The Check's in the Mail?

Bye, Bye Bernie?  Yesterday Ohioans stayed home but in three other states primaries went forward and as expected Joe Biden emerged the victor over rival Bernie Sanders in each one of them.  To no one’s surprise Biden trounced Bernie in Florida, winning 61.9% of the vote to Bernie’s  22.8%, most of the rest consisted of early ballots cast for Mike Bloomberg and Pete Buttigieg.  Though fewer Sunshine State voters showed up yesterday than in 2016, largely as the result of early voting the total number of Floridians voting was up.  Apparently few in Florida were all that impressed with Bernie’s affinity for Fidel Castro or his disdain for AIPAC.  They also didn’t buy into his many ads claiming that Biden would be bad for Medicare.  In Illinois Biden beat Bernie 59.1% to 36.1% but as a result of “virus suppression, ” turnout was lower than in 2016.  Completing the trifecta, Biden beat Bernie 42.6% to 31.6% in Arizona, especially notable because given his strength among Latinos, Arizona was one of the state’s that Bernie thought he could win.  At this point Biden has somewhere in the neighborhood of  1147 delegates to Bernie’s  861, a differential that experts say is insurmountable. That said Bernie hasn’t dropped out yet and it’s not clear that he will but with more and more state primaries getting postponed and the writing on the wall, he’d be doing all of us a favor if he would.  For his part, Biden has already started shifting into general election campaign mode.  And yesterday, at his request he was provided Secret Service protection, let’s hope that protection includes a germ free bubble.  For the record Biden is keeping Celtic, his old VP code name, as his Secret Service code name.    

Channeling Andrew Yang: Yesterday while asserting that he always knew that COVID 19 was a pandemic, Trump announced that he is seeking a $1 trillion or so stimulus package to battle the economic impact of the virus. To quote him, “it’s going to be big, it’s going to be bold” and everything is “tremendous.”  The package is likely to include $1,000 checks to everyone except maybe millionaires, tax cuts, small business assistance, and airline and other industry relief. Later in the day Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, who in addition to serving as Speaker Pelosi point person appears to be driving the Trump administration’s economic strategy, told GOP senators that unemployment could reach 20% if they don’t jump on board the stimulus train.  Though Senate leader Mitch McConnell spent the weekend canoodling with donors and Judge “I like beer” Kavanaugh, he is now back in action. After slamming Pelosi’s House for taking a breather while they wait for him to pass the coronavirus relief package that they passed over the weekend when he was partying, he told his Senate crowd that they’d better get in line and vote for the legislation, not to be confused with the economic stimulus package which is still being finalized.  McConnell’s precise words were “gag and vote for it” whether you like it or not.  Most of them probably will do so, that is most other than gadfly and fellow Kentuckian Ran Paul, who is pulling his usual shtick.  Yesterday, Paul proposed one of his usual stalling amendments, it won’t pass, but it will slow down Senate passage of the House package by a few days.  Getting back to Trump and his assertion that he knew that the coronavirus was a pandemic from day one, that assertion isn’t just wrong it’s stupid and insulting as most remember that just a few weeks ago he said that it was no bigly, that the number of cases would be down to zero, and that it was all a Democratic plot to destroy his presidency, a view a nanosecond ago shared by his son in law, chief of everything Jared Kushner.  For those who don’t remember all the things that Trump previously said, check out the twitterverse which is full of reminders in the form of long tweets detailing all of Trump’s dismissive virus assertions.  Social media doesn’t die, it just haunts forever.

Et Cetera:  New York City is now virus central.  Governor Cuomo, who has been getting accolades for the way he’s handling the burgeoning crisis, insists that the city is not going to be put into quarantine mode, largely because he believes that it would be impossible to enforce but Mayor Di Blasio, who got lots of grief for going to his favorite Brooklyn Y right before all gyms were closed down, says that he is seriously considering going the lockdown route.  In any case, outdoor walking with and without dogs would be allowed during a quarantine and food and drug stores would remain open, and judging by all the trucks unloading at the CVS across the street from me, those stores are getting constantly restocked.  In other news, because yes there still is other news, former California Congressman Duncan Hunter, one of Trump’s earliest supporters, was sentenced yesterday to serve eleven months in jail for campaign violations.  He’s the guy who used some of those funds to fly his giant bunny along on a family vacation but then tried to pin his misdeeds on his wife.  And, yesterday Dale Cabaniss, the head of the government Office of Personnel Management surprised the White House by suddenly resigning.  Apparently Cabaniss, herself a relatively recent addition to the Trump administration was upset about the poor treatment she was getting from John McEntee, the 29 year old who was recently put in charge of the White House Personnel office to root out Trump enemies as well as two of his most recent “senior” level appointees, both of whom are only college seniors. To refresh your memory,  in an earlier chapter of the Trump saga, McEntee was fired from the administration by former Chief of Staff Kelly, something to do with his excessive gambling debts.  This matters because a lot of important positions, many at places like Homeland Security, an entity that should be doing lots of coronavirus work, remain unstaffed because who needs a functioning government in a crisis anyway?