Dangerous Thinking

The End is Near?  Good news, Jared Kushner says the end of our coronavirus nightmare is near.  Appearing on Fox and Friends, the son in law said that "the federal government rose to the challenge and this is a great success story” and that he thinks “that's really what needs to be told." When he was pressed on coronavirus testing levels in the US, he said the question shouldn't be why did it take so long, but "How did we do this so quickly?" And then he predicted that things will be “rocking” by July.  Apparently Jared missed that more than 60,000 Americans are already gone and doesn’t get that prematurely loosening stay in place restrictions already has  modelers revising their mortality predictions upward.  It’s unclear what exactly motivated the usually publicity shy Jared to show up on Fox, maybe it was the recent Vanity Fair article that hammered his ineptitude and moral failings while pointing out that he pushed Trump to discount all those virus warnings he got from his health and intelligence experts as just another one of those deep state hoaxes intended to damage the “Trump” economy. Though Jared lays claim to lots of responsibility, he gets little done but still retains the confidence of Trump so during a midday press conference that most of the media outlets, even Fox, opted not to air live, Trump reminded us that Jared is a genius  and then went on to say that he plans to start traveling again and not too coincidentally his first trips will be to manufacturing plants in swing state Arizona and Ohio, the state that the Democrats hope to swing blue. He’s also ready to plan some of those really big rallies.  Apparently the Ventilator King is beyond bored and panicked about recent polling that shows him behind Joe Biden in a number of the  keys states that he needs to win to stay in office.  He’s so mad about that polling that he screamed at and threatened to sue his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, the lawsuit part being for no discernable reason other than that Trump likes to sue people, particularly those he owes money to.  Parscale, who makes bigly bucks off of the Trump machine while funneling “pay” checks to folks like Lara Trump and Don Jr girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, California Governor Newsom’s one time wife (!), hopped a plane to Washington DC to provide Trump with “new” more favorable polls and has, at least for now, returned to Trump’s good graces.  As to Trump’s travel plans and Jared’s “everything thing is great” statement, the consequences of both are likely to lengthen rather than shorten the virus crisis as respected medical experts, as opposed to the faux ones who appear regularly on Fox filling the space previously occupied by Diamond and Silk, largely agree that ending stay in place orders too soon will have dire consequences.  Nevertheless, the Trump/Kushner message is appealing especially to his base and Fox diehards.  Sadly, we’ll know more about those consequences in a few weeks. Ask those residents of towns with meat packing plants, they are experiencing the impact of wishful thinking in real time.

Some Real News:  The news isn’t all bad.  New York statistics are improving, some Governors are being prudent about the way that they are loosening restrictions and Dr Fauci, the credible virus guru believes that Gilead’s anti-viral drug Remdesivir is showing lots of promise.  To be clear, the drug which is administered by IV isn’t a cure all, but it appears to shorten the duration of severe illness in a statistically significant number of hospitalized patients.  Part of the optimism is that if one drug can inhibit virus replication others in the pipeline might be able to do so as well.  As to that pipeline, a number of manufacturers appear to be a little ahead of schedule on developing a vaccination and while it still remains unlikely that one will be ready any time soon, the hope is that one or more of them will get to market sooner rather than later.  To that end, yesterday it was reported that the Trump administration is gearing up for a mass vaccination program.  Let’s hope that someone not name Jared Kushner is in charge of that.  News on the testing front remains all over the place.  Trump insists that he never said that the country would soon be able to do 5 million tests daily although he did actually say that on camera.  Testing levels remain and are likely to remain inadequate but more tests are available now, some for the virus and others for antibodies.  Unfortunately, especially with regard to antibodies, a number of those tests remain unacceptably inaccurate in part because, facing criticism for being so far behind the curve, the FDA let many manufacturers race questionable tests to market. What a mess.      

Election Update:  Representative Justin Amash appeared everywhere yesterday talking about his presidential exploratory committee.  He claims he’ll only run if he thinks he can win, but since we know he can’t win that’s hogwash.  He also says that its wrong to assume that he’ll mostly take votes away from Joe Biden, but former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill doesn’t buy that.  She believes that the White House is tickled pink by Amash’s plans.  Amash may soon be joined by former pro wrestler/Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura who now says that he’s thinking of running on the Green Party ticket.  As to Joe Biden, he remains hidden away in his hermetically sealed basement on the receiving end for not denying more forcefully early 1990’s staff aide Tara Reade’s claims that he molested her.  Her assertions, which he has denied, have been getting lots of press attention of late, even though her story is inconsistent, records she asserts exist appear not to be real, and the timing of her complaints are questionable.  Having spent the better part of the Trump years saying women must be heard, some Democrats are having a hard time dealing with the fact that a woman who’s been known for expressing her undying love for Vladimir Putin and Russia might be “embellishing” her story.  Interestingly enough, Senator Gillibrand, known mostly for having upended Al Franken’s political career remains on Team Biden on this one as do most of the Democratic mainstream. For fairly obvious reasons Trump has, at least for now, had little to say about Biden’s accuser but its fair to assume that some of his supporters, as well as a few Berniacs, are helping Reade along.  Biden has been busy, this morning he announced the members of his VP selection committee.  They include Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd, Delaware Congresswoman Lisa Blunt Rochester, Los Angeles Mayor and campaign co-chair Eric Garcetti and former White House and Senate counsel Cynthia Hogan. For his part Trump is now accusing China, his scapegoat for this election cycle, of spreading COVID 19 to help Biden win and has asked the various US intelligence agencies to investigate all the ways that China and the WHO obfuscated the coronavirus problem, those are the same intelligence agencies who warned Trump about the virus as far back as January, around the time that Joe Biden penned an op ed in USA Today about his concerns that we were vulnerable to a pandemic because Trump had disassembled all of the things that the Obama and Bush administrations had put in place to prepare for one.         

Spurts and Masks

Viral Musings:  Instead of the usual daily virus rally, Trump treated us to some press time after his meeting with small business leaders.  That’s the meeting where the SBA head remained in the audience while that famous job creator Ivanka spoke, introduced by her father who once again bragged about the 15 million jobs she didn’t create.  Trump, who once promised that the coronavirus was a hoax perpetrated by Democrats after their impeachment efforts failed, promised that the virus would be gone soon and won’t come back in the fall because he’ll use his powers to eliminate any “spurts.”  When asked about the Washington Post article that detailed all those January and February warnings about the impending pandemic in his daily intelligence briefing memos he mumbled something unintelligible and then quickly pivoted to his canned talking point about how he’d shut down travel from China over the objections of Nancy Pelosi who had been busy dancing in the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown.  He also addressed virus testing, pushing back against virus guru Dr Fauci’s assertion that we need to be doing 5 million tests a day by June in order to be in a position to get the country back up and running, asserting once again that we are the galaxy’s best and most prolific tester.  I don’t know what they’re doing on Mars, but suffice it to say that at somewhere around 200,000 tests a day, we have far to go and are currently way down the league tables in per capita testing.  As to testing and spurts, far too little testing is being done at meat packaging plants, and the spurts in many of them are more like tsunamis affecting not just the plants but neighboring communities.  Trump, who still won’t invoke the Defense Production Act to fix the testing paraphernalia pipeline, invoked it yesterday to keep those meat plants open.  I get that we need food and that closing plants will raise prices at a time when people are severely cash constrained but the lives of plant employees should count too.  Unfortunately, the Trump administration appears less interested in their health or fixing their cramped horrible working conditions than anything else.  Perhaps it’s because so many of the plant employees are immigrant workers and we know how Trump feels about immigrants who aren’t members of his family.  As to immigration, Stephen Miller is continuing to work behind the scenes to drum up support for extending Trump’s sixty day ban against granting green cards and now Trump is threatening to hold up an aid package for the states unless those blue ones change their sanctuary city policies.  That’s probably more sop to his base than anything else, like Mitch McConnell’s suggestion that states consider filing for bankruptcy.  As to future legislation, nothing will happen next week except perhaps the confirmation of another one of Mitch McConnell’s woefully unqualified but seriously conservative young judges.  Speaker Pelosi abandoned her plans to reconvene the House citing the rising number of coronavirus cases in the District and its surrounding suburbs.  Of course Trump used that as another opportunity to slam the “do nothing” Democrats once again criticizing Pelosi for all the ice cream in her freezer.  Yes, you got that right.  The right has been going after Pelosi ever since she gave an interview in front of her ice cream packed freezer.  Apparently, they prefer Clorox snacks over mint chocolate chip.  And then of course there’s VP Pence, the man in charge of coordinating the fight against COVID 19, he spent yesterday at the Mayo Clinic, touring and meeting patients.  Despite hospital policy, he refused to wear a face mask because he’s tested so frequently and anyway he wanted the patients to be able to see his eyes.  Either Pence doesn’t understand that masks are not blindfolds, that they only cover the nose and mouth, or he didn’t want to upset his orange leader who thinks that wearing protective gear is a sign of weakness.  Anyway, why would Pence care about protecting any of those Mayo Clinic patients anyway?

Election Politics:  Add Hillary Clinton to the list of people who’ve now formally endorsed Joe Biden.  She joined Speaker Pelosi who endorsed him earlier in the week.  Not that either of their endorsements was ever in doubt.  A number of Bernie Sanders most dedicated supporters are fairly outraged by the cancellation of the New York State presidential primary,  One of them, the sometime actor/political activist John Cusack, who appears to be trying out for this election’s Susan Sarandon role is now calling on Bernie to “un-endorse” Joe Biden and restart his campaign in protest.  In other primary news, the results are in from Ohio which finally completed the primary it started but then put on hold due to the virus.  Joe Biden received 72% of the votes to Bernie’s 16% with the rest going to others including Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg and the usual cast of Democratic characters. While Cusack may be aspiring to be Sarandon, Representative Justin Amash, the one-time Republican who is now an Independent, appears to be trying out for the Jill Stein spoiler role.  He announced that he is creating an exploratory committee to run for president as a Libertarian.  He’d probably take more votes away from Trump than Biden, but then again you never know.  

Et Cetera:  During his daily news conference, the one that drives Trump crazy, New York’s Governor Cuomo detailed his approach to opening the various regions of New York.  Unlike a lot of those mostly red state Governors he’s sticking with the Federal guidelines and advice from his scientists.  In addition to waiting for a consistent 14 day decline in virus mortality and morbidity statistics and hospitalizations, he wants to see New York’s hospital occupancy fall below 70% capacity so that enough beds are available to handle any new surges.  He also wants to see contagion rates remain below one new person per virus victim.   On the governor front, Florida’s Ron DeSantis, Trump’s mini-me, who recently took flack for called his state God’s Waiting Room, met with Trump yesterday and is expected to announce his reopening plan today.        

Testing, Testing, Maybe

Daily Rally: Over the weekend Trump tweet ranted that he wouldn’t be hosting daily virus rallies anymore because of the hostile “lamestream” press and their underserved ”Noble” prizes  but really because of his advisors’ fears that the rallies were damaging his poll numbers not to mention all the blowback caused by his lethal disinfectant “musings.”  Nevertheless, one was put on the schedule for yesterday, cancelled and then rescheduled with a new name, Open Up America, and a new subject, the economy. Nevertheless, yesterday’s rally was just more of the same:  everything is great and there are no virus hotspots, except of course for the ones spreading across meat processing plants, native American communities, Wisconsin voters and nursing homes, and the ones that are likely to start springing up in places near Georgia nail salons and tattoo parlors and in the other states opening up without meeting any of the government’s own guidelines.  The Ventilator King is now also the Testing King, or so he wants up to believe. To that end we were treated to a few words from the heads of various and sundry drug store chains about all the testing that they would be doing, we’ve heard much of that before, remember all those parking lot testing sites that were supposed to spring up everywhere around the country but didn’t, well supposedly now they really will be testing, or so we are to believe.  Following the parade of mostly white older guy CEOs, Dr Debby along with her fancy charts and graphs, Admiral Giroir and VP Pence appeared to brag some more about all the testing.  The promise is that every state will get enough tests and accoutrements to test 2% of their population, an amount that would still fall short of what should be done but not to worry because Trump still insists that some governors don’t really want to test.  Pence continued to brag about the millions of tests that have been done but when pressed finally admitted that though millions of people had been swabbed a large number of those earlier tests were either never processed or took so long to be processed so as to render them irrelevant. Though the intent was to leave us with the impression that the Trump regime is responsible for the best testing system in the universe, even that assertion was a lie as earlier in the day VP Pence told state governors that testing is in their court, that the federal government should only be called upon as a last resort.  So basically, more smoke and mirrors and little else.

More Musings: As to the pandemic, last night the Washington Post reported that Trump was warned more than a dozen times in his “daily” intelligence briefing books, the ones he only has read to him three times a week, about the rising coronavirus threat, but that he either didn’t understand the severity of the threat or dismissed it because he was busy with other things like scheduling golf games, that whole impeachment thing, and making nice to China in the hopes of getting his trade deal done but also because who believes intelligence experts anyway?  As he reminded us several times yesterday the pandemic is China’s fault because no one else could have seen it coming, that is no one but every expert advising him.  Blaming China, and to be fair, they deserve a lot of blame, is the Trump’s newest pivot, everything not Obama or the Democrat’s fault is now theirs.  They killed “his” great economy, they are responsible for our increasing death count, the one that Trump casually admitted yesterday will exceed the mere 60,000 he previously talked about up until last week.  He’s now replaced that number with 70,000, but wants us to know that if it wasn’t for his highly porous China travel ban and his herculean efforts to build ventilators and obtain swabs, would be in excess of one million.  As to those departed souls, Trump finally expressed some condolences to their families, mostly his response to an article that detailed how his daily pressers were mostly about self-congratulation and rarely about expressing sympathies to those families about their loss. When he was told that there had been an increase in reports about people ingesting disinfectants, Trump responded “I can’t imagine why” and when asked if he took any responsibility he said “No I don’t.” Trump appeared supportive of Attorney General Barr’s threats to sue states for not opening up fast enough and for barring large religious gatherings and also seems rather pleased that Barr is supporting efforts to get one time national security advisor Michael Flynn’s conviction overturned.  When a friendly OAN reporter asked him if he would rehire Flynn if his legal problems went away, Trump demurred, using the opportunity to go on a tirade against the impeachment scam.  Flynn is due to start serving his sentence shortly, and we all know that’s not going to happen.

Et Cetera:  Though Trump tweeted out agreement with Senate Leader Mitch McConnell’s remarks that those blue states suffering coronavirus financial woes should just file for bankruptcy protection, McConnell appears to be backing off of his remarks, possibly because NY’s Governor Andrew Cuomo keeps pointing out how much Kentucky relies on money from those big blue states.  McConnell now appears to be trying to trade a state aid package for a promise that businesses who call back their employees without providing adequate virus protections be exempt from any liability. In any case Speaker Pelosi appears confident that there will be another aid package and that it will cover the needs of the most affected states.  There were also a few notable Supreme Court announcements yesterday.  The court punted on a NY gun case saying that because NY had already revoked a law that restricted licensed carriers from transporting their guns out of NYC limits, there was nothing for them to rule on.  There had been a fear that the court would use the case to further expand gun rights. Neil Gorsuch, one of Trump’s appointees, was in the minority wanting to hear the case, while Brett Kavanaugh stuck with the majority’s decision.  On Obamacare, the court ruled that certain payments promised to insurance companies had to be honored.  That’s not to say that they won’t ultimately rule against other aspects of the ACA when they consider the case being pursued by all those Republican Attorneys General and the administration, because who need health insurance anyway?  On the election front, NY’s presidential primary is now officially cancelled. Bernie Sanders is not happy because he’d hoped to get more delegates to enhance his platform bargaining position.  There will still be a primary but only for relevant local and congressional seats.  And Trump kind of said that he knows that North Korea’s Kim Jung un isn’t dead, but then again maybe he was lying, he does that sometimes.                        

Embalming Fluid

Rainy Weekend Blues: Another exciting weekend in the days of coronavirus is behind us.  Not only were live sports off the table for those of not all that into watching the football draft, but Trump’s daily virus rallies were cancelled, put on what’s probably just a temporary Lysol hiatus.  Blaming the “lamestream” press for missing the sarcasm in his suggestion that people consider downing disinfectant cocktails, Trump decided to shorten his Friday appearance, but not before his staff unsuccessfully tried to move a CNN reporter from the network’s usual front row perch to the Siberia section of the briefing room.  Trump then stayed home over the weekend, celebrated Melania’s 50^th birthday by using it to score more donor contact information for his fund raising efforts and tweeted out hate, criticizing everyone from the Fake press to the Democrats to Sleepy Joe Biden.  As to his delusional disinfectant recommendation, the one that his newest Press Secretary insisted he didn’t say or if he did was misunderstood, the manufacturer of Lysol and a number of people around the country also missed it’s comical tone.  The Lysol folks issued a disclaimer reminding people not to ingest their products and calls were up at a number of poison control centers.  None of that seemed to overly concerned Dr Debby who appeared on almost all of the network Sunday shows to stick by her Donny, telling Fox News that the media is slicey dicey” about how they put sentences together in order to create headlines while telling other more skeptical Sunday news hosts like Jake Tapper and that other “sleepy eyed” guy Chuck Todd that the whole disinfectant thing was so over and was getting too much air time.   As to that disinfectant “thing” Speaker Pelosi put it best when she said that there is a word for drinking Lysol, it’s called embalming.  On the Debby front, Dr Birx’s once excellent reputation is circling the drain, at least in Democratic and main stream news circles, but seems to be doing just fine with the right.  Rumors emerged over the weekend that Trump was considering dumping his current Health Secretary, the sidelined Alex Azar with Debby’s name was on the list of people being considered as a possible replacement.  Trump denied that he has any plans to fire Azar and even called him to tell him so but since he never admits he’s going to fire someone until he does, who knows what’s going to happen?  It’s fair to assume that an administration that opts to sideline it’s vaccine expert during a pandemic for questioning the advocacy of unproven drugs would have no problem throwing its Health Secretary to the curb too.  Though virus guru Dr Fauci, still has his job, it’s fair to assume that he’s not on Trump’s BFF list.  Not only was he favorably portrayed by heartthrob Brad Pitt on this weekend’s not so live SNL, something that’s got to be burning a hole in Trump’s gut, but he told the National Academy of Sciences that the US needs to double its testing ASAP, because the country needs to "have enough tests to respond to the outbreaks that will inevitably occur as you try and ease your way back into the different phases."  An understatement when you consider the number of people in Georgia who got their nails done, hair dyed and  new tattoos even though that state doesn’t meet any of the government’s stated targets for reopening.  Fauci’s remarks were made as Trump continues to insist that we’re the best testers on earth and while Dr Debby told a baffled Chuck Todd that  the US needs a “breakthrough on antigen testing in order to aid in the reopening.” It’s not totally clear what she was talking about but it may have been a reference to either the shortage of testing reagents or the unreliability of the various and sundry antigen tests that have been rushed into the market without adequate FDA approval or both. As to that other type of test, the antibody one that tells you whether or not you had the virus, WHO, the organization that Trump is trying to defund but that most health professionals want us to remain in, says that it’s still not clear whether or not having antibodies makes you immune from a second virus go round.  To be clear, it might, they just don’t know and don’t want anyone to feel safe until research answers that question.  And on that research front, though Trump has cornered the hydroxychloroquine market, it’s more dangerous than helpful, preliminary results on Gilead’s anti-viral Remdesivir are still inconclusive and several reports are out that some NY hospitals are testing Pepcid as a possible treatment.  Could another shortage be on the horizon?

Et Cetera:  As the NY Post put it North Korea’s Kim Jung un is either dead, in a coma, or punking us.  Reports that he died during emergency heart surgery are either true or not.  His sister, who apparently outdoes him in deviousness, is either next in line or isn’t.  Anyway, Trump insisted that his good buddy is just fine but if the Little Rocket Man isn’t and Trump knews he wouldn’t tell us.  Democratic candidate Joe Biden is still tucked away in his basement, but at least for now his strategy or failure to make it into the news cycle appears to be working well for him.  He’s polling well in critical swing states and older white Americans have finally figured out that Trump’s presidency and inept handling of the virus catastrophe might not turn out all that well for their age cohort, again at least for now.  The Democratic VP sweepstakes is on, Georgia’s Stacey Abrams, was everywhere this weekend, making it known that she wants in, although it’s not really clear if her in your face strategy will catapult her over other candidates such as Senators Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar and all those other women further down everyone’s list.  As to Trump, because Russia and Vlad are always on his mind, in addition to offering up some ventilators he issued a way too coordinated statement commemorating the 75th anniversary of a meeting between American and Soviet troops at the Elbe River on April 25, 1945, particularly odd since Russian planes have been engaging in some risky hostile maneuvers against our fighter jets lately.  In other military news, Trump who is chafing at the bit about being stuck in the White House announced to the surprise of everyone at West Point that he plans to speak at this year’s graduation.  The chief problem with that is that all of those cadets have already been sent home and will now have to be called back and be placed in quarantined for fourteen days to serve as his audience, no doubt at a cost of many millions that could be applied to other things like personal protective gear or testing reagents, all to satisfy Trump’s itch, ego and campaign needs.  And remember  Captain Crozier, he’s the Naval officer who was fired for sounding the alarm about COVID 19 infections on his air force carrier,  the Navy has now recommended that he be reinstated although others at the Pentagon including Defense Secretary Esper aren’t so sure that they want him back in command maybe because who wants someone who puts his crew above all in command of anything?  For the record, 856 of the 4845 sailors on the Roosevelt have tested COVID positive.  With many of those positive sailors asymptomatic, military health authorities are now studying the ship to better understand the behavior of the virus. So is Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire is now redirecting all his foundation's efforts towards fighting the virus.    

Unhinged

Lysol Spritzers:  Well, it initially looked like yesterday’s virus rally would be just more of the same, short on reality but heavy on lies and it was, but then it went truly off the rails, which is notable because it’s not like these rallies are ever all that sane.  To bolster the assertion that he made back in February, the one where he said that the coronavirus would be gone once temperatures starting rising, Trump had Bill Bryan a senior Homeland Security scientist present the preliminary findings of his study of COVID 19’s behavior.  Bryan reported that the virus’ half-life is shorter in high temperatures and in high humidity than in cold dry environments, something that’s probably true but that provides little comfort to people living in places like hot and humid Singapore and southern Florida, where the virus continues to circulate. Bryan then talked about how the virus could be killed by disinfectants and heat, not much of a surprise to those of us who’ve been spraying Lysol on everything while scorching our laundry and hands in hot water. Bryan’s conclusion was that exercising outdoors was better than doing so in a gym and that outdoor bar-b-ques were preferable to indoor gatherings. Things got really weird when Trump turned to Bryan and asked if anyone had considered injecting disinfectant into the virus afflicted or subjecting them to intense heat, you know sticking them in the microwave or in ramped up tanning beds or maybe poking hot rods down throats, to hasten recovery.  When asked her view, “Dr Debby” who tries hard not to contradict Trump in public, mumbled something about fever being the body’s way of killing viruses.  Poison control centers, where calls have already been up due to accidental disinfectant ingestion, better gear up, their call volume is going to skyrocket because as we all know, Trump’s base clings on his every word.  As to Dr Debby, it turns out that she’s the one who got Trump to turn on Georgia Governor Kemp and his plan to open up tattoo parlors, hair salons and bowling allies even though he had initially told Kemp that doing so was okay with him.  Debby pulled that short straw after virus guru Fauci made it clear that he thought Kemp’s plan was bat sh*t crazy and was prepared to say so in public. Yesterday Trump threw some more shade at Kemp, again saying that though he could do what he wanted to do he shouldn’t open up those facilities. Sadly for Georgia so far Kemp hasn’t changed his plans, head to Georgia to cover your gray, but while you’re there go to a tanning salon too, it may turn out to be your only hope because it’s looking more and more like Trump’s other miracle cure, the hydroxychloroquine/Z-Pac combo that he, a few of his entrepreneurial friends and everyone at Fox had been pushing doesn’t work. Earlier in the week preliminary results of a VA study showed that neither the combo or hydroxychloroquine alone helped although it did hurt some patients and last night the results of a New York study confirmed that the drugs do not advance recovery.          

Testing, Testing, Testing:  Trump still insists that he’s testing more people than all the other countries in the world combined, comparing us favorably to Germany where lots of testing really is being done largely because Angela Merkel is a trained scientist who gets it. Trump refused to acknowledge that we are way down the lead table on a per capital basis and that testing is one of those things that his open-up criteria requires.  While insisting that not all governors want more testing capability, an assertion that he hasn’t backed up, he bragged about all those machines that his team has located but continued to remain silent about the reagent shortage and doesn’t appear to be using his presidential powers to ramp up reagent production. When asked about a recent interview where Dr Fauci said that far more testing was needed, Trump said that he was right and Fauci was wrong and when asked about the recent demotion of vaccine expert Dr Bright he ignored the question. He continued to brag about ventilators, questioning why the press no longer asks him about them and then slammed the fake news Washington Post and its Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Phil Rucker after he pressed him on whether it was a good idea to push the hot weather/disinfectant solution.  And of course he found a moment to attack “sleepy” Joe Biden who he called out for hiding in his basement.  Trump is clearly not happy that recent polls show Biden beating him in key swing states Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  Biden should stay in the basement, right now Trump’s daily rallies are doing his job for him.      

Et Cetera:  Mike Bloomberg is helping NYS gets its testing/tracking program in gear.  Bill Gates says that the world won’t get back to normal until most of us are vaccinated because most people get that going into crowded places will be too risky until then.  And NYS Governor Cuomo, who appears to have lost his “bestie governor” position to California’s Gavin Newsom who said something nice about Trump yesterday, reports that about 21% of NYC residents and 14% of NYS residents have virus antibodies in their blood, far short of what’s needed for herd immunity to take effect but higher than was expected.  Additionally Cuomo wants Senate Leader Mitch McConnell to know that his suggestion that blue states like New York should just declare bankruptcy rather than get any money from the Federal government is reckless, dumb and counterproductive because if NY doesn’t get its economy up and running the country will suffer and by the way, it’s states like New York that fund his state of Kentucky which gets far more from the Federal government than it contributes.  Unfortunately, former New Yorker Trump who now says that McConnell’s idea is worth considering, appears to have forgotten that he promised Cuomo earlier this week that money would be forthcoming in the next recovery bill.  Are you surprised about that? 

Stay safe!        

Ventilator King

Human Resources:  The news was filled with stories about people yesterday: good ones who have seen their jobs diminished: evil ones who can’t stop saying and doing, or at the very least trying to do hateful things; and C-players who may have really screwed up, or may just be the scapegoat of the day or both.  First the good ones, back in late February after Nancy Messonnier, the director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases who is also Rod Rosenstein’s sister, very publicly and presciently warned that a pandemic was coming and that she was preparing her children for dramatic changes in their daily lives, Trump, who was still claiming that the coronavirus was a bigly nothing, tried to have her fired.  She’s still employed, but notably we haven’t heard from her since then.  Keeping with that theme, yesterday Dr Rick Bright, was removed from his position as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA) where he was in charge of efforts to come up with a COVID 19 vaccine because why would we ever want our most experienced vaccine developer working on the disease responsible for the nightmare we are all currently living?  The highly respected Bright, who was shifted to another position that takes him away from vaccination development and deprives the country of his expertise, isn’t going down quietly.  Yesterday, after hiring a whistle blower lawyer, he issued a statement saying that he was removed because of his criticism of the administration’s advocacy of hydroxychloroquine and its waste of money on that and other “quack” cures being advocated by “certain” politicians and appointees. When asked about Bright during his daily virus rally, Trump said that he’d never heard of him, said maybe he was pushed out of his job and maybe he wasn’t and then challenged the querying reporter for even saying that Bright was a respected expert.  Among others, Bright blames Health Secretary Alex Azar for his demotion.  Azar, who was yesterday’s whipping boy, also was the subject of a Wall Street Journal article/hit piece that detailed how many times he screwed up, the Journal even pointed out that he’d put a political appointee whose previous job experience was breeding labradoodles in charge of the pandemic task force. However, since Trump recently had Michael Caputo, one of his long term supporters and a Roger Stone caliber king of propagating misinformation, put in charge of the Health Department’s press relations because he wasn’t happy that several early press reports said that he had ignored Azar’s early warnings about the coming COVID 19 onslaught, it’s hard to tell if Azar is the abject failure that the WSJ says he is or whether he is just the scapegoat du jour or both.  In any case, Azar is still Health Secretary.  Then there’s Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, things haven’t been going his way lately, the pandemic has interfered with his ability to get all those really young conservative judges confirmed to lifetime appointments, his legislative initiatives keep getting rewritten by Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and he’s facing a challenge in his upcoming election. That might explain why yesterday, despite Trump’s promise to NY’s Governor Cuomo that the next piece of recovery legislation will provide money to the state’s with the biggest pandemic related budget gaps, McConnell said that he favors letting those states declare bankruptcy rather than providing them with any aid.  Who needs state funded essential services and education anyway?

Virus Rally:  During yesterday’s very long virus update/rally Trump, the self-proclaimed King of Ventilators, continued to assert that he’s the best and that his administration is doing more virus testing than all other country’s combined. He talked a bit about how he’s helping the states source testing paraphernalia but it was hard to tell whether he was following through with his promises or just talking about them especially since he once again said that “some people and governors” believe that testing isn’t really all that necessary. Notably, before he even launched into all his usual patting himself on the back stuff, he called CDC Director Robert Redfield up to the podium to have him correct a Washington Post article which quoted him as saying that “There's a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through. We're going to have the flu epidemic and the coronavirus epidemic at the same time." Redfield,  dutifully went to the podium but pretty much repeated the disputed remarks, adding only that he’d said them to impress upon the public the importance of getting their seasonal flu shots. While both Trump and VP Pence insisted that the coronavirus will be mostly if not entirely gone by the fall, if not sooner, Dr Fauci said it would most likely be back but that since we had all become so good at social distancing, we’ll be able to keep it more or less under control during its next visit.  Surprisingly, everyone including Trump said that Georgia’s Governor Kemp’s decision to open up tattoo parlors and other such facilities was premature.  Trump did that while making it clear that he still thinks that Kemp, who he added beat that woman Stacey Abrams because he campaigned for him, is awesome and that he understands the desire to open up tattoo shops because those wonderful Bikers for Trump are among his biggest fans.  In keeping with his, take no responsibility for anything approach, Trump also said that while he wouldn’t open all those questionable locales, if Kemp wants to he can because it’s his decision and basically the buck stops everywhere but Trump’s desk, except with regard to immigration and the dismantling of environmental protections, of course.  And to make us all feel better Trump plans to have the Thunderbirds and Blue Angels fly over during his upcoming July 4 celebrations to make up for having to keep the number of holiday attendees down to a size that can be adequately socially distanced, but a crowd that will still be bigger than the one that Dr Martin Luther King had for his “I’ve Got a Dream” March on Washington.  Yup, he said that.         

Hydroxy What?

Daily Rally:  Trump went with his usual lies, exaggerations and halve truths during yesterday self-congratulatory virus rally.  He once again bragged about all those virus and antibody tests that aren’t really being done throughout the country, asserting that the US is the world’s leading tester, he threw in another claim that we are now the world’s biggest producer of ventilators and asserted that the end of the virus pandemic is near, dismissing concerns that it could be back with a vengeance during the upcoming flu season.  He also proudly stated that twenty states are on the verge of opening up and though he feigned ignorance when he was asked if he thought that it was wise for Georgia’s Governor Kemp to open up massage, tattoo, hair and manicure venues  even he looked a bit concerned about the idea.  He said that he would be talking to that really awesome governor to learn more about those plans after the rally.  As to Governor Kemp’s decision, when asked about it Dr Deborah Birx proved once again why she rather than virus guru Dr Fauci is Trump’s preferred medical mouthpiece.  Though she was clearly horrified by Kemp’s deadly decision, she didn’t say so, instead she engaged in twisted verbal gymnastics saying something along the lines of it should be fine to open those types of facilities as long as proper social distancing is maintained, as if anyone other than Edward Scissorhands could do so while cutting hair and painting nails. Getting back to Trump, he addressed his tete a tete with NY’s Governor Cuomo saying that he and “Andrew” had discussed New York’s unique needs, that he was planning to snatch back the Navy hospital docked outside NYC and that he had kind of agreed to help NY obtain swabs, reagents and collection vials, those scarce resources needed to conduct virus and antibody testing.  Not surprisingly, the wily “Andrew” had already boxed him in on that, he went live with his own summary of their meeting, beating Trump to the punch.  Curiously Cuomo’s spin on the floating hospital was a little different than Trump’s, he said that he told Trump that he was welcome to take the ship back as NY no longer needed the back-up hospital capacity.  On the testing front, Cuomo said that he told Trump that he could manage testing and tracing, he just needed federal help locating and financing the hard to obtain testing paraphernalia. It will be interesting to see if Trump sticks with his promise to “Andrew” or if he reneges.  It will also be interesting to see if Trump sticks by his other promise, to support future legislation to provide states and localities hardest hit by COVID 19 with additional funding to fill the huge holes in their budgets brought on by the pandemic.  Aside from some funding for testing and some additional money for hospitals the newest $480 billion emergency funding package agreed to yesterday still leaves the states out in the cold.  As to the “small” business loan fund that the newest legislation supplements, it appears that quite a few large companies and institutions have figured out how to become unintended beneficiaries.  One of them, Shake Shack, has already said that it will return the $10 million that it managed to obtain, but another Harvard University which has a $40 billion endowment hasn’t yet agreed to return the $8.6 million that it obtained though Trump is doing his best to shame them into doing so.   

Immigration Follies: It turns out that Trump surprised everyone, including his policy staff, with his late Monday night immigration ban tweet when he said "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!"  That immigration announcement which has little to do with the virus but does have a lot to do with his sinking poll numbers and a desire to reenergize his base, was just another premature eruption.  White House policy denizens spent yesterday hashing out details, trying to craft an order that satisfied Trump but also provided some wiggle room to corporate America.  By the end of the day, it was announced that Trump’s executive order will block most people in the immigration hopper from receiving green cards for 60 days but will still allow the processing of visas for hundreds of thousands of temporary employees, including farm workers, landscapers and crab pickers, the largest source of immigration. The order is also expected to carve out additional exemptions for so-called essential employees, including much needed health care workers.  Just a little more smoke and mirrors from the king of deception, enough to satisfy his base while doing little to disrupt his big donors.  As to the rest, many of those who are on the verge of getting their permanent residency cards were already in limbo due to virus related shutdowns and staffing cutbacks and will now have to wait to see if Trump let’s up in sixty days or uses his power to further destroy what’s left of legal immigration.

Et Cetera:  Have you noticed that Trump and his echo chamber at Fox have gone dark on hydroxychloroquine?  That’s because reports out of the trenches indicate that the hydroxy-C/zithromax combination isn’t the magic potion they claimed it was.  In fact, early study results indicate that it’s hurting rather than helping.  Not that you’ll hear any of them admit it. As to all those anti-stay at home demonstrations, Trump insists that they’re okay because it’s a free country and people can demonstrate if they want to and anyway as far as he can tell all those demonstrators are social distancing even though they’re not, besides those demonstrations are being spurred on by one of his good friends Stephen Moore, the guy who was deemed too incompetent to be confirmed to the Federal Reserve Board but who is serving as one of Trump’s “reopen the economy advisors.”  As to inadequate social distancing, a number of those Wisconsin voters and poll workers who participated in that state’s primary election are now testing positive for COVID 19.  None of that seems to be of concern to Attorney General Barr, he is now talking about suing states for some of their “aggressive” shutdown tactics.  That may be his way of diverting attention from the Senate Intelligence committee’s most recent  bipartisan report, just released it confirms the US intelligence agencies’ conclusions that the Russians interfered in the 2016 on behalf of Trump.                        

Bromance Alert

Testing Follies:  Trump lied about the usual things during yesterday’s virus press conference/campaign rally, used the presence of the General in charge of the Army Corp of Engineers who was there to discuss what have been and continue to be impressive hospital building accomplishments to brag about his border wall construction, slammed a few governors, and expressed undying love for NY’s Governor Cuomo, whose strategy of complimenting Trump while criticizing his failures seems to have earned him a special place in Trump’s head, somewhere between the dreaded Nancy Pelosi and the much loved Vladimir Putin.  Perhaps because Cuomo, who will be visiting Trump today, spent so much of his daily press conference discussing virus testing and the challenges of sourcing testing paraphernalia for machines made by so many different manufacturers, Trump focused his rally on testing, putting on a dog and pony show that was intended to leave the impression that testing is now his numero uno priority, even though he couldn’t resist saying that “many” say testing is overrated. Trump and a few of his minions spent a lot of time talking about the huge number of resources that they’ve provided to the states, once again talking about all of those swabs they’ve located, most of which won’t be available for a few more weeks but failing to say anything at all about the shortage of the chemical reagents needed to complete the tests.  They announced that they’ve given each of the governors a list of the machines previously hidden away in local Federal facilities as if that’s the solution to everything.  Trump used that reveal to bash Maryland’s Republican Governor Hogan who, taking advantage of the connections and language skills of his ethnically Korean wife, managed to secure a large volume of test kits from South Korean manufacturers something that really offended Trump who ratchets back and forth between telling governors that they need to source their own materials to punishing them when they do. To that end, he also slammed Illinois’ Governor Pritzker for managing to source his own protective gear.  Getting back to testing, Trump once again claimed that with 4 million completed the US is the world leader though our per capita ranking still sucks bigly. As a reminder, not too longer ago VP Pence promised that 4 million tests would be completed by the end of March, he was only off by one month!  The bottom line on testing is that we are still woefully behind where we need to be to get the country reopened, resources are still limited, and Trump doesn’t appear to really care, to him saying a problem is solved is far more important that actually solving it. Without irony, Trump said that when the story of how he handled the coronavirus is written up, the truth will come out.  It most certainly will, but its fair to say that he won’t emerge as the hero.  Getting back to Governor Cuomo and his visit, he is likely to repeat what he said on Monday during his daily presser he’ll flatter Trump, agreeing that states need to conduct their own testing but then hammer home that it’s Trump’s job to see that the federal government really sources testing materials.  He will probably be equally focused on getting Trump to commit to providing more funding to the states, particularly the ones like NY with the highest virus caseloads.  Good luck with that.  

Darwin Candidate:  Despite all those demonstrations that keep popping up around the country, three quarters of Americans remain worried that it’s still too early to go back to work.  Democrats and Independents are more concerned than Republicans, a differential that is as much based on political affiliation as it is on source of news and a perception that COVID 19 is something that only affects big cities, coastal states and the “other,” like immigrant workers in meat plants.  Although Georgia is one of the states towards the top of the infection list, Governor Brian Kemp has decided it’s time to start getting back to business so while other state governors are gearing up to ramp up essential businesses, he’s going with gyms, hair and nail salons, tattoo parlors and bowling alleys on Friday with dine in restaurants and theaters to follow on Monday. Apparently, Governor Kemp believes that his residents will have no trouble maintaining social distance while getting their nails done or sticking their fingers in bowling balls.  He acknowledges that his virus rate might tick up as people get back to their favorite activities, but feels that’s a fair price to pay for the privilege of getting new tattoos.  We should know in about two weeks if he’ll be a qualifier for one of  this year’s Darwin awards, the honor bestowed on those who contribute to evolution by selecting themselves or other like thinkers out of the gene pool.  Although the competition is steep right now, my money‘s is on him.        

Et Cetera:  Another great thinker, North Korea’s Kim Jung Un is reported to be having some troubles of his own.  Intelligence agencies report that he recently had some sort of heart surgery and that his recovery isn’t going well.  Those reports, which are being denied by his spokespeople as well as officials from South Korea and China, are bolstered by his failure to make an appearance at one of his country’s most important events, a celebration of the anniversary of the birth of his grandfather, the country’s founder. Over the weekend Trump claimed to have received a really nice note from the Little Rocket Man, but the existence of that note, like the reports of Kim’s imminent demise was denied by a North Korean representative.  At least with regard to the note, North Korea is probably telling the truth.   In other international news, three times appears to be the charm for Israel.  Instead of moving forward with a fourth election Benny Gantz has agreed to join with Bibi Netanyahu in the formation of a unity government, one that the indicted Netanyahu will lead until October 2021.  Gantz who previously said that he would never go the unity route with Bibi, says that he is doing so now because a fourth election during a pandemic isn’t a good thing.  And lastly, its now reported that Trump is using the pandemic to close down all immigration into the US.  How nice to see that Stephen Miller is working so hard behind the scenes.   

Birds of a Feather

Crazier By the Day:  The twisted tape running through Trump’s head is stuck in a deadly repeat loop:  he’s the best, the governors love him, he’s producing thousands upon thousands of ventilators even though all those governors (hint, hint Andrew Cuomo) overstated their needs, his hospital ships are awesome, testing is overrated and anyway we’re doing more than any other country in the universe, everyone, everywhere will be ready to open soon and the press, or at least most of it is pushing fake news especially when they ask him tough questions and/or challenge his answers. Continuing on that theme, he slammed some ungrateful mostly swing state governors but then played a carefully selected segment of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s Sunday daily update, the part where Cuomo expressed appreciation for the help he’d been getting from the federal government, leaving out the part where Cuomo hammered Trump for his refusal to take the reins on ramping up virus testing.  As an aside, when Trump’s video of Cuomo’s comments failed midstream he looked like he was going to explode, someone in the White House audiovisual department is probably jobless this morning.  As to that testing capability, yesterday Trump actually brought a swab to Sunday’s pep rally and did a little show and tell, mocking how similar the medical swab was to the Q tip he brought along for comparison.  He then said that he had solved the swab scarcity problem by finally invoking the Defense Production Act to get a bigly amount into production, only to later say that he was only threatening to do so and anyway swabs are east compared to those complex computerized ventilators that he plans to share worldwide, especially with his friend Vlad.  As to the chemical reagents needed to complete the COVID tests, Trump dismissed the idea that they were in short supply, and does not appear to be doing anything to increase their availability because it’s a lot more fun to watch the states compete and pay top dollar for scarce resources.  It’s hard to understand why Trump and his minions are so reluctant to get fully behind testing.  Sure it’s complicated, there are lots of different machines out there, with different requirements, but ramping up testing is essential to getting the country up and running again, at least that’s what the Governors, or at least most of them, are saying, and it’s not just the Democratic Governors, Ohio’s DeWine and Maryland’s Hogan are both in the testing camp so much so that they both went on the Sunday morning talk show circuit to say so.  It’s fair to assume that at some point in the future we’ll learn more about what’s really behind the failure to ramp up testing but by then we might already be suffering the consequences of the ineptitude, and by consequences think a preventable second virus wave.  On that incompetence front, while Trump continues to bash Obama and by association Biden for their failure to come up with COVID 19 testing capacity, I know that makes no sense because there was no COVID 19 when they were in office but when did Trump ever worry about making sense, we are learning more about how the CDC really messed up their first early COVID 19 tests, the ones that they insisted were superior to the WHO tests that they rejected but that turned out to have been rendered useless by a combination of complexity and avoidable lab contamination. On the WHO front, it turns out that one of the benefits of being WHO’s major funder is that a significant number of the people working at the organization are Americans who also report in to the CDC.  It turns out that those US WHO employees provided countless updates and warnings to their CDC counterparts about the burgeoning China coronavirus outbreak going as far back as December.  If only someone in the White House like Trump, had cared enough to do something other than push forward with his Chinese trade pact aspirations.

Insurrection:  Trump insists that his actions and able management of the virus crisis is the reason that mortality projections are down to more tolerable levels, as if 60000-70000 people dying is tolerable.  Yet he also seems to be doing his best to egg on the pockets of anti-stay at home protesters showing up across the country.  To that end on Friday he sent out a series of tweets calling for Minnesota, Michigan and Virginia to be “liberated,” because why wouldn’t he want to support civil unrest in the purple states that he hopes, or should I say needs to win in November.  When asked about those tweets, he refused to acknowledge that the protesters, who by the way appear to have gotten some if not all of their funding from conservative donors including possibly a right wing PAC funded by his Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’ family, are violating the very stay at home policies that his administration has advocated. He called the protesters, even the ones sporting Confederate and Nazi flags, good people exercising their inalienable rights and then whenever possible he pivoted to saying that protesting in Virginia was a really good thing because someone has to speak out against Virginia Governor Northam’s attack on Second Amendment gun rights.  Trump stands little chance of winning Virginia, but going after Northam over gun regulations pays dividends elsewhere, or at least Trump hopes that it will.  On the mortality count, Trump seemed not to know that we’re past the 40,000 mark, so when a reporter corrected his 30,000 plus assertion while asking him how he can congratulate himself for his accomplishments at a time when so many people are dying, Trump attacked him saying “you’re CNN, you’re fake new, you don’t have the brains you were born with.”

Et Cetera:  Congress and the administration appear very close to agreeing on another aid package, this one for $470 billion to provide more funding for small business loans, hospitals and virus testing, an amped up version of the legislation that Senate leader Mitch McConnell tried to force through last week without any Democratic input.  Unfortunately, the package doesn’t provide money to supplement the states’ virus strained budgets.  Trump insists that the states’ financial distress will be addressed in a subsequent piece of legislation but its not clear that he’s delivered that message to McConnell who doesn’t seem to be all that concerned that states like NY are floundering and appears to be ignoring that there will be no US economy if NY runs out of cash.  Princess Sofia of Sweden  has just gotten herself qualified to work as a medical assistant to help out on the COVID 19 front.  Not to be outdone, local princess Ivanka sent out the following tweet over the weekend:  “Looking for a Saturday night activity? Try making shadow puppets from Henry Bursill's recently unearthed 1860's book of engravings.” Her tweet included a series of hands configured to depict birds and animals.  Not surprisingly, she got a lot of responses to her tone deaf tweet, but none with animals just middle finger “birds.”  Talk about not having the brains you were born with.  And before ending his press conference, Trump hinted that he may pardon a few birds of his own, of the jailbird variety birds named Flynn, Manafort and Stone.  He did that while calling the FBI scum.    

The New Normal

Opening Up Is Hard to Do:  During yesterday’s afternoon virus/pep rally an unusually toned down Trump revealed his plan for opening up the country, one that is geared more towards getting his best ever economy up and running in time for him to win the November election than anything else.  The plan is less a plan than a series of guidelines for how governors should gradually open up their states.  Trump who has ping ponged from insisting that he’s an all-powerful king to saying that he can’t make governors do what they don’t want to do has figured out that leaving opening up decision to the individual governors will allow him to take credit if those decisions pan out while at the same time evading blame if things go bad, as in viral.  Notably, the guidelines, could lead some governors, particularly the red state ones who see little benefit in the short term sacrifice of their economies for greater life expectancy, a view shared by lots of people on Fox including the quacky Dr Mehmet Oz who thinks throwing a few kindergarteners under the bus  would be acceptable, to conclude that they’re ready to open up now.  The Trump plan relies on each of the states being able to implement aggressive testing and tracking to keep ahead of any burgeoning viral hotspots. The testing/tracking concept is a good thing, however to work, the states will need more test capacity than any of them have as well as the ability and willingness to marshal resources to implement tracking infrastructures.  While it’s fair to leave the tracking in the hands of the states, with unemployment through the roof lots of people would take those tracking positions, the problem with this plan is that Trump still doesn’t intend to help the states ramp up their testing capabilities because going to “parking lots in the middle of nowhere” to swab people isn’t his thing.  As to those swabs which appear to be in as short supply as the rest of the testing paraphernalia, he insists that too short, unsterile Q tips should suffice. Further, Trump is standing firm with his assertion that the US is the universe’s testing leader, true in volume, but still not true on a per capita basis. Notably, although New York, the virus hotspot of hotspots except for that South Dakota Pork Plant where cases of COVID 19 continue to grow exponentially, has actually performed more tests than anywhere else, Governor Cuomo remains concerned that far more tests are needed now and that even more will be needed before he can get the state back to a new normal, and by new normal, think social distancing, face masks, which become mandatory in NY tonight, and a gradual ramping up of business activity.  Cuomo continues to call for the federal government to take over marshalling testing resources.  Trump who insists that the US now has excess testing capacity remains reluctant to do so.  That is inexplicable but then again lots of things about him are both inexplicable and intolerable but there is nothing new about that.  One more thing on the governor front, taking a page from their east and west coast cousins, seven Midwestern governors, including Illinois’ Pritzker, Michigan’s Whitmer, Ohio’s DeWine, Wisconsin’s Evers, Minnesota’s Walz, Indiana’s Holcomb and Kentucky Beshear have signed up to a their own mutli-state pact, one that is unlikely to lead to any of their states opening up all that soon. DeWine and Holcomb are Republicans, Trump won’t be happy.    

People Report:  While Trump may have backed off from being king of everything, well backed off a little, Ivanka continues to act like an entitled princess.  Apparently, despite New Jersey Governor Murphy’s request that people avoid traveling to their NJ resort homes, Ivanka, Jared, the kids and their secret service coterie traveled to the Trump Bedminster resort for the Passover holiday.  Apparently, rules don’t apply to her and anyway what’s the fun of hiding the afikomen in your Kalorama Washington mansion when you can hide it somewhere in a golf resort.  Ivanka and Jared aren’t the only ones on the road.  This morning it was reported that one time Trump fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen will be released from prison in fourteen days, as soon as he completes a required pre-release quarantine.  He wasn’t due out until November 2021 but has been granted  early release to home confinement due to the pandemic.  He’s not the only one, earlier this week it was announced that Michael Avenatti has been temporarily released from his jail cell where he was awaiting sentencing for his Nike extortion antics.  Yesterday Roger Stone’s judge, Amy Berman Jackson, denied his request for a retrial but given the plague it’s fair to assume that Stone who has already been sentenced will be allowed to stay out of jail while his inevitable appeals work their way through the system and if that doesn’t work, there’s always that pardon which we all know he’s going to get.  Paul Manafort is also trying for a get out of jail free card, a suspicious type might think that that releasing Cohen early provides the Justice Department with the justification to do the same for Manafort.    

Stay safe!             

Gray is the New Orange

Another Day, Another Rally: It took only minutes for yesterday’s edition of ‘As My Stomach Turns’ to go fully off the rails.  After teasing that he would be releasing really beautiful guidelines to begin the opening of the country by May 1, or even sooner, later today, Trump went off topic, launching into another one of his epic rants.  This one was about the Senate’s failure to confirm so many of the people he’s nominated to fill hundreds of vacant government positions, people he asserts are needed now more than ever given the virus crisis, the crisis he’ll probably make worse by opening up too soon.  Trump went on to threaten to use his presidential power to adjourn both houses of government to allow him get all of those slots filled via unilateral recess appointments.  For the record, though recess appointments are a thing, presidents can only adjourn the House and Senate under certain conditions and those conditions have not been met.  Apparently whatever incompetent aide set him off in the direction of recess appointments failed to fully inform him about that.  In any case, the Senate is run by Trump’s very own Republican party, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to assume that the people who haven’t been confirmed are either woefully unqualified, haven’t passed their background checks and/or are members of the KKK or another similar white supremacist organization.  And for the record there aren’t hundreds of them, as of now 82 of Trump’s nominees remain unconfirmed, he never bothered to nominate anyone to fill any of the other vacant 150 slots.  Getting back to his May Day plans, the Wall Street Journal reports that yesterday, banking and financial services executives told him that he would need to dramatically increase the availability of virus testing in order for the public to be confident enough to return to work, eat at restaurants or shop in retail establishments.  When a reporter asked Trump about that, he started in with his usual testing spiel, asserting again that under his guidance the US has tested more people than any other country, that his tests, including the initial faulty ones developed by the CDC were and are the best and that anyway, it’s not his job to stand in Walmart parking lots swabbing people’s throats, that’s the job of state governors. Who knows, maybe Trump’s fear that someone really expects him to do some swabbing is the reason that his usually unworldly orange hair is now grey.  Really it’s grey, or at least it was yesterday.   Not coincidentally many of the governors, particularly the rational ones, agree that testing needs to be ramped up and that the best way to make that happen ASAP would be for Trump to use the power he really has, the Defense Production Act, but for some reason he still won’t do that. 

Porky Pig and Friends: Although no one directly addressed the crisis at the Sioux City, South Dakota pork processing plant, the Smithfield plant that’s now closed because over 500 of its employees are COVID 19 positive, Trump had Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue at the daily rally to speak about how confident he is that the country’s food chain is in fine shape and that there are no shortages on the horizon, which leads skeptical me to believe that things are probably much worse than we’re being told.  And once again, instead of focusing on the processing plant catastrophes, Trump used Perdue’s presence to complain some more about all his unconfirmed appointees, saying that Perdue calls him daily to ask when his undersecretary will make it through the Senate gauntlet, not to discuss infected plants but to complain about appointees?  Before exiting, Trump also fielded some questions about his decision to hold up funding to the World Health Organization, a decision that’s been met with wide condemnation at home and abroad and one that Speaker Pelosi says isn’t even possible because she controls the purse strings not him.  It’s not just Pelosi, though Senator Lindsey Graham has tweeted his full support for defunding WHO, Trump’s own CDC Head Robert Redfield appears to be team Pelosi on this one, yesterday he said “that WHO has been a longstanding partner for CDC. We've worked together to fight health crises around the world. We continue to do that." Could Redfield be the next to be pushed aside?  If so he’ll have plenty of company.  Health and Human Secretary Azar is currently in the dog house, Trump is so upset about all those reports that Azar warned him of the impending pandemic in January that he’s now appointed Michael Caputo, one of his die hard supporters to serve as Health and Human Services’ new Communications Director.  Caputo is incredibly qualified for the job, he’s a long term associate of both Roger Stone and Paul Manafort and though he has no health care experience he has resided in Russia and did communications work for Gazprom.  Kellyanne Conway reared her head yesterday too, weighing in WHO, she defended Trump’s defunding decision saying “This is Covid-19, not Covid-1, folks. You would think that people charged with the World Health Organization facts and figures would be on top of that.” Apparently spinmeister Kellyanne doesn’t understand that “19” refers to the year 2019, and is not a reference to the novel virus’ 19^th appearance. 

Democrats:  Add Elizabeth Warren to the long list of Democrats who have now endorsed Joe Biden for president.  Yesterday she said "Empathy matters. And, in this moment of crisis, it's more important than ever that the next president restores Americans' faith in good, effective government. Joe Biden has spent nearly his entire life in public service. He knows that a government run with integrity, competence, and heart will save lives and save livelihoods. And we can't afford to let Donald Trump continue to endanger the lives and livelihoods of every American."   She also appears very interested in being Joe’s VEEP choice, last night when Rachel Maddow asked her if she would accept the position she answered YES!  Probably not going to happen but there’s no point in being shy about one’s aspirations.  At least that’s the position that Georgia’s Stacey Abrams is also taking, she’s told everyone who’s asked her that she’d love to be Biden’s VEEP too.  My guess is that Kamala Harris and Amy Klobuchar are closer to the top of that list but who knows.  

Where's the Bacon?

Who's Up First?  During yesterday’s virus update/campaign rally Trump offered up nothing new on the fight against COVID 19, but he did deliver on one of his promises, not the one about ramping up virus testing, nor the one about ordering the state governors to get in line, instead he suspended funding of the World Health Organization making them the official scapegoat for all things coronavirus.  That’s significant because though he exaggerated the amount of funding that the US provides to the WHO each year, his observation that the US is the organization’s largest funder is, or at least until yesterday was, correct.  To state the obvious, cutting funding to WHO during a pandemic is absurdly stupid and hugely damaging to world health and if anything will foster rather than hinder future pandemics but then again Trump is kind of a moron, or at least has been called one a few times by people in the know.  That’s not to say that WHO is perfect, they’ve made mistakes, they did show too much deference to the Chinese, Trump’s major criticism, but they also warned their members, including US officials, about the virus back in January.  While the government of South Korea responded to that warning by gearing up bigly, successfully protecting its population from much of the virus’ impact, Trump, who was more concerned about winning his trade war with China, responded by expressing his appreciation to China for taking the virus so seriously and dealing with it so transparently.  Making matters far worse, he did nothing to stock up or protect the US except for that very porous travel ban that he put into effect in early February.  Getting back to the governors, Trump’s messaging on that front has been all over the place.  After saying on Monday that as president he could order them to do anything he wanted them to do, Constitution be damned, he started yesterday with an inane tweet comparing himself to Captain Bligh saying “Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”  That tweet made little sense, it’s not even  clear that Trump understands that the dictatorial Bligh was so cruel to his own crewmen, that they rebelled against him.  In any case, NY’s Governor Cuomo masterfully refused to take Trump’s bait, though he did throw a few barbs Trump’s way, he said that now wasn’t the time to fight.  Anyway, by the time of his evening rally, Trump sounded a bit more conciliatory, he was back to a carrots and sticks approach and came close to admitting that despite his early claims, he couldn’t get the governors to do anything that they didn’t think was in the best interests of their states. 

Testing, Testing, Testing:  Trump wants the states to get back to business as soon as possible. He continues to insist that some will be able to open up within the next two weeks and it’s possible that a few will, but it’s also fair to assume that most won’t and that the few who do might regret acting rashly.  For his part California’s Governor Newsom laid out the beginning of his plan to get California open again.  That plan relies on the ability to monitor and protect communities through testing, contact tracing, isolating, and supporting those who are positive or exposed.  Notice the emphasis on testing, that’s something that NY’s Governor Cuomo is emphasizing too.  He’s called for the federal government to step up and take the lead there saying that it makes no sense for the various states to compete for scarce resources.  Unfortunately for some unfathomable reason Trump refuses to recognize the importance of testing, he continues to assert that he’s done enough on that front, that it’s now the states’ responsibility.  The testing situation is so screwed up that mass testing efforts are still being hampered by a lack of swabs.  SWABS! If only someone in the Oval Office had the authority to use his powers to ramp up super-sized Q tip production.  The scientists weren’t called to the podium during yesterday’s news conference, but someone participating on one of the group governors’ calls reported that Dr Birx acknowledged that the testing situation was a great disappointment, to her at least, and virus guru Dr Fauci told the AP that the US does not yet have the critical testing and tracing procedures needed to begin reopening the nation’s economy adding “We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we’re not there yet.” As to those smaller population red states that Trump keeps insisting will be able to open up first, some of them, including South Dakota whose governor has refused to impose work/stay in place restrictions are now home to some very large virus hotspots. If you were hoping to have bacon with your quarantine eggs you might have to do without as Smithfield Farms, one of the nation’s biggest pork processing plants has had to close down its South Dakota facility due to a rather large virus outbreak among its workers.  As to the rest of his daily rally, Trump listed the names of as many of the country’s CEOs as he could pronounce as being part of his new open the country working group but still aside from task force building he doesn’t appear to have a viable plan.     

Democrats:  Yesterday, President Obama formally endorsed his good buddy and former partner Joe Biden.  The endorsement was never in doubt but still it was nice to hear and probably marks Obama’s return from hibernation. In an effort to appeal to recalcitrant Bernie Sanders supporters Obama complimented the progressive Senator for “setting a new agenda for the party” and made it clear that they need to stand up, hold their noses if necessary, and vote for Biden or else.  Obama also spoke out about the current crisis, urging “fortitude in the face of the virus,” using the kind of words and showing the genuine compassion  that the current occupant of the White House would never be able to muster.  As to Trump, Obama took a not so subtle swipe at his competency saying “The kind of leadership that’s guided by knowledge and experience, honesty and humility, empathy and grace — that kind of leadership doesn’t just belong in our state capitals and mayor’s offices. It belongs in the White House.” Yup. Lacking anything else to say, Brad Parscale, Trump’s campaign manager snidely commented that Obama had no choice but to endorse Biden as he was the only guy left standing, and even worse, that he’d been “beaten to the table” by Sanders.  Whatever.  Expect an endorsement from Senator Elizabeth Warren, as well as another disparaging comment from Parscale and the rest of the Trump camp and Fox echo chamber to follow soon.     

Et Cetera:  Most people getting COVID 19 economic aid checks will receive them virtually, through direct deposit to their bank accounts but those lucky individuals who’ll be receiving real checks will get a to see Donald Trump’s name on their payments.  He won’t be the signatory since that would render the checks worthless, instead his name will appear in the checks’ memo section.  It took a few extra days to work out that logistic  but good old Don wouldn’t have it any other way because though he doesn’t want you to know about all of those missteps that magnified the virus’ spread he does want all the check recipients to know that he’s their money man.