don’t Civil War them back, isn’t that just murder?
Additionally, in order to secede and have a Civil War, they need to have actual territory of some kind, which they do not. The “Boogaloo” people claim to have “sleeper cells” in every state (yes, they actually say “sleeper cells”), which is horrifying, but also rather unworkable in a Civil War scenario.
Discussions among the group members show mixed feelings about using Facebook as a means of communication. One member post on March 20 chastised others for not being careful enough while talking about civil war preparations on social media, noting that “the boog[aloo] is a class of sleep cell organization and sleeper cells work on the basis that you don’t post about it.”
[…] they are planning mass murder. They are planning terrorism. If they were anyone other than a bunch of angry white dudes, they would almost definitely be in some amount of trouble right now, on account of how murdering people, planning to murder people and plotting terrorism is not only a violation of Facebook’s ban of “Violence and Criminal Behavior,” it is illegal.
[…] In the meantime, Facebook might want to start cracking down on this shit.
The cruise industry’s decision to keep sailing for weeks after the coronavirus was first detected on a ship helped carry the virus around the globe.
On land, more than 300,000 people worldwide had contracted the deadly coronavirus, and the governor of California had just ordered all 39 million residents to stay at home. But as the Celebrity Eclipse cruise ship steamed north across the Pacific Ocean on March 21, hundreds of passengers crammed together on the ship’s pool deck and overlooking gangways.
As they stood shoulder-to-shoulder and crowded around pool chairs, the captain led the ship in a special salute to health-care workers of the world, an onboard version of the nightly applause adopted by some cities to honor medical professionals battling the novel coronavirus.
Five days later and thousands of miles away in the Atlantic, a group of British passengers aboard another ship, Coral Princess, likewise gathered elbow-to-elbow to cheer the United Kingdom’s National Health Service.
[…] Soon, passengers on both ships were contending with flu-like symptoms.
There have been 150 coronavirus cases and six deaths reported so far among passengers of the two vessels, which finally docked weeks after the virus was declared a global health crisis […] Two people died on the Coral Princess before passengers could even come ashore in Miami.
The Eclipse and Coral Princess were among scores of ships that continued voyages even after early outbreaks on other vessels, carrying thousands of international passengers to far-flung ports and helping seed the virus around the globe […] the coronavirus infected passengers and crew on at least 55 ships that sailed in the waters off nearly every continent […]
At least 65 people who traveled or worked on the ships have since died, […] although the full scope of deaths is unknown. […]
Public health experts say that a number of factors contributed to the rapid spread of the virus around the world, predominantly air travel; an estimated 4.54 billion people flew last year, compared to the 30 million passengers who traveled on cruise ships worldwide. But with hundreds of people dining, swimming and dancing together over a sustained period of time, the ships provide unique environments for disease to spread […]
“People on a large ship, all together, at the same time, all the time — you couldn’t ask for a better incubator for infection,” Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert, said in February.
[…] Until early this month, federal health officials allowed passengers who left infected ships but appeared healthy to board commercial airlines home.
[…] on the Celebrity Eclipse and the Coral Princess, those aboard said they were reassured by company officials there was no coronavirus infection on their ships — even as some travelers were wracked with fevers and coughs.
[…] Despite high-profile outbreaks on several ships, industry leaders have insisted cruise ships are not more susceptible to the coronavirus than other places. […]
But top U.S. health officials said there is evidence that cruise ships have been a factor in the spread of the coronavirus, both aboard ships and through their travel. […]
One of the world’s first indications of the wild infectiousness of the coronavirus came in February, when it whipped through the Diamond Princess, a 2,666-passenger ship docked at a port in Japan. […]
More than 700 passengers and crew members ultimately tested positive and 13 died. Some Americans tested positive for the coronavirus only after they were aboard buses headed to government-chartered airplanes to be flown back to the United States. […]
another coronavirus-stricken cruise ship docked in Oakland, Calif. The Grand Princess […] more than 130 people from the ship tested positive, and at least six have died […] “We don’t see those kinds of attack rates in other settings — even in household settings,” he said. “Even in cities experiencing outbreaks, this is pretty dramatic.” […]
The coronavirus was spreading, and Caribbean countries worried about their citizens’ exposure began to impose new rules on ships and limit access to their ports. […] The cruise industry expressed concern about the new rules, which upended scheduled stops for its vacationing guests […]
Cruise vessels continued to visit Jamaica after the meeting.
The clout of the industry was also apparent in the United States, where Carnival chairman Micky Arison is a personal friend of President Trump. The major cruise lines have avoided federal income taxes and labor laws by incorporating overseas and flagging their ships in other countries. […]
The day after meeting with the Jamaican officials, top cruise line executives huddled in Fort Lauderdale with Vice President Pence, the head of the White House coronavirus task force, arguing cruise lines could voluntarily contain the outbreak. […] It still wasn’t enough.
On March 14, the CDC issued a no-sail order for 30 days — and noted that there were already signs of covid-19 clusters associated with cruise ships […]
In Iowa, state health officials found that the state’s first 16 confirmed coronavirus cases were all part of a group that had recently returned from a cruise on the Nile River in Egypt. Pockets of cases were linked to the same cruise voyage in Houston and Maryland.
[…] The biggest driver of the coronavirus cases in Australia has been an outbreak on the Ruby Princess cruise ship, […]
Along with airplanes, cruise ships also played a role in the spread of the virus in the Caribbean, a region with small island populations and a fragile health-care system. While air travelers brought the first cases to islands such as St. Lucia and Cuba, cruise passengers were the first confirmed coronavirus patients in places such as the Cayman Islands and Puerto Rico […]
A Post analysis found that five ships — the Costa Favolosa, Costa Magica, Costa Luminosa, MS Braemar and MSC Meraviglia — made 18 stops in the Caribbean between Feb. 29 and March 11 while carrying someone who later tested positive for coronavirus. […]
[…] 350 Americans and Canadians disembarked March 19 in Marseille, France. The group was crowded together on buses and then an airplane to Atlanta, where the CDC allowed many to enter the terminal and then board commercial airliners home.
It would take more than two more weeks for the CDC to change its guidelines about disembarking passengers from stricken ships, barring even those without symptoms from further commercial travel. […]
“My dad had said multiple times if the cruise had let them know there was a possible covid case, they would have just gotten off in Puerto Rico and flown home,” said Sheehan’s son, Kevin. “They were more worried about keeping people on the boat and spending money.” […]
On the Coral Princess, passengers received a letter March 20 from the senior physician assuring them that the risk of the ship’s exposure was “near negligible.”
[…] hundreds partied again at a special ceremony to mark the ship’s passage of the equator. The ship’s theater hosted daily events. “They actually made more activities, to keep people occupied,” Miller said. […]
As the ship sailed toward Barbados on March 30, where a stop the next day was planned, the cruise line released a public statement at 6 p.m. Eastern that said in part: “There remains no known risk of COVID-19 onboard.” […]
More at the link. The article is long, and thorough. If you really want to have the complete picture of what part cruise ships played in spreading the virus, read the whole article.
[…] In my home state of Georgia, we’ve exceeded 20,000 cases and have more than 800 deaths. With only a fraction of the available tests needed to adequately track this virus, officials cannot predict with certainty what is to come — when this virus will hit its peak, when hospitals should prepare for an even larger surge of critically-ill patients and how to best prevent further spread to our most vulnerable communities.
This novel coronavirus crisis has also exposed inequities that make this pandemic deadlier than it had to be. Closures of hospitals throughout Georgia had already limited rural communities’ life-saving health care access, and the additional strain of this pandemic has put even more patients at risk. Throughout the south, black and brown Americans are contracting and dying from COVID-19 at far higher rates than white Americans. […]
Like our fellow Americans, I am heartbroken by this ongoing tragedy. But I am also angry because, to a large extent, this devastation was preventable.
We live each day with the effects of state and national leaders’ failures and abdication of responsibility. President Trump has repeatedly downplayed this threat and blithely used the White House’s daily briefings to promote misinformation and outright lies to cover his administration’s failed response. Closer to home, Georgia’s governor claimed he was unaware the virus could be spread asymptomatically — despite repeated warnings from the CDC throughout the month of February and March. His decision forcing localities to open their beaches has put communities like Tybee Island at risk. His failure to expand Medicaid puts lives at risk. And his decision to reopen barbershops, tattoo parlors, nail salons, gyms and restaurants while coronavirus cases continue to rise is dangerously incompetent and will lead to the loss of lives in our state. [Right. Stacey summarized that well.]
[…] This week marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day, and I am hopeful that, unlike what has unfolded in the coronavirus pandemic, our leaders will once again put science before political gamesmanship as we face another looming threat: the consequences of climate change.
In Georgia, rising sea-levels threaten our coastline and our cities from Savannah to St. Marys, and rising global temperatures increase the potential for wildfires throughout our state. Increased risk of natural disasters affects every county and community, from our farmland to our business towers. […] Climate change also reveals the same disparities the COVID-19 epidemic has, with our most marginalized communities paying the highest price for negligence and poor planning. […]
Thankfully, we still have an opportunity to listen to experts and take strong action on climate change before the worst overwhelms our best intentions. And, if we do, we can not only prevent a crisis, but we can boost our economy and create millions of clean energy jobs here in America.
Throughout my time in the Georgia General Assembly, I proudly co-sponsored bills to clean up hazardous waste, protect streams and waterways, offer tax credits for hybrid and low-emission vehicles, protect state parks and promote clean energy. But more must be done. […]
That is why I am honored to be part of a bipartisan coalition in World War Zero, a campaign dedicated to bringing people together, mobilizing millions of Americans, and pushing policymakers to take the critical steps we need to prevent a climate calamity.
When I ran for governor in 2018, our grassroots campaign held conversations with individual voters, one at a time, to inspire change — and we transformed participation in Georgia’s politics. Similarly, by the end of 2020, World War Zero aims to drive 10 million conversations across the country — transforming our nation’s commitment to change. Conversations not just with people already convinced and taking action, but with those who may need to learn a bit more, or hear from someone different, before they agree with the need to act. Person by person and community by community, I am confident that we can build the grassroots army we need to take on this global challenge and win this war for our nation’s future.
We can’t turn back the clock and undo our leaders’ tepid, dangerous response to the coronavirus crisis. But we can shine a spotlight on those who failed to act, learn from their mistakes, and mobilize Americans to prevent history from repeating itself. This pandemic has shown us how important it is to keep our friends, families, and loved ones safe. Let’s do right by them and prevent the next disaster.
LA Times: New Data Reveals COVID-19 Is Killing Younger Black and Latino Californians at Higher Rates
An analysis published by the Los Angeles Times reveals that Black and Latino Californians aged 18 to 64 are dying at higher rates than their white or Asian peers, relative to population, as the pandemic continues to highlight deep inequalities across the country.
According to the Times:
When accounting for each group’s share of the population, black and Latino patients under the age of 65 had higher rates of fatality than even older blacks and Latinos—although people over 65 still make up the overwhelming majority of COVID-19 deaths. The trend is particularly noticeable among those age 18 to 49, the Times analysis found…
Among patients ages 18 to 49, black residents are dying nearly two and a half times as often as their share of the state’s population. By comparison, black people 65 and older are dying twice as often as their share of that age group. Latino death disparities also go down as patients get older, the analysis found.
The new reporting adds extra numbers to a powerful preliminary analysis performed by my Mother Jones colleagues Eddie Rios and Sinduja Rangarajan published mid-April, which found that Black people overall have disproportionately contracted and died from the coronavirus. In 20 of the 28 states plus DC for which a usable racial breakdown of infection data was provided, Black people make up a larger share of coronavirus infections than they do of the general population.
According to that reporting:
In 18 of the 23 states plus DC for which a usable racial breakdown of fatality data was provided, Black people likewise make up a disproportionately large share of coronavirus fatalities. In Michigan, Black people are 14 percent of the state’s population but 33 percent of its coronavirus cases and 40 percent of its deaths. In Wisconsin, Black people are six percent of the state’s population but 25 percent of its coronavirus cases and 39 percent of its deaths.
Trump and Putin just issued a joint statement … because, of course they did.
[…] Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement on Saturday commemorating the 75th anniversary of a World War II meeting of U.S. and Soviet troops at the Elbe river in 1945.
“As we work today to confront the most important challenges of the 21st century, we pay tribute to the valor and courage of all those who fought together to defeat fascism,” the statement read.
Protect your irony meters. Trump and Putin celebrating the defeat of fascism? Really?
Those familiar with the statement’s drafting said that its issuance is symbolic, noting that the intent is to prove to the public that the nations can “put aside their differences,” according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. […]
Such statements are rare, with the last one occurring in 2010 between former President Obama and then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev.
[…] the decision to issue the statement was controversial among Trump administration officials at the Pentagon and State Department […]
The officials pointed to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and its aid to Syrian President Bashar Assad for his offensive in the country’s Idlib province.
The U.S. also charges that Russia has spread disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic and interfered in U.S. campaigns. […]
“I am sure this was a Russian initiative,” Angela Stent, a former U.S. intelligence analyst and author of “Putin’s World,” told the Journal. “Putin wants validation from the United States that today’s Russia like the Soviet Union is a great power.”
Earlier this month, Trump spoke with Putin for two consecutive days about oil production as the fossil fuel industry in both countries faces historic lows.
Russia wants everyone to forget they signed a non-aggression pact with Hitler with plans to divide up Eastern Europe between them.
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Putin wants to gloat. His plan worked perfectly. Trump has destroyed the USA, is mass murdering us, and fomenting a civil war.
Oggie: Mathomsays
We had an astroturf anti-health rally in our town today. Forty pickups with 70 plus American flags, plus the usual assortment of traitor’s flags. About fifty motorcycles, some with AR15s slung over their shoulders. Kids standing on car roofs, no one wearing a mask And an amazing number of the protesters are in my age cohort — you know, over fifty, male. Assholes.
From Wonkette: “Reports Of Bleach And Lysol Drinking Increase Day After Trump ‘Sarcastically’ Suggests It.”
Once upon a time, many years ago, Donald Trump opined that he could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot someone, and not lose any followers. He was not wrong about that. As we have learned, there is basically nothing he can do to lose the support of his base. If he does something they don’t like, they’ll change their opinion on it and swear they always felt that way. If he does something seemingly indefensible or says something obviously wrong, they will twist themselves into knots trying to defend it or find a way for him to actually be right. If he says to drink Lysol, goddamnit, they will get out their finest shot glasses and go to town. […]
As such, in the days following Trump’s remarks about ingesting or injecting household cleaners in order to cure COVID-19, poison control centers have reported an uptick in people doing just that. WNBC reports that New York City’s Poison Control Center got about 30 calls regarding exposure to these products in the hours following the presser — 10 calls about bleach, nine calls about Lysol, and 11 regarding other household cleaners. Luckily, none of these calls resulted in death or hospitalization.
Last year, on the same day, they got 13 such calls. That’s a pretty big increase! […] [See the link for a CDC graph.]
[…] sure, a lot of this can be explained away by the fact that we are simply using these products more, but some of it is also just people doing stupid shit with these products — like this case cited by the CDC in which a woman attempted to bleach her groceries.
An adult woman heard on the news to clean all recently purchased groceries before consuming them. She filled a sink with a mixture of 10% bleach solution, vinegar, and hot water, and soaked her produce. While cleaning her other groceries, she noted a noxious smell described as “chlorine” in her kitchen. She developed difficulty breathing, coughing, and wheezing, and called 911. She was transported to the emergency department via ambulance and was noted to have mild hypoxemia and end-expiratory wheezing. She improved with oxygen and bronchodilators. Her chest radiograph was unremarkable, and she was discharged after a few hours of observation.
Yeah … don’t do that. Even if you don’t get sick from inhaling the bleach, you’ll get sick from eating produce that has been soaked in it. Bleach is not edible.
Note that apples, oranges, bananas, etc. can be washed just like you wash your hands. Rinse well.
It would be one thing if Donald Trump were the only moron in this country who would go to the well of “Oh, maybe drink Lysol?,” but he is not. There are people who will go to that well all on their own. However, having a president who would suggest such a thing (even if he later claims he was being “sarcastic”), makes things a lot worse.
Michigan state Sen. Dale Zorn [a Republican] apologized Saturday after wearing a face mask that looks like the Confederate flag.
Zorn wore the mask to the Republican-controlled state Senate on Friday to vote on coronavirus-related measures. Zorn supported a bill that would repeal Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s emergency powers and a resolution that would create a joint committee to oversee the state’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
However, after denying that the mask was a Confederate flag pattern and facing criticism that the symbol tied to slavery was inappropriate for a coronavirus discussion, Zorn apologized.
For weeks, nurses and other employees at Veterans Affairs hospitals have said they were working with inadequate protective gear. VA officials denied it.
But in an interview, the physician in charge of the country’s largest health-care system acknowledged the shortage — and said masks and other supplies are being diverted for the national stockpile.
“I had 5 million masks incoming that disappeared,” said Richard Stone, executive in charge of the sprawling Veterans Health Administration. He acknowledged that he’s been forced to move to “austerity levels” at some hospitals.
Stone said the Federal Emergency Management Agency directed vendors with equipment on order from VA to instead send it to FEMA to replenish the government’s rapidly depleting emergency stockpile.
Why? Are they stockpiling it for Jared?
[…] VA’s four-week supply of equipment — on the shelves of 170 medical centers and in an emergency cache normally used for hurricane responses — was almost gone, and employees have held protests to say they were not safe. The system was burning through about 200,000 masks in a day, Stone said.
“The supply system was responding to FEMA,” said Stone, a former combat surgeon and former Army deputy surgeon general. “I couldn’t tell you when my next delivery was coming in.”
The shortages, and the agency’s claims that they did not exist, have been a low point in what observers say is an otherwise commendable response by VA to the pandemic. The health system, with fewer covid-19 patients than it expected, is now reaching out to assist veterans in troubled state facilities. […]
After an appeal from Secretary Robert Wilkie to top FEMA officials, the emergency management agency provided VA with 500,000 masks this week, FEMA said in a statement. It did not address questions about the agency’s diverted equipment orders. A similar shipment arrived last week, Stone said. It’s allowed him to loosen the mask policy to provide employees working directly with covid-19 patients with one face mask a day.
What? One face mask per day is not enough?
Still, hospitals in the sprawling system have discretion to ration equipment if they are treating large numbers of covid-19 patients and face shortages. In a recent memo, a top health system official told regional directors they should plan for “scenarios that permit extended mask use, permit limited re-use, permit staff to bring in their own facemasks and N95 respirators, and allow decontamination of used N95 respirators.” […]
The Labor Department says it is investigating a union complaint at one hospital that employees suspected of contracting the virus were ordered to continue to report to work. On Thursday, several Senate Democrats, describing a “broken federal procurement and distribution process,” called on the Trump administration in a letter to Vice President Pence to get more supplies to VA hospitals.
Barbara Galle, an intensive care nurse at the Minneapolis VA hospital who is president of AFGE Local 3669, said staff caring for covid-19 patients still can only get an N95 mask if they are involved in a procedure that puts them at extra risk of breathing in virus droplets in the air […]
Other hospital workers, including pharmacy technicians and cafeteria workers who deliver food to patients on covid wards, have been told to wear their masks for a week, she said. If the straps break, they must staple them back together.
[…] VA serves a vulnerable veteran population dominated by older, Vietnam-era men with underlying health conditions. The system mobilized early in the crisis, restricting visitors to its nursing homes, screening veterans and others entering hospitals and turning its health-care system into a series of acute-care, covid-19 wards.
[…]
The number of VA patients with covid-19 hit 6,300 in recent days, with 400 deaths.
About 1,900 health-care workers have become sick with the virus, the agency said, with 20 deaths. About 3,600 of the health-care staff are now quarantined after exposure.
Stone said the system was able to start testing the staff for the coronavirus only in recent weeks. […]
regional leaders said they were starting to get frantic calls from the staff at many state-run nursing homes for veterans. The homes were desperate for help, as the virus was spreading through and killing dozens of veterans.
[…] In the last week, the health system has lent its support to the troubled state system of veterans homes. The homes are not run by the federal government, but VA gives them financial assistance — and has now offered to treat dozens of their patients in its hospitals.
About 50 veterans from homes in 11 states are now being treated for covid-19 at VA hospitals, officials said. About 90 nurses have deployed to two New Jersey homes with virulent outbreaks.
[…] On Friday, the nurses union continued its protests over protective gear shortages, forming a picket line in front of hospitals in Florida and Georgia, two states whose governors have announced that they are reopening for business during the pandemic.
Wilke is a Trump stooge.
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Just one more reason the GOP will be losing the military’s vote. Keep it up Trump.
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Kushner: “Since Pops cut VA’s funding they just couldn’t afford to outbid China and, well, since it is OUR stockpile…”
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“Thank you for your service” is ringing a little hollow in this Republican administration.
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Under the law, the head of VHA (the Veterans Health Administration) is the Under Secretary for Health, a position requiring a nomination from the President and Senate confirmation.
The reason Dr. Stone isn’t referred to as the Under Secretary is because there is no confirmed Under Secretary for Health in VA. Nor has there been for the entire time Trump has been president.
Three plus years, no confirmed Under Secretary for Health.
Says a great deal about how much the President cares about VA and veterans.
John Moralessays
In Oz, former Prime Minister Turnbull has released his memoir.
Pullquote:
In an hour-long interview to be streamed online on Monday night for the Sydney Writers Festival, Mr Turnbull’s disdain for the organisation he once led is palpable.
He argues that the “crazed ideology” dictating the Liberal Party’s policy on climate could now only be altered by a crushing electoral defeat, or an about-face on the issue from media magnate Rupert Murdoch.
Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch both wear navy suits
Photo: Lachlan and Rupert Murdoch. (Reuters: Peter Nicholls)
“It’s basically just Australia and the United States above all where this issue of climate policy has been turned into an issue of belief,” the nation’s 29th prime minister says in the interview.
“And it’s bonkers.”
“To be honest with you, I think the only way out of it — unless you believe the Coalition can have a road-to-Damascus conversion which I think is unlikely — is a devastating electoral defeat. I’m not saying I want that to happen, I’m just saying, being practical, that is what would shock the Coalition.”
Mr Turnbull describes Rupert Murdoch’s media empire as “the largest endorser of climate denialism in the world”.
“I think if Lachlan Murdoch decided to become a greenie overnight, the Coalition would switch instantly. They’d turn on a dime. Andrew Bolt would suddenly discover he was a greenie, Alan Jones would develop a passionate love for solar panels, Peta Credlin would be, you know, into pumped hydro — they’d all switch,” he insists.
This is Trump’s version of what happened, and his excuse for not having a coronavirus press briefing today:
What is the purpose of having White House News Conferences when the Lamestream Media asks nothing but hostile questions, & then refuses to report the truth or facts accurately. They get record ratings, & the American people get nothing but Fake News. Not worth the time & effort
Trump later sent out a tweet in which he lied (again) about his bizarre statements about “injection” of disinfectant “inside the body.” Trump claimed that he did NOT address Doctor Birx, and that the “fake news” wrote that he had addressed some of those remarks too Birx. In Trump’s disordered mind, this means the “fake news” was lying about everything he said.
Trump tweeted:
Was just informed that the Fake News from the Thursday White House Press Conference had me speaking & asking questions of Dr. Deborah Birx. Wrong, I was speaking to our Laboratory expert, not Deborah, about sunlight etc. & the CoronaVirus. The Lamestream Media is corrupt & sick!
Yeah, there’s just one huge problem with that: Trump did address Dr. Deborah Birx, even using her first name when he looked at her and spoke to her during the briefing.
A pained-looking Dr. Deborah Birx listened carefully as Trump mused about “cleaning” bodies with disinfectant. When Trump asked her about using “heat and light” as a treatment, she demurred.
Trump said, “I’m not a doctor, but I’m, like, a person who has a good you-know-what [gesturing to his head]. Deborah, have you ever heard of that, uh, the heat and the light relative to certain viruses, yes, but relative to this virus?” [This is on video!]
“Not as a treatment,” Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator and public health expert, replied. “I mean, certainly fever is a good thing. When you have a fever, it helps your body respond. But not as — I’ve not seen heat or … ”
Trump cut her off — “I think it’s a great thing to look at” — before moving on.
With limited supplies of coronavirus tests available, the Pentagon is focusing first on testing those performing duties deemed most vital to national security. Atop the list are the men and women who operate the nation’s nuclear forces, some counterterrorism forces, and the crew of a soon-to-deploy aircraft carrier.
Defense leaders hope to increase testing from the current rate of about 7,000 a day to 60,000 by June. […]
The current tight supply forced the Pentagon to take a phased approach, which includes testing sailors aboard the USS Nimitz, the Bremerton, Washington-based Navy carrier next in line to head to the Pacific. Officials hope to avoid a repeat of problems that plagued the virus-stricken USS Theodore Roosevelt. On Friday the Navy disclosed a virus outbreak aboard another ship at sea, the USS Kidd.
Despite […] Trump’s assertion that testing capacity is not an issue in the United States, Pentagon officials don’t expect to have enough tests for all service members until sometime this summer. […]
The first tier of U.S. troops are being tested this month, followed in May and June by the second-highest priority group: forces in combat zones such as Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Next will be those abroad outside of war zones, like troops in Europe and aboard ships at sea, as well as those returning to the United States from overseas deployments. […]
At least 3,900 members of the military had tested positive, including more than 850 from the Roosevelt. […]
The military’s staggered approach to testing is necessary, officials said […]
“It is a supply issue right now, which is causing us not to be able to go down the full spectrum of all of the forces,” Hyten said. “So we’ll have to — that’s why we came up with the tiered approach.” […]
People in the White House probably get tested every day or whenever they want. The rest of us…bupkis.
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Nearly 53,000 American dead, 26 millions American jobs lost, Trillions of taxpayer money squandered in corrupt and dirty bailouts, biggest stock market crash in American history.
More Americans have died due to COVID-19 under President Skanky Turdface’s ignorant leadership than the American combat casualties in all of the Vietnam War.
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We start the day at 960,000 corona virus cases and 54,254 deaths. We will almost certainly top 1 million cases by Monday, a politically significant threshold. At our current pace, we will reach 60,000 fatalities by Tuesday or Wednesday.
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Can someone do a study on the number of MAGA hats that were made as Trump was running for President vs the number of cotton swabs that are being produced currently?
Trump’s decision to hold an in-person graduation at West Point proves he is unfit.
[…] Due to that decision, some 1,000 cadets will have to come back to West Point for the June 13 ceremony. And the great majority of them will have to fly into New York, which is currently the biggest hot zone in the nation and the world for coronavirus.
For Trump to do this so soon after much of the nation is slowly reopening would be reckless in and of itself. But to make anywhere from 700 to 800 Firsties fly back into a region that probably won’t be able to reopen until July, and at a time when air travel is a crapshoot at best, is probably the starkest evidence yet that this man is not fit to be president. […]
Even if the ceremony is restricted to Firsties only, there’s still the risk of catching it at JFK, La Guardia or Newark, or at the hotel at some point in the journey. […] Trump damn well knows this. And he’s doing it anyway—in all likelihood, so he can get a photo op or to satisfy his desire to recreate something close to the atmosphere of his rallies. And in so doing, it increases the likelihood that I, or someone close to me, could catch this virus. […]
In doing this, Trump isn’t owning the libs. He’s putting someone’s son, daughter, grandchild, niece, nephew in harm’s way. And all to satisfy his narcissism. That, more than Russia, more than Ukraine, more than ANYTHING this so-called president has done, should remove any doubt that he is not fit for office.
“We’ve spent a lot of time on what the president said, and disinfectant in the body,” she stated to Tapper at the close of the interview. “You know what they call that? They call that embalming; that’s the medical term.”
More details from Tapper’s “State of the Union” show. Dr. Birx appeared. Her continued make-excuses and/or minimize-as-much-as-possible-Trump’s-dangerous-statements schtick is getting on my last nerve. Maybe she needs to stop talking too.
[…] Tapper asked the White House coronavirus task force response coordinator about the disinfectant musing as well, which especially shouldn’t have been a surprise given that her facial expression went viral. In his words: “What should the American people know about disinfectants and the human body?”
First, Birx talked through points about decontaminants, masks, and DHS studies about the effect of sunlight on the lifespan of the virus, describing Trump’s remarks as a “dialogue.” Tapper pressed Birx on Trump’s proposal to use that science as a way to “treat” coronavirus in the human body. He described her taking a “generous approach” to Trump “musing aloud.” He added: “This is potentially dangerous. I mean, poison control centers got calls from people and they had to issue statements.” […]
Tapper asked: “As a doctor, does it bother you that you have to even spend any time discussing this?”
“It bothers me that this is still in the news cycle,” she replied. “I think we’re missing the bigger pieces.” She pushed the need to talk about asymptomatic conditions, young people experiencing the virus, and comorbidities. She said she worries that the right information isn’t getting to the American people “when we continue to bring up something that was from Thursday night.” Given that the “something from Thursday night” was Trump casually hypothesizing about injecting disinfectant and UV rays as possible treatments during a pandemic, this back-bending twist rings in as pretty hard to hear.
Tapper replied: “I would say that I think the source of the misinformation is not the news media on this.” […]
Birx made a similar complaint when appearing on Fox News late Saturday night, suggesting that the media is “very slicey and dicey” in “the way they put together sentences in order to create headlines.” She went on to put the “responsibility” on the media to “really ensure” that headlines “reflect the science and data” that’s in the piece. The irony of this conversation happening on Fox is incredible.
“I think often, the reporting may be accurate in paragraph three, four, and five,” Birx stated. “But I’m not sure how many people actually get to paragraph three, four, and five.” […]
I wrote this for all the people that work so hard & never hear the words Good Job. I believe in us though, I believe in the way we are showing up for each other & caring 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽
More on Trump’s decision to deliver an in-person commencement address at West Point:
[…] As reported by multiple outlets, Donald Trump has announced his intention to deliver the commencement address at West Point, an especially savored prize because it combines Trump’s love of all things military (except serving) with hearing himself talk (at length) in front of an audience that is explicitly barred from booing him. There is a problem with this, however: Because of pandemic dangers, the graduating cadets were already sent home.
You know what’s coming next, right? Yep. West Point is now ordering their graduating class to return, during the pandemic, despite the risks of travel, because President Tide Pods demands a military audience.
As reported by The New York Times, the new orders by their “commander in chief” caught academy officers by surprise. They had been working to determine just what ought to be done about graduation—for example, delaying it—when Dear Leader burped out on April 17, in response to a question about Mike Pence’s upcoming trip to speak at the Air Force Academy commencement, that well he would be speaking at West Point. And he didn’t want any of the social distancing nonsense that had graduates spread out to avoid cross-contamination, he wanted the audience “nice and tight.”
Rather than writing it off as yet another rambling aside from the Embalmer in Chief, another little something that they could all pretend not to hear and later scold reporters for even mentioning, West Point and White House officials took Trump seriously. Tear up the old plans: Now graduation will be held live, with the pretzeldent himself speaking, on June 13.
This turns out to be a very big deal, because despite Trump’s ego we are indeed still in the midst of a worldwide pandemic, shelter-in-place orders are still commonplace, and New York is currently among the hardest hit areas of the country. For the cadets involved, it’s going to be a full-fledged Trumpian bullshit nightmare.
The Times reports that the 1,000 re-summoned graduates will be given off-campus COVID-19 tests. The ones that pass will be quarantined for 14 days in their dorms, in relative isolation, to further ensure they do not infect each other or Dear Leader. The Defense Department will have to grant waivers to the current travel ban for military personnel to allow the graduates to return in the first place. It’s likely that the cadets will need to self-quarantine upon their arrival back home, as well; whether or not they had been exposed to COVID-19 before this, flying to and back from New York, a current pandemic hotspot, will be risky for not just themselves but for their communities.
Doesn’t matter. Trump wants an audience. Trump wants a “tight” audience that looks good on camera, and not one that reminds viewers of his ongoing deadly-drug-boosting bleach-injection-promoting no-plan no-test megafailure, and that means assembling one from among the only people in the country who can be ordered to attend.
Thanks for joining our military, kids. Let this be your initiation into the world of Republican leaders not giving a flying damn about your actual welfare, so long as you are properly able to carry out your duties as background prop.
Utah residents may be lukewarm on […] Trump […] but Utah has proven to be an enthusiastic booster of Trump’s favorite coronavirus miracle cure, the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine. On March 21, a group of drug promoters in the state held a press conference to advocate for its use to treat Covid-19, claiming it could practically raise the dead, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence that it can be dangerous to some people.
“There are responses that are equivalent to Lazarus—literally the biblical Lazarus—people almost dead coming back,” physician Kurt Hegmann, director of the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health at the University of Utah, said at the event.
Ten days later, the state spent $800,000 to purchase 20,000 doses from a local pharmacy chain, Meds in Motion, whose owner had been promoting the drug to state officials for weeks. […]
Eight million dollars for pharmaceuticals is a lot of money in a state that ranks dead last in per-pupil public school spending and spent most of the last decade refusing to expand Medicaid under Obamacare, even after state residents passed a ballot initiative demanding the expansion.
Utah House Democrats were suspicious of the GOP state officials’ enthusiasm for the unproven drug. […] Citing a recent study showing that hydroxychloroquine may endanger coronavirus patients, the state democrats said on April 21, “[O]ur colleagues quietly pushed the state to buy the stockpile of Dan Richards of Meds In Motion, a pharmacist lobbyist, with precious taxpayer dollars to compound the unproven drug without public scrutiny.”
[…] Nonetheless, Utah officials moved forward, urged on by state Senate President Stuart Adams, who had appeared at the March press conference with Richards and the other drug promoters. But on Friday, after the FDA warned against negative impacts of the drug, Governor Gary Herbert announced that the state would not purchase any more hydroxychloroquine. He claimed to have no idea how the first batch got procured by his administration, which issued the no-bid contract under emergency procurement rules enacted because of the pandemic.
The 20,000 pills haven’t yet been delivered to the state health department, so Herbert suggested that the state should get a refund. “That’d be nice if they just said, you know, we had a miscommunication here and we’re apologizing and here’s your money back,” he said at a news conference Friday.
Trump is taking the idea of making the World Health Organization his favorite coronavirus scapegoat to another level.
[…] Trump and his top aides are working behind the scenes to sideline the World Health Organization on several new fronts as they seek to shift blame for the coronavirus pandemic to the world body […]
Last week, the president announced a 60-day hold on U.S. money to the WHO, but other steps by his top officials go beyond a temporary funding freeze […]
At the State Department, officials are stripping references to the WHO from coronavirus fact sheets […]
Petty asshats.
“The Secretary has asked the State Department and USAID to identify and utilize alternative implementers for foreign assistance programs beyond the WHO,” read a memo sent to State Department employees in recent days. […]
U.S. opposition to the WHO also prevented health ministers at a virtual G-20 meeting from issuing a joint statement on the pandemic earlier this month.
The White House is imploring allies to question the organization’s credibility and push claims that its employees routinely go on excessive “luxury travel,” as one White House official, Sarah Makin Acciani, told a group of surrogates in a recent phone call without offering evidence […]
Trump, who has said the outbreak could be contained with “very little death” if the WHO had done its job, reiterated his complaints during a Group of Seven conference call this month. World leaders cautioned that it would be unwise to “switch horses” in the middle of the race and that an investigation into mistakes could be made after the crisis subsides, European officials familiar with the conversation said. After the call, several G-7 leaders issued public statements in support of the WHO. […]
“A 60-day pause to U.S. funding is a headache for the WHO but not necessarily an existential crisis. That said, if State starts giving funds to other implementers to carry out health programs the WHO would have overseen, there is a risk that the U.S. starts spreading resources out in an inefficient, fragmentary fashion,” said Richard Gowan, a senior fellow at the International Crisis Group. […]
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said that the WHO had shown a “clear bias towards China, even though China contributes a small fraction of what the U.S. does each year.” […]
The WHO, born out of the ashes of World War II “to promote and protect the health of all peoples,” is designed to identify emerging contagion and “support the delivery of essential health services in fragile settings,” according to a statement on its website. […]
critics say the president is scapegoating the WHO to distract from charges that he responded slowly to the pandemic and waited too long to implement protective measures that would have saved lives in the United States. They also question the value of seeking alternatives to the WHO at this juncture. […]
Pompeo has suggested that the United States, which contributed $553 million to the WHO in 2019, may withhold all funding to the organization in the future. On Wednesday night, he declined to rule out the possibility that the United States would seek Tedros’s removal as a condition for resuming funding.
“It may be the case that the United States can never return to underwriting, having U.S. taxpayer dollars go to the WHO,” he told Fox News host Laura Ingraham. […]
As schools closed across the nation amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, students transitioned to online learning. For kids and teenagers who don’t have reliable internet access at home or even a computer, however, keeping up with school can be a serious hardship. That’s been the case in Detroit, where the majority of students have struggled to reach teachers over video chat or use all the virtual resources […] The solution? A “Connected Futures” program is working to get every single public school student not only a tablet but high-speed internet access before June. […]
How does this work? For the first six months of the program, internet connectivity will be covered by the program in full. After that, the school district will cover it. District Superintendent Nikolai Vitti estimates that $17 million of the fund will go toward buying the tablets, and an additional $6 million will cover the internet. The students, grades K through 12, will own the tablets […]
To accomplish all of this, the program started fundraising just three weeks ago. Since then, they’ve raised $23 million. The program includes the Detroit Public Schools Community District as well as the Kellogg and Skillman Foundations, General Motors, Quicken Loans, and DTE Energy.
This is truly fantastic, and also a reminder that the internet should be considered a public utility, not a private service. Relatedly, as schools have closed, other less discussed issues have finally gotten some mainstream media attention. For example, some states (and local communities) have stepped up to help get free breakfast and lunches to kids who qualify, as well as aiding food banks struggling to meet heightened demand. Taking care of the most vulnerable among us is one of the very basic tenets of what our government should do, especially during a global pandemic.
An interesting UK poll on confidence in the UK government’s handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. There is still a majority, although a shrinking one, expressing general approval, but on specific questions – did they act quickly enough? – how have they done on testing? – there are large majorities disapproving. My guess is that the general approval is for the continued lockdown, combined with what the linked article suggests, a hope that they will succeed in controlling the epidemic.
Pierce R. Butlersays
Lynna … @ # 39: WTF has gone wrong with Birx? Is she now a trumpian cult follower?
As a longtime “just say no” faction leader on the anti-reproductive-health posse of the hyperchristian right wing, she’s had at least one foot in that camp all of her career.
Russia confirmed 6,361 new coronavirus infections Sunday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 80,949 cases.
In total, 747 people have been killed by the virus in Russia.
The majority of Russia’s cases are in Moscow, although Covid-19 patients have been confirmed in every one of Russia’s 85 regions and the spread is accelerating outside the capital. Since March 30, all of Moscow’s 12 million residents have been ordered to stay in their homes with few exceptions.
Moscow Deputy mayor Anastasia Rakova has warned the city “will face difficult weeks” ahead.
“The peak in morbidity should arrive in the next two to three weeks,” she said in a video released on social media Friday….
Elena Milashina had received death threats before. But they were never so direct or brazen.
The erratic and iron-fisted leader of Chechnya in southern Russia, unhappy with her journalism about the coronavirus, put out an unambiguous call for violence against the reporter on social media this month.
Ramzan Kadyrov “was direct in saying what he was going to do with me — and how. This was the first time he said it this way, so concretely,” Milashina, 42, told AFP.
“If the threat was real… I wouldn’t be able to secure my life by taking any measures. It’s not possible.”
Kadyrov’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is hardening his reputation as a strongman intolerant of dissent or criticism, with fresh allegations of police intimidation and press censorship emerging from his isolated fiefdom.
“Once he understood the seriousness of the virus, he decided to fight it with characteristic excessive force, as usual employing harsh measures and intimidation,” said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Centre and a longtime observer of Chechnya.
“This is something he knows how to do,” she said. “This is something he enjoys doing.”
…
When the pandemic hit Russia, videos circulated on social media of Chechen police patrolling streets and imposing a curfew with batons.
Warnings rang out from mosques in the Muslim-majority republic of punishments for breaking quarantine and not wearing protective equipment outside.
The republic has registered 347 coronavirus cases and six deaths but observers fear the figure is higher….
…
…Kadyrov has said that people who break quarantine should be “killed,” and likened Chechens who do not self-isolate and infect others to “terrorists” who should be buried in pits.
In her April 12 article “Dying of coronavirus is a lesser evil,” Milashina reported that Chechens are battling the virus in their homes, instead of seeking support from ill-equipped hospitals, fearing punitive reprisals from overbearing law enforcement.
The authorities “think that the main threat is the critics, not the virus. They can stop information, but they can’t stop the problem,” she told AFP in a video interview from her home in Moscow.
A day after the article ran, Kadyrov slammed her paper Novaya Gazeta as “puppets of the West,” and urged the Kremlin to “stop those non-humans who are writing and provoking our people”.
“If you want us to commit a crime and become criminals, just say it. One (of us) will take on this burden, this responsibility, will be punished in accordance with the law… Don’t make bandits and killers out of us.”
Asked about Kadyrov’s comments, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the Chechen leader’s response was “nothing out of the ordinary”.
Instead, he dismissed it as “emotional” rhetoric, saying it was understandable given the unprecedented pandemic.
In a final blow, the prosecutor general ordered the article to be removed, ruling its “unreliable” reporting posed a threat to public health.
The Kremlin’s lukewarm response to the threat sparked condemnation at home and abroad.
More than 100 figures within civil society in Russia called for state protection for Milashina and for an investigation to be launched, an appeal echoed by European diplomats, leading international rights groups and press freedom monitors.
…
Yet Milashina is not holding out hope for an investigation.
After she and a human rights lawyer were assaulted in a hotel in Grozny in February this year, a police probe into the incident stalled, with security camera footage lost and no arrests made.
“Between me and Kadyrov,” she said, “Moscow will choose Kadyrov.”
People protest against the Brazilian president after the resignation of popular minister Sérgio Moro. There were calls for Bolsonaro’s impeachment and an investigation into claims he had improperly interfered in the country’s federal police.
Bolsonaro denied claims from his outgoing justice minister that he had sought to appoint a new federal police chief in order to gain access to secret intelligence reports.
The political storm engulfing Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has intensified with reports that federal police investigators have identified his son as one of the alleged key members of a “criminal fake news racket” engaged in threatening and defaming Brazilian authorities.
One of Brazil’s top newspapers, the Folha de São Paulo, claimed an investigation by Brazil’s equivalent to the FBI had honed in on Carlos Bolsonaro, the president’s social-media-savvy son.
Carlos Bolsonaro, 37, rejected the claims as “garbage” and “a joke” on Twitter, where he has 1.7 million followers.
But the allegations will deepen the crisis consuming Bolsonaro’s 16-month-old government and further distract from the country’s efforts to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 4,000 Brazilians.
Bolsonaro’s administration was already floundering before the recent resignation of his powerful justice minister, Sergio Moro, with another of the president’s sons, Flávio Bolsonaro, facing police scrutiny for suspected corruption and ties to Rio de Janeiro’s mafia.
Bolsonaro’s dismissive reaction to the coronavirus crisis has sparked outrage across the political spectrum and pot-banging protests.
The latest political melodrama exploded on Friday when Moro resigned and publicly accused the president of attempting to improperly meddle in the operations of the federal police by sacking the federal police director, Maurício Valeixo, that morning.
Moro alleged that Bolsonaro, for reasons that remain unclear, hoped to replace Valeixo with someone more amenable to discussing federal police business and sharing intelligence reports with the president.
The man widely touted as Valeixo’s successor is Alexandre Ramagem, the head of Brazil’s intelligence agency, who is reportedly a friend of Carlos Bolsonaro’s.
A photograph of Ramagem and Carlos Bolsonaro fraternising at a New Year’s Eve party was published by Brazilian media on Saturday.
The Folha de São Paulo claimed federal police officials were convinced Bolsonaro had fired Valeixo “because he was aware the corporation was closing in on his son”.
An editorial in another leading broadsheet, O Globo, said Bolsonaro seemed to want “to turn the federal police into a personal police force, as if he were some kind of third world dictator”.
The Folha de São Paulo claimed another of Bolsonaro’s sons, the congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, was also being investigated for possible involvement in the fake news group. Eduardo Bolsonaro, who is the South America representative of Steve Bannon’s far-right group The Movement, claimed on Twitter the claims were “an attempt to confuse the population”. He also retweeted an image of a dog defecating on the newspaper’s masthead.
Jair Bolsonaro and his backers have been battling to regain control of the narrative since Moro’s damaging exit, painting the former judge as a pro-choice, anti-gun traitor to their far-right cause.
Bolsonaro denied any wrongdoing in a rambling speech in which he claimed he was the victim of a political conspiracy. “Powerful people have risen up against me. This is a reality. This is the truth. I’m fighting against the system – against the establisher [sic],” he claimed.
“We are, in the figurative sense, going to get shot in the face loads. But we will fulfil our mission,” Bolsonaro vowed.
But claims investigators had identified the president’s son as part of the alleged fake news network – something political foes have long suspected – prompted fresh calls for the president’s impeachment and reinforced growing doubts over whether the rightwing populist would complete his four-year term….
Israel’s embattled health minister Yaakov Litzman has announced that he would step down, following a public uproar over his handling of the coronavirus crisis and his own Covid-19 infection.
Litzman informed the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that he would step aside as the country forms a new government.
He made no mention of his much-criticised performance at the health ministry, which he has led for most of the past decade, and instead said he would take over the construction ministry, the Associated Press reports.
Part of Litzman’s early response to the pandemic was to exclude the ultra-Orthodox community from social distancing regulations, allowing public bath houses and synagogues to remain open, and even promising that the messiah would come and put an end to the epidemic, the Haaretz newspaper reports….
For those too young to remember, Men Behaving Badly was a light-hearted 1990s British and American sitcom about silly blokes doing stupid things. Covid-19 has revived the storyline. But now it’s not so funny.
Around the world, authoritarian leaders are exploiting, exacerbating or grossly mishandling the response to the pandemic, placing selfish interest ahead of public good.
They are mostly male. Their behaviour is frequently appalling. Unlike harmless Gary and Tony, they are a modern incarnation of TS Eliot’s “hollow men”.
Sex is relevant, in that female leaders are generally thought to be behaving better. Germany’s Angela Merkel, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, and Taiwan’s Tsai Ing-wen are among competent and compassionate women singled out for praise.
Yet do the worst-performing leaders share dysfunctional characteristics beyond mere maleness? A war fixation is one. Poverty of imagination is another. They routinely trot out tired martial metaphors and cliches such as “wartime president”, “blitz spirit”, and “fighting the invisible enemy”.
Lack of empathy also seems to be a common denominator, even among self-styled “man of the people” populists. This may be a product of class, culture or elite upbringing.
A more decisive factor is a man’s political orientation. Broadly speaking, illiberal leaders who run authoritarian regimes, refuse democratic and legal constraints, abuse civil and women’s rights, reject media scrutiny, tolerate corruption, and believe that they, personally, know best are the worst-behaved, least effective pandemic performers.…
The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries.
Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods.
If the same level of underreporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000.
To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from all causes in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019. The total of 122,000 amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied.
In all the countries analysed except Denmark, excess deaths far outnumbered the official coronavirus death tolls. The accuracy of official death statistics from the virus is limited by how effectively a country is testing people to confirm cases. Some countries, including China, have retrospectively revised up their death tolls from the disease.
…
Even the much higher numbers of deaths in the pandemic suggested by excess mortality statistics are likely to be conservative, as lockdowns mean that “mortality from numerous conditions such as traffic accidents and occupational injuries possibly went down,” said Markéta Pechholdová, assistant professor of demography at the University of Economics, Prague.
Much more, including startling graphs, at the link.
Tens of millions of pounds of American-grown produce is rotting in fields as food banks across the country scramble to meet a massive surge in demand, a two-pronged disaster that has deprived farmers of billions of dollars in revenue while millions of newly jobless Americans struggle to feed their families.
While other federal agencies quickly adapted their programs to the coronavirus crisis, the Agriculture Department took more than a month to make its first significant move to buy up surplus fruits and vegetables — despite repeated entreaties.
“It’s frustrating,” said Nikki Fried, commissioner of agriculture in Florida. Fried, who is a Democrat, and much of the Florida congressional delegation asked Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue nearly a month ago to use his broad authority and funding to get more Florida farmers plugged into federal food purchasing and distribution programs as the food service market collapsed. “Unfortunately, USDA didn’t move until [last week].”
Tom Vilsack, who served as agriculture secretary during the Obama administration, put it this way: “It’s not a lack of food, it’s that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven’t been able to connect the dots. You’ve got to galvanize people.”
It has been six weeks since President Donald Trump and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first urged Americans to avoid restaurants as part of national social distancing guidelines to slow the spread of Covid-19 — a move that immediately severed demand for millions of pounds of food earmarked for professional kitchens across the country.
…
Images of farmers destroying tomatoes, piling up squash, burying onions and dumping milk shocked many Americans who remain fearful of supply shortages. At the same time, people who recently lost their jobs lined up for miles outside some food banks, raising questions about why there has been no coordinated response at the federal level to get the surplus of perishable food to more people in need, even as commodity groups, state leaders and lawmakers repeatedly urged the Agriculture Department to step in.
Demand at food banks has increased an average of 70 percent, according to Feeding America, which represents about 200 major food banks across the country. The group estimates that 40 percent of those being served are new to the system.
In mid-April, USDA unveiled a long-awaited $19 billion aid program with $3 billion set aside to buy excess food, a pot of money that would cover a major ramp-up of fresh produce purchases, along with dairy and meats. But federal officials predicted it would take the better part of a month before that food is packed and shipped to food banks and other nonprofits in need. At that point, it will be too late for many produce growers who saw a huge drop in demand right at the peak of their season.
“By the time that comes through, it won’t help Florida,” said Brittany Lee, a blueberry farmer and executive director of the Florida Blueberry Growers Association. Blueberry prices are about half of what they were this time last year, she said.
…
In March, about a week after much of the country shut down restaurants, events and other food-service businesses, several produce groups wrote to USDA with an urgent plea to buy perishable commodities because at least $1 billion was “sitting stagnant in the supply chain.”
“There is no reason these high-quality, nutritious, farmer-grown products should be left in facilities to rot when there are so many American families who are suddenly faced with food insecurity,” the groups wrote to Perdue. “These growers and companies are already donating to food banks and others in need and will continue … but they are also facing their own economic crises.”
The department did not make any fresh purchases in response to that request, according to USDA records. Perdue has yet to respond to the letter.
…
A handful of states, including Florida and California, set up online clearinghouses to try to match up excess food with need in their area, but the high volumes of surplus produce often can’t be absorbed by local food banks alone, making national distribution important for making even a dent in the waste….
More atl.
lotharloosays
Yet another front page Fox news article on AOC: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/aoc-slammed-by-new-york-paper-for-voting-against-latest-stimulus-bill
It’s really really amazing, since she burst on the national stage, I think they have been doing weekly, almost daily hit jobs on her. It’s unbelievable how threatened they feel but they are doing their job. Don’t be surprised to find out in a few years, she’s suddenly hated for no reason by the idiot “independents”.
a_ray_in_dilbert_spacesays
It appears that Dr. Birx is about to learn the only thing one can learn from serving in the Trump Administration: When dealing with a malignant narcissist who views every interaction as a zero-sum game, there is no room for anyone else to benefit. Only Donald Trump is allowed to benefit. I don’t think Birx will every be thought of as a serious professional again.
President Vladimir Putin’s “business tsar” has called for the government to end the economic lockdown and reopen the economy.
Boris Titov, the president’s business ombudsman, announced Monday he will organize an online protest Friday calling for businesses to be reopened, as frustration at the government’s economic response to the coronavirus grows throughout Russia’s business community.
“Yes, the coronavirus is a problem. But poverty and starvation are no less a misfortune. What are we [LOL – SC] going to live on in a week? A month?” Titov posted on his Facebook page.
“I am convinced that it is time to reweigh everything. It is time to assess the danger as soberly as possible and allow those who observe sanitary conditions to work … There are many of us, and the authorities will hear us.”…
Here’s a link to the April 27 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Mexico’s president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has claimed his country has managed “to tame” the coronavirus pandemic despite widespread suspicions that Covid cases are being undercounted in Latin America’s second biggest economy.
Mexico reported its first Covid case in late February and has now registered 1,351 deaths and 14,677 infections. Experts say they believe the country is still several weeks away from the peak of infections.
But in a video message on Sunday López Obrador, or Amlo as he is widely known, claimed: “We’re doing well because we have managed to tame the epidemic”.
Amlo praised Mexico’s 126 million citizens for helping slow the disease’s advance by following social distancing guidelines “to the letter”.
Health specialists questioned Amlo’s claim Covid had been completely controlled.
“I don’t believe we should be claiming victory,” said Alejandro Macías, a leading infectious diseases specialist. “We’re still in the upward phase [of infections].”
Amlo has said he hopes Mexico can begin returning to normal from mid-May onwards, with schools possibly reopening at the start of June.
But Macías said he believed low testing meant only a “small fraction” of cases had been identified and that it was not yet time to reopen.
“To me these dates seem a little premature because we don’t yet know what the intensity of this will be,” he said. “Italy, France and Spain started this problem well before Mexico.”
In a clear indication of concern over Covid’s spread, there were reports over the weekend that authorities in Jalisco state were racing to complete a special 700-grave cemetery for coronavirus victims.
Citing grave dangers to privacy, Israel’s Supreme Court ruled on Sunday that the government must bring its use of mobile phone tracking deployed in the battle against the new coronavirus under legislation.
Circumventing parliament in March, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet approved emergency regulations that enabled the Shin Bet internal security service to tap into cellular data to retrace the movements of people infected by the virus.
The technology, customarily used for anti-terrorism, has since yielded data used by the Health Ministry to locate and alert those who have been in their vicinity. The practice has been subjected to some parliamentary oversight following a subsequent court ruling.
Accepting petitions from Israeli rights groups, the Supreme Court said the government must begin legislation by April 30 and complete it within a few weeks if it wanted to continue tracking people’s phones in its bid to stop the virus spreading.
“The state’s choice to use its preventative security service for monitoring those who wish it no harm, without their consent, raises great difficulties and a suitable alternative, compatible with the principles of privacy, must be found,” the court said.
Citing freedom of the press, the court also ruled that monitoring of journalists confirmed to have been infected with the coronavirus can only be done with their consent. If they refuse, members of the media could seek an injunction against the practice, in order to protect their sources.
“We must take every precaution to ensure that the extraordinary developments with which we are dealing these days do not put us on a slippery slope in which extraordinary and harmful tools are used without justification,” said the ruling.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), one of the groups which petitioned the court, hailed the ruling as a victory….
Downing Street trying to get us to say trust in government not declining and to rewrite this story with new headline. Request refused. We are not edited by Downing Street.
Ben Warner: 2 years ago he was doing physics postdoc. Now he’s a ‘data scientist’ advising govt & sitting on SAGE. His brother, Marc – who worked with Cummings on Vote Leave – won £250m NHS contract when Cummings entered Downing Street. And now the contract for NHS tracking app
There are so many questions about Marc Warner’s firm, Faculty, & its role now with NHS & its previous work for Vote Leave & Conservatives. But first the back story…
[quoting Boris Johnson:] “I know there will be many people looking at our apparent success”. That’s obscene. Unutterably grim and tone deaf. Thousands have died. And thousands more have died than in comparable nations.
There is no success here. Just abject failure. We’re looked at with pity and horror by the world.
It’d be easier to be sympathetic to the govt if they confessed to what they had done wrong and the miscalculations which led us to this point. But instead we’re presented with obfuscation and the presentation of a parallel reality.
Fourteen vaccination campaigns that would have covered more than 13 million people have been postponed because of the crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization has said.
In his opening remarks to today’s coronavirus press conference, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said vaccination drives against polio, measles, cholera, human papillomavirus, yellow fever and meningitis had not gone ahead.
“When vaccination coverage goes down, more outbreaks will occur, including of life-threatening diseases like measles and polio,” Ghebreyesus said. “The tragic reality is that children will die as a result.”
The SC dismissed New York State, Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, because the law had been rescinded. This disappoints Second-Amendment activists who had hoped to get a definitive ruling that citizens could carry a gun to firing ranges out of state or to a second home. The restriction was unique to New York City.
The unsigned opinion was apparently joined by Roberts, while Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented, claiming that the Court had been manipulated, as NYC rescinded the law after the SC took the case. “By incorrectly dismissing this case as moot, the court permits our docket to be manipulated in a way that should not be countenanced,” wrote Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch.
Kavanaugh agreed the case was moot but wants the Court to decide the issue. “The court should address that issue soon, perhaps in one of the several Second Amendment cases with petitions for certiorari now pending before the court.”
Today I am announcing my endorsement of @JoeBiden for President of the United States.
VP Biden is a deeply dedicated public servant with the ability to unite the American people. I am moved by his compassion and ability to connect with people on the most human level.
As Congressional Progressive Caucus Co-Chair, I believe wholeheartedly that gov’t can & must be a force for good—expanding access to health care & education, fighting the climate crisis, passing humane immigration reform, & looking out for working people instead of corporations.
I started this campaign as an ardent and vocal surrogate for @BernieSanders & while I have not always agreed with Vice President @JoeBiden on matters of policy, I’m ready to work with him to craft & then implement the most progressive agenda of any candidate in history.
As President, Donald Trump has consistently sided with the wealthy & well-connected over working families & regular Americans, fostered racism & xenophobia & undermined democratic norms & the rule of law.
Trump & his admin have demonstrated repeatedly—& most recently in their disastrous response to COVID-19—an inability to govern, make tough decisions, speak the truth & unite the country in common purpose.
Any progress toward a better future requires defeating him this November.
Our progressive movement of people organizing in the streets & in the halls of Congress has only grown bigger & more diverse, & we have made enormous strides toward racial, gender, & economic justice.
We are ready for a President who will encourage us to be as big as we can be, with compassion & bold leadership. That President must be @JoeBiden
I will do everything I can to help @JoeBiden win back the White House, take back the Senate, & preserve our House majority.
Together, I am confident we can build a more perfect union.
blfsays
Apologies for not having any “[Pandemic and] Political Madness” to report / comment-on, albeit there is plenty. Just showing up, mostly to report I am fine; motivated by one of my best friends going silent for a disturbingly long time now… probably Ok, but I am very very worried as they are in the States.
Here in France, the current plan is for a gradual lifting of lockdown / social-distancing requirements starting May 11th; more information (details?) to be announced tomorrow (Tuesday April 28th).
Locally, the project to make masks — at both the yacht shipyards and at-home volunteers — is well underway (not sure of the numbers, and the masks are intended for first-responders and the health services†). Several of the local nursing homes are reporting no Covid-19 cases; this has obviously been a cause for concern, as this area is popular with retirees, and hence there is a (perhaps larger than usual?) number of elderly people here, and with (e.g.) the younger (i.e., possibly asymptomatic), international / traveling yacht crews and service people. Obviously a potential for infection (to the more vulnerable), albeit the closure of the restaurants, &tc, has massively helped.
† I am apparently now mistaken — a recent announcement from the village council says (in paraphrased translation): “The village will provide everyone with reusable masks before May 11th.” Hand sanitiser will also be provided to all(?) shops (a bit late, in my opinion, as there are(? were?) no hand-washing stations, albeit perhaps exceptionally difficult to arrange earlier?).
New Zealand says it has stopped community transmission of Covid-19, effectively eliminating the virus.
With new cases in single figures for several days – one on Sunday – Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said the virus was “currently” eliminated.
But officials have warned against complacency, saying it does not mean a total end to new coronavirus cases.
The news came hours before New Zealand moved out of its toughest level of social restrictions.
From Tuesday, some non-essential business, healthcare and education activity will be able to resume.
Most people will still be required to remain at home at all times and avoid all social interactions.
“We are opening up the economy, but we’re not opening up people’s social lives,” Ms Ardern said at the daily government briefing.
New Zealand has reported fewer than 1,500 confirmed or probable cases of coronavirus and 19 deaths.
New Zealand’s Director-General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, said the low number of new cases in recent days “does give us confidence that we have achieved our goal of elimination”.
He warned that “elimination” did not mean there would be no new cases “but it does mean we know where our cases are coming from”.
Ms Ardern said there was “no widespread undetected community transmission in New Zealand”, adding: “We have won that battle.”
But she said the country “must remain vigilant if we are to keep it that way”.
The country brought in some of the toughest restrictions in the world on travel and activity early on in the pandemic, when it only had a few dozen cases.
…
Ms Ardern said modelling indicated New Zealand could have had more than 1,000 cases a day if it had not brought in the lockdown so early.
She said the country could never know how bad it would have been but that “through our cumulative actions we have avoided the worst”.
New Zealand’s remote location and easily sealable borders played in its favour when the virus broke out, experts say.
But the government has also been praised for the clarity of its messaging throughout the crisis.
…
In Australia, the rise in infections has also slowed considerably in recent weeks. There were just 16 new cases recorded on Sunday.
Much like in New Zealand, its government has been praised for its response to the crisis and opinion polls show that trust in the country’s leadership has risen.
Restrictions are easing in some areas, with some states planning to relax social distancing rules to permit larger outdoor gatherings this week….
I worked with @HillaryClinton on public policy [f]or two decades.
I Know that if she was President, she would have ordered mass testing in January, stayed on it, devised a plan to contain the virus like S Korea, and countless lives would’ve been saved.
Children are falling ill with a new and potentially fatal combination of symptoms apparently linked to Covid-19, including a sore stomach and heart problems, Denis Campbell, the Guardian’s health policy correspondent, reports.
The children affected appear to have been struck by a form of toxic shock syndrome. Some have been left so seriously unwell that they have had to be treated in intensive care. At least one has undergone extra corporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) treatment, which is used when someone’s life is at risk because they can no longer breathe for themselves.
It is not known how many such cases have appeared, though it is thought to be a small number. But NHS bosses are so concerned that they have written to doctors alerting them to the existence of the syndrome and asked them to urgently refer any children who appear to have it to hospital. In a letter to GPs in north London, reported by the Health Service Journal, NHS bosses said:
It has been reported that over the last three weeks there has been an apparent rise in the number of children of all ages presenting with a multi-system inflammatory state requiring intensive care across London and also in other regions of the UK.
The cases have in common overlapping feature of toxic shock syndrome and atypical Kawasaki disease with blood parameters consistent with severe Covid-19 in children.
There is a growing concern that a Sars-CoV-2-related inflammatory syndrome is emerging in children in the UK, or that there may be another, as yet unidentified, infectious pathogen associated with these cases.
Akira MacKenziesays
@ 73
…the White House has announced that the president will brief the nation tonight.
Please let him announce he’s resigning… please, oh please, oh please…
Really needs to be read in full. “Trump posted more than 40 tweets or retweets just in the 12 hours between noon Sunday and midnight. The word ‘coronavirus’ was mentioned in one of them.”
johnson catmansays
re SC @77: Calling his comments and tweets “sarcasm” only makes him look worse. If he was being “sarcastic” in a presser that is supposed to be a serious event about the dire circumstances of a medical crisis in our country, he is wasting time and resources speaking to the country. The Orange Toddler-Tyrant is an ignorant liar, and his motives are completely transparent. He will never admit that he was wrong because he is a weak-ass bully.
a multi-system inflammatory state requiring intensive care
And here in the USA we still have doofuses protesting, (while not observing social distancing rules), and carrying signs that claim that the media is hyping coronavirus just to hurt Trump. Meanwhile, children are dying from a multi-system inflammatory state brought on by coronavirus. Sometimes I just want to throw up my hands and give up.
SC @73, and Akira @76, I actually experienced a moment of relief when I heard that Trump would not appear at a press briefing today to misinform the public. I was so disappointed when I saw that he would subject us to a press conference tonight. My bet is that he does not want to take questions from the press, but that he has to get his TV audience fix by appearing in front of the camera to spout his usual torrent of lies and disinformation.
blf @68, glad you checked in. “Several of the local nursing homes are reporting no Covid-19 cases,” I have to say “wow” to that news. So unlike most of the news in the USA. Rachel Maddow has really been on top of the nursing home infection rates and deaths here. Very disturbing news.
Here’s one example from The Rachel Maddow Show: Link.
Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California Association of Long-term Care Medicine, talks with Rachel Maddow about the steps that are necessary to secure the health of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to maintain a crucial piece of the national coronavirus response.
SC @62, OMG, more bad consequences. I hadn’t considered that vaccination programs for other diseases would be cancelled because of coronavirus. Makes sense, but that just hadn’t occurred to me. It’s like dominoes falling.
a_ray @55:
I don’t think Birx will ever be thought of as a serious professional again.
Yes. It’s unfortunate, but I think you are right. She is now a trumpian mouthpiece, albeit still smarter than Hair Furor himself.
blfsays
Lynna@80, In France overall, the nursing home situation has been dire, a problem exacerbated by it being a not-too-well funded part of the French healthcare system (I am not familiar with details, so may be inadvertently misrepresenting), plus — initially — a systemic glitch which meant Covid-19 deaths (and cases?) were being under-reported (or simply not counted). As far as I am aware, that glitch has been fixed; to the authority’s credit, the glitch was acknowledged early on.
I think they have been doing weekly, almost daily hit jobs on her [AOC]. It’s unbelievable how threatened they feel but they are doing their job. Don’t be surprised to find out in a few years, she’s suddenly hated for no reason by the idiot “independents”.
I’m afraid you are right.
The hate campaign against AOC is relentless. I don’t think it will stop.
The rightwing arguments against her are less of an actual disagreement with the policies she espouses, and are more of an expression of the rightwing’s obsessive need to have a target. All that hate has to be directed somewhere, and what better target than a woman.
Also, the rightwing can, once it has a target, create an atmosphere in which that target stands in for everything they hate. AOC is a symbol to them, not a person. Now, to Fox News, AOC represents all liberals, all politicians who are not trumpian, etc.
blf @82, ah, I see. Thanks for the additional information.
Here’s some good news from the USA: “Supreme Court rejects argument intended to undermine the ACA.”
Many of the Affordable Care Act’s opponents keep looking to the U.S. Supreme Court to help undermine the health care reform law. They also keep failing.
From NBC News’ Pete Williams:
By an 8-1 vote, the court said when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act, it set up programs to compensate insurance companies during the first three years for plans that turned out to be unprofitable. But when several companies sustained a total of $12 billion in losses, both the Obama and Trump administrations said because Congress didn’t fully fund the reimbursement program, the government had no obligation to pay.
More explanation, from Steve Benen:
[…] When the ACA was created a decade ago, there was a broad understanding that private insurers would benefit from millions of new customers, but they’d also take on new risks, since the law required insurance companies to treat all customers equally, regardless of pre-existing conditions. That raised the prospect, of course, of some insurers taking on hard-to-predict numbers of unhealthy consumers whose coverage would cost more.
The law’s architects added “risk corridors” — an idea Republicans liked in the not-too-distant past — to help reimburse insurers that took a hit, at least for the first few years as the new marketplace took shape. The same provision also required insurance companies that didn’t take a hit to pay into a risk corridor fund to help the rest of the industry.
As longtime readers may recall, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), for reasons that were never altogether clear, helped lead the charge to destroy the risk corridors. (It almost certainly had something to do with the Floridian’s ill-fated presidential campaign and its false claim that he “killed Obamacare.”) Rubio and his Republican brethren succeeded, which led to some very unhappy insurers: companies that worked within the system in good faith were suddenly told the money they were promised would never arrive.
Litigation soon followed, and the justices heard the case in December. Many observers who were in the chamber for oral arguments came away with the same impression: most of the justices seemed quite sympathetic to the insurers’ concerns.
Those impressions proved true.
While this resolves one of the pending Supreme Court cases related to “Obamacare,” as we discussed last month, there’s a more serious threat to the law still on the horizon. The fact that today’s ruling was so one-sided has fueled some talk in legal circles that the justices just aren’t too keen on tearing down the ACA just because some far-right officials want them to.
…As the American people face the devastating toll of the coronavirus pandemic, they are vigorously debating whether their president is psychologically fit to lead the country in the weeks and months ahead. The silencing of Lee and her collaborators by Lieberman and the APA detracts from the ability of the mainstream media to conduct this vital discussion. And today, looking back at the public relations campaign against her book, key questions have yet to be definitely answered: Why did Lieberman and the APA seek to silence the voices of these distinguished psychiatrists who study dangerousness? Was the potential loss of federal funding the main driver? Was it perhaps also done for reasons of ego and power, with Lee and her collaborators getting too much attention?
But the most pressing question now is this: Is it time for the APA to modify or even suspend the Goldwater rule? As the nation grapples with a series of previously unimaginable long-term threats to the health and well-being of its citizens, can America afford to be guided by a guild that silences experts who could provide insight into the mind of a president who may be exacerbating this crisis?
Much more atl. (Two notes: First, I read The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President when it came out in 2017. Some of the chapters are insightful, but the overall quality is very uneven, and so I couldn’t/can’t recommend it as a whole. I haven’t read the new edition. Second, I’m summoning every ounce of self restraint not to rant about Lieberman and the APA. You’re welcome.)
Of course he doesn’t understand the real situation.
Abandoning everything he said last week, Trump suddenly has concerns about aiding “Democrat-run” states.
The New York Times published a good analysis yesterday on one of the “recurring features” of Donald Trump’s presidency: [Trump’s] “knack for detonating so many of our powerful shared experiences into us-versus-them grenades.” […]
This morning, for example, the president thought it’d be a good idea to question why certain struggling states — led by officials from a party he holds in contempt — should receive federal aid during the pandemic.
“Why should the people and taxpayers of America be bailing out poorly run states (like Illinois, as example) and cities, in all cases Democrat-run and managed, when most of the other states are not looking for bailout help?” Trump tweeted Monday morning. “I am open to discussing anything, but just asking?” he added.
[…] Trump made several seemingly unambiguous statements in support of federal aid to states early last week, treating it as an issue with broad, bipartisan support. His new posture contradicts his position from last week, suggesting the president is receiving some misguided advice from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. […]
At this point, we could explain the fact that many states are facing fiscal crises, not because of mismanagement or reckless budgeting, but because of a global pandemic. We could also explain that the consequences of adopting this far-right approach — letting states and cities deal with deteriorating fiscal conditions through mass layoffs, for example — would be a longer and an even more brutal economic downturn.
But for now, let’s put those relevant angles aside to focus on something known in policy circles as “donor states.”
Governing magazine explained last year, “Residents in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey and New York have some of the highest tax bills in the nation. They also pay thousands more in federal taxes than their state receives back in federal funding. In total, 10 states are so-called donor states, meaning they pay more in taxes to the federal government than they receive back.”
[…] Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky, meanwhile, is on the other end of the spectrum: more than almost any other state, the Bluegrass State receives more in federal funds than it sends to D.C.
Similarly, Rick Scott’s Florida — the president’s adopted home state — also receives about $3,000 more per resident in federal funds than it adds to the treasury in D.C. (In fact, the number of donor states in the southeast is literally zero.) When Florida was living “within its means,” as Scott put it, the state was doing so thanks in part to donor states that were sending federal dollars its way.
In other words, states like New York and Illinois help subsidize states such as Kentucky and Florida — all of which adds a degree of irony to the rhetoric we’re hearing from the likes of McConnell, Trump, and Rick Scott.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) was understated about this on Twitter this morning, though he wrote, “If Florida would like to have a conversation about making sure no state gets more money from the federal government than they send to it, Connecticut is ready.”
…Whitlock said her 14-day quarantine period ended on Sunday and she was asymptomatic, but when contacted by ABC 11’s Jonah Kaplan about whether Whitlock had attended rallies the last two Tuesdays, Whitlock simply said, “No comment.” If she did attend, she risked the lives of hundreds of her fellow neighbors. Whitlock did confirm that she planned to attend a rally this week….
We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won’t be.
He got that wrong… so wrong.
The Irish Times’ Fintan O’Toole had a rather brutal column over the weekend on Donald Trump’s presidency and its impact on global perceptions of the United States. “Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” O’Toole wrote. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
The award-winning columnist added that it’s easy to “feel sorry for Americans” because we’re struggling during crisis conditions “with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.”
O’Toole’s indictment of the American president came the day after the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ran this similarly unfortunate report.
Usually straitlaced and solemn in his delivery of up-to-the-minute health advice, Australia’s Chief Medical Officer stifled giggles when asked about US President Donald Trump’s latest suggested treatments for coronavirus.
[…] A journalist quite fairly summarized Donald Trump’s comments about possible research into treating the virus with ultraviolet light on disinfectant injections, and asked, “Given that this is coming from the president of the United States — an influential person — is there any scientific basis to either of these propositions?”
Brendan Murphy, Australia’s chief medical officer, seemed to struggle to avoid laughing. Grinning and apparently amused, said he would “caution against” the injection of disinfectants because they can be “quite toxic to people.”
Broadly speaking, I think there are two angles of note to developments like these. The first is Trump is reportedly outraged by the very idea of people laughing at him, but on the international stage, it’s not an unusual occurrence.
[…] Trump has reportedly been preoccupied for years with concerns about being the subject of ridicule, but the list of instances in which world leaders have laughed at him is not short. […]
for all of Trump’s obsessive focus on improving the United States’ global reputation, he’s obviously done the opposite.
As a New York Times report put it last week, the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is “perhaps the first global crisis in more than a century where no one is even looking for Washington to lead.”
The world is, however, looking to Washington for comic relief.
Signing relief checks wasn’t enough. Trump is now also sending letters to we-the-people, all in order to declare his magnanimity.
Nothing says selfless generosity like holding up the checks people desperately need for food and shelter in order to attach your personal signature to them. But apparently putting his name on pandemic relief checks that were paid for by American taxpayers wasn’t deplorable enough for Donald Trump.[…]
Now Trump will also be sending a letter to American taxpayers declaring that he “proudly signed” the checks for which they are footing the bill. (Of course, you realize, Trump thinks that’s his money and not ours. He doesn’t actually get that he’s just a steward of the financial resources that taxpayers amass and will eventually be on the hook for.)
“I am pleased to notify you that as provided by the CARES Act, you are receiving an Economic Impact Payment of $1,200.00 by Direct Deposit,” Trump writes in the letter, according to TPM. “We hope this payment provides meaningful support to you during this period.”
People who receive a physical check will also receive the letter, but the main problem for Trump was the notion that direct deposit recipients might not give him proper credit for all the “incredible” work he’s been doing during the pandemic. […]
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, however, wants to block Trump from pulling the PR stunt of affixing his signature to any future pandemic relief. Schumer plans to introduce a bill called the No PR Act.
“President Trump unfortunately appears to see the pandemic as just another opportunity to promote his own political interests,” the New York Democrat said in a statement. “The No PR Act puts an end to the president’s exploitation of taxpayer money for promotional material that only benefits his reelection campaign.”
Not to mention the fact that taxpayers won’t be deprived of badly needed relief for weeks on end just so Trump can perpetuate the fantasy that he’s actually doing anything during this crisis besides binge-watching cable news, sending out a few tweets, and promoting deadly “miracle cures” in his spare time.
In his role as Donald Trump’s do-little secretary of state, Mike Pompeo has appeared to devote most of his diplomacy to trolling the rest of the world on Donald’s behalf. Such is the case yet again, as Pompeo prepares to unveil a new argument that Well Actually the United States remains a “participant” in the Iranian nuclear deal that Trump loudly (very loudly) withdrew from, and which the Trump team continues to insist no longer applies, and which the Trump team has been continuously pressuring all international allies to also treat as invalid, issuing various threats to those that continue to deal with Iran under the accord’s guidelines.
[…] By arguing that the United States is still “participating” in the nuclear deal despite an entire administration’s worth of public claims that no we absolutely are not, Pompeo will argue that the United States still has the authority to forcibly “snapback” harsher world sanctions on Iran that were lifted after the deal was inked, sanctions that the Trump administration will in turn argue are binding on all United Nations members. Most specifically, the Trump administration will argue that the world must re-impose sanctions prohibiting conventional arms sales to Iran, after the current such ban expires in October.
Yes, it’s a complete troll move and everybody knows it. The United States is now known on the world stage for being the world’s greatest exporter of bullshit, and Pompeo’s performances have been reliably Trumpian in their … unsubtlety. You can’t presume we’re not part of an international accord simply because we’ve said repeatedly that we have withdrawn from it! Maybe we were lying! We probably were lying!
[…] The Trump administration has argued that the deal no longer applies, because they say so—but when it comes to the sanctions imposed by the deal, threatened by the deal, or reversed by the deal, Pompeo and team have argued that all of those sanctions should now apply because Reasons. It’s only the U.S. obligations that have gone by the wayside; on everything else, the world remains obligated to Do What Donald Says.
The Times repeatedly refers to the Pompeo plan as an “intricate strategy,” part of the Times’ continued insistence on portraying the Trump team’s endless reversals and dishonesty as strategic, rather than flailing. The plan does not seem terribly “intricate,” however. It is just petty.
OMG, the New York Times should just put a MAGA hat on it’s front page. The newspaper is now guilty of pumping out trumpian propaganda almost every day.
Having failed to convince even our close international allies to abandon the Iranian nuclear deal on Donald Trump’s say-so, overall administration “strategy” toward Iran still remains the same. It is centered around forcing Iran to itself break the accord by putting it under such untenable sanctions and military pressure that they are all but obliged to do so, at which point Mike Pompeo will jump to his feet to triumphantly declare that see, that nation over there cannot be trusted, just like we told you. […]
He’s definitely eager to please, you’ve got to give him that. […]
The Wisconsin health department now reports that 36 people have tested positive for coronavirus after probably being exposed during the April 7 primary election. Republicans in that state forced voters to show up in person, and to stand in long lines for hours, if they wanted to vote.
Now the number of people who were infected continues to rise.
[…] Shortly after the state held an in-person election on April 7, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services announced “new tracing mechanisms” to help local health departments track residents who might have been exposed to the virus while working the polls or casting a ballot.
“So far, 36 people who tested Covid-19 positive after April 9 have reported that they voted in person or worked the polls on election day,” said Jennifer Miller, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.
Miller said “several” people within that group reported additional possible exposures, making it unclear whether the election itself is responsible for their contraction of the disease. If those people contracted the virus prior to the election, they could have also spread it to others who went to the polls that day.
For that and other reasons, the figure is likely to grow in coming weeks. Forty people in Milwaukee County who participated in the election have tested positive, according to WUWM. Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik on Friday said data was still being analyzed but could be finalized by May 1.
State and local health officials said they expected to see cases begin emanating from the election by the following week, but the Department of Health Services said it wouldn’t “have a full picture of the impact for several weeks,” noting the lengthy contact tracing process to track exposure of the virus. […]
As states continue to do what the federal government should be doing, Nevada and Colorado have joined the West Coast reopening alliance.
[…] The governors of California, Washington and Oregon had already announced a regional pact aimed at restarting their economies as the pandemic’s spread has slowed. The addition of two more states means the group will encompass some 60 million Americans, or about a fifth of the nation’s population.
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak said on Twitter that “our states will only be effective when working together against” the coronavirus, citing the need to share information. And he noted that their economies are intertwined by tourism and commerce, necessitating collective action to prevent the virus from flaring anew. […]
The growing alliance reflects the fact that governors, rather than the federal government, are making the critical decisions about when to reopen their states’ slumbering economies. All five of the Western group’s governors are Democrats, and all have said they will hew to science first.
A business group representing employers in Washington, California and Oregon wrote a letter those states’ governors on Monday urging clear directives for industry and pledging “to work with you, collectively as a region and individually in each of our states, as we execute a plan for economic recovery.”
After posting many tweets in which he misspelled Nobel Prize and Nobel Committee as “Noble….”, Trump claimed, once again, that he was being sarcastic:
Does anybody get the meaning of what a so-called Noble (not Nobel) Prize is, especially as it pertains to Reporters and Journalists? Noble is defined as, “having or showing fine personal qualities or high moral principles and ideals.” Does sarcasm ever work?
No, dude. You just can’t spell. Also, you still fail to understand what “sarcasm” means.
There are screenshots of the multiple tweets, which Trump later deleted.
From Wonkette:
[…] Mmhmm. “Sarcasm.” Like when he “sarcastically” wondered whether people should inject bleach into their lungs to treat COVID-19. Yep. […]
[…]
The United States announced a $12 billion (€11.1 billion) economic development package for Greenland this week and confirmed plans to open a consulate in the capital, Nuuk, this year. The funding will allow US agencies to work with Greenlandic officials to develop [sic] natural resources.
[…]
blfsays
(I’m listening to France24 right now…) Here in France, Macron promised masks for everyone (before(?) May 11th), and supplies are just now starting to reach pharmacies. Apparently the price will be restricted to at most c.5€ (each? per pair?), but details still seem to be vague (e.g., are they reusable?). And supplies are currently very very limited. The local village scheme mentioned in @68 is indirectly related — It seems the village council is annoyed about the vagueness (at least? (also, a different political party, fortunately not teh le penazis despite the disturbing levels of local support)), and hence moved ahead on it’s own…
“BREAKING: ‘U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump’.
First was in early January.”
WaPo link atl.
tomhsays
All of a sudden Barr cares about the Constitution. Look for the DOJ to get involved where states are restricting church gatherings.
Attorney General Bill Barr today issued a memo directing all U.S. attorneys to examine state and local policies for directives that could violate the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens. Barr also directed the assistant attorney general for civil rights and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan to oversee and coordinate efforts to monitor state and local policies and potentially take actions to correct them.
Here’s a link to the April 28 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there, more re #75 above:
Some children in the UK with no underlying health conditions have died from a rare inflammatory syndrome which researchers believe to be linked to Covid-19, the health secretary Matt Hancock said on Tuesday.
Italian and British medical experts are investigating a possible link between the coronavirus pandemic and clusters of severe inflammatory disease among infants who are arriving in hospital with high fevers and swollen arteries.
Doctors in northern Italy, one of the world’s hardest-hit areas during the pandemic, have reported extraordinarily large numbers of children under nine-years-old with severe cases of what appears to be Kawasaki disease, more common in parts of Asia.
Hancock told LBC Radio:
There are some children who have died who didn’t have underlying health conditions.
It’s a new disease that we think may be caused by coronavirus and the Covid-19 virus.
We’re not 100% sure because some of the people who got it hadn’t tested positive, so we’re doing a lot of research now but it is something that we’re worried about.
Children were until now thought to be much less susceptible than their parents or grandparents to the most deadly complications wrought by the novel coronavirus, though the mysterious inflammatory disease noticed in Britain, Spain and Italy may demand a reassessment.
“It is rare, although it is very significant for those children who do get it, the number of cases is small,” Hancock, one of the ministers leading Britain’s COVID-19 response, said.
He did not give an exact figure for the number of deaths.
Kawasaki disease, whose cause is unknown, is associated with fever, skin rashes, swelling of glands, and in severe cases, inflammation of arteries of the heart.
Brazil’s Supreme Court has ordered an investigation into accusations that President Jair Bolsonaro sought to “interfere” with police investigations for political gain.
In his decision on Monday, Justice Celso de Mello gave the federal police 60 days to question former Justice and Public Security Minister Sergio Moro, whose resignation last week pitched the administration into turmoil, about his explosive allegations.
The findings, which will be handed over to the attorney general, could result in either a request for a political trial against Bolsonaro or an indictment against Moro for false testimony.
According to the judge, “the crimes allegedly practised by the president of the republic” seem to have “an intimate connection with the exercise of the presidential mandate”, which allows for an investigation of Bolsonaro.
…
During Moro’s announcement of his resignation on April 24, he said Bolsonaro had told him on multiple occasions that he wanted to replace the head of the federal police with someone who could facilitate access to investigations and intelligence reports.
He hit out at “political interference” with the federal police, saying he could not do his job without “autonomy” for the force.
The Supreme Court judge’s document, obtained by AFP news agency and reported by local media, lists seven accusations against Bolsonaro, including malfeasance and obstruction of justice.
…
Should the investigation confirm the accusations, it will be up to the Brazilian Congress to initiate an impeachment process against Bolsonaro and potentially remove him from office.
A poll published on Monday night shows divided opinions about Bolsonaro’s future, with 45 percent of Brazilians saying Congress should open an impeachment process against the right-wing leader.
In comparison, 48 percent think Bolsonaro should not be impeached, according to the Datafolha poll.
The tensions come at the height of the global health crisis over the coronavirus.
Last week, Bolsonaro fired his Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta, who supported isolation as a tool to contain the spread of the pandemic. Bolsonaro has repeatedly downplayed the danger of COVID-19.
As of Tuesday, Brazil reported more than 67,000 confirmed coronavirus cases with at least 4,600 deaths.
Russia confirmed 6,411 new coronavirus infections Tuesday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 93,558 and marking a new one-day record increase.
Russia is now the eighth most-affected country in terms of infections, having surpassed China and Iran this week.
In total, 867 people have been killed by the virus in Russia….
A second Russian doctor has fallen from a hospital building in a week as the country’s health system continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic, with authorities ruling her death a tragic accident.
Natalia Lebedeva, the chief EMS officer at a cosmonaut training center outside Moscow, plunged to her death Friday from the window of a hospital room where she was placed with Covid-19 symptoms earlier last week.
…
The FMBA said it was investigating Lebedeva’s death jointly with Russia’s Investigative Committee, which probes major crimes.
Unconfirmed reports citing her colleagues suggested that Lebedeva may have taken her own life after facing accusations of allowing a Covid-19 outbreak to spread among the cosmonaut training center’s medical staff. Lebedeva reportedly contracted Covid-19 from Star City colleagues she had helped hospitalize.
News of Lebedeva’s death comes days after the chief doctor of a repurposed coronavirus hospital in Siberia fell from the hospital’s fifth-floor window following talks with health officials. Yelena Nepomnyashchaya, who allegedly opposed admitting Covid-19 patients due to protective equipment shortages and a lack of training among staff, was said to be in critical condition.
Lebedeva’s name appears alongside 71 other Russian and Belarussian doctors who have died from coronavirus-related complications in an unofficial list compiled by their colleagues mistrustful of official figures.
Russia’s space chief said 111 space industry workers have been infected with Covid-19 as of Monday, three of whom have died.
Putin will be making a speech later today about…something.
Brett McGurk re the WaPo report @ #101: “We need an independent commission to compare what was in the PDB with what Trump was regularly telling the public to include his often parroting President Xi. This report suggests a total dereliction of any POTUS’s first job: to protect the American people.”
Earlier this month, the Senate Republican campaign arm circulated a memo with shocking advice to GOP candidates on responding to coronavirus: “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban — attack China.”
The Trump campaign was furious.
On Monday — just days after POLITICO first reported the existence of the memo — Trump political adviser Justin Clark told NRSC executive director Kevin McLaughlin that any Republican candidate who followed the memo’s advice shouldn’t expect the active support of the reelection campaign and risked losing the support of Republican voters.
McLaughlin responded by saying he agreed with the Trump campaign’s position and, according to two people familiar with the conversation, clarified that the committee wasn’t advising candidates to not defend Trump over his response.
The episode illustrates how the Trump political apparatus demands — and receives — fealty from fellow Republicans and moves aggressively to tamp down on any perceived dissent within the GOP. The president maintains an iron grip on his party, even as his poll numbers sag and he confronts fierce criticism from Democrats over his response to the coronavirus pandemic.
During the conversation, McLaughlin called the line in the memo inartful in its wording [LOL – SC] and argued that the overall thrust of the document was about pushing candidates to go on offense over China — something that Trump has done frequently in recent days — and not to evade defending the president….
The stage is already being set by this discredited prime minster and his government. They are positioning themselves as victorious leaders of the country’s emergence from our disastrous encounter with the Covid-19 virus. Moreover, they are already using the pandemic to argue for the UK’s isolation from the rest of the world, by holding to the current Brexit transition ending on 31 Dec 2020. They do not seem to care about the impact the disease, followed by a hard Brexit, will have on our economy for years to come. Despite widespread evidence to the contrary, their message will be, “Of course we can cope on our own. Look how well we’ve all responded to the epidemic.”
The country’s response to the pandemic is indeed laudable but the PM’s role as its leader does not stand up to scrutiny. His and his government’s handling of the pandemic have been woeful. It epitomises Johnson’s casual, irresponsible and reckless nature.
Populist, nationalistic governments have developed the management of crises into an art form. Firstly, they are the authors of the crisis through their own policies. Then they claim credit for the rescue effort, despite it being achieved by others. Finally, through the use of PR and spin, they place themselves at the forefront of these recovery efforts and thereby assert leadership prowess. They are skilled at both creating the crisis (by incompetence or design) and at capitalising on the consequences. Their actions in claiming victory from a self-inflicted crisis are as shameless as they are breathtaking.
…
We are being invited to see ourselves in a battle. A battle with a virus; a virus that we can overcome with our traditional British ‘backs to the wall’ defiance…. Sadly, being ill-equipped for battle is also part of the do or die tradition we call upon. It’s insupportable to those who find themselves unable to survive the virulence of this virus. It’s offensive to the hundreds of NHS staff who have already died as a result of this tactic. And it’s a move that may well qualify as corporate manslaughter when we finally hold a public inquiry into what went so catastrophically wrong with our response.
Seizing the narrative has become the most potent weapon for enhancing the reputation of governments and political leaders. Repeated often enough, in the absence of a critical press or confident news media, the Government’s chosen narrative has a way of becoming accepted truth amongst great swathes of the population. This is because it’s often the only narrative being given any prominence and coherence….
When the immediate crisis passes, the county will be praised for its recent demonstration of national character, possibly attributed to a revival after years of EU oppression. Many heroes, known and unknown, will be publicly acknowledged and celebrated. And the Tories will launch a new branding campaign that places Boris Johnson at the forefront of this revival of the British character. Worse still, he will position himself in the vanguard of fight against the virus having looked death in the face and survived; both Churchillian and Christ-like.
We must not let Boris Johnson or his government insert themselves as leaders of the heroic national effort nor accord themselves the qualities of Churchill in leading the country through the worst of the coronavirus threat. We must stand up for and applaud the real achievers: the NHS staff, the supermarket workers, the academics and the manufacturing originations, the hard-pressed local government staff, the army, the belatedly recognised key workers and the numerous community volunteers who have kept society running in the difficult life-threatening circumstances. Let us also express our anger at the unnecessary loss of life and commiserate with the relatives and friends of those who have died.
…There are two ways of thinking about those interconnections. One might be called ‘ideational’, meaning things arising from an overlapping mind-set (it would be to ascribe too much coherence to it to call it an ideology). The other might be called ‘institutional’, meaning those things arising from governmental or administrative overlaps. And, of course, there is an interplay between the two.
Ideational connections
Here, the main issue is the very clear overlap (£) between those who think that the coronavirus restrictions are overdone, should never have happened or should be lifted quickly, and that the whole thing is essentially a fuss about nothing – the self-styled ‘lockdown sceptics’ – and those who support Brexit, think it is easy and simple, and should have been done by now.
There is a small but very influential group of politicians and commentators who approach a nexus of issues in the same way be it Brexit, coronavirus, climate change, immigration, sexual harassment or any number of other things. It’s always the same people, and always the same blokey, angry, resentful, constantly triggered but can’t-you-take-a-joke-snowflake, sneeringly superior yet self-pitying victimhood schtick.
And it’s always the same argumentative tricks – cherry-picked statistics (£350M/ comparative death rates), semi-understood factoids (WTO rules/ herd immunity), bogus past comparisons (we managed fine before/ flu), overblown rhetoric (dictatorship/ house arrest), and drastic exaggerations of their opponents’ claims so as to erect absurd strawmen for demolition (so it means WW3/ we’re all going to die? Really?).
In a previous post I gave Tim Martin, the Wetherspoon’s boss, as an exemplar in discussing this overlap, at least as regards Brexit and coronavirus. Martin, of course, is a passionate advocate of Brexit and ferocious critic of social distancing measures. Since then, fascinating work has been done by Professor Ben Ansell, a political scientist at Oxford University, showing correlations between Brexit-voting areas and lower levels compliance with social distancing instructions.
The data are open to different interpretations – especially the possibility that those in leave voting areas might be more likely to have jobs that cannot be done from home – but a plausible one is that the correlation partly reflects the overlap in mind-set I alluded to (just as there is an overlap in the US between Trump’s core vote and those objecting to coronavirus restrictions).
Another set of interconnections was identified this week by Professor David Edgerton, a historian of science and technology at King’s College London. He argues that both Brexit and the government response to coronavirus reveal shared “fantasies about British scientific and inventive genius”. He also links this to pervasive myths about the Second World War which, of course, have been central to Brexit and are almost unavoidable in relation to the pandemic. As the historian Robert Saunders, of Queen Mary, University of London, remarked, it is as if British politicians only have one historical reference point and it’s one they don’t understand anyway.
Institutional connections
Edgerton’s analysis centres on the government’s attempts to boost ventilator production, the story of which was devastatingly laid bare by Peter Foster in the Financial Times this week (£), provoking an angry response from the government. And here the ideational and institutional connections begin to merge. For as Foster records, the link is not just idiotic comparisons with the Blitz or Spitfire production, but a constant boneheaded refusal of politicians to engage seriously with experts. In other words, governmental failures over coronavirus are inseparable from Brexit ‘simplism’ in general and the Second World War myths in particular.
…
…What both Brexit and coronavirus reveal are some fundamental flaws in the way we are governed and the political discourse around it. The populist explosion of this decade, of which Brexit was a prime example, has bequeathed a way of governing which is impervious to reason, and incapable of engaging with complexity. It isn’t just chance that we have a woefully incompetent Prime Minister, a dud stand in, and a cabinet of mediocrities, propped up by a cadre of special advisors with few skills beyond contrarian posturing.
They are the legacy of Brexit. They were brought into power by Brexit. But all the things which secured the vote for Brexit – the clever-but-dumb messaging, the leadership-by-slogan, the appeal to nostalgic sentiment, the disdain for facts and evidence, the valorisation of anger and divisiveness, the bluff ‘commonsense’ and the ‘bluffers’ book’ knowledge – are without exception precisely the opposite of what is needed for effective governance in general, and crisis management in particular….
Today, Colorado and Nevada joined CA, OR, and WA in our Western States Pact.
The West Coast is — and will continue to be — guided by SCIENCE. We issued our stay at home orders early to keep the public healthy. We’ll open our economies with that same guiding principle.
Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, has announced plans to turn the city into a vast open-air cafe by giving over much of its public space to hard-hit bar and restaurant owners so they can put their tables outdoors and still observe physical distancing rules.
The Baltic state, which has recorded 1,344 cases of the coronavirus and 44 deaths, allowed cafes and restaurants with outdoor seating, hairdressers and almost all shops to begin reopening this week as part of a staged exit from lockdown.
But the health ministry has imposed strict physical distancing rules and safety measures. Shops must limit the number of customers at one time, masks will remain mandatory in all public spaces, and cafe and restaurant tables have to be placed at least two metres apart.
…
Eighteen of the city’s public spaces, including its central Cathedral Square, have been opened up for outdoor cafes and restaurants, city hall said, and more are expected to be added as the summer progresses. The move has been welcomed by owners, with more than 160 applying to take up the offer.
“It came just in time,” said Evalda Šiškauskienė of the Lithuanian Association of Hotels and Restaurants, adding that the measure would help members “accommodate more visitors and bring life back to the city streets, but without violating security requirements”.
Vilnius authorities have also given the city’s public health workers €400,000-worth (£350,000) of restaurant vouchers intended both as gesture of thanks for their work and a much-needed stimulus to the city’s cafes.
This sounds like a great idea. I wonder what arrangements they’re making for bathrooms….
“Told that states have reported an increase in people taking disinfectant since his comments last week, Trump says, ‘I can’t imagine why. I can’t imagine why’. Asked if he takes any responsibility, he says, ‘No, I don’t’.”
The local village where I live in S.France intends to provide everyone with two washable / reusable masks next week. The masks are obtained by scheduled appointment — makes sense — and to my considerable surprise, one of them will be FFP2-grade, which is known to be effective against some viruses (however, I have not been able to locate anything too definitive on FFP2 vs SARS-CoV-2). Such masks are commonly used in construction and the like (apparently), so guessing, this is a result of the local yacht shipyards, where — again, guessing — such masks are in common use…
Sadly, my beard — the notorious hedgehog swallowed sideways — will interfere with the masks.
[…]
I don’t know what kind of disinfectant Donald Trump has been injecting, but the man does not appear to be well. The president’s [sic] lethal medical musing has turned him into (even more of) a global laughing stock and the widespread ridicule has clearly bruised his fragile ego. While Trump has never been a paradigm of calmness or competence, he has become increasingly irate and erratic in recent days. Now even his diehard supporters seem to be cooling towards him. Is the very stable genius starting to unravel? [just “starting”? — he’s never been very ravelled in the first place! –blf]
Let’s start with the president’s [sic] weekend tweetstorm, which, even by Trumpian standards, was spectacularly unhinged. On Sunday, Trump lashed out at what he called a phony story in the New York Times that claimed he spends his days eating junk food and watching TV. […] He then deleted the tweet and replaced it with one in which hamburger was spelled correctly. (This was clearly a challenge for him: he has previously misspelled hamburgers hamberders.)
It turned out that the hambergers were just an appetiser. A rant about the Noble prize, which Trump seems to have confused with the Pulitzer prize, followed. This was subsequently deleted and replaced with a tweet stating it had all been an exercise in sarcasm. He is a master of sarcasm, as we all know.
[…]
Perhaps the only people more incompetent than Trump are the ragtag team of sycophants he has surrounded himself with. According to Politico, Trump is leaning heavily on Hope Hicks, who he reportedly calls Hopey, to steer him through the coronavirus crisis. Hicks, 31, who was formerly the White House communications director, is one of Trump’s most-trusted aides; according to one tell-all book, her duties used to include steaming his trousers — while he wore them. It turns out Hopey is the mastermind who urged Trump to act as a frontman during the crisis instead of deferring to health experts. Now that plan has backfired, Hicks — who officially works under boy genius Jared Kushner — is apparently developing a new strategy for Trump. He had better Hopey this one is a little more effective.
@SC 108
I’ve been thinking about how to take advantage of the lack of positive case for Donald Trump. His followers often just try to pivot to someone else being worse, and depending on the issue that someone else isn’t an american running against him or politicking against him (china, who…). But since I’m not a D that doesn’t work very well.
I didn’t consider challenging Trump with the knowledge that his supporters often don’t want to talk about him on issues. And aparently some Rs think no one should try.
To be fair loads of Ds also redirect to Trump instead of positively supporting a candidate, but I think that’s because it’s uniquely easy at the moment.
Twice as many Britons feel outlet is doing a ‘good job’ compared with nearest rival amid record traffic to its website
The Guardian’s coverage of the coronavirus outbreak is considered to be substantially better than any other British newspaper, according to a University of Oxford study looking at the UK population’s attitudes to news during the lockdown.
[…]
The Guardian’s website was also one of the most-read sources for information on the outbreak, second only to BBC News. This fits with internal traffic statistics which show the Guardian has consistently reached record audiences over the last two months […]
[…]
Separate research published on Tuesday by media regulator Ofcom […] found that around half the population had encountered disinformation suggesting the coronavirus pandemic was linked to the roll-out of 5G mobile phone technology — although it did not ask respondents whether they believed the conspiracy theory, which has led to people burning down telecoms equipment.
Vladimir Putin has extended a non-working period in Russia until 11 May, as he warned the rate of infection in the country had not yet peaked, according to Reuters.
The Russian president made the announcement during a televised meeting with senior government officials and regional heads.
Restrictions were due to be lifted at the end of April, but Putin said the peak of Russia’s coronavirus infections had not yet been reached.
He ordered the government to come up with fresh measures aimed at supporting the economy and citizens, and to prepare recommendations on gradually easing the coronavirus lockdown restrictions by 5 May.
Zoe Tillman, BuzzFeed: “Hello from my living room, where I’ll be streaming arguments at 9:30am before the en banc DC Circuit in two blockbuster cases about whether/under what circumstances Congress can take the executive branch to court — the Don McGahn subpoena fight, and a border wall funding dispute….”
This is still going on.
Tierney Sneed, TPM: “lol merrick garland just got DOJ to say that if a president instructed treasury to just pay for the health care for uninsured people, congress couldnt sue to stop it.”
A Virginia Circuit Court judge ruled Monday that the governor exceeded his authority by forcing an indoor gun range in Lynchburg to close as part of his order shuttering some nonessential businesses.
Lynchburg Circuit Judge F. Patrick Yeatts’s decision to grant a temporary injunction allowing Safeside Tactical to reopen marks the first victory by a business challenging restrictions imposed by Gov. Ralph Northam (D) to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Yeatts ruled the state law that allowed Northam to declare a state of emergency gives him broad powers, but it specifically prohibits him from limiting the right to keep and bear arms. The judge found accessing indoor gun ranges falls under that right.
The gun lobby is relentless. Although gun shops and outdoor ranges remained open, temporarily closing an indoor range was just too much.
Two Democratic senators are demanding that the country’s largest medical equipment providers shed light on the White House’s role in distributing life-saving supplies during the coronavirus pandemic.
In letters sent Monday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) asked six companies to explain how and where the Trump administration has decided to direct critically needed medical supplies now that the White House is deeply involved with managing the nation’s supply chain.
“Given the ‘unprecedented’ nature of this partnership, and the numerous reported problems with states and hospital officials being unable to obtain personal protective equipment and other medical supplies, or having shipments of these materials seized by federal officials and spirited to unknown destinations, the American people need an explanation for how these supplies are obtained, priced, and distributed,” the letters read.
The senators’ questions revolve around Project Airbridge, a public-private partnership overseen by President Donald Trump’s close adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to accelerate overseas shipments of supplies like personal protective equipment.
Kushner has touted the partnership as an “unprecedented” answer to critical supply shortages facing many hospitals. Under the arrangement, the U.S. government pays to ship orders of supplies like masks, gowns, gloves and respirators from overseas. The companies ordering the supplies — giants such as McKesson Corporation and Cardinal Health — still pay for those orders and are permitted to sell half to buyers that have already placed orders. The companies must then sell the other half to hard-hit regions prioritized by the federal government.
But Project Airbridge is subject to little public oversight. The administration has not publicized what it considers “hot spots” or what controls it is placing on supplies being flown into the country with taxpayer money.
Warren and Blumenthal asked companies to clarify whether they are hiking up the prices of those supplies. The senators are also seeking transparency on how much equipment Project Airbridge has moved, how companies are selected, and which hard-hit regions of the country are receiving half the equipment.
The senators sent their requests to Cardinal Health, Concordance, Henry Schein, McKesson, Medline, and Owens & Minor, all major medical wholesalers and distributors, and set a May 8 deadline for responses….
tomhsays
Re: #123
I forgot to mention that the the judge in this case, F. Patrick Yeatts, got his J.D. from Regent University (founded by Pat Roberson) and was the attorney for Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s school.)
“New York Times newsroom lawyer David McCraw delivers this response to @seanhannity request for retraction and apology related to @nytimes coverage: ‘No’. Addressed to Hannity lawyer Charles Harder:…”
governmental failures over coronavirus are inseparable from Brexit ‘simplism’ in general
That’s the first time I’ve seen “simplism” used to describe that kind of rightwing mindset, but, yes, I agree.
The tendency to overly simplify every issue is endemic. It’s as if they get to a certain point in analyzing a situation, and then it hurts their brain to go any further. The threat of thinking too long and hard, the threat of actually having to do a lot of work … those threats are perceived as actual threats. So they retreat into an overly simplified description. And, worse yet, they run for the comfort of well-trodden pathways like “patriotism,” “English excellence in all things,” “winning WWII,” etc.
In the USA, Trump’s cult followers do the same things. They just add trumpian flavors like MAGA, evangelical christianity, the founding fathers, freedom, guns, etc.
Let’s not let Trump get away with claiming “no responsibility” this time.
[…] At a White House press briefing, NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked him whether he should take responsibility for the failure to disseminate larger quantities of tests earlier. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” Trump replied.
Yesterday, we saw a similar display.
President Donald Trump said he takes no responsibility for a spike in cases of people misusing disinfectants after he wondered aloud last week about possibly injecting them as a treatment for coronavirus. When asked Monday about the increase of people in some states ingesting disinfectants Trump answered: “I can’t imagine why.”
Pressed further on whether he takes any responsibility for those harmed by misuse of cleaning products, the president replied, “No, I don’t.”
The fact that Trump is preemptively dodging culpability isn’t exactly surprising. On the contrary, it’s one of his standard moves. But what struck me as notable was the president twice saying he “can’t imagine why” there’d be a sudden increase in poison-control problems.
As it happens, I can imagine why. On Thursday afternoon, the president of the United States told a national television audience that disinfectants are effective in “knocking out” the virus “in a minute.” He proceeded to wonder aloud whether there’s “a way we can do something like that by injection inside — or almost a cleaning.”
It wasn’t long before Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) said her state had “seen an increase in numbers of people calling poison control.” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said something similar.
State health officials in Illinois said over the weekend that there’d been “a significant increase in calls” to the state’s poison control center, and New York’s health department acknowledged a related increase.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reported yesterday that Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Lee Norman said poison control officials in his state saw “a 40% increase in the ingestion of toxic chemicals following remarks made by President Donald Trump.” Norman added that one Kansan over the weekend drank a disinfectant product “because of the advice that he had received.”
It’s against this backdrop that Trump “can’t imagine” why there’d be an increase in Americans misusing disinfectants. […]
Trump is moving the goalposts again when it comes to the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic. This makes me think, in part, that Trump is relatively comfortable accepting large death tolls because he had no empathy in the first place.
New York’s Olivia Nuzzi asked the final question at yesterday’s White House press briefing, and it was a doozy: “If an American president loses more Americans over the course of six weeks than died in the entirety of the Vietnam War, does he deserve to be reelected?”
The reaction to the question from assorted far-right websites was unkind, but Donald Trump didn’t seem to take issue with the premise. He replied:
“So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people. But if you look at what original projections were — 2.2 million — we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. It’s far too many. One person is too many for this. And I think we’ve made a lot of really good decisions.”
The president went on to try to defend the White House’s record, concluding, “I think we’ve done a great job.” […]
Exactly one week earlier, Trump held a briefing and shared his expectations for the pandemic’s U.S. death toll: “[W]e’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people…. We could end up at 50 to 60. Okay?”
That was last Monday. This Monday, the goalposts shifted: 50,000 to 60,000 has become 60,000 to 70,000.
[…]. Within four days of Trump saying the U.S. death toll could end up as low as 50,000, the number of fatalities cleared that threshold and kept going.
Which apparently meant it was time for a new bar.
The lesson the president should’ve learned last week is that sharing overly rosy projections with the public is unwise. But Trump appears to have missed that lesson entirely, concluding that the smarter tack is to quietly move the goalposts and hope no one notices.
Except, this strategy isn’t likely to go well, either. The U.S. death toll will clear 56,000 today, and barring a miracle, projections show the number will climb above 60,000 next week, if not sooner.
Will Trump appear before the cameras next week and declare. “We’re probably heading to 70,000, 80,000”?
I expect Trump to continue to move the goalposts as needed to suit his view of himself as keeping the death toll to a minimum. It’s another version of coming in “under budget and ahead of schedule.” He doesn’t mind lying and shirking his duties in order to shore up that fragile ego of his.
As has already been noted up-thread, Trump was warned many times about the severity of the coming pandemic. Nicole Lafond wrote about this:
There have been dozens of news reports in recent weeks suggesting […] Trump was warned about the dire circumstances surrounding the coronavirus pandemic around the same time that he was downplaying the spread publicly.
The Washington Post added fodder to that argument with a new report on Monday evening, revealing that Trump was warned in at least 12 difference classified intelligence briefings throughout the months of January and February about the virus spread. The warnings were reportedly included in the President’s Daily Brief, a document given to presidents each day to inform them of the most severe and sensitive developments and threats around the globe.
It’s been known for some time that Trump rarely reads the briefing and has requested that it be read to him orally instead. But, per the Post, Trump was made aware in these reports that the virus was spreading and China was hiding information about the deadliness and contagiousness of the disease. Around the same time, we saw the President comparing the deadly virus to the flu and downplaying the need for swift action in the U.S.
Yeatts ruled the state law that allowed Northam to declare a state of emergency gives him broad powers, but it specifically prohibits him from limiting the right to keep and bear arms. The judge found accessing indoor gun ranges falls under that right.
That is some pretty twisted “logic” to get to that conclusion. The right to “keep and bear arms” doesn’t really seem to say anything about “indoor shooting”.
.
re Lynna @129:
[The Orange Toddler-Tyrant] said he takes no responsibility for a spike in cases of people misusing disinfectants after he wondered aloud last week about possibly injecting them as a treatment for coronavirus. When asked Monday about the increase of people in some states ingesting disinfectants [he] answered: “I can’t imagine why.”
A non-functioning or missing brain leads to a lack of imagination.
If there is a counterproductive way to use presidential powers, Trump will find it.
From Hunter at Daily Kos:
As pandemic-related closures rock the nation’s meat processing plants, Bloomberg is now reporting that Donald Trump plans to “order” beef, chicken, pork, and egg processing plants to remain open despite the risks to employees and surrounding communities.
Bloomberg cites an unnamed source to report Trump “plans to use the Defense Production Act to order the plants to stay open.”
This would be a … surprising move, to say the least. The plants, owned by meat producing giants like Smithfield and Tyson foods, have been shuttered due to mass outbreaks of infection among employees and multiple deaths. Over 300 workers in a now-shuttered Smithfield plant tested positive for COVID-19. Trump would essentially be ordering workers at those plants, by law, to return to the job despite the risk.
[…] Trump has hinted that he will solve the problem of endangering workers in a more brute-force way: by immunizing plant owners from liability if their employees do get infected—or die.
This would be a smaller scale version of the blanket immunity the White House and Republican leaders are mulling for all reopening businesses.
Whether workers will agree to return to work is not clear; Trump may be able to “order” the plants to reopen, likely paving the way for plant owners to swiftly fire any workers who refuse to come back or who demand safer working conditions for their return. However, that does not necessarily mean other workers will be eager to take their place after numerous plants throughout America swiftly became hotspots for coronavirus infection.
[W]e’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people. One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50- or 60,000 people…. We could end up at 50 to 60. Okay?
So, yeah, we’ve lost a lot of people. But if you look at what original projections were — 2.2 million — we’re probably heading to 60,000, 70,000. It’s far too many. One person is too many for this. And I think we’ve made a lot of really good decisions.
The “one is too many” thing is something he says whenever the tens of thousands of preventable deaths are raised. It’s an insultingly meaningless phrase in the context of thousands of deaths a day, and not reflected in his lethargy and passivity in addressing the crisis. Very likely something one of his PR people – Hicks, possibly – gave him or told him to repeat while he’s downplaying the suffering to try to fake some understanding that the deaths are a bad thing independent of his image problems and reelection chances. (As usual, he helps give the game away when he adds “I always say it” as if to underscore that it’s nothing but an empty catchphrase.)
The United States has to test like no other nation, because Trump screwed up like no other leader.
From the first moment that social distancing guidelines were considered, critics said that such steps were “just buying time.” Which is exactly correct. Diseases like COVID-19 can’t be wiped out by social distancing, but these steps can slow the rate of transmission, reducing the number of cases at any given moment and providing an opportunity for other actions. Those other actions are lead by testing. […] If it were possible to put everyone with an active infection into isolation, the rest of the nation could go back to work […]
But the problem isn’t the time purchased by social distancing. It’s the time wasted by Donald Trump. By failing to prepare for the pandemic when it first became a threat in January and continuing to snooze through February despite a wave of cases that was building both outside and inside the United States, the nation entered March with an epidemic already underway and testing that was utterly inadequate to find active cases and isolate them.
[…] the level of testing it will take at this point is genuinely enormous.
At the time South Korea brought the epidemic within its borders firmly under control, it had conducted just over 500,000 tests. It has continued testing since that point, and has now conducted another 100,000. On Monday, there were only 10 new cases of COVID-19 in South Korea, all of them with known sources.
[…] Fiddling away the entire month of February and continuing to provide inadequate numbers of tests since then has meant that testing has completely failed to describe the scope of infection at any point. Pair that lack of testing with no federal coordination of test results, no federal case tracing, no effort to standardize where and when tests are administered, and the result is a nation where 10 million tests can be done … and it will not, cannot be enough.
The percentage of positive tests in South Korea is 1.7%. Australia, which has also managed to bring the rate of new cases to a tiny number thanks to widespread testing and effective case tracing, has a positive percentage of 1.2% over 500,000 tests. Both countries used social distancing guidelines to buy time, but they also used that time, acting quickly to bring in a strong, federally-managed testing program. The total number of deaths in South Korea is 243. In Australia, it’s 83.
Had the United States engaged in an active program of testing and case tracing in February, it is almost certain that the total number of cases in the United States could have been held to a level similar to those in South Korea and Australia. And the number of Americans dead at this point would be less than 1,000.</B
[…] To reach a level of 2% positives, the United States would at this point need to conduct 45 million more tests—and that’s if it didn’t discover any new cases of disease. In reality, America is likely to need well over 100 million more tests. And it must pair those tests with an equally massive effort at case management, isolation, and follow-up. What was a huge task two months ago has been made almost overwhelming by pure time-wasting. And it still has to be done.
As The New York Times reports, Trump’s return to the evening self-congratulation session on Monday included word that the government intended to test at a rate that eventually reaches about 2% of the population in a week. That level of testing would have been wholly adequate two months ago. But is laughably inadequate now and becoming more inadequate by the day.
As economist Paul Romer noted, testing at a 2% level isn’t even enough to test the nation’s healthcare workers once a week, even if their patients were completely ignored. […]
[…] the choice can be made to have inadequate social distancing and inadequate testing, which simply results in more deaths. [that seems to be the choice of many Republican governors, and it is the choice Trump already took.]
Pew Research Center yesterday released a study of the extent to which each state has created religious exemptions to COVID-19 distancing orders.
Sixteen states allow religious gatherings, with no limit on their size. In some cases, states have deemed religious worship “essential,” in the same category as food shopping and health care. These states include Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee, among others. Twenty-one states and D.C. allow religious gatherings of only ten or fewer people. Three states have other kinds of limits. Only ten states prevent all in-person religious gatherings.
Lawsuits have popped up all over the country seeking relief from restrictions on religious gatherings, for instance, this one in Virginia last week, seeking a TRO plus damages (warning– it’s a 50 page complaint.) Expect Barr’s DOJ to get behind these lawsuits.
“Nothing But Death”: Inside the Nursing Home Where NYC’s Most Vulnerable Struggle to Survive COVID-19
Fifteen years ago, when LeVar Lawrence was 28 years old, he was shot and paralyzed from the neck down. Suddenly unable to bathe or eat or get out of bed without help, […] after the first hospital he was in closed down, he was moved to Coler Rehabilitation and Nursing Care Center on the northern tip of Roosevelt Island, a skinny strip of land floating between Queens and Manhattan in New York. Established in the 1950s, Coler is a city-run, long-term care facility for people like Lawrence who require full-time medical care and rely on Medicaid or Medicare to pay for it.
At Coler, Lawrence rediscovered his childhood interest in art through the OPEN DOORS project, joining an artist collective called the Reality Poets. Using a stylus that he drives with his mouth, Lawrence creates digital art. Known within the group as “the Vartist,” Lawrence illustrated the “Wheeling and Healing” poetry anthology and takes commissions. Every weekend he goes to visit his family in Brooklyn, where he was born and raised.
But for the past month, Lawrence has been isolated in his room at Coler with two other residents. Both of his roommates started showing symptoms of COVID-19 in early April. […]
. Residents typically live four to a room and require physical help to accomplish everyday tasks, like getting into their wheelchairs or eating, which makes social distancing impossible. Lawrence cannot wear a face mask because he uses his mouth to drive his wheelchair and type with a stylus on his phone. During our conversation, incessant, hacking coughs in the background interrupted the flow. “You’re hearing everything you need to know,” Lawrence said. “It’s just been hell. Very stressful.” […]
The arrival of the coronavirus at Coler was swift and brutal. The first case was detected in mid-March, when two long-terms residents in a women’s unit tested positive for COVID-19 and one passed away. Since then, some staff estimate that over 20 residents have died. “They’re just not testing anymore,” said Cynthia, a staff nurse who is using a pseudonym for fear she might lose her job. “They said treat them all as infectious. Residents are dying every day.” There have been five deaths in Cynthia’s unit, all of whom were showing COVID-19 symptoms; she insists that none had been tested. […]
“Part of the perception among the residents is that because they are predominantly people of color—many of them young, mostly Latino and African American men who ended up there as the result of gun violence—the administration really doesn’t care about them.”
On Monday, March 16, the day after deciding to close New York City’s public schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio held a press conference to explain how the city was going to respond to the rapidly escalating spread of the coronavirus across its five boroughs. At that time there were 464 cases, but over the next month the number of cases skyrocketed to 112,141, and confirmed deaths rose to 7,890, which turned New York into the epicenter of the outbreak, […]
shortages have proved deadly. Cynthia’s unit is normally staffed with five health care workers. In April, she said that number dropped to three as her colleagues started calling out of work, either because they were sick or afraid of getting infected. “They are so short on staffing,” Cynthia said, “one day I came in and I was the only nurse on my floor, caring for two units.” The shortages only exacerbate the discomfort and poor health of residents. Another nurse who asked not to be named notes, “We try our best to turn them every two or three hours so they won’t break down, but you need two people for the transfer into the chair, and two people to get them back. Right now they cannot take them out. There are too few staff.”
[…] The Coler administration started quarantining entire units, leaving patients who were showing symptoms in the same room as those who were healthy, like LeVar Lawrence. […] “Why would you hold someone who tests positive in a unit with 50 other people? It’s going to be nothing but death.” […]
When residents started dying, some health workers received face shields. “I asked what happened to N95,” said Cynthia. “They said we don’t have N95. Only for nurses and doctors, not nurse’s aids.” One day, one of her patients was still healthy when she left. Four hours later, she learned that the patient had been sent to Mt. Sinai hospital and died. “A healthy patient is a dead patient in four hours. We realized we don’t know what we’re up against,” she said. “We started ripping fabric to cover our hair, making our own PPE.” […]
The head of Russia’s state-run nuclear corporation has expressed concern about the spread of the new coronavirus to three “nuclear cities”, including one that houses a top-secret research institute that helped develop the Soviet atomic bomb.
The cities are closely linked to Russia’s nuclear industry, which is managed by the Rosatom corporation. Several are closed to foreigners and Russians require special clearance to enter them as facilities located there are closely guarded secrets.
Rosatom chief Alexei Likhachev said special deliveries of ventilators and personal protection equipment (PPE) were being sent to the closed town of Sarov, east of Moscow, and other towns where dozens of cases of the virus have been registered.
“This [pandemic] creates a direct threat to our nuclear towns. The situation in Sarov, Elektrostal [and] Desnogorsk is today particularly alarming,” he said in an online speech to Russia’s nuclear industry workers.
“The situation in Sarov is exacerbated by an outbreak of the illness in the nearby Diveyevo monastery,” he said, without elaborating further.
Likhachev made his remarks on a day when Russia reported its biggest daily rise in new coronavirus cases. Russia now ranks eighth worldwide with 93,558 confirmed cases, though its [official – SC] death toll of 867 is still far below that of many other countries.
…
Last week, Rosatom said seven people at Sarov’s All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Experimental Physics had been diagnosed with coronavirus, bringing the total number of cases in the city – which has a population of about 95,000 – to 23.
It said the outbreak in Sarov had begun when a retired couple returned to the city from a Russian holiday resort and that more than 100 people had since been isolated to stop it spreading further.
Ever the bully, looking for leverage to bully his perceived opponents even more, Trump suggested a federal bailout for states could depend on the sanctuary city policies of those states.
[…] Trump on Tuesday suggested that state and local bailout money from the federal government could hinge on whether the immigration policies of the individual governments seeking relief align with Trump administration priorities.
Between skyrocketing healthcare expenses and the costs of an unprecedented economic shutdown, the coronavirus has imperiled state and local budgets across the country, prompting calls for federal relief. During an exchange with reporters on Tuesday, the president suggested he would be open to such a plan, but only for states economically impacted by coronavirus, not for problems “related for mismanagement over a long time.”
Alongside Trump’s suggestion that states will have to look at sanctuary city policies the president also said a payroll tax cut would need to be part of any negotiation on a state and local bailout.
“I think there’s a big difference with a state that lost money because of covid and a state that’s been run very badly for 25 years,” the president said during his meeting with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. “There’s a big difference, in my opinion. And you know, we’d have to talk about things like payroll tax cuts. We’d have to talk about things like sanctuary cities, as an example. I think sanctuary cities is something that has to be brought up where people who are criminals are protected, they are protected from prosecution.”
He continued: “I think that has to be done. I think it’s one of the problems that the states have. I don’t even think they know they have a problem, but they have a big problem with the sanctuary situation.” […]
In a bipartisan letter to Congress last week, the National Governors Association emphasized that coronavirus-related financial hardship has struck blue and red states across the country. But the president has used the requests as an opportunity to attack Democrat-led states, insisting on Tuesday that without certain conditions, such bailouts would be unfair to the states “that have done such a good job.” […]
Bloomberg is now reporting that Donald Trump plans to “order” beef, chicken, pork, and egg processing plants to remain open despite the risks to employees and surrounding communities.
Bloomberg cites an unnamed source to report Trump “plans to use the Defense Production Act to order the plants to stay open.”
This would be a … surprising move, to say the least. The plants, owned by meat producing giants like Smithfield and Tyson foods, have been shuttered due to mass outbreaks of infection among employees and multiple deaths. Over 300 workers in a now-shuttered Smithfield plant tested positive for COVID-19. Trump would essentially be ordering workers at those plants, by law, to return to the job despite the risk.
[…] Trump has hinted that he will solve the problem of endangering workers in a more brute-force way: by immunizing plant owners from liability if their employees do get infected—or die.
Seems like they would then have a good case against the federal government.
Most legislators will stay away from D.C. a while longer.
House leaders on Tuesday reversed course on plans to bring the chamber back into session next week amid fears about whether it is safe to return to the Capitol during the coronavirus pandemic.
Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) announced the change in plans […] citing discussions with the Capitol physician, who warned that the Washington region has not yet flattened its number of coronavirus cases.
[…] “The House physician’s view was that there was a risk to members that was one he would not recommend taking.”
Hoyer said that House leaders will instead wait to call members back to Washington when the next round of coronavirus relief legislation is ready for a vote. […]
“So under those circumstances, we have decided that we will not come back next week, but we will come back very soon to pass the [next] piece of legislation. And at that point in time, we will be asking members to return to Washington,” Hoyer said.
[…] “We are going to be working in the interim on trying to facilitate committees meeting in a real way, but virtually, and provisions for the House of the Representatives to meet if in fact members cannot come back because of the virus,” Hoyer said. […]
Guidance from House officials that everyone wear face masks had mixed results. Most members of both parties wore masks, but some GOP lawmakers opted to forgo the advice.
Hoyer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told Democrats on a conference call on Monday that they planned to proceed with a vote on allowing a form of remote voting regardless of whether Republicans get on board with the plan.
House Democratic leaders have warmed to the idea of allowing proxy voting, in which absent members could authorize other members physically present in the Capitol to cast votes on their behalf. They initially planned to put the rule change up for a vote last week but called it off following pushback from Republicans, who argued that lawmakers should still be voting in person during the pandemic.
The US has reached the milestone of one million confirmed coronavirus cases, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The US death toll is now over 57,000.
The United States accounts for about a third of all confirmed cases.
The global total stands at 3,083,467, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The US has confirmed 1,002,498.
That is far more than any other country. Spain has confirmed 232,128 cases, and Italy has confirmed 201,505 cases. No other country has confirmed more than 200,000 cases.
John Hodgman judges the monologue. Ronan Farrow and I face tough questions from Akilah Hughes. Katie Porter joins for an update from Congress. And we hear this week’s highs (and a few rants) from listeners. Packed show! A real barn burner. (Burning barns does NOT cure coronavirus.)
One-hour podcast atl. Interesting discussion with Katie Porter about various aspects of the congressional situation.
From Wonkette: “Proud Boys See ‘Reopen America’ Rallies As Chance To Recruit Fellow Idiots To Their Cause”
The “Reopen America” rallies happening across the country have managed to attract all kinds, and by “all kinds” we mean anti-vaxxers, QAnon people, white nationalists, neo-Confederate groups, your average unaffiliated selfish Trumpist asshole who can’t conceive of why they should have to go perm-less just because it might save a few lives, and, of course, people who are all of these things at once. Probably most of them are all of these things at once.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that the Proud Boys are also involved. You remember the Proud Boys — the Trump-loving, cereal naming, milk-chugging, violent street gang/fraternity previously led by professional bigot Gavin McInnes and known for wearing matching outfits, assaulting protesters, and talking about “Western Chauvinism”? They are known to be friendly with various white nationalists and white nationalist groups and say a lot of racist things but also insist they can’t be racist because of how one of their members is married to a former friend of mine (no joke) who happens to be a black woman?[…]
they’re hoping to use these rallies to attract new members and supporters and propel themselves into being minutely culturally relevant again.
The Southern Poverty Law Center reports:
On April 19, the Proud Boys announced a plan called “Operation: Reopen Florida”, which included a series of rallies around the state on April 25 to “stand for freedom & against the democrat driven unconstitutional lockdown.” The promotional poster for the event, […] directs you to the group’s online store. There, you can sign up for emails to hear more about their upcoming events and purchase clothing and other items that provide financial support for the Proud Boys.
Ah yes, the Proud Boys online shop — where for $50, you too could be the “proud” owner of this travel mug reading StopTheSlander.com (a website that does not actually exist) on one side, and “Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes, Milo Yiannopoulos, Proud Boys and Laura Loomer” written on the other.
The Proud Boys are also using these rallies to rally people to their other causes, like their war against Antifa. As such, they have declared the nurses and other health care workers blocking Reopen America jerks from blocking hospital entrances to also be Antifa. […]
They’ve also been prominent participants and creators of Facebook “Boogaloo” groups — rightwing terrorist sleeper cells planning to use the pandemic to spark a Civil War. […]
See comment 25 for more on Boogaloo groups.
Of course, when they are not planning to kill us all, they are searching to find some semblance of mainstream legitimacy. As such, two of them are running for office, one already serves on the Fennville, Michigan, city commission, and others have used the rallies as opportunities to pose with congressional candidates like Michigan’s Mike Detmer:
[…] prompting Detmer to post a Facebook video describing the Proud Boys as a group fighting for “all the things that you value in your Constitution.” In an accompanying post, he listed and described all of the official Proud Boys tenets, including “Reinstating a Spirit of Western Chauvinism.”
Yep! A Congressional candidate posting about “Reinstating a Spirit of Western Chauvinism” like it’s a good and normal thing. Those tenets also include “venerate the housewife” on account of how all the Proud Boys think women shouldn’t have jobs and should instead stay home and have their babies and make them sandwiches.
On the bright side, while the Proud Boys may attract a few new members here and there, and may even make an impression on a few aspiring lawmakers, their participation in these rallies will only serve to remind the rest of the country of what absolute [choose your own descriptor] they are.
Oh, Tucker Carlson, really? You were already a mix of bad news and misinformation, and now you are effing dangerous.
There is new misinformation du jour about the novel coronavirus and it is all over Facebook, and of course, it is now being injected into the brainless heads of Fox News viewers […]
Fucking Tucker Carlson, goddammit. If there was a moment where he was being halfway decent about the dangers of COVID-19 — better than Hannity, at least — that moment is over. Carlson gave a prominent place to the misinformation du jour last night, […]
Carlson featured the video that’s flying all over Facebook, of two dumbass urgent care doctors in the medical hub of “Bakersfield,” who have done a little of their own back-of-the-napkin “research” and determined that coronavirus is a mere sniffle. Tucker Carlson, of course, presented the doctors as the REAL experts THEY don’t want you to know about, because Tucker Carlson is full of shit. […]
Carlson began by referring to new studies showing that COVID-19 is actually much more widespread in the population than we originally knew, which is something pretty much everybody suspected. He extrapolated that this therefore means it’s much less deadly than we thought, simply because all these people have it and aren’t symptomatic. (We still don’t know why some people remain asymptomatic, while others — many others — get very sick and die. We do know it’s very deadly though, to the tune of almost 60,000 dead Americans so far, in just two months. And we don’t know about what longterm effects might hit people who were exposed and didn’t die.) Carlson accused “the people in charge” of “ignoring the science.” […]
CARLSON: Here’s a physician and researcher from California called Dr. Dan Erickson. Erickson and a partner just delivered a 50-minute briefing on the latest numbers from California. The video they made has been viewed millions of times in a few days online. [If it’s a viral video, it MUST be true! – Ed.] The bottom line is after looking carefully at the data, these two researchers have concluded that California should end its shelter-in-place order:
DR. DAN ERICKSON: We’ve seen 1,227 deaths in the state of California, with a possible incidence or prevalence of 4.7 million. That means you have a 0.03 chance [sic] of dying from COVID-19 in the state of California. 0.03 chance [sic] of dying from COVID in the state of California. Is that — does that necessitate sheltering in place? Does that necessitate shutting down medical systems? Does that necessitate people being out of work?
CARLSON: These are serious people who’ve done this for a living for decades.
Actually no. They are urgent care docs from Bakersfield (Bakersfield’s finest!), and they are not epidemiologists.They own a string of urgent care facilities, and they appear to be mad COVID-19 has fucked up their business model. […]
CARLSON: They have in their hands the largest currently available data sets on this question. And the question they’re asking after analyzing all of those numbers: Are the lockdowns worth it? So what is the answer to that? What’s so striking is that so many politicians, the ones enforcing the lockdowns, don’t seem at all interested in asking it. Instead they’re bulling (?) forward as if nothing has changed. Just today, the San Francisco Bay Area announced it will be extending its lockdown until the end of May, that’s five weeks from now. What is the scientific justification for doing that? They didn’t tell us, because there is none. None.
Tucker Carlson says there is no scientific justification, therefore there is none. None. (Trump’s CDC director Robert Redfield, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Deborah Birx, and all other public health and epidemiology experts disagree.)
Over at Cal Matters, an actual journalism website, medicine and health reporter Barbara Feder Ostrov examined Dr. Erickson’s junk science about a “0.03 death rate [sic]” from COVID-19, and spoke to actual epidemiologists to see if these guys are full of shit. You will never guess what she found out.
[…] public health experts were quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing. […]
Dr. Carl Bergstrom, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, explained to Ostrov that the dipshits shouldn’t have assumed their test subjects — people who specifically came to an urgent care looking for corona tests, because of how they were sick — were a good subset of the general population, comparing it to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.”
[…] Erickson and his buddy Massihi are not very good at math or science. Did we mention they are also not epidemiologists? That seems important.
Ostrov noted that the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine have also called bullshit on these idiots:
T]he American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”
Want another actual expert? Here’s Andrew Noymer, a public health professor at UC Irvine, quoted in the Bakersfield newspaper:
“They’re advancing factual inaccuracies and playing off the esoteric nature of the mortality stats to make a case that the economy should be reopened,” Noymer said. “I agree it should be reopened, but it should be opened deliberately, bit by bit, and informed by science. Not informed by a misreading of the mortality.”
How about another actual expert? Here’s an ER doc in Michigan, as quoted by Ostrov, calling out what really seems to be motivating these Trump-loving dumbfuck boy wonders of Bakersfield, shut up, it IS TOO where all the best and brightest medical minds go to open up urgent care chains!
[…] While re-opening the economy might be good for their Urgent Care Centers (sic), it would kill medical personnel on the actual front lines.
[…] After Tucker Carlson’s fact-free bullshit that your Uncle Bugfuck is now drunk-quoting, he went on to say everything is great now, that the “curve has been flattened, but it’s likely not because of the lockdowns.” (How does he know? Just does!) He said hospitals haven’t collapsed from coronavirus, and that actually hospitals are collapsing “from lack of patients.” He and the medical rent-a-cops are right about one thing, though: California’s COVID-19 curve got flattened way earlier than anybody else’s. California — specifically the Bay Area — also shut everything down first. Oh golly, we wonder if those things are directly related!
Then Carlson attacked Dr. President Dictator Anthony Fauci, the boss of all of us, whose wishes must be obeyed:
CARLSON: Earlier this month, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom we are apparently required by law to respect no matter what he says, suggested that, in fact, we may never be allowed to resume normal life. […]
CARLSON: Now we should tell you that is the same Dr. Fauci — and keep this to yourself, because as noted, it’s not allowed to show any skepticism whatsoever — but that’s the same Dr. Fauci who also announced that shaking hands […] should be done away with forever, but then a week later told Snapchat that actually it’s fine to have sex with strangers you meet on Tinder! That was his epidemiological advice.
Another lie from Tucker Carlson, because that is absolutely not what Fauci said. Indeed, Fauci — adorable old balls Dr. Fauci — seemed to not initially realize the interviewer was asking specifically about meeting up just for sex, because he started talking about “relative risk,” and whether you were willing to stay six feet apart from the person you met on the dating app, and wear masks and whatnot. (Difficult to stay six feet apart WHILE FUCKING, Tucker.) Fauci did reference boning, but was clearly troubled by the idea, saying ultimately, “well, then that’s your choice regarding a risk.”
Are you shockingly shocked Tucker Carlson outright lied to his viewers about what Fauci said? […]
In Summary And In Conclusion!
After that, Tucker Carlson attacked Dr. Zeke Emanuel, Rahm’s brother, because Fox News likes attacking Zeke Emanuel, Rahm’s brother. The funniest part was when Carlson cautioned listeners to always be careful when somebody like Emanuel tells you what “the truth is,” because that means they are about to lie.[…]
Carlson also said THEY have not mentioned that there has never been a successful vaccine for any kind of coronavirus, which is funny because we have heard THEY mention that quite a few times. […]
For more on why the Fabulous Bakersfield Boys and Tucker Carlson are totally fucking full of shit, we refer you to a not-very-well-known website called Google.
This is a long post, but like we said, this video of Dr. Dumbfuck and Dr. Other Dumbfuck are EVERYFUCKINGWHERE right now. On Fox News, on Facebook, even on the Facebook pages of people who are otherwise smart. Misinformation and disinformation are getting worse, not better, during this pandemic.
And the more people believe it, the more people will die. […]
A Federal Reserve program expected to begin within weeks will provide hundreds of billions in emergency aid to large American corporations without requiring them to save jobs or limit payments to executives and shareholders.
Under the program, the central bank will buy up to $500 billion in bonds issued by large companies. The companies will use the influx of cash as a financial lifeline but are required to pay it back with interest.
Unlike other portions of the relief for American businesses, however, this aid will be exempt from rules passed by Congress requiring recipients to limit dividends, executive compensation and stock buybacks and does not direct the companies to maintain certain employment levels.
Critics say the program could allow large companies that take the federal help to reward shareholders and executives without saving any jobs. The program was set up jointly by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department. […]
This is courage and composure in it’s purest form.
#HealthWorkersDefendNC”
Video atl. (No idea why Neil Diamond’s “America” seems to be playing there.)
tomhsays
After dismissing the NYC 2nd Amendment case on Monday, the Supreme Court distributed for consideration at Friday’s conference 10 gun cases that had apparently been on hold for the New York case. Included are whether the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense and a challenge to Cook County’s ban on assault rifles and large-capacity magazines.
There is a full list of the 10 cases here. Orders from Friday’s conference are expected on Monday, May 4, at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
The Trump administration abruptly cut off funding for a project studying how coronaviruses spread from bats to people after reports linked the work to a lab in Wuhan, China, at the center of conspiracy theories about the Covid-19 pandemic’s origins.
The National Institutes of Health on Friday told EcoHealth Alliance, the study’s sponsor for the past five years, that all future funding was cut. The agency also demanded that the New York-based research nonprofit stop spending the $369,819 remaining from its 2020 grant […]
“At this time, NIH does not believe that the current project outcomes align with the program goals and agency priorities,” Michael Lauer, the agency’s deputy director for extramural research, wrote in a letter to EcoHealth Alliance officials.
The group caught national attention a week ago after reports swirled that millions from its NIH grants had been sent to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a research facility in the city where the coronavirus pandemic originated. In an email last week to NIH officials, EcoHealth Alliance President Pete Daszak denied giving any money this year to the Wuhan lab, although researchers from the facility have collaborated with EcoHealth Alliance scientists on research supported by an earlier grant.
The Wuhan lab is at the center of conspiracy theories alleging that the coronavirus outbreak began when the virus escaped the facility. U.S. intelligence agencies and scientists have not found any evidence to support the rumors. […]
Suddenly ending a grant early is an unusual move for the NIH, which typically takes such steps only when there is evidence of scientific misconduct or financial improprieties — neither of which it has alleged took place in this case.
The EcoHealth Alliance has received more than $3.7 million since 2015 for its research on the risks of coronavirus spread through bats and the potential for spillover into humans. The effort has produced at least 20 scientific papers, including several published in prominent journals such as Nature.
As recently as April 2018, the NIH issued a press release promoting a study linked to the research project, whose authors included a scientist at the Wuhan lab.
But the project had turned into a political liability for the NIH by the time Lauer emailed Daszak on April 20 asking for a list of all Chinese participants.
A Newsmax reporter asked President Donald Trump about the research project in an April 17 press briefing, suggesting that all $3.7 million had gone to the Wuhan lab.
“We will end that grant very quickly,” Trump said. “It was granted quite awhile ago,” he added, referencing the Obama administration. “Who was president then, I wonder?”
The CDC’s mask guidance is designed to protect everyone else from the wearer. Everyone is protecting Mike Pence in this video, without him returning the favor.
The Trump administration is now wearing their disregard for everyone else on their faces, instead of wearing masks.
When you don’t wear a mask, especially inside the Mayo Clinic, you are not being brave. You are showing that you think the rules don’t apply to you. And you are setting a dangerous example by ignoring experts.
From Trevor Noah at The Daily Show:
Probably the first time Mike Pence has ever said no to Mayo
Impeached president Donald Trump, Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Treasury Sec. Steve Mnuchin have been sued by an Illinois man over a decision to exclude nearly two million U.S. citizens and green card holders from federal pandemic relief because they filed joint taxes with immigrant spouses who lack Social Security numbers. Under the CARES Act, only taxpayers who have a Social Security number are eligible for funds, shutting out immigrants who filed returns using an IRS-issued Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN).
But this anti-immigrant decision also shuts out U.S. citizen spouses if they filed joint returns, like “John Doe” and his spouse in Illinois. “’Mr. Trump and the other defendants have failed ‘to treat him as equal to his fellow United States citizens based solely on whom he chose to marry,’ the lawsuit alleges,” CBS News reported. “John Doe ‘has lawfully filed taxes in the United States, yet he is being denied the rights and privileges under the CARES Act.’”
While the law makes an exception if a spouse is in the U.S. military, this caveat will still leave millions, including U.S. citizen children, without critical financial assistance as unemployment numbers continue to skyrocket, the Migration Policy Institute said. “MPI estimates that due to the restriction in the CARES Act, 15.6 million people will be excluded from the stimulus payments: 10 million unauthorized immigrants, along with 3.8 million children and 1.8 million spouses who are either U.S. citizens or green-card holders.”
Some of the U.S. citizen spouses left out in the cold are “frontline workers employed in hospitals, police departments and public transit,” the LA Times reported earlier this month. Others are teachers, who were already struggling before this crisis. David Hessell-Cercado told the LA Times he was surprised when he saw he was excluded. “He had assumed his husband of six years, a Mexican citizen who is in the middle of applying for his green card, would not get a check as he didn’t have a Social Security number,” the report said. “But he never imagined the government would withhold assistance from a U.S. citizen.”
Undocumented immigrants have been excluded from relief even as they pay billions in taxes annually, and pay billions more to help fund Social Security and Medicare—programs they’ll never be able to access unless they’re able to adjust their immigration status.
As Vox reported in 2018, many undocumented immigrants have filed taxes using their IRS-issued ITIN to “create a paper trail to show when they entered the country and how long they’ve been contributing tax dollars. Many are hoping it will help them get legal status one day. That has happened in past reform efforts, and one of the first requirements is usually to prove that a person has been paying taxes … So despite all the political rhetoric, undocumented immigrants are not a drain or burden on the government.”
Re #154 – here’s a version of “America” that somehow manages to ignore the pro-immigrant lyrics (and to accompany “eye of the storm” with an image of the eye of a hurricane, which is fucking hilarious).
Rachel Maddow’s opening monologue showed how the Trump administration is changing regulations/guidelines for safety to suggestions in the meat packing industry. The corruption continues.
Nearly three-dozen search warrants unsealed late Tuesday reveal a web of contacts between longtime Donald Trump confidant Roger Stone, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and other key figures in the long-running probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Stone, who was convicted last year of lying to House investigators during their own Russia probe, was never charged with aiding efforts by Russia. But his contacts with Assange add new details to a relationship that he long denied existed.
In a set of 2017 messages revealed in one search warrant, Stone assured Assange — who spent years in asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London before being arrested by British authorities last year — that he would “bring down the entire house of cards” if U.S. prosecutors pursued him.
Stone also told WikLeaks in early 2017 that he was Assange’s only hope for a pardon from the president if extradited and prosecuted in the United States. The longtime Trump adviser also appeared to be trying broker a deal to resolve the long-running U.S. investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks.
“I am doing everything possible to address the issues at the highest level of government,” Stone wrote to Assange in June 2017. “Fed treatment of you and WikiLeaks is an outrage. Must be circumspect in this forum as experience demonstrates it is monitored.”
“Appreciated. Of course it is!” Assange wrote back.
The newly revealed messages often raise more questions than answers. They show Stone in touch with seemingly high-ranking Israeli officials attempting to arrange meetings with Trump during the heat of the 2016 campaign. They also provide clues about an attempt to procure some kind of “October surprise” involving damaging information held by the Turkish government.
At times, Stone and his contacts appeared to acknowledge that Trump seemed doomed in the 2016 election and needed outside intervention. Stone also described multiple direct contacts with Trump and efforts to arrange meetings for him.
Stone also told WikLeaks in early 2017 that he was Assange’s only hope for a pardon from the president if extradited and prosecuted in the United States. The longtime Trump adviser also appeared to be trying broker a deal to resolve the long-running U.S. investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks.
“I am doing everything possible to address the issues at the highest level of government,” Stone wrote to Assange in June 2017. “Fed treatment of you and WikiLeaks is an outrage. Must be circumspect in this forum as experience demonstrates it is monitored.”
“Appreciated. Of course it is!” Assange wrote back.
The newly revealed messages often raise more questions than answers. They show Stone in touch with seemingly high-ranking Israeli officials attempting to arrange meetings with Trump during the heat of the 2016 campaign. They also provide clues about an attempt to procure some kind of “October surprise” involving damaging information held by the Turkish government.
At times, Stone and his contacts appeared to acknowledge that Trump seemed doomed in the 2016 election and needed outside intervention. Stone also described multiple direct contacts with Trump and efforts to arrange meetings for him.
In the summer of 2016, one Stone associate expressed fears Trump would lose, floated “critical intell” that could impact the campaign and mounted a frenzied effort to get a one-on-one meeting with the candidate.
“I have to meet Trump alone,” the associate wrote to Stone in July 2016. Stone arranged for such a meeting, but he said in a later email that a “fiasco” ensued after the associate unexpectedly brought a foreign military officer along.
The associate’s name was deleted from the warrant application released Tuesday, but the FBI laid out the repeated efforts to meet Trump as part of a series of events involving conservative author Jerome Corsi and UK-based financial consultant Ted Malloch, including a previously reported directive by Stone telling Corsi that Malloch “should see Assange” and prod him to release information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Ultimately, prosecutors did not charge Stone for his dealings with Assange or various intermediaries, but rather for misleading House investigators about them. Earlier this year, a federal judge sentenced Stone to almost three-and-a-half years in prison for lying to House investigators and impeding their probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
…
Prosecutors also acknowledged that their picture of Stone’s communications was incomplete: He relied on a slew of encrypted apps during some of the most sensitive months of the campaign, from Signal to Wickr to WhatsApp, and messages he exchanged on those services were not obtained….
“As part of reopen plan, Iowa gov warns that workers who don’t return to work over fears of contracting COVID will be deemed to have quit their jobs and lose unemployment insurance.”
This is what it’s all about. An owner of a tattoo parlor in Georgia was interviewed on MSNBC over the weekend and she talked about how Kemp’s saying those businesses could reopen would make those workers ineligible for state unemployment benefits. (It was a very good interview with Ali Velshi; I’ll try to find the video.) Every single thing the Republicans have done or tried to do in the course of this crisis has benefited corporations, CEOs, and Republican donors and cronies at the expense of people’s lives and livelihoods. McConnell is now insisting that liability protections for bosses who reopen be included in the next relief bill.
…In addition to treating COVID-19 patients and worrying about their own health, health care workers like Satori are suddenly on the front lines of the coronavirus information wars. On social media and in person, they’re battered with conspiracy theories about Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, the COVID-19 death toll, and the existence of the coronavirus itself. In Mexico, India, the Philippines, and Pakistan, rumors and lies have led to nurses and other health care workers getting assaulted, doused with bleach, and chased by mobs.
It’s a shocking situation for nurses, who have been rated the most trusted profession in the United States for 18 years in a row. “For people to now say, ‘Well, I don’t even trust the most trusted profession’ — that’s baseless,” Dr. Eileen Sullivan-Marx, president of the American Academy of Nursing and dean of the New York University Rory Meyers College of Nursing, told BuzzFeed News.
Nurses are sad and angry — and pushing back.
Sartori’s Facebook post was shared more than 22,000 times. He’s received support from the post, but it has also attracted conspiracy theorists. “I’ve had people asking me if I’m paid by Bill Gates. They think I’m a crisis actor. It shows me how easily people can be manipulated.”
Sartori said he has empathy for people who mistrust the medical establishment….
But after a heated discussion on social media with someone who believed the coronavirus is a hoax, he realized how different things are with the pandemic.
…
“It’s like a slap in the face,” Laura, a nurse at a hospital in North Carolina, told BuzzFeed News. “Not only are you saying nurses aren’t trustworthy, you’re also disputing my education when you’re saying that what you think is right because you saw it on social media.” She asked to use her first name because she didn’t want to face blowback on social media.
“Never have I felt that distrust until recently. I just don’t understand it,” Nicole Swiers, a nurse who works with elderly patients in their homes in northeast Minnesota, told BuzzFeed News. “We have nothing to gain by lying to you.”
Swiers said she’s blocked family members and friends on social media after they began spreading claims about the virus not being real and calling for stay-at-home orders to end. “I have hidden so many people that my Facebook feed is essentially just ads at this point,” she said.
People who used to come to Swiers for health advice now view her work with suspicion.
“My friends and family come to me with any little rash that one of their kids might have,” she said. “People went from ‘Please tell me if I need to take my kid to the doctor or not’ to believing that I’m lying about shortages of [personal protective equipment] or patient load.”
Swiers said there could be long-term effects if pockets of mistrust persist beyond the pandemic. “The problem is that if you don’t trust your health care provider, you’re not going to seek medical attention. This really is so much bigger than just the coronavirus — you’re creating this sense of distrust with health care,” she said. “And gosh, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of problems in health care, but I really don’t believe that untrustworthy nurses are one of them.”
Russians’ trust in President Vladimir Putin has fallen to a 14-year low, the state-funded VTsIOM polling agency said Monday.
The latest poll results come as Russian authorities — and Putin in particular — have faced criticism for their response to the coronavirus pandemic, which many see as providing insufficient support to businesses and workers….
Just 28.3% of Russians surveyed by VTsIOM in March named Putin when asked to name a politician whom they trust, the lowest percentage since the pollster began asking the question in January 2006.
Valery Fyodorov, the head of VTsIOM, told Forbes Russia that respondents are more likely to say they trust Putin if asked the question in multiple-choice format rather than the “open-ended” format that VTsIOM normally uses.
For example, when asked to give a yes-or-no answer to whether or not they trust Putin in April, 69.8% of respondents said yes, he said.
“The open-ended question is more about memory and information activity than about trust, unfortunately,” Fyodorov said. “In general, I would stop asking this question at all, but if I stop asking it, they will start suspecting me of some terrible things.”
In its May 2019 survey, VTsIOM said that trust in Putin had reached a 13-year low of 31.7%. Following criticism from the Kremlin, VTsIOM said it would change its polling methodology, and its revised results showed trust in Putin skyrocket to 72.3%.
More than 5,000 Brazilians have lost their lives to the coronavirus – even more people than in China, if its official statistics are to be believed.
But on Tuesday night Brazil’s president shrugged off the news. “So what?” Jair Bolsonaro told reporters when asked about the record 474 deaths that day. “I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”
Bolsonaro’s 11-word response – the latest in a series of remarks belittling the pandemic – sparked immediate fury. One newspaper, the Estado de Minas, stamped the president’s words on to a black front page beside Brazil’s death toll: 5,017.
“Bolsonaro isn’t just an awful politician and a bad president, he’s a despicable human being,” tweeted Marcelo Freixo, a leftwing opponent.
“My name’s Messiah,” Bolsonaro also told reporters on Tuesday, in reference to his second name, Messias. “But I can’t work miracles.”
A wave of disgust swept over social media as word of the president’s comments spread. “A sociopath,” tweeted the musician Nando Moura. “What a tragedy,” wrote the journalist Sônia Bridi.
“It’s a mockery. An insult. It is intolerable,” tweeted Mariliz Pereira Jorge, a scriptwriter and commentator.
Another critic superimposed Bolsonaro’s words on to a photograph of the muddy graves into which scores of Brazilian bodies are being deposited each day.
“Bolsonaro wants to turn Brazil into the Republic of So What,” the political commentator Bernardo Mello Franco wrote in his column on Wednesday.
…
There is no escaping the scale of the tragedy unfolding in Brazil, with daily images of gravediggers in protective suits emerging from some of the worst-hit cities, including Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Recife and Manaus.
As Bolsonaro made his remarks, newspapers and television programmes filled with stories about the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters losing their lives to the pandemic….
“@jaredkushner on fox and friends this AM: ‘We have achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So, the government, federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story and I think that that’s really what needs to be told’.”
Several hundred small business owners protested in Kiev, Ukraine, on Wednesday, demanding the authorities ease anti-virus restrictions to save them from bankruptcy, AFP reports.
Wearing surgical masks, demonstrators briefly blocked traffic outside a government building in the centre of the capital in defiance of rules against public gatherings, an AFP journalist reported.
“One more day of your protection and we will disappear!” read one slogan.
Ukraine reported 456 new cases and 11 new deaths on Wednesday, bringing the total number of infections to 9,866 coronavirus cases and the death toll to 250.
The country has been under lockdown since March, when authorities ordered all non-essential businesses to close – with only grocery stores and pharmacies permitted to remain open.
Public transport has been reserved for employees of essential services, including police and hospital staff.
Images atl.
johnson catmansays
re SC @165:
In its May 2019 survey, VTsIOM said that trust in Putin had reached a 13-year low of 31.7%. Following criticism from the Kremlin, VTsIOM said it would change its polling methodology, and its revised results showed trust in Putin skyrocket to 72.3%.
Wow! Sounds like the last poll used choices like those right-wingnut sites that want people to rate the performance of The Orange Toddler-Tyrant with “great”, “wonderful”, or “couldn’t have been better”.
This talk, shared by Chris Hayes on Twitter, is super informative. It also gives you hope. (Watching this after hearing Trump’s musings on ingesting disinfectants is like returning home from another planet.)
The U.S. has conducted around 5 million tests since February; the idea that we’ll very soon be up to 5 million tests per day is literally unbelievable.
On Monday, Donald Trump announced a new federal blueprint on expanding virus testing capacity, but the plan was rather modest in its scope. It still relied heavily on state governments, and by some assessment, the administration’s new approach would increase daily testing in the United States from about 220,000 to 260,000. That’s better, but it’s still not close to the kind of figures public-health experts are recommending.
It’s against this backdrop that the president made some rather extraordinary claims at the White House yesterday. NBC News’ Kristen Welker asked, “Some health experts say the U.S. needs 5 million tests per day by June in order to safely reopen. You unveiled a plan yesterday that will increase testing, but not by that much. Why not? And can you get to that benchmark?”
The president’s answer meandered a bit and included all kinds of bizarre claims. Trump claimed that the United States is “the best in the world on testing,” which is ridiculous. He twice said we’ve tested “more than every country combined,” which is a lie. He even said his administration “inherited a very broken test,” which is just odd given that he was referring to a test developed by his own team.
But the part of the answer that stood out for me was the part in which he actually tried to answer Kristen Welker’s question:
“Well, it will increase it and it’ll increase it by much more than that in the very near future.”
OMG. I saw this on video. You can actually see Trump lying. You can hear him lying. You can tell from his tone and his face that he is lying. You can see him decide to just bluster his way though. Disgusting and alarming.
Naturally, this led to a follow-up question: “Did I hear you saying you’re confident you can surpass 5 million tests per day?” Trump added:
“Oh, well, we’re going to be there very soon.”
No, we’re really not. The United States has conducted around 5 million tests since February; the idea that we’ll very soon be up to 5 million tests per day is literally unbelievable.
It was among the most unfortunate of Donald Trump’s claims about the coronavirus crisis. Pointing to the modest number of positive cases in the United States, the president argued on Feb. 26, “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” He added at the time that this amazing trend line was a direct result of the “good job” he said Team Trump was doing.
That was, of course, tragically wrong. Two months later, the 15 cases in the United States now stands at over 1 million cases.
Asked in early April to reflect on his comments from February, Trump told reporters, “[Y]ou have to understand, I’m a cheerleader for this country…. I think a president has to be a cheerleader for their country.” By this reasoning, “cheerleading” is a legitimate excuse for saying things that aren’t true and giving the public false hope during a public-health crisis.
At a White House event yesterday, a reporter reminded the president of his quote from February and asked, “How did we get from your prediction of zero to 1 million?” Trump replied:
“Well, it will go down to zero, ultimately.”
Oh. So, Trump thinks he was … right?
In case there are any lingering doubts, the president said the total number of U.S. cases would be close to zero “within a couple of days,” not “within a couple of years.” Trump probably would’ve been better off just chalking up his mistake to “sarcasm” again.
[…] Trump’s mantra from yesterday — “This is going to go away” — is practically word-for-word identical to his rhetoric from February and March. […]
The eternal lockdown crowd can make jokes on television but the reality is that the data is on our side. And President Trump has created a pathway to safely open up our country and make sure that we get our economy going.
Commentary from Marissa Higgins:
[…] This “pathway,” of course, has low-income workers, people of color, food service workers, and others terrified about returning to work for minimal wages, perhaps without health insurance or affordable child care as students stay out of school, all while only a minuscule fraction of the public has been tested for the virus. Trump himself recently told governors to consider and maybe “get going” on reopening schools, so while the logic is baffling, it’s apparently consistent between Trump and Kushner.
“The hope is by July,” Kushner suggested, “the country is really rocking again.” Again, this coincides with Trump’s plan for a Fourth of July event on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., this year… in spite of the global pandemic. […]
All of this, of course, while our testing number remains shamefully low, and the new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data suggests our death toll is actually far higher than has been reported.
From Mark Sumner: “Republicans are creating a fake movement designed to kill workers and enrich corporations. Again.”
When it comes to states that should be talking about “getting back to normal,” Iowa should be very, very far down the list. The state is in the middle of a burst of new cases which only accelerated on Tuesday, and University of Iowa researchers are predicting a second wave of infections if states move too quickly. But instead of expressing any concern over the health of the state’s citizens, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds is not only rushing to remove the few social distancing guidelines that were ever put in place for Iowa, she’s making it clear that any workers who fail to show up for jobs out of concern over their health, their family’s health, or anything else that might result from exposure to a disease that has already killed 60,000 Americans, are not protected. They are the opposite of protected. They are deemed to have “voluntarily quit” their jobs.
For anyone who had any doubts about the motivations behind wealthy conservative groups funding “reopen” protests, or right-wing media inflaming people to get out there on the streets, or Donald Trump issuing “liberate” tweets, this is it: purge workers without having to pay unemployment. And you can bet that also includes allowing corporations to pocket emergency relief that was intended to go to employees.
[…] Exactly as they did during the tea party “movement,” billionaires and corporations have stepped in, hand in glove with Republican campaigns, to fund and promote a group of reopen protests. These protests were genuinely tiny, sometimes no more than a few dozen people, and yet the media has them far more coverage than protests that have literally involved millions. Again … exactly as happened with the tea party.
[…] Iowa officials are encouraging companies to report employees who don’t show up promptly, and sent a warning about weekly fines for anyone who attempts to file a “fraudulent claim” of unemployment. All of this, after the federal government has just issued trillions of dollars in emergency funding that is supposed to help workers … but is going to companies.
Republicans have demonstrated, again, just how easily they can convince a handful of low-wage workers to become the face of their own destruction. And how easily they can get the media to report tiny groups as though there is a huge “movement” eager to do corporate bidding. […]
[…] Trump may have been blunt in ordering meatpacking companies to remain open, even though dozens of workers are ill, and the situation is in no way safe. But though Trump may have explicitly ordered workers to lay down their lives for his chicken nuggets, the whole Republican scheme has scarcely been more subtle.
Create corporate-funded protests. Provide corporate media coverage. Pretend that Republicans are acting in response to the needs of workers, rather than corporations.
And above all else, this whole scheme is designed to screw workers. Screw them. Force them into a no-win situation where they have to literally risk their lives and the lives of others, or walk away without a dime of the unemployment pay they earned. Meanwhile, corporations are sitting on loans that were supposed to go to providing payroll … just guess where that money will end up.
There are, as of this second, more than ONE MILLION confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the United States. As of this second, there are 59,692 deaths in America, more than the number of US troops lost in the Vietnam War, and the equivalent of approximately 30 9/11s. (What mass-death milestone will Donald Trump hit next?!) […]
antibody tests show, as we’ve suspected, that COVID-19 is far more widespread in the population than we ever knew, which would mean it’s far less deadly than the six percent fatality rate that’s been recorded around the world but still far higher than the flu. It’s also absolutely nowhere near what we need to reach any kind of herd immunity, if such a thing in fact exists with COVID-19. […]
As Yascha Mounk writes in a sad-but-truthful piece at The Atlantic, we are in a dark place. There’s no real testing plan, we’re not doing anywhere near the kind of testing and tracing we need, no treatments, no vaccines for a long time, if ever … it’s bad. And it’s far worse than it had to be, because of the 24/7 burlesque show of fuckups that has been the Trump administration’s response to the virus. Meanwhile, Dr. Anthony Fauci says a second wave in the fall is “inevitable.”
So anyway, here’s Jared Kushner, crown prince of the coronavirus fuckups, to tell us all on “Fox & Friends” what a smashing success this all is, on behalf of the 59,692 people who have died so far. […]
KUSHNER: We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this, and I think we’ve achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So, the government, federal government, rose to the challenge, and this is a great success story.
That punchy sound you hear is 59,692 dead people punching Jared Kushner in the face. Lined up behind them are the next, oh who knows, 50- or 100,000 people who will die of COVID-19 because of Trump’s (and Kushner’s) corona-failures.
“Milestones.” You know, like the 1,000,000 confirmed American coronavirus cases. […]
See? Trump’s bragging about it too.
The only reason the U.S. has reported one million cases of CoronaVirus is that our Testing is sooo much better than any other country in the World. Other countries are way behind us in Testing, and therefore show far fewer cases! [Fact check: LIE!]
Our testing is a fucking joke. Most states are nowhere near where they need to be to even think about reopening. According to a team at Harvard, we need to be doing at least twice as much testing as we are now. […]
Prince Jared said more fucked up bullshit on “Fox & Friends,” assuming you care. Hey look, he’s bragging about how much testing we are doing, and saying states have “excess capacity” for testing, oh my god, it’s just so great! […]
Do the states really have “excess” testing capacity right now? […] ask the governors.
Prince Jared, continuing to blow smoke up the “Fox & Friends” hosts eager asses, said the country will be pretty much “back to normal” by June, so everybody relax, if Jared says that’s the timeline, that’s obviously the timeline!
He also made a very funny wisecrack about the “eternal lockdown crowd” making impolite jokes about his father-in-law’s beautiful huge unmitigated million-strong corona-success, as if we over here in the pro-science/pro-not-dying community are just loving staying home and not being able to carry on with our normal, rich day-to-day lives: […]
And the choir of angels said “go fuck yourself, Jared” and then the choir of angels moved to the side so more recent coronavirus victims could punch Jared in the face a whole bunch more, the end.
From Wonkette: “Wasilla [Alaska, where Sarag Palin lives] Wingnuts Use Coronavirus Shutdown To Ban Some Books
The school board for the Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District, which includes the towns of Palmer and Wasilla, Alaska, voted last Wednesday to bar teachers from using five “controversial” books that parents had objected to several times in the past. […] there were no teachers or parents there to speak up in defense of the books. Jesus, you have to watch rightwing idiots ALL THE TIME, even during a pandemic. […]
The books that will be removed from the district’s list of approved works for classroom use are all standbys in the college-prep curriculum, and have won multiple awards, so of course they’re suspect.
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man
Joseph Heller’s Catch-22
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
Dianne K. Shibe, president of the Mat-Su Education Association teachers union, complained that although an agenda item had mentioned the books would be considered, most teachers and parents didn’t believe the books were endangered.
“Most of the community didn’t respond, because these books had been used forever,” Shibe told NBC News. “Now in retrospect, it’s like, ‘duh.’ I could have seen this coming.” […]
The two board members who supported keeping the curriculum list as it is, Kelsey Trimmer and Sarah Welton, both pointed out that the books had all previously gone through a public review process. District policy already requires that if a parent objects to an assigned work, students can be assigned an alternative that meets with the parents’ approval. Welton also noted that the books were only assigned in upper-level, elective classes.
It doesn’t really look like any of the board members who voted to ban the books from the reading list had read the books at all […]
Board member Kelsey Trimmer noted that what’s “controversial” can often be a matter of perspective, and that there had been complaints from a lot of different outlooks over a class on the Bible in history and literature, but that the class remained in place. She again noted that the books had all been chosen for their “literary value,” […]
Taylor insisted he thought people should have the right to read whatever they want, but that he didn’t see why schools should be assigning dirty nasty books. “For us to put them in front of teenagers as part of our curriculum, that’s just something I can’t — I don’t understand why we would put those sort of things in front of them.” Which is apparently as far as he got in reading the books.
[…] he triumphantly noted that no corporation in America would allow you to talk that way at work […]
Well there’s a compelling argument against people reading SparkNotes summaries of novels at work. And against divorcing works from their literary context, like pointing out that the man told her he’d kill her brother if she said anything, and that Angelou therefore literally didn’t speak for years, until a wonderfully kind woman helped her to find language again. It’s one of the most singularly moving things I’ve ever read, but Angelou’s rediscovery of her own voice only works because you know what she experienced, in painful detail. It would not be the same work had she only said “Mr. Freeman molested me and told me he’d kill Bailey if I ever say a word.”
[…] He also went on to insist that these five books, which he hadn’t read, have no value at all: “We’re not talking about something that’s mind expanding or something that’s going to help anybody learn any better. We’re talking about something that would not be acceptable in a professional environment, which is what parents expect out of the schools!”
[…] In addition to prohibiting the five terrible books from being assigned by teachers, the board also voted to eliminate the schools’ use of “The Learning Network,” the New York Times’ educational supplement for teachers and journalism classes, because protecting innocent teens from Donald Trump’s second-most-hated news outlet is what dipshit local governments are into these days. […]
Shortly after Wednesday’s vote, board President Tom Bergey explained to the Anchorage Press that barring teachers from assigning the five books was not “book banning,” because they would still be available in school libraries, […]
Following the banning of the books for use in classrooms, NBC News reports, all five titles sold briskly at a local bookseller:
Mary Ann Cockle, owner of Fireside Books in Palmer, about a mile from district headquarters, said her store ran out of copies of the books within hours of the board’s action.
[…] “Our biggest outpouring of support are people buying the books and donating them or leaving them to us to distribute for free.”
A new shipment of “Caged” and “Invisible Man” arrived at Fireside on Tuesday, and Cockle expects them all to be gone by Wednesday.
Anchorage TV station KTTU notes that its reporters “searched for favorable reactions to the board’s decision but was unable to find any prior to publication of this story.” Bravo. Let’s also hope that this idiotic decision leads to some changes on the school board.
The 26th Amendment takes on newfound importance in the pandemic.
The 26th Amendment is often viewed as a relic of the Vietnam War era, when 18-year-olds protested the fact that they were old enough to be drafted but not to cast a ballot. Ratified in less than 100 days, the amendment enshrined in the Constitution citizens’ right to vote at age 18, knocking down laws that set the voting age at 21. […] the amendment has newfound importance: It should prevent states from discriminating against younger voters with both subtle and brazen tactics.
The threat of the coronavirus is creating unprecedented demand for absentee ballots; many Republican lawmakers are responding by trying to limit access. There are laws on the books to help them in one regard. Currently, seven states permit only elderly voters to mail in their ballots: Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas grant this privilege to voters 65 and older; Tennessee extends it to those 60 and older; and Kentucky only bestows it upon voters of “advance age.” […] Younger people who want to vote by mail must give a reason, such as a serious illness or absence from the state on Election Day. As New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore has noted, these laws effectively limit absentee voting to “Trump-approved groups,” older Americans who are much more likely to vote Republican.
On Wednesday, voting rights advocates filed a federal lawsuit against Texas’ restriction. It is likely the first in a spate of challenges to protect the election. Unless the federal judiciary decides to unilaterally rewrite the 26th Amendment, it will be obligated to invalidate these laws.
Although it is often viewed as a simple promise that Americans can vote upon turning 18, the 26th Amendment is actually a broad ban on age-based voting restrictions. It declares that the right to vote “shall not be denied or abridged” for citizens 18 and over “on account of age.” […]
it is remarkable that such laws remain on the books nearly a half-century after the ratification of the 26th Amendment. Today, most litigation over the amendment involves overt efforts to suppress college students’ suffrage—as when Florida attempted to outlaw early-voting sites on university campuses. […]
If Americans cannot vote by mail in November, they will be forced to choose between protecting their health and exercising their constitutional rights. Some advocates are fighting in state court to expand absentee balloting, citing the health crisis and state-level voting protections. But they face a fierce battle in states like Texas, where lawmakers are appealing a state court order that would let voters cite the coronavirus as an excuse to vote by mail
Luckily, in seven states—including Texas—the 26th Amendment plainly compels federal courts to strike the age limitation and open up vote by mail to everyone, young and old. Federal courts stacked with Donald Trump appointees may disagree given their flagrant disregard for precedent, but the Supreme Court should not let them write the amendment out of the Constitution. States simply have no power to impose “special burdens” on voters who are not in the demographic most favorable to Trump.
[…] Surveying eight Georgia hospitals, researchers found that in a sample of 305 covid-19 patients, 247 were black — more than 80 percent and more than they expected.
“It is important to continue ongoing efforts to understand the reasons for these racial disparities, including the role of socioeconomic and occupational factors in transmission,” the researchers wrote. “Public officials should consider racial differences among patients affected by COVID-19 when planning prevention activities.” […]
a quarter of the patients included in the study had no preexisting conditions, and 5 percent of those patients died, a reminder the virus can cause significant illness and death for previously healthy patients.
The median age of patients was 60. Most had private insurance or Medicare; 11 percent were on Medicaid; and 15 percent were uninsured. All the Medicaid patients in the study were black, but the black patients were no more likely than others to be uninsured. […]
From Alexandra Petri, writing for The Washington Post:
“And since I don’t have the coronavirus, I thought it’d be a good opportunity for me to be here, to be able to speak to these researchers, these incredible health-care personnel, and look them in the eye and say, ‘Thank you.’” — Vice President Pence, explaining his decision not to wear a mask at the Mayo Clinic, in defiance of its policy that all visitors wear masks.
Well, it is worse than I thought.
Mike Pence, who is heading up our coronavirus task force, does not know where the eyes are located on the face.
He did not want to wear a mask because he wanted to … look health workers in the eye?
I am not wearing socks on the grounds that I want to be able to hear. I won’t be wearing a hat on the grounds that I want to be able to smell. I won’t be putting on gloves because I want to be able to taste. (I sometimes feel that I cannot hear as well when I am wearing sunglasses, but I know that this is because I am wrong and maybe something is the matter with me.) […]
He thinks the eyes are in the mouth or perhaps in the quadrant of the face between the mouth and the ears. An alarming and potent fancy! The eyes perhaps protrude from the tip of the tongue. The eyes are tucked just beneath the nose! The eyes are in a little serried row along the lips, where they wink and glisten! Where are the eyes, Mike Pence? Show us on a map where you find the eyes. Pretend I am Mike Pompeo, and they are Ukraine.
I understand that to know too much about the bodies of others and their mysterious construction might seem like impertinence, but — please. You are heading the coronavirus task force. I want to know that you are at least as confident as the average 3-year-old as to where the eyes are located in the face.
Where are the eyes? Sweet God, where are the eyes? […]
Oh, dear god. We will be subjected to a Fox News town hall shot live, featuring Hair Furor at the Lincoln Memorial. Oh, FFS.
Trump will participate in a Fox News virtual town hall Sunday evening shot live from the Lincoln Memorial. The event will include a sit-down interview with Fox anchors followed by a round of audience-submitted questions related to the reopening of the economy. The president also suggested Wednesday that he does not plan to extend federal social-distancing guidelines amid the coronavirus pandemic, noting that the country’s governors will make decisions on what guidelines work best given the conditions in their states.
Meanwhile, as antsy Americans show growing signs of “quarantine fatigue” and officials face pressure to ease coronavirus restrictions, factories, malls and state governments in many parts of the country are taking steps toward reopening.
Here are some significant developments:
Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said a second wave of infections is “inevitable” in the United States, which has recorded more than 1 million confirmed cases — nearly one-third of the global total. […]
Millions of municipal workers could find themselves out of a job or without pay. This is the next wave of the disaster, in my opinion.
In Michigan, some unstaffed highway rest stops are shuttered. In Santa Barbara, Calif., local librarians are out of a job. Dayton, Ohio, has ordered furloughs at nearly every agency, and in Arlington, Tex., police officers and firefighters may soon see painful cuts.
Facing an urgent financial crisis, these and other cities and states nationwide are eyeing dramatic reductions to their workforces, threatening critical public-sector employees and first responders at a time when many Americans may need their local governments’ help the most.
Even as […] Trump and top Republicans contend that only what they depict as big-spending, liberal-leaning states are to blame for mounting budget woes, a Washington Post review found the economic havoc wrought by the coronavirus is far more widespread — saddling Democratic and Republican mayors and governors alike with souring finances and major revenue gaps. Some local governments have already started laying off or furloughing thousands of their workers, and the numbers are likely to grow markedly in the absence of federal aid.
Among municipalities, the new budget cuts could be profound: Between 300,000 and 1 million public-sector workers could soon be out of a job or sent home without pay, according to a new estimate from the National League of Cities. The steep reductions in staffing levels could affect education, sanitation, safety and health, local leaders warn, potentially leaving critical public services in utter disarray.
For governors, mayors and other top local officials, their economic troubles stem from the precipitous drops in revenue that have come as a result of shuttered businesses and sharp decreases in shopping and travel. The extent of the disruptions are poised to reach a level not seen since the Great Recession more than a decade ago, a reality that has prompted many city and state leaders to plead with Washington for help.
But their public quest for federal cash has been met with staunch political resistance from Republicans, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who at one point suggested states should have the option of falling into bankruptcy. Top Trump administration officials have echoed that skepticism and signaled that any aid would come with conditions: On Tuesday, for example, the president said he would only approve money if states cracked down on immigration policies in “sanctuary cities.” […]
The text quoted above is from The Washington Post.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump retracted his claim that the U.S. will soon be able to administer 5 million COVID-19 tests every day after his own testing director on the White House task force, Admiral Brett Giroir, emphatically rejected the possibility of that goal.
“Somebody started throwing around five million,” Trump told reporters, referring to a Harvard University study that found that reopening the economy would only be feasible if the government were able to do at least five million tests daily by early June, and then ramp it up to 20 million tests each day by late July.
“I didn’t say 5 million,” Trump said, despite the fact that he had said exactly that the day before.
On Tuesday, Trump had told a reporter that “we’re going to be there very soon” when she asked if the U.S. would be able to carry out 5 million tests a day.
That was the same day Giroir told TIME that “there is absolutely no way on Earth, on this planet or any other planet, that we can do 20 million tests a day, or even 5 million tests a day.”
From the readers comments:
NUMBERS!!!
must be difficult to have to deal with numbers with such a dumb fuck brain
———————-
Never mind that he completely contradicts what he said about this vital matter literally the next day. He’s done that god knows how many times. It’s that this really is vital to making a semblance of normality viable in this country without risking people’s lives. And he knows nothing about it, doesn’t care about it, and they’ve done nothing about it. Nothing. The states can’t do this. It has to be the feds. And they’ve done nothing.
———————–
But, but “Somebody started throwing around the 5 million tests claim and I was only passing it on doncha see? Why do you reporters always need to remind me of what I said yesterday when I don’t want you to or even remember what I said yesterday? Why is the truth so mean to me?”
“NEW: @USAID grant-recipient language seen by The Daily Beast informs NGOs they can’t buy PPE — for themselves or for people in need — with USAID $. Ex-USAID official @JeremyKonyndyk: ‘We’re making the whole world pay the price for our own incompetence’.”
“Scoop: The U.S. has just circulated a confidential proposal to conduct an immediate evaluation of WHO’s response to the pandemic, focusing on how the pathogen got its start in China. Dips say U.S. faces uphill battle to get support.”
In a study of 1,063 patients sick enough to be hospitalized, Gilead Sciences’s remdesivir shortened the time to recovery by 31% — 11 days on average versus 15 days for those just given usual care. The drug also might be reducing deaths, although that’s not certain from results of the study so far.
…
By comparison, antiviral drugs for the flu shorten illness by about one day on average and only when started within a day or two of symptoms first appearing.
About 8% of those on the drug died versus 11.6% of the comparison group, but the difference is not large enough for scientists to say that remdesivir was the reason.
…
It’s given through an IV and blocks an enzyme the virus uses to copy its genetic material.
…
The study only tested the drug in patients sick enough to be hospitalized, so its safety and effectiveness for people less ill isn’t known, Fauci said.
…
Gilead said it was ramping up production and aims to have more than 140,000 treatment courses by the end of May, more than 500,000 by October and more than 1 million by December.
As political leaders discuss relaxing social distancing restrictions and opening up the economy again, a majority of Americans are concerned about whether it is safe to do so. They have fundamental questions about how the nation is doing, what will happen after it opens up, whether we will be able to keep people safe, and could we have to shut down again.
As we struggle our way through this, an essential element is missing: strong, effective leadership from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the premier public health agency in the world.
Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the CDC has been inexplicably absent, and Americans are suffering and dying for it.
The CDC has long been the steady, trusted source for high-quality national data and evidence-based guidance. But not this time, when its voice is needed the most.
While individual states oversee their public health departments, provision of health care, and actually implement policies and programs, the CDC has always provided the intellectual leadership, technical expertise, the expert guidance that states rely on to do their work. This federal agency coordinates efforts across states so they can learn from one another. And the CDC standardizes data and methods so we can get a true national picture of what is happening.
Want to know how many tuberculosis cases there were in the U.S. last year? Ask the CDC. Want to know about health-care-associated infections? Ask the CDC. It knows.
But ask how many Covid-19 tests have been done, and the CDC’s doesn’t have an answer. Want a daily update on how many people are getting hospitalized for Covid-19? The CDC isn’t tracking it. Want to know if social distancing is making a difference? The CDC doesn’t know.
During this pandemic, when accurate, timely, nationwide information is the lifeblood of our response, the CDC has largely disappeared.
The performance of the world’s leading public health agency has been surprising, and by that I mean surprisingly disappointing….
…
Effective leadership from the CDC starts with immediately collecting standardized data and updating it regularly — including weekends. Yet for four weeks, the CDC took weekends off from reporting any data on the pandemic until overwhelming criticism forced it to change course. Daily CDC briefings would help the American public understand the data: Not only do we need to know the number of infections, tests, hospitalizations, deaths, and ICU cases, we need CDC experts to put these numbers in context, explain trends and outliers, and keep us grounded in science. Daily updates from the CDC would allow all of us to better understand how we are doing, whether we are likely to run out of hospital capacity and when, what the bottlenecks are on testing, and how we get ahead of this outbreak.
It would be easy for the CDC to do this, but it hasn’t.
Most states are already reporting some of this information every day, though often in haphazard and incomplete ways. The CDC’s natural role is working with states to standardize data collection and reporting it in a way that would make timely, important information publicly available.
It should also commit to providing guidance based solely on evidence, not speculation….
During any public health crisis — especially the largest one of our generation — the nation’s top public health agency needs to provide leadership. That’s what the American people expect and deserve. But so far the CDC has been absent from the fray, and its absence is being felt.
This must be a painful time for the many extraordinary career scientists who continue to work at the agency. But it’s a painful moment for the American people, too, and with deadly consequences. Real CDC leadership — clear, science-based guidance, effective coordination of states, and public transparency of data — is absolutely essential for confronting and getting clear of this crisis.
The CDC was once the world’s greatest public health agency. We need that CDC back, and we need it now.
Brazil has reported a record increase in cases, with its ministry of health confirming 6,276 more infections in a 24-hour period, taking the country’s total to 78,162.
It has also suffered another 449 deaths in that time, raising its toll to at least 5,466 people since the outbreak began. Health specialists believe the real numbers are much higher.
…
Now, [Bolsonaro] has sought to blame state governors and mayors for the deaths – even though they have introduced social distancing measures against his orders while he repeatedly mingled with supporters and other Brazilians.
He argued that they should be asked why they “took such restrictive measures and people kept dying” and told reporters: “You won’t put that bill on my lap.”
Asked what responsibility he held for rising deaths, he replied: “The question is so idiotic I’m not going to reply.”
In the Amazon city of Manaus, where the overloaded health system has collapsed, reports from Yahoo News said many people were dying at home without being tested and others in ambulances as they drove around the city looking for beds in intensive care. Relatives of some victims were even opening the sealed coffins of relatives being buried in mass graves to ensure they were really inside.
Talking privately, one Manaus doctor working in the public health sector said there are about 100 people on the waiting list for intensive care beds. Hospitals are also struggling to remove bodies.
There’s no room and nowhere to put them. The refrigerated containers fill up occasionally.
In Rio de Janeiro, a doctor also speaking anonymously said one hospital was running out of sedatives and neuromuscular blockers used for intubating and managing intubated patients. Local media has published photos of the vertical structures cemeteries are building to stack coffins up to eight high.
Brazil’s new health minister Nelson Teich has said he does not know when the epidemic will peak in Brazil and that a “second wave” is a very real possibility.
According to the O Globo newspaper, Teich said a “critical point” is a lack of ventilators in the country, adding: “We’ve never had so many big problems at the same time.”
In Washington, the US president Donald Trump has suggested a vaccine may not be needed as part of a recovery from the pandemic.
If you don’t have a vaccine, if the virus is gone, you’re like where we were before.
At least 89 vaccines are in development, according to the World Health Organization. But even the most promising options still need to undergo rigorous safety testing, which could take a year to 18 months.
But without a vaccine, why does Trump think the pandemic will just go away? He dodged the question. “It’s gonna go, it’s gonna leave,” Trump said, without explaining his thinking. “It’s gonna be eradicated.”
I’ll take this opportunity to repeat my recommendation of the video @ #172 above.
“Ben Shapiro: ‘If somebody who is 81 dies of COVID-19, that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of COVID-19…If grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81, that’s tragic and it’s terrible, also the life expectancy in the United States is 80’.”
Trump told Reuters he did not believe opinion polls that showed his likely Democratic presidential opponent, Joe Biden, leading the race for the White House.
“I don’t believe the polls,” Trump said. “I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent.”
Russia confirmed 7,099 new coronavirus infections Thursday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 106,498 and marking a new one-day record increase.
Thursday marks the first time new cases have been registered in all 85 regions of Russia.
Russia is now the eighth most-affected country in terms of infections, having surpassed China and Iran this week.
In total, 1,073 people have been killed by the virus in Russia….
The coronavirus pandemic has put the spotlight on the risks faced by frontline health workers, and Russia is no exception. Medical facilities in the country have emerged as one of the main breeding grounds for Covid-19, and two dozen hospitals have had to shut down for long quarantines, with many doctors falling sick.
The numbers are stark. On Thursday, Russia’s total number of reported coronavirus cases surpassed the 100,000 mark, exceeding numbers reported from Iran and China. And of 285 coronavirus hotspots the country is trying to contain, 64% are in hospitals, said Alexander Gorelov, an epidemiologist at the state wellbeing agency Rospotrebnadzor, at a recent meeting chaired by President Vladimir Putin.
For weeks, Russian independent media and non-governmental organizations have reported anonymous pleas from outraged medical workers who said they had been ordered to the frontlines of a public health crisis without adequate protection, and that bureaucratic foot-dragging was costing lives. As the situation worsens, many have become more outspoken, sometimes risking legal action against them.
…
To move ahead of the curve, doctors have turned to activists and NGOs to lobby for the equipment they need. But speaking out publicly can have consequences: investigative committees in at least five regions have called in the authors of social media posts for questioning, according to a CNN tally.
The Alliance of Doctors said on Twitter that some health care workers have been threatened with fines for spreading fakes news about the lack of equipment.
“We have gathered over 200 requests, there is deficit of everything, but especially protective suits, respirators and eyewear,” union communications director Ivan Konovalov said. “Absolutely all regions are in need, including Moscow.”
Russia’s Federal Security Service, or the FSB, has requested statistics from the Alliance of Doctors about the complaints they receive.
Meanwhile, the doctors are counting their own dead. A group of doctors set up a website called “List of memory” asking colleagues across the country to submit names of those who have died of coronavirus complications.
“The only idea here is not to forget the colleagues that died,” one of the co-creators of the project, Moscow-based cardiologist Aleksey Erlich, told independent outlet Meduza.
As of Wednesday, the list had over 70 names, but the organizers say it is far from complete, as it has been difficult to get official confirmation of cause of death. Russia has released no official numbers yet on health worker fatalities, though Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has acknowledged “sad news” regarding the death of frontline medical personnel.
35-minute YT video at the link. This just aired live. I can’t stand Greenwald on pretty much any other topic, and find him barely tolerable even when he’s speaking on this one, but it’s a useful discussion of the situation in Brazil.
blfsays
One usually weekly show I try to watch on France24 is “French Connections“, which isn’t always about politics, but is instead “A quirky, insider’s guide to understanding France and the French, from the sublime to the ridiculous.” I’ve referenced the show a few times in this series of poopyhead threads.
Since the start of the lockdown, there hasn’t been a new edition — for very probably good & understandable reasons — but there is now a new filmed-at-home(-mostly) episode, France in lockdown: Shopping and cooking in a time of confinement (video). Despite being filmed entirely in Paris, it almost could have been filmed in the S.France Mediterranean seaside village where I live: Except for perhaps fewer (long-)queues at the open shops, it gives a good look into some of the current reality (at least for those who are not badly disadvantaged). And yes, I had the “run on eggs” problem at first also, but have now found a reliable supply. (There hasn’t been a cheese problem, to the mildly deranged penguin is, ah, well “content”, in her rather unique way… just don’t mention walruses, peas, and the other usual suspects… Oops!!1!!).
blfsays
Oh for feck’s sake, the first link in @198 is borked (well, doesn’t go to the intended page), it should be “French Connections“. Sorry. (The second link is Ok.)
Here’s a link to the April 30 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Hosting the Tour de France for more than a century, it is a country already famous for cycling. Now French commuters are being urged to swap cars for bicycles when the Covid-19 lockdown ends.
The government has announced plans to develop temporary bike lanes, with an additional €20m subsidy towards the cost of repairs.
The initiative, by the energy and transport ministry, also includes an increase in bicycle parking spaces and training to get people back in the saddle.
France, where there has been more than 24,000 coronavirus deaths, is due to ease lockdown measures on 11 May. The minister Élisabeth Borne said:
While 60% of trips made in France are less than 5km, the coming weeks represent an opportunity for many French people, already cyclists or not, to choose biking.
The “bicycle repair boost” programme, which will provide up to €50 for repairs by sponsored mechanics, as well as supporting a scheme that allows employers to cover up to €400 of travel costs of staff who commute by bike. Paris currently has about 370km of bike paths and the temporary lanes are expected to increase that to 650km.
When John Gianoulidis, owner of the Kafenio Greek Diner, heard the Georgia governor, Brian Kemp, announce restaurants could offer dine-in services once again this week, he feared the worst for his restaurant and coffee shop in Atlanta.
Here’s the deal, he typed out on Facebook.
“Kemp mandates restaurants reopen, whether I reopen dining rooms or not. I file for business interruption insurance, it does not go through since I am ‘allowed’ to operate full capacity,” he hypothesized, adding further down in the now viral post, “If things blow up again, they are still on my tab not on the states, since they are no longer employed. Guys, this is about screwing the working class and small business, not about helping us.”
Economists are uncertain if Gianoulidis is entirely correct about the exact rationale behind the sudden announcement to reopen Georgia as coronavirus cases continue to rise, with nearly 25,000 confirmed in the state as of Tuesday afternoon. [He’s correct. – SC] The state’s reopening has been so early that even Donald Trump urged Kemp not to do it.
But they can agree the most in danger from Kemp’s actions – both economically and healthwise – are those who open their businesses or return to work in Georgia’s new sudden easing of restrictions.
The state’s current count of positive virus cases makes it the tenth highest in the country as employees were cleared to serve meals in a restaurant, offer up tattoos or provide hair and nails services and check-in gym goers for Zumba class. In the last month, Georgia’s department of labor processed 1,090,536 claims, more than the last three previous years combined. Nearly a third of the claims came from the food and accommodation industry, many of whom can now – technically – go back to work as restaurants open.
While that may help ease the burden of claims processed by the state, how it affects the greater economy is unclear, said Elise Gould of the Economic Policy Initiative.
…
Kemp’s office did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. The state’s department of labor did not have much concrete guidance as to whether the reopening would see jobless claims shifted off the government books.
“This is a way for them to continue to receive some of those same benefits as they gradually come back to work. And then when it’s time to get back to work that employer stops filing for them,” the Georgia department of labor communications director, Kersha Cartwright, said.
But it’s unclear when that line between gradual and full time was drawn and by whom it was to be decided – the state or the employer.
…
But for those businesses that do open up, while the state continues to follow through on its shelter-in-place order until 30 April , this could leave vulnerable employees on even more uncertain grounds, said Gould. Some might not want to go back to work, feeling unsafe while others may be living with elderly family members or those with pre-existing conditions.
Others may return to work, uncertain about the state’s policy on unemployment insurance, Gould added, unsure if they would still qualify now that their place of employment is open.
When asked what would happen if employees of non-essential businesses that could reopen under the state’s mandate chose not to return in fear of their safety, Georgia’s department of labor could not clarify if they would still be eligible to file for unemployment.
“Work with your employer, try to work something out. If you cannot work it out and you decide to separate yourself from that place of employment then we will base our eligibility upon the facts presented in the case,” Cartwright said.
…
But the health risks of an early reopening could be even more risky than an economic one.
According to a new analysis of data released by the Daily Beast in collaboration with MIT and Harvard Universities, that could most likely be the case. If the state had continued its current stay-at-home mandate and kept non-essential businesses closed, coronavirus fatalities by mid-June would have been somewhere between 1,004 and 2,922. Instead, the team’s simulation suggests that number could now be as high as 9,748.
“This is a policy that has not been endorsed by experts in public health … one concern going forward is whether it would lead to new outbreaks and contribute to a second wave of growth of the pandemic,” Cornell University labor economics professor Francine Blau said….
Since the U.S. death toll surpassed 60,000 yesterday, Trump has tweeted about:
-Michael Flynn
-CNN
-MSNBC
-Brian Williams
-Don Lemon
-Joe Scarborough
-Sweden
-Roger Stone
-His poll numbers
-Jim Comey
-Hillary Clinton’s campaign
-Rep. Jim Ryun’s birthday
Three years earlier on this date, in 1942, Hitler met with Mussolini about sending Italian reinforcements to Russia. From Shirer’s Rise and Fall:
When Russia’s sources of oil are exhausted [Ribbentropp said] she will be brought to her knees. Then the British…will bow in order to save what remains of the mauled Empire…
America is a big bluff…
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has said he has been diagnosed with coronavirus and will self-isolate from the government in the country’s highest-profile case of the disease yet, reports the Guardian’s Andrew Roth in Moscow.
Mishustin disclosed that he was infected during a video call with Vladimir Putin, Russian state news agencies reported on Thursday evening. It wasn’t immediately clear how severe Mishustin’s case of the disease was, although one news agency reported that he had an elevated temperature of 39 degrees.
Mishustin has been tasked with leading the government’s response to the coronavirus outbreak, which surpassed 100,000 cases in Russia on Thursday. First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov would take on his duties in his absence, Mishustin said.
“Dear Vladimir Vladimirovich, I have just found out that the tests I gave for coronavirus have come back positive. Accordingly… I will go into self-isolation, fulfilling my doctors’ orders. This is necessary to do in order to protect my colleagues,” Mishustin reportedly told Putin during a video call.
Putin has led semi-regular video calls with members of the government from his residence at Novo-Ogaryovo. He has not been pictured with other members of the government in the last several weeks.
More re #203 – Shirer on Hitler’s last will and testament:
These two documents survive, as Hitler meant them to, and like others of his papers they are significant to this narrative. They confirm that the man who had ruled over Germany with an iron hand for more than twelve years, and over most of Europe for four, had learned nothing from his experience; not even his reverses and shattering final failure had taught him anything. Indeed, in the last hours of his life he reverted to the young man he had been in the gutter days in Vienna and in the early rowdy beer hall period in Munich, cursing the Jews for all the ills of the world, spinning his half-baked theories about the universe, and whining that fate once more had cheated Germany of victory and conquest. In this valedictory to the German nation and to the world which was also meant to be a last conclusive appeal to history, Adolf Hitler dredged up all the empty claptrap of Mein Kampf and added his final falsehoods. It was a fitting epitaph of a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely and destroyed.
In the hours before his death, after finally being forced to realize his ideas about surprise counterattacks turning things around were pure fantasy, he was still expelling people from the top echelons of the party, sneering at the army leadership, and lying about not having wanted the war.
It turns out red states are really, really screwed too.”
Graph atl. Florida and Kentucky have higher projected shortfalls than Michigan or Illinois. From a quick look at the graph of the states with the highest projected budget shortfalls, most of them are red states.
SC @196, This is alarming: “Medical facilities in the country [in Russia] have emerged as one of the main breeding grounds for Covid-19, and two dozen hospitals have had to shut down for long quarantines, with many doctors falling sick.”
I remember all too well the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when doctors in Italy pointed out that hospitals had become a breeding ground for COVID-19 in that country.
Fairly early on, China designated some hospitals as COVID-only. If I remember correctly, Germany did the same thing. I don’t think this problem has been adequately addressed. It looks to be far worse in Russia.
And this part, in text quoted by SC, sounds all too familiar: “For weeks, Russian independent media and non-governmental organizations have reported anonymous pleas from outraged medical workers who said they had been ordered to the frontlines of a public health crisis without adequate protection, and that bureaucratic foot-dragging was costing lives. As the situation worsens, many have become more outspoken, sometimes risking legal action against them.” Sounds like the situation Trump and his cronies created in the USA, minus some of the coercion.
Trickster Goddess @193, I can’t stop laughing, but it is bitter laughter. I have stopped replacing my broken irony meters. Trump just continues to destroy them at such a rapid pace, that I can’t keep up.
“I don’t believe the polls,” Trump said. “I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent.”
In text quoted by SC in comment 206: “In this valedictory to the German nation and to the world which was also meant to be a last conclusive appeal to history, Adolf Hitler dredged up all the empty claptrap of Mein Kampf and added his final falsehoods. It was a fitting epitaph of a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely and destroyed.”
What poor schmuck is Trump going to pay to write his version of this after he loses the next election?
blfsays
As the Grauniad’s current main pandemic live blog is reporting, departments in France are being assessed on a daily basis to decide the level of lockdown easing (due to start on 11th May):
The French government has unveiled its coronavirus map dividing the country into “green” areas where lockdown regulations will be relaxed and “red” areas where strict measures will remain in place.
A number of departments were declared “orange” meaning they will be watched closely over the next week before being declared red or green on 7 May.
I myself am in an orange department, which isn’t surprising since Marseille is not a million kilometres away, with the additional hotspots of Italy, Corsica, and some others not all that much further. (Like I’ve observed before, I’m surrounded, even if locally the impact is still, as far as I know, fairly minor.)
[…]
Three criteria were used to decide what people living in the 96 mainland departments and five overseas departments would be allowed to do when the national confinement finishes: the number of new Covid-19 cases in the previous seven days; the capacity of the department’s hospitals to deal with the epidemic; and the department’s ability to test, track and contain the virus.
[…]
The definitive map used to determine who can do what and where after 11 May, will be published on 7 May.
I understand there will be updated maps published daily, albeit I don’t know where. There is no link in the Grauniad. The best copy of today’s map I have found is in Coronavirus et déconfinement : une première carte publiée ce jeudi […]. (For some reason, most copies of the map are of an absolutely appalling quality.)
Rep. Justin Amash, I-Mich., said Tuesday that he has launched a committee that would explore a presidential run under the Libertarian Party…. “Today, I launched an exploratory committee to seek the @LPNational’s nomination for president of the United States,” he said on Twitter.
From the link above:
[…] Trump wasted little time in celebrating the announcement, apparently with the expectation that the Michigan congressman will help him win a second term. Those hoping to see Trump lose responded with equal and opposite alarm for the same reason.
[…] There are a few possible outcomes, and they each seem to have merit.
Amash will help Trump: There’s a sizable chunk of the American electorate that’s desperate to kick Trump out of the office, and any effort that divides this chunk necessarily creates an advantage for the president. The goal for Trump’s detractors must be to consolidate these voters behind a credible, major-party rival, and in a race that’s likely to be tight, splitting off even a small percentage of votes could make a difference.
Amash will help Biden: Giving disaffected Republicans — who’d never vote for a Democrat — another choice would help split the right, not the left. After all, Amash has been a conservative lawmaker throughout his career, and there’s very little in his agenda that would appeal to moderate or progressive voters. Plus, he’ll likely spend the next several months making the argument that Trump needs to be removed from office, and that will certainly dovetail with the Democratic message.
And let’s not overlook the possibility that Amash won’t make much of a difference either way: The congressman is not especially well known to a national audience; he probably won’t have a lot of money; he’s likely to struggle to qualify for the debates; and a Libertarian anti-government message during a pandemic and economic crash isn’t likely to be persuasive to the vast majority of Americans.
Which of these arguments is the correct one? I’m leaning toward Door #3, but ask me again in a few months.
DNI believes virus ‘was not manmade or genetically modified’
The office of the director of national intelligence has released an unusual statement saying officials do not believe coronavirus was manmade, echoing many health experts.
“The Intelligence Community also concurs with the wide scientific consensus that the COVID-19 virus was not manmade or genetically modified,” the statement reads.
The statement added, “The IC will continue to rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence to determine whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or if it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
Kansas’ proof-of-citizenship voter registration requirement, championed by former Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R), was rejected yesterday by a federal appeals court. The 10th Circuit found the voter-suppression tactic, which blocked tens of thousands of Kansas from registering to vote, is unconstitutional.
I have lost count of the number of times right-winger Kris Kobach has been slapped down by the courts. He never learns a thing.
In other campaign news there is a lot, a LOT, of back and forth concerning allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden. I am waiting for Biden to adequately address this himself. In the meantime, here is one opinion from Michael J. Stern: “Why I’m skeptical about Reade’s sexual assault claim against Biden.”
During 28 years as a state and federal prosecutor, I prosecuted a lot of sexual assault cases. […]
A year ago, Tara Reade accused former Vice President Joe Biden of touching her shoulder and neck in a way that made her uncomfortable, when she worked for him as a staff assistant in 1993. Then last month, Reade told an interviewer that Biden stuck his hand under her skirt and forcibly penetrated her with his fingers. Biden denies the allegation.
When women make allegations of sexual assault, my default response is to believe them. But as the news media have investigated Reade’s allegations, I’ve become increasingly skeptical. Here are some of the reasons why:
Delayed reporting … twice. Reade waited 27 years to publicly report her allegation that Biden sexually assaulted her. I understand that victims of sexual assault often do not come forward immediately because recounting the most violent and degrading experience of their lives, to a bunch of strangers, is the proverbial insult to injury. That so many women were willing to wait in my dreary government office, as I ran to the restroom to pull myself together after listening to their stories, is a testament to their fortitude.
Even so, it is reasonable to consider a 27-year reporting delay when assessing the believability of any criminal allegation. More significant perhaps, is Reade’s decision to sit down with a newspaper last year and accuse Biden of touching her in a sexual way that made her uncomfortable — but neglect to mention her claim that he forcibly penetrated her with his fingers.
As a lawyer and victims’ rights advocate, Reade was better equipped than most to appreciate that dramatic changes in sexual assault allegations severely undercut an accuser’s credibility — especially when the change is from an uncomfortable shoulder touch to vaginal penetration.
Implausible explanation for changing story. When Reade went public with her sexual assault allegation in March, she said she wanted to do it in an interview with The Union newspaper in California last April. She said the reporter’s tone made her feel uncomfortable and “I just really got shut down” and didn’t tell the whole story.
It is hard to believe a reporter would discourage this kind of scoop. Regardless, it’s also hard to accept that it took Reade 12 months to find another reporter eager to break that bombshell story. This unlikely explanation damages her credibility.
People who contradict Reade’s claim. After the alleged assault, Reade said she complained about Biden’s harassment to Marianne Baker, Biden’s executive assistant, as well as to top aides Dennis Toner and Ted Kaufman. All three Biden staffers recently told The New York Times that she made no complaint to them.
And they did not offer the standard, noncommittal “I don’t remember any such complaint.” The denials were firm. “She did not come to me. If she had, I would have remembered her,” Kaufman said. Toner made a similar statement. And from Baker: “I never once witnessed, or heard of, or received, any reports of inappropriate conduct (by Biden), period.” Baker said such a complaint, had Reade made it, “would have left a searing impression on me as a woman professional, and as a manager.”
Missing formal complaint. Reade told The Times she filed a written complaint against Biden with the Senate personnel office. But The Times could not find any complaint. When The Times asked Reade for a copy of the complaint, she said she did not have it. Yet she maintained and provided a copy of her 1993 Senate employment records. […] Memory lapse. Reade has said that she cannot remember the date, time or exact location of the alleged assault, except that it occurred in a “semiprivate” area in corridors connecting Senate buildings. After I left the Justice Department, I was appointed by the federal court in Los Angeles to represent indigent defendants. The first thing that comes to mind from my defense attorney perspective is that Reade’s amnesia about specifics makes it impossible for Biden to go through records and prove he could not have committed the assault, because he was somewhere else at the time.
For instance, if Reade alleged Biden assaulted her on the afternoon of June 3, 1993, Biden might be able to prove he was on the Senate floor or at the dentist. Her memory lapses could easily be perceived as bulletproofing a false allegation.
The lie about losing her job. Reade told The Union that Biden wanted her to serve drinks at an event. After she refused, “she felt pushed out and left Biden’s employ,” the newspaper said last April. But Reade claimed this month in her Times interview that after she filed a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate personnel office, she faced retaliation and was fired by Biden’s chief of staff.
Leaving a job after refusing to serve drinks at a Biden fundraiser is vastly different than being fired as retaliation for filing a sexual harassment complaint with the Senate. The disparity raises questions about Reade’s credibility and account of events.
Compliments for Biden. In the 1990s, Biden worked to pass the Violence Against Women Act. In 2017, on multiple occasions, Reade retweeted or “liked” praise for Biden and his work combating sexual assault. In the same year, Reade tweeted other compliments of Biden, including: “My old boss speaks truth. Listen.” It is bizarre that Reade would publicly laud Biden for combating the very thing she would later accuse him of doing to her.
Rejecting Biden, embracing Sanders. By this January, Reade was all in for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. Her unwavering support was accompanied by an unbridled attack on Biden. In an article on Medium, Reade referred to Biden as “the blue version of Trump.” Reade also pushed a Sanders/Elizabeth Warren ticket, while complaining that the Democratic National Committee was trying to “shove” Biden “down Democrat voters throats.”
Despite her effusive 2017 praise for Biden’s efforts on behalf of women, after pledging her support to Sanders, Reade turned on Biden and contradicted all she said before. She claimed that her decision to publicly accuse Biden of inappropriately touching her was due to “the hypocrisy that Biden is supposed to be the champion of women’s rights.”
Love of Russia and Putin. During 2017 when Reade was praising Biden, she was condemning Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s efforts to hijack American democracy in the 2016 election. This changed in November 2018, when Reade trashed the United States as a country of “hypocrisy and imperialism” and “not a democracy at all but a corporate autocracy.”
Reade’s distaste for America closely tracked her new infatuation with Russia and Putin. She referred to Putin as a “genius” with an athletic prowess that “is intoxicating to American women.” Then there’s this gem: “President Putin has an alluring combination of strength with gentleness. His sensuous image projects his love for life, the embodiment of grace while facing adversity.”
In March 2019, Reade essentially dismissed the idea of Russian interference in the 2016 American presidential election as hype. She said she loved Russia and her Russian relatives — and “like most women across the world, I like President Putin … a lot, his shirt on or shirt off.”
Pivoting again this month, Reade said that she “did not support Putin, and that her comments were pulled out of context from a novel she was writing,” according to The Times. The quotations above, however, are from political opinion pieces she published, and she did not offer any other “context” to The Times. […] The Larry King call. Last week, new “evidence” surfaced: a recorded call by an anonymous woman to CNN’s “Larry King Live” show in 1993. Reade says the caller was her mother, who’s now deceased. Assuming Reade is correct, her mother said: “I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him.”
As a prosecutor, this would not make me happy. Given that the call was anonymous, Reade’s mother should have felt comfortable relaying the worst version of events. When trying to obtain someone’s assistance, people typically do not downplay the seriousness of an incident. They exaggerate it. That Reade’s mother said nothing about her daughter being sexually assaulted would lead many reasonable people to conclude that sexual assault was not the problem that prompted the call to King.
Reade’s mother also said her daughter did not go to the press with her problem “out of respect” for the senator. I’ve never met a woman who stayed silent out of “respect” for the man who sexually assaulted her. And it is inconceivable that a mother would learn of her daughter’s sexual assault and suggest that respect for the assailant is what stands between a life of painful silence and justice.
The “out of respect” explanation sounds more like an office squabble with staff that resulted in leaving the job. Indeed, in last year’s interview with The Washington Post, Reade laid the blame on Biden’s staff for “bullying” her. She also said, “I want to emphasize: It’s not him. It’s the people around him.”
Statements to others. Reade’s brother, Collin Moulton, told The Post recently that he remembers Reade telling him Biden inappropriately touched her neck and shoulders. He said nothing about a sexual assault until a few days later, when he texted The Post that he remembered Reade saying Biden put his hand “under her clothes.”
That Reade’s brother neglected to remember the most important part of her allegation initially could lead people to believe he recounted his Post interview to Reade, was told he left out the most important part, and texted it to The Post to avoid a discussion about why he failed to mention it in the first place.
In interviews with The Times, one friend of Reade’s said Reade told her she was sexually assaulted by Biden. Another friend said Reade told her that Biden touched her inappropriately. Both friends insisted that The Times maintain their anonymity.
On Monday, Business Insider published an interview with a friend of Reade’s who said that in 1995 or 1996, Reade told her she was assaulted by Biden. Insider called this friend, Lynda LaCasse, the “first person to independently corroborate, in detail and on the record, that Reade had told others about her assault allegations contemporaneously.”
But Reade alleged she was assaulted in 1993. Telling a friend two or three years later is not contemporaneous. Legal references to a contemporaneous recounting typically refer to hours or days — the point being that facts are still fresh in a person’s mind and the statement is more likely to be accurate.
The Insider also quoted a colleague of Reade’s in the mid-1990s, Lorraine Sanchez, who said Reade told her she had been sexually harassed by a former boss. Reade did not mention Biden by name and did not provide details of the alleged harassment.
In prior interviews, Reade gave what appeared be an exhaustive list of people she told of the alleged assault. Neither of the women who talked to Business Insider were on that list. […] Prior statements made by a sexual assault victim can carry some weight, but only if the accuser is credible. […]
Lack of other sexual assault allegations. Last year, several women claimed that Biden made them uncomfortable with things like a shoulder touch or a hug. […] The Times and Post found no allegation of sexual assault against Biden except Reade’s.
It is possible that in his 77 years, Biden committed one sexual assault and it was against Reade. But in my experience, men who commit a sexual assault are accused more than once … like Donald Trump, who has had more than a dozen allegations of sexual assault leveled against him and who was recorded bragging about grabbing women’s genitalia.
What remains. There are no third-party eyewitnesses or videos to support Tara Reade’s allegation that she was assaulted by Joe Biden. No one but Reade and Biden know whether an assault occurred. This is typical of sexual assault allegations. Jurors, in this case the voting public, have to consider the facts and circumstances to assess whether Reade’s allegation is credible. To do that, they have to determine whether Reade herself is believable.
I’ve dreaded writing this piece because I do not want it to be used as a guidebook to dismantling legitimate allegations of sexual assault. But not every claim of sexual assault is legitimate. During almost three decades as a prosecutor, I can remember dismissing two cases because I felt the defendant had not committed the charged crime. One of those cases was a rape charge.
The facts of that case made me question the credibility of the woman who claimed she was raped. In the end, she acknowledged that she fabricated the allegation after her boyfriend caught her with a man with whom she was having an affair.
I know that “Believe Women” is the mantra of the new decade. It is a response to a century of ignoring and excusing men’s sexual assaults against women. But men and women alike should not be forced to blindly accept every allegation of sexual assault for fear of being labeled a misogynist or enabler.
We can support the #MeToo movement and not support allegations of sexual assault that do not ring true. […]
President [sic] blows his top in Friday argument and reportedly tells Brad Parscale I’m not fucking losing to Joe Biden in November
A row between Donald Trump and his election campaign manager, Brad Parscale, over a recent drop in the president’s poll numbers resulted in Trump threatening Parscale with a lawsuit.
The argument reportedly happened last Friday [24th April], as the US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic reached 50,000 in three months and the fallout continued from Trump’s suggestion at the White House the night before that taking disinfectant internally could be examined as a possible treatment for coronavirus, even though it is potentially lethal.
But the blow-up was just the latest in a series of tense moments between Trump and his 2020 re-election team, according to reports from multiple outlets including the Washington Post, the Associated Press and CNN.
[…]
Trump deflected much of the blame for the disappointing polls, ignoring criticism of his performances at the podium during daily White House coronavirus press briefings […]
In a meeting two days before the call, political advisers briefed Trump on data sourced internally and from the Republican National Committee. The figures showed the president [sic] losing ground against Biden in key battleground states.
Advisers had warned Trump to change his tone at daily coronavirus briefings, citing data that showed the negative coverage was fueling a decline in approval ratings.
The president [sic] allegedly balked at the guidance, insisting viewers love them and think he’s fighting for them. Trump instead pointed to restricted travel and an inability to host campaign rallies as the source of the slump.
“[A]n inability to host campaign rallies” —Possibly another reason hair furor wants to abandon social distancing and other science-led actions?
While the sincerity of the president’s [sic] lawsuit threat against Parscale isn’t clear, or what would be the grounds for suing, sources told CNN the two patched things up by that same night. On Thursday, Trump tweeted that Parscale is doing a great job.
To the extent Parscale is assissting hair furor’s very public and obvious meltdowns — everyone has been following the advice from the very stable genusis to drink bleach, mainline hydroxychloroquine, and have a healthy internal UV glow, correct? — yes, Parscale is doing a great job. And conveniently for Biden, it’s not costing his campaign a penny (albeit it probably also isn’t being paid for by hair furor).
I never shouted at him (been with me for years, including the 2016 win), and have no intention to do so, he wrote.
The president [sic] then lashed out at media outlets for reporting on the alleged tensions, taking particular aim at MSNBC and its lead anchor, Brian Williams, in a flood of tweets.
After leaving office last year following two tumultuous terms, former Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) moved to Florida. Yesterday, the Republican announced that he’s moving back to Maine to run for governor again in 2022.
On another subject, here is Jeff Flake telling it like it is:
The Washington Post asked Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) what would be better for the Republican Party: Trump’s re-election or a sound defeat for the GOP ticket. “Oh, a sound defeat, no doubt,” Flake replied. “Long term for the Republican Party, you bet. And for conservatism as well.”
Last year, military leaders warned that the raids on their budget could be dangerous. Evidently, the pushback wasn’t persuasive to Team Trump.
After failing to secure funding from Congress for new border barriers, Donald Trump started raiding the Defense Department’s budget, redirecting money away from the military and toward his misguided “wall” initiative.
It wasn’t long before U.S. military officials raised the alarm about possible consequences. Last fall, for example, NBC News obtained a report compiled by the U.S. Air Force, which concluded that money diverted away from military construction projects “poses various national security risks for the U.S. armed forces.”
[…] The Pentagon’s budget is still being raided. Bloomberg News reported this week that Defense Secretary Mark Esper is shifting a half-billion dollars worth of construction projects — “many in Europe meant to counter Russian aggression” — to finance construction of the president’s so-called “wall.”
[…] Esper lists several projects in Norway, Germany, Spain and elsewhere totaling more than $200 million from which he says funds can be redirected. Those projects are all part of the European Deterrence Initiative designed to bolster allies and undermine Russia’s growing influence on the continent. The projects include infrastructure for military aircraft, fuel, munitions and cargo.
The report added that Esper’s initiative “would appear to conflict with the National Defense Strategy, which prioritizes ‘great power competition’ with Russia and China.”
This wouldn’t ordinarily be possible, but the president early last year declared a national emergency at the border. Even at the time, Trump effectively admitted that there was no emergency, but for the sake of convenience, he was issuing the declaration anyway.
“I didn’t need to do this,” the president conceded in February 2019.
blf @217, Trump is definitely looking around for someone to blame, not just about his low poll numbers, but about the facts appearing on the horizon. Trump is going to lose to Biden.
Seems logical to Trump to blame his campaign manager.
Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us. Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today.
If Trump quit the self-compliments altogether, he might even have time to start taking naps
On Friday, the New York Times accused Donald Trump of spending time eating fries and watching TV during the pandemic, sometimes not arriving at the Oval Office until noon. As a response, multiple White House officials were rolled out to confirm Trump was working non-stop, so much so that the president [sic] sometimes misses his lunch.
Let’s make clear that this is not meant to cast shade on lunch-takers. Quite the contrary: taking lunch is as much a measure of how hard one works as a man’s shoe size is a measure of how big his ego is.
But Trump’s “proof” of his hard work is a bit surprising. Almost a third of US workers don’t get to take a lunch break — and those are just ordinary people, the ones who homeschool their children while working from home if they’re lucky enough to have a paycheck, with a salary to reflect that.
Unfortunately for Trump, his routine pales in comparison to other famous leaders’ schedules. Margaret Thatcher was memorably said to have slept just four hours a night, while George W Bush reportedly arrived at the White House at 6.45am. Winston Churchill reportedly did a day and a half’s work in 24 hours during the second world war, but littered among his working day were multiple naps, cocktails, board games and a few decadent meals. If his diary proves anything, it’s that productive people can take a lunch break and still manage to get things done.
As for Trump, there is no way of proving whether he takes his lunch, nor is it possible to measure his productivity from afar. But it’s worth considering that he might be able to take a lunch break if he congratulated himself less.
How much time would he save, you ask? Well, roughly however long it takes to say 260,000 words — and that’s just during press briefings. If he quit the self-compliments altogether, he might even have time to start taking naps.
[…] Trump issued a threatening tweet about CNN late Wednesday night, claiming Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, had suffered “persecution” at the news outlet’s hands.
“@CNN doesn’t want to speak about their persecution of General Michael Flynn & why they got the story so wrong,” Trump tweeted. “They, along with others, should pay a big price for what they have purposely done to this man & his family.”
“They won’t even cover the big breaking news about this scam!” he added.
Based on his retweets of right-wing news outlets before the sinister post, Trump seemed to be referring to documents presented by Flynn’s lawyers showing former FBI intelligence director Bill Priestap’s thoughts on how investigators ought to interview the adviser in the 2017 Russian election interference probe.
“What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Priestap wrote in a handwritten note. “I don’t see how getting someone to admit their wrongdoing is going easy on him.”
“If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ & have them decide,” he continued. Or, if he initially lies, then we present him [redacted] & he admits it, document for DOJ, & let them decide how to address it.”
It’s unclear why Trump accused CNN of not covering the story, which can be read here.
Flynn agreed to a plea bargain with Special Counsel Robert Mueller in December 2017 after he was indicted to lying to the FBI. However, he later accused the intelligence agency of setting him up and is currently pushing to get his case dismissed.
Trump has repeatedly come to Flynn’s defense, claiming that investigators had “ruined” his former adviser’s life and even calling the FBI “human scum” for pursuing the case.
“What happened to General Michael Flynn, a war hero, should never be allowed to happen to a citizen of the United States again!” Trump tweeted on Thursday morning.
The President has not yet said whether he plans to pardon Flynn.
From the readers comments:
He just wants to build the narrative in Rightwingostan that pardoning a traitor is OK. That’s it.
————————
what “set up”? No one told Flynn to lie about being an agent for the Turks, least of all to Pence. The Obama administration warned the Trump transition team about that same involvement. If Trump were truly interested in his own political survival [I was about to write, “If Trump were smart,” but I caught myself], he’d shut up about Flynn. All this noise, though, only draws attention to the case, only compels people to re-litigate the case and lay out the definitive evidence that Flynn did this to himself–and gets people to wonder what the deal is with Trump.
————————–
Wow! FBI investigators approach questioning their targets with a tough mindset. Shocking!
BTW, I prefer “war heroes” who avoid treason.
——————-
Trump fired Flynn…lets not forget that. He fired him for the same reason that Flynn is being prosecuted.
I imagine Trump thinks enough time has passed for revisionism to work. So out come the standard tropes. “unfair”, “persecution” and “the media”. He’ll pardon Flynn. We know that. But lets hope he keeps this self destructive behavior up.
Maryland @GovLarryHogan on whether he was concerned that the federal government would seize the tests the state procured from South Korea. He says the tests are being guarded by the National Guard at an undisclosed location.
Elizabeth Warren and Jan Schakowsky have a plan to end mask and medicine shortages amid the Covid-19 crisis.
Under a new bill from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), a new federal agency would take responsibility for eliminating protective gear shortages and other supply scarcities critical to the coronavirus response.
The legislation […] seeks to remedy the critical supply shortages reported in some Covid-19 hot spots. It also serves as a counter to […] Trump’s reluctance to exploit the full power of the Defense Production Act (DPA) to address those problems.
The bill would set up a new Emergency Office of Manufacturing for Public Health within the US Health and Human Services Department. That agency would be charged with guaranteeing “an adequate supply of drugs, devices, biological products, active pharmaceutical ingredients, and other supplies necessary to diagnose, mitigate, and treat COVID-19 and to address shortages in products used to treat non-COVID conditions and illnesses,” according to a summary of the bill.
The office could enter into contracts with private manufacturers to produce those supplies or it could assume responsibility for manufacturing itself. The bill text authorizes the federal government to construct manufacturing facilities if necessary to perform that work. Separate from addressing supply needs, the bill would also authorize the government to construct facilities that could produce vaccines and other therapeutics as soon as they become available.
If the bill were to become law, the office would be required to begin its work within one month of its passage. Once supplies are produced, the government must provide them to federal, state, local and Native American health programs at no cost. They could be sold to private or international entities at a fair price. The office would also be charged with replenishing the national strategic stockpiles that have been depleted during the Covid-19 outbreak.
“We need to radically increase our supply of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies to attack the coronavirus crisis head-on. We have an Administration that is failing to lead and failing to ensure health care providers and patients have the resources they need,” Warren said in a statement. “Our bill will rapidly produce the equipment and supplies Americans are counting on. The president won’t act, but Congress should. Our bill needs to be included in the next relief package.” […]
Trump claims they’re a “total exoneration” for his former top adviser. They aren’t.
[…] Trump’s latest string of tweets about the Flynn case came days after he retweeted a post from Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo teasing that “sources tell me @GenFlynn will be completely exonerated this week. It was a total fraud. A Set up.” Suffice it to say nothing that has emerged this week delivers on that promise.
[…] Flynn planted the seeds of his own undoing before he even started the job by having secretive communications with Russian officials during the transition period.
Now, however, Trumpworld wants you to believe that Flynn was a victim — and is using newly released documents to make the case.
Posting a bunch of vindictive tweets about how he overcame the forces arrayed against him may have served as a pleasant distraction for a president besieged by the coronavirus pandemic and the human and economic carnage it has produced. But a close look at the context of what Trump is saying about the new Flynn revelations reveals it’s not all he’s framing it to be. […]
At issue are newly released documents detailing how top FBI officials handled a key January 24, 2017, interview with Flynn […]
FBI leadership was already aware at that time that Flynn had phone calls with then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presidential transition period. In those calls, Flynn advised Kislyak not to respond to new sanctions the Obama administration placed on Russia for interfering (on Trump’s behalf) in the just-completed presidential election. Intercepts of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak raised concerns within the bureau that Flynn had violated the Logan Act, a law that prohibits unauthorized citizens from negotiating with foreign governments. […]
The newly unsealed documents, which were released by Flynn’s lawyer on Wednesday and are the first fruits of Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the Flynn investigation, indicate that FBI officials debated how to question Flynn about his contacts with Russia and whether their aim was to get him to admit any wrongdoing.
That’s right, William Barr is looking high and low for some excuse Trump can use to pardon Flynn. If Barr’s involved in this, you know it is suspect.
In one handwritten note that Trump and his backers in Congress and on Fox News are trumpeting as a bombshell, Bill Priestap, then the FBI’s head of counterintelligence, wrote, “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired? If we get him to admit to breaking the Logan Act, give facts to DOJ & have them decide. Or, if he initially lies, then we present him [redacted] & he admits it, document for DOJ, & let them decide how to address it.”
On that same piece of paper, Priestap wrote, “If we’re seen as playing games, WH [White House] will be furious. Protect our institution by not playing games.” Another note says, “We regularly show subjects evidence, with the goal of getting them to admit their wrongdoing. I don’t see how getting someone to admit their wrongdoing is going easy on him.”
None of this may seem like a big deal. But to Trumpworld, it’s evidence that Flynn was set up by “dirty cops” who were already resolved at that early date to bring Trump down.
It was Devin Nunes, reliably batshit whacko and also a Trump lackey, who posted “Clear now that General Flynn was set up by dirty cops at the highest levels of our government.”
Trump even went as far as to retweet a post from his son Donald Trump Jr. calling for the imprisonment of FBI officials involved in the case. […]
What this effort to portray Flynn as a victim ignores is not only that the FBI already had evidence that he may have broken the law at the time the notes were written, but also that Flynn did lie to FBI officials during the January 24 interview, saying that he and Kislyak did not discuss sanctions.
Flynn resigned as national security adviser in February 2017 amid reports that the DOJ had caught him in this lie. He was ultimately prosecuted by the office of special counsel Robert Mueller, pleaded guilty, and cooperated with Mueller. But now, after copping to wrongdoing, Flynn is seeking to withdraw his plea.
[…] Trump is trying to reframe Flynn’s prosecution as a symptom of the same anti-Trump bias that produced the Mueller “witch hunt.”
Of course, Trump’s allegations that bias affecting the Russia investigation were already investigated by the Justice Department inspector general, who found it did not.
It’s hard to assess the full significance of the Priestap notes without more context. While Trumpworld and Flynn’s lawyer are hyping it up as smoking gun evidence of FBI misconduct, former US attorney and FBI congressional liaison Greg Brower told CNN that “To the extent this is being advertised as evidence of something nefarious, I certainly don’t see it in that way. … I don’t know what this means and I don’t know that it’s important at all.”
What we do know is that Trump is lying about them. During a press availability on Thursday, Trump claimed that the notes show the FBI was “trying to force [Flynn] to lie.” But they show no such thing — all they show is that officials debated how aggressively and on what grounds to confront Flynn about his Russia contacts. […]
Nonetheless, in another lie, Trump added that “if you look at those notes from yesterday, that was total exoneration.” He wouldn’t even close the door to Flynn’s possible return to the administration.
[…] for a president who continues to flail in response to a deadly pandemic he wasn’t prepared for that has now killed more Americans than the Vietnam War, the opportunity to pivot back to a day of bashing the “deep state” is likely a pleasant diversion. And it sets the stage for another news cycle that Trump will relish in the increasingly likely event he pardons Flynn.
[…]
Governor Andy Beshear has contacted a Kentucky resident, Tupac Malik Shakur, to apologize for delaying his unemployment cheque because he believed he was impersonating the deceased rapper of the same name.
On Monday, Beshear described problems he was having processing unemployment claims in Kentucky, where almost one in four residents has filed for unemployment, singling out Shakur, who he thought was acting maliciously.
In a televised briefing, Beshear said: “We had somebody apply for unemployment for Tupac Shakur here in Kentucky and that person probably thought they were being funny.” He continued to accuse the alleged bad apple for delaying payments to other people: “One person thinking they were funny using someone else’s identity is gonna make tens of thousands potentially of other people wait.”
His announcement probably gave some clarity to Shakur, a […] line cook from Lexington, who applied for unemployment after his restaurant closed down in March and was still waiting to receive his first check. “I’ve been struggling for like the last month trying to figure out how to pay the bills,” Shakur told the Lexington Herald-Leader.
According to local reports, Shakur legally changed his name because Shakur means “thankful to God” in Arabic.
While his legal surname remains the same, Shakur now uses his middle name, Malik, because of the understandable confusion that arises from it. Following Beshear’s original announcement, Shakur said he was upset at being publicly labelled a prankster.
[…]
The next day, Beshear publicly apologized for his statement, and accepted that he had made a mistake. He said: “Last night I spent a little bit of time talking about fraudulent claims holding us up … I didn’t know, and it’s my fault, that we have a Kentuckian who goes by Malik, whose name is Tupac Shakur.”
Beshear has now called Shakur to apologize personally, and there is no longer any bad blood between the two. Beshear commended Shakur’s gracious phone manner and said Shakur had even apologized to the governor for the embarrassment the mistake had brought him.
“I understand, he’s dealing with a lot,” Shakur later told the Lexington-Herald, adding: “Mistakes happen.”
Oh, no. This is bad news. Trump-loving Republicans are using the coronavirus pandemic to get away with committing bad deeds. They think no one will notice. Now they are working to confirm another Trump toady as Director of National Intelligence.
[…] While the rest of the nation is distracted by a true national emergency, Senate Republicans are taking the opportunity to quietly schedule hearings for fervent Trump acolyte Rep. John Ratcliffe’s confirmation as Trump’s new director of national intelligence. Ratcliffe had to bow out of the nomination in scandal the last time Trump attempted it; after the Senate nullification of impeachment charges, however, Senate Republicans seem to be signaling that there’s no “scandal” left that they won’t pave over to do Trump’s bidding.
The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr, intends to hold a confirmation hearing for Ratcliffe next week. […] Burr had opposed Ratcliffe’s prior nomination last year, but has now evidently changed his mind.
[…] Burr’s change of heart might be because he has been under heavy attack from Trump, who views him as disloyal for his unambiguous recognition that yes, the Russian government did indeed act to manipulate the 2016 elections. But it may be that Burr, at least in theory being investigated by the Justice Department for his stock dumping, has come to the same post-impeachment conclusion as every other non-Romney Senate Republican: In for a penny, in for a pound. If we’re going to erase Trump’s proven extortion attempt against a foreign nation, using the tools of government to brazenly abuse the office in a manner long recognized, unambiguously, as corrupt, it’s impossible to argue that merely installing a Trump-loyal sycophant of sketchy record as top intelligence official is an authoritarian-minded bridge too far.
[…] the move forward to install Ratcliffe is also because the current part-time acting Trump pick, odious hyperpartisan Twitter troll Richard Grenell, is deemed so universally unacceptable that both parties would rather install a rotting tuna in the post than leave him in it. […]
Ratcliffe is, in typical Trump adviser fashion, about the last person you would want in the role of director of national intelligence. He has little relevant experience. As a House Republican, he has proven a pathetic and dishonest partisan, aggressively promoting Trump-favoring conspiracy theories like the notion that the intelligence community’s probe of 2016 Russian election hacking was actually a Democratic-led plot against Trump. These conspiracies were enough for Senate Republicans to signal Ratcliffe’s nomination would be a heavy lift even for them last time around, but it was the discovery that Ratcliffe had “embellished” his resume by a considerable amount that led to his eventual withdrawal from the nomination. […]
That was enough, back in August, to send the seemingly perpetually dishonest Ratcliffe packing. […]
The confirmation hearing will be eventful, however, with at least Democratic senators eager to probe Ratcliffe’s claims that the investigation into Russian hacking was a Democratic plot against the glorious ascendant Trump. And Republican estimations that Ratcliffe’s confirmation can be sneaked through a busy news cycle might instead find that news-starved, entertainment-starved Americans stuck at home might not have anything more pressing to do than watching Richard Burr and other Republicans again humiliate themselves for Donald’s benefit.
A bizarre moment from Trump about the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluding Covid-19 “was not manmade or genetically modified” but investigations into the origins of the outbreak are ongoing.
Oh my God, Trump is completely unaware that his own ODNI said that the virus was natural. John Roberts asked him about it and Trump asked: Who said that[?] Roberts told him, and Trump said who is that? Holy crap. Even Roberts was flummoxed.
The John Roberts mentioned is not the Chief Justice, but a fox journalist (no scare quotes around “journalist” despite being from fox as he seemed to be acting like a real journalist in the exchange (as reported)).
From Wonkette: “California Gonna Feed Some Hungry Kids”
Somehow, 40 percent of people who filed for unemployment claims in Florida were denied benefits. That’s horrific, and we’ll yell at Florida later. Right now we want to praise a state with a […] governor that’s done something decent.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Wednesday that low-income families will soon receive up to $365 per child as part of a pandemic EBT program. According to the California Department of Social Services, about 3.8 million children rely on free or reduced-cost lunch from school cafeterias. […]
“Food insecurity” for children was a serious problem before the pandemic, but the number of Californians who are now seeking food assistance has increased by 60 percent since the state economy was cancelled.
The $365 is in addition to benefits from California’s food stamps program, CalFresh. It’s automatic for CalFresh recipients whose children currently receive free or reduced-cost meals. Families not already on food stamps can apply online. The Trump administration has threatened to revoke the legal status of immigrants who apply for the aid […]
NEWSOM: Putting food on the table during this pandemic is hard for families on the brink. [W]e want families struggling to access food to know we have your backs.
Effective Tuesday, CalFresh recipients can also use their EBT cards to purchase food online through Amazon and Walmart. This is a smart move that helps poor families comply with the state’s stay-at-home order and limit in-person trips to the grocery store or farmers’ markets, where their debit cards were previously accepted. This will positively impact about 2.2 million households or more than 4 million people.
[…] Newsom estimates that the initiative will cost about $1.8 billion […] The program is scheduled to end June 12, and Newsom suggested Wednesday that schools could physically reopen — in a drastically different format — as soon as July. […]
The governor gave a shout out to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her work in making the pandemic EBT program possible. Our badass lady in charge ain’t just whistling fancy ice cream. She’s helping deliver for those most in need in her state.
Follow-up to @233, the transcript the Grauniad is quoting shows just how incompetent hair furor is (my added emboldening):
JOHN ROBERTS: The Director of National Intelligence put out a statement saying they think the coronavirus was naturally occurring
TRUMP: Who?
R: It was a statement from the DNI office
TRUMP: Oh, he would know that, huh?
R: That would be your Director of National Intelligence
If he didn’t make a habit of not understanding things said to him, and ignoring the rest of the exchange, I’d be inclined to let the Who? be an impolite “I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear, so please repeat the question.” But his habit, plus his demeaning response, [H]e would know that, huh? rules out any problem with hearing the question, and rules in, very much in, hearing something he doesn’t want to hear — time to go shoot some messengers! And blame China, Biden, WHO, and Benghazi, along with the all-purpose bogeyman, Senator Clinton!! Because it’s all Obama’s fault!!!
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh is the first Muslim woman to run for federal office in the US state of New Jersey.
Dozens of women activists, leaders and lawmakers have joined a petition denouncing a death threat against congressional candidate Amani Al-Khatahtbeh, the first Muslim woman to run for federal office from New Jersey.
The 27-year-old is the founder of MuslimGirl.com, an online magazine with a global audience. After hosting a virtual town hall on Instagram, she said someone called her phone, and using racial slurs against Muslims, threatened to kill her and her family.
[…]
Al-Khatahtbeh published a recording of the April 21 death threat on her Twitter account on Wednesday. An open letter condemning the threat was signed by many supporters, including Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza, US Representative Rashida Tlaib and fellow Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar.
Al-Khatahtbeh is “running to be a public servant for the benefit of all Americans. Yet, because she is a Muslim woman, she is faced with Islamophobic and racist vitriol that threatens her life and the lives of those she loves,” the letter said.
[…]
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Al-Khatahtbeh was bullied. People threw eggs at her home and slashed her mother’s tyres. Her family faced such a backlash that her father temporarily relocated them to Jordan.
When she returned to New Jersey, she started a blog at the age of 17 with help from friends at her local mosque. It eventually turned into her popular site, which covers everything from how it feels to be the only woman in a hijab at a kickboxing class, to beauty tips and stories of teenagers fighting Islamophobia.
In recent years, Forbes magazine chose Al-Khatahtbeh for its “30 Under 30” list of top achievers, and she was asked by former First Lady Michelle Obama to speak at the United State of Women Summit.
She launched her fully digital campaign in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic; her opponent in the July 7 Democratic primary is longtime incumbent Representative Frank Pallone.
MSNBC during the day has a list of the five countries and five US states with the most confirmed cases. The UK has moved quickly onto the list, and I imagine will shortly be followed by Russia and Brazil (and later Mexico and possibly Turkey, Chile, and Peru). It’s plausible that we’ll see a similar pattern with US states, especially as some with Republican governors reopen.
I cut my own hair yesterday and I have to say…it’s not bad! (It’s curly, so it’s much easier – little precision necessary. Can’t imagine trying to cut the back if I had straight hair…)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A U.S. appeals court on Thursday ruled against a Trump administration attempt to withhold millions of dollars from so-called “sanctuary” jurisdictions that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
The decision, by the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, upheld a pair of lower court rulings that blocked the administration from placing immigration-related conditions on law enforcement grants.
[,,,]
Federal appeals courts have issued divergent rulings over Trump’s attempts to restrict funding to “sanctuary” cities, setting up a possible appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
SC@240, Congratulations!
I haven’t had my hair cut since c.2000, when it was even longer than now and had it cut to raise something like 1800€ for Amnesty International (Ireland). My own current problem is my beard, which hasn’t been shaved in ten or so years, but will interfere with the wearing of (or at least with the effectiveness of) any masks… which reminds me, I still haven’t booked an appointment yet to collect my own two free masks (no, no, I don’t procrastinate, at least when I’m not procrastinating…).
Dr Rick Bright says he was removed as head of office working on a Covid-19 vaccine for refusing to boost hydroxychloroquine
Donald Trump’s musing over whether cleaning people’s lungs with disinfectant might treat the coronavirus caused a furore but it may be the US president’s [sic] pushing of anti-malarial drugs that does far more lasting damage to his administration.
There is building anticipation over the content of an upcoming whistleblower complaint by Dr Rick Bright, who last week was abruptly removed as the head of the federal government office working on a vaccine for Covid-19.
It is understood that Bright is still working on the details of the complaint before lodging it with the Department of Health and Human Services’ inspector general.
Bright, a vaccines expert, has claimed he was removed as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (Barda) because he resisted an effort to expand the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine to treat Covid-19. The drugs, approved to treat malaria, have yet to be proven effective for this new use but have been repeatedly promoted by Trump, who has called them a game-changer.
“I am speaking out because to combat this deadly virus, science — not politics or cronyism — has to lead the way,” Bright said in a statement, adding he was concerned about “efforts to fund potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections”.
Bright’s lawyers, Lisa Banks and Debra Katz, subsequently claimed their client was pushed out of his job solely because he “resisted efforts to provide unfettered access to potentially dangerous drugs, including chloroquine, a drug promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which is untested and possibly deadly when used improperly”.
It is expected that Bright’s complaint, when revealed, will shed new light on the political pressure exerted by the Trump administration on health officials to back up the president’s [sic] sweeping praise of the drugs as a key weapon against Covid-19.
According to reporting by outlets including Vanity Fair, administration officials pushed for the widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, despite the FDA’s warnings, while also formulating a narrative where Bright was shifted from his role after mistreating his staff. His lawyers reject this characterization.
[…] When asked about Bright, Trump said that he had never heard of the man heading the effort to find a vaccine for a virus that has already caused more than 60,000 deaths in the US.
[…]
Two days after Bright announcing his planned whistleblower complaint, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a warning against the use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine. The drugs, the regulator warned, can cause a number of side-effects “including serious heart rhythm problems that can be life-threatening”.
…Egged on by Bolsonaro, who has routinely scoffed at both the virus and stay-at-home policies, Brazilians are heeding his call for revolt. Support for isolation is faltering, particularly among the wealthy, and more people are milling and mixing. From the sun-worshipers to the Instagram influencers and pro-Bolsonaro protesters, denial is spreading and quarantine is coming apart. But, unlike other countries looking to ease restrictions, Latin America’s largest nation is still weeks from the peak in its viral curve.
Bolsonaro first staked out his argument that the economy needs to get back to work in a national address at the end of March, when he referred to the coronavirus as “a little flu” and said his history as an athlete would protect him.
Since then, he has doubled down time and again, saying only high-risk Brazilians need to be isolated, even as the official count of cases rockets past 85,000 and deaths surpass 5,900 — more than the amount suffered by China. Experts consider both figures to be significant under-counts due to a lack of widespread testing.
Asked about the grim milestone Bolsonaro responded, “So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”
Personal trainer Gabriela Pugliesi would seemingly have little reason to question risks posed by the virus. The 34-year-old was infected last month at her sister’s wedding. Several other guests also contracted COVID-19 at the five-star resort with beachfront bungalows.
Coughing and feverish — yet no less bronzed and blonde — Pugliesi repeatedly told her 4.5 million followers on Instagram to stay home and take care of themselves. She recovered in late March, and on Saturday threw a party at her apartment in Sao Paulo, the epicenter of Brazil’s outbreak. No one wore masks and in one video Pugliesi posted, she and friends shouted “Screw life!” into the camera.
Flouting isolation drew an immediate backlash and more than 100,000 people unfollowed her. She also lost about a dozen sponsors, who also bailed on her influencer guests.
Tatá Werneck, a TV talk show host, was a fierce critic.
“My cousin is a doctor and arrived home in tears. They already have to choose who to save,” Werneck posted on Pugliesi’s account. “This behavior of yours, even more so because you have so many followers … is inadmissible.”
Pugliesi apologized then suspended her Instagram account. She didn’t respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press.
Others in Sao Paulo and elsewhere are defying social distancing, albeit more discreetly….
On Thursday, the governor of Rio de Janeiro state extended restrictions on activity and gatherings until May 11; Sao Paulo had previously extended them until May 10. The two states have the largest virus incidence.
Still, a poll by Datafolha showed 52% of people surveyed believe even those who don’t belong to at-risk groups – the elderly and people with chronic illness – should remain in isolation, down from 60% at the start of the month. Among the wealthiest, support for continued quarantine is just 39%.
Bolsonaro’s hard-core base has staged rallies to shore up support for their leader’s views, most recently on Sunday in the capital, Brasilia. Many of the several hundred demonstrators draped themselves in the Brazilian flag, and the few face masks were in the national colors of green and yellow. Most neglected to use masks altogether, even as they shouted into a shared bullhorn.
Not all of Bolsonaro’s ministers have fallen into lock-step behind him, but those who don’t do so risk losing their jobs….
Russia confirmed 7,933 new coronavirus infections Friday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 114,431 and marking a new one-day record increase.
Russia is now the eighth most-affected country in terms of infections, having surpassed China and Iran this week….
Scientists working for the US military have designed a new Covid-19 test that could potentially identify carriers before they become infectious and spread the disease, the Guardian has learned.
In what could be a significant breakthrough, project coordinators hope the blood-based test will be able to detect the virus’s presence as early as 24 hours after infection – before people show symptoms and several days before a carrier is considered capable of spreading it to other people. That is also around four days before current tests can detect the virus.
The test has emerged from a project set up by the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) aimed at rapid diagnosis of germ or chemical warfare poisoning. It was hurriedly repurposed when the pandemic broke out and the new test is expected to be put forward for emergency use approval (EUA) by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) within a week.
“The concept fills a diagnostic gap worldwide,” the head of Darpa’s biological technologies office, Dr Brad Ringeisen, told the Guardian, since it should also fill in testing gaps at later stages of the infection. If given FDA approval, he said, it had the potential to be “absolutely a gamechanger”.
While pre-infectious detection would improve the efficiency of test-and-trace programmes as governments worldwide relax lockdowns, Darpa cautioned that it must wait until after FDA approval is given and the test can be put into practise for evidence of exactly how early it can pick up the virus.
“The goal of research is to develop and validate an early host blood response diagnostic test for Covid,” Prof Stuart Sealfon, who leads the research team at Mount Sinai hospital in New York, said in an email.
He said the testing approach, which looks at the body’s response as it fights Covid-19, should produce earlier results than current nose-swab tests that hunt for the virus itself. “Because the immune response to infection develops immediately after infection, a Covid signature is expected to provide more sensitive Covid infection diagnosis earlier,” he told the Guardian.
The research behind the development of the tests will eventually be made public, with the collaborating teams from medical schools at Mount Sinai, Duke University and Princeton expected to publish online, allowing scientists around the world to trial similar methods.
If EUA is granted, the test should start being rolled out in the US in the second half of May. Approval is not guaranteed, but Darpa scientists are enthusiastic about the potential impact as governments loosen lockdowns amid worries about controlling potential second-wave outbreaks.
…
The test would up up the possibility of isolating pre-infectious cases and closing down transmission chains. It could also dramatically reduce quarantine periods for people exposed to Covid-19 spreaders, allowing them to go back to work within days. “It could have exceptional demand,” said Chris Linthwaite, the chief executive of Fluidigm, a California life-sciences technology company that is part of the project, who believes frequent testing can help manage workforces as they return to offices, warehouses and factories.
…
Darpa experts also see potential to improve protocols for protecting health care workers and others in high-risk jobs, as well as those in relatively self-contained or isolated communities such as care homes and prisons or onboard ships.
…
Limitations on use are similar to those already faced by countries such as Britain and depend on PCR capacity, stocks of chemical reagents and logistics. Results can take an hour, or longer if samples must be sent away to laboratories….
[… Federal prosecutor Aaron] Zelinsky responded to Corsi’s email by reaching out to Corsi’s lawyer and asking for all of Corsi’s communications with Zelenko, according to The Post. The Justice Department is now investigating all of [quack Vladimir] Zelenko’s communications.
[…]
Gregory Rigano, a lawyer who said he’s working with Zelenko, told The Post on Thursday that federal prosecutors have not contacted him or his client, and that is not aware of any potential law enforcement interest in Zelenko.
It’s not something I’m familiar with, Rigano said. We’re just saving people’s lives that have coronavirus and getting rid of this virus from America as soon as possible.
In his YouTube video, Corsi showed the email he said he accidentally sent to Zelinsky, in which he wrote that Zelenko had an FDA approved randomized test of HCQ underway, referring to hydroxychloroquine.
Corsi said that Zelinsky then went to a government website that displays approved clinical trials and found no mention of or reference to Zelenko. Corsi said he later asked Zelenko about it, and Zelenko replied that his study was approved by an internal hospital panel.
I pointed out to Zelenko, ‘But it’s not registered as an FDA test, and you can’t say it is,’ Corsi said Thursday on YouTube, The Post reported. He added that he didn’t think Zelenko was trying to dupe anyone but instead does not understand what it means to have an FDA-approved test. [he’s a quack, of course he doesn’t! –blf]
As I feared, the federal government wasted April much as it wasted February.
That is a harsh assessment given how much the country has been suffering. But without competent federal leadership, the best we are managing is to tread water. Some stats:…
…
So for each month we remain on the plateau, we risk losing more Americans than we lost in nearly a decade in Vietnam. If we spend May like we spent April, we will blow past 100k dead in weeks.
If we relax the restrictions too early, death tallies could be much worse.
There is simply no way out of our current predicament without a much more aggressive approach. Distancing, as painful as it is, is not enough.
We must, must, must scale up testing and tracing as well. Without that we are stuck.
And alongside that, we must surge attention and support toward the kind of places that are now producing the largest volumes of new cases – unsafe workplaces and unsafe care facilities….
…
The way forward is very clear: test, trace, isolate, protect. Putting that infrastructure into place can bring down cases to a manageable level, enable us to relax lockdowns, and move to a posture of sustainable suppression.
But that will be tough to deliver without the feds.
The states have vital roles, but they can’t do it on their own. They need a functioning federal partnership – resources, guidance, technical advice, operational support.
Instead they have to hide their tests and PPE to avoid the feds confiscating them.
So it is hard to be optimistic (I’m sorry). We are stuck in an untenable holding pattern as long as federal leadership means vague slide decks and empty assurances rather than test kits, PPE, and accountability.
The feds lost February by ignoring the domestic threat and failing to prepare.
They’ve lost April by failing to lay the foundation for a safe exit from the lockdowns.
Jay Rosen: “Before her first briefing today, I want to remind people that @PressSec is a culture war appointment. She was hired to fight with the press on TV, and to address a narcissistic wound: that no one was defending him hard enough against… whom? Journalists! So that’s your primer.”
The UK has reported 739 more deaths from Covid-19, bringing the total death toll in the country to 27,510.
In a daily briefing on the outbreak, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said 177,454 people have so far tested positive for coronavirus, an increase of 6,201 since yesterday.
Of those, 15,111 patients are currently in hospital, Hancock said.
The number of people who have died from Covid-19 in Turkey has risen by 84 in the last 24 hours to 3,258, with 2,188 new cases of the virus, Health Ministry data showed on Friday, according to Reuters.
The total number of cases rose to 122,392, the data showed, the highest total outside Western Europe or the US.
A total of 53,808 people have so far recovered. The number of tests conducted in the past 24 hours stood at 41,431, raising the total number of tests during the outbreak to 1.075 million.
Texas has had three days where we’ve seen more than 40 people die from covid-19 in a single day and two of them were yesterday (42) and today (50). Businesses can reopen in eight hours.
The part of this that people seem to fundamentally misunderstand is that it isn’t a choice between continued lockdown vs. deaths. It is a choice between continued lockdown vs. ending lockdown now, spread of disease, surge in hospitalizations, additional lockdowns AND death.
The places like NYC and Lombardy where we have seen hospitals overwhelmed came DURING lockdowns, not INSTEAD of lockdowns. They were just lockdowns instituted too late.
i wrote a little more about this… [link atl]
people asking “should we just stay closed forever then” are asking the wrong question, the actual question is “what have we done to make it safe to reopen” and until that answer corresponds with the recommendations of public health experts, yes, we stay closed.
if we don’t stay closed until it is safe to reopen, the consequences are a massive spread of disease AND more lockdowns, it’s not either/or.
it’s not “stay closed until we are 100% sure no one will ever get infected again,” it’s “stay closed until we have created a robust system for testing and contact tracing that means we can do it safely.”
if you are desperate or frustrated or angry and you need to blame someone, blame the people who didn’t find a way to use the last six weeks of lockdown to make it safe to reopen.
Last thought tonight: this is all awful. I’m lucky that my job is stable, even if my industry isn’t. I worry constantly that as the overall economic picture gets worse, my situation will change. I get the anxiety of people whose lives got much worse the past six weeks. And yet.
Ending lockdown doesn’t make it safe to go out. It increases the likelihood of future, longer, lockdowns, based on expert models. That is worse for everyone’s future, including those hurting right now. We can’t end a pandemic by wanting it to be over. I desperately wish we could.
I want to go out. I want to see my niece and nephew in Houston. I want to go see Black Widow. I want to feel the relative predictability of life as it was in January. I want to eat at the Chinese buffet on I-35. I want to see Sharon Van Etten play. I want to feel normal. And yet.
It’s not within our power to make it normal. The virus doesn’t care what we want. We don’t have treatment. We don’t have a vaccine. We don’t have measures in place to contain it. The unfairness of living in vulnerable human bodies took those things, not rules that keep us safe.
Even those of us who are lucky right now live with the uncertainty of a future that could be much worse than our current moment. And even if that is where we end up, it will be the virus, and our lack of preparation for its inevitability, that brought us there.
SC @260, I liked this paragraph because it is succinct and correct:
it’s not “stay closed until we are 100% sure no one will ever get infected again,” it’s “stay closed until we have created a robust system for testing and contact tracing that means we can do it safely.”
People have chosen to radically alter their lives both to avoid getting sick and to save other people’s lives.
That is a significant political act, and there is enormous support for it. But it doesn’t fit conventional political scripts so it’s not understood as political.
At least, it’s not understood as political in the way the lockdown protests are, even though the protests are much, much smaller and have very little public support.
The closest we get to a political understanding of the choice to stay home (for those who have that choice) is when we talk about the partisan divide in support for restrictive measures.
So the lockdown protests are treated — and legitimated — as a movement, while the much larger political action is not.
And I should add: the lockdown protests are *designed* to look like a traditional political event, and meant to draw exactly the kind of media attention they generate. (Although journalists have been pretty good about looking at the people and pocketbooks behind the protests.)
[…]
“These weapons were designed for one purpose and one purpose only: to kill the largest number of people in the shortest amount of time. There is no use and no place for such weapons in Canada,” said the prime minister. “Effective immediately, it is no longer permitted to buy, sell, transport, import or use military-grade assault weapons in this country.”
[…]
The prime minister announced a two-year “amnesty period” to allow gun owners to comply with the law. The ban covers 1,500 models and variants of firearms.
Canada has one of the highest per capita gun ownership rates in the world, at an estimated 34.7 firearms per 100 people, according to the Small Arms Survey in 2018. The country still trails far behind the US, which has close to 120 guns per 100 people.
[…]
An “overwhelming majority” majority of Canadians — nearly four out of five people — support the ban, according to a poll from the Angus Reid Institute, released Friday.
From the Washington Post article mentioned by SC in comment 253:
Federal prosecutors are examining the communications of a New York family doctor whose work has been discussed on Fox News and who has been in touch with the White House to tout an anti-malarial as a treatment for the novel coronavirus, […]
The examination of Vladimir “Zev” Zelenko’s records began when an associate, conservative commentator Jerome Corsi, accidentally sent an email intended for Zelenko to another “Z” name in his address book — federal prosecutor Aaron Zelinsky, who as a member of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s team had spent months scrutinizing Corsi’s activities during the 2016 presidential election.
During episodes of his daily podcast this week and in a YouTube video he posted late Thursday in response to questions from The Washington Post, Corsi said that Zelinsky responded to the unexpected email by reaching out to Corsi’s lawyer and requesting all of Corsi’s communications with Zelenko.
Corsi said he and Zelenko are collaborating on a website designed to connect people with doctors. They have acted lawfully, Corsi added, but he plans to cooperate with the request and has handed over his communications.
Zelinsky is tasked now with investigating coronavirus-related crimes in the Maryland U.S. attorney’s office, as part of a directive from U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr to prioritize such cases. The department already has charged a medley of fraudsters for peddling fake cures, selling personal protective equipment they didn’t actually have or running more complicated Medicare reimbursement schemes, and officials say tips are coming in droves. […]
Despite a lack of scientific evidence, […] Trump has enthusiastically promoted the drug as a potential treatment for patients infected with covid-19, […] Last week, the Food and Drug Administration, citing reports of “serious heart rhythm problems” associated with hydroxychloroquine, warned doctors against its use outside of a hospital or clinical trial. […]
He [Corsi] said he had turned over to Zelinsky emails and text messages between himself and Zelenko, as well as copies of his podcast and marketing materials for the website — “everything he asked for.” […]
even passing interest from federal authorities into efforts to promote the anti-malarial is likely to chafe the president and his allies, particularly given the involvement of a former member of Mueller’s team. […]
Zelenko has said he successfully treated hundreds of suspected covid-19 patients with what he called a cocktail of hydroxychloroquine, the antibiotic azithromycin and zinc sulfate.
By “successfully treated” does he mean they didn’t die? And by “hundreds of patients” does he mean ten or less?
Experts, including Trump’s leading infectious disease specialist Anthony S. Fauci, have repeatedly cautioned that while there is some anecdotal evidence the drug shows promise, its efficacy must be validated through controlled scientific studies.
Zelenko consults frequently with some of Trump’s closest allies. Trump aides say he has been in contact with Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and other officials. In a recent interview, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani said he and Zelenko speak frequently — often more than once a day.
“He’s a very smart doctor,” Giuliani said. “I’ve seen an analysis of Dr. Zelenko’s patient list. There are thousands of people who have been helped by it.”
Corsi said he was referred to Zelenko by another doctor also interested in covid-19 and hosted Zelenko for the first time on his podcast earlier this month.
Corsi’s website, speakwithanmd.com, offers people the opportunity to schedule a virtual appointment with a doctor, by clicking on a button and inputting their name and address. It advertises a “low consult fee” of $59.95, as well as “Prescriptions Delivered Right to Your Door, Same Day!” through a partner.
The site claims to be linked with more than 625 health-care providers, spanning all 50 states. In a “Frequently Asked Questions” section, it says it is “designed to see and treat non-emergency type consultations,” though it lists “COVID-19” as one of many health problems its doctors can examine, along with constipation, allergies and the common cold. […]
He [Zelenko] accused Fauci and other government scientists of opposing use of the drug for political and financial reasons. “History will prove me right,” Zelenko said on Corsi’s podcast. “The difference between me and Dr. Fauci is only about 100,000 dead people.” […]
The federal government placed orders for well over 100,000 new body bags to hold victims of COVID-19 in April, according to internal administration documents obtained by NBC News, as well as public records. The biggest set was earmarked for purchase the day after President Donald Trump projected that the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus might not exceed 50,000 or 60,000 people.
That batch is a pending $5.1 million purchase order placed by the Department of Homeland Security on April 21 with E.M. Oil Transport Inc. of Montebello, California, which advertises construction vehicles, building materials and electronics on its website. The “human remains pouches” have not been paid for or shipped to the Federal Emergency Management Agency yet, according to the company’s marketing manager, Mike Pryor.
“I hope to God that they don’t need my order and that they cancel it,” Pryor said in a text message exchange with NBC News.
Body bag contracts bid by Homeland Security and the Veterans Affairs Department are just one illustration of how Trump’s sunny confidence about the nation’s readiness to reopen is in conflict with the views of officials in his own administration who are quietly preparing for a far worse outcome.
Around the same time it wrote the contract for the body bags, FEMA opened up bidding to provide about 200 rented refrigerated trailers for locations around the country. The request for proposals specifies a preference for 53-foot trailers, which, at 3,600 cubic feet, are the largest in their class.
The cache of internal documents obtained by NBC News includes an April 25 “pre-decisional draft” of the coronavirus task force’s “incident outlook” for the response, a summary of the task force leaders’ meeting the same day and various communications among officials at several agencies. The documents show that task force members remain worried about several major risks ahead, including insufficient availability of coronavirus tests, the absence of a vaccine or proven treatments for the coronavirus, and the possibility of a “catastrophic resurgence” of COVID-19….
Social networks still carrying former footballer’s bogus information about coronavirus
Facebook has removed a page belonging to David Icke after social media platforms came under pressure for giving a platform to the conspiracy theorist, whose bogus messages about Covid-19 have continued to gain viewers.
A page […] was removed for repeatedly violating Facebook’s policies on harmful misinformation, the company said on Friday.
But while the deleted page had more than 770,000 followers, a secondary account with more than 68,000 followers remained active. A verified account for him also remained on Twitter, which said it was prioritising the removal of Covid-19 content when it had a call to action that could potentially cause harm.
[…]
A report by the CCDH [Centre for Countering Digital Hate] claims that Icke’s conspiracies about coronavirus have been viewed more than 30m times. Based on an analysis of videos that feature Icke speaking about the coronavirus on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, the group described him as the leading producer of misinformation on Covid-19.
[…]
The action against Icke’s social media presence was also welcomed by Hope Not Hate, which said: “Icke’s deluded, often antisemitic, posts encourage harmful lies to spread. Other platforms should follow Facebook’s lead.”
The local television station London Live was sanctioned recently after the media regulator, Ofcom, found it had posed a threat to the public’s health by showing a lengthy interview with Icke about the coronavirus pandemic.
Icke, who has repeated discredited claims that the pandemic is linked to 5G, had used the broadcast to claim without evidence that the pandemic was cover for a supposed global world order to crash the economy, end the use of cash payments and track people.
[…]
In one video, he suggested a Jewish group was behind the virus.
Following the ban, his Twitter account posted: Fascist Facebook deletes David Icke — the elite are TERRIFIED.
[… examples of the loon’s blatherings from the CCDH, including the following doozey]
● a YouTube video in which he falsely claimed it was not possible to catch a virus from shaking hands
[…]
I guess teh reptilians got annoyed with him. They need the humans alive…
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trollssays
Got a letter from the Treasury Dept. today with a letter where the hair furor was trying to take credit for the stimulus package. The shredder was ready, and easily digested the propaganda.
On MSNBC this morning, Joe Biden categorically denied sexual assault allegations raised by Tara Reade, a former staffer, and called on the National Archives to release any potential records related to her claims. The likely Democratic presidential nominee also issued a written statement, calling attention to what Biden described as “the full and growing record of inconsistencies in her story, which has changed repeatedly in both small and big ways.”
Joe Biden’s and Bernie Sanders’ camps agreed yesterday to a delegate arrangement in which the Vermont senator will maintain representation and influence over shaping the Democratic Party’s platform.
Akira MacKenziesays
Nerd @ 269
I got mine yesterday after my Trump-worshiping father brought in the mail. Since he think’s I’m a mental incompetent (nor does he have any sense of privacy), he thought I was being audited for whatever screw-up I obviously made on my taxes. After I explained that it was Trump propaganda, taking credit for the stimulus payments, he angrily replied with “If you don’t like him, then send the money back?” Not wanting to spend the rest of my suddenly shortened life in a cardboard box, I held my tongue.
militantagnosticsays
BLF @268
I guess teh reptilians got annoyed with him. They need the humans alive…
Trump is siding with those “very good people” who carried AR-15 guns and other weapons into the Michigan capitol:
The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.
Some of those protesters carried machine guns into the galleries above where the lawmakers debated.
From Governor Gretchen Whitmer:
While some members of the legislature might believe this crisis is over, common sense and all of the scientific data tells us we’re not out of the woods ye. By refusing to extend the emergency and disaster declaration, Republican lawmakers are putting their heads in the sand and putting more lives and livelihoods at risk. I’m not going to let that happen.
Whitmer ended the current state of emergency, and she promptly issued two new emergency declarations.
[…] She declared the first under the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act of 1945, which gives the governor broad powers without any time constraints.
She issued the second under the Emergency Management Act of 1976, which only allots the governor 28 days of authority under a state of emergency before the legislature must approve an extension. Her first order technically ending the current state of emergency seems to be a way to skirt the law’s legislative extension requirement. […]
Michael Cohen […] told yesterday that he must cease writing a tell-all book about his time working for Trump […]
ABC News reports:
Cohen received a letter from lawyers representing the Trump Organization demanding Cohen halt writing a ‘tell-all book’ about his time working for the president [sic], according to sources familiar with the matter.
Charles Harder, the attorney representing the company, writes that Cohen signed a non-disclosure agreement when he joined the Trump Organization and thus it would prohibit him from disclosing certain information about the president [sic], his family and the company.
Nothing like having a president who is busy supporting armed insurrection.
…………………
So a couple dozen citizens whine about not being able to go where they want while being allowed to wander the halls of the state capital with guns (irony alert), and the Governor is supposed to make deals with them?
70+% of America supports the stay at home orders. It’s ridiculous.
———————
The President of the United States is guilty of incitement, and his fellows Repubs remain silent.
——————–
…and they’re armed like a fully kitted SWAT team.
But they mean well.
——————-
Yeah, more of his “very good people.” Thugs carrying AR-15s into a State legislature.
———————
Football player kneels. “Fire him!” “Get him the hell out of there!”
Armed insurrection at a state capital “very good people”
[…] I didn’t think we’d fall this far this fast. I can’t believe I’m literally debating—with Trump supporters in my neighborhood—the value of letting people live during this outbreak. How the fuck are we still having serious discussions about Trump’s electability?
Serious discussions of sacrificing the weak weren’t acceptable too long ago; I don’t even want to think what might be considered acceptable four years from now, if the right-wing is still clinging to power.
This terrifying stance should scare you to do everything you can to make sure this Nazified version of the GOP is thrown out of power this year. Otherwise, you or your family might be subjected to the “next stage.” Right now, the right is asking for voluntary sacrifices of the old and weak, but history shows it’s just a few atrocities away from being made mandatory.
There is no other truthful or responsible way to characterize this. Every question asked of him, his apparatchiks, and any other Republican, every story written about this, must start with this basic reality and the enormity of what it means for our country.”
I can honestly say that this week is worse than the worst scenarios I had imagined.
“NEW — The Capitol’s attending physician warned McConnell’s office and others LAST WEEK that DC hadn’t cleared benchmarks for reopening. McConnell’s office pushed forward with reconvening the Senate anyway.”
Yesterday, a bunch of armed militia nuts stormed the Michigan Capitol to demand that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer reopen the state despite the fact that doing so would be an incredibly bad idea.
Today, a bunch of gun-toting “Boogaloo” enthusiasts are doing the very same in Raleigh, North Carolina, along with another group calling themselves “American Revolution 2.0.” This time, however, they are actually in a state where it is illegal for them to protest on government property while carrying guns, so it may not work out as well for them.
As you may recall, “Boogaloo” is the latest term white supremacist and militia groups have given to their dream of a second Civil War. Many of them see this pandemic as an opportunity to get that going. Of course, as we have previously noted, when you try to Civil War people who are not interested in having a Civil War with you, that is just murder. Or terrorism.
The first group is organized on Facebook under the name “Blue Igloo” — one of the many code terms for “Boogaloo” that have proliferated on social media — and they have been promoting their event on the supposedly more mainstream private group Reopen NC.
Via Triad City Beat:
Promoters of today’s event have been actively recruiting on the more mainstream Reopen NC Facebook group, which is set to private.
“I have perfectly legal, constitutionally protected liberty sticks with plenty of freedom seeds,” wrote one user who has indicated he plans to be in Raleigh today.
Another user chimed in: “You bet me to it. Bring the boog sticks.” Then, in another comment: “Don’t forget your Hawaiian shirt!” The same commenter spelled out his intentions for the benefit of an uninitiated person on the thread: “The boogaloo. The big igloo. The big luau. The show. Etc. Americans’ second revolution.”
A Facebook user who has been active in the planning for today’s event posted a photo of himself on April 6 wearing a black and white shirt with palm tree silhouettes and a pink boa while holding a black pistol.
“Grow out your mustache and go full Boognum PI,” a friend — also involved in the planning for the Raleigh event — advised.
Cute.
If Reopen NC sounds familiar, that’s because it is the group where one of the founders actually has COVID-19 and tried to claim it was a violation of her First Amendment rights and also the Americans with Disabilities Act to require her to quarantine herself for as long as she was contagious. […]
They hold the rule of law in the highest regard … except for wanting to be armed in places where they are, legally, not allowed to be armed. And except for wanting to start a Civil War with the rest of us, which is, we must assume, also not legal. […]
Of course, the group is already aware that sites like Wonkette will be writing about any stupid thing they do, and have thus encouraged participants to film everything so that we do not Project Mockingbird them.
In order to combat against the corrupt media propaganda machine (research: Operation Mockingbird), we are going to need everyone to have their cell phones rolling at all times during this event. Live Streaming and offline video recording alike. Also need this to be on diverse platforms, so Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and whatever else. Be prepared to bring portable battery chargers as well. If we don’t do this, we will absolutely drown in lies and false narratives.
Project Mockingbird, for the record, was an alleged Cold War era CIA program supposedly developed to counter what they saw as communist propaganda from journalists. The only official documented mention of Project Mockingbird is in the Family Jewels report, declassified in 2007, and it is in reference to wiretapping journalists (rather than telling journalists to make fun of right-wing nut jobs who are trying to get us all killed).
So far, the protests have been as stupid as you might imagine. […]
The other group protesting today is American Revolution 2.0, a group that may actually be just one guy named Josh Ellis, who lives in the Chicago suburbs and records many very long YouTube videos that not a lot of people watch. […]
You may recall the whole “I have a whole group of people standing behind me and agreeing’ schtick from such classics as the Unabomber’s manifesto and Eric Rudolph’s statements to the press. Not to insinuate anything.
According to the official website, AR 2.0 is planning 50 protests in every state capitol today. That does not appear to be happening. Ellis has, however, shown up in North Carolina and has even spoken to the news media about what his “group” hopes to achieve.
Via WRAL:
[…] When asked if he was concerned about the spread of the virus if states opened too early, Ellis said, “That says I am not responsible for my own health. That’s the message when you are saying only government can protect you from this. You are saying you are either incapable or too stupid to take care of your own health.”
Well, given all of the protesters showing up at these rallies, particularly those who subsequently got sick, it seems pretty clear that they are, in fact, too stupid.
“You don’t want people to misconstrue the expiration of these guidelines as a recommendation that it’s okay to go back to your normal life…. It’s not.”
[on March 16 Trump] unveiled the White House’s coronavirus guidelines — they were called at the time, “15 days to stop the spread” — complete with social-distancing recommendations. Much of the United States effectively came to a halt soon after. It wasn’t long, however, before the president started feeling antsy.
A week after the announcement, Trump started talking up the idea of retreating from mitigation restrictions by Easter, to the alarm of public-health professionals who knew that would be far too soon. Cooler heads prevailed, and as March came to a close, the president said he was leaving the guidelines in place through the end of April.
But there was something in his announcement that stood out for me. On March 29, Trump stood in the Rose Garden and said, “[W]e will be extending our guidelines to April 30th to slow the spread.” About a minute later, he added, “We can expect that, by June 1st, we will be well on our way to recovery. We think, by June 1st, a lot of great things will be happening.”
Those familiar with how calendars work took note of the gap: Trump extended the White House guidelines until the end of April, and he expected great things at the start of June. Isn’t there a month in between?
Given the framing, I more or less assumed that officials would conclude that social-distancing measures were having the intended effect and the White House would therefore leave the guidelines in place another month. As USA Today noted, that’s not what happened.
The deadline to lift social distancing guidelines quietly passed on Thursday as the White House pushed a new set of suggestions designed to reopen the U.S. economy now decimated by the coronavirus pandemic. The White House is sunsetting the federal guidelines, once a central tenet of its coronavirus response and the focus of the administration’s message, in the latest sign of the president’s eagerness to revive the once booming economy upended by the coronavirus crisis.
In their place, the guidelines have been replaced with voluntary re-opening directives, creating a patchwork model in which states are left to do as they please.
It’s not hard to find knowledgeable observers who see this as a mistake. Richard Besser, the CDC’s former acting director, told the Washington Post that no one in the Trump administration has yet offered a clear explanation on why states could begin to relax such measures.
Besser added, “You don’t want people to misconstrue the expiration of these guidelines as a recommendation that it’s okay to go back to your normal life, because it’s not.”
[…] Trump declared May 2020 “Older Americans Month” as his campaign works to blunt an erosion in support among the demographic that’s integral to his reelection. “Our country could not be anything near what it is without our incredible seniors,” Trump said Thursday at a White House event.
But older Americans can be forgiven if they’re not super excited by the transactional rhetoric of a man who very clearly considers them collateral damage in his reelection. Trump and other Republicans have eagerly prioritized saving the economy over slowing the spread of the virus, which has proven particularly lethal to older people. […]
Buttressing the trends in recent Civiqs polling that showed the group’s sagging support for Trump, the Wall Street Journal notes that Trump has trailed Biden among 65-plus voters in all four of its polls this year, sometimes by double digits. That stands out in particular because older voters have favored Republicans in elections for the past couple decades. In Florida, for instance, which Trump won by 17 points in 2016, Trump trailed Biden by 10 points in the latest Quinnipiac poll in mid-April. […]
But Trump doesn’t just have a Biden problem—he’s got a Trump problem. Trump’s campaign […] found that Trump’s slide with older voters was directly related to his piss-poor showings at the White House coronavirus briefings. It’s almost as if older voters remember how a real commander in chief is supposed to act in the midst of a national emergency. […]
Old voters, a critically at-risk population with very few other distractions, have been paying a great deal of attention to those briefings, according to the campaign. And many, apparently, don’t like what they’ve seen.
“I quit watching. I truly can’t stand it,” Judy Hoffman, a 72-year-old Ohio retiree who had considered supporting Trump until the pandemic emerged, told the Journal. “I quit feeling like I was gaining any information. I started listening to podcasts.”
From Mark Sumner: “Mike Pence retaliates against reporter for telling the truth—Pence knew he should wear a mask.”
The most amazing fact about the entire Trump White House is not that they’re constantly wrong. Any deliberately ignorant, boneheaded ideologue can be wrong—just ask Louie Gohmert. Nope, what has set Team Trump apart from the very beginning is their inability to admit to being wrong about the smallest, most obvious thing. Ever. The phone call was perfect. The inauguration crowd was huge. Little things like transcripts and photos be damned.
Fast climbing the ranks of things that are wrong, undeniably wrong, fully documented wrong, obviously, on camera, in your face wrong … and yet still being inexplicably defended by people who just can’t let anything go, is Mike Pence’s face mask. Or rather, the fact that Mike Pence doesn’t apparently have a face mask. Four days after Pence offered himself up as the great white virus vector, his staff isn’t just finding new ways to justify the unjustifiable—they’re threatening to sue reporters for showing what Pence actually did.
These are the facts:
The Mayo Clinic informed Mike Pence that anyone coming to visit their facility needed to wear a mask. […] Pence himself didn’t deny it when the White House was in Excuse Round #1.
Everyone with Pence at the clinic was wearing a mask. The video of him strolling around exhaling his milk breath into everyone’s face is immediately striking expressly because everyone else is clearly following the rules, and Pence is so clearly not following the rules.
Pence’s initial response when questioned about why he wasn’t wearing a mask wasn’t to say he didn’t know he needed to wear a mask—because it was just damn obvious that he knew he was supposed to be wearing a mask. Instead Pence claimed he didn’t wear a mask because he wanted to look healthcare workers “in the eye.” Which shows that Pence knew he should have been wearing a mask, but doesn’t know how to wear a mask.
Pence then engaged the claim that he didn’t need to wear a mask because he gets tested for COVID-19 all the time. That’s maybe not the best thing to say in a nation where most healthcare workers, nursing home workers, and people who are displaying symptoms still can’t get tested. It also offers absolutely no protection to people who could be infected by Pence between those regular tests.
In the third round of how to bungle a response, “Mother” Karen Pence was dispatched to Fox, where she denied everything up to that point and claimed that her husband was unaware that everyone in the clinic was required to wear a mask. Because the idea that Mike Pence is just intensely, intensely ignorant is always an acceptable position. Also, it’s apparently okay for Mother to blatantly lie on nationwide TV.
And now The Washington Post is ready with the next round in this thing that might be funny if it wasn’t putting people’s lives at risk. Pence’s office is threatening to sue a reporter for revealing the fact that Pence’s own office warned journalists accompanying Pence to the clinic that they would need to wear masks.
Not only did Pence’s office know that masks were required, they—not Mayo Clinic, but Pence’s team—told journalists they would have to wear masks to go along. Voice of America Reporter Steve Herman spilled the beans that all the journalists “were notified by the office of @VP the day before the trip that wearing of masks was required by the @MayoClinic and to prepare accordingly.” […]
For making it clear that Karen Pence was simply out-and-out lying to America in the continued effort to cover up this event, an event that would be the silliest aspect of the entire crisis had not Donald Trump suggested drinking bleach, Trump’s staff is now claiming that Herman “violated the off-the-record terms” of the memo telling him to wear a mask for the trip. He has also been banned from Air Force Two and from coming along on future Pence trips.
Notice what’s not in these statements is any claim from Pence’s staff that Herman is lying. That’s exactly the problem—Herman told the truth. But his truth is getting in the way of their lies … and that clearly can’t be allowed.
Here’s a link to the May 2 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Russia has posted another record jump in coronavirus cases, as the disease continues to overwhelm the country’s hospitals and infect top members of government.
Russia posted a record increase of 9,623 new confirmed cases of coronavirus on Saturday, indicating the country has still not reached a plateau, with the national tally growing to 124,054. Russia is showing the second-highest rate of spread of the disease in the world behind the US, and the surge has vaulted Russia past Turkey to give it the seventh-largest caseload in the world.
Officials say that the actual number of infected may be far higher than government statistics show. Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin, estimated on Saturday that 2% of the Russian capital’s population was infected, meaning that more than 240,000 people may have the virus in a city of more than 12 million. That exceeds the confirmed 62,658 cases by nearly four times.
Hospitals in the capital are at capacity, with television footage showing ambulances forced to wait for hours or even overnight in order to deliver the infected to emergency rooms. Sobyanin last week also ordered medical students to be mobilised in the fight against disease, with some telling the Moscow Times and other news outlets that they had been coerced into serving at local hospitals.
Officially, Russia has posted close to 1,200 deaths from coronavirus, but the numbers are likely higher. In St Petersburg, eight refrigerator trailers used as mobile morgues appeared outside of hospitals this week to handle the overflow, according to the Fontanka news agency.
johnson catmansays
re SC @286:
Russia is showing the second-highest rate of spread of the disease in the world behind the US
Rarely have two words ignited such a firestorm of controversy.
“So what?” said Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro on Tuesday when a journalist asked him about the fact that more than 5,000 Brazilians had died of the coronavirus.
The far-right leader’s off-the-cuff comment has been sparking anger ever since, with governors, politicians, healthcare professionals and media figures all weighing in to express their outrage at his lack of empathy.
Bolsonaro is no stranger to controversy. But his latest remark sparked such a fury because Brazil is facing a seemingly uncontrollable outbreak of the disease and is still several weeks away from the peak of the pandemic, with a death toll that threatens to surpass even the most dire predictions.
There have been more than 91,000 officially confirmed cases so far but scientists warn the real figure could be 15 to 20 times higher.
With a death toll that has already topped 6,300, the giant South American country is facing as grim a scenario as Italy or the United States.
“So what? I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?” Bolsonaro said Tuesday when questioned about his country passing the 5,000-death mark, more than China. He joked that even though his middle name is Messias, or Messiah, “I don’t do miracles.”
Wilson Witzel, the governor of Rio de Janeiro state, called the president’s remarks “absolutely unacceptable.”
With his own state on the verge of a public health meltdown, Witzel slammed the president for “being ironic about the deaths” rather than “being a leader at such a moment.”
“Do your job,” he said on Twitter Wednesday, the day when the pro-gun president was training at a target range, far from the woes of Brazil’s 210 million citizens.
Joao Doria, governor of Sao Paulo state which is also on the frontlines of the battle against the coronavirus with more than 2,500 deaths already, replied furiously to Bolsonaro in the capital Brasilia.
“Get out of your Brasilia bubble,” he retorted, urging Bolsonaro to visit hospitals “in this country which is crying for its dead and infected.”
Unlike many other heads of state, the Brazilian leader has not been seen in any hospitals nor has he expressed much solidarity with victims of the disease, bereaved families or healthcare staff who have condemned the lack of ventilators or beds.
The head of the doctors’ union in Sao Paulo, Eder Gatti, called on television for “a more serious attitude from the president of the republic.”
Bolsonaro “shows very little sensitivity to the tragedies that the families of those directly affected by the pandemic are going through,” said Lucio Renno, director of the Institute of Political Science at Brasilia University.
“His style is the iron fist, to be hard rather than to show solidarity or empathy,” he told AFP.
It is a style that inevitably draws comparison with Bolsonaro’s own role model, US President Donald Trump.
That type of reaction is “shocking for a large part of the population” and “reinforces the idea for a good part of the elites and for the Brazilian people that he is not fit to govern,” Renno said.
Miriam Leitao, an op-ed writer at the daily O Globo, wrote on Thursday that with his “So what?” Bolsonaro had “renounced the presidency.”
“Anyone who shows such contempt for his own people can no longer be president,” she wrote….
The Chinese virologist whose work has been at the centre of the controversial claim that the coronavirus came from a laboratory has dismissed rumours that she has defected from China, South China Morning Post reports.
Shi Zhengli, a researcher of bat coronaviruses, wrote on WeChat on Saturday that she and her family had not fled the country, despite coming under heavy scrutiny amid conspiracy theories that the virus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic had originated at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in central China where she works.
“No matter how difficult things are, there will not be a ‘defector’ situation as the rumours have said,” Shi wrote.
Chinese state newspaper Global Times said it had confirmed the post had been written by Shi.
“We have not done anything wrong and we continue to have strong faith in science. There must be a day when the clouds part and the sun comes out,” she added.
[…] Bloomberg’s enormous wealth and influence is still strong in the party via a growing network of groups, former associates and allies sprinkled across the Democratic party universe.
[… claims he’s trying to help defeat hair furor (probably true), nothing else (very unlikely)…]
[… efforts to buy dummie-leaning data gathering / analysis firms to add to his collection of such firms…]
The end goal for Bloomberg, 78, is still somewhat murky.
The former mayor has repeatedly said he would use his considerable resources to oust Trump from office. But the rapid expansion of Bloomberg-connected groups and operatives around Washington also suggests Bloomberg intends to hold a seat at the table among the most influential Democratic party leaders, albeit one outside of elected office.
blfsays
A few snippets from assorted Grauniad articles about antics in the States:
● White House blocks Fauci testimony as Trump welcomes Senate return: “White House said it would be counterproductive for senior member of the taskforce to discuss response in House hearing”. In contrast, defunding WHO, using an implausible conspiracy theory to blame China, and not doing much of anything expect lying & profiteering is very much productive. How’s that bleach-fueled internal UV glow working? Some more from the article:
Late on Friday, the White House moved to replace a health department official who warned of supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals, according to the New York Times.
Trump criticized the official, Christi Grimm, at a briefing three weeks ago, in response to the report she authored. Trump also attacked Grimm on Twitter, highlighting her work in the Obama administration. She also served under George W Bush and Bill Clinton.
The White House announced Friday night that it had nominated a new inspector general for the department. Grimm would be the fourth government watchdog pushed out in recent weeks.
[…]
The 5 minute Abbott Test will be used [for the Senate], Trump wrote. The Times has also reported that Trump and other members of the White House have access to a rapid-testing kit developed by Abbott Laboratories which provides results in five minutes. [The Congress doctor, Dr Brian] Monahan’s office said the testing kits to which it has access do not provide results for two days.
McConnell, the Senate majority leader who is requiring senators, staff and US Capitol employees to return on Monday despite Monahan’s recommendations, is doing so in part because of his election-year focus on pushing conservative judicial nominees through the Republican-majority Senate.
My motto for the rest of the year is leave no vacancy behind,” McConnell said in late March.
The German phrase translates as work sets you free, with JB referring to the Illinois governor, JB Pritzker, who is of Jewish descent.
The font of both instances of the letter “B” on the picket sign bore a striking resemblance to the shape of the letter “B” on the sign above the gates of Auschwitz, the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps and extermination centres, where more than 1.1 million men, women and children were murdered.
Florida’s governor, Ron de Santis, announced on Friday that state parks will soon reopen, even as the coronavirus pandemic continued and Death himself stalked the beaches of the Sunshine state.
In fairness, the Grim Reaper in question was actually Daniel Uhlfelder, a lawyer and campaigner for public beach access who put on a cowl and wielded a scythe in an attempt to alert Floridians to the dangers of reopening their economy too soon.
As footage of a socially distanced interview with a TV reporter at Miramar Beach in Walton county went viral, Uhlfelder told CNN: “We aren’t at the point now where we have enough testing, enough data, enough preparation for what’s going to be coming to our state from all over the world from this pandemic.
“I know how beautiful and attractive our beaches are. But if we don’t take measures to control things, this virus is going to get really, really out of control.”
Reuters reports on the conservative groups advising the US government [sic] that have issued an array of coronavirus economic reopening plans. They all have a common theme: Americans should go back to work immediately to halt the economic and societal damage from prolonged lockdowns.
The Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus has focused in recent days around the same message — the need to reopen quickly. The White House did not renew federal guidelines on social distancing that expired on 30 April, and Donald Trump is expected to go to Arizona next week, after a month without travel. […]
[…] Apart from the disease’s more well-known ravaging of the respiratory system, significant numbers of COVID-19 patients arrive at hospitals with serious heart problems, many of which first appear to be those of a heart attack but turn out to be symptoms of the coronavirus or the body’s response to it.
So doctors on the frontline of the COVID-19 pandemic have adapted, relying on new medical research from foreign hotspots like Wuhan and Lombardy to contend with how little we still know about the virus itself. Many hospital cardiology departments, for example, have begun to take potential heart attack patients with suspected COVID-19 into their ERs to first determine whether they have contracted the virus before moving “them back into the cardiac care path,” Thomas Maddox, chair of the American College of Cardiology’s Science and Quality Committee, told TPM.
He added that in hotspots like New York City, hospitals had “moved to a lower threshold: to test, and wait until it comes back, before doing anything with the patient.”
Maddox described the dilemma to TPM as a decision between bad variables. On the one hand, treating a COVID patient presenting heart symptoms as if he had a heart attack could expose the doctor. On the other, treating all patients as if they were infected with COVID could deprive those suffering from heart attacks of precious minutes.
“It’s been so hard to solve,” Maddox added. “Because, at the same time, you don’t want to take somebody who is short of breath because they’re having a heart attack and delay their treatment because you send them to a COVID unit, and miss the opportunity to help out their heart.”
The symptoms appear in different ways, experts told TPM. Some patients struggle with blood clots that course throughout their body, while others have severely inflamed hearts. Others still face organ failure amid spiraling blood oxygen levels.
“There’s not an easy way to tell, though, if they’re presenting so much like a heart attack,” Gulati told TPM. “We’re seeing reports of myocardial infarction when they have COVID-19, but often they aren’t always having blockages of the coronary arteries that we traditionally expect.”
She added that, in COVID-19 patients, lack of blood oxygen can creep up fast, overtaxing the heart.
“They are sitting there talking to you, and suddenly they go incredibly bad,” Gulati said, speaking of patients with dangerously low blood oxygen levels. “That is a big demand on the heart, if the heart is not getting enough oxygen, and the organs aren’t getting enough oxygen. As a result, everything is compromised.”
The lack of knowledge around COVID-19 and its symptoms can complicate diagnosis after death, as well.
Preliminary mortality data released by the Centers for Disease Control suggests that, as the pandemic peaked in New York City, the number of people dying due to what the CDC classifies as “diseases of the heart” also peaked. […]
More at the link, including graphs of mortality data.
Nearly 100 cases of the unusual illness linked to Covid-19 have emerged in at least six countries
Doctors around the world have reported more cases of a rare but potentially lethal inflammatory syndrome in children that appears to be linked to coronavirus infections.
Nearly 100 cases of the unusual illness have emerged in at least six countries, with doctors in Britain, the US, France, Italy, Spain and Switzerland now reported to be investigating the condition.
The French health minister, Olivier Veran, said on Wednesday that the country had more than a dozen children with inflammation around the heart, and while there was insufficient evidence to prove a link with coronavirus, he said the cases were being taken “very seriously.”
[…]
The new syndrome, which has yet to be named, dominated discussion between leading doctors on a teleconference about Covid-19 in children hosted on Tuesday by the World Health Organization.
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, Republican state legislators are still looking for ways to deprive people of their right to vote. (This remind me of Mitch McConnell’s determination to carry on despite the coronavirus risks, as detailed in comments 280 and 291.)
Missouri remains under a COVID-19 stay-at-home order. But that didn’t stop GOP legislators who returned to the capitol this week from reviving a measure that would shore up their political power.
The Missouri House is considering a constitutional amendment that would usher in an anti-immigrant approach to redistricting. The proposal is packaged with several others that would water down an anti-gerrymandering initiative voters approved in 2018.
The House has until May 15 to pass the new measure, in order to put it on the ballot in the fall elections. […]
Since at least 2018 Missouri Republicans have tried to change redistricting so that maps are drawn based on the number of citizens, rather than total population. The failed 2018 proposal to do so came as the Trump administration was trying to do add a citizenship question to the census.
Changing the metric that’s used to draw legislative maps has been a longstanding goal of the GOP. […]
It would mean that parts of the country with relatively few noncitizens — i.e. whiter, rural and more Republican regions — would get more representatives while those with higher noncitizen rates — including urban, Democratic-leaning areas — would get fewer.
[…] the proposal mandated that districts should “be drawn on the basis of one person, one vote.” The current version uses the same language.
The measure’s sponsor Sen. Dan Hegeman (R) admitted at a House committee hearing Thursday that the goal would be to count only citizens when drawing legislative districts. He pushed back at the suggestion that minors — who also don’t vote — could be excluded from the count as well. […]
If Republicans successfully get the measure on the ballot and it is approved by voters, the state could provide the test case for whether the Supreme Court would allow noncitizens to be excluded in redistricting. […]
The measure was considered Thursday by the House’s General Laws committee, which advanced the measure by a party line vote.
Hegeman, the bill’s sponsor, repeated several falsehoods at the hearing about the measure he is currently trying to pass.
He repeatedly claimed that it was about keeping “illegals” out of the count for legislative maps. Rep. Peter Merideth (D) pointed out that there are several classes of non-citizens and other non-voters in Missouri who are not there illegally. After a staffer ran up to whisper in Hegeman’s ear, he clarified that he meant “non-Missouri citizens.”
Hegeman also claimed falsely that […] “in the past, we dealt with citizens in the state being the counted and taken into consideration, not the illegals.” Missouri has historically included noncitizens, including undocumented immigrants, in its redistricting count, and a 1875 amendment to the constitution said that apportionment would be done based on the “whole number of inhabitants.”
Hegeman is obviously an anti-immigrant fanatic. He is Missouri’s Stephen Miller. Hegeman lies as readily as Trump does.
Additionally, Hegeman insisted that it was “well defined” and “well established” in federal law idea that the idea of “one person, one vote” meant using citizenship rather than total population for redistricting.
Merideth tried to correct him, noting that the question of using citizens instead of total population has not been resolved by the courts. The case that Hegeman seemed to be referring, Merideth said, settled only the question of whether states could use total population. (The Supreme Court in 2016’s Evenwel v. Abbott unanimously said they could).
“The only court case that has addressed this, as we just talked about, said it could include total population, which is different than what you just said,” Merideth said,
“You’ve asked the question, I’ve answered it to the best of my ability,” Hegeman said.
Has the Misery GOP tried intravenous Clorox and a Twenty Mule Team Borax enema
———————-
You couldn’t scream “Dirty Immigrants!” any louder than that, even with a bullhorn.
——————-
Why doesn’t the Missouri Republican Party just cut out all the BullShit and put into a bill what they REALLY WANT: Only White, Male, Christians are allowed to vote.
———————
Clean Missouri was a voter ballot initiative. It was to change redistricting to a non-partisan method. After passing Republicans keep trying to ignore the vote of the people (sound familiar?).
The Kansas City Star: In November 2018, 62 percent of Missourians voted to amend the state constitution to enact a series of campaign finance and legislative ethics proposals, along with a new system for redrawing legislative districts following the U.S. Census.
Clean Missouri passed after a two-year campaign garnering hundreds of thousands of petition signers.
Among the changes to the redistricting process, the constitutional amendment requires that a state demographer use a mathematical formula to try to engineer “partisan fairness” and “competitiveness” in legislative elections.
An Associated Press analysis found that while the new method appears unlikely to impact overall control of the Missouri General Assembly, it will likely increase Democrats’ chances of winning elections and cut into Republicans’ supermajorities in the state House and Senate.
Bad journalism from Newsweek … well, maybe it is not even journalism. The headline is particularly misleading.
[…] It’s been a long time since Newsweek has been, you know, Newsweek. As in the once respected news magazine that did significant original reporting and was seen as a regular source of impactful political journalism. But even in these later days, the site occasionally snags some information of significance, or reframes an issue in a way that’s helpful.
And then there’s this nonsense. If you didn’t click through, and I wouldn’t blame you, the title of the article is this: “Dr. Fauci backed controversial Wuhan lab with millions of U.S. dollars for risky coronavirus research.” Except to really get the feel for it, you have to imagine all that in 32-point block capitals.
That’s a headline that surely has it all when it comes to giving a big sloppy kiss to every conspiracy theory percolating on the right, alt-right, and gun-slinging vaccine-hating virus-humping right.
It features all of the above:
Betrayal! By internationally-respected infections disease expert Anthony Fauci, who the most MAGA of MAGA know is secretly to blame for everything that has gone wrong. Ever.
Evil China! Whose lab Donald Trump has fingered as the source of the outbreak, and who dumped coronavirus on the world because it was the only way to slow the Trump train.
Wasted tax dollars! Your hard-earned money routed to Asian people, almost certainly so they can do unspeakably unbiblical things with bats.
The truth behind this article? The lab near Wuhan has been an essential part of research into emerging diseases for decades. It’s been the recipient of outside grants since at least 2003, when that dangerously liberal George W. Bush administration provided funds for research on SARS … which would be some of the “risky coronavirus research” in the Newsweek headline. In fact, the lab in Wuhan has been there, in one form or another, since the 1950s specifically because the area has been recognized as a source of emerging diseases.
Only, the fact that grants have been going to this lab for critical research isn’t quite what the article indicates. Newsweek didn’t stop the misinformation at the headline. In reporting Fauci’s treacherous support for research into diseases, Newsweek describes the funding this way “In 2019, with the backing of NIAID, the National Institutes of Health committed $3.7 million over six years for research … the program followed another $3.7 million, 5-year project for collecting and studying bat coronaviruses, which ended in 2019, bringing the total to $7.4 million.” ‘
Okay. Except they’re really, really really hiding some important information in those sentences. As Snopes pointed out weeks ago, only a portion of either grant went to the Wuhan lab, or to the study of coronaviruses, or even to China. Over a five year period, between 2014 and 2019, a series of grants totaling $3.7 million went to the EcoHealth Alliance. That’s a 45 year-old international organization that works across borders to support medial research of all types. It receives contributions from multiple nations, corporations, individuals, and from other NGOs. EcoHealth Alliance, in turn, made contributions toward China’s research into coronavirus. So the U.S.—including the U.S. under Donald Trump—gave money to the EcoHealth alliance, and the EcoHealth alliance in turn gave some funding to China for research into emerging diseases.
[…] What’s the result of that funding? It has directly resulted in the publication of papers showing the origins of the SARS virus and reporting on other aspects of the features and threats of related coronaviruses. That research has direct benefit into the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the search for an effective vaccine.
What’s the result of the attention of the bad reporting about those grants, and the way they’re being presented as something controversial and risky? As Science reports, the U.S. has abruptly cut off funding to the EcoHealth Alliance to prevent money going into a six-year study called “Understanding the Risk of Bat Coronavirus Emergence Novel zoonotic, bat-origin CoVs.” Which seems like pretty fucking important research. This funding was cut off as stories like the one in Newsweek became hot stuff for Republicans to wave around while claiming that China was to blame for the pandemic […]
chopping funding for the EcoHealth Alliance research at this point is precisely the kind of thing that is going to get lots, and lots of people killed. These are the people who have done, and are doing, the research necessary to identify these viruses, sequence their genetics, determine their source, uncover how they work, and figure out how to fight them. […]
Oh, and where did Newsweek get that claim that $3.7 million went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology? That came from a question at one of Trump’s press events. A question asked by a reporter from right-wing conspiracy site Newsmax.
Maybe it’s time for Newsweek to change their name. After all, they wouldn’t want people to mistake them for actual Newsweek.
On Monday, Republican Gov. Greg Abbot of Texas told the world that he would be allowing the state’s stay-at-home order to expire on Thursday, April 30. Alongside other historically awful Texas officials, Gov. Abbott made an attempt at oration, saying, “Now it’s time to set a new course, a course that responsibly opens up business in Texas.” Starting on Friday, restaurants, movie theaters, and malls will all open—though only at 25% capacity. Museums and libraries also opened Friday under the same restrictions.
It’s noteworthy that on Thursday, the day before the grand reopening of Texas began, the Lone Star State reported that 50 Texans died in a single day and 1,033 tested positive for COVID-19 over that same 24-hour period. The number of people who died marks the highest number Texas has seen in a single day from the virus. The number of confirmed cases marks the third highest single-day figure, according to the Texas Tribune. […]
Texas infectious disease epidemiologist Catherine Troisi questioned the governor’s low bar, saying, “We’re not testing as many people as we should be. Are we testing in vulnerable neighborhoods, grocery store workers, bus drivers?”
Abbott and other GOP leaders like Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp don’t really care too much about what’s good for public health. But there’s something even more distressing about these two governors’ moves: As COVID-19 infection rates have been imbalanced across racial lines, it almost seems like these two men, both big supporters in suppressing Black and minority votes, are using this epidemic as a war of attrition—with real human casualties.
[…] Trump’s new press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, held her first White House briefing on Friday afternoon. That in itself was notable considering that it marked the first official press briefing since March 11, 2019 as her predecessor, Stephanie Grisham, never actually held one. And McEnany said she plans to continue with the practice that was common when Sarah Sanders held the job. “I will never lie to you. You have my word on that,” she told the reporters gathered at the White House on Friday. What happened next shouldn’t surprise anyone. McEnany proceeded to sprinkle her answers with falsehoods and lies. […]
The first notable falsehood peddled by the press secretary was concerning the news of the day, former Vice President Joe Biden’s staunch denial of sexual assault allegations by Tara Reade. Trump had said Reade’s accusations were “far more compelling” than those made against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and McEnany was asked to comment. “I think it was a grave miscarriage of justice with what happened with Justice Brett Kavanaugh. There’s no need for me to bring up the salacious, awful, and verifiably false allegations that were made against Justice Kavanaugh,” she said. But of course, there’s no way you could actually accurately characterize the accusations against Kavanaugh as “verifiably false.” […]
McEnany also blasted reporters for asking questions about sexual assault allegations against Trump. “Leave it to the media to really take an issue about the former vice president and turn it on the president and bring up accusations from four years ago,” she said. Except, of course, the allegations against Trump aren’t all from four years ago and there have been plenty of new ones since he took office, including one from E. Jean Carroll, who said last year that Trump assaulted her in a store in the mid-1990s. […]
The new White House press secretary also wasn’t quite truthful when asked about fired national security adviser Michael Flynn and new FBI notes that administration officials say is evidence about how the investigation was mishandled. At the heart of the issue is a handwritten note from Bill Priestap, who was then the counterintelligence director at the FBI. “We have a handwritten FBI note that says, quote, we need to get Flynn to lie, quote, and get him fired,” McEnany said. Except that’s not what the note says. Priestap actually wrote: “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Flynn is currently trying to withdraw his guilty plea for lying to the FBI. […]
That’s not all the FBI note said. For context, see comment 230.
For now at least, it seems McEnany will continue having the same complicated relationship with the truth as her predecessors.
Officials in Stillwater, Okla., on Friday walked back a requirement that people wear face masks inside reopened stores and restaurants, citing threats of violence and physical abuse directed at employees.
Mayor Will Joyce, an independent, amended his emergency declaration on the same day it took effect “in response to concerns voiced by business proprietors and citizens,” according to a news release. The anger directed toward store employees started in the first three hours businesses were open and included a threat of gun violence.
State and local governments have included a requirement that people wear masks in at least some circumstances as part of their reopening plans. […]
McNickle [City Manager Norman McNickle] said wearing a mask is a minor inconvenience that protects the person wearing it and anyone they encounter. “The City of Stillwater has attempted to keep people safe by the simple requirement to wear a face covering to protect others,” McNickle wrote. “It is unfortunate and distressing that those who refuse and threaten violence are so self-absorbed as to not follow what is a simple show of respect and kindness to others.” […]
[…]
The coronavirus, a teetering US economy, and President Trump’s uneven response to the pandemic combined with Joe Biden’s emergence as the presumptive Democratic nominee appear to have put the Senate in play, key political analysts are now predicting.
Old GOP assumptions about the political climate “are totally upside-down” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse told the Associated Press news agency. “Republicans have to be prepared for an all-out battle, and it’s going to be a challenge.”
Although much can change by Election Day, favourable signs for Democrats are evident. Analysts point in particular to two Republican senators whose re-elections were once considered safe — Lindsey Graham in South Carolina and Steve Daines in Montana — but now face credible Democratic challengers.
“The race for control of the Senate has gotten more competitive,” said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
“At the start of the cycle, Republicans were favoured to hold a majority. At this point, it’s more of a 50–50 game,” Kondik told Al Jazeera.
[…]
The four most vulnerable Republicans are Martha McSally in Arizona, Cory Gardner in Colorado, Susan Collins in Maine, and Thom Tillis in North Carolina.
[… McSally is the appointed replacement for John McCain in Arizona, which explains why hair furor’s next travalling lie-a-thon circus will be in Arizona, at a factory now making masks…]
The Lincoln Project, a political action committee formed by eight Republican political operatives who oppose Trump, is targeting the four vulnerable senators with a new television advertisement accusing them of “spineless servility” to Trump.
[…]
blfsays
France24 just did a report on the situation in Russia, where apparently, e.g., few hospitals in Moscow have ICUs, and the hastily-installed ones are appallingly inadequate — lack of equipment and even dirty — and very poor to non-existent confinement / isolation measures. Plus a lack of PPE, possibly unreliable tests (resulting in dubious statistics), and so on. They interviewed a number of health-care workers (all(?) in Moscow), all of whom requested anonymity and so had their appearances and voices distorted. I cannot find a video of this report on the site, but this older video, Russia sees record one-day increase in Covid-19 cases (20-April-2020) touches on some of issues reported.
blf @304, it almost doesn’t seem possible, but Russia is fucking up even more than Hair Furor of the USA when it comes to handling the coronavirus pandemic. No wonder Russian hospitals are becoming super-spreaders of the virus. I feel sorry for the health-care workers.
In Hair Furor news, as reported by Daniel Dale:
Trump now says we’ll “hopefully” have a final death total below 100,000. (On April 20, he said we’d end between 50,000 and 60,000, then this week mentioned 70,000 and 65,000.)
Trump is again describing their problem-plagued pandemic response as a great success, citing model estimates of up to 2.2 million people dying.
“We have saved thousands and thousands of lives,” he says. “I can even make that, if you want, hundreds of thousands of lives.”
the president is lying so much that I’m doing like 15-hour days to try to catch up on all the lies that’ve piled up.
McEnany claimed the Russia probe ended with “$40 million of taxpayer money being lost in a complete and total exoneration of President Trump.”
The final total was $32M, per official figures; govt. expected to recoup about $17M; Mueller report explicitly said it didn’t exonerate.
Declarations of false victory and a vacuum of federal leadership have undermined testing as experts warn reopening the US could result in disaster
A broad coalition of US health systems has mobilized to ramp up coronavirus testing in a national effort on a scale not seen since the second world war. But declarations of false victory by the Trump administration and a vacuum of federal leadership have undermined the endeavor, leading experts to warn that reopening the US could result in a disaster.
Interviews with agents on the frontlines of the coronavirus battle — lab directors, chemists, manufacturers, epidemiologists, academics and technologists — reveal as diverse an application of the legendary American ingenuity as the century has seen.
Test kit manufacturers are running production lines around the clock to triple their output, and triple it again. A private healthcare institute in California has constructed a mega-lab to process thousands of tests daily and deliver the results by text message alert. In smaller labs across the country, microbiologists improvise each day to fill unpredictable supply chain gaps that might leave them without swabs one day, and without crucial chemicals the next.
[… A]nalysts say that without centralized governance and coordination, the national effort remains a competing coalition of state and local outfits hampered by duplicated work, competition for supplies, siloed pursuits of non-transferable solutions and red tape that leaves some labs with testing backlogs and others with excess capacity.
[… A]s states begin to relax social distancing measures, the Trump administration is spreading dangerous misinformation, denying persistent supply shortages, underestimating the number of Covid-19 cases and exaggerating the margin of safety conferred by the current volume of testing and contact-tracing, experts say.
We’ve done more than 200,000 tests in a single day, Mike Pence said at a taskforce briefing this week, in which Trump touted testing as one of the great assets that we have in reopening the US.
But at current testing levels, with only rudimentary plans for contact tracing for new cases, the US will be flying virtually blind as it reopens, said Glen Weyl, a technologist who co-authored a report issued by Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics that calls for 5m tests a day by early June.
“No, definitely not, you can’t open up with that number,” Weyl said of Pence’s announcement. “It’s not even remotely in the right ballpark. It’s off by a factor of 10.”
[… synopsis of the need for testing and tracing…]
In the US, regulatory and administrative hurdles are everywhere, with clinics unable to send samples to private labs that might be out of their usual networks, a lack of protocols for reporting testing data, slow regulatory approval for the use of alternative testing materials, insufficient federal funding to support lab efforts and no central leadership steering the country’s massive laboratory apparatus.
[…]
The Trump administration’s response to this complicated thicket has been to declare the federal government a supplier of last resort and wish the states luck. It’s pretty simple, Trump has said. They have tremendous capacity. We hope to be able to help out.
[…]
“If Jared Kushner wanted to do something decent, and Vice-President Pence, they could try to standardize and distribute nationally a global test,” said [a renowned research chemist in the pharmaceuticals industry who teaches at Princeton University, Paul] Reider. “At least make it available and let people choose if they want to use it.”
The Harvard report called for the establishment of a “Pandemic Testing Board” “akin to the War Production Board that the United States created in World War II”. The director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) at the University of Minnesota calls for a new Marshall plan to stand up testing in the US.
But no efforts to create such a central authority are apparent, said Michael Osterholm, CIDRAP director, who described a shortage of reagents, or chemicals used in testing […].
[…]
In Minnesota, academics at the state university partnered with scientists at the Mayo clinic, one of the country’s premier labs, to deliver on a challenge by governor Tim Walz to stop coronavirus in the state with comprehensive testing and contact tracing. [poopyhead is in Minnesota, albeit the governor has not called out for spider assistance… –blf]
[…] About two in three Americans think restrictions on restaurants, stores and other businesses are appropriate, and 16% on top of that wanted tighter restrictions, a poll this week from the Washington Post and the University of Maryland found.
Top epidemiologists believe it’s possible that the US could get some kind of reprieve from the virus in the warmer months ahead. If that happens, the summer could feature the scenes Trump has dreamed about, of packed churches, humming factories, crowded beaches and sold-out flights.
But Trump’s dream that the virus will simply disappear is just that — a dream, epidemiologists say.
“I hope that over the course of the next few weeks to two months, we’re going to actually see a substantial reduction in transmission,” Osterholm said. “And if it does, it shouldn’t be interpreted that we won, or that somehow we’re in control.
“I hope that the case numbers continue to decrease over time, but I’m also very, very aware that they’re coming back, and we just have to remember that.”
I see that Nerd posted up-thread that he received Trump’s stimulus letter, and that he promptly shredded it. That made me smile.
Here’s another response:
I received the letter from the US Treasury about a week ago, announcing my “Economic Impact Payment” with the letterhead of the White House signed with the Trumpian scrawl. After some thought, I mailed the letter back to the White House, along with my own letter:
Dear Mr. Trump:
I am returning your letter about the recent stimulus payment. I don’t want this letter with your signature in our home. It is as unwelcome as the COVID-19 virus.
We did receive the stimulus deposit. We sent much of it to a family member in New York, who is now unable to work, and living in a hot sport under siege from the pandemic. This is the pandemic that you neglected, and continue to neglect, by ignoring public health and national security exports, and by minimizing its threat.
We are using some of that stimulus payment in hopes of making 2021 a better year than 2020.
We are contributing some of it to Joe Biden, so that next year you’ll be an ex-president, and to Democratic Sentorial candidates, so that Mitch McConnel will be Senate minority leader, or better yet, an ex-senator. We’re also sending contributions to the ACLU to help them fight your authoritarian and anti-immigrant policies, and to environmental groups to mitigate some of the effects of climate change that you continue to deny, and defend environmental safeguards that you continue to weaken.
Here’s your letter. I don’t need a memento of the least qualified, least competent and most corrupt president in U.S. history.
I dropped it into the mailbox with a recent John F. Kennedy commemorative stamp on the envelope—just a reminder of what a real President looks like.
I’d like to think that some years from now, a scholar sifting through the papers of the infamous Trump Administration will use this letter as another small data point of citizen correspondence to the White House. […]
YouTube have deleted conspiracy theorist David Icke’s account.
[…]
The video service, owned by Google, told the BBC:
YouTube has clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS. Due to continued violation of these policies we have terminated David Icke’s YouTube channel.
[…]
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed Icke’s conspiracies over Covid-19 have been viewed more than 30m times and welcomed the move.
CCDH’s chief executive Imran Ahmed said:
[…]
It is time for Instagram and Twitter to follow Facebook and YouTube by acting to remove Icke and his content from their platforms. Lies cost lives in a global pandemic, and their failure to act promptly puts us all at risk.
[… The eejit] tweeted: YouTube delete David Icke — the man the Elite are terrified of — after complaint from CCDH. The reason is made-up. Where are you gutless media? Silent or cheering.
The president [sic] and his allies are hiding the facts and pretending freedom conquers all. As a result, more Americans will die
Donald Trump is getting nervous. Internal polls show him losing in November unless the economy comes roaring back.
But much of the economy remains closed because of the pandemic. The number of infections and deaths continue to climb.
So what is Trump’s re-election strategy? Reopen the economy anyway, despite the risks.
Step 1 — Remove income support, so people have no choice but to return to work.
Trump’s labor department has decided that furloughed employees must accept an employer’s offer to return to work and therefore forfeit unemployment benefits, regardless of Covid-19.
[…]
GOP officials in Oklahoma are even threatening to withhold the $600 a week of extra unemployment benefits Congress has provided workers, if an employer wants to hire them. Safety is irrelevant.
[…]
Forcing people to choose between getting Covid-19 or losing their livelihood is inhumane. It is also nonsensical. Public health still depends on as many workers as possible staying home. That’s a big reason why Congress provided the extra benefits.
Step 2 — Hide the facts.
No one knows how many Americans are infected because the Trump administration continues to drag its heels on testing. To date only 6.5m tests have been completed in a population of more than 200 million adults.
Florida, one of the first states to reopen, has stopped releasing medical examiners’ statistics on the number of Covid-19 victims because the figures are higher than the state’s official count.
[…]
Step 3 — Pretend it’s about freedom.
Weeks ago, Trump called on citizens to LIBERATE states like Michigan, whose Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, imposed strict stay-at-home rules.
[…]
Meanwhile, the attorney general, William Barr, has directed the justice department to take legal action against any state or local authorities imposing lockdown measures that could be violating the constitutional rights and civil liberties of individual citizens.
Making this about freedom is absurd. Freedom is meaningless for people who have no choice but to accept a job that risks their health.
Step 4 — Shield businesses against lawsuits for spreading the infection.
Trump is pushing to give businesses that reopen a liability shield against legal action by workers or customers who get infected by the virus.
[…]
The Senate majority leader [sic], Mitch McConnell, insists that proposed legislation giving state and local governments funding they desperately needs to include legal immunity for corporations that cause workers or consumers to become infected.
We have a red line on liability, McConnell said. It won’t pass the Senate without it.
But how can the economy safely reopen if companies don’t have an incentive to keep people safe? Promises to provide protective gear and other safeguards are worthless absent the threat of damages if workers or customers become infected.
The truth — The biggest obstacle to reopening the economy is the pandemic itself.
Any rush to reopen without adequate testing and tracing — far more than now under way — will cause a resurgence of the disease and another and longer economic crisis.
[…]
The first responsibility of a president is to keep the public safe. But Donald Trump couldn’t care less. He was slow to respond to the threat, then he lied about it, then made it hard for states — especially those with Democratic governors — to get the equipment they need.
Now he’s trying to force the economy to reopen in order to boost his electoral chances this November, and he’s selling out Americans’ health to seal the deal. This is beyond contemptible.
Here in France, I just made an on-line appointment to collect my two free masks next week. Since the seaside village I live in is in a so-called “Orange” zone, the local council is now making contingency plans for a more limited lifting of the lockdown on 11th May than they’d apparently originally anticipated. Note that they are being fairly open about it… and speaking of being open, apparently the original map of French Red / Orange / Green zones had some errors, which They™ admitted (albeit I haven’t seen any explanation of what happened). (And whilst doing some “spring cleaning” I also found my credit card I’d mislaid perhaps three weeks ago… Yeah!)
Sixty-four thousand dead. Thirty million people out of work. Small businesses collapsing. Communities of color hit exceptionally hard.
Even the most ideological conservatives have been forced to acknowledge that government is an essential part of the COVID-19 solution. Government delivers best when its actions are fair, transparent and accountable. But […] Trump’s approach to this crisis doesn’t reflect these values. Without change, more lives will be lost and more families will go broke.
Relief legislation passed by Congress provides critical support for hospitals, families, small businesses and local governments — efforts that will save lives and help cushion the economic blows of this pandemic.
As the price of their support for these measures, Trump and the Republicans insisted on a $500 billion slush fund for big businesses with minimal conditions — a fund Trump could use to reward his political friends and punish his political enemies. They also jammed in a tax cut that overwhelmingly benefits millionaires. This tax break will be particularly helpful to hedge funds and real estate investors like the president’s friends and family — on top of the $1 trillion in giveaways to the wealthy and big corporations Trump previously pushed through Congress. The administration has even allowed a fund meant for America’s small businesses to be used by wealthy, well-connected investors. The cost is more than simply tax dollars — Americans’ faith in government is undermined when the price of helping everyone else is more giveaways for those at the top.
The coronavirus rescue package imposed some oversight of these programs, but when he signed it, Trump said he’d ignore the law and prevent a new inspector general from communicating with Congress. He then appointed a White House loyalist to serve in that role. And just to be sure there was no real accountability, he fired another inspector general independently designated to oversee the bailout.
Both of us have served in Congress overseeing the executive branch. We have also both served in the executive branch and answered to independent oversight. Take it from us: Oversight is vital to an effective democracy and a fair economy, and it’s a threat only if you have something to hide.
When Vice President Joe Biden ran implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in 2009, he invited relevant inspectors general to scrutinize his work. In 2010, they concluded that a remarkable 99.8% of awards were free of any hint of fraud, waste or abuse. And Sen. Elizabeth Warren not only led the oversight panel for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, but she also set up the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2010, where she maintained a strong working relationship with multiple inspectors general, who gave her high marks for her work. […]
Taxpayer relief should go to those most in need. Hospitals, essential workers, small businesses, and state and local governments should get the help they need immediately. If large corporations want help, they should agree not to turn around and fire all their workers. The relief bill’s unconscionable tax giveaway that overwhelmingly benefits millionaires should be repealed. But that is not enough. […]
▪ Conflicts of interest
We need strong, vigorously enforced protections against conflicts of interest, including transparency of personal finances. We need to close loopholes and strengthen the rules on the books — which in emergencies such as this are especially critical in maintaining public confidence. Both of us have long refused to own or trade in individual stocks while in office, and this should be a requirement, not a choice, for members of Congress and other government officials responsible for the recovery programs.
▪ Lobbying
It is time to close loopholes and require more extensive public reporting of all lobbying activity, such as disclosure of the materials that lobbyists now provide behind closed doors to public officials. Big corporations that will apply for or accept bailout funds should not be able to engage in political spending or to use their resources and political clout to lobby for bailout legislation that helps them, not the Americans and small businesses in need. A president who holds up relief for millions of people just so he can put his name on the checks cannot be permitted to auction off federal help in exchange for electoral favors.
▪ Oversight
Inspectors general should be shielded from removal except for what’s codified as “good cause.” Whistleblowers must be protected. While the Federal Reserve recently agreed to disclose certain key information, the full details of every bailout deal the Treasury Department or the Fed strikes with a company must be made public. And the Congressional Oversight Commission, which sits beyond Trump’s reach, needs subpoena power and the authority to oversee all aspects of the recovery, including a Paycheck Protection Program riddled with problems in its implementation.
If Congress and the Trump administration are unwilling to act now, then we will ensure that these changes are made in January 2021, both through new legislation and immediate executive commitments made by the Biden administration.
The Biden administration will appoint an inspector general to review every coronavirus relief transaction currently evading serious scrutiny. Wasteful, corrupt deals and giveaways will be rooted out and undone. Suspicious transactions will be referred to the Justice Department for investigation and prosecution. Every Trump administration official and business executive contemplating such deals should hear us loud and clear. Trump may wink and nod at this corruption. We will not.
Real unemployment in America is soaring. But for many Americans, our economy wasn’t working even before the devastation of the COVID-19 crisis. As we recover, we have the opportunity to create an economy that truly works for everyone. That begins with a government that is accountable to the people — and that is what we will deliver.
blf @310, congratulations on completing your spring cleaning, and on finding your credit card. Great accomplishments! Sounds like your credit card was lost for a long enough period of time for any virus still living on it to have died. I have been neglecting my spring cleaning in favor of working outside in my garden. But now I’m looking around the house and seeing that things are in a sorry state indeed. I know what to do next … go outside and work in the garden.
In other news: “Second ‘accusation’ Against Biden Goes Down in Flames”
The young woman who is a relative of “I am not a witch” Christine O’Donnell and who has accused Biden of speaking to (and looking at) her inappropriately when she was 14 has just been fact-checked by an actual journalist.
Chirps from the archives cast new questions on whether Biden may have been somewhere else entirely… at home recovering from a sinus surgery.
Contemporaneous local news reporting shows Biden may have been out of commish for the “remainder of the week,” according to his then-spox.
[…]
And, then-V.P. of the First State Gridiron Dinner wrote a letter today provided by the campaign, “to whom it may concern” saying, “After reviewing my files of the dinner which included attendees and the show itself, I can conclusively say, Senator Biden was not at the dinner.”
So Christine O’Donnell claimed she was right there and heard Biden say this embarrassing uncomfortable thing when Biden was actually at home recovering from sinus surgery. […]
Just wanted to add that unlike Ms Pezenik, the NY Times seems to have trouble with basic journalism.
NY Times editor-at-large Jessica Bennett tweets that sexual harassment wasn’t a thing in 1993. […]
She didn’t take the 30 seconds needed to google sexual harassment and find that the term dates from the early to mid-70s and became extremely well-known during the 1991 Clarence Thomas hearings. […]
I don’t know if “goes down in flames” is an apt description or not. We’re not done with this. No matter what the facts are, it is clear that Republicans will continue to push stories about Joe Biden having inappropriate interactions with women.
ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council] is playing a big role in pushing lawmakers to reopen the economy.
Long-time readers of this thread will recognize ALEC as a bad actor.
David Armiak and Alex Kotch at the Center for Media and Democracy have given some lengthy scrutiny to documents they have obtained showing that the American Legislative Exchange Council—the powerhouse operation that has spurred many a state legislature to adopt its right-wing, Koch Bros.-funded agenda over the years—is a leader in goading politicians to reopen the economy despite the raging of the coronavirus.
At the time this is being written, the U.S. death toll from the virus is more than 67,000. Epidemiologists and physicians across the nation continue to warn that prematurely ending the economic lockdown will have lethal consequences. Here’s an excerpt from the CMD exposé—ALEC Leading Right-Wing Campaign to Reopen the Economy Despite COVID-19:
[…] ALEC is a corporate pay-to-play operation where legislators and corporate lobbyists vote behind closed doors to adopt model legislation on a broad range of public policy issues.
At a time when many hard-hit states and medical experts are lamenting the lack of federal leadership in dealing with the health crisis, the ALEC documents call for action to “bring the economy back to life through a free market approach that gets big government out of the way.”
In an email to legislators obtained by CMD, ALEC touts that “your ALEC team has been value-pushing your ideas and solutions into the mainstream” with “9 across the States podcast episodes with guests such as Newt Gingrich,” “30 policy prescriptions,” and hosting of “9 calls with top government officials and policy experts.”
ALEC is also coordinating a sign-on letter from “policy leaders and elected officials” to […] Trump and state leaders urging them to “reopen the economy and get people back to work.” The letter praises Trump for his “Opening Up America Again” plan and thanks him for a “disaster response [that] is locally executed, state managed and federally supported.”
Recent polling shows ALEC’s aggressive position on resuming commercial activity to be outside the mainstream of public opinion. Three in four voters (73 percent) think we need to continue social distancing measures despite the impact on the economy, 80 percent want more testing before schools and restaurants reopen, and 65 percent said “they did not want to go back to work without more thorough testing.”
ALEC writes in the letter that, “It is possible and preferable for employers to implement best practices to protect the health of their customers and employees – without micromanagement from the government,” but industry practices during the pandemic suggest otherwise.
“Essential” businesses that have stayed open have repeatedly jeopardized the health of their workers, including “thousands of employees across the country” at meat processing plants and shift workers in over 55 of Amazon’s fulfillment centers who have contracted the coronavirus.[…]
Trump ignored calls for unity and complained once again about being impeached.
Former President George W. Bush, in a rare message for the Call for Unity campaign, is urging Americans across the political spectrum to come together in order to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
“In the final analysis, we are not partisan combatants,” Bush said in a video that premiered Saturday, as somber images of healthcare workers, immigrant families, and loved ones practicing social distancing measures were played. “We are human beings, equally vulnerable, and equally wonderful in the sight of God. We rise or fall together—and we are determined to rise.” […]
Here is Trump’s reply:
.@PeteHegseth “Oh bye the way, I appreciate the message from former President Bush, but where was he during Impeachment calling for putting partisanship aside.” @foxandfriends He was nowhere to be found in speaking up against the greatest Hoax in American history!
Commentary:
Trump seizing on a message to put aside political differences only to complain about his impeachment trial […] during a public health crisis that has already killed more Americans than the death toll from the Vietnam War is no longer surprising. But such grotesque behavior is still worth tracking as a reminder, yet again, that none of this is acceptable.
The concerning thing here is that we’re looking at the prospect that this may be a persistent spread.
While mitigation didn’t fail, I think it’s fair to say that it didn’t work as well as we expected. We expected that we would start seeing more significant declines in new cases and deaths around the nation at this point, and we’re just not seeing that.
[…] the doubling time has come down dramatically, [the number of days it takes for the epidemic to double in size]. But We may be facing the prospect that 20,000, 30,000 new cases a day diagnosed becomes a new normal and a thousand or more deaths becomes a new normal as well.
When people let their guard down a little more, and people are back at work after an August recess, and then you can see this slow simmer explode into a new epidemic, or a large outbreak.
That’s the concern, that if we don’t snuff this out more, that you have this slow burn of infection, it can ignite at any time. […]
The total number of new cases of coronavirus infection are still rising in about twenty states, including: Illinois, Texas, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho, and more. At the same time, many states across the USA are slowly starting to reopen. There is a patchwork approach that I fear is going to guarantee failure to control the epidemic. Sarah Cammarata, writing for Politico, noted this reality, and I am paraphrasing her conclusion.
Seven northeast states will band together to buy personal protective equipment and other medical supplies needed amid the coronavirus pandemic, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) announced on Sunday.
Cuomo said the move will help states get the equipment he and other state leaders have said for weeks is difficult to obtain.
“[This] will make us more competitive in the international market place, and I believe it will save taxpayers money. I also believe it will help us actually get the equipment, because I have trouble still getting the equipment, and just buying the equipment,” Cuomo said during a briefing Sunday.
“These vendors on the other side they’re dealing with countries, they’re dealing with the federal government. Why should they do business with one state, right, when they can do business with an entire country? So this consortium I think will help us get the equipment and get it at a better price,” he added.
The consortium includes New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. […]
Cuomo said the northeast states will share information regarding vendors “found to be irresponsible,” based on past orders.
He said the states will also look to purchase from vendors in the U.S. and in the northeast region, when possible. […]
blfsays
Lynna@312, I didn’t “finish” my “spring cleaning”, more just scored a significant find under relatively recent stratum. Having said that, I now have evidence there is, at least in some parts of the lair, an actual floor; confirmation awaits further evacuations. Ceilings remain hypothetical. (Ceilings on the lair that is; a ceiling on my credit card very much exists.)
lumipunasays
Lynna wrote at 305:
It almost doesn’t seem possible, but Russia is fucking up even more than Hair Furor of the USA when it comes to handling the coronavirus pandemic.
Actually, I suspect plenty of tinpot dictatorships across the world are fucking up their response worse than US, and most of them have fewer healthcare resources to begin with.
As of now, US response remains the most notorious failure internationally (and not just to its own citizens) because the US is a very large and influential country, and because it has a uniquely contrasted free media against authoritarian policies. The US media industry has very successfully marketed itself (together with knowledge of the English language, and recent social media connections) to the global audience, grabbing everyone’s attention to US political failures, which are reported in excruciating detail, in a language much of the world understands without translation.
The epidemiological models under review in the White House Situation Room in late March were bracing. In a best-case scenario, they showed the novel coronavirus was likely to kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans. […] Trump was apprehensive about so much carnage on his watch, yet also impatient to reopen the economy — and he wanted data to justify doing so.
So the White House considered its own analysis. A small team led by Kevin Hassett — a former chairman of Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers with no background in infectious diseases — quietly built an econometric model to guide response operations.
Many White House aides interpreted the analysis as predicting that the daily death count would peak in mid-April before dropping off substantially, and that there would be far fewer fatalities than initially foreseen, according to six people briefed on it.
Although Hassett denied that he ever projected the number of dead, other senior administration officials said his presentations characterized the count as lower than commonly forecast — and that it was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response. It affirmed their own skepticism about the severity of the virus and bolstered their case to shift the focus to the economy, which they firmly believed would determine whether Trump wins a second term.
A serious case of alternative facts!
For Trump — whose decision-making has been guided largely by his reelection prospects — the analysis, coupled with Hassett’s grim predictions of economic calamity, provided justification to pivot to where he preferred to be: cheering an economic revival rather than managing a catastrophic health crisis.
Trump directed his coronavirus task force to issue guidelines for reopening businesses, encouraged “LIBERATE” protests to apply pressure on governors and proclaimed that “the cure can’t be worse than the problem itself” — even as polls showed that Americans were far more concerned about their personal safety.
By the end of April — with more Americans dying in the month than in all of the Vietnam War — it became clear that the Hassett model was too good to be true. “A catastrophic miss,” as a former senior administration official briefed on the data described it. The president’s course would not be changed, however. Trump and Kushner began to declare a great victory against the virus, while urging America to start reopening businesses and schools. […]
The span of 34 days between March 29 […] and this past week […] tells a story of desperation and dysfunction.
So determined was Trump to extinguish the deadly virus that he repeatedly embraced fantasy cure-alls and tuned out both the reality that the first wave has yet to significantly recede and the possibility of a potentially worse second wave in the fall.
The president sought to obscure major problems by trying to recast them as triumphs. He repeatedly boasted, for instance, that the United States has conducted more tests than any other country, even though the total of 6.75 million is a fraction of the 2 million to 3 million tests per day that many experts say is needed to safely reopen.
[…] The factors that health and business leaders say are critical to a speedy and effective reopening — widespread testing, contact tracing and coordinated efforts between Washington and the states — remain lacking.
[…] This story documenting Trump’s month-long struggle to reopen America is based on interviews with 82 administration officials, outside advisers and experts with detailed knowledge of the White House’s handling of the pandemic. Many of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to recount internal discussions or share candid assessments without risk of retribution. […]
Trump crowned himself “the king of ventilators” and boasted of his work shoring up supply chains, yet shamed governors for asking for too many supplies for besieged hospitals and health-care workers in their states. At one point, he seemed to suggest that hospitals were selling protective gear provided by the federal government on the black market.[…]
Trump tried to manage the perception of his performance by holding daily, hours-long press briefings that confused and repelled large swaths of the country. As the death toll mounted, the briefings became less about providing critical health information and more a forum for Trump to air grievances, shift blame, stoke feuds, spread misinformation and inspire false hope.
[…] Aside from reading perfunctory remarks scripted by aides, the president voiced little compassion for the tens of thousands who have lost lives or the tens of millions who have lost their jobs. […]
[…] Task force members prepared to extend social distancing guidelines, already in place for 15 days, for an additional two weeks and then reassess. But Trump — who also had been influenced by watching television footage of body bags being carried out of a hospital near his Queens boyhood home in New York — surprised them by agreeing to extend social distancing for 30 days, until the end of April. For the doctors, this was a quiet victory.
[…] Trump, meanwhile, used his presidential megaphone to promote what he thought was a silver bullet: hydroxychloroquine. […]
On April 3, Fox host Laura Ingraham paid Trump a visit in the Oval Office to talk up hydroxychloroquine. […]
Some senior Republicans who heard about the meeting cringed about a television host’s special access to offer medical advice to the president, but it fit a pattern of Trump soliciting input from media stars rather than government experts.
In what was widely seen as an effort to placate Trump, the FDA issued an emergency use authorization for the drug, and the drug was added to the Strategic National Stockpile. But the president conflated those efforts with outright approval of the drug, [snipped details of alarming drug deals set up by Trump lackeys]
[…] Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Pence, exerted significant influence over the coronavirus task force, setting the agenda and determining seating arrangements for meetings as well as helping to orchestrate press briefings. Short also is one of the White House’s most vocal skeptics of how bad the pandemic would be. He repeatedly questioned the data being shared with Trump, and in internal discussions said he did not believe the death toll would ever get to 60,000 and that the administration was overreacting, damaging the economy and the president’s chances for reelection, according to people who have heard his arguments. […]
A former senior administration official briefed on the internal dynamics described the consensus mind-set among this bloc [Short, Kushner, and others] as believing health officials were “like the school nurse trying to tell the principal how to run the school.”
[…] The task force members with medical degrees — Birx, Fauci and Hahn, as well as CDC Director Robert Redfield, Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams and Brett Giroir, who leads the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps — splintered off in mid- to late-March and began meeting on their own almost daily, three senior administration officials said. Some in the “doctors group” were distressed by what one official dubbed the “voodoo” discussed within the broader task force. […]
“There’s a little bit of a God complex,” one senior administration official said of the group. “They’re all about science, science, science, which is good, but sometimes there’s a little bit less of a consideration of politics when maybe there should be.”
With health professionals and other new faces suddenly in his midst, Trump sought comfort from the familiar. Hope Hicks, an original staffer on the 2016 campaign who left the White House in 2018, returned in March in a senior adviser capacity.
Hicks accompanied the president to most every meeting and planned his daily schedule, aides said, suggesting themed events, tweaking his scripted public comments and even calling Cabinet secretaries […]
One of the more political issues during this period was the fight for supplies, such as ventilators, testing machines and swabs, and masks and other protective gear. Amid disruptions to the global supply chain, governors pleaded with the White House for help obtaining equipment from the Strategic National Stockpile, but the administration did not quickly meet their needs, and Trump derided governors when he thought they were asking for too much or not praising him enough.
[…][Trump] promised that 5 million tests would be distributed before the end of the month. A few days earlier, Pence had been even more optimistic, announcing that more than 1 million tests already had been distributed and another four million would be sent out by the end of that week.
But Trump’s promise of a drive-through testing site at your neighborhood CVS or Walmart never materialized. The administration ultimately stood up 78 testing sites, rather than the thousands initially promised, and then the president placed responsibility for testing on the states.
[…] Trump has tried to claim testing as an unambiguous success. “We want to get our country open, and the testing is not going to be a problem at all,” he said Monday in the Rose Garden. “In fact, it’s going to be one of the greatest assets that we have.” […]
Trump has often touted a testing system created by Abbott that can run nearly 500 tests in 24 hours. But the vast majority of Abbott’s tests are going unused because of a shortage of materials and staff to run them, two senior administration officials said. […] Gov. Tony Evers (D) requested 60,000 plastic tips needed to store reagents and 10,000 testing swabs and numerous reagent kits from FEMA in late March. But by April 21, the day Pence visited Wisconsin to tout the administration’s pandemic response, Wisconsin had only received 2,800 tips and 3,500 testing swabs […]
on April 8, FEMA changed its policy to make it the responsibility of states to procure supplies from commercial distributors, Pocan said. “Just telling us to go to the private market isn’t a solution,” Pocan said. “It’s an excuse.”
[…] In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan (R) quietly entered into negotiations with South Korea, with the help of his wife, Yumi, a Korean American. Exasperated with the lack of tests in his state, Hogan spent about 22 days arranging to procure 500,000 tests, […]
Once the FDA and U.S. Customs and Border Protection signed off on the deal, a Korean Air jet touched down at Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport on April 18 to deliver the supplies. Hogan said he was worried federal officials would try to commandeer the tests, so he had Maryland Army National Guard members and Maryland State Police officers escort and protect the cargo. […]
Kushner said Saturday that criticisms from governors are outdated and that every state’s testing needs have now been satisfied. […]
The weekend of April 11, [Trump] spent considerable time on the phone with friends and advisers and began to shift toward concluding that the country could not afford to remain locked down much longer. He was irate with Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, officials said, screaming and swearing at one ally about how things were so unfair. […]
“Get open, get open, get open — we kept pressing that point,” Moore said. Otherwise, he recalled telling Trump, “You’ll have a mini-Great Depression. You’ll have body bags of dead businesses and jobs that will never be resurrected.”
On April 14, Ingraham returned to the Oval Office to meet with the president. […]
[…] To create political cover for Trump, White House aides scrambled to put together a business advisory council made up of chief executives from across a range of industries. […] the group has been largely dormant since, with no clear mechanism to share ideas.
[…] CDC and FEMA officials sent a 36-page document on April 10 outlining in detail the recommended stages of reopening, including detailed instructions for schools, child-care facilities, summer camps, parks, faith-based organizations and restaurants.
But on April 16, when Trump and Birx released their guidelines for a slow and staggered return to normal in places with minimal cases of the coronavirus, many of the details fine-tuned by the CDC were stripped out. […]
Trump formally embraced the quarantine protesters on April 17 with a trio of all-caps tweets: “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” and “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”
[…] the “LIBERATE” tweets brought Trump back into the realm of conspiracy and anger, which he considers safe harbor when he feels boxed in. […]
“The White House apparatus is totally shifting to the economy,” the senior official said, noting that Trump is convening discussions about reopening this weekend at Camp David.
With Trump engaged in a war of words with governors over testing, public health experts were sounding an alarm about another vulnerability: contact tracing. Finding and isolating infected people and their contacts had been the cornerstone for successful mitigation efforts in South Korea, Singapore and other countries. […]
But as with testing, the federal government has placed the onus on states to devise their own contact tracing programs. So state and local health departments started developing programs on their own, or formed regional partnerships.
[…] Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller questioned contact tracing because so many people were asymptomatic, advisers said.
Trump, however, rarely mentioned contact tracing. His focus was on more personal challenges. One senior White House official said that the president was among the most animated when discussing what his press appearances would be like: A call-in to the radio? A morning photo opp? An evening news conference? Hicks had to move along the conversation in coronavirus meetings by telling the boss they would decide later. […]
His reelection team — including Kushner, campaign manager Brad Parscale and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel — staged something of an intervention. They presented fresh polls that painted a picture so grim they hoped the president would be persuaded to curtail his daily press briefings, as the data suggested the performances had damaged him. [snipped details of polling data]
The decision to share the data with Trump backfired. The president went into one of his rages. He said he did not believe the numbers, arguing that people “love” his performances at the briefings and think he is “fighting for them,” […] He berated Parscale for the polling data,[…]
On April 23, the day after his campaign team’s polling intervention, Trump continued with his usual behavior. During a lengthy and at times hostile question-and-answer session with reporters, Trump mused aloud about being treated with ultraviolet light or injecting bleach or another household disinfectant into the body to cure the coronavirus. […]
That day, 1,857 Americans died of the coronavirus. The next week, the number of cases reported in the United States surpassed 1 million.
And by month’s end, as Trump cheered businesses reopening in Georgia, Texas and several other states “because we have to get our country back,” the total dead climbed past 63,000, with no sign of slowing down.
More at the link. The article is thorough, and it is well-written. There’s not a “Noble” prize for journalism, as Trump claimed, but there are Pulitizer prizes, and this article may well qualify. It was difficult to choose excerpts from the article. The text posted here is choppy and sometimes lacking in details. I suggest reading the original.
blf @317, I’m glad, in a way, to hear that your spring cleaning is not complete. That makes my inside-the-house situation look less bad. I did clean the bathroom. I’m calling that good for now.
In other news, many people are slipping off their already-precarious perch on the lowest rungs of the ladder to middle-class status. I am one of them, so this account by Ray Suarez touched me:
[…] “Dad, what are you afraid of?” That might have been a cue for a heartwarming father-daughter conversation about overcoming life’s challenges. Nope. From my lizard brain, or from the primordial soup in my guts, came an answer I didn’t even consider, out of my mouth before I had a conscious thought of it.
“Being poor. That’s what I’m afraid of.” Then we crossed the street.
I keep returning to that exchange over the past few weeks, as my inbox fills with coronavirus-driven bad news. A paid speaking engagement in Texas? Canceled. Several days of work at an international conference? The organizers decided not to take the risk. A gig moderating a climate change conference in Chicago? Postponed, maybe until October. When I traveled as a reporter to health crises in Africa and Latin America in recent years, exposed to malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia, I knew that if I got sick my health-care costs would be paid by my employer, as would any days I needed to recover. […]
Now that I’m a gig worker over 60, “sick days” are simply salary-free days off. Even if work dries up, that $2,800-a-month health insurance bill still comes due on the first of the month. The electric company won’t take a podcast, a column or a television documentary as in-kind payment for kilowatt hours.
[…] A study from the New School estimates that 8.5 million older workers over 55 would fall into poverty or near-poverty if they retired at 62 and began taking Social Security payments. […]
An eye blink ago, I was anchoring a nightly program for the cable news network Al Jazeera America. Before that, I had long tenures with “PBS NewsHour” and NPR. When I read warnings that workers could face sudden and catastrophic losses of income in their final years of employment, I was empathetic but concluded it could never happen to me. After all, I had worked hard to build in bumpers around my life, and my career, to avoid that. I climbed the ladder in a very competitive business to jobs of greater renown, greater responsibility and higher pay. I did all the things that would have made me the hero of a financial advice column: got married and stayed married, paid off my mortgage years early, fully covered three college educations so my kids wouldn’t have to borrow. Then the wheels came off. After Al Jazeera pulled the plug on its young network, I headed to Amherst College as a visiting professor while beating the bushes for jobs in radio, television and print. I shoved down the rising panic, kept one eye on my bank balance as I started freelancing, and kept the other eye out for the next big thing. […]
For me, the financial strain arrived quickly. As my COBRA health coverage reached its time limit, my wife and I had a long talk about how to lower our enormous monthly health-care costs. One quick fix was to drop dental coverage, so we did it. Two weeks later, I was riding my bike on D.C. streets when I hit an enormous, and unexpectedly deep, pothole. The shock slammed my jaw shut, but I shook it off and continued to pedal. Then the pain began — first searing, then a steady, throbbing ache radiating from my jaw to my eyes to the top of my head. It felt like my teeth were misaligned. I was having trouble chewing food. In just a few weeks I had moved from being a guy who had top-drawer health coverage to being one of the guys I read about, one of the guys I covered, who deferred health care for fear of the cost. […]
These past few weeks indicate that I’ll soon have plenty of company. […]
I’m asked to make generous contributions to organizations for which I had written big checks in the past; today, that’s out of the question. I feel sheepish talking publicly about all this, because I know how many live a lot closer to the edge than I do. But I’m not whining when I say my life is different now. Even before social distancing rendered the outside world strange, I would do a walk-through at the supermarket with my wife’s list in hand, to see if items close enough to what was specified were on sale. A pair of old shoes is resoled for a second time instead of being replaced. […]
Suarez emphasized the plight of being an older man. For the most part, I didn’t find that helpful, and I left those parts out
I focused on the more universal aspects of his piece. Being afraid of being poor may mean you have been poor before. You know what that’s like. Ditto for not having access to health care. Ditto for being homeless. Anybody can slide into poverty, including someone as well-known as Ray Suarez.
On Fox News, Dr. Deborah Birx did not agree with Trump.
[…] Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Deborah Birx offered very different comments compared with […] Trump’s on the projected coronavirus death toll and the protesters who recently stormed the Michigan State Capitol.
Birx was asked about Trump’s projections in recent weeks that there would be between 50,000 and 60,000 deaths, which he later increased to 60,000 to 70,000. We are at over 66,000 deaths, with little sign in recent weeks of any significant downturn.
Birx told host Chris Wallace that “our projections have always been between 100,000 and 240,000 American lives lost, and that’s with full mitigation and us learning from each other of how to social distance.”
That contradicts what Trump said. The president hasn’t just offered a more optimistic tone on the death toll; on April 20, he suggested 50,000 to 60,000 deaths had actually replaced the previous 100,000-to-240,000 goal that he had said would constitute a successful response.
“We’re going toward 50, I’m hearing, or 60,000 people,” Trump said. “One is too many. I always say it: One is too many. But we’re going toward 50 or 60,000 people. That’s at the lower — as you know, the low number was supposed to be 100,000 people. We could end up at 50 to 60. Okay?”
That first lowered estimate was passed in a matter of days, and the 60,000-to-70,000 estimate appears as though it won’t last past the early part of this week.
Birx’s most significant comments on Sunday, though, came with regard to the protesters in Michigan. They stormed the State Capitol, some brandishing guns, to urge a reopening of the state.
Birx’s message was clear: It’s a horrible development.
“It’s devastatingly worrisome to me, personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or a very — or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives,” she said. “So we need to protect each other at the same time we’re voicing our discontent.”
That’s a kind of cautioning and rebuking of the protesters that we simply haven’t seen from Trump. […]
photos showed that the protesters at the time were not abiding by guidelines on social distancing or wearing masks — nor have protesters since then. […]
In cautioning those protesters about putting their own loved ones’ lives at risk, Birx offered almost a diametrically opposed message — as has often been the case between Trump and his top health officials.
Lynna@320, I cleaned half my bathroom… does that count? (Ok, ok, and other places, like most of the kitchen and perhaps half of the main room (the remaining uncleaned half of which is mostly either under the furniture or else is the suspected location of the ceiling)).
Not-at-all jokingly, I’m concerned to hear about your situation in @321. At the moment, I cannot think of anything concert & legal & plausible I can do to help. The mildly deranged penguin suggests a trebuchet-full of cheese, and another of, ah, well, well-rotten shite, your choice as to the targets… (I’d suggest deferring, her aim isn’t all that great; in addition, whilst she’s unlikely to get the two payloads mixed up, the same cannot be said of the two targets.)
johnson catmansays
re Lynna @322:
It’s devastatingly worrisome to me, personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a co-morbid condition and they have a serious or a very — or an unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives.
I don’t think that they will feel guilty at all. That is how clueless and heartless that they are. They just don’t give a good god-damned because their “rights” are being violated.
ravensays
I don’t think that they will feel guilty at all.
QFT.
The current slang term for the Covid-19 virus is…Boomer Remover.
That is what passes for humor these days, especially for the right wingnuts.
I do want to thank Lynna, SC, and the rest for this thread.
I don’t post here because I don’t have anything much to add.
But I do read it every day.
And everyone is hurting these days one way or another.
A paramedic who complained about being forced to work despite contracting coronavirus is in critical condition after he fell from a hospital window in western Russia this weekend, local media reported.
This is at least the third incident in which a Russian healthcare professional has plunged from a hospital building under mysterious circumstances in the past two weeks. The two previous doctors have died from their injuries.
Alexander Shulepov is in critical condition with a skull fracture after falling from the second floor of a rural hospital where he was being treated for Covid-19, the local crisis center told the Vesti Voronezh outlet Saturday.
Shulepov, 37, and his colleague filmed a video on April 22 complaining that the chief doctor of the Novaya Usman village hospital forced him to work despite the fact that he tested positive for Covid-19.
A second video appeared three days later in which Shulepov denied his initial “emotional” claims. His colleague Alexander Kosyakin reportedly faces criminal charges for spreading “fake news” about the virus, which carries a prison sentence of up to five years under a recently passed federal law.
Police have reportedly launched an inspection into Shulepov’s fall from the hospital in the Voronezh region 500 kilometers south of Moscow….
Brazil’s right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro attacked Congress and the courts in a speech to hundreds of supporters on Sunday, as the country’s known coronavirus cases rose to more than 100,000 underlining the former army captain’s increasing isolation over his response to the pandemic.
Bolsonaro has drawn criticism from across the political spectrum for dismissing the threat of the virus in Brazil, which has registered 101,147 confirmed cases and 7,025 deaths, according to the most recent data from the Health Ministry.
On Sunday, dozens of public figures signed an open letter to the Brazilian government calling on officials to protect the nation’s indigenous people, who often live in remote locations with limited access to healthcare.
…
On Saturday, Moro…presented testimony regarding possible obstruction of justice by Bolsonaro. Hours before, the president called Moro “Judas” on Twitter, referring to the apostle who betrayed Jesus.
[See #105 and others above for more on Moro.]
As Bolsonaro’s relationship with legislators and the courts has cooled, he has become increasingly dependent on a cadre of military-linked advisers in his government.
As in an April rally also attended by Bolsonaro, demonstrators called on Sunday for the closing of the Supreme Court and Congress and a return to authoritarian measures used during Brazil’s 1964-1985 military government.
“We have the armed forces at the people’s side: the side of order, democracy, liberty,” Bolsonaro said in a speech broadcast live on Facebook.
“Enough interference. We’re not allowing any more interference. Our patience is over.”
Bolsonaro did not call for a military takeover at the rally in Brasilia and such an occurrence is widely considered unlikely in Brazil, where Congress, the courts, the press and civil society wield significant power.
But political leaders have called Bolsonaro’s participation in anti-democratic rallies irresponsible, especially as he has spoken approvingly of the nation’s former military dictatorship, which was responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial executions.
Bolsonaro’s attendance also drew criticism as the nation is a significant coronavirus hot spot.
Bolsonaro, who did not wear a mask on Sunday, has dismissed the coronavirus as a “little flu,” saying the economic fallout of quarantining measures would be deadlier than the virus itself.
The open letter on Sunday, which warned that loggers and ranchers could introduce the virus to indigenous communities in a development tantamount to “genocide,” was signed by celebrities ranging from US television personality Oprah Winfrey to Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen.
The government has banned people from entering indigenous reserves during the pandemic. It has also cut down, however, on law enforcement against illegal loggers and miners in remote regions as a safety measure.
At the Sunday rally, at least three photographers were attacked by demonstrators, according to a witness quoted by the Reuters news agency – an increasingly routine occurrence in Brazil, where Bolsonaro routinely calls the work of leading newspapers “fake news.”
The Reuters witness saw one photographer from Sao Paulo newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo pulled off a ladder and repeatedly kicked in the ribs.
Joy Reid yesterday showed video of a woman at one of the pro-virus rallies this week, without a mask, getting in the face of a reporter and screaming at her. It’s not an assault like the one described on the Brazilian photographer, but I think this behavior should be understood as some form of assault in the current context.
Maryland politicians, pastors and business owners banded together Saturday afternoon to file a sweeping federal lawsuit aimed at ending restrictions enacted by Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan in response to the coronavirus.
The lawsuit argues that the governor’s orders banning large gatherings and closing most businesses violate constitutional and federal laws protecting commerce, freedom of assembly, the right to protest and the right to practice their religion.
Republican Dels. Dan Cox, Warren Miller and Neil Parrott argue that the restrictions against travel violate their duties to oversee Hogan and state government.
[…]
And elsewhere:
In New Jersey a priest has filed a federal lawsuit against Gov. Phil Murphy, saying that an emergency executive order amid the state’s first public health emergency is unconstitutional for restricting gatherings including religious services.
An Evangelical Christian church in Illinois similarly sued Illinois Governor JB Pritzker for a stay-at-home executive order in effect the same day as Murphy’s.
More and more of these, all with the blessing of Barr’s DOJ.
blf @323, oh, yes, half a bathroom counts when it comes to cleaning.
Thanks for your concern. Not much anyone can do. I am happy to report that more work-via-internet came my way this morning as one of my clients revived a previously cancelled project. I will have more money coming in soon.
In other news, as part of his blame-anybody-but-me routine, Trump is now blaming the intelligence agencies for giving him weak warnings about the coronavirus threat. Trump doesn’t read the daily briefings sent to him by the intelligence agencies. How would he know if the warnings were weak or strong.
The one thing “strong” about Trump is the personal force field he uses to deflect facts.
There have been a variety of reports over the last month about the coronavirus warnings Donald Trump and his team received, but failed to heed, but last week’s Washington Post report was arguably the most serious. It painted a picture of U.S. intelligence agencies issuing a series of warnings — including notices in the President’s Daily Brief — in January and February, which the president failed to take seriously.
As we discussed the other day, the Post’s report added that the PDB, which Trump reportedly does not often read, highlighted the growing viral threat; it raised doubts about the veracity of the claims from Chinese officials; and it warned of dire domestic consequences. What’s more, the frequency with which the coronavirus was mentioned in the PDB “reflected a level of attention comparable to periods when analysts have been tracking active terrorism threats, overseas conflicts or other rapidly developing security issues.”
During an Oval Office Q&A on Tuesday, a reporter asked Trump about the intelligence briefings he received in the early weeks of the year. The president’s long, odd answer meandered a bit — it even included a strange tale about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — before eventually concluding, “I’d have to check. I would have to check. I want to look as to the exact dates of warnings.”
Evidently, we’re supposed to believe that Trump has now checked and discovered how right he was all along. From a tweet he published yesterday afternoon:
“Intelligence has just reported to me that I was correct, and that they did NOT bring up the CoronaVirus subject matter until late into January… Also, they only spoke of the Virus in a very non-threatening, or matter of fact, manner.”
Soon after, during his Lincoln Memorial event with Fox News, Trump echoed the point in response to a question about his intelligence briefings.
“On Jan. 23, I was told that there could be a virus coming in, but it was of no real import. In other words, it wasn’t, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do something, we’ve got to do something.’ It was a brief conversation, and it was only on Jan. 23…. [Intelligence professionals] said it very matter-of-factly, and it was not a big deal.”
Right off the bat, there’s reason for skepticism about the president’s version of events. According to the Post’s reporting, for example, the warnings were far more serious than Trump suggested yesterday.
But taking a step further, it’s hard not to see Trump’s latest push as an effort to blame U.S. intelligence agencies for his administration’s weak response. Confronted with questions about why the White House didn’t act faster, the president’s latest posture seems focused on the idea that intelligence professionals waited until late January to brief him, and even at that point they signaled to him that it was “not a big deal.”
There’s a long list of people, agencies, and entities Trump has blamed for his coronavirus response, and it’s apparently grown just a bit longer.
The Associated Press reported over the weekend that Tara Reade, who’s accused Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her 27 years ago, “says she filed a limited report with a congressional personnel office that did not explicitly accuse him of sexual assault or harassment.” The report added that Reade told the AP last year, in reference to Biden, “I wasn’t scared of him, that he was going to take me in a room or anything. It wasn’t that kind of vibe.”
On a related note, Reade told NBC News she’s “not sure” what wording she might have used in 1993 when filing a complaint with the Senate personnel office.
The Senate is saying they don’t have the right to release any documents from Biden’s 1990’s Senate career, so resolution of this issue may take awhile.
Biden is still working to get the Senate records released.
johnson catmansays
re Lynna @329:
I’m betting that more details will emerge soon. And those details will show that Trump is lying.
I would bet that The Orange Toddler-Tyrant will say that those PDBs are classified and he will block any attempt to release them.
Deaths from COVID-19 are projected to increase to 3,000 per day by June 1.
[…] more than 3,000 Americans will be dying each day of COVID-19 by June 1, according to a newly revealed internal government document obtained by the New York Times.
The Times obtained an internal Centers for Disease Control document providing detailed projections on the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic around the country. […]
There are currently around 25,000 new cases each day in the United States, and around 2,000 deaths each day. […]
The report also suggests that infection rates will increase more in rural America over the coming months.
[…] “There remains a large number of counties whose burden continues to grow,” the report says.
Separately, the report provides new information from the federal government on COVID-19 death rates in the U.S. Around 16 percent of those hospitalized during a period beginning on March 1 died of COVID-19, per available discharge data.
The grim and sobering statistics come as the Trump administration pushes to “reopen” the country, moving to bring federal employees back to work and using the bully pulpit to have local administrators end lockdown policies. Several states around the country, most of which are governed by Republicans, have done so. […]
And all we’ve done is open a few beaches? 3K ain’t squat lets get them nail salons open and bring back the proms.
————-
That’s what I call doing a “great job!” [a reference to statements by Trump and Kushner]
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When the Trump administration produces reports that are likely accurate but in no way supported by the person whose administration it is, I think we have the kind of shadow government that I can totally get behind.
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Why it was only yesterday that the Infection-in Chief predicted a mere 100K. I’m sure he’ll tell CDC to start using his numbers because he knows pandemics. Better than anybody.
———————
Right now 69,011 deaths in the U.S. and none of the western states have updated totals. We will blow by 70,000 before the end of the day. We are still in the middle of this pandemic but hey let’s restart the entire economy. Sure thing.
Oh, FFS. Steve Mnuchin is a dunderhead, a dangerous dunderhead. I wonder what Dr. Fauci thinks of this.
There’s a global pandemic going on, so what better time to have a picnic in Yosemite?
During an interview with Fox Business Network host Maria Bartiromo on Monday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said it was “too hard to tell at this point” whether international travel would be possible this year due to COVID-19.
“But it’s great time to explore America,” the Trump administration official told Bartiromo. “A lot of people haven’t seen many parts of America.”
“I wish I could get back on the road soon,” he added.
But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) guidelines urge people against embarking on any kind of non-essential travel, including road trips.
“Travel increases your chances of getting and spreading COVID-19,” the agency warned. “CDC recommends you stay home as much as possible, especially if your trip is not essential, and practice social distancing especially if you are at higher risk of severe illness.”
From the readers comments:
Please, won’t someone, anyone buy some oil?”
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European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control Director Andrea Ammon told EU lawmakers Monday that “this is not going to end any time soon and people need to prepare mentally for it.”
—————-
Mnuchin: Hey people stuck in area’s with high number of cases, go explore areas that don’t have high amounts of confirmed cases.
——————-
“I’m goin’ to Disneyland!”
(“Unless you think I should take a cruise.”)
—————-
This Administration is nothing but a bunch of negligent homicidal maniacs.
————–
“I wish I could get back on the road soon,” Great idea! Let him start in The Bronx. The maybe go to some of the meatpacking plants in SD in Iowa. Hit the parts of LA where the virus is spiking.
Although really, he could go to his own backyard, as DC has the highest growth in cases among the nation’s 10 largets metro areas.
————————-
I’ve heard a lot of people are visiting Hart Island [Hart Island is the site of mass graves]. In fact, it’s turned into a (final) destination for many.
Yeah, he did it. Trump sat down with Fox News hosts at the Lincoln Memorial in order to spout his usual lies, and in order to add to his compendium of self-congratulatory officious statements.
John Wilkes Booth who?
[…] Trump swan-dived into a whole new level of victimhood on Sunday night during a virtual Fox News town hall at the Lincoln Memorial.
“I am greeted with a hostile press, the likes of which no president has ever seen,” Trump complained to town hall hosts Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum.
“The closest would be that gentleman right up there,” he added, pointing at the the statue of Lincoln, who was shot to death. “They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.”
Trump’s complaint on Sunday was met with incredulity and (apparently necessary) reminders that Lincoln was assassinated. […]
Someone should put together clips of past reporters badgering presidents — Dan Rather tearing into Nixon, Sam Donaldson barking at Reagan, Helen Thomas doggedly going after Clinton, etc. etc.
The idea that Trump is being treated worse than them is ludicrous. Or Lincoln? Jesus.
——————–
When we shot a scene for Parks and Rec at the Lincoln Memorial, we were asked to stay below the top step out of a general reverence for the place and its meaning. But now Trump is sitting right next to Lincoln saying he has been treated worse, so all bets are off I guess?
———————-
Trump made the comment about 24 hours after making another dubious comparison between Lincoln and himself, claiming that he had done more for black Americans than the president who abolished slavery.
After rejecting a bipartisan plan from state officials to expand absentee voting for the pandemic, the Louisiana legislature approved a scaled-back version of the measure that will allow absentee voting for only a limited set of people.
[…] They passed it by voting by mail, and several Republicans still voted (remotely) against it because they thought it went too far in expanding absentee voting. […]The final version was far narrower, letting only those with high risk conditions, with medical orders to quarantine, who are caring for someone subject to a quarantine order or who are seeking a diagnosis for coronavirus-like symptoms to vote absentee.
[…] A federal lawsuit was filed Wednesday against Texas challenging its policy of letting voters over 65 vote absentee, while refusing to let voters younger than that to cite coronavirus as a reason for a mail-in-ballot. (Texas’ broader refusal to relax its absentee voting limits during the pandemic is also being litigated). The lawsuit points to the Constitution’s 26th amendment, which prohibits age-based voter discrimination against Americans 18 years and older. Six other states have similar age-based absentee voting regiments.
Here are some other developments in the coronavirus legal war over election policies:
Disability groups teamed up with voter advocates to file a lawsuit seeking a one-week extension to Pennsylvania’s deadline for returning absentee ballots in its June’s primary.
Virginia has agreed to relax its absentee voting witness requirement as part of a settlement with the ACLU, but now faces a bid by the state GOP to block the settlement.
A judge rejected a lawsuit brought by a voter fraud alarmist group that challenged Nevada’s plans to hold its coming election-by-mail.
Democrats are suing South Carolina to remove “four pillars” of restrictive absentee voting policies: its witness requirement, lack of paid postage, its ban on certain ballot assistance activities, and its requirement that ballots be received on Election Day. […]
Trump takes Social Security hostage in his latest COVID-19 stimulus demand.
[…] Trump has decided to take his own hostage in the next coronavirus stimulus bill: Social Security. “We’re not doing anything without a payroll tax cut,” he said in a Fox News interview Sunday. That’s exactly the kind of policy solution you’d expect from him—it does absolutely nothing to help in the current economic crisis and will do long-term and potentially immense harm to the health of Social Security, while giving a big tax cut to the highest of earners.
[…]. Laid-off people aren’t going to see any benefit because they’re not getting paychecks to be taxed!
[…] Trump, members of Congress, and CEOs of Wall Street banks and Fortune 500 companies would get an annual tax cut of $2,754. Unemployed workers and the millions of state and local workers who contribute to state pension programs rather than Social Security would get $0 in tax cuts. Zero. Dollars.
Of course, employers already got their deal, albeit temporarily. The CARES Act gave them a reprieve from their portion of payroll taxes until the end of the year in order to try to encourage them to keep people on payroll. […]. As Len Burman, a fellow at the Urban Institute says, it’s a “terrible idea.”
“The main problem with the proposal is that it would go to the people who least need help,” Burman told CNBC. “It seems like you’re deliberately targeting it to people who are in the best situation […] the ones who are still working.” Ding, ding, ding. Beyond that, it threatens the most vulnerable among us now; the payroll taxes being paid into Social Security are helping to keep seniors afloat.
“Trump’s actions are a war on seniors,” Nancy Altman, president of advocacy organization Social Security Works, said in an emailed statement. “He wants to open up the economy, even though COVID-19 is disproportionately costing seniors their lives. Now he is insisting on threatening Social Security on which most seniors rely for their food, medicine and other basic necessities.”
This is a demand that Democrats should have no problem whatsoever refusing. It does absolutely nothing for the people who need assistance the most and will harm them in the long run.
Matthew Miller: “The realization that we’ve been locked at home for seven weeks merely to get to a point of treading water – and that we don’t have any national plan to do better than that – is just maddening. Just a historic failure of leadership.”
I’ve been angrier this week than I was before, and I was plenty angry before. It’s murderous ineptitude, corruption, deception, callousness, and malice. It’s failure at a scale previously unimaginable in the US.
I’ve been angrier this week than I was before, and I was plenty angry before. It’s murderous ineptitude, corruption, deception, callousness, and malice. It’s failure at a scale previously unimaginable in the US.
Yes. I agree. And Trump is still actively promoting actions that will make things even worse. It’s maddening.
From Politico: “The verdict is in: China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.”
[…] “Trump says reducing death toll to 100,000 people is ‘not bad’” quickly became a top trending hashtag. Commenters on Weibo called the Rose Garden appearance “preparation for a funeral,” labeled Trump a “joker” and a “blowhard,” and sarcastically predicted, “I’m sure God will protect the United States.” If a similar death toll had been reported in China, one popular comment speculated, “how many people here would be saying that [we are] a dying country?” Another noted, bluntly: “[F]rom here onward, the world order will never be the same.” […]
Since Trump’s late March declaration, each day has brought a fresh batch of horrific news seemingly tailor-made to highlight American weakness. […] On April 28, after the number of confirmed U.S. coronavirus cases topped 1 million, the Weibo account of state-run China Central Television trumpeted the news with an eye-grabbing graphic.
One popular comment professed “astonishment” at seeing America as “narrow, self-interested, buck-passing; not the world’s number one.” Another declared the U.S. response “the disaster flick of 2020.” […]
Chinese social media is a highly imperfect lens into widespread public sentiment, full of hot tempers, trolls, and the ever-present specter of censorship, particularly given the ruling Communist Party’s power and proclivity to punish dissenting voices. It is emphatically not real life; American visitors to China generally describe encountering warmth, or at least respect, even during times of high tension between the countries.
Yet Chinese social media is also a crucial indicator of sentiment among the ultra plugged-in young, as well as a battlefield on which Chinese citizens — within strict limits, and often in code — air out differing views of the Party and the world. As recently as February 7, Chinese social media heaved with resentment at Chinese authorities following the death of doctor Li Wenliang, who had endured police harassment for sharing early news of the new virus. That outcry, too broad and too deep to censor […]
Now, however, a scant two months later, a new narrative predominates inside China. Yingyi Ma, an associate professor of sociology at Syracuse University and author of a recent book on Chinese students in the United States, described an about-face among that relatively affluent group. Now, “Chinese international students in the U.S overwhelmingly consider China a safer place, with [their] government more competently handling the crisis than the American government. That is why so many Chinese students have returned home,” Ma told POLITICO, “despite the high risk of international travel and the enormous difficulty in buying airplane tickets.”
[…] The coronavirus response — now playing out on Weibo, within the private discussion rooms on mobile social behemoth WeChat, and in private conversations — telegraphs a wound to America’s image even deeper and wider than the one sustained after the 2008 financial crisis, which convinced many Beijing policymakers that the United States was more paper than tiger. China’s intellectuals have respected power and wealth for more than a century, says Zhang; they favored the American model because “they naturally gravitated to the most economically and militarily powerful state.” As China rises and America fumbles, that dynamic is changing.
[…] resentment toward the United States has long commingled with admiration, or at least the grudging recognition of an American hegemony that looked set to continue indefinitely. At the turn of this century, many Chinese felt certain their country would not catch up with the United States until the next one. […]
Amid China’s dynamic rise, America has nonetheless held out the distinct promise of clean air and clean water, first-rate universities, competent governance, and a best-in-class public health system.
Now, Chinese propagandists and nationalists can state, truthfully, that U.S. representatives, governors and hospitals have purchased ventilators, gloves and masks from China in a time of desperate need, often without any help from Washington. […]
It’s true that major challenges lie in the way of China’s continued growth — and doubly so that Chinese citizens aren’t told about, or at least allowed to openly talk about, their own country’s failures in timely addressing the coronavirus outbreak. But from within China, that dynamic only sharpens the apparent contrast between its own smooth competence and the fumbling West.
The news is the latest setback for the crew after an outbreak of Covid-19 forced it to halt its Pacific deployment.
[…] Some sailors attempting to walk back onboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt are showing new signs of the virus that sidelined the ship more than a month ago, despite testing negative for Covid-19.
The Navy began moving hundreds of sailors back onto the ship last week after crew members spent more than a month in quarantine or isolation, but a small number have shown a fever or other symptoms of Covid-19 during pier side checks before embarking […]
All sailors on board are provided an N95 mask that must be worn at all times except when sleeping, showering or eating. However, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines state that N95 masks are safe for up to eight hours, leaving sailors concerned that they will be forced to use an expired mask for the remainder of the deployment. […]
As of last Thursday, 1,102 sailors had tested positive for Covid-19, or almost a quarter of the crew, and three were in the hospital. One sailor has died. The Navy has since stopped providing the number of active cases.
The sailors who tested positive for the virus have spent the past month isolated in various locations on U.S. Naval Base Guam, including schools and gymnasiums. The sailors who tested negative have been quarantined in hotel rooms and houses across the island. To return to the ship, each sailor must have completed a quarantine or isolation and test negative twice. However, some sailors have tested positive even after weeks of isolation […]
It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
The details of the experiences of the USS Theodore Roosevelt sailors should be another warning to governors in the USA. They should not be reopening so soon. They should not assume that the virus won’t make a comeback.
World leaders promised $8bn on Monday for the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, European Commission head Ursula von der Leyen said at the end of a pledging event that she chaired.
In the space of just few hours we have collectively pledged €7.4bn euros ($8.07bn) for vaccine, diagnostics and treatment.
This will help kick-start unprecedented global cooperation.
Guess who chose not to be part of the cooperative effort.
Millions of animals are being killed and dumped in landfills.
Across the country, meatpacking plants are shutting down over coronavirus outbreaks among staff. Since the start of April, huge meat firms like Tyson Foods, Smithfield Foods, JBS USA Holdings, and Cargill have closed at least a dozen pork, beef, and chicken processing plants […] At least 3,400 people in meatpacking facilities have tested positive, and at least 17 have died […]
And because of the intense concentration of the meatpacking industry, these facilities account for a massive share of America’s overall meatpacking capacity. As much as 40 percent of America’s pork-packing capacity is currently idle, by one estimate. […]
Pork and poultry production (and to a lesser extent beef production) is done on a “just-in-time” basis, explains Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Purdue. Farms typically operate on the assumption that they’ll be able to send off mature hogs to slaughter so that hogs still being grown have room to live; there isn’t much excess capacity if the mature hogs have to stick around due to meatpacking bottlenecks.
“If the finished pigs, who weigh about 280 lbs, are unable to head to the packing plant, there is no room in the barn to receive the new batch of pigs from the nursery,” Lusk explains in a recent blog post. “If the nursery isn’t vacated, there is no room for the piglets. All the while, new piglets are being born with nowhere to go.”
That means that the number of “excess hogs” on pig farms is growing rapidly. “We have a national pork processing capacity of about 500,000 head per day,” Lusk writes. “Latest data suggests that because of plant closures and slowdowns, we are processing about 40% fewer pigs, […] Every. Single. Day. Do that for 5 days, and that’s 1 million ‘excess’ pigs left on the farm.“ This holds at both small and large farms; these problems are faced by producers at all levels. […]
“You’re having to choose between amazingly bad options for protecting their welfare, or making the incredibly difficult choice to euthanize them all because there are fates worse than death,” says Candace Croney, a professor of animal sciences at Purdue and an expert on animal welfare on farms.
[…] Allen Harim, a poultry processor, has announced it will euthanize 2 million chickens in Delaware and Maryland. JBS’s pork plant in Worthington, Minnesota, has reopened — to euthanize pigs from local hog farms, not to process them for sale. A representative for the Minnesota Pork Producers Association told the Star-Tribune he expects 60,000 to 80,000 hogs will be put down this week in Minnesota alone.
This kind of effort isn’t unprecedented. In 2015, an avian influenza outbreak led to the US Department of Agriculture assisting in the euthanizing of 31.5 million birds in Iowa. But the animal welfare costs of the Covid-19 outbreak are relatively underpublicized, and severe. […] “They’ll try to avoid it if at all possible. It’s devastating to make these kinds of decisions […]
Canada beat the US on coronavirus because its political system works.
[…] With the coronavirus outbreak, the two North American nations had comparable risk profiles, sharing (for example) similarly aged populations and similar distance from the earliest hot spots in Europe and East Asia.
Yet the outbreak has been dramatically worse in the United States than its northern neighbor.
Per capita, the United States has about twice as many confirmed coronavirus cases as Canada and about 30 percent more deaths. Canadian testing rates have been consistently higher, especially during the critical early stages of the North American outbreaks: In mid-March, the Canadian testing rate was roughly five times higher than the American one. […]
“We have a federal government that is supporting provinces’ responses,” says David Fisman, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto. “You have a chief executive who is directly undermining the public health response.”
[…] one of the most important seems to have been a difference in political leadership.
The American response has become infected by partisan politics and shot through with federal incompetence. Meanwhile, Canada’s policies have been efficiently implemented with support from leaders across the political spectrum. The comparison is a case study in how a dysfunctional political system can quite literally cost lives.
The Canadian approach has not been perfect. Its death rate is currently much higher than best-in-class performers like Germany and South Korea; Canadian officials have fallen down, in particular, when it comes to long-term senior care and the indigenous population. […]
“The biggest public health threat to Canada right now is importing cases from the United States,” says Steven Hoffman, a political scientist who studies global health at York University. […]
See the link for charts and graphs.
[…] cases began to tick up in the two countries at roughly the same time. But in March, the American caseload spikes significantly higher and faster than the Canadian equivalent, indicating greater Canadian success at “flattening the curve.” Through early May, the Canadian numbers remain consistently and significantly lower.
The most immediately visible reason for this divergence has been the choices made by each country’s political leadership.
[…] Two clear points of contrast with the US are personal protective equipment (PPE) and testing.
In Canada, the federal government has served as a centralized hub of PPE purchases — buying supplies in bulk and distributing them to the country’s provinces on the basis of need. In the United States, the federal government’s efforts in this area have been haphazard and marked by political favoritism. […]
Canadian federal authorities launched a large-scale testing procurement program aimed at ensuring the country could test early and often. By contrast, Trump put his unqualified son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of the country’s testing ramp-up. Kushner proceeded to hype a Google testing website that didn’t exist and spearhead a drive-through push that, as of early April, had built a grand total of five testing centers across the entire country. […]
the public health budget in Canada has increased in recent years. In the US, by contrast, authorities have been relatively starved of resources: CDC funding has fallen by 10 percent over the last decade in inflation-adjusted dollars.
“Public health has faced chronic underinvestment in the United States for quite some time. Over the last couple of years, there have been further cuts,” says Hoffman, the York professor. “Countries get to choose how prepared they are for pandemics. And the United States made strategic budgeting choices that do not position it well.”
[…] every expert I spoke emphasized the value of Canada’s single-payer health care system at this crucial moment, especially when compared to America’s extremely expensive and low-capacity system.
[…] Some pointed out that, in a single-payer system, the universality of care meant that everyone would go to a doctor if they needed a test or treatment. If care is affordable, poor and marginalized communities — like, say, undocumented migrants — are less likely to become hot spots than they are in the American system, where out-of-pocket costs can be prohibitive.
Others argued that a single-payer system gives Canadian authorities coordinating powers that their American counterparts lack. […]
Canada’s not perfect. But America is clearly worse. […]
blfsays
Lynna@338 and SC@337:
I’ve been angrier this week than I was before, and I was plenty angry before. It’s murderous ineptitude, corruption, deception, callousness, and malice. It’s failure at a scale previously unimaginable in the US.
Yes. I agree. And Trump is still actively promoting actions that will make things even worse. It’s maddening.
Indeed. Whilst I am a States citizen, and was educated there, this is one of those times when I’m very glad I’m not living in the States. Or, for that matter, the UK, another place I also used to live. Here (France), despite a tardy start and some ineptness with testing, reporting, and masks, They™ are science-led, admit and rectify mistakes, plus deploying and (mostly†) supporting a world-class health care system (to the extent of, and this continues to be my favourite example, deploying previously planned-and-tested high-speed rolling TGV train ICU hospitals to relieve stress on the more-affected regions by moving non–Covid-19 patients to less-affected areas).
Locally, the village council is distributing two free masks to each inhabitant (I will be collecting mine later this week), and is also providing free collection services for food & other essentials for those who are strictly confined or otherwise unable to do their essentials shopping. And is publishing daily updates on the situation (my gripe here is they aren’t reporting on cases, albeit it is known this area is not too badly affected). Technically, last I checked, I’m in an “Orange” zone, but noticed this morning the council is saying “it”(the village?) is a “Green” zone — I still haven’t sorted that one out yet…
† I slightly qualify the “supporting a world-class health care system” because apparently has been a series of long-term issues with nursing / care homes. I continue to remain ignorant of the details, which I (broadly) understand to be a case of “last-in-queue”-ism…
About Dr. Deborah Birx’s appearances on the Sunday shows:
[…] Chris Wallace at Fox News asked Dr. Birx about the states that are “reopening” despite not meeting the White House standard of at least a two-week decline in new coronavirus cases.
WALLACE: Are you concerned about this patchwork reopening? Why leave it up to the governors? Why not set a firm if not binding national policy on when states can reopen?
DR. BIRX: I think federal guidelines are a pretty firm policy.
She suppressed a laugh when she answered, which is an adorably passive aggressive way of saying she thought Wallace’s question was stupid-pants.
DR. BIRX: We also made it possible for states to open counties independently of the entire state.
But that’s crazy when we live in the age of the horseless carriage. It’s not a days-long trek from a locked-down city to a now-hopping small town. But this version of “The Oregon Trail” game results in people dying from coronavirus instead of cholera.
DR. BIRX: We also made it very clear to the American people, this is what you need to continue to do to protect yourself. You need to continue to social distance. You need to continue to practice scrupulous handwashing. You need to know where … your hands have been and what they have touched. Make sure you don’t touch your face.
During the 1990s, I followed similar guidelines whenever I visited the Tunnel nightclub in New York. It’s less helpful advice during a global pandemic if people are packing restaurants, movie theaters, and beaches. There is no full-body COVID-19 condom that can protect you from the recklessness of others.
Dr. Birx stressed that if you have a coexisting condition or are otherwise at risk, you should continue sheltering in place. This is frustrating because who does she think is serving people margaritas on Cinco de Mayo? COVID-19 is slapping the shit out of black and Latino Americans, many of whom suffer from the chronic conditions that Dr. Birx claims should keep them at home. But when states or towns prematurely open up, minorities have to choose between their health and their livelihoods. This is cruel and dangerous.
Wallace pointed out that it sends a “mixed message” if governors are dismissing the federal guidelines and opening up businesses willy nilly. He played a clip where Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that states that ignored the phased approach were risking a rebound. He asked Dr. Birx again if she agreed […] that a “patchwork reopening” wasn’t ideal. She literally blinked twice, as if requesting help, before dropping more talking points.
DR. BIRX: We made it very clear that the guidelines are based on very strong evidence and data … We want to make sure every individual, employer, and every person knows how to keep themselves safe in this situation. We’ve made it clear what the gating criteria is.
Who’s “we”? Donald Trump is the president, and he’s praised governors who ignore the guidelines while denouncing the ones who do. Dr. Birx seems to think it’s enough to keep saying “fire is bad” while the president celebrates people playing with matches. Wallace kept asking Dr. Birx if certain actions were “safe” and she held out better than Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man.
Wallace showed Dr. Birx videos of people ignoring social distancing guidelines at beaches and beauty parlors. She struggled to keep a straight face while insisting that it’s OK to go to the park or beach if you social distance […]
WALLACE: If both sides, both parties [during a massage or haircut] are wearing a mask, is that safe?
DR. BIRX: It’s safer.
Sweet Christ.
DR. BIRX: But we’ve made it clear that that is not a good Phase 1 activity. And I think the president made that clear when he discussed the case in Georgia.
Yeah, Trump gave a little “naughty! naughty!” to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp before later suggesting that Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer should negotiate with anti-lockdown terrorists. He’s not an effective messenger on this subject.
Wallace confronted Dr. Birx with footage of protesters in close quarters demanding their haircuts. He asked her if these demonstrations were safe.
DR. BIRX: It’s devastatingly worrisome to me, personally, because if they go home and infect their grandmother or their grandfather who has a comorbid condition, and they have a serious or a very unfortunate outcome, they will feel guilty for the rest of our lives. So, we need to protect each other at the same time we’re voicing our discontent.
It’s weird that she focuses on the protesters’ grandparents, because I think that diminishes how infectious the disease is. The reason we have stay-at-home orders and not stay-away-from-grandma orders is that even the strangers they encounter in public spaces are at risk. You also can’t tell if someone has a “comorbid condition” from looking at them.
What’s “devastatingly worrisome” is that Dr. Birx is so afraid of the president’s wrath she can’t state without qualification that the “patchwork reopening” is a public health hazard. There’s no medical benefit to playing “both sides” with COVID-19.
After @RonanFarrow reported that Andy Lack was not only leading a company with a culture of sexual harassment and silencing survivors, he was personally harassing women employees, thousands of @UltraViolet members and others demanded accountability.
I hope this is one of many steps the company is taking to radically shift their culture to ensure they’re delivering news people can trust and ensuring women employees are safe and can thrive.
The Department of Justice announced yesterday that it has filed a Statement of Interest supporting plaintiff in Lighthouse Fellowship Church v. Northam. The suit seeks to enjoin the state of Virginia from enforcing its COVID-19 Order limit on church services…By filing its Statement of Interest before the state of Virginia was required to file its answer to the complaint, DOJ was able to avoid taking a position on several important questions.
[…]
On Sunday, Virginia’s Governor Northram filed a Notice of Intent To File A Response, asking the court to wait for that before deciding the case.
Details and link to full text of DOJ filing at the link above.
On Friday, while Rick Bright was in the process of filing what promises to be a damning whistleblower complaint to the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services, President Donald Trump announced that he was firing the inspector general, Christi Grimm, and nominating a handpicked replacement.
Two weeks ago, Bright, who, as deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response for HHS, oversaw the government’s purchase and funding of vaccines, treatments, and tests for the coronavirus, said he had been forced out of his job because he refused to cave to pressure to adopt scientifically unproven treatments for Covid-19.
“I believe this transfer was in response to my insistence that the government invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic into safe and scientifically vetted solutions, and not in drugs, vaccines and other technologies that lack scientific merit,” wrote in a statement released by his lawyers, as The Intercept reported at the time.
Grimm became inspector general in January and came under attack from Trump after her office published a report pointing out severe shortages of testing supplies and personal protective equipment. In a tweet, Trump called the report, which was based on interviews with hospital administrators from 323 hospitals in 46 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, “another Fake Dossier” because Grimm had worked for the Obama administration. In fact, while she did serve under Barack Obama, Grimm, who been in the IG’s office since 1999, has also worked for the administrations of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Trump’s nominee to replace Grimm is attorney Jason Weida.
The highly anticipated whistleblower report from Bright is expected to focus on hydroxychloroquine, a drug that Trump hyped as a “game changer” but that was found in a Veterans Affairs study to be of no clinical benefit to coronavirus patients, and actually increased their chances of death. While Trump’s enthusiasm, which sent online demand for the drug surging 1,000 percent, has since fizzled, he has now put his faith in another drug: Gilead Pharmaceutical’s remdesivir. On Friday, Trump met with Gilead CEO Dan O’Day to announce that the Food and Drug Administration would be giving the drug emergency use authorization as a treatment for Covid-19.
“We’re going to be having some really incredible results,” Trump predicted.
While incredible results usually precede FDA authorization, with remdesivir, that has changed….
The approval comes as Gilead, which paid out $874 million in cash dividends to shareholders and made $1.3 billion in stock buybacks in the first quarter of this year, has sharply increased its lobbying. The company, whose former top lobbyist, Joe Grogan, is a member of the White House coronavirus task force, spent $2.45 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2020, up from $1.86 million in the first quarter of last year.
…
Now that remdesivir has emergency approval, questions have turned to its pricing. While the cost of producing a 10-day course of the drug is estimated at $9.32, according to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, it could be priced at $4,500 or more.
Bright already has good whistleblower attorneys, and congress and the public are aware of the complaint. Seems too late for Trump to try to bury it by firing the IG.
More re #340: here’s a list of the world leaders who participated in the pledging event.
johnson catmansays
re SC @350:
While the cost of producing a 10-day course of the drug is estimated at $9.32, according to the Institute for Clinical and Economic Review, it could be priced at $4,500 or more.
Thank goodness for the US healthcare system of assuring the maximum profit so executives and shareholders can make some money. (/s)
.
Can we get some guillotines up and running, please?
Wow. On a call with reporters now, US Senior Officials decline to answer why US is not participating in EU-led #Covid19 vaccine virtual summit held today.
The Officials were asked 3 times. Now fourth time.
Make that 5 times
Well, call just concluded. Question was asked SIX times why US is not participating in Global EU-led today on #Covid19 vaccine. No answer.
2 US senior officials mostly reading from script for 33 min., sometimes same info….
State Dept. has now released the full transcript, with the repeated questioning and repeated dodging. The reporters on this call were impressively dogged.
…MODERATOR: Okay. Let’s move on to the line of Christina Ruffini. We’ll circle back.
QUESTION: — ability to answer questions four times and not actually answer the question. So I think what we’re trying to get at is if you are partnering with the EU, and if you support this funding effort, can you say without quoting statistics at us or talking around it why the U.S. decided not to send someone to this conference today? It’s not a difficult question. Thank you.
SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: I’ve provided the answer. Thank you.
QUESTION: You have not provided the answer, which is why we’ve asked it four times….
Presidential lawyer and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has largely fallen out of the public eye since his starring role in President Donald Trump’s impeachment. But Giuliani hasn’t gone silent.
Instead, he’s in his home, doing a call-in radio show and a podcast — “Common Sense” — during which he has repeatedly gone on bigoted rants about China and its government.
“They have no morals,” he said on his April 28 radio show. “They’re amoral in the sense that human life means something in Western civilization, it means a lot. Human life doesn’t mean the same thing to them.”
Giuliani has also speculated that the spread of the coronavirus may be a plot by the Chinese government.
For example, Giuliani has raised the possibility that China purposely released the virus from a biological lab in Wuhan. “We have to say accidentally,” Giuliani said in a recent radio broadcast. “But I don’t think as responsible investigators we can rule out that it wasn’t done deliberately.”
[Yeah, makes a lot of sense to release it in their own country. – SC]
Experts say there’s no public evidence the virus came from the lab. Amid a reported White House push, U.S. intelligence agencies have said they are investigating the origins of the virus.
Giuliani is also fixated on the idea that the Chinese government sent sick people overseas. In an April 27 episode of his podcast, he said that China allowed “over a million people from Wuhan travel to us, to the United States, to England to France to Italy to Germany.” He added, “I hope the people there have the same reaction we have to the value of human life and the loss of human life.”
“When they found out about this terrible virus that escaped, assuming they didn’t do it on purpose,” Giuliani said a day later on his radio show, “they were going to make sure the West suffered as much if not more than they did and jumped on top of an opportunity, it’s not a big assumption to make. And there isn’t a contrary explanation.”
The New York Times found that thousands, not millions, of people flew internationally out of Wuhan.
Asked about his comments, Giuliani did not respond.
The comments by Giuliani have come as discrimination against Asian Americans has spiked. And they reinforce the White House’s emerging push to blame China for the pandemic.
Giuliani has said he’s spoken to the president a number of times about the coronavirus. Two days after Giuliani said he was sure the virus came from the Wuhan lab, Trump said he has evidence of the same. (The president declined to give the evidence, saying it’s secret.)
Giuliani appears to have found a receptive wider audience too….
…
Giuliani has also said he’d use his access to help guests on his show move ahead with exploratory treatments….
…
Giuliani appears to have strong feelings about the government’s process for approving drugs.
In an April 23 broadcast, Mark, a pharmacist from New Jersey, called in to report on his “informal study” of the patients who have used a drug cocktail that includes hydroxychloroquine — the anti-malaria drug that Trump long has touted.
Giuliani was excited when Mark reported that none of his patients had been hospitalized: “Why doesn’t this count with all these geniuses in Washington? The double blind study and the triple blind study and this study and that study, we don’t have time for that, we’ve got to go to people like Mark in New Jersey!”
In fact, the FDA has warned against widespread use of the drug, noting that it can cause heart problems.
The discussions with his listeners, though, often come back to China.
One caller to Giuliani’s radio show, identifying himself as “George from Bay Ridge,” went on a rant against Chinese people, likening them to serial killers with “no conscience” who are attempting to take over businesses all over the world.
Giuliani responded, “George, I’ve been getting complaints about this for a long time.” He added: “It almost reminds me of the Mafia. You know, they say, if you do business with America it’s one thing. If you do business with China you don’t realize, all of a sudden you start owing them too much and they believe they own you.”
Rep. Malinowski responding to Pompeo’s Twitter thread: “Pompeo is teaching a master class in how to take a good cause – holding China’s Communist Party accountable – and tainting it with cheap slurs (China ‘infecting the world’, ‘Wuhan virus’) that make it impossible to rally allies to our side.”
johnson catmansays
re SC @356: The US does not have any more allies. The administration of The Orange Toddler-Tyrant has isolated the US from the rest of the world.
“European Commission President – and physician – [Ursula von der Leyen] reacts to President Trump’s disinfectant comments: ‘Never, ever do this. This is dangerous, plain and simple. It can be deadly’.”
“IHME just updated their model, and showed a sharp increase in the number of [US] projected deaths to 134,475. This is in addition to an earlier CDC model that was reported on by @nytimes that showed cases (and deaths) continuing to increase through May.”
A Family Dollar store security guard was fatally shot in Flint, Mich. on Friday after telling a customer her child had to wear a face mask to enter the store, the prosecutor’s office said.
The argument began when the security guard, Calvin Munerlyn, 43, told Sharmel Lashe Teague, 45, that customers needed to wear face masks in the store, Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said at a Monday press conference. She yelled at him, spit on him and drove off, Leyton said. About 20 minutes later, her car returned to the store and her husband and son, Larry Edward Teague, 44, and Ramonyea Travon Bishop, 23, stepped out and confronted Munerlyn, according to investigators who spoke to witnesses in the store and reviewed surveillance video. Bishop pulled out a gun and shot him, Leyton said.
In Michigan, people are required to wear face coverings in businesses. Stores can refuse service to anyone who isn’t wearing a mask.
Michigan State Police arrested Sharmel Teague but are searching for the two men.
A 53-year-old anti-lockdown protester in Colorado has been arrested on suspicion of having pipe bombs and bomb-making materials at his home, the U.S. Attorney’s Office says.
FBI agents found four pipe bombs at the Loveland home of Bradley Bunn on Friday, a statement from the office says. They also allegedly found two 1-pound containers of gunpowder in his vehicle.
Bunn has been active in protests against coronavirus lockdown orders at the Colorado Capitol in Denver, where he has been spotted carrying firearms, KCNC reported.
…
Bunn also had been helping organize an armed protest against Colorado’s lockdown order, ABC News reported.
The FBI and ATF began investigating Bunn after he made social media posts urging people to bring assault rifles to a Friday rally at the state capitol, according to the network.
Bunn faces charges of possessing destructive devices, the U.S. Attorney’s office says. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine….
The federal government is considering rolling back infection control requirements in U.S. nursing homes – even as the long-term-care industry’s residents and workers are overwhelmed by the coronavirus.
A rule proposed last year by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) would modify the amount of time an infection preventionist must devote to a facility from at least part-time to “sufficient time,” an undefined term that lets the facility decide how much time should be spent. The regulation has not been finalized, but CMS last week defended its proposal, saying it aims to reduce regulatory burden and strengthen infection control.
Opponents of the change said the rule could leave nursing home residents more vulnerable to infection. They expressed concern, especially given the devastation COVID-19 has caused within long-term care facilities.
“It makes no sense at all – prior to pandemic, but more so now during a pandemic – to roll back any of the necessary infection and control requirements and the federal regulations,” said Lindsay Heckler, a supervising attorney at the Center for Elder Law & Justice, a civil legal services agency in Buffalo, New York. “They should be strengthening these infection and control requirements.”
CMS has acknowledged that infection is “the leading cause of morbidity and mortality” in the nation’s 15,600 nursing homes. In its proposed rule, the agency said 1.6 million to 3.8 million infections occur each year in those facilities, with almost 388,000 deaths attributed to infections.
The coronavirus has put a spotlight on the problem. More than 16,000 long-term-care residents and staff have died of COVID-19, according to a USA TODAY analysis of government data. And nearly 97,000 residents and staff have tested positive for the virus. Those figures are an undercount, because testing has been limited and many states have not released full data. […]
raven @325, thank you! It’s good to know that people find this thread useful.
In other news, Mike Pompeo is being especially trumpian of late:
Playing a risky game: “Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday backed President Trump’s assertion that the coronavirus originated in a research laboratory in Wuhan, China, though the nation’s intelligence agencies say they have reached no conclusion on the issue.”
[…] Speaking on the ABC program “This Week,” Mr. Pompeo, the former C.I.A. chief and one of the senior administration officials who is most hawkish on dealing with China, said that “there’s enormous evidence” that the coronavirus came from the lab, though he agreed with the intelligence assessment that there was no indication that the virus was man-made or genetically modified.
The theories are not mutually exclusive: Some officials who have examined the intelligence reports, which remain classified, say it is possible an animal that was infected with the coronavirus in the laboratory was destroyed, and a lab worker was accidentally infected in the process. But that is just one of many theories still being examined.
Senior American officials, including those who have looked at intelligence and who favor the lab theory, have said in private that evidence pointing to a lab accident is mainly circumstantial and based on public material. Intelligence officers have told senior administration officials that they probably will not find proof of a lab accident. And among scientists and especially virologists, there is largely agreement that the chances that a lab accident sparked the outbreak are slim, while the probability that the new virus made the leap from an animal to a human in a nonlab setting in southern China is much higher. […]
Mr. Pompeo is among the small group of senior officials believed to be pushing American spy agencies to find evidence to support the theory that the government laboratory in Wuhan was the origin of the outbreak. The Chinese government has vigorously denied that the virus leaked from the laboratory […]
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a statement on Thursday saying it was continuing to “rigorously examine emerging information and intelligence” to determine whether the outbreak began with infected animals or whether “it was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan.”
The same day, Mr. Trump said he had a high degree of confidence that the laboratory was the source of the outbreak, but when pressed for evidence said, “I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
I saw video of Trump saying that. He looked and sounded like he was lying.
In a Sunday night interview on Fox News, he promised a report on the subject, which he said would be conclusive. “I think they made a horrible mistake, and they didn’t want to admit it,” he said of China.
Some intelligence analysts are concerned that the pressure from administration officials could distort the final assessments about the virus’s origin, and that they could be used as a political weapon in an intensifying battle with China over a disease that has infected more than three million people across the globe. […]
Some American officials say even intercepts of Chinese officials in Beijing discussing questions surrounding the lab could be circumstantial, since central-level officials always suspect local officials of hiding information and so want to examine all possibilities as they investigate. And American officials say they had little in the way of intelligence collection focused on Wuhan officials before the outbreak.[…]
Vice President Mike Pence on Sunday said he should have worn a mask when visiting the Mayo Clinic, a reversal that came after a harsh backlash for not adhering to the hospital’s policy during the coronavirus pandemic.
The National Rifle Association has laid off dozens of employees, canceled its national convention and scuttled fundraising, membership and shooting events that normally would be key to rallying its base in an election year.
Dinesh D’Souza is dishing out dangerous conspiracy theories and/or misinformation:
Just like that, CDC reduces its #Coronavirus death count to 37,000. That’s nearly HALF the total they were peddling. Did 30,000 people spring back to life like Lazarus? No, this seems a “gaffe”—defined as a case of the CDC accidentally telling the truth
The quoted text is from D’Souza’s twitter feed.
Commentary from Wonkette:
[…] Did that happen? Hahahahahahahahahaha not no, but hell no. The deranged convicted (now pardoned by a criminal) felon is citing a web page that debunks Dinesh D’Souza’s conspiracy right there on that very web page.
There is a chart that shows “total deaths” in America from coronavirus at 38,576, which is indeed far lower than the 69,022 shown in the official figures (which are themselves an undercount). Elsewhere on the CDC website, it lists 65,735 deaths. So what is going on here? Why is the CDC doing the Deep States to Donald Trump like this?
Well, if you look at the printed words directly below the table D’Stupid cites, there are these words:
NOTE: Number of deaths reported in this table are the total number of deaths received and coded as of the date of analysis and do not represent all deaths that occurred in that period. The United States population, based on 2018 postcensal estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau, is 327,167,434.
*Data during this period are incomplete because of the lag in time between when the death occurred and when the death certificate is completed, submitted to NCHS and processed for reporting purposes. This delay can range from 1 week to 8 weeks or more, depending on the jurisdiction, age, and cause of death.
Oh, so this is a (VERY) lagging number. Again, that’s directly below the chart. And because the body bags are piling up so fucking fast because of Trump Disease, it’s gonna remain a lagging number, while the death certificates catch up, at least on this chart. (The other CDC chart counts the deaths in the usual way, which is why its number is up in the 60s.)
This is remarkably simple, like even people as apparently brain damaged as Donald Trump could (maybe) understand it (if you gave him the whole day to work through it and possibly offered him meaty treats as a reward for staying on-task). […]
re tomh @361 and SC @362: Violence like this is the result of the federal administration not promoting a science-based policy but instead allowing bullshit, conspiracy, and falsehoods to dominate the narrative. I expect even more and worse violence because the message from The Orange Toddler-Tyrant is the opposite of what is needed for our country and for the world. He is the root cause of everything that is wrong in the US right now.
There’s not too many states that I know of that are going up [reporting numbers of coronavirus infections going up]. Almost everybody is headed in the right direction. We’re on the right side of it, but we want to keep it that way, but we also want to get back to work.
Reality check, as presented by The Washington Post:
In reality, about a third of states continue to see their number of new coronavirus cases increasing, compared to just a few who have seen a sustained decline. A plurality of states are hovering around the same level, with neither a significant uptick nor decrease in daily cases. That mirrors the national trend, where the rate of new cases has leveled off in recent weeks but not declined.
Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said most governors who have decided to open up are clearly not following the letter of the White House guidelines.
“The first part of the criteria is sustained decline. And we don’t see that,” Jha said.
To date, 1.2 million people have been infected by the coronavirus and more than 68,000 have died in the United States. Both figures are widely believed to undercount the actual totals. […]
Trump rarely discusses his own guidelines, instead encouraging states to move quickly to reverse the economic calamity that took hold as governors imposed stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of the virus. Trump has expressed support for protesters pushing their states to end the orders […]
…Customized theme songs: Tired: Picking your own walk-up music. Wired: Having walk-up music made for you! That’s the KBO’s style. Players get their own customized songs to be introduced with. They’re called cheer songs. (Yes, Eric Thames got one.) They’re indicative of the appreciably more raucous atmospheres at KBO games — which unfortunately we won’t get to witness under the circumstances.
Bat flips! Flip your bat in the States and you can expect a stern lecture from Brian McCann. Often, the end result will be a fastball to your midsection. The KBO isn’t repressed in that way. Players show emotion, largely manifesting itself in an elaborate flick of the bat upon hard contact. It’s an art form out there, meant to be savored. Enjoy….
I think I’m going to root for the Kia Tigers, for no rational reason whatsoever. The first game airs live in a couple hours. The games are all in the middle of the night ET in the US, so that should be interesting.
When Bash pressed [Chris] Christie on whether people would be able to accept reopening in light of news of a Trump administration model projecting a rise up to about 3,000 daily US deaths from coronavirus by June 1, Christie responded, “They’re gonna have to.”
“We’re in the midst of a pandemic that we haven’t seen in over 100 years,” he said. “And we’re going to have to continue to do things.”
…
Christie, asked Monday what his messaging would be to the American public if he sat in the Oval Office, said, “The message is that the American people have gone through significant death before.” He pointed to the first and second World Wars as examples of how “we’ve gone through it and we’ve survived it. We sacrificed those lives.”
Saadsays
Lemme guess. He isn’t talking about the most beloved person in his life in an ICU barely hanging onto life so that someone can get a haircut, right?
KGsays
Rep. Malinowski responding to Pompeo’s Twitter thread: “Pompeo is teaching a master class in how to take a good cause – holding China’s Communist Party accountable – and tainting it with cheap slurs (China ‘infecting the world’, ‘Wuhan virus’) that make it impossible to rally allies to our side.” – SC@356
Yes! I am by no means sure the origin of the pandemic wasn’t an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not that I know of any direct evidence that it was, but SARS apparently escaped a Chinese lab twice (and I’ve read somewhere, twice more from labs elsewhere), and the last smallpox death resulted from an escape from a lab in Birmingham, UK; such things happen. It’s certainly a remarkable coincidence, if SARS-CoV-2 did result from the Wuhan “wet market”, that the only level-4 biosecurity lab in China, which is also a centre for research into bat coronaviruses, is only a few kilometers from the first kinown outbreak. But even if it was a lab escape, that’s going to be very difficult to prove – the lab authorities themselves may not know it. They have said SARS-CoV-2 is not a virus they knew of before the outbreak, but assuming that’s true (and there appears to be no evidence it isn’t), couldn’t one of their cultures or experimental animals have been infected with it, alongside the virus they knew was there? If anyone can tell me this isn’t feasible, and explain why, I’d certainly be glad to hear it. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities are certainly responsible for an initial cover-up, but that’s absolutely no excuse for the European and American government blunders, dishonesty and callousness that have already killed some 200,000 people – and that’s a very conservative estimate. The UK death toll, for example, is probably nearer 50,000 than the official 28,000.
Finally, I second raven’s thanks to Lynna and SC for their incredibly useful work on this thread.
KGsays
One more item from the UK. My son is an engineer, and one of the volunteers at Edinburgh Shield Force, a group of engineers, academics and others turning out medical face shields for the NHS at a local cultural centre. Probably those who can afford to contribute money already have more local organizations they can support, but just in case someone has a personal attachment to Edinburgh, the NHS, or even engineers, they do have a crowdfunder (details at the link).
blfsays
Success! One of the more annoying things about living in Europe — I suppose this is a counterpoint to @343 — is “European” makes / brands of peanut butter aren’t, and the (few) imported USAlien brands are even more alien — whilst there are some decent almond butters, forget about peanut butter. A few weeks ago, I inquired at a organics shop I frequent whether or not they had any nut butters. “No, but I will be making some next week.” Eh? Ok, thanks… The next week I bought some, and what intrigued me was the method used: Basically, put some peanuts into a grinder (food processor) and grind the peanuts into mush. It was superb — possibly the best I’ve had in a long, long, time — and also got me wondering: “Hang on, I‘ve got a food processor, so could I…?”
Yes. No peanuts (didn’t have any), but a mix of Brazil nuts, Almonds, and Walnuts, with a touch of olive oil, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Yes!
(The mildy deranged penguin points out that since cheese was nor mentioned, this comment is probably not “Political” and certainly not for “All the Time”, but clearly is “Madness”.)
johnson catmansays
re blf @378: My wife gets her peanut butter from the co-op where we shop. They have a machine that grinds it from fresh peanuts and dispenses it like a soft ice cream machine into plastic containers (which we bring back each time). It is very good peanut butter! They even have a choice of smooth or crunchy.
blfsays
johnson catman@379, That sounds like precisely what happened in the local organics shop, albeit I’ve not no idea if crunchy is possible / offered. And it was dispesed into an obviously recyclable / reusable glass jar. (The home-made mixed-nuts butter I just made is “crunchy”, albeit for a small value of “crunch”, and decanted into a different glass jar.)
TV spot called Mourning in America was made by group backed by George Conway, husband of White House aide Kellyanne
[…]
The ad riffs on former president Ronald Reagan’s classic 1984 re-election ad, Morning in America, a one-minute commercial where young Americans get married, buy a home and raise the flag.
In contrast, Mourning in America show a decrepit factory, a body wheeled away on a gurney, and Americans lining up in the rain in masks, presumably to get coronavirus tests.
[…]
An early lack of testing allowed the virus to spread and become rampant through American cities for six weeks. Shortages of tests continue to hamper government response.
Despite the lack of tests and a lack of contact tracing to prevent future outbreaks, some states, predominantly Republican-controlled ones, have begun to reopen.
The virus has laid bare longstanding social inequities in American society, disproportionately hitting low-income people and people of color.
Russia confirmed 10,102 new coronavirus infections Tuesday, bringing the country’s official number of cases to 155,370.
…
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, the highest ranking official to contract the infection, is now “feeling normal,” spokesperson Boris Belyakov said Tuesday.
He said Mishustin, who announced he tested positive last week, was continuing treatment under Health Ministry guidance, adding the prime minister is “actively talking with colleagues by phone.”…
“Out with Congress, Supreme Court saboteurs! New anti-communist constitution! Criminalize communism!” read one banner. “Military intervention with Bolsonaro,” read another. A protester waved a sign outside the window of a car: “Weapons for upstanding citizens.” Hundreds of diehard, far-right protesters were gathered on Sunday in Brasília, the capital of Brazil, to rally against the quarantine imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus and in support of what would amount to a military coup against the legislature and judiciary. Multiple journalists were physically attacked. Among the speakers at the rally was President Jair Bolsonaro himself, who was also present at a similar protest two weeks earlier.
Bolsonaro and his allies have repeatedly insisted that these protests in favor of overthrowing the legislature and undermining the Supreme Court are “spontaneous movements” by average supporters, but the Supreme Court has opened an investigation into who is behind them. Multiple members of Congress aligned with the president are suspected of organizing the events, including Bolsonaro’s sons.
Bolsonaro, who favors reopening the country against the advice of public health experts, is increasingly at war with anyone in the government who does not bend their knee to him, which includes representatives of almost every democratic institution in the country — stoking fears that Brazil is accelerating its slide toward another dictatorship.
Meanwhile, the Federal Police are investigating Bolsonaro and his politician sons for multiple suspected crimes; his former political party has called for his impeachment; his former Justice Minister Sergio Moro gave an eight-hour deposition to investigators alleging that the president politically interfered in law enforcement institutions; the public prosecutor — a recent Bolsonaro appointee — has asked for an investigation into Moro’s allegations against Bolsonaro; Supreme Court ministers have blocked multiple actions he has attempted to take in recent days; and the commander of the army has publicly contradicted his coronavirus denialism. That’s just a sampling of the battles underway. With the deck stacked so high against him, Bolsonaro is not signaling defeat or moderation, but rather that he is willing to go all out on his war against Brazilian democracy.
“I pray to God that we have no problems this week. We have reached the limit. There is no more conversation, from now on we will not only demand, we will make them follow the Constitution. It will be enforced at any price,” Bolsonaro told the admiring crowd in Brasília on Sunday, standing at the entrance of the Planalto presidential palace. Brazilian, American, and Israeli flags flew behind him….
Bolsonaro addressed protesters who are explicitly advocating for the overthrow of democratic institutions, which is a crime in Brazil, where a string of military presidents ruled from 1964 to 1985 after a coup backed by the U.S. Bolsonaro and his vice president, retired Gen. Hamilton Mourão, have praised the military dictatorship throughout their careers, but Bolsonaro has gone further to even openly celebrate its widespread use of torture.
Whipped into a fervor at the rally, some of Bolsonaro’s supporters physically assaulted journalists who were covering the protest….
A political crisis erupted in Brazil late last month when Moro, the justice minister, resigned. Leaked chats between Moro and Bolsonaro suggested that the president wanted to replace Mauricio Valeixo as head of the Federal Police to halt investigations into presidential allies. Against Moro’s wishes, Bolsonaro fired Valeixo and appointed Alexandre Ramagem, director of Brazil’s intelligence agency, ABIN, and a close friend of his sons. That appointment was blocked by a decision from Supreme Court Minister Alexandre de Moraes before Ramagem could be sworn in. On Monday, Bolsonaro announced that Ramagem’s righthand man, Rolando Souza, would take the position and had him sworn in 20 minutes later. Souza’s first act in office was to replace the superintendent of the Federal Police in Rio de Janeiro, lending credence to Moro’s accusations; Rio de Janeiro is Bolsonaro’s home state and the jurisdiction where multiple investigations into his family are underway.
During the 15 months of the Bolsonaro administration, eight ministers have been fired or resigned — two in the past three weeks. Finance Minister Paulo Guedes was also recently on the defensive after publicly disagreeing with a Bolsonaro-backed economic plan that was put forward by the military. The president and allies are also currently pressuring Culture Minister Regina Duarte to resign.
The president is also reportedly considering the removal of the army’s top general, Edson Leal Pujol, to replace him with a younger and less qualified general named Luiz Eduardo Ramos, a close adviser to Bolsonaro who is reportedly very loyal to him…. Pujol has put himself at odds with the president by calling the coronavirus pandemic “one of the greatest challenges in our history” and defending social isolation measures to limit its spread.
Separately, a legislative agency responsible for oversight of the executive branch requested an investigation into Bolsonaro for political interference into the military for revoking three decisions that would have increased oversight into weapons and munitions produced in Brazil, which is entirely under the purview of the military.
The day before the protest, Bolsonaro held an unscheduled meeting with top military leaders and the former military men in his cabinet to discuss the current political morass….
Bolsonaro’s defense minister, a retired army general, issued a statement on Monday in which he reiterated the coronavirus’s threat to the population and disavowed attacks on journalists, but signaled that — speaking on behalf of the organizations he oversees — he agrees that the Supreme Court is overstepping its authority. The Armed Forces “consider independence and harmony between the [branches of government] to be essential to the governability of the country,” the statement said.
Brazil is quickly becoming one of the global hot spots of coronavirus infections. On Sunday, Brazil had the third-highest number of new deaths of any country in the world. Official statistics, which are widely understood to be dramatically underreported, show that Brazil has more than 105,000 cases and 7,321 deaths from Covid-19. In São Paulo, black Brazilians are 62 percent more likely to die from the disease than their white peers, a clear measure of the nation’s rampant inequality and government’s failures to address it.
As The Intercept reported, due to flawed certification procedures by federal authorities, 75 percent of Covid-19 tests available in Brazil are unreliable, many of which were even denied approval to be sold in the countries in which they are manufactured. Public health systems in many states are collapsing, and doctors are being forced to ration care. When questioned about the situation last week, Bolsonaro said, “So what? I lament it. What do you want me to do?”
Last month, Bolsonaro fired Health Minister Henrique Mandetta for publicly challenging him on the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and replaced him with the more complacent Nelson Teich, a health care executive and doctor….
Despite being widely criticized for his perceived inaction, Teich was able to push through an illegal measure to block Cuban doctors from returning to Brazil to help prop up collapsing regional health care systems.…
“I’m sure of one thing: We have the people on our side, we have the Armed Forces on the side of the people in the name of law, order, democracy, and freedom. And most importantly, we have God with us,” Bolsonaro told supporters Sunday. At least part of the claim is false: The president’s approval rating has dropped to 27 percent, down 24 percentage points since he took office last January.….
johnson catmansays
re SC @384: WOW! No wonder The Orange Toddler-Tyrant loves him some Bolsonaro. They are twins in different hemispheres of the world.
The World Health Organization has urged countries to look for more early cases of Covid-19 and urged a full exploration of the pandemic’s origins and early path, as Germany took preventive action to head off any future rise in infections.
As European countries continued to ease their lockdown restrictions, the WHO said news that a French hospital re-testing old samples from pneumonia patients had identified a coronavirus infection dating to 27 December, weeks before France confirmed its first cases, “gives us a whole new picture on everything”.
A spokesman, Christian Lindmeier, urged more countries to look for other early incidences of the virus, which was first reported by Chinese authorities to the WHO on 31 December and not previously thought to have spread to Europe until January.
“The findings help to better understand the potential virus circulation,” Lindmeier said, adding that it was “really, really important” to gain a fuller understanding of the early path of the virus and that further WHO missions to China may be needed.
…
With several European countries now cautiously lifting lockdown measures, Angela Merkel’s office announced on Tuesday that local authorities in Germany would have to close schools and all but non-essential shops once again if the number of new cases rose to more than 35 in every 100,000 in a particular area within a seven-day period.
The move came on the eve of a key meeting between the chancellor and leaders of the country’s 16 states, several of which – particularly in the less hard-hit east – want restrictions lifted faster. Germany’s largest state, Bavaria, said on Tuesday it would allow restaurants to resume outdoor service from 18 May, with indoor dining permitted a week later….
For six months, Chile was shaken by a wave of protests in which millions took to the streets to protest against inequality. Residents of the capital, Santiago, grew accustomed to the raucous crowds thronging the main square to sing and chant against the government.
Now, with parts of the capital on coronavirus lockdown, wind rasps through an empty Plaza Italia as a handful of shoppers hurry past security forces enforcing the stay-at-home order.
But the pandemic has reached Chile against a backdrop of unresolved social tensions, and the factors that triggered last year’s explosion of protests are clearly reflected in the way the health crisis has played out.
…
Anger over Chile’s failure to provide a social safety net helped drive the protests, along with a litany of other grievances, including inadequate pensions and minimum wage.
Early demonstrations sometimes flared into looting and arson, and protesters were met with deadly repression by the security forces. More than 30 people were killed and thousands more injured.
“The social movement exploded into life because everything that we had been led to believe about progress and wellbeing turned out to an elaborate facade,” said the columnist Óscar Contardo.
“Judging by how the system handled the political crisis, I don’t think that the eventual outcome of the pandemic will be particularly ethical or democratic.”
The outbreak was initially concentrated in the wealthiest parts of the capital but has since pushed into poorer neighbourhoods.
Quarantines were declared across parts of the country, during which the government moved quickly to wash away traces of the protest movement in Plaza Italia.
Soon after the lockdown was declared, President Sebastián Piñera was photographed posing in the square – which only weeks before had been a rallying ground for demonstrators.
Although the death toll remains relatively low, Chile has been hit hard by the pandemic, with with 20,643 confirmed cases and 270 deaths, according to government data.
But with the health system already overstretched – and the southern hemisphere’s winter flu season fast approaching – fears are growing that the worst is yet to come.
In November, Chile’s health minister, Jaime Mañalich, claimed the country’s health system was among the best in the world.
But in few areas of Chilean society are the country’s inequalities as apparent as in healthcare, where glistening private hospitals contrast sharply with an underfunded public health system.
…
“The gulf between the public and private health systems needs to be totally rethought,” said Alejandra Fuentes-García, a sociologist at the University of Chile’s school of public health. “This is a great opportunity to build a health service with a single funding source that covers everybody – and heals the rifts between the rich and poor in terms of access and quality of care.
“When this is over and people return to the streets, we are going to see a greater emphasis on healthcare at the protests because this crisis will deepen the inequalities,” she added.
The pandemic has already forced the postponement of a plebiscite on whether to draft a replacement for the country’s Pinochet-era constitution – a key demand of the protesters.
But although the movement has ebbed during lockdown, many have attempted to sustain momentum through sporadic bursts of pan-bashing on balconies….
Venezuelan authorities have detained two US citizens allegedly working with a US military veteran who has claimed responsibility for a failed armed incursion into the oil-producing country, President Nicolas Maduro said on Monday.
In a state television address, Maduro said authorities arrested 13 “terrorists” on Monday allegedly involved in a plot he said was coordinated with Washington to enter the South American country via the Caribbean coast and oust him.
Eight people were killed during the foiled incursion attempt on Sunday, Venezuelan authorities said.
Maduro showed what he said were the US passports and other identification cards belonging to Airan Berry and Luke Denman, who he said were in custody and had been working with Jordan Goudreau, an American military veteran who leads a Florida-based security company called Silvercorp USA [of course – SC].
…
Goudreau, who identified himself as an organiser of the invasion on Sunday, told Reuters on Monday that Berry and Denman were also involved.
“They’re working with me. Those are my guys,” he said by telephone.
The State Department did not provide any immediate comment on the alleged arrests. US officials have strongly denied any US government involvement in the incursions.
…
[Opposition leader Juan] Guaidó’s communications team on Monday denied media reports that Guaidó had hired Silvercorp to remove Maduro by force, adding the opposition leader and his allies “have no relationship with or responsibility for the actions of the company Silvercorp.”
…
Silvercorp’s website describes Goudreau as a “highly decorated Special Forces Iraq and Afghanistan veteran.“
I told Laurie Garrett that she might as well change her name to Cassandra. Everyone is calling her that anyway.
She and I were Zooming — that’s a verb now, right? — and she pulled out a 2017 book, “Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes.” It notes that Garrett, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, was prescient not only about the impact of H.I.V. but also about the emergence and global spread of more contagious pathogens.
“I’m a double Cassandra,” Garrett said.
She’s also prominently mentioned in a recent Vanity Fair article by David Ewing Duncan about “the Coronavirus Cassandras.”
Cassandra, of course, was the prophetess of Greek mythology who was doomed to issue unheeded warnings. What Garrett has been warning most direly about — in her 1994 best seller, “The Coming Plague,” and in subsequent books and speeches, including TED Talks — is a pandemic like the current one.
She saw it coming. So a big part of what I wanted to ask her about was what she sees coming next. Steady yourself. Her crystal ball is dark.
Despite the stock market’s swoon for it, remdesivir probably isn’t our ticket out, she told me. “It’s not curative,” she said, pointing out that the strongest claims so far are that it merely shortens the recovery of Covid-19 patients. “We need either a cure or a vaccine.”
But she can’t envision that vaccine anytime in the next year, while Covid-19 will remain a crisis much longer than that.
“I’ve been telling everybody that my event horizon is about 36 months, and that’s my best-case scenario,” she said.
“I’m quite certain that this is going to go in waves,” she added. “It won’t be a tsunami that comes across America all at once and then retreats all at once. It will be micro-waves that shoot up in Des Moines and then in New Orleans and then in Houston and so on, and it’s going to affect how people think about all kinds of things.”
They’ll re-evaluate the importance of travel. They’ll reassess their use of mass transit. They’ll revisit the need for face-to-face business meetings. They’ll reappraise having their kids go to college out of state.
So, I asked, is “back to normal,” a phrase that so many people cling to, a fantasy?
“This is history right in front of us,” Garrett said. “Did we go ‘back to normal’ after 9/11? No. We created a whole new normal. We securitized the United States. We turned into an antiterror state. And it affected everything. We couldn’t go into a building without showing ID and walking through a metal detector, and couldn’t get on airplanes the same way ever again. That’s what’s going to happen with this.”
Not the metal detectors, but a seismic shift in what we expect, in what we endure, in how we adapt.
Maybe in political engagement, too, Garrett said.
If America enters the next wave of coronavirus infections “with the wealthy having gotten somehow wealthier off this pandemic by hedging, by shorting, by doing all the nasty things that they do, and we come out of our rabbit holes and realize, ‘Oh, my God, it’s not just that everyone I love is unemployed or underemployed and can’t make their maintenance or their mortgage payments or their rent payments, but now all of a sudden those jerks that were flying around in private helicopters are now flying on private personal jets and they own an island that they go to and they don’t care whether or not our streets are safe,’ then I think we could have massive political disruption.”
“Just as we come out of our holes and see what 25 percent unemployment looks like,” she said, “we may also see what collective rage looks like.”
…
She said she wasn’t surprised that a coronavirus wrought this devastation, that China minimized what was going on or that the response in many places was sloppy and sluggish. She’s Cassandra, after all.
But there is one part of the story she couldn’t have predicted: that the paragon of sloppiness and sluggishness would be the United States.
“I never imagined that,” she said. “Ever.”
The highlights — or, rather, lowlights — include President Trump’s initial acceptance of the assurances by President Xi Jinping of China that all would be well, his scandalous complacency from late January through early March, his cheerleading for unproven treatments, his musings about cockamamie ones, his abdication of muscular federal guidance for the states and his failure, even now, to sketch out a detailed long-range strategy for containing the coronavirus.
Having long followed Garrett’s work, I can attest that it’s not driven by partisanship. She praised George W. Bush for fighting H.I.V. in Africa.
But she called Trump “the most incompetent, foolhardy buffoon imaginable.”
And she’s shocked that America isn’t in a position to lead the global response to this crisis, in part because science and scientists have been so degraded under Trump.
Referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and its analogues abroad, she told me: “I’ve heard from every C.D.C. in the world — the European C.D.C., the African C.D.C., China C.D.C. — and they say, ‘Normally our first call is to Atlanta, but we ain’t hearing back.’ There’s nothing going on down there. They’ve gutted that place. They’ve gagged that place. I can’t get calls returned anymore. Nobody down there is feeling like it’s safe to talk. Have you even seen anything important and vital coming out of the C.D.C.?”
The problem, Garrett added, is bigger than Trump and older than his presidency. America has never been sufficiently invested in public health.…
…
And what America needs most right now, she said, isn’t this drumbeat of testing, testing, testing, because there will never be enough superfast, super-reliable tests to determine on the spot who can safely enter a crowded workplace or venue, which is the scenario that some people seem to have in mind. America needs good information, from many rigorously designed studies, about the prevalence and deadliness of coronavirus infections in given subsets of people, so that governors and mayors can develop rules for social distancing and reopening that are sensible, sustainable and tailored to the situation at hand.
America needs a federal government that assertively promotes and helps to coordinate that, not one in which experts like Tony Fauci and Deborah Birx tiptoe around a president’s tender ego.
“I can sit here with you for three hours listing — boom, boom, boom — what good leadership would look like and how many more lives would be saved if we followed that path, and it’s just incredibly upsetting,” Garrett said. “I feel like I’m just coming out of maybe three weeks of being in a funk because of the profound disappointment that there’s not a whisper of it.”…
More atl. (The Farzan talk @ #172 above leaves me with a little more optimism concerning treatments and vaccines, but the overall situation is bleak and enraging.)
quotetheunquote @382, [laugh], yes, totally a win-win.
KG @376, thanks!
SC @384, I see that Bolsonaro is firing all the people that could have held him to account. Just like Hair Furor.
Follow up to SC @356 and KG @375: Chris Hayes presented an excellent analysis of the Trump administration desperately grasping at straws, trying to find someone to blame. “They don’t even seem to understand what they’re saying. They just want a convenient scapegoat.” Chris was particularly good at deflating Pompeo’s balloon that he floated about the “escape from the Wuhan lab” theory. The video is about 5 minutes long.
I meant to add in comment 390 that Chris Hayes also presented a helpful survey of rightwing hosts (mostly Fox News) promoting the unproven theory that “there’s evidence,” or “there’s indisputable evidence that this virus escaped from the lab.” No. There is, so far, no evidence.
Lynna @ #s 390 and 391, I thought the whole episode of All In was quite good last night, including his interview with Ed Yong, which I can’t find video of, unfortunately. (I also liked Yong’s room.)
“News w/@maggieNYT @SangerNYT The White House’s coronavirus task force is being wound down in the coming weeks without a clear idea of what, if anything, might replace it”
“Trump complains about tough questions from two standout women correspondents, [Paula Reid and Weijia Jiang of CBS], and suggests they should act more like ‘50s housewives.
‘It wasn’t Donna Reed, I can tell you that’, he said, referring to TV housewife actress.”
Weijia Jiang: “The President told me to be ‘nice and easy’ three out of the last four times I asked him a question.”
The Senate is back, not to help us through the pandemic, but to confirm Justin Walker, rated unqualified to be a district judge by the ABA b/c he’d never tried a case, to the DC Circuit. He is a former Kavanaugh clerk. McConnell said his “motto” is “leave no vacancy behind.”
An update on the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the current case before the Supreme Court, and some perhaps surprising differences of opinion between Trump and Attorney General William Barr:
[…] millions of Americans have reason to be pleased that the Affordable Care Act exists right now.
As the Associated Press reported yesterday, “Without the law, people who recovered from COVID-19 and tried to purchase an individual health insurance policy could be turned down, charged higher premiums or have follow-up care excluded from coverage. Those considered vulnerable because of conditions such as respiratory problems or early-stage diabetes would have run into a wall of insurer suspicion.”
And yet, it’s against this backdrop that the Trump administration and several Republican state attorneys general are still fighting to tear down the ACA in its entirety. In fact, their case is now pending at the U.S. Supreme Court, with the right hoping that five conservative justices will do what the Republican-led Congress failed to do in 2017: destroy “Obamacare.”
Common sense suggests the GOP effort during a deadly pandemic is a misguided and politically ridiculous idea. […]
The White House doesn’t appear to care. Donald Trump said as recently as late March that his position has not changed, and presidential spokesperson echoed the line to the AP.
Team Trump may not, however, be entirely united on this point. CNN reports today:
Attorney General William Barr made a last-minute push Monday to persuade the administration to modify its position in the Obamacare dispute that will be heard at the Supreme Court this fall, arguing that the administration should pull back from its insistence that the entire law be struck down.
[…] the attorney general made his case directly to Vice President Mike Pence, White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, members of the Domestic Policy Council, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany, and several other officials. As part of his argument, Barr said the administration could still ask the Supreme Court to oppose elements of the health care law, while encouraging the justices to leave key benefits in place.
[…] It was in March 2019 when the White House decided to endorse GOP litigation and call for the courts to tear down “Obamacare” in its entirety. Former U.S. Solicitor General Walker Dellinger responded at the time that Team Trump’s position was both “legally indefensible” and “politically insane.”
According to multiple reports, Bill Barr and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar were inclined to agree and they urged the White House to choose a more responsible course. They were overruled, reportedly by Mick Mulvaney, who was the acting White House chief of staff at the time.
It appears Barr is trying again once more before it’s too late. According to CNN’s report, the administration has until tomorrow to alter its filing to the high court. Yesterday’s meeting with attorney general reportedly “ended without a decision,” though the clock is ticking.
Team Trump is planning to sideline/disband the COVID-19 task force. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic rages on in the USA.
Farewell, COVID-19 task force. We barely knew ye.
The White House is planning to put the kibosh on […] Trump’s task force operations, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.
Task force members are reportedly being informed of the change right now. It is not yet known why the Trump administration is disbanding the team, given that the COVID-19 outbreak has yet to be contained in the U.S.
The task force officials’ efforts, particularly that of Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, have been plagued by inconsistent messaging from Trump, along with his bombastic press briefings. Officials have had to clean up the President’s overly optimistic claims and predictions about vaccines for the virus and when the outbreak will be contained enough to reopen the economy.
The apex of the off-the-rails briefings arrived less than two weeks ago when Trump argued that one could be cured of COVID-19 by injecting themselves with disinfectant. […]
It’ll be the open-the-economy hacks going forward.
——————-
Trump beleves he can win reelection by focusing on the economy. Someone should tell him that dead people don’t shop.
——————
We’ve got the Blunderkind Jared Kushner, who can take care of everything with his one-boy “task farce.”
—————–
Does this mean Fauci and Brix can testify?
—————–
Trump makes up his own reality and his cult follows. They are going to act like the virus no longer exists.
Phase II of Donald Trump’s plan to inflict maximal coronavirus carnage on the country is commencing, and now’s the perfect time to cut off public access to any tiny shreds of reality they might glean from the White House’s beleaguered coronavirus task force. Thus, the White House plans to “wind down the operation in coming weeks,” according to The New York Times.
The impetus for such a cessation is clearly twofold: 1.) the pandemic continues to ravage the nation with no end in sight at precisely the moment when Trump is insisting on reopening the country, an inconvenient truth the White House is surely desperate to hide; and 2.) Trump’s performances at the daily briefings proved disastrous for his approval ratings, so halting them both relieves him of the irresistible temptation to appear while ending the possibility that any substantive material might make its way to the public in his absence. After all, if Trump can’t use the briefings to feed his insatiable hunger for attention and self-aggrandizement, why even have them?
UPDATE: CNN reports the task force’s demise will commence around Memorial Day.
As the crisis starts to recede a bit in New York, the pandemic is currently nestling into the very areas of the country that are beginning to ease their social distancing measures. We know this because although the daily death toll is decreasing in New York, the country as a whole has continued to clear 1,000 deaths per day for more than a month straight. One model circulating in the administration put forth the possibility that the daily death toll could spike to 3,000 per day by month’s end as many states start to ease their social distancing measures.
The White House may never formally announce the task force’s demise because, frankly, how could one possibly explain ending it smack dab in the middle of the nation’s deadliest public health crisis in a century? Better to just let it sail off into the night sky in hopes that, with time, no one will even remember it ever existed. Whatever the task force’s limits—and they were profuse—occasional moments of truth did manage to escape from them, usually via the medical experts like Drs. Anthony Fauci or Deborah Birx. […]
The Times reports that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner will likely continue to operate his “shadow task force.” […] it was filled with volunteers who had no expertise in the task at hand and has achieved effectively zero successes.
Anyway, the White House is finally just surrendering any intention whatsoever of trying to combat the coronavirus. Time to just let it run rampant as Trump leads the country to slaughter.
This sounds like a good idea: The Obamas will hold virtual commencement ceremony for graduating seniors nationwide.
Paging former president Barack Obama: You are cordially invited to the class of 2020 commencement. Thousands of students throughout the country took to Twitter to express their desire to have Obama deliver a nationwide commencement speech after one high school senior from Los Angeles posted a tweet asking the former president to speak. Within five hours, the tweet was retweeted over 40,000 times with almost 200,000 likes, and even celebrities reposted it […]
Not only did one Obama accept the invitation—Michelle Obama responded Tuesday too, confirming that the couple will join the class of 2020 in multiple events as part of a #GraduateTogether2020 special. The first event, “Show Me Your Walk HBCU Edition,” will honor students at historically Black colleges and universities. A virtual commencement for the high school class of 2020 will take place the same day, May 16, and an address to the class of 2020 will take place on June 6.
“I’ve always loved joining commencements—the culmination of years of hard work and sacrifice. Even if we can’t get together in person this year, Michelle and I are excited to celebrate the nationwide Class of 2020 and recognize this milestone with you and your loved ones,” Obama said on Twitter.
The “Dear Class of 2020” speeches being delivered through YouTube will feature a variety of “global leaders, celebrities, creators and other voices,” in addition to the former president and former first lady’s address, a statement said according to PEOPLE. A spokesperson told the magazine the couple plans to share advice and inspiration across multiple platforms. […]
A new Washington Post report gives more detail on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 “response” efforts, and it is just about the most depressing and insane thing you will read all week.
That government effort to obtain vital medical supplies needed for the pandemic that has now killed 70,000 Americans, and only continues to grow? It was staffed by volunteers. Unpaid volunteers Kushner and his allies recruited from “consulting and private equity firms with little expertise in the tasks to which they were assigned.”
The people Kushner and team relied on to find supplies to bolster the national stockpile were not the government’s own experts, but “private equity” volunteers.
Nearly every paragraph of the Post’s story reveals a new horror. Based in large part on an anonymous volunteer’s own whistleblower complaint to the House Oversight Committee but backed by numerous other sources, the Post reports, among other things:
• The “volunteer” team responsible for procuring supplies […] had no “significant experience in healthcare, procurement or supply-chain operations.” Or government rules. Or customs rules. […] their efforts were reportedly unsuccessful.
• Those inexperienced volunteers were “instructed to fast-track” leads on medical supplies offered by “VIPs” like Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, while others like Fox News host Jeanine Pirro “lobbied” them for a specific New York hospital to be given priority in receiving masks. […] Yup. It happened.
• Because the volunteers were/are volunteers, they didn’t know relevant federal rules and were, for example, using their own email accounts, leading to “trouble” in procurement efforts—presumably because the people they were contacting would have presumed them to be laughably bad scammers—and possible violations of document preservation laws.
• Just as an aside the Post reports that ABOUT THIRTY ACTUAL PERCENT OF THE PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT IN THE ACTUAL NATIONAL EMERGENCY MEDICAL STOCKPILE WENT TO JARED BUMBLEFLLOK KUSHNER’S FAILED EFFORT TO OPEN “DRIVE-THROUGH” TESTING SITES RATHER THAN TO THE DAMN HOSPITALS THAT HAD DAMN RUN OUT OF THE DAMN EQUIPMENT WHEN TRYING TO SAVE AMERICAN LIVES.
• “Some of the volunteers” were tasked with creating “models projecting how much protective equipment the government would need to address the crisis” and projections of “potential drug shortages.” THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS EXPERTS WHO ADDRESSED THOSE PROJECTIONS AND HAD PRODUCED THE RELEVANT REPORTS BUT APPARENTLY KUSHNER’S TEAM OF FKBLORKS COULDN’T FIND THEM OR DIDN’T CARE.
• When the volunteers did produce those models, the administration dismissed them as “too catastrophic” AND ALSO IGNORED THOSE PROJECTIONS, PREFERRING LESS SEVERE ONES BECAUSE JESUS CLOWN COLLEGE CHRIST, THESE PEOPLE ARE THE MOST POMPOUS SELF-ABSORBED CRACKPOT LOSER FAILSONS THIS NATION HAS EVER GIVEN BIRTH TO.
[…] At every turn, we find out that the “administration” response to the pandemic has been a clown show of incompetence, with each individual White House-based idiot manchild conducting their own operations based on their own personal friends and allies and making up their own half-assed pandemic projections because they fired the top-level government experts tasked with preparing for these things and have steadfastly rejected any “preparation” expertise from the remaining parts of government who told them that the pandemic would be much more severe and deadly than the White House bumblecraps “wanted” to believe.
Not just Trump himself, but this entire administration may go down as the worst, most incompetent, most crooked, most self-absorbed, most damaging, and most deadly in all of American history. The history books devoted to this era, if any are left to exist, will be barred from classrooms because the authors will not be able to contain their swearing when conveying what these jackplarps were up to.
They don’t need to merely be removed from the White House. They don’t need to merely be criminally charged. They need to be deported to an uninhabited island three inches above sea level, and the White House they have conducted their business in needs to be burned down, scraped off the site, the ground salted and a new White House built somewhere else.
They don’t need to merely be removed from the White House. They don’t need to merely be criminally charged. They need to be deported to an uninhabited island three inches above sea level, and the White House they have conducted their business in needs to be burned down, scraped off the site, the ground salted and a new White House built somewhere else.
Trump has long claimed he could have gone pro. We looked into it.
In […] Trump’s memory, he was a high school baseball star.
“I was supposed to be a pro baseball player,” Donald Trump wrote in 2004. “At the New York Military Academy, I was captain of the baseball team. I worked hard like everyone else, but I had good talent.”
That passage was written by Trump for a book called The Games Do Count: America’s Best and Brightest on the Power of Sports, compiled by Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade. It’s the earliest instance I could find of the president claiming to have been a standout player.
“I will never forget […] the first time I saw my name in the newspaper,” he continued. “It was when I got the winning home run in a game between our academy and Cornwall High School. It was in 1964 and it was in a little local paper. It simply said, TRUMP HOMERS TO WIN THE GAME. I just loved it and I will never forget it. It was better than actually hitting the home run.”
Trump, who played first base, wrote that “being a pro was in the equation” until he attended a tryout with “another young kid named Willie McCovey.” Apparently, the sight of the future Hall of Famer in action convinced him to give up baseball for good.
In a 2010 interview with MTV, Trump said, again, “I was supposed to be a professional baseball player,” this time adding a flourish: “Fortunately, I decided to go into real estate instead.” Three years later, Trump inflated his claim on Twitter, pegging himself not just as a pro prospect but the best player in the state.
To biographer Michael D’Antonio, Trump went further still, arguing in 2015 that he’d been the best athlete in every sport at the New York Military Academy. He added that he’d decided against a baseball career because “in those days you couldn’t even make any money being a great baseball player.”
At this point, the claims were all Trump’s. But about a month after Trump announced he was running for president in the summer of 2015, the NYMA coach that Trump mentioned in his tweet, Theodore Dobias, chimed in. Dobias told the Daily Mail that Trump was scouted by the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies, and repeated to Rolling Stone that the Phillies had been interested. “He was quite the athlete,” Dobias said, going on to praise the future president’s cleanliness and his ability to get along with everyone.
There is ample evidence that Trump was a model cadet at the private academy in the Hudson Valley—although his academic record has been hidden. He rose through the ranks to become “cadet captain” and led not only his fellow students but an entire Columbus Day parade down Fifth Avenue in 1963.
But was Trump a high school baseball phenom too? Trump’s achievements at NYMA, in both academia and sports, are a key chapter in the story he tells of his lifelong success. But after years of watching Trump lie about sports, among other things, I wanted to know how much of the baseball part of his life story was true.
Many grown-ups recall high school glory. Far fewer can cite newspaper articles as proof. Except it seems likely that Trump got his own headline wrong—or made it up entirely. After combing the Evening News and the Cornwall Local, the only local newspapers to regularly cover NYMA sports, and doing an extensive search on Newspapers.com, I’ve been unable to find “TRUMP HOMERS TO WIN THE GAME” in any local paper, nor “TRUMP WINS GAME FOR NYMA,” a headline he’d mention to D’Antonio for his book The Truth About Trump.
Perhaps that’s because in 1964, NYMA didn’t play Cornwall High School, according to the schedule in its yearbook. They didn’t play in 1963, either.
What I have been able to find is box scores from some of Trump’s games, and the picture they paint of the player is not pretty.
As for Willie McCovey, he was eight years older than Trump. When Trump was a senior in high school, McCovey was in his fifth year in the major leagues and already an All-Star. […]
“U.S. companies cut thousands of workers while continuing to reward shareholders during pandemic.”
Speaking of shareholders, five companies paid a combined $700 million to shareholders while cutting jobs and closing plants.
Since the coronavirus pandemic was declared, Caterpillar has suspended operations at two plants and a foundry, Levi Strauss has closed stores, and toolmaker Stanley Black & Decker is planning layoffs and furloughs.
Steelcase, an office furniture manufacturer, and World Wrestling Entertainment have also shed employees.
While thousands of their workers are filing for unemployment benefits, these companies rewarded their shareholders with more than $700 million in cash dividends. They are not alone. As the pandemic squeezes big companies, executives are making decisions about who will bear the brunt of the sacrifices, and in at least some cases, workers have been the first to lose, even as shareholders continue to collect. […]
The Caterpillar website advertises that despite the crisis, the company’s “dedication and service to the safety, health and well-being of our team and the communities they serve remain strong.” […]
This spate of dividends is also likely to revive long-standing debates about economic rewards
.
[…] “Companies have to be mindful of the optics of paying dividends if they’re laying off thousands of workers,” she noted.
Others see the trade-offs in starker terms.
William Lazonick, an emeritus economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, has been one of the leading critics of companies that distribute cash to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends rather than reinvesting the profits into employees, innovation and production. For companies that are continuing to do buybacks and issue dividends during the crisis, he said, it is business as usual.
“In a downturn like this, the first thing a company should do is give up any distributions to shareholders,” Lazonick said. “But in a crisis, companies will differ. Some will care … and some will rob the workers, who should expect that their continued employment will be the company’s first concern.”
[…] Caterpillar announced on March 26, that because of the pandemic, it was “temporarily suspending operations at certain facilities.” Two plants, in East Peoria, Ill., and Lafayette, Ind., were coming to a halt, as well as a foundry in Mapleton, Ill., according to news reports.
About two weeks later, the company said it would be giving shareholders $500 million in cash dividends.
[…] Similarly, Levi Strauss announced April 7 that the company would stop paying store workers, and about 4,000 are now on furlough. On the same day, the company announced that it was returning $32 million to shareholders.
“As this human and economic tragedy unfolds globally over the coming months, we are taking swift and decisive action that will ensure we remain a winner in our industry,” Chip Bergh, president and chief executive of the company, said that day.
Stanley Black & Decker announced on April 2 that it was planning furloughs and layoffs because of the pandemic. Two weeks later, it issued a dividend to shareholders of about $106 million. […]
Dr. Rick Bright is back in the news. The vaccine researcher says he was fired from his position in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) because he fought Donald Trump on things like “the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.” He has now officially filed a whistleblower complaint, charging that the administration ignored dire coronavirus warnings.
Bright alleges that the administration was warned in late January of a critical shortage of surgical masks and of the need to start work immediately on a vaccine. He says the White House ignored the warnings. He said that early on in the spread of the virus, he warned about supply chain shortages but got little support from anyone in the administration other than trade adviser Peter Navarro, and ultimately was excluded from meetings on the coronavirus that he was scheduled to attend. Eventually, Bright was fired.
Bright points to a Jan. 21, 2020 email from Mike Bowen, co-owner and executive vice president of domestic surgical mask producer Prestige Ameritech, who had been in contact with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) about masks. Bowen said DHS had contacted him about getting masks, and he was concerned about getting production ramped up but apparently DHS wasn’t as concerned. He went to Bright, who raised the issue within the COVID-19 team, but nothing happened for a week. He said Bowen emailed him again, saying “I think we’re in deep shit.” Again, this is in late January.
Bright says that in a meeting with health officials on Feb. 7, he again raised the issue of scarce N95 masks, and alleges in his complaint that the HHS supply chain team said there was “no indication of a supply chain shortage or of issues with masks.” He and Navarro met on Feb. 8, and in the next few days wrote a memo recommending that HHS immediately stop the export of N95 masks, prioritize stockpiling the potential therapeutic drug Remdesivir, and kick what they called “Operation Warped Speed” into gear. That was their version of a “Manhattan Project” for vaccine development.
“There is currently no vaccine to protect against coronavirus. If we start this week to fast track vaccine development with appropriate funding, we can likely have a vaccine to clinical trials within 7 months and a workable vaccine by October or November, with a production capacity of 150 million doses by the end of the year IF we act NOW,” Navarro and Bright wrote in their memo to the task force. “We don’t yet know what type of vaccine would be safe and effective. Therefore, it is critical the [government] invest in multiple shots on goal to ensure that at least one vaccine is realized.” Trump and team, however, were not interested in hearing about something with a seven-month time lag.
They were looking for a silver bullet. That includes, Bright alleges, Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for Preparedness and Response (ASPR) at HHS. He identifies Kadlec as one of his chief antagonists, and says Kadlec was pushing hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria medication that Trump was convinced was a silver bullet. Bright said his concerns that the administration was funding “potentially dangerous drugs promoted by those with political connections” fell on deaf ears, so he went to the press. That, he says in his complaint, is what he believes got him fired. “Though no one ever provided a reason to me, an HHS spokesperson announced that my transfer was part of a ‘bold new plan’ to defeat COVID-19,” he said in his complaint.
Update to #393: still missing the video of the interview, but here’s a shot of Yong’s room (the room/voice/accent combination had a calming effect in spite of the content of what he was saying).
tomhsays
@ #398, Poll on reopening.
Some states closed gun stores, but most allowed them to remain open, for, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said, the businesses are essential because if there’s a “break down of society” people need to be able to defend themselves.
Also on guns, SCOTUS took no action at their conference last Friday on the ten 2nd Amendment cases that had been distributed. Kavanaugh is chomping at the bit to chew on the 2nd Amendment. It won’t be long.
Without covering his own face, President Trump visited a Honeywell factory making N95 face masks in Arizona while Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Live and Let Die’ played in the background
[video] [article]
Asked if he would receive a coronavirus vaccine as soon as one is developed, Trump said he would but also might decide not to if that were deemed better for the country.
As presidential visits go, it was… a campaign rally.
[…]
[Entering with] the Battle Hymn of the Republic. […] There was Trump, touring the assembly line to the tune of Guns N’ Roses’ Live and Let Die (OK, that was weird) and taking the stage to his campaign anthem, Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA
[…]
owners of Sammy’s Mexican Grill in Catalina […] proclaim that “Latinos love Trump.”
[…]
Trump […] used a lot of words like “phenomenal” and “incredible”, adding “Nobody’s done the job we’ve done.”
[…]
Trump also met with officials of the Navajo and Gila River nations, which on Tuesday got word that the administration finally was releasing 60% of the $8 billion in coronavirus relief appropriated to tribal governments more than a month ago.
[…]
outside a few dozen of his diehard supporters passed the time by harassing and generally mocking reporters who were wearing masks.
“It’s submission,” one MAGA supporter told The Republic’s BrieAnna Frank. “It’s muzzling yourself, it looks weak—especially for men.”
This, as the president was there to promote… a mask plant.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
* Commenters point out they were contaminating the masks in the process.
The facility required masks, with a sign to that effect. The CEO giving the tour was also not covered… and can be seen handling a produced mask, bare-handed, to point out its features, before dropping it back in the pile. Trump shouts over the music to a worker, “How many do ya make a day?” across the pile.
CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captainsays
** Correction: The one seen handling a mask was Tony Stallings, Honeywell’s VP of Integrated Supply Chain. The CEO was present too, also not masked.
The thin coverage of [The Orange Toddler-Tyrant] is conspicuous. Even at schools as small as NYMA, standout players got extensive ink in the local papers. In the same era, a pair of stars at a similarly sized school nearby, Storm King, regularly got extensive write-ups. Longtime Evening News sports editor Bo Gill made it a point to know about the best players in the area and to pay them appropriate attention. It stands to reason that if [The Orange Toddler-Tyrant] had really excelled, I would’ve been able to find at least one story dedicated to him in his home papers.
Pro prospect indeed!
But [The Orange Toddler-Tyrant’s] picture is framed in a hallway in the main building, part of a school hall of fame. There’s also a plaque beside the door to a classroom, noting the donation he made to refurbish it in honor of his parents.
He made a donation to refurbish a classroom. How generous of him! The plaque probably cost as much as his donation.
In 2001, [The Orange Toddler-Tyrant] returned to give the academy’s commencement address. He showed up by helicopter with a model girlfriend on his arm, bragged that he’d bought the Empire State Building, which he hadn’t, and urged the graduates to “think big.”
Actually, the message was obviously to “lie big”.
johnson catmansays
re Saad @416: That man who refused to wear a mask and subsequently wiped his nose on the shirt of the employee was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery. If he had tried to do that to me, I would have been charged with felony assault and battery.
.
I see bunches of people who apparently find wearing a mask properly just too damn hard. They wear it over their mouth but leave their nose exposed. What fucking good is it doing when not used properly? None at all. But now, calling people out for not wearing a mask might just get you killed. Peeple iz stoopid!
Russian Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova has tested positive for the coronavirus, the RBC news website reported Wednesday, citing Lyubimova’s spokeswoman.
Lyubimova’s diagnosis makes her the third Russian cabinet official to become infected with the virus after construction minister Vladimir Yakushev and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. All three have confirmed their infections in the past week as Russia has seen a steady increase in cases.
The culture minister has been working from home for several weeks and is only experiencing mild symptoms, spokeswoman Anna Usacheva told RBC.
…
Lyubimova, 39, was appointed in January when President Vladimir Putin reshuffled the cabinet of ministers.
Mishustin, the highest-ranking Russian official to be infected with the coronavirus, has been hospitalized and First Deputy Prime Minister Andrei Belousov has been appointed as acting prime minister.
Russia is now the European country registering the most new infections as the number surged past 165,000 on Wednesday.
More than 10,000 new cases were identified yesterday, for the fourth day in a row. Mishustin was “feeling normal” yesterday, according to his spokesman (see #383 above), and today he’s been hospitalized.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro says he twice tested negative for the coronavirus but many, including a federal judge, are demanding he share the actual results. Still, the leader has refused.
The surreal standoff is the latest flashpoint in a broader battle between a president who has repeatedly tested the limits of his power and democratic institutions. There are concerns that as Bolsonaro pushes back, it could spark a constitutional crisis.
Bolsonaro has consistently downplayed the coronavirus pandemic and has fiercely criticized efforts by governors and mayors to impose measures to control the virus’ spread, instead advocating for most people to get back to work.
But the courts have repeatedly curtailed him — on this issue and others: They ruled that governors and mayors have the power to determine shutdown measures. They overturned the president’s decree allowing religious gatherings and are trying to force the release of his COVID-19 test results to put to rest speculation he may have lied. They struck down his pick for federal police director and on Saturday suspended his decision to expel 30 Venezuelan diplomats from the country.
Bolsonaro’s supporters have denounced the decisions as part of a plot to derail his presidency, and the president himself says he is a victim of meddling by obstructionist judges.
…
Analysts say the court decisions impose constraints on a populist who is testing democratic guardrails and has shown he is not afraid to take his legal battles to the street when he is unhappy with the courts.
…
The fight over his coronavirus test results has produced a particularly unusual chapter. Concerns about Bolsonaro’s health began in March, when the president returned from the U.S., and local media reported in the weeks that followed that more than a dozen members of his delegation tested positive for the coronavirus.
Initial unconfirmed reports indicated Bolsonaro had tested positive himself but then he announced on social media his results had come back negative. He has refused to produce the actual document, citing medical privacy.
Last week, a federal judge in São Paulo ordered Bolsonaro to present the results in response to a request from the O Estado de S. Pãulo newspaper. Bolsonaro’s attorney-general instead sent a summary of the results, the office said in a statement. The judge again insisted on the actual results, and a separate judge on Saturday gave Bolsonaro’s team five days to comply.
Bolsonaro has also further muddied the waters recently. Following the lawsuits, he said last week he had “perhaps” contracted the virus without knowing it.
All the while, Bolsonaro has kept appearing in public without a mask, addressing crowds and shaking well-wishers’ hands — on one occasion, after wiping his nose.
Bolsonaro’s support among a core base has long seemed nearly unshakable. While a positive result might not challenge that, it would likely erode support from moderates – the portion of people who are not die-hard but believe his policies are reasonable, said Lucas de Aragão, partner at the Brasilia-based consultancy Arko Advice.
“All this creates an environment of institutional crisis,” said Carlos Melo, a political science professor at Insper University in São Paulo. “Constitutional crises are complicated because when institutions no longer resolve controversies and conflicts, then who does? The use of force?”
As the political and economic crisis deriving from the pandemic deepens in Brazil, Bolsonaro might try to further discredit democratic institutions, looking for someone to blame to weather the storm, analysts said.
“This is why he is bashing the governors and judiciary,” said de Aragão. “The Bolsonaro government and his most influential advocates are always looking for a common enemy, because this creates a sense of community among supporters.”
Some of that can already be seen unfolding. Over the weekend, Bolsonaro’s core base made the hashtag #CoupFromTheSupremeCourt trend on Twitter in Brazil. Meanwhile in the capital of Brasilia on Sunday, protesters shouted slogans such as: “Careful, Justices, your robes will turn into handcuffs.”…
As noted in the article @ #384 above, at the pro-dictatorship rally the other day, they (Bolsonaro and his mostly Evangelical followers) flew Brazilian, US, and Israeli flags. This article in the Times of Israel, “Brazilian Jews criticize waving of Israeli flags at ‘anti-democratic’ protests,” describes statements from organizations representing the Jewish community in Brazil, who argue that the community is politically diverse and that the flag of a “vibrant democracy” like Israel shouldn’t be flown at an anti-democracy rally. Meanwhile, the Israeli ambassador to Brazil “shared a post on social media that was supportive of the pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators.”
Despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka has called on leaders of other countries to attend this week’s military parade in Minsk marking the 75th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s defeat in World War II.
The Belarusian capital is preparing for its annual Victory Day parade on May 9, despite the World Health Organization’s (WHO) call on the country’s authorities to impose social-distancing measures and avoid large public gatherings to slow the spread of COVID-19.
“I am publicly calling on leaders of other countries, at least countries of the former [Soviet] Union, to gather in Minsk, which is the right thing to do,” Lukashenka said on May 5, rejecting Russian media reports criticizing the Belarusian leader over his handling of the coronavirus outbreak as “lies.”
Belarus currently has more than 18,350 registered coronavirus cases, including 107 deaths, but Lukashenka has publicly dismissed concerns about the dangers of the disease several times.
Victory Day commemorates the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 and is the most important national holiday in Belarus and other former Soviet states.
Belarus and Turkmenistan are the only two former Soviet republics that have not canceled their traditional Victory Day parade this year.
…
The May 9 parade in Minsk is expected to include more than 3,000 military personnel and more than 180 pieces of military hardware.
Thousands of citizens are expected to line up to watch the hour-long parade, which is often followed by picnics and other activities at public locations such as parks.
Belarus lost about a quarter of its population during World War II.
Britain has the worst coronavirus death toll in Europe, official figures showed on Tuesday, prompting calls for an inquiry into the handling of the pandemic.
The government’s tally of fatalities across the UK reached 29,427 for those who tested positive for coronavirus, exceeding the 29,029 recorded in Italy – until now Europe’s worst-hit country. Italy’s total does not include suspected cases.
Newly released data from the Office for National Statistics showed that 29,648 deaths were registered in England and Wales with Covid-19 mentioned on the death certificate by 2 May. With the addition of the official death figures for Scotland and Northern Ireland, this was calculated to take the UK’s toll to 32,313.
The true figure is likely to be significantly higher due to missed cases and a lag in reporting.
While experts such as Prof David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and a member of the government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), have warned of the risks of comparing countries’ death tolls, he said on Tuesday: “We are not doing very well and it’s been another very bad week. I really don’t like this league table of who’s top and who’s not, but there’s no denying that these are really serious numbers.”
Dr Claudia Paoloni, president of the Hospital Consultants and Specialists Association trade union, said Britain having the highest number of deaths in Europe showed that ministers had “searching questions” to answer about their “inadequate” handling of the crisis, and called for a public inquiry.
“This is a very sobering and unwelcome milestone. It’s of extreme concern that the UK now has the largest number of Covid deaths in Europe,” she said. “There will have to be a full investigation of the [government’s] handling of the Covid response in due course – a public inquiry – to understand why we are experiencing such large numbers in comparison to the rest of Europe.
“It puts into question whether the government’s tactics at the start of the pandemic were sufficiently fast, and especially whether the lockdown should have happened earlier and whether we should have been better prepared with increased capacity for viral testing and contact tracing from the start. Both have proven inadequate.”
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, British Medical Association council chair, said the figures were extremely concerning “given that the UK was originally affected by the outbreak later than many other nations, and with the government initially saying that a death toll of 20,000 would be a ‘good outcome’.”
“It’s too early to come to firm conclusions and we need to ensure that figures between nations are comparing like for like,” he said. “However, there will in the future need to be serious scrutiny of the UK’s response and questions asked about what measures were put in when, from imposition of lockdown to our approach to testing, and whether this may have contributed to the loss of more lives.”
The shadow health secretary, Jonathan Ashworth, said: “Today’s confirmation we have the highest official death rate in Europe is a tragic reminder of the severity of this horrific disease. The public will rightly ask why our death rate is so high.”…
First there was “stupid Watergate,” such an evocative phrase that it was applied both to the Trump camp’s entanglements with Russia and the president’s attempts to leverage aid in Ukraine that eventually led to impeachment. Now, the Trump era has brought us stupid Bay of Pigs: On Monday, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro announced that two Americans were among a group of 13 people arrested for what he described as an attempted coup to overthrow his regime.
In a state TV appearance, Maduro said that the two Americans arrested outside Caracas were “professional mercenaries” named Luke Denman and Airan Berry, who carried ID cards for a Florida-based security contractor called Silvercorp. Maduro equated their alleged efforts to overthrow his government to “playing Rambo” and “playing hero.” He did not mention, however, that the two were not very good at cosplaying the American tradition of violently overthrowing Latin American governments. Below are some of the less thought-through elements of the apparent coup attempt.
They tweeted about the raid while it was in process
It should go without saying that if you’re involved in an alleged attempt to overthrow a government already prepared for interference from a well-funded opposition leader, you should keep it offline. But Silvercorp, the private contractor employing the pair of mercenaries, tweeted about the operation on Sunday while it was still in motion:…
…
Silvercorp appears to have provided security at Trump events
The Trump administration — gung-ho for the removal of Maduro during a power struggle last year led by opposition leader Juan Guaidó — may not be thrilled to learn that Silvercorp apparently did security for the president’s rallies in 2018. Though the photo has been taken down, Vice News grabbed a screenshot of an Instagram post showing what appears to be the backstage at Trump’s October 2018 rally in Charlotte, with the caption “Protecting our Greatest Assets.” The Associated Press has also confirmed that the company’s head Jordan Goudreau accompanied the president’s longtime bodyguard Keith Schiller to a meeting with Guaido’s representatives in May 2019 in Miami. While the president frequently employs private security at his events, on Tuesday he denied any involvement with the plot.
Denman and Berry apparently brought an Airsoft gun on the raid
As any friend of a kid who lived in the woods knows, Airsoft guns hurt. But they would not be effective weapons for a group of 62 to overthrow a president leading a standing army of over 340,000….
The Silvercorp founder confirmed his involvement, and said his planning was inspired by Alexander the Great
Rather than keep a low PR presence as news of the botched and legally spurious act emanated throughout the world, Jordan Goudreau — who won the Bronze Star on three occasions while serving in Iraq — tweeted about the raid and spoke with an exiled Venezuelan journalist, claiming responsibility for orchestrating the attack. When asked why he would hurl his forces onto the heavily fortified coastline outside Caracas, Goudreau said he was inspired by Alexander the Great, who “struck deep into the heart of the enemy” at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C.
Goudreau did not mention the discrepancy between the size of their forces: 62 compared to an army of over 40,000.
A glance at some of the newspaper front pages gives us a sense of what’s happening. “Boris leads £6bn global race for vaccine,” Monday’s Express suggested. The Sun entitled its exclusive prime ministerial interview: “Baby gave me will to live.” The bottom two-thirds of the Mail on Sunday featured a photograph of Boris Johnson’s newborn son with the headline: “He’s got Daddy’s hair!”
In other news, the UK has overtaken Italy, the former poster-child of this catastrophe, and now registers the second-highest death toll in the world. A reader from literally anywhere else in the world would think we had lost our minds.
All this, of course, forms part of a careful communications and PR strategy. It consists of three distinct strands.
The first is the outright manipulation of statistics and facts. The last few weeks have seen an emphasis on numbers. That is, to a large extent, necessary. We need to know how many people are being tested, how many are dying and how much equipment we have to treat patients and protect those caring for them.
But on all counts, the government has dissembled. After Johnson’s early promise of 250,000 daily tests was quietly abandoned, health secretary Matt Hancock plucked the number of 100,000 seemingly at random. When that seemed doomed to fail, ministers started to claim it was not about the number of tests but the capacity. Then, in order to reach the target by April 30th, the government included the unprocessed kits it had simply mailed out. Since then, the numbers of daily tests have dipped sharply – as though the entire focus had not been on testing at all, but meeting an arbitrary number on an arbitrary date and making sure it became a government success story.
Mortality statistics have also come under suspicion….
Then there’s personal protective equipment. Panorama revealed that the government counted a pair of gloves as two items rather than one in order to make its activity seem more impressive.
With over 100 frontline workers dead, many of whom had openly complained about their lack of protection, we might consider this a major scandal – yet the government seems to treat it as ‘one of those things’, as though it hadn’t known pandemics existed and hadn’t in fact simulated one as recently as 2016.
The second big element of the strategy is to deflect blame. At first this focused on the public, who carried the can for not understanding the government’s entirely contradictory messaging.
Now it is almost exclusively targeted at the media….
And as it lashed out, a stream of commentators have lambasted the media for questioning our leaders’ response at all. At the very moment the government most needs to be held to account, scrutiny has been rebranded as sabotage.
The third and most important strand is language itself. Johnson’s words betrayed his complacency from the very start…. For Johnson, governing is entertaining and this was not part of the bill.
Language has since taken on a more important role. Key to this is the focus on war…. The problem is this isn’t a war, and if it was, the enemy should have been expected and we should have been prepared for it. This is not about short-term heroism but years of hard work.
But of course the cynicism goes far deeper. Sometimes it seems the most significant battle is against information itself. Taking its cue from Brexit, the government has deployed a succession of empty phrases and slogans to promote its accomplishments. ‘Take back control’ and ‘get Brexit done’ have become ‘ramping up testing’ and ‘following the science’.…
The most insidious weapon of language is to conceal the reality under our noses. On Thursday Johnson had the audacity to declare that “we have so far succeeded in the first and most important task we set ourselves as a nation – to avoid the tragedy that engulfed other parts of the world”. In reality, the UK accounts for less than one in a hundred of the world’s population and one in eight of its deaths. Our death toll is now eclipsed only by the United States. The government can wave its hands, point elsewhere and cloak inadequacy as competence, but cannot change the truth of how it failed.
The fundamental problem is the government defines success less by what it does than how it communicates. Ministers do not need to flatten the curve so much as flatten the criticism. In the intersection of exceptionalism and misinformation, it can boast of false achievements and project real blame.
Ultimately we will hear any number of distractions, distortions and dead cats to cover up a single question: why a rich country gifted with time and resources became completely overwhelmed when so many of its counterparts did not.
“Pompeo on the bizarre Venezuela raid, says there was ‘no US government direct involvement in this operation’.
Then added: ‘If we had been involved it would have gone differently’.”
President Donald Trump boasted on May 1 that his success in responding to the coronavirus pandemic has made ventilator, test kit and mask shortages a thing of the past, and that much of the country is ready to quickly send people back to work.
“We’ve ensured a ventilator for every patient who needs one,” he said. “The testing and the masks and all of the things, we’ve solved every problem. We solved it quickly.”
But that same day, his own health and emergency management officials were privately warning that states were still experiencing shortages of masks, gowns and other medical gear, according to a recording of an interagency meeting between FEMA and HHS officials across the country, conducted by conference call, which was obtained by POLITICO.
Trump’s federal “Stay at Home” guidelines had quietly expired the night before, leaving states to manage the pandemic as they saw fit. The officials also expressed concern that governors moving to reopen their economies while cases were still prevalent threatened to plunge the nation into a new and potentially deadlier chapter of the outbreak.
“The numbers of deaths definitely will be high,” Daniel Jernigan, director of the Center for Disease Control’s influenza division, said at the start of a May 1 conference call. Jernigan did not respond to an emailed request for comment.
Minutes later, another official underscored the risk facing the U.S.: If all the states moved to lift their social distancing restrictions, hospitals nationwide could see a surge of new coronavirus cases, creating the potential for severe ventilator shortages within weeks.
“If, at the end of stay-at-home orders, you were to lift everything and go back to normal business, and not have any community mitigation, you would expect to see in the second week in May we begin to increase again in ventilator uses,” the official said. “Which means cases increase, and by early June, we surpass the number of ventilators we currently have.”
Those internal anxieties came as dozens of states prepared to reopen their economies over the coming weeks, a push that won’t immediately return the nation to business as normal yet that’s still occurring against the advice of many public health experts. Even Trump himself, who encouraged states to move fast, has acknowledged the pace will likely lead to a greater death toll.
But the daily “HHS/FEMA Interagency” conferences also served as a counterpoint — though one the public did not hear — to the different story that Trump has sought to sell, of a swift and effective response that’s so successfully cleared the path for a restart of the economy that the task force managing the crisis may no longer be needed.
POLITICO obtained audio recordings of three conference-call meetings held between April 24 and May 1, led by HHS and FEMA officials and designed to keep a wide range of federal agencies apprised of the government’s coronavirus response. The meetings included updates from internal task forces focused on various elements of the response — like data and analytics, testing sites and community mitigation efforts — as well as from regional FEMA and HHS leaders in offices around the nation.
In the calls, officials in Washington and their regional counterparts were blunt about their struggle to keep pace with a flood of requests from governors for more medical equipment, even as the president touted the administration’s actions to secure sufficient gear from foreign and domestic producers.
“Now we’re loaded up,” Trump said during a late April press briefing. “The federal government loaded up hospitals with things to take care of people.”
“We have millions and millions of masks,” he added on May 1. “That was something, four weeks ago, was difficult, and now we have millions of masks coming in and already here.”
Despite steps the administration has taken to buy and distribute millions of masks and other gear, health care workers across the country continued to report shortages in recent weeks that put both them and their patients at risk of infection.
…
Nearly all of FEMA’s regional teams reported continued increases in both cases and deaths as governors moved to terminate stay-at-home orders, flagging on the calls new hot spots in prisons, meat processing plants, and other high-risk facilities.
At least two states at the time — South Carolina and Georgia — were among those planning to reopen despite logging zero consecutive days of decreasing cases, according to one slide distributed to the group and obtained by POLITICO, much less meeting any of the other basic reopening recommendations or “gates” laid out by the CDC. In Georgia, according to another slide the group saw, new Covid-19 cases were up 65 percent and deaths were up nearly 103 percent over a two-week period….
Brazil has seen its largest ever daily increase in its coronavirus death toll, despite erroneous suggestions from President Jair Bolsonaro that the worst of the crisis was over.
Brazil – which is now considered a major global centre of the pandemic – reported 633 Covid-19 deaths on Tuesday, taking its total to nearly 8,000.
Three of Brazil’s 27 states this week announced the country’s first official lockdown measures to try to slow the spread of the disease.
But speaking to reporters outside his presidential palace on Tuesday afternoon, Bolsonaro suggested his country was passing its Covid-19 peak.
“I don’t know yet if the number of deaths is less than yesterday. But if it is, if I’m not mistaken, it’ll be the sixth consecutive day in which the number of deaths has fallen,” Bolsonaro said.
“That’s a sign that the worst is over, and I ask God for this to be true,” Bolsonaro added.
It was not true. Just a few hours later, Brazil’s health ministry announced that the number of reported deaths had in fact risen. Under-reporting and a lack of testing also means the true numbers are almost certainly much higher….
A new Banksy artwork has appeared at Southampton General Hospital.
The largely monochrome painting, which is one square metre, was hung in collaboration with the hospital’s managers in a foyer near the emergency department.
It shows a young boy kneeling by a wastepaper basket dressed in dungarees and a T-shirt.
He has discarded his Spiderman and Batman model figures in favour of a new favourite action hero – an NHS nurse.
The nurse’s arm is outstretched and pointing forward in the fashion of Superman on a mission.
She is wearing a facemask, a nurse’s cape, and an apron with the Red Cross emblem (the only element of colour in the picture).
The artist left a note for hospital workers, which read: “Thanks for all you’re doing. I hope this brightens the place up a bit, even if its only black and white.”
The painting will remain at Southampton General Hospital until the autumn when it will be auctioned to raise money for the NHS.
Paula Head, CEO of the University Hospital Southampton NHS Foundation Trust said: “Our hospital family has been directly impacted with the tragic loss of much loved and respected members of staff and friends.
“The fact that Banksy has chosen us to recognise the outstanding contribution everyone in and with the NHS is making, in unprecedented times, is a huge honour.”
She added: “It will be really valued by everyone in the hospital, as people get a moment in their busy lives to pause, reflect and appreciate this piece of art. It will no doubt also be a massive boost to morale for everyone who works and is cared for at our hospital.”
The artwork is now on view to staff and patients on Level C of the Southampton General.
SC @426, one of the comments on that LOL thread was “Coup de disgrace.”
Of course these Silvercorp dunderheads are connected to trumpian cult followers, (including Trump’s former bodyguard). Of course they can’t create a website without plagiarizing, blatantly plagiarizing, government websites. Of course Pompeo would say that the U.S. government was not “directly” involved. Sheesh!
In April, as the pandemic claims tens of thousands of American lives, Trump turned his attention on what color to paint steel border slats.
[…] an almost comical picture of an obsessed president, barking instructions about the color of the barriers. And the shape of their tips. And their height. And what they should be called. And the number of gates. And the size of the gates. And the construction schedule. And “the minutiae of contracts.”
But paint color appears to have especially captured Trump’s attention. Administration officials hoped […] that they’d steered the president away from his preoccupation with black paint, deeming it costly and unnecessary. But the Washington Post reports today that Trump isn’t budging.
Trump has not let go of the idea, insisting that the dark color will enhance its forbidding appearance and leave the steel too hot to touch during summer months. During a border wall meeting at the White House last month amid the coronavirus pandemic, the president told senior adviser Jared Kushner and aides to move forward with the paint job and to seek out cost estimates, according to four administration officials with knowledge of the meeting…. Trump, during that meeting, directed aides to seek input from North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel, a company the president favors.
At this point, I could explore the ongoing concerns surrounding Fisher Sand and Gravel, which Trump apparently likes because he saw its Republican CEO on Fox News. I could also note that the president’s insistence on black paint is reportedly going to cost at least half a billion dollars — which is money that will come from American taxpayers.
But the two words that troubled me most in that excerpted paragraph were these: “last month.”
In other words, in April, as tens of thousands of Americans succumbed to a deadly pandemic, the president participated in a meeting in which he and other White House officials focused their attention on what color to paint steel border slats. […]
Part of a president’s job is recognizing the difference between what matters and what doesn’t. There’s little to suggest Trump has figured this out.
A new national poll from Monmouth University found Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by nine points, 50% to 41%. In April, the same poll found the former vice president with a four-point advantage, and in March, the incumbent president trailed by three points.
Well, that looks good. The trend, as seen by the polls, is going in the right direction.
Monmouth also found a sizable gender gap, with Trump leading among men by two points, while Biden leads among women by 20 points. What’s more, the same poll suggested education levels remain a key indicator: among white voters without college degrees, Trump leads by 27 points, while among white voters with degrees, Biden leads by 24 points.
With Libertarian Justin Amash added to the mix, Monmouth found Biden’s lead shrinking to seven points, 47% to 40%, with the Michigan congressman garnering 5% support.
On the congressional generic ballot, Monmouth’s poll found Democrats leading Republicans, 52% to 42%, which suggests, at least for now, that the GOP faces very long odds in the party’s bid to reclaim the House majority.
[…] while Democratic officials are cautiously optimistic about their U.S. Senate electoral prospects, Politico reports that the party increasingly sees Sen. Doug Jones’ (D) re-election effort in Alabama as a lost cause.
The White House’s Kellyanne Conway appeared on Fox News yesterday morning, and used a specific phrase over and over again. “What we’re trying to do is show that this health care president is the one that is governing,” Conway said, adding that “this health care president” believes in transparency” and “the health care president continues to deliver for America.”
Subtle, it was not.
OMFG.
It’s likely that Conway, who had a background in political polling before joining Team Trump as his third campaign manager in 2016, has seen some of the internal data and concluded that the president is in real trouble when it comes to public attitudes on health care. It’s also likely that she keeps calling Trump “the health care president” in the hopes that the public will take the spin seriously.
But given the circumstances, it’s an awfully tough sell. Trump is, after all, championing a lawsuit that would strip tens of millions of Americans of their health security, even during a pandemic. This is the same president who also championed far-right legislation in 2017 that would’ve devastated millions of families.
As Vox’s Matt Yglesias explained a while back:
He [Trump] has followed that up by pushing a variety of Medicaid waiver schemes to allow GOP-held states to restrict low-income families’ access to health care. His administration is particularly enthusiastic about work requirements that reduce coverage while doing nothing to encourage work…. The result of all this is that the uninsured rate in America is actually rising.
Let’s not overlook Trump’s efforts to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, which have also caused adverse effects. […]
The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell added in early February, after Vice President Mike Pence endorsed a series of regressive changes to Medicaid, “Is the problem incompetence or malice? When it comes to the Trump administration’s terrible health-care agenda, the answer appears to be both.”
If Kellyanne Conway wants to have a conversation about who’s earned “the health care president” label, the White House may not like where the discussion ends up.
President Obama characterized the Republican’s bogus Biden-Ukraine “investigation” as being part of “Russian disinformation.” Yes, that seems right.
A highly politicized GOP Senate investigation into discredited allegations against Joe Biden in Ukraine constitute efforts to boost Russia-sourced disinformation, President Obama’s office said in a March 2020 letter.
The former president’s office sent the letter to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in response to a November 2019 request from Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) for access to documents and records from the Obama administration.
“However, the current request is not a proper use of the limited NARA exceptions,” the letter reads. “It arises out of efforts by some, actively supported by Russia, to shift the blame for Russian interference in the 2016 election to Ukraine.”
Grassley and Johnson, as respective heads of the Senate Finance and Homeland Security committees, have picked up the investigative slack left behind by personal attorney for President Trump Rudy Giuliani.
The committees are probing unsubstantiated allegations that Ukrainian officials conspired with the Democratic National Committee to damage President Trump’s 2016 campaign. The committees have persevered in the probe despite overwhelming opposition from facts and reality, continuing the crucial work of building a narrative to counter evidence showing that President Trump leaned on the Ukrainian government to have Kyiv interfere in the 2020 election.
For the President’s allies on Capitol Hill, the probe has an added benefit: it could be used to smear the Democratic nominee in an election year. […]
The March 2020 letter to the National Archives indicated that Obama believed the GOP records request to be “without precedent” and lacking a “legitimate purpose.”
But, regardless, Obama gave the green light for the release of the records, suggesting that the information itself would counteract the disinformation campaign.
“Nevertheless, in the interest of countering the misinformation campaign underlying this request, we are prepared on this occasion to provide the Committees access to the records responsive to this request,” the letter concludes..
Trump changed his mind. Now he says he won’t end the White House COVID-19 Task Force, but will continue it’s existence indefinitely.
[…]Trump denied on Wednesday morning that he was planning to dissolve the White House COVID-19 task force.
“Because of this success, the Task Force will continue on indefinitely with its focus on SAFETY & OPENING UP OUR COUNTRY AGAIN,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets.
However, “we may add or subtract people to it, as appropriate,” he added.
During a press conference in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, Trump praised the “fantastic” task force but said that “we’re now looking at a little bit of a different form.”
“And that form is safety and opening,” he said. “And we’ll have a different group probably set up for that.”
Yeah, right. He wants to sort of neuter the task force, but pretend that he is not doing so. He also wants to back away from the task force a bit after his disastrous inject-disinfectant-into-humans press briefing. But he also wants to pretend that his administration is actually doing the work that properly addressing the pandemic would require. It’s laughable.
Just as an aside, Trump threw Pence under the bus again. Pence had been making statements in which he tried to provide an excuse for Trump dissolving the task force.
From the readers comments.
Well, that great idea lasted all of about… checks watch… 18 hours…
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Did he have his clown shoes on when he flip-flopped?
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One of its new tasks will be to praise me and express unconditional love for me.
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This is Trump belatedly realizing that the appearance of abject surrender to the virus is bad PR. He’s still gonna unconditionally surrender, of course, but the new policy will be called Viral Victory or some such shit.
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“fighting the virus” was proving difficult…
so Trump tried to quit the “fight the virus” thing …
but quitting was proving to be a problem…
so Trump quit the quitting …
now he is going to keep the “fight the virus team” … but the team members may / will change … and the mission will change to “safety & REOPENING ”
… there appears to be a severe logic shortage here.
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Happens every time
Trump has big idea developed by his big brain
Says something without asking anyone
Everyone say DOH! you f’ing idiot
Walks back with no explanation
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Midseason casting shake-ups often spell doom for new series.
Trump wants the wealthy to benefit even more from the coronavirus pandemic:
[…] Trump’s talking about a slew of new tax cuts for the wealthy. Because of course he is. That includes a cut in the capital gains tax rate and more corporate giveaways, allowing companies to deduct the full costs of investments they made during this crisis—and in perpetuity.
[…] Also, he wants to expand the deduction for corporate spending on meals and entertainment, which wouldn’t benefit Trump resorts at all, I’m sure. […]
Republicans [in the Senate, i.e. Mitch McConnell] are looking at a much bigger assist to corporate America. They want all private employers to be exempted from liability claims for coronavirus. All those businesses now reopening, too soon and while the virus is still storming around the country, wouldn’t be held responsible for their employees’ or customers’ health. Even healthcare workers—perhaps especially healthcare workers—in private hospitals couldn’t find redress for being forced to work in unsafe environments. “If there’s any red line,” McConnell said Tuesday, “it’s on litigation,” […]
Democrats have called blanket liability [a nonstarter], and are moving on a much larger bill “including housing, social services, law enforcement, tribal government needs, food security, the Postal Service, rural broadband, rent and mortgage relief, as well as veterans issues.” You know, stuff that helps everyone, now.
Democratic Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer has focused his response to McConnell on that. “This idea of drawing red lines—particularly when they’re not really related to what the needs of people are, particularly when they side with big corporate interests as opposed to individual workers, as Leader McConnell’s red line—it’s not productive and it’s not going to work,” Schumer said Tuesday. “People have real needs.”
“The whole world is excited watching us,” Trump tells reporters. “Because we’re leading the world.”
Trump says the virus is “a tough enemy, a smart enemy. But nobody’s like us and nobody’s tough like us. And I said it before and I’ll say it again: the people of our country are warriors.”
Commentary:
[…] He wants to sound optimistic, but he’s too stupid to pull it off. No, the world isn’t excited to see the devastation happening in the United States (except maybe Russia) […]The same happens when he tries to frame the pandemic as a battle between a wily mastermind of a virus, and America’s can-do spirit.
The virus isn’t smart. It’s a freakin’ virus. It’s as dumb as a Trump, following base instincts without regards to long-term strategy. And we certainly aren’t going to defeat the virus by being “tough.” The virus doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the grit of the American people. […]
Literally, the only way to currently thwart this virus is to hide from it. That’s how powerful it is. And the only way to thwart this thing, long-term, is through science. So yeah, smart people doing smart things. Again, no “tough” words from Trump will matter a whit.
If Trump wants to treat this as a war, however, why not treat people as actual uniformed soldiers? Give front-line and essential employees veterans benefits, hazard pay, and medals. Give them free socialized medical care like members of the armed forces. Pay out $1 million in death benefits to every one of those workers felled in the line of duty. It’s a war, right? Treat the people like actual warriors.
[…] 27 Department of Defense service members, employees, and dependents have died from the disease, as well as 771 veterans inside the VA medical system. Obviously, that doesn’t count veterans who died outside of that system […]
But Trump doesn’t care. The only time he thinks about our service members and veterans is when they serve his ego, as backdrops for his campaign or photo ops. Otherwise, perhaps he’d keep them in mind and try to minimize the carnage.
But he doesn’t care about anyone. The end. And this toxic brew of psychotic indifference and rank incompetence means that we’re in for hundreds of thousands more deaths before we’re mercifully done with his presidency next January.
The Republican Party will owe this country for the death and destruction it wrought, for refusing to take out Trump when it had the chance (not just impeachment, but via 25th Amendment), and that’s a debt it will never be able to repay.
To be clear, the @FCC does not construe the flushing of a toilet immediately after counsel said “what the FCC has said” to reflect a substantive judgment of the Supreme Court, or of any Justice thereof, regarding an agency determination. #SCOTUS
Oh, FFS. Bad consequences of Team Trump’s immigration policies:
A Canadian-born doctor treating U.S. coronavirus patients was denied permanent status as part of President Trump’s crackdown on immigration amid the pandemic.
“It’s heart-wrenching. I feel helpless,” Julia Iafrate, an intensive care unit doctor in New York, told CNN’s Chris Cuomo Tuesday.
“I’m putting my life on the line every day to do this … I’m honestly beside myself. It’s like a slap in the face,” Iafrate added.
[…] currently an assistant professor at Columbia University Medical Center. She has lived in the U.S. for 13 years, 10 of which were spent completing a residency program at the Mayo Clinic and a sports medicine fellowship at the University of Iowa before starting at Columbia three years ago.
She is currently sponsored by the hospital she practices in but had her green card application denied last week. Iafrate is in the process of filing an appeal.
“It’s heart-wrenching … I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what I could have done better,” she says. “I don’t know what I could have done any differently.”
This week, a bipartisan Senate bill was introduced that would make it easier for doctors and nurses to obtain green cards.
“It is unacceptable that thousands of doctors currently working in the U.S. on temporary visas are stuck in the green card backlog, putting their futures in jeopardy and limiting their ability to contribute to the fight against COVID-19,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement.
Iceland has all but eliminated the virus as 97% of infected patients have recovered and only two new cases have been confirmed in the last week, the country’s country’s chief epidemiologist Thorolfur Gudnason has said.
We have been pleasantly surprised to see a very fast deceleration of the pandemic in Iceland. However, it is extremely important to remain vigilant and minimise the risk of a renewed outbreak.
With that in mind, is this not another arrow in the quiver of mitigation? Ok, if you must gather, do it outdoors. It’s summer time and by the fall we’ll maybe have a better handle at retrying tracing and isolation.
Do any of the very scientifically minded folks here, including PZ, have anything to say about this study? I’m not JAQing off here, I honestly don’t have the expertise to say one way or another but it’s making the rounds on Twitter so I want to know before I back something that’s BS.
Yep, Team Trump still plans to take healthcare insurance away from millions of people … during the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump confirmed Wednesday that his administration was not backing down from the aggressive anti-Obamacare stance it’s taking in a blockbuster case in front of the Supreme Court.
After reports that even Attorney General Bill Barr was concerned about the political risks of the Justice Department’s posture in the case, Trump said the administration was “staying with Texas and the group,” referring to the red states that are arguing for a full dismantling of the Affordable Care Act.
“Obamacare is a disaster, but we’ve made it barely acceptable,” [Lie!] Trump said, according to a pool report of comments made in the Oval Office. “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare.” [True]
[…] Trump’s comments made clear that his Justice Department is holding on to its arguments that the whole law should be invalidated.
[…] The case is based on a claim that the 2017 tax reform bill made the whole Affordable Care Act unconstitutional by zeroing out Obamacare’s individual mandate.
Given that Democrats swept the 2018 midterms by running on Republicans’ previous attempts to repeal Obamacare, and that the coronavirus outbreak is only further putting the issue in the spotlight, the administration’s arguments in the case are likely to be major issue in the presidential campaign.
In his remarks Wednesday, Trump vowed that he would replace Obamacare with something cheaper that still covers pre-existing conditions [Bullshit! Lies and more lies!] — a promise that congressional Republicans found impossible to achieve when they tried in 2017.
It is not clear yet whether the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case before the November election, and it is almost certain the case won’t be resolved until well after Americans vote for their next president.
Team Trump’s incompetence strikes again: “Instead of supplies to fight COVID-19, Native American health center says it received body bags.”
As the United States fumbles in handling the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, many Native American communities are being hit especially hard. While as of Tuesday Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said his department would send $4.8 billion in funding to tribal governments, that doesn’t erase the difficulty some communities have already faced. For example, Esther Lucero, chief executive officer of the Seattle Indian Health Board—which serves thousands in the Seattle and King County area of Washington state—told NBC News that instead of getting coronavirus tests in March, the community health center received a box of body bags.
“We asked for tests, and they sent us a box of body bags,” Lucero told the news outlet. The delivery of the body bags was a mistake, she added. It’s a particularly haunting one, given that the Navajo Nation has the third-highest infection rate per capita of anywhere in the country, following only New York and New Jersey, and the fact that indigenous people are chronically disenfranchised in the U.S.
[…] the Indian Health Service (IHS), which gives medical care to enrolled tribal members, got too little funding even before the pandemic, […] In total, the IHS grants health care to more than 2 million American Indians and Alaska Natives. “Native American communities are often invisible in terms of their health inequities,” Dr. Laura Hammitt told NPR in an interview. “IHS is chronically underfunded.” […]
“This is a metaphor for what’s happening,” Abigail Echo-Hawk, an enrolled member of the Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma and the chief research officer for the health board, told NBC News about receiving the box of body bags. Even with pandemic relief funds allegedly finally making their way, Echo-Hawk told the network she’s concerned about a second wave of the virus and whether or not they’ll actually have enough personal protective equipment (PPE) or coronavirus tests. […]
Echo-Hawk’s question to NBC is one everyone should be asking given the Trump administration’s approach to the ongoing health crisis. “My questions is: Are we going to keep getting body bags or are we going to get what we actually need?”
While it doesn’t erase or cancel out the big picture of the structural failings of our federal government, one bit of good news coming out of Ireland is how the Irish are helping the Navajo and Hopi nations. The Irish are using an interesting approach, and it circles back to repaying a debt that’s almost 200 years old, as first reported by The Telegraph. The Irish have reportedly raised more than $2 million to donate in return for the $170 the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma sent to Ireland during the Great Famine.
And of course, if you want advice on how to to be an effective ally to Native people, check out our Making Progress video interview with educator Prairie Rose Seminole, who breaks down a common mistake you want to avoid. […]
From Wonkette: “Trump Calls Dead Americans A Blue State Scam To Get Government Cheese”
[…] Axios reports that “Trump has complained to advisers about the way coronavirus deaths are being calculated, suggesting the real numbers are actually lower — and a number of his senior aides share this view, according to sources with direct knowledge.” Apparently, that idiot is particularly pissed off that states are retroactively adding presumptive positive covid cases to their tallies, as New York did last month, increasing the state’s reported death toll by 3,000 people.
A rational person might infer that widespread testing shortages imply an undercount of coronavirus cases, since no one can get a test. But rational people are thin on the ground in the White House just now. Instead Trump is surrounded by sycophants and cranks who whisper nonsense into his ear hair about states propping up their death numbers to get their mitts on that sweet, sweet government cheese. […]
Naturally, other members of the Trump administration rushed in to assure Jonathan Swan that Daddy was just joking, silly, he doesn’t mean it when he says he hates you and wishes you’d never been born!
“Skepticism isn’t the right way to frame it. The numbers have been revised up to include presumptive cases — meaning deaths that are believed to be related to COVID but not known for sure,” a senior White House official told Axios. “So he’s expressed the need to properly convey that to American people so they’re not startled by why numbers ticked up.”
Yes, that’s very on-brand for Donald Trump. He’s always very careful in his language to avoid startling the American people. Like when he claimed that states like Arizona and Florida, which count absentee ballots in close elections, were “finding votes out of nowhere” and said, “Do you notice, the votes never go the other way [in Republicans favor]?” The president is just constantly trying to properly convey to the American people that complex data sets should be carefully interpreted, so they don’t get startled and jump to insane conclusions that help him politically.
Haha, just kidding! The Trumpers all think it’s woo […]
“With something like this virus, where you’ve got this weird coagulation in the lungs . . . we need more autopsies,” another official told Axios. “America’s out of practice of how to deal with something like this and to report it accurately . . . We don’t have uniform reporting standards in the United States or internationally. And we’re not getting good data.”
Jared, is that you?
Here on Planet Earth, the real death numbers are clearly much higher than reported. Without widespread testing, we’ll probably never know who died from the virus. But we can get a rough proxy by counting the number of excess deaths over what would normally be anticipated from all causes, and subtracting out the covid numbers. Here’s a table from the New York Times, but be careful since the data sets are not consistent in duration. [View chart at the link.]
Trump’s minions have gestured vaguely towards “deaths of despair” due to suicide and drug overdose during quarantine, but have presented zero evidence of 7,400 “extra” suicides and overdoses in New York and New Jersey during the relevant time frames. (Not to mention the fact that traffic fatalities were substantially reduced with no one out on the roads.) It’s much more likely that many of those are coronavirus deaths, meaning the state tallies are too low, not too high.
But that’s, like, boring facts ‘n’ shit. Can’t win an election with that! And you can’t convince people to go to the mall if they think it’s dangerous. Better to pretend that the government’s own data is bullshit. Sure they might notice that their friends and neighbors are dropping dead, but that’s a problem for another day.
ETB@447. I read the article. I’m a retired chemist, not an epidemiologist. This was a preliminary study, with low numbers of cases, compared to a large scale study with thousands of cases. The conclusions seemed to jibe with the reports I’ve seen on the method of transmission. Being outdoors will reduce he likelihood of transmission unless the people are close or touching. Consider rugby scrums versus a foursome of golfers. In the scrum, people are touching and breathing in each others faces as they fight for the ball. The foursome playing golf usually maintain a social distance from one another. Both are outdoor sports. But one (rugby) is much more likely to lead transmission than a round of golf if someone is infectious. The article is not the last word that being outdoors per se means one is safe. Context is required.
‘Sporadic for you, but not sporadic for a lot of other people’, Trump replies. ‘That was fine, but I have heard we have a tremendous supply to almost all places’.”
Video clip of this appalling, petulant display atl.
A couple weeks ago, Donald Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) fired Dr. Rick Bright — who was America’s very qualified chief of vaccines and a pandemic expert […] Until that demotion, he had been director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) and deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response at HHS. He was fired, according to his statement, because he (a scientist expert) refused to go along with the administration’s obsession with promoting Trump’s favorite malaria drug, Hydroxybonercream 3000, as the miracle cure for the novel coronavirus.
Specifically, he wrote that “contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the Administration as a panacea but which clearly lack scientific merit,” because Fox News and Rudy Giuliani and President Mouth Lies wouldn’t stop lying to the American people about it.
According to Bright’s lawyer Debra Katz, when they offered him his cool “new job,” which he has not started and may not even technically exist, they were like, “Oh, you are just a victim of your own success! Oh boy, we have a special mission for you!” They lied to Bright and told him his transfer was part of a “bold new plan” to defeat the coronavirus, […] they started lying about him, smearing him like a common Marie Yovanovitch, because everything in Trumpworld is the same all the time.
Now Dr. Bright has filed an official whistleblower complaint. It is … fuck.
You thought there was incompetence on Jared Kushner’s Power Ranger Volunteer Strike Force for PPE Procurement? Hahahahahaha, well, check out what’s happening at HHS, according to Rick Bright.
Bright’s supervisor was a guy named Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response (ASPR), who answers directly to HHS Secretary Alex Azar. In the complaint, Bright accuses Kadlec of abuse of authority and censorship and mismanagement and waste of funds and and just generally acting in a way that’s a “substantial and specific danger to public health.” […]
Bright’s lawyer writes in the complaint that Bright “clashed” with Kadlec starting around 2018, when Bright started to notice rampant cronyism taking precedence over science at BARDA, but says it got really bad when COVID-19 hit.
Allegations of cronyism in Bright’s whistleblower complaint go all the way back to 2017, though. There’s a specific situation involving a pharma lobbyist named John Clerici strong-arming Bright into continuing a contract with a pharma company called Aeolus, even though it was a bad contract, because — you’ll never guess — the CEO of the company, John McManus, was friends with Jared. Sounds like Clerici just casually mafia-threatened Bright by suggesting the CEO might have bad stories about Bright put in the newspaper if he stood in the way of the CA$H. And then there was an issue in 2018, involving the same lobbyist, and Bright’s objections to spending $40 million on a crap influenza drug from a company that guy repped, instead of another drug Dr. Bright recommended that was better, according to science.
Bright reported more pre-coronavisus misdeeds involving Kadlec and Clerici, details omitted here.
From the complaint:
Once the COVID-19 pandemic hit […] Dr. Bright became even more alarmed about the pressure that Dr. Kadlec and other government officials were exerting on BARDA to invest in drugs, vaccines, and other technologies without proper scientific vetting or that lacked scientific merit. Dr. Bright objected to these efforts and made clear that BARDA would only invest the billions of dollars allocated by Congress to address the COVID-19 pandemic in safe and scientifically vetted solutions and it would not succumb to the pressure of politics or cronyism.
[…] The complaint states that HHS “leveled baseless criticisms” at Bright for trying to fight for an actual vaccine and procure actual PPE, and then retaliated against him for refusing to go along with their plan to “flood” states with the unproven Trump miracle drug Hydroxybonercream 3000 from Pakistan and India, which “had not been inspected by the FDA.”
When the Trump administration was just pretty sure Bright was the source for an article about how the hydroxys are actually not good — he was a source, and acted as one because nobody else would listen and people were fucking dying — they fired him.
Katz explains that in “early January,” Bright and other HHS scientists knew how dangerous coronavirus was, […] what Bright got from HHS leadership in exchange for waving his hands and shouting “FUCK! PANDEMIC!” was “indifference which then developed into hostility.” He couldn’t get them to do anything. They needed money. They needed virus samples from China, which HHS refused to even request, apparently, even from the CDC, which was acquiring them. And even back then, Dr. Bright knew they needed N95 masks and other PPE. This guy was trying to fix the mask shortage problem in fucking January. Oh yeah, and testing! On January 23, Bright told HHS leadership that the coronas “might already be here. We just don’t have the tests to know one way or the other.” So he was already yelling WHERE ARE THE FUCKING TESTS, in January.
He got jackshit for his efforts. Dr. Kadlec didn’t give a fuck. Alex Azar didn’t give a fuck. Donald Trump didn’t give a fuck. Katz writes that Bright’s requests did set off a “shit storm,” though, in the words of Bryan Shuy, Dr. Kadlec’s chief of staff, and that his pleas for BARDA funding “offended HHS leadership.” So they kicked him out of the coronavirus meetings.
Oh, and remember how for the longest time, the US government just didn’t think people should wear masks, but then all of a sudden they changed their mind because “new information” or whatever? […]
Dr. Bright responded, “I can’t believe that you can sit there and say that with a straight face. Do you really believe that changing a CDC guideline to tell people not to wear masks would reduce the panic people would feel once this virus spreads?” He again emphasized the need to contact mask producers to place orders immediately. […]
Dr. Bright emphasized the need to secure N95 masks and to ramp up mask production. He also informed Mr. Navarro about other actions that were urgently needed to develop diagnostic tools, drugs, and ultimately a vaccine, to combat the virus. In the short run, Dr. Bright urged Mr. Navarro to take immediate action to increase the mask supply, amass Remdesivir, and fund and initiate a “Manhattan Project” for vaccine development. Unlike Secretary Azar, Dr. Kadlec and other members of HHS leadership who dismissed Dr. Bright’s assessments and urgent requests and excluded Dr. Bright from key meetings, Mr. Navarro asked good questions and was prepared to take prompt action to address this impending health crisis. Mr. Navarro clearly recognized that Dr. Bright was unable to get any traction with HHS and was, to Dr. Bright’s great relief, prepared to act.
[…] Bright continued briefing Navarro, which made HHS even madder, because it made HHS look like a buncha idiots.
[…] Kadlec got real mad when Bright managed to get money for coronavirus research appropriated by Congress directly in the CARES Act to BARDA — the correct place — instead of just generally to HHS and the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, where Dr. Kadlec could slush fund it around more easily and just give BARDA whatever allowance he thought was appropriate.
As Katz writes:
For the first time, the ASPR had less control over BARDA’s money, and BARDA could direct its resources towards those proposals with the greatest scientific potential to combat COVID-19. Accordingly, it became much more difficult for Dr. Kadlec to redirect funds to support projects for his cronies or for political purposes. Dr. Kadlec obviously understood this fact and was not happy.
[…] according to the complaint, Dr. Kadlec stole BARDA’s money anyway. […]
On or around April 1, 2020, [BARDA doctor Gary] Disbrow called Dr. Bright with concerns about this request. Dr. Disbrow asked Dr. Bright, “Can you believe they want to use Pepcid AC now?”
[…] BARDA was ultimately forced to give the money to the “Let’s cure coronavirus with Pepcid AC!” trial. Because of course.
But THEN the REAL hydroxy-fun began! And also the straw that broke the camel’s back that got Dr. Bright fired.
[…] Bayer told them it was totally awesome and they were going to donate three million hydroxybonercreams! And BARDA was like seriously, you guys, that’s not proven, and it’s not looking good.
[…] Because BARDA knew there were serious, serious problems with it, and they were not OK with everybody just eating hydroxybonercream, because it didn’t appear to be safe.
Excerpts from intra-BARDA emails: […] “no data available to support that chloroquine provides clinical benefit in the treatment or prevention of COVID-19.”
[…] So the deal was rammed through, and Trump lied about Hydroxybonercream 3000 to the American people, and Bayer gave them millions of free pills from Pakistan and India. They just needed a way to give it to the American people, so the White House demanded Dr. Bright make that happen. He was not pleased, for a number of reasons, including that the drug appeared unsafe in some instances for coronavirus patients, the FDA couldn’t inspect the facilities that made them, etc.
[…]. HHS apparently was so eager to give Trump his “win” that it was trying to get the hydroxys approved for people to just be able to buy at their local Walgreens, and not even under a doctor’s care. For real! Jesus Christ.
The expanded use authorization (EUA) for hydroxychloroquine that came from the FDA — for doctors to be able to give it to patients in hospitals “off label” at their discretion — was a compromise between medical sanity and the HHS […]
But yet HHS leadership and the Trump administration KEPT trying to go around even that EUA, which Dr. Bright negotiated, to get hydroxychloroquine into the Corn Flakes of all breathing Americans, with the help of folks like HHS Assistant Secretary for Health Admiral Brett Giroir and Stephen Hahn, Trump’s idiot over at the FDA.
A missive from Giroir, who didn’t like the EUA:
“NOPE . . . Needs to go to pharmacies as well. The EUA matters not . . . The drug is approved [and] therefore can be prescribed as per doctor’s orders. That is a FINAL ANSWER.”
Fucking hell. As the complaint states, “Adm. Giroir’s response made crystal clear that the Administration would stop at nothing to make the experimental drug widely available to the American people, no matter the consequences—not because it was safe or effective, but because […] it was seen by the Administration as ‘a BIG immediate win.'”
[…] when a journalist came a-calling, Dr. Bright felt he had no moral choice but to talk to that journalist about the well-documented dangers of the Hydroxyboner snake oil cure. And so he talked.
He didn’t give the journalist any classified information. He followed whistleblower laws. And then he got fired, in what the complaint describes as “blatantly retaliatory” action. They told him he was going on a super-secret special COVID mission with the National Institutes of Health, because he was so good at stuff. It was a trick.
Then they started a smear campaign against Dr. Bright, claiming he “mismanaged his office and mistreated his staff” and a whole shit-ton of other things. You betcha. […]
IN CONCLUSION!
This whistleblower complaint is one of the most horrifying things we have ever read.
Dr. Bright has receipts for all of it, in the form of MANY emails, and they would be hilarious to read if we weren’t talking about the blood of 70,000 dead Americans and counting smeared all over Donald Trump’s hands.
How bad is the Trump administration response to coronavirus, really? This bad.
[…] When asked by a reporter in the Oval Office about Rick Bright, the former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), Trump said he’d only just learned about him earlier in the day.
“I never met Dr. Bright. I don’t know who he is. I didn’t hear good things about him. I did not hear good things about him at all,” Trump said. “And to me he seems like a disgruntled employee that’s trying to help the Democrats win an election.” […]
Trump in his remarks pushing back on the whistleblower complaint Wednesday alluded to the fact that Bright’s attorney is the same one who represented Christine Blasey Ford, the Stanford professor who accused Justice Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault.
“He certainly seemed to have a well packaged deal, he’s got the same lawyers as some other well known people had,” Trump said of Bright.
This morning the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act’s “birth-control mandate,” which generally requires employers to provide their female employees with health insurance that includes access to certain forms of contraceptives. In 2017, the Trump administration issued new rules that expanded an exemption from the mandate and allowed private employers with religious or moral objections to opt out of providing coverage without any notice. Two states, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, challenged the 2017 rules.
@451 Nerd, I agree. Context is everything. My comparison is 10k people spread out in an arena meant to hold 40k, outdoors, we can be social and get out of the house, but keep that distance. This should be a reasonable compromise.
johnson catmansays
re erikthebassist @456: Good luck enforcing that kind of distance at an event. It may be a reasonable compromise, but when you have armed people who won’t wear masks invading a state legislature building or rallying in public spaces because their “rights” are being violated, or people crowding public beaches and parks because they don’t have the inclination to work towards a common goal, I don’t think you would have much success keeping the space in an arena. Too many people do not know how to be reasonable.
@457 so we’re resorting to “don’t bother” over “trying to illuminate the path going forward”. Sadly, I think you are right, this is what we’ve come to. We have options but screaming and yelling being right is blinding us to them. Cooperation is a dead idea. :(
Humor from Andy Borowitz, writing for The New Yorker:
Calling it “a tall order, for sure,” a swarm of murder hornets are openly questioning whether they can do as much damage to the United States as Donald J. Trump has.
In an unusually candid interview, the deadly winged insects said that their initial plans to invade North America, spreading terror and carnage in their wake, have been largely upended by Trump’s performance this year.
“We had been talking about coming to America for, like, forever,” one hornet said. “It’s obviously a huge market, and we wanted to make a big splash over here. And now this.”
The hornet said that, when it became clear that Trump was causing headline-grabbing destruction, “a bunch of us were, like, ‘Should we postpone our whole deal? It seems like we’re not going to get the attention we’ve been shooting for.’ ”
Ultimately, the hornets decided to stick with their original launch date, but they are now confronting the unpalatable reality that “Trump has definitely left us in the dust, threat-wise.”
“Look, we’re murder hornets,” the hornet said. “We’re going to do what murder hornets do. We’re going to sting people. We’re going to terrify them. But are we really going to engulf the United States of America in terror and existential despair? Trump has set the bar very high.”
A top donor to President Trump and the Republican National Committee will be named the new head of the Postal Service, putting a top ally of the president in charge of an agency where Trump has long pressed for major changes in how it handles its business.
[…]
The action will install a stalwart Trump ally to lead the Postal Service, which he has railed against for years, and probably move him closer than ever before to forcing the service to renegotiate its terms with companies and its own union workforce. Trump’s Treasury Department and the Postal Service are in the midst of a negotiation over a $10 billion line of credit approved as part of coronavirus legislation in March.
[…]
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, denounced the move as a reward by Trump to a “partisan donor.”
“The Postal Service is in crisis and needs real leadership and someone with knowledge of the issues,” Connolly said. “This crony doesn’t cut it.”
[…]
johnson catmansays
re tomh @460: Just following the standard policy of this administration of putting someone totally unqualified in charge of a government agency who also, coincidentally, favors dismantling that agency.
Russia’s coronavirus cases overtook France and Germany on Thursday to become the fifth highest number in the world after a record daily rise, and Moscow’s mayor said the real figure, not captured by official statistics, was much higher.
The official tally surged to 177,160, meaning Russia now has more registered cases than Germany or France, as the number of new cases of the novel coronavirus jumped by 11,231 in the past 24 hours.
More than half of all cases and deaths are in Moscow, the epicentre of Russia’s outbreak, which on Thursday reported a record overnight increase of 6,703 new cases, bringing its official total to 92,676.
But Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said research showed the real number of cases in the Russian capital was around 300,000, or more than triple the official figure.
…
Russia’s official death toll, which remains far lower than in many countries — something that has been called into question by some Kremlin critics — rose to 1,625 on Thursday after 88 people died overnight, official figures showed.
…
Putin on Wednesday backed a plan put forward by Sobyanin to gradually begin lifting some lockdown restrictions after May 12, allowing certain industrial facilities to begin working.
Sobyanin said on Thursday that anyone who used public transport after May 12 would need to wear a mask and gloves to offset the risks that came with the partial easing.
Moscow and other Russian regions are in their sixth week of a lockdown. The capital’s residents have been told to stay at home except in certain circumstances, such as going out to buy food and medicine. They must obtain a digital permit to travel anywhere by public or private transport.
Brazil, one of the world’s emerging coronavirus hot spots, registered a record number of cases and deaths on Wednesday, prompting the health minister to flag the possibility of strict lockdowns in particularly hard-hit areas.
The nation registered 10,503 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus in the last 24 hours, well above the previous record of 7,288 cases on April 30, according to health ministry data. Brazil also registered 615 deaths, up from the previous record of 600 on Tuesday.
There are over 100,000 completed coronavirus tests that still have not been registered in the national database, health ministry subsecretary Wanderson Oliveira warned, meaning case numbers could rise steeply in the coming days.
Overall, Brazil has registered 125,218 cases and 8,536 deaths due to the virus. New cases rose roughly 9.2% over the last 24 hours, while deaths increased roughly 7.8%.
Health Minister Nelson Teich told a press conference an increasing number of local authorities may have to institute “lockdowns,” as the coronavirus growth curve does not appear to be flattening.
The state prosecutor’s office in Rio de Janeiro said it had received a report from Brazil’s leading epidemiological institute, Fiocruz, recommending a lockdown in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro.
…
Still, Teich said, some areas of the country that had not borne the brunt of the pandemic may be able to consider gradually opening up.
As part of Brazil’s bid to combat the coronavirus outbreak, officials said they were attempting to dramatically ramp up testing capacity from the current 2,700 tests per day.
“At the most elevated level of (test) production, which we think we’ll get to in the middle of July, we’ll get to 70,000 per day,” Oliveira said.
ravensays
Latest headline this morning.
DONALD TRUMP LEADS JOE BIDEN BY TWO POINTS ACROSS SIX KEY BATTLEGROUND STATES: POLL
BY JAMES WALKER ON 5/07/20 AT 6:06 AM EDT
President Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden by two points in six battlegrounds states, a new poll has found.
The latest survey by Change Research and CNBC revealed that 47 percent of likely voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin would back the commander-in-chief if an election were held the same day.
After everything that has happened, Trump may well be reelected.
I don’t know what to say about this poll.
The USA seems to have a death wish.
Since I live here, it includes me whether I like it or not.
blfsays
Earlier this week (see @304) I summarised a France24 report on the poor state of hospitals in Moscow / Russia, and exceptionally poor Covid-19 response. At the time, I could not find the video on their site. I now have, Moscow hospitals struggle with late surge in coronavirus cases:
Covid-19 took hold relatively late in Russia but is now spreading fast, with the country recording a record surge in cases. At Moscow’s hospitals, unreliable testing is compounded by problems isolating the sick. Dozens of hospitals have been requisitioned to take in Covid-19 patients, but they were not designed for treating infectious diseases. Faced with the emergency, the city authorities are building a new 800-bed hospital with high-tech equipment, part of which is already in service. […]
A document created by the nation’s top disease investigators with step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging outbreak has been shelved by the Trump administration.
The 17-page report by a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention team, titled “Guidance for Implementing the Opening Up America Again Framework,” was researched and written to help faith leaders, business owners, educators and state and local officials as they begin to reopen.
It was supposed to be published last Friday, but agency scientists were told the guidance “would never see the light of day,” according to a CDC official. The official was not authorized to talk to reporters and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
The AP obtained a copy from a second federal official who was not authorized to release it. The guidance was described in AP stories last week, prior to the White House decision to shelve it.
The Trump administration has been closely controlling the release of guidance and information during the pandemic spurred by a new coronavirus that scientists are still trying to understand, with the president himself leading freewheeling daily briefings until last week.
Traditionally, it’s been the CDC’s role to give the public and local officials guidance and science-based information during public health crises. During this one, however, the CDC has not had a regular, pandemic-related news briefing in nearly two months. CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield has been a member of the White House coronavirus task force, but largely absent from public appearances.
The dearth of real-time, public information from the nation’s experts has struck many current and former government health officials as dangerous.
…
The Trump administration has instead sought to put the onus on states to handle COVID-19 response. This approach to managing the pandemic has been reflected in President Donald Trump’s public statements, from the assertion that he isn’t responsible for the country’s lackluster early testing efforts, to his description last week of the federal government’s role as a “supplier of last resort” for states in need of testing aid.
…
The rejected reopening guidance was described by one of the federal officials as a touchstone document that was to be used as a blueprint for other groups inside the CDC who are creating the same type of instructional materials for other facilities.
The guidance contained detailed advice for making site-specific decisions related to reopening schools, restaurants, summer camps, churches, day care centers and other institutions. It had been widely shared within the CDC and included detailed “decision trees,” flow charts to be used by local officials to think through different scenarios. One page of the document can be found on the CDC website via search engines, but it did not appear to be linked to any other CDC pages.
Some of the report’s suggestions already appear on federal websites. But the guidance offered specific, tailored recommendations for reopening in one place.
…
The CDC is hearing daily from state and county health departments looking for scientifically valid information with which to make informed decisions.
Still, behind the scenes, CDC scientists like those who produced the guidance for “Opening Up America Again″ are working to get information to local governments. The agency still employs hundreds of the world’s most respected epidemiologists and doctors, who in times of crisis are looked to for their expertise, said former CDC director Tom Frieden. People have clicked on the CDC’s coronavirus website more than 1.2 billion times.
States that directly reach out to the CDC can tap guidance that’s been prepared but that the White House has not released.
“I don’t think that any state feels that the CDC is deficient. It’s just the process of getting stuff out,” Plescia said.
Document at the link. From the article:
A person close to the White House’s coronavirus task force said the CDC documents were never cleared by CDC leadership for public release. The person said that White House officials have refrained from offering detailed guidance for how specific sectors should reopen because the virus is affecting various parts of the country differently. The person spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
They keep making this argument, and it’s nonsensical. The whole point of the decision trees is to determine the specific situation and capabilities of the locality and organization. The guide “contained detailed advice for making site-specific decisions” and “offered specific, tailored recommendations for reopening in one place.” It assumes there are differences across localities and organizations, FFS.
Here’s a link to the May 7 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Poland plans to test 1,000 miners a day for coronavirus at drive-through sites, as data showed a rapid growth in new cases in the coal region.
The country has reported 14,898 infections, including 737 deaths. Earlier this week the Silesia mining region in southern Poland showed the highest number of infections at 3,025.
“I have become acquainted with the situation in Silesia. It is very complicated, because it is a large agglomeration, with a huge density of workplaces,” the chief sanitary inspector said in a statement.
Poland’s biggest coal group, PGG, which employs around 40,000 people, has reported 384 cases of coronavirus among its workers, its spokesman said, adding that 1,516 were in quarantine.
In the last 24 hours, there were 1,494 tests in the Silesia region.
In total 481 miners are infected in Poland, which generates most of its electricity from coal.
PGG, which is also struggling with falling prices and demand for coal and rising stockpiles, closed three of its eight mines due to the epidemic.
Link to the opinion, written by Kagan, atl. They found that while the actions involved “deception, corruption, abuse of power” they didn’t violate the specific federal property-fraud statutes at issue.
Joyce White Vance: “If you & your son shoot & kill a man jogging down the street, you’re a danger to the community & should be arrested pending charges. If the murder is motivated by racism & state authorities won’t do their job, DOJ has the jurisdiction to indict & arrest.”
blfsays
(I’m listening to France24 now.) The PM will soon announce details of how France will ease its lockdown starting next Monday, 11th May. The general shape is known — the country is divided in Red & Green zones (the current interim Orange zone disappears) albeit precisely what happens in each zone should be announced, restaurants and bars will not be allowed to open, some shops & schools will, masks are mandatory on public transport (which will be limited, especially long-distance). (He’s speaking now, but there are issues with France24’s simultaneous translation.)
Most (probably by area) of France is “Green”, and if “most” of France stays Green, then it may be possible to open, e.g., restaurants sometime in June. Not so in the Red areas (which includes Paris), albeit different Red areas will be manged differently. In Paris, there will be special measures on public transport.
The Health Minister is now speaking. On the maps: They show the measures of active circulation of the virus (still high in the Paris & Mayotte areas); availability of ICU beds (poor in Paris, Mayotte, and (broadly speaking) Alsace areas); measures of viral testing capacity (“Green” everywhere), “France is ready to test massively”; and then a composite (Paris, and to Paris’ North and East, and Mayotte are all “Red”, the rest of France is “Green”).
Covid-19 symptomatic people “must act, don’t wait” and contact the medical services (and any tests or whatever will be fully covered (i.e., for free)); if infected, your contacts will be traced, and you must stay in strict isolation. If a “serious” contact case, you must isolate and will be tested.
A tax-free bonus of at least 1000€ will be paid to all(?) health staff in the next few weeks.
The Education Minister is now speaking. There will be a phased reopening in Green areas, will assorted additional protective measures. There will be some civic activities, when possible, for students who won’t be returning to school in the next week or so (in addition to continuing remote schooling). Physiological support will be provided to teachers.
The Minister for “Transition”(? Transport?) is now speaking. Local transport should go to c.50% services starting Monday. Regional and long-distance services will still be severely limited, and must(?) be booked in advance. Some measures to reduce car trips (more try not to use your car than anything concrete).
The Interior Minister is now speaking. Whilst a form will not be necessary to go outside the house in your local area, not respecting social distance or not wearing a mask on public transport will be fined. Long-distance travel (over 100km?) will require a form. Some museums will be allowed to reopen, but not cinemas, theatres, and so on; beaches are decided locally. Religious sites remain closed but “discussions” are ongoing. International travel, including within the EU, remains more-or-less the same as currently (for now).
Apparently about c.6% (not sure of what, people? stops?) have been fined.
The Finance Minister is now speaking. Estimates 400,000 businesses will be allowed to reopen, provided protective protocols are respected. The “Soladitry fund” supporting businesses will continue to at least the end of May, even if the business reopens. Certain taxes will not be levied (didn’t catch all the details).
The Labour Minister is now speaking. Protections (masks, social distancing, &tc) are mandatory for staff, visitors, customers, etc. Continue to work-from-home if possible. For those who cannot work at home, work hours should be staggered (a concrete suggestion regarding traffic!).
The PM is now concluding. Plans will have to adapt, with the next major review before the end of the May. It’s possible lockdown measures will have to resume.
Taking questions… Some confusion about Red and Green area differences.
A critical indicator is the number of positive tests. Contact-tracing data will not be retained.
(France24 has now cut away…)
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An “obvious” flaw is that, at the end of May, when some Red areas may turn Green, they won’t be “as” Green as the areas which are Green now (and remain Green); or more to the point, the “Greener” areas may be able to relax restrictions further, but the just-turned-Green won’t be as relaxed; i.e., there will be shades of Greeness. (The PM, in his questions, as I was writing this up, acknowledged the problem.)
Locally, I collected my free masks yesterday. Now I have to learn how to use them…
Also yesterday, I finally got Fibre-into-the lair installed, boosting my ‘Net speeds by at least an order of magnitude. Amusingly, I debugged the final problem when it wouldn’t, at first, content, and the technicians were baffled.
After three years in office, the Trump administration has dismantled most of the major climate and environmental policies the president promised to undo.
Calling the rules unnecessary and burdensome to the fossil fuel industry and other businesses, his administration has weakened Obama-era limits on planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and from cars and trucks, and rolled back many more rules governing clean air, water and toxic chemicals. Several major reversals have been finalized in recent weeks as the country has struggled to contain the spread of the new coronavirus.
In all, a New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts more than 60 environmental rules and regulations officially reversed, revoked or otherwise rolled back under Mr. Trump. An additional 34 rollbacks are still in progress.
[…]
The bulk of the rollbacks identified by the Times have been carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency, which repealed and replaced the Obama-era emissions rules for power plants and vehicles; weakened protections for more than half the nation’s wetlands; and withdrew the legal justification for restricting mercury emissions from power plants.
At the same time, the Interior Department has worked to open up more land for oil and gas leasing by cutting back protected areas and limiting wildlife protections.
[…]
All told, the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks could significantly increase greenhouse gas emissions and lead to thousands of extra deaths from poor air quality each year, according to energy and legal analysts.
NBC is reporting that a personal valet to Trump (presumably a Navy steward), who serves him meals and doesn’t wear a mask, has tested positive for coronavirus.
The WH argued yesterday, contrary to the Constitution, that the president has virtually unlimited authority to use military force “in order to protect the United States, its allies, and its partners.” In the midst of a pandemic rampaging across the country and killing thousands of people every day, from which he’s doing fuck all to protect anyone.
If all had gone to plan, Vladimir Putin would have marked Victory Day in Red Square this weekend, hosting Emmanuel Macron and Xi Jinping as columns of soldiers and artillery passed by to honour the 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany.
The 9 May celebrations would have crowned a historic political season in Russia, including a symbolic referendum to amend Russia’s constitution and reset Putin’s term limits, allowing him to remain in the Kremlin until 2036.
Instead, the coronavirus pandemic has brought on Russia’s toughest crisis in years, scrapping the Kremlin’s political agenda and putting the country’s economy in peril amid a collapse in oil prices.
Since boldly donning a hazmat suit to visit a coronavirus hospital in March, Putin has largely made his public appearances from a windowless room in his residence, a beige backdrop that has been panned as his “bunker”. There is no indication that Putin has been infected with the virus.
“This was supposed to be a grandiose political show,” said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political analyst and former Kremlin adviser. “They had portrayed this as the central political event of this year, a culmination of his two decades in power. And none of it has gone as planned.”
Russia has the highest growth rate of infections in Europe and as of Thursday has the fifth highest number of cases in the world, surpassing Germany and France. Mikhail Mishustin, the Russian prime minister, and two other cabinet members have fallen ill.
Putin’s approval ratings have dropped to their nominal lowest in 20 years, the independent Levada Centre said, and the IMF has forecast that the country’s economy will contract by 5.5% this year. Russia’s official death toll has remained mercifully low for the number of cases, although medics are dying at worrying rates.
In discussions with his subordinates, Putin at times has looked deeply bored. As his health minister discussed regional payouts on Wednesday, the president distractedly rolled a pen back and forth across his desk, lost in a moment of reverie broadcast nationwide.
“Putin not only doesn’t control the situation but he cannot even plan how to change the agenda,” said Nikolay Petrov, a senior research fellow at the British thinktank Chatham House. “He cannot adjust … I think partly Putin’s lack of activism is connected to the fact that he is out of his normal position.”
He has sought to regain the initiative by holding televised briefings and promising economic stimulus to Russians hit by the economic downturn, while soliciting timetables for business to reopen. But the measures have been underwhelming and the virus’s long horizon has meant Putin takes a back seat while local officials – such as Moscow’s mayor, Sergei Sobyanin – lead the fight against the virus.
“Putin wants to become a ladder out of the crisis: Sobyanin makes rules and Putin will cancel them; that’s a positive role,” noted Pavlovsky. “But there’s no way out of this crisis, this pandemic, yet. Things are still getting worse and more dangerous.”
…
State television serves as a window on what could have been. On Sunday the lead segment on Channel One’s flagship news programme, Vremya, was not an update on the country’s battle with the virus but a 13-minute report marking 20 years since Putin’s first inauguration on 7 May 2000. It felt like a time capsule from before the epidemic.
“The very existence of the country was under threat,” read Yekaterina Andreyeva, the well-known anchor. “Over two decades, Russia has once again become a strong country that is once again reckoned with in the world and which is able to solve the hardest problems and overcome any obstacles.”
The political risk to the Kremlin is limited. Putin’s approval ratings remain high, at 59%, and he has no true political rivals to present an alternative. The regional officials taking the lead in the fight against coronavirus owe their positions to him.
But the Kremlin does closely follow its polling numbers, which have shown two years of sliding approval for Putin, mainly due to the economy. And the loss of this spring’s political calendar has robbed the Kremlin of a chance to recharge his image as he begins a third decade in power.
…
The next stage of the crisis will take place as the scale of the epidemic becomes clear in Russia’s regions, indicating whether Russia may be looking at an extended health crisis and how much longer the economy will remain shuttered. Already, a number of coronavirus hotspots have appeared at far-flung oil and gas fields and at regional hospitals.
“The whole management system looks inefficient,” said Petrov. “The regions are far less prepared in general to face the crisis than Moscow … I am afraid that they will suffer more.”
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s spokesman has tested positive for the novel coronavirus, his office said on Wednesday, raising further questions about the president’s exposure to the virus.
Spokesman Otavio do Rego Barros, 59, is currently quarantined in his home and has no coronavirus symptoms, his office said in a statement. His staff is awaiting test results for the virus in their homes, the office added.
“Here is the link to the CDC document, cited in @AP report, providing step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging outbreak.
It has been shelved by the Trump administration:…”
A secret government report that said the UK was not prepared for a pandemic and forewarned of the Covid-19 crisis in care homes is being published by the Guardian.
The report is based on the findings of a government simulation of an influenza pandemic, codenamed Exercise Cygnus. It concluded starkly that Britain was not adequately prepared for a flu-like pandemic’s “extreme demands”.
The 2017 report is likely to raise questions over whether ministers ever implemented key recommendations pertaining to the care home sector.
It contained 26 key recommendations, including boosting the capacity of care homes and the numbers of staff available to work in them. It also warned of the challenge facing homes asked to take in patients from hospitals.
Asked recently about the report on Exercise Cygnus, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said he had been assured by officials at the Department of Health that “everything that was recommended was done”.
However, Martin Green, the chief executive of Care England, which represents the largest independent care home providers, said concerns raised by the exercise about the social care system’s ability to handle patients discharged from hospitals and the need for the largest private care providers to increase capacity were not raised by government agencies with his members.
“It beggars belief,” Green told the Guardian. “This is a report that made some really clear recommendations that haven’t been implemented. If they had put in place a response to every one, we would have been in a much better place at the start of this pandemic.”
Covid-19 has swept through the UK’s care homes, killing 6,686 people up to 1 May in England and Wales, in some cases claiming dozens of lives in a single facility. Operators have been beset by shortages of essential personal protective equipment (PPE) to protect staff and limit the spread of the virus among residents who are by definition the most vulnerable to the disease.
With a third of all Covid-19 deaths so far being recorded in care homes, Boris Johnson told parliament on Wednesday: “There is an epidemic going on in care homes, which is something I bitterly regret.”
The government has kept the Exercise Cygnus report secret since it was first circulated in Whitehall three years ago, and has resisted growing calls for more transparency, which culminated in the announcement of a legal case to force ministers to release the findings. However a copy was leaked to the Guardian, which is publishing the document in the public interest.
The report, marked “Official – Sensitive”, is being published in full, although names and email addresses of government officials have been redacted….
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by churches against governors, covering just about every state that has restricted religious gatherings, whether in total or by numbers, such as 10 or less. And in Kentucky, the Attorney General has joined churches suing the governor over restrictions, so you have the (Republican) AG pitted against the (Democratic) governor in federal court.
A member of the US Navy who serves as one of President Donald Trump’s personal valets has tested positive for coronavirus, CNN learned Thursday, raising concerns about the President’s possible exposure to the virus.
The valets are members of an elite military unit dedicated to the White House and often work very close to the President and first family. Trump was upset when he was informed Wednesday that the valet had tested positive, a source told CNN, and the President was subsequently tested again by the White House physician.
In a statement, the White House confirmed CNN’s reporting that one of the President’s staffers had tested positive.
“We were recently notified by the White House Medical Unit that a member of the United States Military, who works on the White House campus, has tested positive for Coronavirus,” deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement. “The President and the Vice President have since tested negative for the virus and they remain in great health.”
Valets assist the President and first family with a variety of personal tasks. They are responsible for the President’s food and beverage not only in the West Wing but also travel with him when he’s on the road or out of the country. Past presidents have relied on them not only for these matters, but also as confidants. The valets have an inside view to a president’s personal life like few others.
A White House source said the valet, a man who has not been identified, exhibited “symptoms” Wednesday morning, and said the news that someone close to Trump had tested positive for coronavirus was “hitting the fan” in the West Wing.
Trump, who is a self-described germophobe, has chastised aides before who coughed or sneezed in his presence. He has claimed to rarely get sick himself.
Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and the senior staffers who regularly interact with them are still being tested weekly for coronavirus, two people familiar told CNN.
The White House is continuing to use the rapid Abbott Labs test, which provide results in about 15 minutes….
Still, the White House has not enforced strict social distancing guidelines for staffers and few people inside the building wear masks during the day, including valets.
Trump said before traveling aboard Air Force One earlier this week that he was not concerned about being in close quarters with other people since those around him are regularly tested.
“The test result comes back in five minutes, and we have great testing. Or they wouldn’t be allowed to travel with me,” Trump said. “It’s not my choice; it’s a very strong group of people that want to make sure they are tested, including Secret Service.”
Still, a negative test and lack of symptoms isn’t a sure sign that someone can’t spread the virus.
Doctors say the incubation period for the coronavirus varies. The incubation period is the time that it takes from when you are exposed to the virus to developing symptoms. It ranges anywhere from 2-14 days. The average incubation period is estimated to be five days, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
People can be infectious, meaning they can transmit the virus to somebody else, up to two days before they start showing symptoms. Like any other virus, this can vary from person to person.
The coronavirus is spread between people mainly through respiratory droplets produced when an infected person coughs or sneezes. These droplets can then spread to the nose or mouth of people nearby or possibly be inhaled into the lungs, according to the CDC. This type of spread is more likely when people are in close contact with each other, within about six feet.
The CDC says that people who feel healthy but recently had close contact with a person with Covid-19 should stay home and monitor their health. They should quarantine by staying home until 14 days after their last exposure and should check their temperature twice a day and watch for symptoms. The CDC also recommends they stay away from people who are at higher risk for becoming very ill.
The White House did not say whether Trump would adhere to those guidelines after his valet tested positive.
It’s amazing how every story about happenings in the WH just screams that Trump is a humongous assclam. In addition to so much else in this one, neither Trump nor any of his coterie thought to offer one word of well wishes to the valet.
A Russian journalist has been expelled from Belarus over a report that described the neighboring allied country’s dire coronavirus situation, according to the Russian state-run television channel where his report aired.
Wednesday’s report on Channel One alleged that Belarussians mistrust their country’s official Covid-19 infection numbers (19,255) and death count (112). In the video report, Channel One correspondent Alexei Kruchinin visits a cemetery in the Belarussian town of Stolbtsy and describes “an abundance of fresh graves.”
…
Channel One confirmed on its website that both Kruchinin and cameraman Sergei Panasyuk have been deported and the broadcaster’s entire film crew stripped of accreditation.
…
Belarussian state-run television said that the Channel One news crew was stripped of accreditation because its segment contained “fake news” and “propaganda.”
“That’s why the Belarussian foreign ministry by law revoked the Channel One film crew’s accreditation with a warning: They’re ready for tougher measures,” the Belarus-1 broadcaster wrote in a scathing piece on its website.
Russia’s Embassy in Minsk refused to comment on the decision, citing the need to receive an official explanation from the Belarussian authorities.
Belarus, with a population of 9.5 million, has one of Eastern Europe’s highest per capita infection rates. Its President Alexander Lukashenko, who has not introduced a lockdown to slow the spread of Covid-19, has criticized Russian media for what he said was unfair coverage of its response to the pandemic.
…
Belarus and Russia, members of a symbolic union state, had been in talks to deepen their integration last year. Belarussians have been wary of a possible quiet annexation by Moscow, fueled by speculation that President Vladimir Putin was considered extending his 20-year rule by merging Belarus and Russia.
The Justice Department on Thursday said it is dropping the criminal case against President Donald Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abandoning a prosecution that became a rallying cry for Trump and his supporters in attacking the FBI’s Russia investigation.
The move is a stunning reversal for one of the signature cases brought by special counsel Robert Mueller. It comes even though prosecutors for the last three years had maintained that Flynn had lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian ambassador in a January 2017 interview. Flynn himself admitted as much, and became a key cooperator for Mueller as he investigated ties between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign.
In court documents being filed Thursday, the Justice Department said it is dropping the case “after a considered review of all the facts and circumstances of this case, including newly discovered and disclosed information.” The documents were obtained by The Associated Press.
The Justice Department said it had concluded that Flynn’s interview by the FBI was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Flynn” and that the interview on January 24, 2017 was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”
The U.S. attorney reviewing the Flynn case, Jeff Jensen, recommended the move to Attorney General William Barr last week and formalized the recommendation in a document this week.
“Through the course of my review of General Flynn’s case, I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case,” Jensen said in a statement. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed.”
The decision is certain to be embraced by Trump, who has relentlessly tweeted about the case and last week pronounced Flynn “exonerated,” and energize supporters who have taken up the retired Army lieutenant general as something of a cause celebre. But it may also add to Democratic concerns that Attorney General William Barr is excessively loyal to the president, and could be a distraction for a Justice Department that for months has sought to focus on crimes arising from the coronavirus.
The Justice Department’s action comes amid an internal review into the handling of the case and an aggressive effort by Flynn’s lawyers to challenge the basis for the prosecution….
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to temporarily block a ruling that requires the Justice Department to give Congress certain secret grand jury material from the investigation conducted by former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in March cleared the way for Congress to access secret evidence from Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election in one of a set of separation-of-powers lawsuits between House Democrats and the Trump administration.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco told the Supreme Court on Thursday that if it does not put the order on hold, “the government will have to disclose those materials on May 11, 2020, which would irrevocably lift their secrecy and possibly frustrate the government’s ability to seek further review.”
[…]
In its 2-1 opinion, the D.C. Circuit said grand jury records are court records — not Justice Department records — and have historically been released to Congress in the course of impeachment investigations involving three federal judges and two presidents.
The House Judiciary Committee’s “need for the grand jury materials remains unchanged. The Committee has repeatedly stated that if the grand jury materials reveal new evidence of impeachable offenses, the Committee may recommend new articles of impeachment,” wrote Judge Judith Rogers, who was joined by Judge Thomas B. Griffith.
[Trump appointee] Judge Neomi Rao dissented, saying the House Judiciary Committee lacks legal grounds to ask the court to enforce a subpoena for the grand jury materials.
Explains Van Grack’s withdrawal earlier today. Another blow to DOJ’s already battered reputation and independence.
This development should also draw attention back to the events that influenced Mueller’s decision to close up shop last spring with much of his office’s work unfinished. That decision put the Stone and Flynn cases back in the hands of political actors at DOJ.
Flynn pleaded guilty. Twice. His conviction has not been overturned. What does Emmet Sullivan do?
An important point to remember in why Flynn is being rewarded: He never gave up the missing piece of the puzzle which is whether Trump knew about or directed the call to Kislyak. Mueller said he couldn’t get to bottom of it, because Flynn and McFarland claimed to not remember.
They likely have a list of these terrible actions to drop into the news cycle when it’s focused on all of the people dying, their virus-related corruption and failure and indifference, or the valet exhibiting symptoms and testing positive (on the same day as – prior to? – the WH hosting a bunch of nurses in a room where no one was observing proper social distancing). A criminal racket is in charge during a global pandemic.
Commentary from Steve Benen concerning the dropping of a criminal case against Michael Flynn:
[…] The Associated Pres reported this afternoon:
The Justice Department on Thursday said it is dropping the criminal case against […] Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, abandoning a prosecution that became a rallying cry for Trump and his supporters in attacking the FBI’s Russia investigation.
It wasn’t long ago that this outcome would’ve seemed bizarre. Federal prosecutors charged Flynn after he lied to the FBI about his conversations with the Russian government, lied to investigators about being a paid foreign agent, and acted illegally as an unregistered foreign agent during the time that he was the top national security adviser on the Trump campaign.
For his part, Flynn admitted he lied, pleaded guilty, and became a cooperating witness with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.
In December 2018, a conservative federal judge told Flynn during a sentencing hearing, “Arguably, you sold your country out” by working as an unregistered foreign agent. The judge even briefly broached the subject of whether Flynn committed “treason.”
But in the months that followed, the legal case changed dramatically. Flynn replaced his legal defense team and decided he didn’t want to plead guilty anymore. Attorney General Bill Barr, indifferent to concerns about his involvement in cases directly relevant to the White House, took a special interest in the charges against Flynn and directed U.S. Attorney Jeff Jensen to scrutinize the investigation into the retired Army general.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who fired Flynn a few weeks after taking office, began lashing out at federal law enforcement’s handling of the case, insisting that his former had been “totally exonerated.” (He hadn’t.)
And now the Justice Department is dropping the charges altogether.
While these developments are new and still coming into focus, it’s hard to separate them from the larger context at the Justice Department. It may seem like ages ago, but it was earlier this year when federal law enforcement confronted a genuine emergency for the rule law, with Trump and Barr politicizing the process in ways without modern precedent, leading several federal prosecutors to resign in protest.
[…] a pattern emerged and it was not subtle: on cases of interest to Trump, we saw the president’s attorney general, trying to steer prosecutorial decisions in ways consistent with the White House’s wishes. The result was a dynamic in which there two parallel systems seemed to take shape: one for cases that the president cares about, in which Barr played a direct and personal role, and another for the rest of the justice system.
A Washington Post report added at the time that Barr’s Justice Department “has repeatedly tasked U.S. attorneys from far-flung offices to parachute into politically explosive cases,” which has raised “concerns among current and former officials that agency leaders are trying to please the president by reviewing and reinvestigating cases in which he is personally or politically invested.”
The article specifically referenced the attorney general’s intervention in the Flynn case, which current and former officials said “seemed to be part of a new pattern of Justice Department political leadership spinning up inquiries that might help Trump and his friends and hurt their perceived foes.”
It’s against this backdrop that the Michael Flynn, who advised Candidate Trump before taking on a high-ranking position under President Trump, is no longer facing criminal charges — including the charges to which he previously pleaded guilty.
Trump appears to have a problem with coronavirus testing, despite its critical significance, because the resulting data makes his administration “look bad.”
As a rule, data-driven decision-making can be an important part of responsible governing, but Donald Trump has an unfortunate habit of looking at numbers though the lens of political optics. At a White House event yesterday, for example, the president presented this awkward observation:
“The media likes to say we have the most [coronavirus] cases, but we do, by far, the most testing. If we did very little testing, we wouldn’t have the most cases. So, in a way, by doing all of this testing, we make ourselves look bad.”
He quickly added that the United States has “done more testing than every other country combined” — which is ridiculously untrue, but which has nevertheless become one of the president’s favorite lies.
Trump doesn’t just lie all the time, he does actually have favorite lies that he repeats.
Trump’s unscripted comments offered a peek into an unhealthy perspective: he apparently has a problem with coronavirus testing, despite its critical significance, because the resulting data makes his administration “look bad.”
[…] in early March, as the crisis was taking shape, Trump told Fox News he struggled with a decision about bringing Americans who’d contracted the coronavirus abroad back to U.S. soil. As he put it, he “hated to do it statistically,” adding that the question on his mind at the time was, “Is it going to look bad?” […]
[…] As part of a discussion about a cruise ship with Americans on board, Trump told reporters, “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship.”
When a reporter asked why he’d prioritize “attractive numbers” over treating ailing Americans, Trump quickly said that providing care was more important — before quickly adding how much emphasis he places on the tallies. “I like the numbers,” he added. “I would rather have the numbers stay where they are.”
[…] there’s no need for an investigative reporter to dig up such a damaging revelation — because Trump keeps saying it out loud, on the record, and on camera, indifferent to how unsettling it is to see a president respond to a deadly pandemic this way.
Complicating matters is the overwhelming hypocrisy surrounding the president’s concerns about testing making his team “look bad”: the White House is doing an extraordinary amount of testing for Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and those they interact with. As a Washington Post analysis noted this morning, “There is at least one employer in the United States that is currently meeting a robust standard of testing aimed at preventing an outbreak: the White House.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes added this week, “The White House actually does have a robust testing plan to safely get back to a semblance of normal. It just doesn’t involve you.”
To hear the president tell it, extensive testing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is sensible, but extensive testing elsewhere produces positive cases that make the administration “look bad.” It’s quite a standard.
The corrupt, unprecedented abandonment of the prosecution of Mike Flynn by the Barr Justice Department – despite having secured a guilty plea – takes your breath away.
A pardon? Also corrupt and deeply problematic, but expected in this strange new post-legal America. But a wholesale capitulation by the Justice Department that throws the FBI under the bus and embraces the most inane conspiracy theories about federal law enforcement?
Taken together with Barr’s handling of the Mueller report and the Roger Stone sentencing, it exceeds the worst of the prior episodes of politicization that bedeviled the department. I’m think specifically of Watergate and the U.S. attorneys scandal under W.
If back in December 2017 when Flynn pleaded guilty you had envisioned DOJ utterly bailing on the prosecution more than two years later in the midst of a pandemic with thousands of Americans dying every week, then you are cursed by a vivid imagination. But it proves again that in Trumpworld things not only can get worse, they do.
Brad Parscale, the campaign manager for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, compared the campaign to the Death Star, a fictional superweapon from Star Wars designed to blow up entire planets, on Thursday.
A number of people on Twitter were left wondering how anyone could possibly think that particular analogy in context of electoral politics was a good one.
“For nearly three years we have been building a juggernaut campaign (Death Star),” Parscale tweeted. “It is firing on all cylinders. Data, Digital, TV, Political, Surrogates, Coalitions, etc.”
“In a few days we start pressing FIRE for the first time,” he added with a GIF of the Death Star firing at an unsuspecting planet.
People pointed out that hyping a campaign with comparisons to a WMD wielded by a tyrannical regime to kill millions of people en masse isn’t exactly smart politics, especially considering the fact that the weapon and regime both ultimately get destroyed by rebels fighting for a return to democracy.
And in the middle of a global pandemic that’s killed more than 75,000 Americans so far, it’s not exactly the best timing for the message. […]
From Joe Scarborough:
Dude, the Death Star gets blown up at the end of every Star Wars movie. Why don’t you just brag about the Great Pumpkin rising from the pumpkin patch at the end of the campaign? As much money as you’ve grifted off of Trump, spend a few dollars streaming some movies.
From Asha Rangappa:
So you’re saying that your campaign has a fundamental design flaw creating a vulnerability which if targeted by the opposition could cause it to self-implode?
From Josh Chafetz:
“First we’ll commit mass murder, then we’ll get destroyed” is actually a pretty good slogan for Trump 2020.
Later, Parscale blamed the media, not himself., He said it was the media that referred to the campaign as the Death Star. Bullshit. Parscale referred to the Death Star in the original tweet.
Fox News contributor Pete Hegseth encouraged healthy Americans to “have some courage” and defy social distancing orders in order to get sick with COVID-19.
“Herd immunity is our friend,” Hegseth said in an appearance on Fox News’ “Outnumbered” Thursday. He was referring to the phenomenon in which a sufficient number of people become immune from a disease such that spread of that disease is slowed.
“Healthy people getting out there, they’re going to have to have some courage,” Hegseth said, citing Texas as a state where “people are defying ridiculous orders.”
“That takes courage, that’s not easy,” he added. “So I think that spirit, the American spirit, frankly, is in full supply and ready to go — if some of our experts and some of our leaders will just get out of their way.”
Those experts, Hegseth said, “are drunk on power. It’s time to open up.”
Without a vaccine for COVID-19, “herd immunity” would mean a critical mass of people becoming infected with the novel coronavirus.
[…] the World Health Organization has warned that “there is currently no evidence that people who have recovered from COVID-19 and have antibodies are protected from a second infection.”
Public health experts warn that using herd immunity as an anti-COVID-19 strategy would lead to many otherwise avoidable deaths.
Carl T. Bergstrom and Natalie Dean, a biologist and biostatistician respectively, addressed that issue in a recent New York Times op-ed.
“[E]ven assuming that immunity is long-lasting, a very large number of people must be infected to reach the herd immunity threshold required,” they wrote. “Given that current estimates suggest roughly 0.5 percent to 1 percent of all infections are fatal, that means a lot of deaths.”
In addition, they pointed out, the virus won’t “magically disappear” once herd immunity is achieved. Rather, “it could continue for months after herd immunity was reached, infecting many more millions in the process.”
I think one of my neighbors is watching Fox News. She seems to be confused. She told me that the state in which we live had no coronavirus cases. Not true. The count in this rural state is 2,158. The number of deaths is 66, and a graph of new cases shows a consistent trend upward.
From the readers comments on TPM:
this asshat should be arrested for criminal endangerment. I am quite serious. I am not snarking here. This n00b is endangering ME as an old fart. I DO NOT WANT TO DIE JUST TO KEEP HIM HAPPY. I think I might just call up our state police or FBI to see if charges can be brought.
There is no “Herd Immunity for old folk who succumb at 40% to covid. And this idiot would be killing 3-8% of his own viewership.
————————
The term “essential workers” has been updated to “sacrificial workers”.
———————–
He said from his home office while he shelters in place and homeschools his children he wont let outside…
Twitter should be on fire demanding that he bring his children to the next armed white nationalist tantrum to show them how real warrior.Americans exercise their rights.and courage.
———————–
He needs to add that to truly demonstrate courage, the idiots following his advice must sign a pledge not to go to a hospital if they are infected. The herd will take care of them.
Many conservatives are in love with the idea of Sweden’s approach—no lockdown. They don’t take into consideration that half of Swedes live alone, or that they have a top-notch universal healthcare system. They just think “no lockdown” is a better response to the novel coronavirus pandemic.
If nothing else, Sweden’s alternative response to the virus was … a good control group. And what we’re learning now is that failing to shut down hasn’t just led to more deaths, but—surprise surprise!—it also didn’t prevent its economy from tanking. In fact, Sweden is poised for more economic pain than its neighbors.
Sweden is quickly rising up the ranks of the world leaders in deaths. […]
Sweden […] will overtake the Netherlands sometime this weekend for the sixth spot in the world. Meanwhile, its neighbors following more standard shutdown protocols are looking pretty okay: [chart showing Sweden with 301 deaths per million; Demark with 89 deaths per million; Finland with 46; and Norway with 40]
t’s not even close. So Sweden is starting to wonder whether this all made sense. “[Anders] Tegnell, who has been leading the country’s COVID-19 response and previously defended the nation’s decision not to impose a lockdown, this week admitted he was ‘not convinced’ the unconventional anti-lockdown strategy was the best option to take,” reported Newsweek. Tegnell called the death toll, now surpassing 3,000 dead, a “horrifyingly large number.”
But that sacrifice in blood at least saved the country’s economy, right? Well, that’s the funny part. (And not in a “ha ha” funny way.) “Sweden’s economy is expected to contract between 6.9% and 9.7%,” […]
The FDA pushed back against Trump’s effort to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine:
Link
On Monday, Trump told the public the pandemic death toll could be as low as 50,000. We crossed the 50,000 threshold today, and the total keeps climbing.
What Trump said:
From Steve Benen:
Link
Well here’s a surprise. It turns out that SAGE, the committee supposed to give the UK government scientific advice free from political interference, has included Dominic Cummings – Johnson’s pet supergenius (at least in his own estimation), and a “Vote Leave” chum and fellow political adviser who has links with Peter Thiel:
The two were apparently attending the committee – as participating members, not observers – at least from February.
TPM – “Navy Recommends Reinstating Captain Who Warned About COVID, But Decision Is Esper’s”:
Tweet o’ the day.
CA Gov. Gavin Newsom:
Link for more information at the link.
McConnell’s Supreme Court coup continues to pay dividends.
Scotusblog:
Divided court upholds restrictive reading of immigration statute, limiting relief to noncitizens facing removal
Jayesh Rathod
April 24, 2020
No surprise here, Kavanaugh started with a goal in mind and spun his opinion to meet that goal. Detailed analysis at the link.
#DontDrinkBleach is trending on Twitter, which is quite a thing to see.
Uh, thank you, Canadian military.
Links back to the previous chapter of this thread.
Comment 498, details about the FDA pushback against Trump’s effort to encourage people to take hydroxychloroquine.
Comment 497, about Trump’s comments suggesting that doctors look into the use of disinfectants injected, or somehow otherwise used, inside the human body to kill the coronavirus: Trump is now claiming that he was speaking sarcastically to reporters. No, he wasn’t.
SC’s comment 496, which provides details related to “Brazil Justice Minister Resigns Over Bolsonaro’s Interference in Investigations — and Impeachment Talk Ramps Up”
“I can’t believe I have to say this, but please don’t drink bleach.”
Today is the day Joe Biden became president.
From Laura Clawson: “Donald Trump is spending a deadly pandemic watching TV and stewing over negative coverage.”
Link
Other news reports say that Trump also occasionally rage-watches MSNBC.
ARIDS@492,
Yes, I’m sure that’s part of McConnell’s calculation. The situation is much the same in the UK. As I tell the young people of today, in a fake Yorkshire accent: “Ee, we ‘ad it easy when I were a lad!”
From Mark Sumner:
Link
Here are the tactics Republicans are suggesting as the 2020 candidates continue to campaign as best they can: “GOP memo urges anti-China assault over coronavirus.”
The Senate Republican campaign arm distributed the 57-page strategy document to candidates.
Link
About the increasing cases of coronavirus in states with more rural areas, and with fewer large urban centers:
Link
From Wonkette:
From the U.S. Surgeon General:
From FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn:
From Judy Melinek M.D.:
From Kashif Mahmoud:
From Jonathan Spicer MD PhD:
What would happen if you did act on Trump’s rambling speculations?
Link
Yikes.
Stephen Miller has a long-term vision for Trump’s ‘temporary’ immigration order, according to a private call with supporters.
Washington Post link
Stacey Abrams made her case for selecting her a Joe Biden’s running mate:
Link
[L]eader of group peddling bleach as coronavirus wrote to Trump this week:
If the numerous clews haven’t already clewed you in, this is is , one of the most lethal quack garbage being hocked today, “a toxic chemical that in ‘high oral doses’ can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and life-threatening low blood pressure due to dehydration.” It, and the quacks / who are pushing for this method of mass genocide, have been discussed / referenced before in this series of poopyhead threads.
The current occupant of Wacko House fancies himself as a quack & implementator, but he can’t even pretend do that convincingly. All teh bestingerest
peoplesdaleks…If you are really special, you get a haircut.
Link
Joe Biden issues ad to mark the anniversary of his entry into the race
A video of the ad can be seen at the link. The ad is organized around the idea of “we the people.” Trump is not mentioned.
Ad from the Lincoln Project
Link
Trump is mentioned, in quite a negative light.
Trump is congratulating himself this morning, while claiming that other people are congratulating him.
Link
WHO warns against coronavirus “immunity passports” due to reinfection concerns
It says there is “currently no evidence” that someone cannot be reinfected.
From Wonkette: “Right-Wing ‘Boogaloo Boys’ Spend Pandemic On Facebook, Plotting To Kill Us All In A Civil War”
Oh how I despise this use of “liberty” to excuse this civil war nonsense.
Link
The pandemic at sea.
Washington Post link
The cruise industry’s decision to keep sailing for weeks after the coronavirus was first detected on a ship helped carry the virus around the globe.
More at the link. The article is long, and thorough. If you really want to have the complete picture of what part cruise ships played in spreading the virus, read the whole article.
From an op-ed by Stacey Abrams:
Link
LA Times: New Data Reveals COVID-19 Is Killing Younger Black and Latino Californians at Higher Rates
Link
See the link for charts.
Trump and Putin just issued a joint statement … because, of course they did.
Protect your irony meters. Trump and Putin celebrating the defeat of fascism? Really?
Link
From the readers comments:
We had an astroturf anti-health rally in our town today. Forty pickups with 70 plus American flags, plus the usual assortment of traitor’s flags. About fifty motorcycles, some with AR15s slung over their shoulders. Kids standing on car roofs, no one wearing a mask And an amazing number of the protesters are in my age cohort — you know, over fifty, male. Assholes.
From Wonkette: “Reports Of Bleach And Lysol Drinking Increase Day After Trump ‘Sarcastically’ Suggests It.”
Note that apples, oranges, bananas, etc. can be washed just like you wash your hands. Rinse well.
Link
A follow-up, of sorts, to Oggie @30.
Washington Post link
About shortages of PPE at hospitals for veterans:
Why? Are they stockpiling it for Jared?
What? One face mask per day is not enough?
Washington Post link
From the readers comments:
In Oz, former Prime Minister Turnbull has released his memoir.
Pullquote:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-26/malcolm-turnbull-calls-for-expulsion-liberal-party/12185404
This is Trump’s version of what happened, and his excuse for not having a coronavirus press briefing today:
Trump later sent out a tweet in which he lied (again) about his bizarre statements about “injection” of disinfectant “inside the body.” Trump claimed that he did NOT address Doctor Birx, and that the “fake news” wrote that he had addressed some of those remarks too Birx. In Trump’s disordered mind, this means the “fake news” was lying about everything he said.
Trump tweeted:
Yeah, there’s just one huge problem with that: Trump did address Dr. Deborah Birx, even using her first name when he looked at her and spoke to her during the briefing.
The UK government is continuing to follow the trump playbook by attacking critical articles, publications and journalists in insulting terms when they uncover facts showing it in a bad light.
Even the Pentagon doesn’t have enough tests.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/pentagon-coronavirus-testing
From the readers comments:
Trump’s decision to hold an in-person graduation at West Point proves he is unfit.
Link
From Nancy Pelosi:
More details from Tapper’s “State of the Union” show. Dr. Birx appeared. Her continued make-excuses and/or minimize-as-much-as-possible-Trump’s-dangerous-statements schtick is getting on my last nerve. Maybe she needs to stop talking too.
Link
WTF has gone wrong with Birx? Is she now a trumpian cult follower?
https://twitter.com/aliciakeys/status/1253546599428640768
From Alicia Keys.
More on Trump’s decision to deliver an in-person commencement address at West Point:
Link
Utah Was Really Into Trump’s Miracle Cure. Now It Wants Its Money Back.
Whoops.
Trump is taking the idea of making the World Health Organization his favorite coronavirus scapegoat to another level.
Petty asshats.
Washington Post link
Good news:
Link
An interesting UK poll on confidence in the UK government’s handling of the Covid-19 epidemic. There is still a majority, although a shrinking one, expressing general approval, but on specific questions – did they act quickly enough? – how have they done on testing? – there are large majorities disapproving. My guess is that the general approval is for the continued lockdown, combined with what the linked article suggests, a hope that they will succeed in controlling the epidemic.
Lynna … @ # 39: WTF has gone wrong with Birx? Is she now a trumpian cult follower?
As a longtime “just say no” faction leader on the anti-reproductive-health posse of the hyperchristian right wing, she’s had at least one foot in that camp all of her career.
Cases in Russia continue to rise dramatically (and the official numbers are undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg).
Moscow Times – “Russia Sees Record One-Day Rise in Coronavirus Cases, Bringing Total to Over 80k”:
There was a similar rise yesterday. A week ago, Putin assured the public that the “situation is under full control” and that “everything would work out with God’s help.”
In related news, from Yahoo, “Chechen strongman’s strategy against virus — fear and threats”:
Meanwhile, in Brazil, updates to the comment linked @ #7 above:
Guardian – “Brazilians take part in pot-banging protests against Bolsonaro’s coronavirus response – video”:
Also from the Guardian – “Bolsonaro in fresh crisis over son’s alleged links to fake news racket”:
Here’s a (belated) link to the April 26 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
And…Simon Tisdall in the Guardian – “From Trump to Erdoğan, men who behave badly make the worst leaders in a pandemic”:
Much more at the link.
FT (free article) – “Global coronavirus death toll could be 60% higher than reported”:
Much more, including startling graphs, at the link.
Politico – “USDA let millions of pounds of food rot while food-bank demand soared”:
More atl.
Yet another front page Fox news article on AOC: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/aoc-slammed-by-new-york-paper-for-voting-against-latest-stimulus-bill
It’s really really amazing, since she burst on the national stage, I think they have been doing weekly, almost daily hit jobs on her. It’s unbelievable how threatened they feel but they are doing their job. Don’t be surprised to find out in a few years, she’s suddenly hated for no reason by the idiot “independents”.
It appears that Dr. Birx is about to learn the only thing one can learn from serving in the Trump Administration: When dealing with a malignant narcissist who views every interaction as a zero-sum game, there is no room for anyone else to benefit. Only Donald Trump is allowed to benefit. I don’t think Birx will every be thought of as a serious professional again.
Moscow Times, minutes apart:
“Russia’s Coronavirus Cases Surpass China’s in Latest One-Day Surge”:
“Putin’s Business Tsar Attacks Economic Lockdown”:
Here’s a link to the April 27 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Reuters – “Israel’s top court says government must legislate COVID-19 phone-tracking”:
Observer political editor Toby Helm tweeted re the article to which KG links @ #45 above:
SAGE thread from Carole Cadwalladr:
Ian Dunt:
G liveblog:
Yup.
The SC dismissed New York State, Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, because the law had been rescinded. This disappoints Second-Amendment activists who had hoped to get a definitive ruling that citizens could carry a gun to firing ranges out of state or to a second home. The restriction was unique to New York City.
The unsigned opinion was apparently joined by Roberts, while Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch dissented, claiming that the Court had been manipulated, as NYC rescinded the law after the SC took the case. “By incorrectly dismissing this case as moot, the court permits our docket to be manipulated in a way that should not be countenanced,” wrote Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch.
Kavanaugh agreed the case was moot but wants the Court to decide the issue. “The court should address that issue soon, perhaps in one of the several Second Amendment cases with petitions for certiorari now pending before the court.”
The WH coronavirus briefing for today has been canceled.
“The president is too recklessly, dangerously stupid for the White House to be able to hold briefings during a global pandemic.”
They’ve finally finished testing on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. 955(!) active infections and 14 people recovered.
Pramila Jayapal:
Apologies for not having any “[Pandemic and] Political Madness” to report / comment-on, albeit there is plenty. Just showing up, mostly to report I am fine; motivated by one of my best friends going silent for a disturbingly long time now… probably Ok, but I am very very worried as they are in the States.
Here in France, the current plan is for a gradual lifting of lockdown / social-distancing requirements starting May 11th; more information (details?) to be announced tomorrow (Tuesday April 28th).
Locally, the project to make masks — at both the yacht shipyards and at-home volunteers — is well underway (not sure of the numbers, and the masks are intended for first-responders and the health services†). Several of the local nursing homes are reporting no Covid-19 cases; this has obviously been a cause for concern, as this area is popular with retirees, and hence there is a (perhaps larger than usual?) number of elderly people here, and with (e.g.) the younger (i.e., possibly asymptomatic), international / traveling yacht crews and service people. Obviously a potential for infection (to the more vulnerable), albeit the closure of the restaurants, &tc, has massively helped.
† I am apparently now mistaken — a recent announcement from the village council says (in paraphrased translation): “The village will provide everyone with reusable masks before May 11th.” Hand sanitiser will also be provided to all(?) shops (a bit late, in my opinion, as there are(? were?) no hand-washing stations, albeit perhaps exceptionally difficult to arrange earlier?).
BBC – “Coronavirus: New Zealand claims no community cases as lockdown eases”:
blf, thank you for checking in.
Neera Tanden:
“For those keeping track, @realDonaldTrump has scrubbed his Twitter feed of many of the rants he posted yesterday.
Here’s a handy database of Trump’s Twitter feed, including his (many) deleted tweets….”
Update to #65: “After the White House canceled tonight’s briefing, the White House has announced that the president will brief the nation tonight.”
“USS Teddy Roosevelt has 955 COVID cases out of 4,800 crew, 1 in hospital. Story on USS Kidd getting worse – 47 positive, 2 sailors evacuated to US and 15 transferred to USS Makin Island ‘for monitoring due to persistent symptoms’.”
G liveblog:
@ 73
Please let him announce he’s resigning… please, oh please, oh please…
Yeah, unlikely, but I man can dream.
Aaron Rupar in Vox – “Trump keeps using ‘sarcasm’ to explain away his embarrassing statements.”
Really needs to be read in full. “Trump posted more than 40 tweets or retweets just in the 12 hours between noon Sunday and midnight. The word ‘coronavirus’ was mentioned in one of them.”
re SC @77: Calling his comments and tweets “sarcasm” only makes him look worse. If he was being “sarcastic” in a presser that is supposed to be a serious event about the dire circumstances of a medical crisis in our country, he is wasting time and resources speaking to the country. The Orange Toddler-Tyrant is an ignorant liar, and his motives are completely transparent. He will never admit that he was wrong because he is a weak-ass bully.
johnson catman @78, too true. Well said.
SC @75:
And here in the USA we still have doofuses protesting, (while not observing social distancing rules), and carrying signs that claim that the media is hyping coronavirus just to hurt Trump. Meanwhile, children are dying from a multi-system inflammatory state brought on by coronavirus. Sometimes I just want to throw up my hands and give up.
SC @73, and Akira @76, I actually experienced a moment of relief when I heard that Trump would not appear at a press briefing today to misinform the public. I was so disappointed when I saw that he would subject us to a press conference tonight. My bet is that he does not want to take questions from the press, but that he has to get his TV audience fix by appearing in front of the camera to spout his usual torrent of lies and disinformation.
blf @68, glad you checked in. “Several of the local nursing homes are reporting no Covid-19 cases,” I have to say “wow” to that news. So unlike most of the news in the USA. Rachel Maddow has really been on top of the nursing home infection rates and deaths here. Very disturbing news.
Here’s one example from The Rachel Maddow Show: Link.
Dr. Michael Wasserman, president of the California Association of Long-term Care Medicine, talks with Rachel Maddow about the steps that are necessary to secure the health of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities to maintain a crucial piece of the national coronavirus response.
SC @62, OMG, more bad consequences. I hadn’t considered that vaccination programs for other diseases would be cancelled because of coronavirus. Makes sense, but that just hadn’t occurred to me. It’s like dominoes falling.
a_ray @55:
Yes. It’s unfortunate, but I think you are right. She is now a trumpian mouthpiece, albeit still smarter than Hair Furor himself.
Lynna@80, In France overall, the nursing home situation has been dire, a problem exacerbated by it being a not-too-well funded part of the French healthcare system (I am not familiar with details, so may be inadvertently misrepresenting), plus — initially — a systemic glitch which meant Covid-19 deaths (and cases?) were being under-reported (or simply not counted). As far as I am aware, that glitch has been fixed; to the authority’s credit, the glitch was acknowledged early on.
lotharloo @54:
I’m afraid you are right.
The hate campaign against AOC is relentless. I don’t think it will stop.
The rightwing arguments against her are less of an actual disagreement with the policies she espouses, and are more of an expression of the rightwing’s obsessive need to have a target. All that hate has to be directed somewhere, and what better target than a woman.
Also, the rightwing can, once it has a target, create an atmosphere in which that target stands in for everything they hate. AOC is a symbol to them, not a person. Now, to Fox News, AOC represents all liberals, all politicians who are not trumpian, etc.
blf @82, ah, I see. Thanks for the additional information.
Here’s some good news from the USA: “Supreme Court rejects argument intended to undermine the ACA.”
Many of the Affordable Care Act’s opponents keep looking to the U.S. Supreme Court to help undermine the health care reform law. They also keep failing.
From NBC News’ Pete Williams:
More explanation, from Steve Benen:
Link
Fascinating article at Mad in America – “Muzzled by Psychiatry in a Time of Crisis: The Man in the White Coat, The New York Times and The Stifling of the Public Debate about Donald Trump’s Fitness to Serve as President”:
Much more atl. (Two notes: First, I read The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President when it came out in 2017. Some of the chapters are insightful, but the overall quality is very uneven, and so I couldn’t/can’t recommend it as a whole. I haven’t read the new edition. Second, I’m summoning every ounce of self restraint not to rant about Lieberman and the APA. You’re welcome.)
“Mike Flynn has deleted his tweet confessing to crime…”
Plenty of jokes in the responses about his guilty plea having been sarcastic.
Trump picks a fight over state aid he doesn’t fully understand.
Of course he doesn’t understand the real situation.
Abandoning everything he said last week, Trump suddenly has concerns about aiding “Democrat-run” states.
From Nancy Pelosi:
Daily Kos – “‘Reopen NC’ organizer tested positive for COVID-19, says quarantine a violation of civil rights.”
What Trump said earlier:
He got that wrong… so wrong.
Link
OMFG.
Signing relief checks wasn’t enough. Trump is now also sending letters to we-the-people, all in order to declare his magnanimity.
Link
Say, what now!?
OMG, the New York Times should just put a MAGA hat on it’s front page. The newspaper is now guilty of pumping out trumpian propaganda almost every day.
Link
The Wisconsin health department now reports that 36 people have tested positive for coronavirus after probably being exposed during the April 7 primary election. Republicans in that state forced voters to show up in person, and to stand in long lines for hours, if they wanted to vote.
Now the number of people who were infected continues to rise.
Link
LOL. Literally words said by my father when I got a 97 on a test.
As states continue to do what the federal government should be doing, Nevada and Colorado have joined the West Coast reopening alliance.
Link
Tweet o’ the day.
After posting many tweets in which he misspelled Nobel Prize and Nobel Committee as “Noble….”, Trump claimed, once again, that he was being sarcastic:
No, dude. You just can’t spell. Also, you still fail to understand what “sarcasm” means.
There are screenshots of the multiple tweets, which Trump later deleted.
From Wonkette:
Link
See the link for more, including screenshots, and a summary of Trump’s other 40 tweets that confirmed his stupidity.
Ha! SC @96, that video goes perfectly with comment 97.
Lynna@90, Sadly, Fintan O’Toole’s Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again is behind a paywall. However, this report — yet another hair furor antic — is not, Trump eyes resource-rich Greenland again with $12bn aid package (25-April-2020):
(I’m listening to France24 right now…) Here in France, Macron promised masks for everyone (before(?) May 11th), and supplies are just now starting to reach pharmacies. Apparently the price will be restricted to at most c.5€ (each? per pair?), but details still seem to be vague (e.g., are they reusable?). And supplies are currently very very limited. The local village scheme mentioned in @68 is indirectly related — It seems the village council is annoyed about the vagueness (at least? (also, a different political party, fortunately not teh le penazis despite the disturbing levels of local support)), and hence moved ahead on it’s own…
“BREAKING: ‘U.S. intelligence agencies issued warnings about the novel coronavirus in more than a dozen classified briefings prepared for President Trump’.
First was in early January.”
WaPo link atl.
All of a sudden Barr cares about the Constitution. Look for the DOJ to get involved where states are restricting church gatherings.
Lawfare:
Justice Department Will Monitor State and Local Pandemic Policies for Civil Rights Violations
By Elliot Setzer Monday, April 27, 2020
You can read the memo here
WTAF
Resign, evil clown.
Here’s a link to the April 28 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there, more re #75 above:
Al Jazeera – “Brazil top court orders probe into accusations against Bolsonaro”:
Moscow Times:
“Russia’s Coronavirus Cases Surpass 90K in Latest One-Day Record Surge”:
Again, those are the official numbers.
“Second Russian Doctor Falls From Hospital Window Amid Coronavirus”:
Putin will be making a speech later today about…something.
Brett McGurk re the WaPo report @ #101: “We need an independent commission to compare what was in the PDB with what Trump was regularly telling the public to include his often parroting President Xi. This report suggests a total dereliction of any POTUS’s first job: to protect the American people.”
Politico – “Trump campaign lashes out over ‘Don’t defend Trump’ memo”:
!!!!!!!
Yorkshire Bylines – “Watch out for Boris Johnson’s imminent Churchill impersonation”:
More atl.
The Brexit Blog – “Coronavirus and Brexit: the connections and their consequences”:
Much more atl.
CA governor Gavin Newsom yesterday:
Sorry – I’d missed Lynna’s #95 above.
Guardian (support the Guardian if you can)- “Lithuanian capital to be turned into vast open-air cafe”:
This sounds like a great idea. I wonder what arrangements they’re making for bathrooms….
“Told that states have reported an increase in people taking disinfectant since his comments last week, Trump says, ‘I can’t imagine why. I can’t imagine why’. Asked if he takes any responsibility, he says, ‘No, I don’t’.”
Wow – visualization of the numerous pacts and coalitions amongst the US states and localities arising to deal with the pandemic in the absence of even subadequate federal leadership or coordination. Thread with more information atl.
The local village where I live in S.France intends to provide everyone with two washable / reusable masks next week. The masks are obtained by scheduled appointment — makes sense — and to my considerable surprise, one of them will be FFP2-grade, which is known to be effective against some viruses (however, I have not been able to locate anything too definitive on FFP2 vs SARS-CoV-2). Such masks are commonly used in construction and the like (apparently), so guessing, this is a result of the local yacht shipyards, where — again, guessing — such masks are in common use…
Sadly, my beard — the notorious hedgehog swallowed sideways — will interfere with the masks.
Presumably unrelated (to both the hedgehog and local village’s scheme), French police seize 14,000 face masks bound for black market. The seized masks just happen to be FFP2s.
Trump is unravelling — even his supporters can’t ignore it now:
@SC 108
I’ve been thinking about how to take advantage of the lack of positive case for Donald Trump. His followers often just try to pivot to someone else being worse, and depending on the issue that someone else isn’t an american running against him or politicking against him (china, who…). But since I’m not a D that doesn’t work very well.
I didn’t consider challenging Trump with the knowledge that his supporters often don’t want to talk about him on issues. And aparently some Rs think no one should try.
To be fair loads of Ds also redirect to Trump instead of positively supporting a candidate, but I think that’s because it’s uniquely easy at the moment.
The Grauniad has long been praised in this series of poopyhead threads, especially for their Covid-19 pandemic coverage — please support the Grauniad if possible — so not really a surprise, Guardian tops poll of national [UK] papers for coronavirus coverage:
G liveblog:
He “ordered the government”? What’s he doing?
Zoe Tillman, BuzzFeed: “Hello from my living room, where I’ll be streaming arguments at 9:30am before the en banc DC Circuit in two blockbuster cases about whether/under what circumstances Congress can take the executive branch to court — the Don McGahn subpoena fight, and a border wall funding dispute….”
This is still going on.
Tierney Sneed, TPM: “lol merrick garland just got DOJ to say that if a president instructed treasury to just pay for the health care for uninsured people, congress couldnt sue to stop it.”
WaPo:
Va. gun range wins first victory against order requiring businesses to close
By Justin Jouvenal, April 27, 2020
The gun lobby is relentless. Although gun shops and outdoor ranges remained open, temporarily closing an indoor range was just too much.
HuffPo – “Senators Demand Answers About Jared Kushner’s Role In Distributing Medical Supplies”:
Re: #123
I forgot to mention that the the judge in this case, F. Patrick Yeatts, got his J.D. from Regent University (founded by Pat Roberson) and was the attorney for Liberty University (Jerry Falwell’s school.)
SC @121,
Maybe Putin could ask Governor Cuomo to do it.
“New York Times newsroom lawyer David McCraw delivers this response to @seanhannity request for retraction and apology related to @nytimes coverage: ‘No’. Addressed to Hannity lawyer Charles Harder:…”
Letter atl.
From text quoted by SC @111:
That’s the first time I’ve seen “simplism” used to describe that kind of rightwing mindset, but, yes, I agree.
The tendency to overly simplify every issue is endemic. It’s as if they get to a certain point in analyzing a situation, and then it hurts their brain to go any further. The threat of thinking too long and hard, the threat of actually having to do a lot of work … those threats are perceived as actual threats. So they retreat into an overly simplified description. And, worse yet, they run for the comfort of well-trodden pathways like “patriotism,” “English excellence in all things,” “winning WWII,” etc.
In the USA, Trump’s cult followers do the same things. They just add trumpian flavors like MAGA, evangelical christianity, the founding fathers, freedom, guns, etc.
Follow-up to SC @115.
Let’s not let Trump get away with claiming “no responsibility” this time.
Link
Trump is moving the goalposts again when it comes to the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic. This makes me think, in part, that Trump is relatively comfortable accepting large death tolls because he had no empathy in the first place.
Link
I expect Trump to continue to move the goalposts as needed to suit his view of himself as keeping the death toll to a minimum. It’s another version of coming in “under budget and ahead of schedule.” He doesn’t mind lying and shirking his duties in order to shore up that fragile ego of his.
As has already been noted up-thread, Trump was warned many times about the severity of the coming pandemic. Nicole Lafond wrote about this:
TPM link
Utterly unforgivable.
re tomh @123:
That is some pretty twisted “logic” to get to that conclusion. The right to “keep and bear arms” doesn’t really seem to say anything about “indoor shooting”.
.
re Lynna @129:
A non-functioning or missing brain leads to a lack of imagination.
WTF?
Trump to use Defense Production Act to reopen pork, chicken plants closed due to COVID-19 outbreaks
If there is a counterproductive way to use presidential powers, Trump will find it.
From Hunter at Daily Kos:
Link
Trump, quoted in Lynna’s #130:
The “one is too many” thing is something he says whenever the tens of thousands of preventable deaths are raised. It’s an insultingly meaningless phrase in the context of thousands of deaths a day, and not reflected in his lethargy and passivity in addressing the crisis. Very likely something one of his PR people – Hicks, possibly – gave him or told him to repeat while he’s downplaying the suffering to try to fake some understanding that the deaths are a bad thing independent of his image problems and reelection chances. (As usual, he helps give the game away when he adds “I always say it” as if to underscore that it’s nothing but an empty catchphrase.)
The United States has to test like no other nation, because Trump screwed up like no other leader.
Link
Pew Research Center yesterday released a study of the extent to which each state has created religious exemptions to COVID-19 distancing orders.
Sixteen states allow religious gatherings, with no limit on their size. In some cases, states have deemed religious worship “essential,” in the same category as food shopping and health care. These states include Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee, among others. Twenty-one states and D.C. allow religious gatherings of only ten or fewer people. Three states have other kinds of limits. Only ten states prevent all in-person religious gatherings.
Lawsuits have popped up all over the country seeking relief from restrictions on religious gatherings, for instance, this one in Virginia last week, seeking a TRO plus damages (warning– it’s a 50 page complaint.) Expect Barr’s DOJ to get behind these lawsuits.
“Nothing But Death”: Inside the Nursing Home Where NYC’s Most Vulnerable Struggle to Survive COVID-19
More at the link.
Link
Guardian – “Concern as coronavirus threatens Russia’s closed ‘nuclear cities’”:
Ever the bully, looking for leverage to bully his perceived opponents even more, Trump suggested a federal bailout for states could depend on the sanctuary city policies of those states.
Link
Quoted in Lynna’s #133:
Seems like they would then have a good case against the federal government.
Most legislators will stay away from D.C. a while longer.
Link
G liveblog:
Good news: New Orleans reported zero coronavirus deaths for the first time in 37 days.
Predictable, but terrible news: the USA reported more than 1 million cases of COVID-19 cases.
Trump’s inane blathering is still having deleterious effects: The FDA issued a warning: people should NOT be drinking hand sanitizer solutions.
Saturday’s episode of Lovett or Leave It – “The King’s Bleach”:
One-hour podcast atl. Interesting discussion with Katie Porter about various aspects of the congressional situation.
Update to Lynna’s #130 above.
From Wonkette: “Proud Boys See ‘Reopen America’ Rallies As Chance To Recruit Fellow Idiots To Their Cause”
See comment 25 for more on Boogaloo groups.
Link
Oh, Tucker Carlson, really? You were already a mix of bad news and misinformation, and now you are effing dangerous.
Link
Tweet o’ the day.
“The U.S. plans to give $500 billion to large companies. It won’t require them to preserve jobs or limit executive pay.”
The Fed’s coronavirus aid program lacks restrictions Congress placed on companies seeking financial help under other programs.
Washington Post link
More at the link.
“PENCE flouts Mayo Clinic policy that everyone on campus wear a mask, even as he meets with staff and a patient.”
Video atl. Dude isn’t wearing a mask in a hospital.
This is still my favorite analysis of Tucker Carlson, and seems completely apropos right about now.
Hillary Clinton was Joe Biden’s guest on his podcast today and endorsed him. (Video atl.)
“Breaking- @MassGovernor announces #StayAtHome order extended until May 18th.”
“As people screamed at them, our health care workers stood in silence defending our state.
This is courage and composure in it’s purest form.
#HealthWorkersDefendNC”
Video atl. (No idea why Neil Diamond’s “America” seems to be playing there.)
After dismissing the NYC 2nd Amendment case on Monday, the Supreme Court distributed for consideration at Friday’s conference 10 gun cases that had apparently been on hold for the New York case. Included are whether the Second Amendment protects the right to carry a handgun outside the home for self-defense and a challenge to Cook County’s ban on assault rifles and large-capacity magazines.
There is a full list of the 10 cases here. Orders from Friday’s conference are expected on Monday, May 4, at 9:30 a.m. EDT.
Politico link
JFC
Follow-up to SC @150.
TPM link
From Kendall Brown:
https://twitter.com/kendallybrown/status/1255208086618484736
From Brian Schatz:
From Trevor Noah at The Daily Show:
Illinois man sues Trump, McConnell, and Mnuchin over exclusion of U.S. citizen spouses from relief
Re #154 – here’s a version of “America” that somehow manages to ignore the pro-immigrant lyrics (and to accompany “eye of the storm” with an image of the eye of a hurricane, which is fucking hilarious).
(An aside.)
Rachel Maddow’s opening monologue showed how the Trump administration is changing regulations/guidelines for safety to suggestions in the meat packing industry. The corruption continues.
Politico – “Roger Stone search warrants reveal new clues — and mysteries — about 2016”:
“As part of reopen plan, Iowa gov warns that workers who don’t return to work over fears of contracting COVID will be deemed to have quit their jobs and lose unemployment insurance.”
This is what it’s all about. An owner of a tattoo parlor in Georgia was interviewed on MSNBC over the weekend and she talked about how Kemp’s saying those businesses could reopen would make those workers ineligible for state unemployment benefits. (It was a very good interview with Ali Velshi; I’ll try to find the video.) Every single thing the Republicans have done or tried to do in the course of this crisis has benefited corporations, CEOs, and Republican donors and cronies at the expense of people’s lives and livelihoods. McConnell is now insisting that liability protections for bosses who reopen be included in the next relief bill.
BuzzFeed – “This Nurse Is Speaking Out Against Coronavirus Rumors And Hoaxes That Are Putting Him And His Colleagues In Danger”:
Moscow Times:
“Russia’s Coronavirus Cases Near 100K in Latest One-Day Jump”:
“Russians’ Trust in Putin Hits 14-Year Low – State Poll”:
Wow.
Guardian – “‘So what?’: Bolsonaro shrugs off Brazil’s rising coronavirus death toll”:
Here’s a link to the April 29 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
“@jaredkushner on fox and friends this AM: ‘We have achieved all the different milestones that are needed. So, the government, federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story and I think that that’s really what needs to be told’.”
GFY.
G liveblog (linked @ #167):
Images atl.
re SC @165:
Wow! Sounds like the last poll used choices like those right-wingnut sites that want people to rate the performance of The Orange Toddler-Tyrant with “great”, “wonderful”, or “couldn’t have been better”.
LOL. I was so distracted by this room this morning, I couldn’t focus on what he was saying.
“Addressing the Coronavirus Challenge: Front Row Lecture with Michael Farzan, PhD.”
This talk, shared by Chris Hayes on Twitter, is super informative. It also gives you hope. (Watching this after hearing Trump’s musings on ingesting disinfectants is like returning home from another planet.)
On testing, Trump’s misplaced boasts go completely off the rails
The U.S. has conducted around 5 million tests since February; the idea that we’ll very soon be up to 5 million tests per day is literally unbelievable.
OMG. I saw this on video. You can actually see Trump lying. You can hear him lying. You can tell from his tone and his face that he is lying. You can see him decide to just bluster his way though. Disgusting and alarming.
Well, it is somehow weird that we still have election news, but we do.
Joe Biden defeated Bernie Sanders in Ohio by about 56 points. Ohio held a primary election yesterday.
Oh, FFS.
Link
Follow-up to SC @168.
Jared Kushner also said:
Commentary from Marissa Higgins:
Link
From Mark Sumner: “Republicans are creating a fake movement designed to kill workers and enrich corporations. Again.”
Link
From Wonkette: “Go F*ck Yourself, Jared”
https://www.wonkette.com/go-f-ck-yourself-jared
From Wonkette: “Wasilla [Alaska, where Sarag Palin lives] Wingnuts Use Coronavirus Shutdown To Ban Some Books
Link
Seven States Restrict Mail-In Voting on the Basis of Age. That’s Unconstitutional.
The 26th Amendment takes on newfound importance in the pandemic.
More than 80 percent of hospitalized covid patients in Georgia were African American, study finds.
Link
From Alexandra Petri, writing for The Washington Post:
Washington Post link
Oh, dear god. We will be subjected to a Fox News town hall shot live, featuring Hair Furor at the Lincoln Memorial. Oh, FFS.
Washington Post link
Mass layoffs begin in cities and states amid coronavirus fallout, threatening education, sanitation, health and safety
Millions of municipal workers could find themselves out of a job or without pay. This is the next wave of the disaster, in my opinion.
The text quoted above is from The Washington Post.
Follow-up to comment 173.
Hair Furor is walking back one of his recent lies.
Trump Walks Back Huge Goal For Tests After His Own Testing Chief Said It Was Impossible
From the readers comments:
“NEW: @USAID grant-recipient language seen by The Daily Beast informs NGOs they can’t buy PPE — for themselves or for people in need — with USAID $. Ex-USAID official @JeremyKonyndyk: ‘We’re making the whole world pay the price for our own incompetence’.”
“Scoop: The U.S. has just circulated a confidential proposal to conduct an immediate evaluation of WHO’s response to the pandemic, focusing on how the pathogen got its start in China. Dips say U.S. faces uphill battle to get support.”
A 1st: US study finds Gilead drug works against coronavirus
Ashish Jha at STAT – “We need the real CDC back, and we need it now”:
G liveblog (see also #166 above):
G liveblog:
I’ll take this opportunity to repeat my recommendation of the video @ #172 above.
“Ben Shapiro: ‘If somebody who is 81 dies of COVID-19, that is not the same thing as somebody who is 30 dying of COVID-19…If grandma dies in a nursing home at age 81, that’s tragic and it’s terrible, also the life expectancy in the United States is 80’.”
They’re all so terrible.
Tweet o’ the day.
Link
Trump owes me a new keyboard.
Trump may suck at sarcasm, but he truly is a master of irony.
There were 3.84 million jobless claims in the US this past week, bringing the six-week total to more than 30 million.
Moscow Times – “Russia’s Coronavirus Cases Surpass 100K in Latest One-Day Record Surge”:
CNN – “Anger rises among Russia’s doctors as coronavirus hospitals get put on lockdown”:
More at the link.
“System Update with Glenn Greenwald – The Three-Pronged Crisis Imperiling the Bolsonaro Government.”
35-minute YT video at the link. This just aired live. I can’t stand Greenwald on pretty much any other topic, and find him barely tolerable even when he’s speaking on this one, but it’s a useful discussion of the situation in Brazil.
One usually weekly show I try to watch on France24 is “French Connections“, which isn’t always about politics, but is instead “A quirky, insider’s guide to understanding France and the French, from the sublime to the ridiculous.” I’ve referenced the show a few times in this series of poopyhead threads.
Since the start of the lockdown, there hasn’t been a new edition — for very probably good & understandable reasons — but there is now a new filmed-at-home(-mostly) episode, France in lockdown: Shopping and cooking in a time of confinement (video). Despite being filmed entirely in Paris, it almost could have been filmed in the S.France Mediterranean seaside village where I live: Except for perhaps fewer (long-)queues at the open shops, it gives a good look into some of the current reality (at least for those who are not badly disadvantaged). And yes, I had the “run on eggs” problem at first also, but have now found a reliable supply. (There hasn’t been a cheese problem, to the mildly deranged penguin is, ah, well “content”, in her rather unique way… just don’t mention walruses, peas, and the other usual suspects… Oops!!1!!).
Oh for feck’s sake, the first link in @198 is borked (well, doesn’t go to the intended page), it should be “French Connections“. Sorry. (The second link is Ok.)
Here’s a link to the April 30 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
Guardian – “Politics drive Georgia’s reopening gamble as coronavirus cases rise”:
Philip Rucker:
Today is the 75th anniversary of Hitler’s death by suicide.
Three years earlier on this date, in 1942, Hitler met with Mussolini about sending Italian reinforcements to Russia. From Shirer’s Rise and Fall:
“Two thirds of the UK public now think the government acted too late to bring in the coronavirus lockdown.”
Charts atl.
G liveblog – “Russian Prime Minister diagnosed with coronavirus”:
More re #203 – Shirer on Hitler’s last will and testament:
In the hours before his death, after finally being forced to realize his ideas about surprise counterattacks turning things around were pure fantasy, he was still expelling people from the top echelons of the party, sneering at the army leadership, and lying about not having wanted the war.
“So, after a week of Republicans raving about ‘blue state bailouts’ I went and looked at an actual state-by-state forecast from Moody’s analytics.
It turns out red states are really, really screwed too.”
Graph atl. Florida and Kentucky have higher projected shortfalls than Michigan or Illinois. From a quick look at the graph of the states with the highest projected budget shortfalls, most of them are red states.
“Putin nervously shuffled his papers and grimaced, as he reacted to the revelation that his Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin contracted the #coronavirus.”
Image atl. Here’s the video.
“Trump on his handling of pandemic: ‘I think we did a spectacular job’.”
GFY.
SC @196, This is alarming: “Medical facilities in the country [in Russia] have emerged as one of the main breeding grounds for Covid-19, and two dozen hospitals have had to shut down for long quarantines, with many doctors falling sick.”
I remember all too well the sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when doctors in Italy pointed out that hospitals had become a breeding ground for COVID-19 in that country.
Fairly early on, China designated some hospitals as COVID-only. If I remember correctly, Germany did the same thing. I don’t think this problem has been adequately addressed. It looks to be far worse in Russia.
And this part, in text quoted by SC, sounds all too familiar: “For weeks, Russian independent media and non-governmental organizations have reported anonymous pleas from outraged medical workers who said they had been ordered to the frontlines of a public health crisis without adequate protection, and that bureaucratic foot-dragging was costing lives. As the situation worsens, many have become more outspoken, sometimes risking legal action against them.” Sounds like the situation Trump and his cronies created in the USA, minus some of the coercion.
Trickster Goddess @193, I can’t stop laughing, but it is bitter laughter. I have stopped replacing my broken irony meters. Trump just continues to destroy them at such a rapid pace, that I can’t keep up.
“I don’t believe the polls,” Trump said. “I believe the people of this country are smart. And I don’t think that they will put a man in who’s incompetent.”
SC @209, as one reader responded, “South Korea, pop 51 million, had its first covid-19 case the same day as the US.
247 South Koreans have died.
How, exactly, is 60,000 US dead “spectacular?” Spectacularly bad. That’s Trump.
In text quoted by SC in comment 206: “In this valedictory to the German nation and to the world which was also meant to be a last conclusive appeal to history, Adolf Hitler dredged up all the empty claptrap of Mein Kampf and added his final falsehoods. It was a fitting epitaph of a power-drunk tyrant whom absolute power had corrupted absolutely and destroyed.”
What poor schmuck is Trump going to pay to write his version of this after he loses the next election?
As the Grauniad’s current main pandemic live blog is reporting, departments in France are being assessed on a daily basis to decide the level of lockdown easing (due to start on 11th May):
I myself am in an orange department, which isn’t surprising since Marseille is not a million kilometres away, with the additional hotspots of Italy, Corsica, and some others not all that much further. (Like I’ve observed before, I’m surrounded, even if locally the impact is still, as far as I know, fairly minor.)
I understand there will be updated maps published daily, albeit I don’t know where. There is no link in the Grauniad. The best copy of today’s map I have found is in Coronavirus et déconfinement : une première carte publiée ce jeudi […]. (For some reason, most copies of the map are of an absolutely appalling quality.)
Justin Amash could affect 2020 outcome, but in what direction?
From NBC News:
From the link above:
From the Grauniad’s current States pandemic live blog:
Someone spook told hair furor to go feck himself.
Good news:
I have lost count of the number of times right-winger Kris Kobach has been slapped down by the courts. He never learns a thing.
In other campaign news there is a lot, a LOT, of back and forth concerning allegations of sexual assault against Joe Biden. I am waiting for Biden to adequately address this himself. In the meantime, here is one opinion from Michael J. Stern: “Why I’m skeptical about Reade’s sexual assault claim against Biden.”
Link
Trump erupts over poll slump and threatens to sue campaign manager:
“[A]n inability to host campaign rallies” —Possibly another reason hair furor wants to abandon social distancing and other science-led actions?
To the extent Parscale is assissting hair furor’s very public and obvious meltdowns — everyone has been following the advice from the to drink bleach, mainline hydroxychloroquine, and have a healthy internal UV glow, correct? — yes, Parscale is doing a great job. And conveniently for Biden, it’s not costing his campaign a penny (albeit it probably also isn’t being paid for by hair furor).
Feel sorry for Maine:
On another subject, here is Jeff Flake telling it like it is:
Oh, no. Not again.
Pentagon budget raided (again) to finance Trump’s ‘wall’
Last year, military leaders warned that the raids on their budget could be dangerous. Evidently, the pushback wasn’t persuasive to Team Trump.
blf @217, Trump is definitely looking around for someone to blame, not just about his low poll numbers, but about the facts appearing on the horizon. Trump is going to lose to Biden.
Seems logical to Trump to blame his campaign manager.
OMFG. Guns and all.
TPM link
See also:
https://twitter.com/SenPolehanki/status/1255899318210314241
This snark was from a few days ago, but is à point, as the frogs croak here in France, Trump reportedly doesn’t have time to get lunch. He might if he quit the self-praise (quoted in full (it’s short)):
Trump Threatens CNN Over Coverage Of Michael Flynn, Says Outlet ‘Should Pay A Big Price’
From the readers comments:
JFC!
https://twitter.com/postlive/status/1255878355016134656
Video is available at the link.
Sorry! My #224 was already posted by Lynna @ #221.
Elizabeth Warren and Jan Schakowsky have a plan to end mask and medicine shortages amid the Covid-19 crisis.
Link
Congratulations to Michelle Goldberg. Well deserved.
Video of #221 above.
The new Michael Flynn documents aren’t the bombshell Trump is making them out to be
Trump claims they’re a “total exoneration” for his former top adviser. They aren’t.
That’s right, William Barr is looking high and low for some excuse Trump can use to pardon Flynn. If Barr’s involved in this, you know it is suspect.
It was Devin Nunes, reliably batshit whacko and also a Trump lackey, who posted “Clear now that General Flynn was set up by dirty cops at the highest levels of our government.”
Why am I not surprised this governor is a Democrat (or, perhaps more to the point, not a thug)? Probably because I cannot image a thug sincerely apologising and admitting they got it wrong, Kentucky governor ends beef with Tupac Shakur over unemployment check:
Oh, no. This is bad news. Trump-loving Republicans are using the coronavirus pandemic to get away with committing bad deeds. They think no one will notice. Now they are working to confirm another Trump toady as Director of National Intelligence.
Link
Follow-up to @215, from the Grauniad’s current main pandemic live blog:
The John Roberts mentioned is not the Chief Justice, but a fox journalist (no scare quotes around “journalist” despite being from fox as he seemed to be acting like a real journalist in the exchange (as reported)).
From Wonkette: “California Gonna Feed Some Hungry Kids”
Link
Follow-up to @233, the transcript the Grauniad is quoting shows just how incompetent hair furor is (my added emboldening):
If he didn’t make a habit of not understanding things said to him, and ignoring the rest of the exchange, I’d be inclined to let the be an impolite “I’m sorry, I couldn’t quite hear, so please repeat the question.” But his habit, plus his demeaning response, rules out any problem with hearing the question, and rules in, very much in, hearing something he doesn’t want to hear — time to go shoot some messengers! And blame China, Biden, WHO, and Benghazi, along with the all-purpose bogeyman, Senator Clinton!! Because it’s all Obama’s fault!!!
Activists condemn threat against Muslim congressional candidate:
MSNBC during the day has a list of the five countries and five US states with the most confirmed cases. The UK has moved quickly onto the list, and I imagine will shortly be followed by Russia and Brazil (and later Mexico and possibly Turkey, Chile, and Peru). It’s plausible that we’ll see a similar pattern with US states, especially as some with Republican governors reopen.
“Trump on funds for ‘Democrat states’. ‘If we do that we’re going to have to get something for it’.” Video atl.
“We’re doing very strongly on deaths per million is a presidency ending level remark for anyone besides Trump.”
I haven’t seen the whole clip, so don’t know if he bothered to throw in “one is too many – I always say that” this time. This is nightmarish.
Tweet o’ the day.
I cut my own hair yesterday and I have to say…it’s not bad! (It’s curly, so it’s much easier – little precision necessary. Can’t imagine trying to cut the back if I had straight hair…)
“Texas reports most deaths in a day from COVID-19 as Gov. Abbott prepares to drop stay-home order.”
“Pence staff threatens action against reporter who tweeted about visit to clinic without surgical mask…”
WaPo link atl. GFY.
:).
OMG, congratulations to Anderson Cooper!
U.S. appeals court rules against Trump attempt to withhold funds from ‘sanctuary’ cities
Ted Hesson, APRIL 30, 2020
Happy May Day!
Heh.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-01/china-state-media-propaganda-video-mock-us-coronavirus/12204836
SC@240, Congratulations!
I haven’t had my hair cut since c.2000, when it was even longer than now and had it cut to raise something like 1800€ for Amnesty International (Ireland). My own current problem is my beard, which hasn’t been shaved in ten or so years, but will interfere with the wearing of (or at least with the effectiveness of) any masks… which reminds me, I still haven’t booked an appointment yet to collect my own two free masks (no, no, I don’t procrastinate, at least when I’m not procrastinating…).
Here’s a link to the May 1 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
Follow-up to @188(previous page), @131(two pages ago), and especially @218(two pages ago), Whistleblower complaint set to lift lid on Trump pressure to push untried drug:
AP – “Brazilians start defying isolation, egged on by Bolsonaro”:
Moscow Times – “Russia’s Coronavirus Cases Hit 114K in New One-Day Record Surge”:
Hahahahaha – “Jerome Corsi, the commentator who narrowly escaped charges in Mueller probe, meant to email Zev Zelenko, a White House-allied doctor, about a hydroxychloroquine project. He instead emailed Aaron Zelinsky, the Mueller prosecutor. A new probe has begun…”
WaPo link at the link. Wish I had access.
Natasha Bertrand: “Omg. He literally emailed one of the prosecutors just tasked with investigating coronavirus-related crimes.”
Guardian – “US germ warfare lab creates test for pre-infectious Covid-19 carriers”:
More atl.
Follow-up to SC@253 & @254, Business Insider has an article, DOJ began investigating a doctor promoting unproven COVID-19 treatments after a Roger Stone associate accidentally emailed a federal prosecutor instead of the doctor. However, it’s not wanting to load for me, so the following excerpt has been gleaned from some circumventions around the mysterious(? maybe ad-blocker related?) problem:
Thread by Jeremy Konyndyk:
Jay Rosen: “Before her first briefing today, I want to remind people that @PressSec is a culture war appointment. She was hired to fight with the press on TV, and to address a narcissistic wound: that no one was defending him hard enough against… whom? Journalists! So that’s your primer.”
G liveblog:
Dan Solomon, Texas Monthly:
I can’t.
SC @260, I liked this paragraph because it is succinct and correct:
Nicole Hemmer:
In Canada (and not pandemic related), Trudeau announces Canada is banning assault-style weapons:
From the Washington Post article mentioned by SC in comment 253:
By “successfully treated” does he mean they didn’t die? And by “hundreds of patients” does he mean ten or less?
Washington Post link
All the best people.
NBC – “Government orders 100,000 new body bags as Trump minimizes death toll”:
More atl.
Thanks, blf @ #256 and Lynna @ #265. I was extremely curious to hear more of the story.
Facebook removes page belonging to conspiracy theorist David Icke:
According to the BBC, Coronavirus: David Icke kicked off Facebook:
I guess teh reptilians got annoyed with him. They need the humans alive…
Got a letter from the Treasury Dept. today with a letter where the hair furor was trying to take credit for the stimulus package. The shredder was ready, and easily digested the propaganda.
Follow-up to comment 216.
Campaign news:
Nerd @ 269
I got mine yesterday after my Trump-worshiping father brought in the mail. Since he think’s I’m a mental incompetent (nor does he have any sense of privacy), he thought I was being audited for whatever screw-up I obviously made on my taxes. After I explained that it was Trump propaganda, taking credit for the stimulus payments, he angrily replied with “If you don’t like him, then send the money back?” Not wanting to spend the rest of my suddenly shortened life in a cardboard box, I held my tongue.
BLF @268
Yes, they taste better that way.
Trump is siding with those “very good people” who carried AR-15 guns and other weapons into the Michigan capitol:
Some of those protesters carried machine guns into the galleries above where the lawmakers debated.
From Governor Gretchen Whitmer:
Whitmer ended the current state of emergency, and she promptly issued two new emergency declarations.
TPM link
From the Grauniad’s current States pandemic live blog, albeit this pandemic isn’t Covid-19 but hair furorrid:
Follow-up to comment 274.
From the readers comments:
https://twitter.com/dyllyp/status/1252990117557370883
Photo at the link.
Follow-up to comment 277.
Link
Much more at the link.
“The president is praising literal terrorists who have threatened the lives of duly elected leaders.
There is no other truthful or responsible way to characterize this. Every question asked of him, his apparatchiks, and any other Republican, every story written about this, must start with this basic reality and the enormity of what it means for our country.”
I can honestly say that this week is worse than the worst scenarios I had imagined.
“NEW — The Capitol’s attending physician warned McConnell’s office and others LAST WEEK that DC hadn’t cleared benchmarks for reopening. McConnell’s office pushed forward with reconvening the Senate anyway.”
Daily Beast link atl.
Follow-up to SC’s comment 279.
More Armed ‘Boogaloo’ Terrorists To Storm North Carolina Capitol Because Haircuts And Civil War
With no fanfare, Trump’s coronavirus guidelines quietly fade away
“You don’t want people to misconstrue the expiration of these guidelines as a recommendation that it’s okay to go back to your normal life…. It’s not.”
Trump works to offset erosion among older Americans lacking enthusiasm for the GOP death march
Now that’s an accurate headline!
From Mark Sumner: “Mike Pence retaliates against reporter for telling the truth—Pence knew he should wear a mask.”
Link
Tweet o’ the day.
Here’s a link to the May 2 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
re SC @286:
WOOHOOOO! The US is still #1! USA! USA!
France24 with more re #166 above – “President’s ‘So what?’ as 5,000 die sparks fury in Brazil”:
G liveblog:
Still trying to buy his way to the presidency, albeit not as the president-by-title, Michael Bloomberg expands influence network within Democratic party:
A few snippets from assorted Grauniad articles about antics in the States:
● White House blocks Fauci testimony as Trump welcomes Senate return: “White House said it would be for senior member of the taskforce to discuss response in House hearing”. In contrast, defunding WHO, using an implausible conspiracy theory to blame China, and not doing much of anything expect lying & profiteering is very much productive. How’s that bleach-fueled internal UV glow working? Some more from the article:
● Auschwitz memorial condemns presence of Nazi slogan at US anti-lockdown rally: “ on sign at Illinois demonstration against state’s coronavirus measures”. It’s actually a bit worse, as the article explains:
● Florida man stalks beach as Grim Reaper to protest reopening amid pandemic (images (plural) at link):
The Grauniad’s current main pandemic live blog notes:
A Mysterious, COVID-Linked Surge In Heart Symptoms Has Forced Cardiologists To Adapt
TPM link
More at the link, including graphs of mortality data.
Steve Bell in the Grauniad (cartoons, should be viewed in order): 1st, Donald Trump’s medicine backdown; then, 2nd, Donald Trump’s bleach of an idea to defeat corona; and finally, 3rd, Donald Trump’s Mary Poppins moment.
Lynna@293, That excerpt reminds me of this Grauniad article, More cases of rare syndrome in children reported globally (29-April-2020):
Despite the coronavirus pandemic, Republican state legislators are still looking for ways to deprive people of their right to vote. (This remind me of Mitch McConnell’s determination to carry on despite the coronavirus risks, as detailed in comments 280 and 291.)
Hegeman is obviously an anti-immigrant fanatic. He is Missouri’s Stephen Miller. Hegeman lies as readily as Trump does.
TPM link
And, why is Hegeman’s bill named “Clean Missouri”? Sounds racist.
Follow-up to comment 296.
From the readers comments:
Bad journalism from Newsweek … well, maybe it is not even journalism. The headline is particularly misleading.
Link
Texas:
Link
From Hillary Clinton:
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1256598372179423232
Image can be viewed at the link.
New White House Press Secretary Vows “I Will Never Lie to You” Before Telling a Few Lies
That’s not all the FBI note said. For context, see comment 230.
Oh, that’s not good!
Washington Post link
Coronavirus woes raise Democratic chances of taking US Senate:
France24 just did a report on the situation in Russia, where apparently, e.g., few hospitals in Moscow have ICUs, and the hastily-installed ones are appallingly inadequate — lack of equipment and even dirty — and very poor to non-existent confinement / isolation measures. Plus a lack of PPE, possibly unreliable tests (resulting in dubious statistics), and so on. They interviewed a number of health-care workers (all(?) in Moscow), all of whom requested anonymity and so had their appearances and voices distorted. I cannot find a video of this report on the site, but this older video, Russia sees record one-day increase in Covid-19 cases (20-April-2020) touches on some of issues reported.
blf @304, it almost doesn’t seem possible, but Russia is fucking up even more than Hair Furor of the USA when it comes to handling the coronavirus pandemic. No wonder Russian hospitals are becoming super-spreaders of the virus. I feel sorry for the health-care workers.
In Hair Furor news, as reported by Daniel Dale:
No leadership and no plan: is Trump about to fail the US on coronavirus testing?:
I see that Nerd posted up-thread that he received Trump’s stimulus letter, and that he promptly shredded it. That made me smile.
Here’s another response:
Link
I like this return-to-sender response.
Chris Riddell in the Grauniad, The end of the old order (cartoon): “Rough winds do shake / The darling buds of May …”.
Follow-up to @268, from the Grauniad’s current main pandemic live blog:
Donald Trump’s four-step plan to reopen the US economy — and why it will be lethal (emboldening in the original):
Here in France, I just made an on-line appointment to collect my two free masks next week. Since the seaside village I live in is in a so-called “Orange” zone, the local council is now making contingency plans for a more limited lifting of the lockdown on 11th May than they’d apparently originally anticipated. Note that they are being fairly open about it… and speaking of being open, apparently the original map of French Red / Orange / Green zones had some errors, which They™ admitted (albeit I haven’t seen any explanation of what happened). (And whilst doing some “spring cleaning” I also found my credit card I’d mislaid perhaps three weeks ago… Yeah!)
Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren co-authored an editorial titled, “There’s no oversight of coronavirus relief — because that’s what Trump wants.”
Miami Herald link
There’s a lot of “we” in that opinion piece.
blf @310, congratulations on completing your spring cleaning, and on finding your credit card. Great accomplishments! Sounds like your credit card was lost for a long enough period of time for any virus still living on it to have died. I have been neglecting my spring cleaning in favor of working outside in my garden. But now I’m looking around the house and seeing that things are in a sorry state indeed. I know what to do next … go outside and work in the garden.
In other news: “Second ‘accusation’ Against Biden Goes Down in Flames”
Link
I don’t know if “goes down in flames” is an apt description or not. We’re not done with this. No matter what the facts are, it is clear that Republicans will continue to push stories about Joe Biden having inappropriate interactions with women.
ALEC [American Legislative Exchange Council] is playing a big role in pushing lawmakers to reopen the economy.
Long-time readers of this thread will recognize ALEC as a bad actor.
Link
Trump ignored calls for unity and complained once again about being impeached.
Here is Trump’s reply:
Commentary:
Link
From former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb:
Link
The total number of new cases of coronavirus infection are still rising in about twenty states, including: Illinois, Texas, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Idaho, and more. At the same time, many states across the USA are slowly starting to reopen. There is a patchwork approach that I fear is going to guarantee failure to control the epidemic. Sarah Cammarata, writing for Politico, noted this reality, and I am paraphrasing her conclusion.
Northeast states band together to buy protective gear
Lynna@312, I didn’t “finish” my “spring cleaning”, more just scored a significant find under relatively recent stratum. Having said that, I now have evidence there is, at least in some parts of the lair, an actual floor; confirmation awaits further evacuations. Ceilings remain hypothetical. (Ceilings on the lair that is; a ceiling on my credit card very much exists.)
Lynna wrote at 305:
Actually, I suspect plenty of tinpot dictatorships across the world are fucking up their response worse than US, and most of them have fewer healthcare resources to begin with.
As of now, US response remains the most notorious failure internationally (and not just to its own citizens) because the US is a very large and influential country, and because it has a uniquely contrasted free media against authoritarian policies. The US media industry has very successfully marketed itself (together with knowledge of the English language, and recent social media connections) to the global audience, grabbing everyone’s attention to US political failures, which are reported in excruciating detail, in a language much of the world understands without translation.
34 days of pandemic: Inside Trump’s desperate attempts to reopen America.
Washington Post link
A serious case of alternative facts!
More at the link. The article is thorough, and it is well-written. There’s not a “Noble” prize for journalism, as Trump claimed, but there are Pulitizer prizes, and this article may well qualify. It was difficult to choose excerpts from the article. The text posted here is choppy and sometimes lacking in details. I suggest reading the original.
lumipuna @318, good point. Thanks.
blf @317, I’m glad, in a way, to hear that your spring cleaning is not complete. That makes my inside-the-house situation look less bad. I did clean the bathroom. I’m calling that good for now.
In other news, many people are slipping off their already-precarious perch on the lowest rungs of the ladder to middle-class status. I am one of them, so this account by Ray Suarez touched me:
Washington Post link
Suarez emphasized the plight of being an older man. For the most part, I didn’t find that helpful, and I left those parts out
I focused on the more universal aspects of his piece. Being afraid of being poor may mean you have been poor before. You know what that’s like. Ditto for not having access to health care. Ditto for being homeless. Anybody can slide into poverty, including someone as well-known as Ray Suarez.
On Fox News, Dr. Deborah Birx did not agree with Trump.
Washington Post link
Lynna@320, I cleaned half my bathroom… does that count? (Ok, ok, and other places, like most of the kitchen and perhaps half of the main room (the remaining uncleaned half of which is mostly either under the furniture or else is the suspected location of the ceiling)).
Not-at-all jokingly, I’m concerned to hear about your situation in @321. At the moment, I cannot think of anything concert & legal & plausible I can do to help. The mildly deranged penguin suggests a trebuchet-full of cheese, and another of, ah, well, well-rotten shite, your choice as to the targets… (I’d suggest deferring, her aim isn’t all that great; in addition, whilst she’s unlikely to get the two payloads mixed up, the same cannot be said of the two targets.)
re Lynna @322:
I don’t think that they will feel guilty at all. That is how clueless and heartless that they are. They just don’t give a good god-damned because their “rights” are being violated.
QFT.
The current slang term for the Covid-19 virus is…Boomer Remover.
That is what passes for humor these days, especially for the right wingnuts.
I do want to thank Lynna, SC, and the rest for this thread.
I don’t post here because I don’t have anything much to add.
But I do read it every day.
And everyone is hurting these days one way or another.
Here’s a link to the May 4 Guardian coronavirus liveblog.
Also today, Moscow Times – “Russia’s Coronavirus Cases Rise By Over 10K for Second Straight Day”:
“Third Russian Doctor Falls From Hospital Window After Coronavirus Complaint”:
Al Jazeera – “Brazil’s Bolsonaro: Turning COVID-19 denial into media spectacle”: “Bolsonaro and COVID-19 misinformation. Plus, how well has WHO performed as a key information source during the pandemic?”
The 26-minute video also includes a short report on Pakistan.
Also from AJ – “Brazil’s Bolsonaro rallies the right amid coronavirus criticism”:
Joy Reid yesterday showed video of a woman at one of the pro-virus rallies this week, without a mask, getting in the face of a reporter and screaming at her. It’s not an assault like the one described on the Brazilian photographer, but I think this behavior should be understood as some form of assault in the current context.
Baltimore Sun:
State delegates, pastors and businesses file lawsuit against Hogan seeking to end coronavirus restrictions
And elsewhere:
In New Jersey a priest has filed a federal lawsuit against Gov. Phil Murphy, saying that an emergency executive order amid the state’s first public health emergency is unconstitutional for restricting gatherings including religious services.
An Evangelical Christian church in Illinois similarly sued Illinois Governor JB Pritzker for a stay-at-home executive order in effect the same day as Murphy’s.
More and more of these, all with the blessing of Barr’s DOJ.
blf @323, oh, yes, half a bathroom counts when it comes to cleaning.
Thanks for your concern. Not much anyone can do. I am happy to report that more work-via-internet came my way this morning as one of my clients revived a previously cancelled project. I will have more money coming in soon.
In other news, as part of his blame-anybody-but-me routine, Trump is now blaming the intelligence agencies for giving him weak warnings about the coronavirus threat. Trump doesn’t read the daily briefings sent to him by the intelligence agencies. How would he know if the warnings were weak or strong.
The one thing “strong” about Trump is the personal force field he uses to deflect facts.
Link
I’m betting that more details will emerge soon. And those details will show that Trump is lying.
Update on the Tara Reade/Joe Biden issue:
The Senate is saying they don’t have the right to release any documents from Biden’s 1990’s Senate career, so resolution of this issue may take awhile.
Biden is still working to get the Senate records released.
re Lynna @329:
I would bet that The Orange Toddler-Tyrant will say that those PDBs are classified and he will block any attempt to release them.
Deaths from COVID-19 are projected to increase to 3,000 per day by June 1.
TPM link
The CDC document can also be read at the link.
From the readers comments:
Oh, FFS. Steve Mnuchin is a dunderhead, a dangerous dunderhead. I wonder what Dr. Fauci thinks of this.
From the readers comments:
Yeah, he did it. Trump sat down with Fox News hosts at the Lincoln Memorial in order to spout his usual lies, and in order to add to his compendium of self-congratulatory officious statements.
Link
From the readers comments:
Irony and/or hypocrisy alert:
Link
Trump takes Social Security hostage in his latest COVID-19 stimulus demand.
Link
Matthew Miller: “The realization that we’ve been locked at home for seven weeks merely to get to a point of treading water – and that we don’t have any national plan to do better than that – is just maddening. Just a historic failure of leadership.”
I’ve been angrier this week than I was before, and I was plenty angry before. It’s murderous ineptitude, corruption, deception, callousness, and malice. It’s failure at a scale previously unimaginable in the US.
SC @337:
Yes. I agree. And Trump is still actively promoting actions that will make things even worse. It’s maddening.
From Politico: “The verdict is in: China has outperformed, while the once-respected American system has disastrously faltered.”
Link
USS Theodore Roosevelt sailors still showing virus symptoms despite month of isolation.
The news is the latest setback for the crew after an outbreak of Covid-19 forced it to halt its Pacific deployment.
It ain’t over ’til it’s over.
The details of the experiences of the USS Theodore Roosevelt sailors should be another warning to governors in the USA. They should not be reopening so soon. They should not assume that the virus won’t make a comeback.
G liveblog:
Guess who chose not to be part of the cooperative effort.
Yikes. More consequences we did not foresee.
The closure of meatpacking plants will lead to the overcrowding of animals. The implications are horrible.
Millions of animals are being killed and dumped in landfills.
Canada succeeded on coronavirus where America failed. Why?
Canada beat the US on coronavirus because its political system works.
See the link for charts and graphs.
Lynna@338 and SC@337:
Indeed. Whilst I am a States citizen, and was educated there, this is one of those times when I’m very glad I’m not living in the States. Or, for that matter, the UK, another place I also used to live. Here (France), despite a tardy start and some ineptness with testing, reporting, and masks, They™ are science-led, admit and rectify mistakes, plus deploying and (mostly†) supporting a world-class health care system (to the extent of, and this continues to be my favourite example, deploying previously planned-and-tested high-speed rolling TGV train ICU hospitals to relieve stress on the more-affected regions by moving non–Covid-19 patients to less-affected areas).
Locally, the village council is distributing two free masks to each inhabitant (I will be collecting mine later this week), and is also providing free collection services for food & other essentials for those who are strictly confined or otherwise unable to do their essentials shopping. And is publishing daily updates on the situation (my gripe here is they aren’t reporting on cases, albeit it is known this area is not too badly affected). Technically, last I checked, I’m in an “Orange” zone, but noticed this morning the council is saying “it”(the village?) is a “Green” zone — I still haven’t sorted that one out yet…
† I slightly qualify the “supporting a world-class health care system” because apparently has been a series of long-term issues with nursing / care homes. I continue to remain ignorant of the details, which I (broadly) understand to be a case of “last-in-queue”-ism…
About Dr. Deborah Birx’s appearances on the Sunday shows:
Wonkette link
As raven @325, and johnson catman @324, already noted, Dr. Birx is being naive when she talks about protestors infecting their grandparents.
ITV YouTube video – “‘We’re playing with fire’: Belarus life continuing as normal despite coronavirus spread.”
3-minute video. Belarus is going ahead with their big public celebration of VE Day on the 9th.
Thanks, raven @ #325.
Andy Lack is out at NBC (still all men in the top positions).
Shaunna Thomas:
As expected, the first of many.
Religion Clause blog:
DOJ Files Statement of Interest Supporting Church’s Challenge To Virginia’s COVID-19 Restrictions
Details and link to full text of DOJ filing at the link above.
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
Intercept – “Trump Fires Inspector General Ahead of Damning Whistleblower Complaint About Bogus Coronavirus Cures”:
Bright already has good whistleblower attorneys, and congress and the public are aware of the complaint. Seems too late for Trump to try to bury it by firing the IG.
More re #340: here’s a list of the world leaders who participated in the pledging event.
re SC @350:
Thank goodness for the US healthcare system of assuring the maximum profit so executives and shareholders can make some money. (/s)
.
Can we get some guillotines up and running, please?
Joyce Karam earlier today:
State Dept. has now released the full transcript, with the repeated questioning and repeated dodging. The reporters on this call were impressively dogged.
TPM – “The Bigoted, Conspiratorial Rants of Rudy Giuliani’s Radio Show”:
Big Gretch. (Detroit rapper GMac Cash is the artist.)
Rep. Malinowski responding to Pompeo’s Twitter thread: “Pompeo is teaching a master class in how to take a good cause – holding China’s Communist Party accountable – and tainting it with cheap slurs (China ‘infecting the world’, ‘Wuhan virus’) that make it impossible to rally allies to our side.”
re SC @356: The US does not have any more allies. The administration of The Orange Toddler-Tyrant has isolated the US from the rest of the world.
“European Commission President – and physician – [Ursula von der Leyen] reacts to President Trump’s disinfectant comments: ‘Never, ever do this. This is dangerous, plain and simple. It can be deadly’.”
Video atl.
“IHME just updated their model, and showed a sharp increase in the number of [US] projected deaths to 134,475. This is in addition to an earlier CDC model that was reported on by @nytimes that showed cases (and deaths) continuing to increase through May.”
“Right now outside the Massachusetts State House.
This crowd is calling for the Governor to reopen the state.
While packed tightly together, with many not wearing masks.”
Aerial video atl.
WaPo:
A security guard was fatally shot for enforcing the Michigan mask policy, prosecutor says
By Meryl Kornfield
May 4, 2020 at 12:14 p.m. PDT
McClatchy – “FBI seizes four pipe bombs from home of Colorado anti-lockdown protester, feds say”:
WTF!?
‘It makes no sense’: Feds consider relaxing infection control in US nursing homes
raven @325, thank you! It’s good to know that people find this thread useful.
In other news, Mike Pompeo is being especially trumpian of late:
NY Times link
More details:
I saw video of Trump saying that. He looked and sounded like he was lying.
It’s about time.
The quoted text is from Politico.
Good news:
Quoted text is from the Associated Press.
OMFG.
Dinesh D’Souza is dishing out dangerous conspiracy theories and/or misinformation:
The quoted text is from D’Souza’s twitter feed.
Commentary from Wonkette:
Link
re tomh @361 and SC @362: Violence like this is the result of the federal administration not promoting a science-based policy but instead allowing bullshit, conspiracy, and falsehoods to dominate the narrative. I expect even more and worse violence because the message from The Orange Toddler-Tyrant is the opposite of what is needed for our country and for the world. He is the root cause of everything that is wrong in the US right now.
What Trump said:
Reality check, as presented by The Washington Post:
Link
ESPN – “Power rankings, top players, key storylines and more: Everything you need for KBO [Korea Baseball Organization] opening day.”
I think I’m going to root for the Kia Tigers, for no rational reason whatsoever. The first game airs live in a couple hours. The games are all in the middle of the night ET in the US, so that should be interesting.
Tweet o’ the day.
Endorse.
From the article linked @ #372:
Lemme guess. He isn’t talking about the most beloved person in his life in an ICU barely hanging onto life so that someone can get a haircut, right?
Yes! I am by no means sure the origin of the pandemic wasn’t an accidental escape from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Not that I know of any direct evidence that it was, but SARS apparently escaped a Chinese lab twice (and I’ve read somewhere, twice more from labs elsewhere), and the last smallpox death resulted from an escape from a lab in Birmingham, UK; such things happen. It’s certainly a remarkable coincidence, if SARS-CoV-2 did result from the Wuhan “wet market”, that the only level-4 biosecurity lab in China, which is also a centre for research into bat coronaviruses, is only a few kilometers from the first kinown outbreak. But even if it was a lab escape, that’s going to be very difficult to prove – the lab authorities themselves may not know it. They have said SARS-CoV-2 is not a virus they knew of before the outbreak, but assuming that’s true (and there appears to be no evidence it isn’t), couldn’t one of their cultures or experimental animals have been infected with it, alongside the virus they knew was there? If anyone can tell me this isn’t feasible, and explain why, I’d certainly be glad to hear it. Meanwhile, the Chinese authorities are certainly responsible for an initial cover-up, but that’s absolutely no excuse for the European and American government blunders, dishonesty and callousness that have already killed some 200,000 people – and that’s a very conservative estimate. The UK death toll, for example, is probably nearer 50,000 than the official 28,000.
More UK coronavirus-related news. A contact tracing app is about to be trialled on the Isle of Wight (a small island off the south coast which , as it happens, was the first place in the UK to be cleared of the eponymous predatory vegetables in John Wyndhams’ Day of the Triffids. But the app is already being criticised with regard to both efficacy and privacy. In other unsurprising developments, the government appears to be using the crisis to outsource NHS public health duties to private corporations, and a company linked both to “Vote Leave” (hence Dominic Cummings, johnson’s pet supergenius, at least by his own estimation), and to Peter Thiel, has gained multiple AI-related contracts with the NHS, often without any competitive tendering.
Finally, I second raven’s thanks to Lynna and SC for their incredibly useful work on this thread.
One more item from the UK. My son is an engineer, and one of the volunteers at Edinburgh Shield Force, a group of engineers, academics and others turning out medical face shields for the NHS at a local cultural centre. Probably those who can afford to contribute money already have more local organizations they can support, but just in case someone has a personal attachment to Edinburgh, the NHS, or even engineers, they do have a crowdfunder (details at the link).
Success! One of the more annoying things about living in Europe — I suppose this is a counterpoint to @343 — is “European” makes / brands of peanut butter aren’t, and the (few) imported USAlien brands are even more alien — whilst there are some decent almond butters, forget about peanut butter. A few weeks ago, I inquired at a organics shop I frequent whether or not they had any nut butters. “No, but I will be making some next week.” Eh? Ok, thanks… The next week I bought some, and what intrigued me was the method used: Basically, put some peanuts into a grinder (food processor) and grind the peanuts into mush. It was superb — possibly the best I’ve had in a long, long, time — and also got me wondering: “Hang on, I‘ve got a food processor, so could I…?”
Yes. No peanuts (didn’t have any), but a mix of Brazil nuts, Almonds, and Walnuts, with a touch of olive oil, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Yes!
(The mildy deranged penguin points out that since cheese was nor mentioned, this comment is probably not “Political” and certainly not for “All the Time”, but clearly is “Madness”.)
re blf @378: My wife gets her peanut butter from the co-op where we shop. They have a machine that grinds it from fresh peanuts and dispenses it like a soft ice cream machine into plastic containers (which we bring back each time). It is very good peanut butter! They even have a choice of smooth or crunchy.
johnson catman@379, That sounds like precisely what happened in the local organics shop, albeit I’ve not no idea if crunchy is possible / offered. And it was dispesed into an obviously recyclable / reusable glass jar. (The home-made mixed-nuts butter I just made is “crunchy”, albeit for a small value of “crunch”, and decanted into a different glass jar.)
Trump rails at as dissident Republican ad gets under his skin:
@Lynna #366
In related good news, NRA members say “they’ll never visit Canada again because of the assault rifle ban.”
Presumptiously speaking for the vast majority of Canadians, I have two words for the NRA: “win-win”.
Moscow Times – “Russia’s Coronavirus Cases Rise By Over 10K for Third Straight Day”:
Intercept – “Brazil’s President Goes to War With Democratic Institutions — and Hopes the Military Has His Back”:
re SC @384: WOW! No wonder The Orange Toddler-Tyrant loves him some Bolsonaro. They are twins in different hemispheres of the world.
Here’s a link to the May 5 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
Also from the Guardian – “WHO seeks early coronavirus cases as Merkel warns over German lockdown”:
More updates on various countries atl.
Guardian:
“Chile: pandemic highlights health crisis as lockdown halts inequality protests”:
“Venezuela detains two Americans allegedly involved in failed raid to remove Maduro”:
Frank Bruni interviews Laurie Garrett in the NYT (from Saturday) – “She Predicted the Coronavirus. What Does She Foresee Next?”:
More atl. (The Farzan talk @ #172 above leaves me with a little more optimism concerning treatments and vaccines, but the overall situation is bleak and enraging.)
This is great.
quotetheunquote @382, [laugh], yes, totally a win-win.
KG @376, thanks!
SC @384, I see that Bolsonaro is firing all the people that could have held him to account. Just like Hair Furor.
Follow up to SC @356 and KG @375: Chris Hayes presented an excellent analysis of the Trump administration desperately grasping at straws, trying to find someone to blame. “They don’t even seem to understand what they’re saying. They just want a convenient scapegoat.” Chris was particularly good at deflating Pompeo’s balloon that he floated about the “escape from the Wuhan lab” theory. The video is about 5 minutes long.
I meant to add in comment 390 that Chris Hayes also presented a helpful survey of rightwing hosts (mostly Fox News) promoting the unproven theory that “there’s evidence,” or “there’s indisputable evidence that this virus escaped from the lab.” No. There is, so far, no evidence.
Bellingcat thread on the WTF coup attempt in Venezuela @ #387 above.
Lynna @ #s 390 and 391, I thought the whole episode of All In was quite good last night, including his interview with Ed Yong, which I can’t find video of, unfortunately. (I also liked Yong’s room.)
Oh, and thanks, KG @ #376!
“News w/@maggieNYT @SangerNYT The White House’s coronavirus task force is being wound down in the coming weeks without a clear idea of what, if anything, might replace it”
NYT link atl. Trump has to be made to resign.
“The White House says Fauci couldn’t testify in the House because he was busy dealing with the pandemic.
Trump says Fauci couldn’t testify in the House because ‘the House is a set up. The House is a bunch of Trump-haters’.”
“Trump complains about tough questions from two standout women correspondents, [Paula Reid and Weijia Jiang of CBS], and suggests they should act more like ‘50s housewives.
‘It wasn’t Donna Reed, I can tell you that’, he said, referring to TV housewife actress.”
Weijia Jiang: “The President told me to be ‘nice and easy’ three out of the last four times I asked him a question.”
“Opposition to reopening among Americans in new WaPo/U.Md. poll:
82% movie theaters
78% gyms
74% dine-in restaurants
70% gun stores
69% barber shops/hair salons”
From SC’s link in comment 371:
An update on the fate of the Affordable Care Act, the current case before the Supreme Court, and some perhaps surprising differences of opinion between Trump and Attorney General William Barr:
Link
Team Trump is planning to sideline/disband the COVID-19 task force. Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic rages on in the USA.
TPM link
Follow-up to comment 401.
From the readers comments:
“Iowa now revealing workplaces with large outbreaks. Perry’s Tyson plant, which has avoided publicly disclosing their numbers, has 730 cases, or 58% of their total plant employees testing positive.”
From Kerry Eleveld:
This sounds like a good idea: The Obamas will hold virtual commencement ceremony for graduating seniors nationwide.
Link
Jared Kushner … what an arrogant fuckup:
Link
Was Donald Trump Good at Baseball?
Trump has long claimed he could have gone pro. We looked into it.
Link
Trump like about Willie McCovey? Surely that’s a major league sin.
Tweet (thread) o’ the day.
In comment 407, “Trump like about Willie McCovey” should have been “Trump lied about Willie McCovey.”
Follow-up to johnson catman @352.
Washington Post link
“U.S. companies cut thousands of workers while continuing to reward shareholders during pandemic.”
Speaking of shareholders, five companies paid a combined $700 million to shareholders while cutting jobs and closing plants.
Fired whistleblower alleges dire warnings on mask shortages were ignored by Trump administration
Update to #393: still missing the video of the interview, but here’s a shot of Yong’s room (the room/voice/accent combination had a calming effect in spite of the content of what he was saying).
@ #398, Poll on reopening.
Some states closed gun stores, but most allowed them to remain open, for, as Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said, the businesses are essential because if there’s a “break down of society” people need to be able to defend themselves.
Also on guns, SCOTUS took no action at their conference last Friday on the ten 2nd Amendment cases that had been distributed. Kavanaugh is chomping at the bit to chew on the 2nd Amendment. It won’t be long.
Reuters
Bonus from the linked article:
teehee
azcentral:
* Commenters point out they were contaminating the masks in the process.
The facility required masks, with a sign to that effect. The CEO giving the tour was also not covered… and can be seen handling a produced mask, bare-handed, to point out its features, before dropping it back in the pile. Trump shouts over the music to a worker, “How many do ya make a day?” across the pile.
** Correction: The one seen handling a mask was Tony Stallings, Honeywell’s VP of Integrated Supply Chain. The CEO was present too, also not masked.
Imagine if only [insert non-white race here] people were found doing protests and stuff like this
re Lynna @407:
Pro prospect indeed!
He made a donation to refurbish a classroom. How generous of him! The plaque probably cost as much as his donation.
Actually, the message was obviously to “lie big”.
re Saad @416: That man who refused to wear a mask and subsequently wiped his nose on the shirt of the employee was charged with misdemeanor assault and battery. If he had tried to do that to me, I would have been charged with felony assault and battery.
.
I see bunches of people who apparently find wearing a mask properly just too damn hard. They wear it over their mouth but leave their nose exposed. What fucking good is it doing when not used properly? None at all. But now, calling people out for not wearing a mask might just get you killed. Peeple iz stoopid!
Moscow Times – “Russian Culture Minister Contracts Coronavirus”:
More than 10,000 new cases were identified yesterday, for the fourth day in a row. Mishustin was “feeling normal” yesterday, according to his spokesman (see #383 above), and today he’s been hospitalized.
AP – “In fight over Brazil leader’s virus test, crisis looms”:
As noted in the article @ #384 above, at the pro-dictatorship rally the other day, they (Bolsonaro and his mostly Evangelical followers) flew Brazilian, US, and Israeli flags. This article in the Times of Israel, “Brazilian Jews criticize waving of Israeli flags at ‘anti-democratic’ protests,” describes statements from organizations representing the Jewish community in Brazil, who argue that the community is politically diverse and that the flag of a “vibrant democracy” like Israel shouldn’t be flown at an anti-democracy rally. Meanwhile, the Israeli ambassador to Brazil “shared a post on social media that was supportive of the pro-Bolsonaro demonstrators.”
RFE/RL – “Lukashenka Wants World Leaders To Mark Victory Day In Minsk Amid Coronavirus”:
Here’s a link to the May 6 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
Guardian – “Calls for inquiry as UK reports highest Covid-19 death toll in Europe”:
Jimmy Kimmel: “I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency than Donald Trump not wearing a face mask to a face mask factory while the song ‘Live and Let Die’ blares in the background.”
Real-time arguments on Health Care Law Birth Control Mandate Exemption Expansion from the Supreme Court here.
LOL.
New York magazine – “The Dumbest Aspects of the Apparent Coup Attempt in Venezuela”:
Politics.co.uk – “Closing down criticism: No.10’s campaign to silence the outrage over covid”:
“Pompeo on the bizarre Venezuela raid, says there was ‘no US government direct involvement in this operation’.
Then added: ‘If we had been involved it would have gone differently’.”
“no US government direct involvement”
Politico – “Trump touted reopening. Privately, his team sounded alarms.”:
Much more atl.
Hahaha.
Guardian – “Brazil: largest rise in Covid-19 deaths follows Bolsonaro ‘worst is over’ claim”:
“Hong Kong has no new coronavirus cases today, and that now feels so normal that I forgot to tweet about it. 17 days without a local case.”
BBC – “New Banksy artwork appears at Southampton hospital”:
Image at the link.
SC @426, one of the comments on that LOL thread was “Coup de disgrace.”
Of course these Silvercorp dunderheads are connected to trumpian cult followers, (including Trump’s former bodyguard). Of course they can’t create a website without plagiarizing, blatantly plagiarizing, government websites. Of course Pompeo would say that the U.S. government was not “directly” involved. Sheesh!
Even during pandemic, Trump focuses on border wall paint color
In April, as the pandemic claims tens of thousands of American lives, Trump turned his attention on what color to paint steel border slats.
Bits and pieces of campaign news:
Well, that looks good. The trend, as seen by the polls, is going in the right direction.
Link
I don’t think any race is a “lost cause” at this point.
Madness.
Oh, Kellyanne Conway, please stop talking.
OMFG.
Link
President Obama characterized the Republican’s bogus Biden-Ukraine “investigation” as being part of “Russian disinformation.” Yes, that seems right.
TPM link
You can also read the entire letter from the “Office of Barack and Michelle Obama” at the link.
Trump changed his mind. Now he says he won’t end the White House COVID-19 Task Force, but will continue it’s existence indefinitely.
Yeah, right. He wants to sort of neuter the task force, but pretend that he is not doing so. He also wants to back away from the task force a bit after his disastrous inject-disinfectant-into-humans press briefing. But he also wants to pretend that his administration is actually doing the work that properly addressing the pandemic would require. It’s laughable.
Just as an aside, Trump threw Pence under the bus again. Pence had been making statements in which he tried to provide an excuse for Trump dissolving the task force.
From the readers comments.
Trump wants the wealthy to benefit even more from the coronavirus pandemic:
Link
OMFG.
What Trump said on May 5, yesterday:
Commentary:
Link
https://twitter.com/AjitPaiFCC/status/1258083973307269128
Oh, FFS. Bad consequences of Team Trump’s immigration policies:
Link
G liveblog:
Hey folks, been a while since I piped up but I keep reading and admire what you do as always in this thread.
I find this study interesting. It’s certainly plausible that the disease is much less transmissible outdoors, and this study seems to back that up: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.04.20053058v1
With that in mind, is this not another arrow in the quiver of mitigation? Ok, if you must gather, do it outdoors. It’s summer time and by the fall we’ll maybe have a better handle at retrying tracing and isolation.
Do any of the very scientifically minded folks here, including PZ, have anything to say about this study? I’m not JAQing off here, I honestly don’t have the expertise to say one way or another but it’s making the rounds on Twitter so I want to know before I back something that’s BS.
Yep, Team Trump still plans to take healthcare insurance away from millions of people … during the coronavirus pandemic.
Link
Team Trump’s incompetence strikes again: “Instead of supplies to fight COVID-19, Native American health center says it received body bags.”
Link
From Wonkette: “Trump Calls Dead Americans A Blue State Scam To Get Government Cheese”
Link
ETB@447. I read the article. I’m a retired chemist, not an epidemiologist. This was a preliminary study, with low numbers of cases, compared to a large scale study with thousands of cases. The conclusions seemed to jibe with the reports I’ve seen on the method of transmission. Being outdoors will reduce he likelihood of transmission unless the people are close or touching. Consider rugby scrums versus a foursome of golfers. In the scrum, people are touching and breathing in each others faces as they fight for the ball. The foursome playing golf usually maintain a social distance from one another. Both are outdoor sports. But one (rugby) is much more likely to lead transmission than a round of golf if someone is infectious. The article is not the last word that being outdoors per se means one is safe. Context is required.
“Trump rebukes a nurse who says ‘PPE has been sporadic, but it’s been manageable’.
‘Sporadic for you, but not sporadic for a lot of other people’, Trump replies. ‘That was fine, but I have heard we have a tremendous supply to almost all places’.”
Video clip of this appalling, petulant display atl.
From Wonkette:
Bright reported more pre-coronavisus misdeeds involving Kadlec and Clerici, details omitted here.
Link
Follow-up to comment 453.
JFC. This is so predictable.
Link
[head/desk]
This morning the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act’s “birth-control mandate,” which generally requires employers to provide their female employees with health insurance that includes access to certain forms of contraceptives. In 2017, the Trump administration issued new rules that expanded an exemption from the mandate and allowed private employers with religious or moral objections to opt out of providing coverage without any notice. Two states, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, challenged the 2017 rules.
The audio and transcript (PDF) are here.
An analysis with excerpts is at Howe on the Court.
@451 Nerd, I agree. Context is everything. My comparison is 10k people spread out in an arena meant to hold 40k, outdoors, we can be social and get out of the house, but keep that distance. This should be a reasonable compromise.
re erikthebassist @456: Good luck enforcing that kind of distance at an event. It may be a reasonable compromise, but when you have armed people who won’t wear masks invading a state legislature building or rallying in public spaces because their “rights” are being violated, or people crowding public beaches and parks because they don’t have the inclination to work towards a common goal, I don’t think you would have much success keeping the space in an arena. Too many people do not know how to be reasonable.
@457 so we’re resorting to “don’t bother” over “trying to illuminate the path going forward”. Sadly, I think you are right, this is what we’ve come to. We have options but screaming and yelling being right is blinding us to them. Cooperation is a dead idea. :(
Humor from Andy Borowitz, writing for The New Yorker:
Link
WaPo:
Top Republican fundraiser and Trump ally named postmaster general, giving president new influence over Postal Service
A top donor to President Trump and the Republican National Committee will be named the new head of the Postal Service, putting a top ally of the president in charge of an agency where Trump has long pressed for major changes in how it handles its business.
[…]
The action will install a stalwart Trump ally to lead the Postal Service, which he has railed against for years, and probably move him closer than ever before to forcing the service to renegotiate its terms with companies and its own union workforce. Trump’s Treasury Department and the Postal Service are in the midst of a negotiation over a $10 billion line of credit approved as part of coronavirus legislation in March.
[…]
Rep. Gerald E. Connolly (D-Va.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the Postal Service, denounced the move as a reward by Trump to a “partisan donor.”
“The Postal Service is in crisis and needs real leadership and someone with knowledge of the issues,” Connolly said. “This crony doesn’t cut it.”
[…]
re tomh @460: Just following the standard policy of this administration of putting someone totally unqualified in charge of a government agency who also, coincidentally, favors dismantling that agency.
As I predicted @ #237 above, but even sooner than I’d expected – Yahoo – “Russia overtakes Germany, France after record rise in coronavirus cases”:
Brazil – Yahoo – “Brazil hits record for coronavirus deaths, raising chances of lockdowns”:
Latest headline this morning.
After everything that has happened, Trump may well be reelected.
I don’t know what to say about this poll.
The USA seems to have a death wish.
Since I live here, it includes me whether I like it or not.
Earlier this week (see @304) I summarised a France24 report on the poor state of hospitals in Moscow / Russia, and exceptionally poor Covid-19 response. At the time, I could not find the video on their site. I now have, Moscow hospitals struggle with late surge in coronavirus cases:
AP – “AP Exclusive: US shelves detailed guide to reopening country”:
Document at the link. From the article:
They keep making this argument, and it’s nonsensical. The whole point of the decision trees is to determine the specific situation and capabilities of the locality and organization. The guide “contained detailed advice for making site-specific decisions” and “offered specific, tailored recommendations for reopening in one place.” It assumes there are differences across localities and organizations, FFS.
Here’s a link to the May 7 Guardian coronavirus world liveblog.
From there:
“Supreme Court unanimously reverses federal convictions of New Jersey officials in Bridgegate case…”
Link to the opinion, written by Kagan, atl. They found that while the actions involved “deception, corruption, abuse of power” they didn’t violate the specific federal property-fraud statutes at issue.
There were more than 3 million jobless claims in the US this week, bringing the growing total to 33 million over the past several weeks. 33 million.
Joyce White Vance: “If you & your son shoot & kill a man jogging down the street, you’re a danger to the community & should be arrested pending charges. If the murder is motivated by racism & state authorities won’t do their job, DOJ has the jurisdiction to indict & arrest.”
(I’m listening to France24 now.) The PM will soon announce details of how France will ease its lockdown starting next Monday, 11th May. The general shape is known — the country is divided in Red & Green zones (the current interim Orange zone disappears) albeit precisely what happens in each zone should be announced, restaurants and bars will not be allowed to open, some shops & schools will, masks are mandatory on public transport (which will be limited, especially long-distance). (He’s speaking now, but there are issues with France24’s simultaneous translation.)
Most (probably by area) of France is “Green”, and if “most” of France stays Green, then it may be possible to open, e.g., restaurants sometime in June. Not so in the Red areas (which includes Paris), albeit different Red areas will be manged differently. In Paris, there will be special measures on public transport.
The Health Minister is now speaking. On the maps: They show the measures of active circulation of the virus (still high in the Paris & Mayotte areas); availability of ICU beds (poor in Paris, Mayotte, and (broadly speaking) Alsace areas); measures of viral testing capacity (“Green” everywhere), “France is ready to test massively”; and then a composite (Paris, and to Paris’ North and East, and Mayotte are all “Red”, the rest of France is “Green”).
Covid-19 symptomatic people “must act, don’t wait” and contact the medical services (and any tests or whatever will be fully covered (i.e., for free)); if infected, your contacts will be traced, and you must stay in strict isolation. If a “serious” contact case, you must isolate and will be tested.
A tax-free bonus of at least 1000€ will be paid to all(?) health staff in the next few weeks.
The Education Minister is now speaking. There will be a phased reopening in Green areas, will assorted additional protective measures. There will be some civic activities, when possible, for students who won’t be returning to school in the next week or so (in addition to continuing remote schooling). Physiological support will be provided to teachers.
The Minister for “Transition”(? Transport?) is now speaking. Local transport should go to c.50% services starting Monday. Regional and long-distance services will still be severely limited, and must(?) be booked in advance. Some measures to reduce car trips (more try not to use your car than anything concrete).
The Interior Minister is now speaking. Whilst a form will not be necessary to go outside the house in your local area, not respecting social distance or not wearing a mask on public transport will be fined. Long-distance travel (over 100km?) will require a form. Some museums will be allowed to reopen, but not cinemas, theatres, and so on; beaches are decided locally. Religious sites remain closed but “discussions” are ongoing. International travel, including within the EU, remains more-or-less the same as currently (for now).
Apparently about c.6% (not sure of what, people? stops?) have been fined.
The Finance Minister is now speaking. Estimates 400,000 businesses will be allowed to reopen, provided protective protocols are respected. The “Soladitry fund” supporting businesses will continue to at least the end of May, even if the business reopens. Certain taxes will not be levied (didn’t catch all the details).
The Labour Minister is now speaking. Protections (masks, social distancing, &tc) are mandatory for staff, visitors, customers, etc. Continue to work-from-home if possible. For those who cannot work at home, work hours should be staggered (a concrete suggestion regarding traffic!).
The PM is now concluding. Plans will have to adapt, with the next major review before the end of the May. It’s possible lockdown measures will have to resume.
Taking questions… Some confusion about Red and Green area differences.
A critical indicator is the number of positive tests. Contact-tracing data will not be retained.
(France24 has now cut away…)
─────────────────────────
An “obvious” flaw is that, at the end of May, when some Red areas may turn Green, they won’t be “as” Green as the areas which are Green now (and remain Green); or more to the point, the “Greener” areas may be able to relax restrictions further, but the just-turned-Green won’t be as relaxed; i.e., there will be shades of Greeness. (The PM, in his questions, as I was writing this up, acknowledged the problem.)
Locally, I collected my free masks yesterday. Now I have to learn how to use them…
Also yesterday, I finally got Fibre-into-the lair installed, boosting my ‘Net speeds by at least an order of magnitude. Amusingly, I debugged the final problem when it wouldn’t, at first, content, and the technicians were baffled.
NYT:
The Trump Administration Is Reversing Nearly 100 Environmental Rules.
Full list at the link.
NBC is reporting that a personal valet to Trump (presumably a Navy steward), who serves him meals and doesn’t wear a mask, has tested positive for coronavirus.
The WH argued yesterday, contrary to the Constitution, that the president has virtually unlimited authority to use military force “in order to protect the United States, its allies, and its partners.” In the midst of a pandemic rampaging across the country and killing thousands of people every day, from which he’s doing fuck all to protect anyone.
Guardian – “Covid-19 puts Putin’s power plans on hold and economy in peril”:
“holy shit… Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) tried to bully a local GOP official into committing a crime by submitting false election results.
AUDIO:…”
Audio and Denver Post link atl.
Reuters – “Spokesman for Brazil’s President Bolsonaro tests positive for coronavirus”:
“Florida removed data from the state Department of Health website that showed 171 patients had coronavirus symptoms or positive test results in January and February, before any cases were publicly announced. There has been no explanation for the removal.”
Palm Beach Post link atl.
Great cartoon.
Good ad.
“Here is the link to the CDC document, cited in @AP report, providing step-by-step advice to local authorities on how and when to reopen restaurants and other public places during the still-raging outbreak.
It has been shelved by the Trump administration:…”
Link atl.
Guardian – “Revealed: the secret report that gave ministers warning of care home coronavirus crisis”:
Report and more atl.
Support the Guardian if you can!
Hahahahaha.
Yesterday’s tweet o’ the day.
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by churches against governors, covering just about every state that has restricted religious gatherings, whether in total or by numbers, such as 10 or less. And in Kentucky, the Attorney General has joined churches suing the governor over restrictions, so you have the (Republican) AG pitted against the (Democratic) governor in federal court.
CNN report re #473 – “One of Trump’s personal valets has tested positive for coronavirus”:
It’s amazing how every story about happenings in the WH just screams that Trump is a humongous assclam. In addition to so much else in this one, neither Trump nor any of his coterie thought to offer one word of well wishes to the valet.
Moscow Times – “Belarus Expels Russian Journalist Over ‘Fake’ Coronavirus Report: Media”:
AP – “AP Exclusive: Justice Dept dropping Flynn’s criminal case”:
WaPo:
Trump administration asks Supreme Court to stop release of Mueller material
By Ann E. Marimow and Robert Barnes
May 7, 2020
Re #488:
southpaw:
Susan Hennessey:
They likely have a list of these terrible actions to drop into the news cycle when it’s focused on all of the people dying, their virus-related corruption and failure and indifference, or the valet exhibiting symptoms and testing positive (on the same day as – prior to? – the WH hosting a bunch of nurses in a room where no one was observing proper social distancing). A criminal racket is in charge during a global pandemic.
Follow-up to SC @488 and 490.
This is the dissolution of the justice department. It is no longer an arbiter of justice.
How many people with experience covering Russia and other authoritarian regimes warned us to watch out for the dismantling of the justice system?
Commentary from Steve Benen concerning the dropping of a criminal case against Michael Flynn:
Link
Trump: ‘We make ourselves look bad’ through coronavirus testing
Trump appears to have a problem with coronavirus testing, despite its critical significance, because the resulting data makes his administration “look bad.”
Trump doesn’t just lie all the time, he does actually have favorite lies that he repeats.
Darkest Of Days At DOJ
TPM link to an article by David Kurtz.
The Trump Campaign proves to be clueless … again.
From Joe Scarborough:
From Asha Rangappa:
From Josh Chafetz:
Later, Parscale blamed the media, not himself., He said it was the media that referred to the campaign as the Death Star. Bullshit. Parscale referred to the Death Star in the original tweet.
OMFG.
Link
I think one of my neighbors is watching Fox News. She seems to be confused. She told me that the state in which we live had no coronavirus cases. Not true. The count in this rural state is 2,158. The number of deaths is 66, and a graph of new cases shows a consistent trend upward.
From the readers comments on TPM:
About Sweden and their “keep things open” policy:
Link