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.