Tuesday, April 21, 2020

IF TRUMP IS REELECTED AND THE VIRUS IS TAMED, WILL ANY OF THIS BE REVERSED?

Belatedly, President Trump (and Stephen Miller) decide that they shouldn't let a crisis go to waste.
President Trump announced in a tweet late Monday night that he plans to suspend immigration to the United States, a move he said is needed to safeguard American jobs and defend the country from coronavirus pandemic, which he called “the Invisible Enemy.”

“In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!,” the president wrote, announcing the plan at 10:06 p.m.
And if that wasn't enough shock doctrine for you....
Senior White House and Trump administration officials are planning to launch a sweeping effort in the coming days to repeal or suspend federal regulations affecting businesses, with the expected executive action seen by advisers as a way to boost an economy facing its worst shock in generations, two people familiar with the internal planning said.

The White House-driven initiative is expected to center on suspending federal regulations for small businesses and expanding an existing administration program that requires agencies to revoke two regulations for every new one they issue, the two people said.

While the plan remains in flux, changes could affect environmental policy, labor policy, workplace safety and health care, among other areas.

The White House is also likely to seek to make permanent some temporary regulations issued by agencies over the past few weeks to respond to the coronavirus pandemic.
I assume everything described in these two stories that isn't blocked in the courts will be permanent, or at least it will all remain in force as long as Trump is president. I say that knowing that we'll probably have effective treatments for COVID-19, and eventually a vaccine, well before the end of Trump's second term, if (God help us) he's reelected.

If he wins again, why would he reverse any of this? Why would he allow himself to seem "weak"? Maybe industries that rely on legal guestworkers will put pressure on him to resume immigration -- but it's easier to imagine him feeling triumphant after an electoral win (whether or not he's lost the popular vote again), and he'll still crave the adulation of his insane base, so he'll probably just keep the immigration ban in place. And because the regulatory suspensions get his fellow Republicans (and their beloved plutocrats) that much closer to their Utopia, they're all likely to be made permanent.

I don't know why Trump isn't trying to throw a suspension of all abortions into the mix, or nationwide concealed carry of firearms without a permit, but I bet those will be coming.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:09 AM 0 comments

Monday, April 20, 2020

THERE'S STILL NO POLITICAL LEADER IN AMERICA WHO REGULARLY DENOUNCES THE REPUBLICAN RIGHT

Every day, the Republican right presents us with a new set of outrages. Today, for instance, there's this menace to society:



Among the states, Georgia has the 12th-highest number of total COVID-19 cases and the 11th-highest death toll, according to Worldometer. Today it ranked #8 in new cases.

And there's news about these professional disinformers:
Right-wing commentators Diamond and Silk, who host a Fox News program and are surrogates for President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign, have been pushing a conspiracy theory that 5G towers are fueling coronavirus infections.

... Diamond and Silk pushed the conspiracy theory in an April 10 online live stream which aired on their personal [YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook] social media accounts. Diamond said she was concerned that “these 5G towers are going up, and if they’re in certain places, the frequency of that can really throw your body off“ to which Silk replied, “Your genetics, yup.” Diamond later said that it “can also cause for your genetic material to test for COVID-19. Now, I don’t know how true that is, but I believe somebody should look into it.”
And then there's this professional liar:



The death toll is, in fact, probably an undercount, given the large numbers of home deaths in several U.S. cities, a probably also seen in Britain.

There are passionately outraged politicians on the American left. Progressives such as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and the Squad denounce economic and social injustice, and fight for comprehensive changes to the way our society is run.

And there are many politicians who are outraged by the daily abuses of President Trump.

But still -- still -- there is no prominent politician in America who routinely says: The Republican right is an ongoing threat to the well-being of this country, and therefore we must vote out as many Republicans as possible and shame the liars of the Republican noise machine.

The awfulness of the Republican wing of American politics is not the focus of anyone in politics at the national level, when it should be the focus of everyone in (or affiliated with) the Democratic Party. The most important issue in America now, and for the past several decades, has been the damage being done to America by conservative polices and conservative propaganda.

And now those policies and that propaganda are literally killing Americans in real time -- and still no politician in America specifically declares Republicanism to be our most serious problem, or even a problem at all. This or that Republican politician might be denounced (Donald Trump now, George W. Bush a dozen years ago), but not the entire edifice.

That needs to change. We literally can't live with Republicanism run rampant in America anymore.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:25 PM 0 comments

ANTI-SHUTDOWN AGITATORS HAVE PREVIOUSLY BEEN SEEN AS SCAMMERS, EVEN BY REPUBLICANS

The Washington Post reports:
A trio of far-right, pro-gun provocateurs is behind some of the largest Facebook groups calling for anti-quarantine protests around the country, offering the latest illustration that some seemingly organic demonstrations are being engineered by a network of conservative activists.

The Facebook groups target Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, and they appear to be the work of Ben Dorr, the political director of a group called “Minnesota Gun Rights,” and his siblings, Christopher and Aaron. By Sunday, the groups had roughly 200,000 members combined....

The Dorr brothers manage a slew of pro-gun groups across a wide range of states, from Iowa to Minnesota to New York, and seek primarily to discredit organizations like the National Rifle Association as being too compromising on gun safety. Minnesota Gun Rights, for instance, describes itself as the state’s “no-compromise gun rights organization.”
This is a better story than most of what I've read about the demonstrations. It acknowledges that the demonstrators aren't in sync with public opinion:
The online activity instigated by the brothers helps cement the impression that opposition to the restrictions is more widespread than polling suggests. Nearly 70 percent of Republicans said they supported a national stay-at-home order, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll. Ninety-five percent of Democrats backed such a measure in the survey.
The story describes a lot of recent activity by the brothers:
“Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine” was created on Wednesday by Ben Dorr. His brother Christopher is the creator of “Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine,” as well as “Ohioans Against Excessive Quarantine.” A third brother, Aaron, is the creator of “New Yorkers Against Excessive Quarantine.”
There's some suggestion that they don't always operate according to the rules.
In certain cases, the Dorr brothers have bypassed rules requiring them to register as lobbyists by arguing that they are instead involved in “pro-gun grassroots mobilization,” as “Ohio Gun Owners,” whose board Chris Dorr directs, describes its work.

A now-retired state legislator in Iowa, who in 2017 sought to close a loophole allowing the brothers to skirt lobbying rules, said he was not surprised the Dorr brothers were involved in fomenting resistance to the public health precautions.

“The brothers will do anything to fan the flames of a controversial issue, and maybe make a quick nickel,” said the former state legislator, Republican Clel Baudler.
In fact, there are a lot of people out there who don't like the Dorr brothers -- and for the most part, the critics seem to be conservatives. Here's a site called Exposing the Dorr Brother Scams.
Welcome. If you have been directed to this site, it is most likely because you have worries about one or more of the many groups run by or associated with the Dorr Brothers (Aaron, Chris, Ben, and Matt).

We are happy you are here and hope you will learn the truth and that you will help us spread the word about this scheming group of fraudsters that are having a splendid time collecting your well-intended donations for their personal use while using confrontational politicking to harm and disparage some of our best legislators and some of the most effective lobbying and pro-gun, pro-life advocating groups around.
The main objection is that organizations set up by the Dorrs attack other pro-gun activists (as well as anti-abortion activists) for allegedly being too willing to compromise, and that they take credit for legislative victories that are the work of others. The Dorrs are also accused of being in it only for the money.



Here's a Facebook page called The Truth About Iowa Gun Owners & The Dorr Family Gun Scam.



Here's a site about the Dorrs called Minnesota Scammers Exposed. It was set up by the Minnesota Republican Party.



A 2019 Cleveland Plain Dealer story quotes pro-gun legislators attacking the Dorrs.
Iowa state Rep. Matt Windschitl, who shepherded through a 2017 bill that created a Stand Your Ground law and allowed Iowans to sue local governments for creating gun-free zones, said Iowa Gun Owners first opposed the bill — in the form of continuous fundraising emails to their members — but weren’t actively involved in talks. They then took credit for its passage, he said, prompting him to call out the group on the floor of the Iowa House as a “scam.”

“They are not motivated by a genuine appetite for advancement of Second Amendment virtues,” said Windschitl, a trained gunsmith. “They are there to stir the pot and make as much animosity as they can, and then raise money off that animosity.”

“I’m all for advocacy,” said Minnesota state Rep. Jim Nash, a leading pro-gun Republican in Minnesota. “But the best advocacy groups go in with the end goal in mind of the legislative outcome they want, not just their personal wealth increasing. And that one you can quote me on exactly.”
This appears to be a typical tactic: attacking Republican legislators who supported an extremely small compromise with Democrats.
... in the case of a proposed law change that would allow Ohioans to carry a concealed rifle, shotgun or handgun without a permit, [Chris] Dorr this year found himself in a lead role, negotiating changes on behalf of the bill’s sponsor.

... Committee Democrats, with the help of three Republican members, managed to temporarily change the bill so it preserved a current requirement that gun sellers provide buyers with a pamphlet summarizing Ohio gun laws. And the committee advanced the bill, recommending it for a vote by the full House.

Dorr loudly protested the change. ​Here’s how he described it in an online fundraising message: “Representative Kyle Koehler (R-Springfield) joined with 4 radical anti-gun Democrats and two turn-coat Republicans to ram through an amendment to HB178 that, until Ohio passes a Stand-Your-Ground law, could get innocent gun owners killed.”

His reasoning? The pamphlets would include a description of an Ohio law that requires someone to attempt to retreat before using lethal force.
All that for ... a pamphlet.

So the Dorrs stir up trouble, alienate would-be allies, raise a lot of money (the state of Minnesota revoked tax-exempt status for Minnesota Gun Rights in 2016), and just form and more organizations.

But now they've stumbled into mainstream acceptance. The establishment right likes what they're doing. President Trump, Fox News, and the plutocracy are on their side.

Will they start accusing other anti-shutdown forces of being weak compromisers? Or will they take the contributions and run? Hard to say.

But for the time being, the GOP mainstream clearly doesn't care whether the Dorrs are scammers. The top priority, now and always, is to keep the country divided and the libs owned. The Dorrs are useful for The Cause.

Posted by Steve M. at 8:36 AM 0 comments

Sunday, April 19, 2020

THE PRESS CONTINUES TO BELIEVE THAT "REPUBLICAN" = "AMERICAN"

Politico's Anita Kumar does what too many mainstream journalists do: Under the influence of GOP spin doctors, she treats what Republicans want as a synonym for what Americans want.
Trump aides and allies say they are growing confident that an earlier [economic] restart amid the coronavirus pandemic could help the president in his reelection campaign, according to six people close to the White House or Trump campaign.

They point to emerging signs around the country. Trump-supported activists are protesting strict stay-at-home orders. Conservative groups’ internal polling in red-leaning and swing states show a significant uptick in Americans who favor reopening the country. A growing chorus of Republican lawmakers across the nation are on board.

“If you don't see something start to happen ... you’re going to see a conservative revolt by our base,” said Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative group which recently polled on reopening the economy.
The argument is that it's good politics for Trump to do what his base wants -- even though a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll makes clear that it's not what America wants.
Nearly 60 percent of American voters say they are more concerned that a relaxation of stay-at-home restrictions would lead to more COVID-19 deaths than they are that those restrictions will hurt the U.S. economy, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

But while strong majorities of Democrats and independents are more worried about the coronavirus than the economy, Republicans are divided on the question, with almost half of them more concerned about how the restrictions could affect the economy.

How many polls like this have I quoted to you over the years -- polls in which Democrats and independents are on one side of an issue and Republicans on the other? And yet there's never a suggestion in the mainstream press that the right is out of step with "the real America." In this crisis, it's just the opposite -- the press implies that the minority viewpoint is the emerging consensus viewpoint:



The Politico story tells us that reopening the economy is good politics, according to ... um, private polling, which doesn't show solid support for what Republicans want to do, but merely shows an uptick in support for GOP ideas:
Conservative groups have noticed a change in polling in recent weeks when they ask respondents if they want to go back to work, even if they know the outbreak could continue to cause infections or deaths, and if they would be willing to wear protective gear, such as masks and gloves, in order to reopen the country. Some polls saw upticks as large as 20 percentage points of people willing to return to work, even with the caveats, according to said Brandon and others familiar with the polls. The FreedomWorks polling was conducted in suburban House districts in battleground states, including Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The NBC/Journal poll, by contrast, shows Trump losing to Joe Biden in swing states by 6 points, and losing by 7 overall. It shows Trump with a 52% disapproval rating on his handling of the virus (44% approve), and says that only 36% of respondents trust what they hear from Trump on the virus, while 52% don't trust what he says.

The mainstream media wants you to believe that the majority of Americans who'd prefer to hang tight are the outliers, while these folks are representative of the mainstream:





The political press is failing us.


Posted by Steve M. at 10:31 AM 0 comments

Saturday, April 18, 2020

LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS -- TOWARD CONSERVATIVES



He's right. Check out the lede of a story that appeared last night at The Washington Post:
More than a dozen protesters gathered near the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge Friday calling for Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards (D) to suspend measures designed to stop the spread of the coronavirus so people can go back to work.
Really? "More than a dozen" people show up to gripe and that's a news story? Sorry -- "more than a dozen" people isn't a protest, it's a small social gathering. It's not news.

The Post story links to a local news report that says a whopping seventeen people showed up. Here they are -- and yes, they appear to be all white, in the majority-black city of Baton Rouge.



In the clip, these folks call themselves "real Americans" -- even though polling has shown nationwide support for an even more extensive shutdown that we've had, and even though Louisiana voters approve of Governor Edwards's approach to the virus by a 68% to 16% margin. It doesn't matter -- when the "liberal" media sees angry Caucasian right-wingers, it automatically regards them as The Genuine Voice Of The People.

I'll grant that the elite media might have liberal biases on some issues. The right has a point when it says that the sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden has received a lot less coverage than the one against Brett Kavanaugh (though the multiple allegations against Donald Trump haven't been covered thoroughly either, and I imagine that we'll have saturation coverage of the Biden allegation precisely when the right wants it, which is next fall).

But when the press wants to take the the pulse of the populace, it believes that a representative sample of "real Americans" is overwhelmingly white, blue-collar, and rural. The press is giving saturation coverage to mostly tiny anti-lockdown demonstrations out of the same impulse that, pre-coronavirus, inspired big-city reporters to venture into rural diners every few weeks so we could be reassured that, yes, Trump supporters still support Trump.

The GOP hacks and plutocrats who are ginning up these demonstrations know that the media will fall for them, the same way Bugs Bunny knows that Elmer Fudd will fall for all his schemes, even the schemes that are just like the ones Fudd fell for in the previous cartoons. On this at least, the press never learns. The right knows that, and is taking full advantage.
Posted by Steve M. at 9:02 AM 0 comments

Friday, April 17, 2020

THE CONSERVATIVE BELIEF THAT BAD FORTUNE STRIKES THE DESERVING WILL KILL PEOPLE IN A PANDEMIC

The coronavirus is reaching the heartland.
The bump in coronavirus cases is most pronounced in states without stay at home orders. Oklahoma saw a 53% increase in cases over the past week, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Over same time, cases jumped 60% in Arkansas, 74% in Nebraska, and 82% in Iowa. South Dakota saw a whopping 205% spike.
But don't assume that the Republican governors' attitudes toward lockdowns will hurt them politically.

Since long before the pandemic, American conservatives have fought government social programs based on a simple belief: If misfortune has come to your life, you probably deserve it. If you're broke, or unemployed, or have medical bills you can't pay, well, sorry, but you must have set up your life in such a way that misfortune came to you. Maybe you made bad life choices. Maybe you're a sinner. (Real Christians believe that everyone is a sinner, but American conservatives believe that some people -- not themselves -- are sinners in ways that God responds to with terrestrial punishments.)

One governor, Pete Ricketts of Nebraska, says outright that getting sick or dying from the coronavirus is your own damn fault.
"This is a program that depends on people exercising personal responsibility and their civic duty," Ricketts told Politico Wednesday. "This is about making that decision, not the heavy hand of government taking away your freedoms."
It won't be long before reporters find covid-19 sufferers, or relatives of sufferers, in these states who absolve their governors of blame for the preventable spread of the virus -- because freedom, of course.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:05 PM 0 comments

TREATMENTS COULD RE-ELECT TRUMP (BUT I'LL TAKE THEM ANYWAY)

If this is true, it's the first good news we've had in a while:
A Chicago hospital treating severe Covid-19 patients with Gilead Sciences’ antiviral medicine remdesivir in a closely watched clinical trial is seeing rapid recoveries in fever and respiratory symptoms, with nearly all patients discharged in less than a week, STAT has learned....

“The best news is that most of our patients have already been discharged, which is great. We’ve only had two patients perish,” said Kathleen Mullane, the University of Chicago infectious disease specialist overseeing the remdesivir studies for the hospital....

“... when we start [the] drug, we see fever curves falling,” she said. “Fever is now not a requirement for people to go on trial, we do see when patients do come in with high fevers, they do [reduce] quite quickly. We have seen people come off ventilators a day after starting therapy. So, in that realm, overall our patients have done very well.”
We're screwing this up. We're reopening large parts of the economy without the ability to do mass testing or contact tracing, even in some places where officials have done a good job.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine was one of the first governors to start closing down his state when the coronavirus hit, but now he's offering one of the first economic reopenings in the nation.

DeWine, a Republican, announced Thursday that Ohio will begin to reopen some of its businesses on May 1....

DeWine said he will start to announce strategies for reopening, including mandating that businesses take temperatures, sanitize facilities, and require face masks until the virus is contained by vaccines or therapeutics.
Do we really believe these mandates will be strictly enforced? In a country where large businesses tend to regard the relatively small fines imposed for flouting regulations as a cost of doing business?

We won't have a vaccine for a while. We're getting better at testing, but we continue to struggle. Cash-strapped states will find it difficult to hire, train, and deploy contact tracers, and much of the country, having absorbed decades of right-wing propaganda, will rebel against tracing and enforced individual quarantines.

So I hope remdesivir works. I hope other treatments show promise soon. I hope production can be ramped up. Until the distant day when we have a vaccine, it's our best hope.

Even though I'm rooting for treatments, I believe that good news of this kind could easily reelect President Trump. Trump has successfully branded himself as Mr. Good News in this crisis. If remdesivir or some other drug reduces the toll of death and suffering, Trump will act as if he personally conducted the clinical trials and did the lab work, and millions of Americans will associate him with the ray of hope. (Trump has mentioned the drug, but not the way he's relentlessly promoted the hydroxychloroquine, which appears to be useless in fighting covid-19.)

As we approach the election, Trump will discuss every positive development as if he's responsible for it. Many Americans will fall for that. Meanwhile, in the eyes of Republican voters (and possibly some swing voters) he's successfully deflected responsibility for the spread of the virus (he restricted flights from China early on, the virus is the fault of the Chinese and the WHO, and besides, it isn't all that scary anyway), and he's getting none of the blame for the economic downturn (he wants the economy up and running again, so the downturn is the fault of the haters and losers who don't).

And while the polls are all over the map, one of the best pollsters, Pew, shows Biden leading Trump by only 2 and trailing in swing states. Elie Mystal is basically right:
Right now, it feels like the only Democrat running for president is New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, while Biden has been busy polishing his résumé for Indeed.com.

... all Biden can come up with in response to this flagrant failure of governance is a 940-word essay in The New York Times. Maybe next week Biden can write a cartoon caption for The New Yorker so we know he still has a pulse.

... Biden should be out there with his own team of medical experts and public health professionals telling us what we should really be doing to protect ourselves and our families.

... Millions and millions of people have been laid off or furloughed because of this crisis. Trump never talks about them, because his narcissism demands a constant stream of positive stories about his own greatness. But Biden can and should talk about them. He should even talk to them. He should be holding press conferences with union leaders who are trying to find ways to avoid layoffs. He should be holding public meetings with the people fighting to get paid leave. The faces of the economic victims of this pandemic are not the CEOs of airlines; they’re the laid-off flight attendants and the furloughed baggage handlers. I don’t want to hear Biden tell me whom he’d be fighting for if he were president tomorrow; I want him to show me whom he’s fighting for today.

... Biden’s Twitter feed should be a constant stream of coronavirus information. It should be a place to lift up the voices of those being snuffed out by this disease and Trump’s ineffectual response to it. His digital schedule should be as full as his public schedule would have been if a real-world campaign were possible right now.
I don't believe Biden should be convening these groups in person -- he should be using technology to convene them virtually. But he should be doing all these things. The most important thing he should be doing is creating another narrative for this crisis, one in which he explains in detail why the terrible decisions are terrible decisions, and shows us how he'd do better.

And I may have said this before, but I'll say it again: He should be telling voters, We hope to have a vaccine in 2021. Who do you want overseeing its manufacture and distribution? The guy who couldn't get tests out to people who desperately needed them, while his friends could all get tested? The guy who distributed aid and ventilators and personal protective equipment to the governors who kissed his butt rather than to the governors who needed them the most? The guy who gave up on a national strategy for every aspect of this crisis and just turned it all into The Hunger Games with all fifty states competing against one another? Do you really want that guy overseeing the manufacture and distribution of a covid-19 vaccine?

And yet I want remdesivir to work. I want other treatment regimens to work. If the cost of good news is a Trump victory, I'll still take the good news. But the cost shouldn't be a Trump victory.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:30 AM 0 comments

Thursday, April 16, 2020

SOME SIMPLE MATH (updated)

We've heard right-wingers say many times that the current projections for covid-19 deaths in the U.S. make the disease seem no more lethal than the seasonal flu in a bad year. In 2018-2019, for instance, the flu killed more than 60,000 Americans.

Let me just remind you that the typical flu season is six months long.



Covid-19 has now killed 34,475 Americans, according to Worldometer. That's as of today -- April 16 -- and it doesn't include today's death toll from every state.

Now recall that the first covid-19 death in this country was on February 29.

A flu season that kills 60,000 Americans does so over the course of six months. This virus has killed more than half that number in approximately a month and a half. And even though the model of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation predicts that daily deaths are past their peak, and will decline every day until they reach zero in late June -- assuming we maintain social distancing through the end of May, which conservatives are determined not to do -- that means we're still on course to have 20,384 additional covid-19 deaths just this month, for a total of approximately 55,000 deaths in two months.

And that's with lockdowns across the nation. This is as opposed to 60,000 deaths in six months from the flu while we were all living our normal lives.

Even your wingnut relatives can do that math.

*****

And speaking of math, there was this moment in yesterday's Trump gripefest:


QUESTION: Why do we have 20 percent of the world’s deaths from the coronavirus when we’re only 4 percent of the world’s population?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, you don’t know what you have. Do you think you're getting honest numbers from some of these countries? Do you really believe those numbers in this vast country called China? They have a certain number of cases at a certain number of -- does anybody really believe that?
To be fair, the questioner is wrong. We don't have 20 percent of the world's reported cases -- we have 31 percent. Here are the ten countries with the most cases.



And yes, our share of the world's population is approximately 4 percent.

But is China lying about its low infection rate? Well, let's assume it is. Let's assume that China has ten times as many cases as it claims -- 823,410 rather than 82,341.

If you were to add those additional 741,069 cases to China's total, bringing the world's total to 2,914,272, the U.S. would still have 23 percent of the world's cases, with only 4 percent of its population.

The virus was spread by global travel to and from the United States. Poorer countries around the world have fewer travelers and less incoming travel. That's what a different president would have said. It's not the entire answer -- we really did fail to contain the virus early on -- but it's part of the answer.

Instead, Trump challenged the math. But math is not his best subject.

*****

UPDATE, FRIDAY MORNING: Since I discussed cases while the questioner asked about deaths, let's do the math on deaths. Right now the U.S. has 23 percent of the world's covid-19 deaths: 34,641 out of a total of 147,508. China has announced 4,632 deaths. Let's bump that up to 46,320. The additional 41,688 would bump the world death toll to 189,196. The U.S. total of 34,641 would be 18 percent of 189,196, for a country that has 4 percent of the world's population.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:17 PM 0 comments

WHO WAS BEHIND THE OTHER PROTESTS? BECAUSE WE KNOW THE ONE IN MICHIGAN IS LINKED TO THE DeVOS FAMILY

Wow, that looked ... spontaneous.
On Wednesday, opponents of Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home order in Michigan held a car-bound protest dubbed “Operation Gridlock.” ... the protest saw the streets around the capitol in Lansing fill with vehicles. The traffic jam blocked at least one ambulance.

Despite organizers asking protesters to remain in their cars, groups gathered in front of the capitol waving pro-Trump and anti-Whitmer signs. One reporter tweeted that he heard chants of “recall Whitmer,” “U-S-A,” and “lock her up.”

... On Tuesday, more than 100 protesters in Raleigh, North Carolina, came together to oppose Governor Roy Cooper’s stay-at-home order. Some shouted and honked from the relative safety of their cars.
Also, by astonishing coincidence, at exactly the same time...
FRANKFORT, Ky. – Impatient protesters demanding Gov. Andy Beshear reopen Kentucky disrupted his televised Wednesday afternoon pandemic update, chanting, blowing horns and shouting into a megaphone outside the window of the briefing room and nearly drowning out his comments to Kentuckians.

The protest began with just a few people holding signs on the Capitol lawn, but by the time Beshear started to speak, the group numbered about 100 people.
I don't know who's behind the other protests, but the Michigan protest is linked to the DeVos family.
... Michigan Freedom Fund is a listed host of the in-car rally.... It’s also sharing updates about the protest on social media.

... The group was founded by Greg McNeilly, political adviser to the DeVos family, a powerful name in Michigan Republican politics who’ve also contributed to the group financially.
This didn't all happen on the same day by accident, in red or purple states with Democratic governors. Someone in the Republican establishment and/or the plutocracy sent up the bat signal. Someone's trying to drive down these governors' ratings and manufacture consent for a broad reopening by creating the impression that "real Americans" are eager to end the lockdowns.

They aren't.
Most Americans believe President Donald Trump needs to issue a national stay-at-home order in order to curb the spread of the coronavirus, according to polling data released Wednesday by The Economist and data analytics firm YouGov....

A majority of those surveyed, 61 percent, said Trump should issue a stay-at-home order for the entire country. Those against the idea numbered 22 percent while 18 percent said they weren't sure.
And the polling for the governors has been quite good. In Michigan, Whitmer's poll rating, which had been 42% positive and 34% negative in October, jumped to 60%/22% in March. In North Carolina, Cooper had his highest job approval number ever in late March, at 62%. Kentucky's Beshear had the highest rating of any governor in a U.S. News poll released earlier this month, with 86% of respondents rating his response as good or excellent.

****

What continues to be maddening is that we have a massive crisis on our hands, yet the top priority of the right is to score political points, whether it's agitating against lockdowns (especially in Michigan, which is the state with the third-highest covid-19 death toll, behind only New York and New Jersey) or obsessing over the possible origin of the virus. CNN is reporting that the feds are "looking into the possibility" that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan -- but Fox News is declaring that theory all but proven.
Sources believe coronavirus originated in Wuhan lab as part of China's efforts to compete with US

EXCLUSIVE: There is increasing confidence that COVID-19 likely originated in a Wuhan laboratory, though not as a bioweapon but as part of China's effort to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States, multiple sources who have been briefed on the details of early actions by China's government and seen relevant materials tell Fox News.
Obsessing over the origin of the virus while you're slackening in your efforts to curb transmission is like sending the firefighters away while your house is still burning because you think the #1 priority is to find someone to blame for the fire.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:29 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 15, 2020

NO COMPETENCE, PLEASE, WE'RE THE TRUMP WHITE HOUSE

The lede of this CNN story suggests that President Trump's new advisers are attempting the impossible.
In the first phone call convened between President Donald Trump and some members of his newly formed business council, industry leaders reiterated to the President what public health experts and governors have been telling him for weeks: that there would need to be guarantees of ramped-up coronavirus testing before people return to work, according to one person briefed on the discussions.
Do the members of this council think they can persuade Trump that his government needs to do a more competent job in order to get the economy reopened? That won't work. Trump doesn't believe in competence. It's as if he's morally opposed to the pursuit of it. Trump believes in hype, razzle-dazzle, bunkum. He believes in the sizzle rather than the steak, as they used to say. You don't give the people a better product or service -- you give them a more impressive pitch. Competence is for losers.

Trump genuinely takes no pride in his work, if by "work" you mean what he actually does. He does take pride in his salesmanship -- in fact, that and his ability to insult and intimidate people are the only things he takes pride in. He once tried to make his buildings the glitziest and the most piss-elegant, but he gave up on that years ago, around the time of Trump Steaks, Trump Water, and Trump University, not to mention the Trump Network.
Ideal Health was a multi-level-marketing company—that’s the polite term for “pyramid scheme”—founded in the 1990s that sold personalized vitamin supplements based on the results of a urine test.

This pee test supposedly provided “a scientific window into your personal biochemistry.”

... Naturally, Donald J. Trump had to get a piece of the action.

In March 2009, Trump purchased Ideal Health and then took Worldcom and Stringer Bell’s advice on fixing a troubled asset by giving it a shiny new gold lamé moniker. He called it “The Trump Network.”

Under Trump, The Network offered a miracle “custom essential” multivitamin based on the “privatest.” They also offered pills for “silhouette solutions” (a diet program), skin care, low-energy, and of course some “Snazzle Snaxxs” for the kids. (I’m sure the health benefits of the Snazzle Twissters Sour Cream and Onion were legion).

But Trump’s real value add was as a pitch man. The Trump Network launch came on the heels of the financial meltdown, so he updated the Ideal Health proposition to would-be salespeople, convincing them that if they listened to Trump they would discover the cheat code to breaking out of financial hardship.

You should watch for yourself.


If you want to sell Trump on the idea of more testing, don't tell him that massive testing is a vital component of any post-lockdown strategy in the absence of a widely available vaccine. Tell him that not testing enough is making him look bad. That might bring him around. But at best he'll probably want to develop a half-assed test, put his name on it, and hope the rubes fall for it. He'll never try to get testing right.

****

Did I say Trump is morally opposed to competence? Let's go back to that CNN story and find out how this new business council was put together.
Some business leaders discovered they were part of Trump's council only when the President read off their names in the Rose Garden, said one person on the list and two others close to those named....

Others only learned in the moments before Trump made the announcement public.

"We got, maybe, 10 minutes advance warning that we were on the list," said one person on the list. "We were listening to the President listing off the names and that's about when they sent the list."

Others described the outreach to executives as chaotic.

"We got a heads up that there would be a call, but we got absolutely no information of what would be discussed, or what the nature of this call is," said another person who was included....

"The White House is just making sh*t up," said one person close to an executive who was invited to one of several calls the President convened with members of the group on Tuesday....

It was particularly challenging for some of the bank CEOs to join the calls. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon and Citi CEO Michael Corbat couldn't make it because their banks hosted earning calls around the same time as the White House call.

"Who is organizing a call with banking executives in the middle of earnings week?" said another one of the sources.

Even after the calls, confusion remained as to what the White House wanted from the CEOs.

"There was no specific ask from Trump and no clarity on what's next -- how the groups work," said one of the people who was briefed after the 10 a.m. ET call....

At least one of the executives who dialed into a call said the phone line didn't work.
It's as if Trump think competence would make his hair fall out.
Posted by Steve M. at 6:57 PM 0 comments

CRAZIES, UNKNOWN AND OTHERWISE

Here's a random conspiracy-monger at Free Republic.
This is a rumor, coming from someone pretty plugged in to things. She said that the corona virus is man made, in China, and the purpose was population control through male infertility.

It rings true because we keep hearing that this virus is affecting men at a much higher rate. There's considerable info out there, including the article linked here https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/07/coronavirus-hits-men-harder-evidence-risk, that discusses the high rate of affected men. Men are scrambling to 'bank' sperm because of one of the symptoms of this virus.

It also rings true because Gates' main focus is population control and being so invested in China.

A few short months ago, this would have been preposterous to hear, let alone say. But, today...not so much.
The conspiracy theory doesn't show up anywhere in the linked Guardian article, which notes the higher covid-19 death rate among men worldwide and speculates on possible reasons (men are more likely to smoke, men are more likely to have the chronic health conditions that make the coronavirus more dangerous, and men also seem to have weaker immune systems).

The theory advanced in this post is so absurd that even some of his fellow Freepers scoff at it. ("Whatever keeps the tinfoil flowing.")

Now let's here from a man who's been a top adviser to the president of the United States.
Roger Stone suggested Monday that Bill Gates may have had a hand in the creation of coronavirus so that he could plant microchips in people’s heads to know who has and has not been tested for COVID-19.

“Whether Bill Gates played some role in the creation and spread of this virus is open for vigorous debate. I have conservative friends who say it’s ridiculous and others say absolutely,” Stone told Joe Piscopo, host of the radio program “The Answer” on 970 AM, who had asked about conspiracy theories regarding the pandemic.

“He and other globalists are using it for mandatory vaccinations and microchipping people so we know if they’ve been tested. Over my dead body. Mandatory vaccinations? No way, Jose!” Stone told a fawning Piscopo, who referred to President Trump’s longtime adviser as “a legend.”
Random nutjob are gonna nutjob -- but Stone is a random nutjob who talks to the president, or at least he used to, and he's worked for several previous Republican presidents and presidential candidates.

I wonder whether any of Stone's "conservative friends" whisper similar things into Trump's ear at Mar-a-Lago. Would that surprise you?
Posted by Steve M. at 8:46 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

SPOILED RICH BOY WHO BOUGHT A CONGRESSIONAL SEAT WANTS US TO DIE ON THE JOB

I see we're being lectured by our Randian betters again.
Rep. Trey Hollingsworth (R-IN) said Tuesday that Americans need to get back to work immediately, even if it means significantly increasing the spread of COVID-19.

In an interview with an Indianapolis radio station, Hollingsworth acknowledged that ending social distancing could result in major public health harms and "loss of life," but he said it was better than letting the economy fall apart.

"It is policymakers' decision to put on our big boy and big girl pants and say it is the lesser of these two evils," he urged.
So who is Congressman Hollingsworth? Well, let's start with the nickname.

Wikipedia tells us his full name is Joseph Albert "Trey" Hollingsworth III. I'm the son of a truck driver, and I can tell you that people who grew up the way I grew up don't use roman numerals after their names, or call themselves "Trey" as a shorthand way of saying "the Third."

Joseph Albert Hollingsworth the Second and his boy Trey are rather well-to-do, as The Indianapolis Star reported in 2016.
[Trey] Hollingsworth grew up in Clinton, Tenn., a small town about 30 miles northwest of Knoxville. It is notable in part for the "Clinton 12," who in 1956 became the first African-American students to desegregate a public school in the South, a rancorous saga commemorated by a statue of the students.

Hollingsworth, however, didn't attend Clinton High School. He went to the private Webb School in Knoxville, Tenn., whose alumni include a former governor, a state Supreme Court judge, CEOs, the owner of the Cleveland Browns and professional athletes.

By all accounts, Trey lived what can fairly be described as a privileged life....

In 2003, Joe Jr. wrote a book called “The Southern Advantage” that extolled the benefits of doing business in the South, without a strong union presence....

In addition to business and politics, Joe Hollingsworth Jr. has a voracious appetite for adventure.

He was featured in Megayacht News in 2009 for his 29-day chartered cruise of the Caribbean aboard the 118-foot boat Savannah....

His adventures aren't even limited to Earth. A 2012 story posted on his company's website described Joe Jr. as among 300 people who signed up for a space flight on Virgin Galactic. The price for the two-and-a-half-hour ride: $200,000....

Trey Hollingsworth made a mark early. When he was 15 years old, he was touted as someone to watch in a Washington Post article headlined “How I Got Rich On My Summer Vacation.” The story was about high school students in a summer entrepreneurship camp in Oregon....

After Hollingsworth graduated from the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School, his father set him up in business. The younger Hollingsworth's personal worth, according to campaign documents, is at least $58 million.

Hollingsworth said he raised funds for his real estate business at first by feverishly pitching potential investors and scouring the Midwest and South for vacant industrial sites that could be rejuvenated.

But his father also helped finance the start-up business. A press release from Hollingsworth Cos. noted that in 2005 "Hollingsworth Capital Partners was formed with Joe's son, Trey, as managing partner and majority owner."
You may be asking yourself why, if the Hollingsworths lived in Tennessee, Trey is a congressman from Indiana.

Well, he moved to Indiana in September 2015. In October 2015, he announced his candidacy for the congressional seat he now holds. He was called a carpetbagger, but money made that a non-issue.
Trey Hollingsworth, a wealthy businessman who has lived in Indiana less than a year, is spending more than $1 million of his own money in the crowded congressional contest in south central Indiana, according to recent disclosure reports.

In addition, Hollingsworth’s father, has spent another $370,000 on a super political action committee, which has run ads praising Hollingsworth and criticizing Attorney General Greg Zoeller, one of the four other Republicans vying for the nomination to succeed Rep. Todd Young.

The combined amount spent by Hollingsworth and his father through March is 10 times the amount spent by Hollingsworth’s next closest financial competitor, state Sen. Erin Houchin.

Houchin and Zoeller have accused Hollingsworth of trying to buy the congressional seat....
So this is the guy who's lecturing policymakers about being unwilling to put on "big boy and big girl pants" and demanding that others risk their lives on the job. Has he ever worked a day in his life on a shop floor or in a cubicle farm? Does he have any idea what it's like for ordinary people -- as opposed to start-up executives financed by Daddy's money -- to go back to work under these conditions?

And I'll remind you that, as a congressman, Hollingsworth just had his own enforced time away from the workplace extended to at least May 4.

If Hollingsworth had ever lived like a normal wage slave, I might take him seriously. But he has no idea how the rest of us live.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:03 PM 0 comments

WOULD LIBERALS CHEER A HIGHER DEATH TOLL?

Yesterday I posted this on Twitter:



Someone I don't know -- his bio and banner tell me he's a fan of the band Rush, and he follows the My Pillow guy and the Claremont Institute, among others -- responded:



Would liberals be happy if there were 2 million deaths? Would I be happy?

I wrote this on February 29, the day of the first U.S. covid-19 death:
Trump wants you to believe that everything's under control, and that America will largely avoid outbreaks. He's crossing his fingers and hoping the virus's spread will abate in the spring.

But I hope he's right. I want him to get away with this because the damage a botched epidemic could do to his poll numbers isn't worth the risk to Americans' health and the profound disruption they'll experience in their lives.
Twenty-three thousand American deaths later, I still feel that way. If America got a lucky break right now -- if good treatments emerged sooner rather than later, if the virus turns out to be less lethal than we feared (as some are arguing) -- I'd welcome it even if right-wingers insisted they were right all along and Trump's poll numbers went up. This is a horrible disease. I'd love a miracle, even if there were political benefit to people I despise.

But the likely course of this disease isn't good. It was better where local authorities pounced early, mostly on the West Coast. It's bad where they acted too late -- and yes, I'm very much including New York City.

But now we know what to do. May 1 is too soon to reopen the country, yet at least one right-wing governor is talking about a partial earlier reopening.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, is eyeing a plan rollout as early as this week to begin opening parts of his state back up for commerce. During an interview on Sean Hannity’s program on Fox News on Monday evening, Abbott reiterated the need to get Texas back to work as early as this week—and definitely ahead of the previous schedule of May 1.

“We want to open. Texans love to work. Texans are dying to get back to work,” Abbott said during the Hannity interview. “We want them to get back to work, but we have to do so in a very safe way so that we don’t regenerate the spread of the coronavirus in the state of Texas. But we’re working on strategis as we speak with medical experts and business leaders to find the right strategy so we can unleash our economy.”

He added that he believes Texas—and many other states—can reopen well before May 1.

“I think most states can reopen even sooner than later. We don’t have to wait until May 1,” Abbott said.
Do I want the virus to spread in red states? No. Too many people will suffer, including people who don't support the way their leaders govern. And viruses don't respect borders.

But if right-wing politicians are going to act foolishly, then the virus will spread. People will die. It would be fitting if the pain that resulted could be seen a direct consequence of bad decisions. And I would hope that the people who made the bad decisions would recognize what they'd done and take steps to undo the damage.

I don't know how the rest of you feel. That's how I feel.
Posted by Steve M. at 8:18 AM 0 comments

Monday, April 13, 2020

TRUMP WANTS REVENGE (updated)

The president is going to regard this as a dominance challenge:
States on the country's East and West coasts are forming their own regional pacts to work together on how to reopen from the stay-at-home orders each has issued to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.

The first such group to be announced came Monday on the East Coast. Democratic New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said his state, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island and Massachusetts each plan to name a public health and economic official to a regional working group. The chief of staff of the governor of each state also will be a part of the group, which will begin work immediately to design a reopening plan.

Later on Monday, the West Coast states of California, Washington and Oregon also announced they are joining forces in a plan to begin incremental release of stay-at-home orders. Governors of the three states will collaborate on their approach to getting back to business in "in a safe, strategic, responsible way," as announced by California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
The West Coast group is even planning to encroach on a Very Special Epsiode of Trump's reality show.
At noon Pacific Time on Tuesday, California will announce what Newsom called a "bottom-up" plan on Tuesday for the easing of restrictions in the state and "targeted interventions" to slow the spread of the coronavirus. That briefing will come hours before Trump is expected to outline the members of his "Opening our Country" task force, setting up a possible clash between the caution the Western-state governors have exhibited so far and Trump's desire to move quickly to reopen the country.
Trump's task force is this set of geniuses:



When these governors put up resistance to Trump's go-go plans, do you think he'll just shrug and say, "Oh well, I guess good people can disagree on reopening the economy"? That's unimaginable. He clearly regards this as a direct challenge to his masculinity.



We're regularly told that Trump has no legal right to decide when the economy reopens. We're told it's up to the states. But Trump can become even more vindictive than he has been regarding medical equipment, economic relief funds, and unrelated issues. I can easily imagine the feds not offering California a dime after the next bad wildfire. I can imagine deliberate delays on stimulus checks to residents of the affected states. I'm probably failing to imagine just how vindictive the president can be, and in what ways.

I suppose he can't treat these states much worse than he's already treating them. I suppose there are legal barriers to some of what he'd like to do -- although with the current attorney general and federal bench, I think what Trump can get away with is limited only by his own imagination.

But he won't take this lightly, and he'll never forget this.

****

UPDATE: At National Review, John "Torture Memos" Yoo refuses to endorse Trump's threatened power grab, arguing that the president can't force the economy to open because our system gives police power to the states. Yoo, however, writes this.
Trump could use the money appropriated by Congress to respond to the pandemic as a reward for states that end their lockdowns in May. He could send disaster relief funds, made available by the Stafford Act in time of emergency, or allocate more medical equipment and protection supplies to these states, perhaps on the ground that they risk greater harm from the virus in exchange for opening up.
Yup, that's what's coming -- South Dakota, for instance, where the governor refuses pushes hydroxychloroquine and to issue a statewide stay-at-home order even after a large meat-processing plant had to shut down in response to more than 300 cases of covid-19, will get the big bucks, and the Northeast and West Coast won't.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:09 PM 0 comments

ON ANTHONY FAUCI, REPUBLICAN VOTERS WILL DO AS THEY'RE TOLD

It's safe to predict that Dr. Anthony Fauci will be out of a job soon.
President Trump publicly signaled his frustration on Sunday with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the federal government’s top infectious disease expert, after the doctor said more lives could have been saved from the coronavirus if the country had been shut down earlier.

Mr. Trump reposted a Twitter message that said “Time to #FireFauci” as he rejected criticism of his slow initial response to the pandemic that has now killed more than 22,000 people in the United States. The president privately has been irritated at times with Dr. Fauci, but the Twitter post was the most explicit he has been in letting that show publicly.



Also:
Over the weekend, the president picked up the phone and began dialing various close advisers and associates to ask them their opinion on how soon he should “open” the U.S. economy....

... certain key members of his coronavirus task force—including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases—have urged a more cautious, patient approach, particularly on “reopening” the United States for business.

And so the doctor appeared to weigh on Trump’s mind this Easter weekend....

“What do you think of Fauci?” the president repeatedly worked into his phone conversations over the past few days, ... three sources said.... At one point this weekend, Trump remarked that he’s made Fauci a “star” and that barely anybody would have known who the doctor was were it not for the president putting him front and center in the administration’s coronavirus response, televised press briefings, and media strategy.

“He did not sound bitter about it, I wouldn’t say that,” one of the people familiar with the comments said. “It just sounded like he thought it was worth a reminder.”
That last part is meant to be reassuring. It isn't. It means that Trump expects Fauci to grovel before him in public, to begin prefacing his remarks with "Thanks to the bold, decisive leadership of the president..."

Perhaps Trump will conclude that firing Fauci would cause him more trouble than it's worth, as he did when he concluded that he couldn't arrange the termination of Robert Mueller. Perhaps he'll just toy with Fauci for months, the way he did with Jeff Sessions.

But if he continues to be peeved at Fauci, one thing is certain: Fauci's poll numbers will dip somewhat. Fauci will still get very high marks from Democrats and independents. But Republicans take their cue from Dear Leader, who's been relatively nice to Fauci until now. They'll turn on Fauci in large numbers.

Right now, Republicans like Fauci as much as the rest of us do. In a recent Quinnipiac poll, Fauci's approval was 81% among Democrats, 79% among independents, and 77% among Republicans. (Trump is at 89% among Republicans, 12% among Democrats, 43% among independents.) In a Morning Consult poll, 80% of Democrats and 79% of Republicans say they're satisfied with the quality of information they're getting from Fauci. (Trump is also at 79% among Republicans, but at 16% among Democrats.) In a Florida poll conducted by the University of North Florida, 86% of Republicans, 85% of Democrats, and 80% of independents say they approve of Fauci's work on the pandemic. (Trump's numbers are 85% among Republican, 12% among Democrats, and 40% among independents.)

But if Trump turns against Fauci, Republican voters will no longer feel they have permission to like the doctor. If Trump turns on him, they'll turn on him.

I hope no one in the mainstream media believes that the inevitable dip in Fauci's poll numbers suggests a general loss of the public's trust. It'll just be Republican voters doing as they're told.

*****

A quck word on DeAnna Lorraine, whose #FireFauci tweet was retweeted by the president. She's the author of a book, apparently self-published, titled Making Love Great Again!: The New Road to Reviving Romance and Winning at Relationships. The promo material posted at Amazon describes it as follows:
They say Politics is downstream from Culture - And we are currently knee-deep in a Cultural Apocalypse. There are more single adults than ever before, yet people are not connecting and forming real relationships. The US birth rate is at the lowest point in history, traditional values are under attack, the family unit is broken, and any sense of traditional romance and chivalry have all but died at this point. In Making Love Great Again, DeAnna explains how Feminism, Marxism and radical "Progressivism" have killed romance, relationships and the family unit, and destroyed our culture from within. She explains why many men are "boycotting" marriages with women and no longer interested in committing beyond a fling (HINT: Feminism and the #MeToo movement)....
I'll stop there. She also has a YouTube channel with similar content.



Lorraine ran for Nancy Pelosi's seat in the March 3 nonpartisan primary. She finished fifth, with 4,635 votes. (Pelosi won 190,574 votes.) Here's a campaign video -- posted to YouTube, for some reason, eight days after Lorraine's defeat -- in which she superimposes her own face on Wonder Woman's and repeatedly pulverizes Pelosi's head with her forearm. The video also shows a plane flying a banner reading "PELOSI FOR PRISON." In the clip, Lorraine calls the Speaker a communist and "the head of the snake."





In other words, by 2020 standards, Lorraine is a mainstream Republican.
Posted by Steve M. at 7:44 AM 0 comments

Sunday, April 12, 2020

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WON'T DO ITS JOB AND WON'T LET THE STATES DO IT

The Washington Post reports that the Trump administration won't centralize the acquisition of needed medical and protective equipment, but is also thwarting the states when they try to buy the equipment themselves.
Rushing to stave off a shortage of medical-grade protective gear to combat the spread of the coronavirus, Minnesota officials leaned on a local company’s global connections to airlift a cache of N95 masks from a Chinese factory back to the state for delivery this week.

Washington state purchased 750,000 cotton swabs for coronavirus tests, taking a risk because the product located by officials has not yet been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. The state is also betting that a Seattle-based outdoor gear company, known for its backpacks and parkas, can reconfigure its operations to produce N95 respirators.

And California, acting as a “nation state” in the words of the governor, began buying 200 million masks per month to shore up supplies in that state and, potentially, across the country.

Elsewhere, some governors and lawmakers have watched in disbelief as they have sought to close deals on precious supplies, only to have the federal government swoop in to preempt the arrangements.

Officials in one state are so worried about this possibility that they are considering dispatching local police or even the National Guard to greet two chartered FedEx planes scheduled to arrive in the next week with millions of masks from China, according to people familiar with the planning. These people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, asked that their state not be identified to avoid flagging federal officials to their shipment.
Imagine if the parties were reversed. Imagine if President Hillary Clinton were responding to a pandemic by diverting necessary equipment ordered by a red state. (Of course, a Democratic president wouldn't fail to step up the way President Trump has and wouldn't divert equipment based on pique, cronyism, and bad advice from his a son-in-law. Most Republicans wouldn't either.) Imagine if the state challenged by President Clinton were Texas. Governor Greg Abbott wouldn't formulate a stealth plan to protect the shipment -- he'd go on Fox News and loudly proclaim that he was sending out the Texas Rangers to make sure that the shipment reached his state. This would be such a victory for the right in the culture wars that the president would be forced to back down and reverse her policy immediately.

But unfortunately, I can't see how blue-state governors can get Trump to back down. When Southern and Western right-wingers play the anti-"federal overreach" card, even "liberal" journalists conclude that respect is owed to the rugged descendants of the men and women who conquered America, living off the land, blah blah blah. There's no comparable myth in New York or California or Illinois. Maybe there's a different kind of myth surrounding NYPD cops, who I suppose might be persuaded to defend a shipment to the city. But for all the respect New York's cops get on the right when one of them is the victim of violence ("Blue lives matter!"), we could barely get conservatives to care when first responders from the city were dying of post-9/11 cancers.

I hope I'm wrong about this. In a pandemic, the feds should help the states get what they need; if they abdicate, they should at least not interfere as the states try to navigate the sellers' markets in the goods they need. The Trumpers won't take the lead, yet they insist on fighting with the states as they try to step up. It's the worst possible approach.

Posted by Steve M. at 1:30 PM 0 comments

ANGRY RIGHT-WINGERS: MATH IS HARD!

UPDATE: Embarrassing math error corrected below. Math is hard!

My Right-Wing Dad has been collecting conservative email forwards and social media posts for more than a decade. The latest post is a collection of coronavirus-related images, which are predictably appalling. A sample:








Here's the first posted image:




It's widely believed on the right that impeachment cost the U.S. taxpayer $40 million. A popular post -- now labeled false on Facebook -- helped spread that message:



PolitiFact debunked this: The cost of the Mueller investigation was closer to $32 million, and convictions resulting from the probe led to asset forfeitures of up to $22 million that offset the cost. The actual impeachment hearings and trial were the work of members of Congress and staffers who would have been paid anyway.

But let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that the $40 million figure was correct. The population of the U.S. is more than 329 million. Forty million dollars is approximately twelve cents per person.

And the dollar amount of the recent coronavirus stimulus package is $2 trillion. That's 50 50,000 times the cost of impeachment, according the right's (exaggerated) impeachment cost estimate. And that's on top of an $8.3 billion bill passed in early March to fight the virus. And there's quite a bit of talk about another stimulus bill.

In other words, the federal government is managing to find money -- lots of it. That $40 million (or $10 million, or whatever) doesn't seem to be missed.

But this is how right-wing arguments about money work. Dollar amounts are never measured against the U.S. population, and they're never measured against one another. Whenever there's an amount of spending that right-wingers don't like -- of any amount over four figures -- it's processed by the conservative brain not as a specific dollar amount or a specific per capita dollar amount, but as a large amount of money. The message, as conservatives understand it, is: Wasteful government spenders are about to fritter away ... a large amount of money! How much? A lot!

Of course, the same conservatives are incapable of grasping the costs of policies they like -- military spending increases under Republican presidents, tax cuts for the rich, and, now that they're afraid of the coronavirus, spending in response to the pandemic. In those categories, no dollar amount is too large.

So math is hard, and twelve cents per person could end the pandemic, even though much greater dollar amounts aren't ending it now.
Posted by Steve M. at 10:15 AM 0 comments

Saturday, April 11, 2020

SO WE HAVE A NEW MODEL -- AND THE RIGHT DOESN'T LIKE IT

Yesterday I said that we need a new model projecting what will happen if there's a campaign to reopen the country soon. Via The New York Times, we can see what that might look like:
... new federal projections, obtained by The New York Times, come from the departments of Homeland Security and Health and Human Services, and outline three possible situations. The first imagines policymakers doing nothing to mitigate the spread of the virus. The second, labeled “steady state,” assumes schools remain closed until summer, 25 percent of Americans telework from home, and some social distancing continues. The third scenario includes a 30-day shelter in place, on top of those “steady state” restrictions.

The government’s conclusions are sobering. Without any mitigation, the death toll from the virus could have reached 300,000. And if the administration lifts the 30-day stay-at-home orders, the death total is estimated to reach 200,000.

The projections foresee a bump in the demand for ventilators 30 days after stay-at-home orders are issued, a major spike in infections about 100 days after, and peaking 150 days after the initial order. (Those timelines assume further shelter-in-place policies are not put in place to reduce future peaks.)
Maybe numbers like these will be enough to prevent a campaign to reopen the country too soon. But the numbers are already being criticized, by right-wingers and by a gadfly reporter whose work they've seized on.

From Breitbart:
... the Times story omits the fact that the modeling that HHS and DHS used here is not from April 9–but actually from March 31, when models were notoriously incorrect because of a lack of actual data based in reality about the spread of the disease.

... former New York Times former New York Times health reporter Alex Berenson–a critic of the national lockdowns whose reporting has shed a light on much of the inaccuracy in the data and modeling used to make public policy decisions–quickly pointed out that the DHS and HHS model is outdated and comes from a time when the government was relying on modeling that has been significantly flawed.

... as Berenson noted in his thread on this, the modeling has changed multiple times since the model that HHS and DHS had in this document was first crafted:



The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) model from the University of Washington in Washington state has been considerably wrong throughout this crisis. Originally, the IHME model predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States....

But IHME has revised its models multiple times as real-world data has proven them incorrect. First, it dropped the numbers of expected American deaths down to about 93,000, then again down to about 81,000. Now, the IHME model stands at around 61,000 dead Americans–equivalent to the total in a really bad flu season
Yes -- the new numbers project death totals equivalent to those from "a really bad flu season" because we locked down much of the country and lowered the death toll. The numbers in the IHME model assume we'll continue to do that until the end of May. And now we might not. It's a battle from Trump's brain.



We need a strategy for a reopened America, but The Washington Post reports that the White House is dumping the problem onto the states.
A national plan to fight the coronavirus pandemic in the United States and return Americans to jobs and classrooms is emerging — but not from the White House.

Instead, a collection of governors, former government officials, disease specialists and nonprofits are pursuing a strategy that relies on the three pillars of disease control: Ramp up testing to identify people who are infected. Find everyone they interact with by deploying contact tracing on a scale America has never attempted before. And focus restrictions more narrowly on the infected and their contacts so the rest of society doesn’t have to stay in permanent lockdown.

But there is no evidence yet the White House will pursue such a strategy.

Instead, the president and his top advisers have fixated almost exclusively on plans to reopen the U.S. economy by the end of the month....

“It’s mind-boggling, actually, the degree of disorganization,” said Tom Frieden, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director.

... when it comes to ... the labor-intensive work of contact tracing ... local health departments lack the necessary staff, money and training.
And there's no evidence yet that they'll get the money they need from the federal government. States such as Massachusetts and Utah are trying to set up systems of their own. But this won't work if it isn't done consistently across the country.

Meanwhile, there's an answer Trump gave to a reporter's question at yesterday's press conference that's getting a lot of attention for Trump's simpleminded musings about antibiotics (which, of course, fight bacterial infections, not viral ones) and the "genius" of the "brilliant enemy." But please note the way Trump talks about contract tracing.



Yesterday was April 10. He's known about the threat of this virus for three months, yet he's talking about contact tracing as if the concept is completely new to him ("they were on it, like, so fast, you wouldn't believe it").

We're so screwed.

Posted by Steve M. at 8:25 AM 0 comments
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