Mayday

Weekend Follies:  Over the weekend, the NY Times published an article detailing the cascade of warnings that Trump failed to take into account during the months leading up to the US coronavirus onslaught.  Going back to January a number of public health experts, many members of an aptly named Red Dawn group of scientists and doctors were sounding alarm bells, as were people like Health Secretary Azar and Trade Advisor Peter Navarro but due to a combination of factors including disdain and distrust for science and experts in general, concern over damaging any of the economic drivers that Trump viewed as key to his reelection and in-fighting and political backstabbing, warnings were ignored and actions that could have gotten the country in a better position to handle the virus weren’t taken.  And we aren’t just talking about closing everything down, a hard decision for any administration to make, the Trump machine was too focused on messaging and trade negotiations with China to take actions that would have built up key reserves of personal protective equipment, ventilators and testing equipment, including things as mundane as swabs. As tactfully as he could virus guru Anthony Fauci pretty much verified the truth of many components of the NY Times article, including the fact that he and others tried to get Trump to shut things down earlier and that doing so would have slowed the virus and saved lives, during his appearance on Jake Tapper’s Sunday morning news show and Fox’s Chris Wallace made several of the same points on his Sunday morning talk show, a show that included an interview with the highly respected disease modeling expert from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg(!) School of Public Health, Dr Tom Inglesby.  Inglesby, even more forcefully than Fauci, reiterated the importance of ramping up testing and contact tracing, steps that both agree are integral to getting the country back open.  Those are messages that Trump who insists that he wants the country to open on May 1 wasn’t pleased to hear.  Though he was a bit less visible this weekend due to the Easter holiday, he found plenty of time to tweet his dismay.  He retweeted a missive from right wing outlet OANN that slammed Fauci and ended with “Time to #FireFauci” and e-punched Chris Wallace, saying “Just watched Mike Wallace wannabe, Chris Wallace, on @FoxNews. I am now convinced that he is even worse than Sleepy Eyes Chuck Todd of Meet the Press(please!), or the people over at Deface the Nation. What the hell is happening to @FoxNews. It’s a whole new ballgame over there!”  It’s fair to assume that Trump who insisted that he would be doing the virtual church service thing on his laptop, wasn’t paying much attention to any of that godliness stuff.  That’s the same Trump who also said that the decision to open the country back up will be the biggest decision he’ll ever make, he said that while pointing at his brain, because forget those experts, he’s going to rely on his own faculties, limited or not, to make that decision.  In any case, the governors who matter, the ones from the big states with the biggest economies continue to make it clear that the decisions to get things open again will be theirs.

Testing, Testing Tracking: Trump continues to stick with the assertion that under his guidance, the country is at the forefront of testing volume and technology.  He says that while refusing to acknowledge any of the failures that have plagued “his” testing system and while shifting the responsibility to testing on to state governors, the same group of people he’s taken to blaming for shortages and misuse of equipment.  As to the testing, the Trump friendly NY Post reports that while 15 of those Abbott Labs quick testing machines that Trump keeps bragging about were provided to every state except Alaska, the machines lacked enough cartridges to be useful so most of them are sitting idle, kind of like getting a new printer and running out of ink in the first week only to find out that no one is selling the cartridges you need. As to those 15 machines, don’t even get me, or for that matter NY’s Governor Cuomo started on why states with smaller populations and low caseloads are getting a disproportionate amount of many essential resources and funding as states with much larger populations and many more affected people.  The only rationale for that is that a lot of those less affected, smaller population states are red, and/or as in the case of Arizona and Colorado, have vulnerable Republican Senators up for reelection, which likely explains why Senators Cory Gardner and Marth McSally were set up to pat themselves on their respective backs tweeting out how they had obtained resources for their states due to their Trump connections, while Long Island’s Republican Congressman Lee Zeldin took a similar victory lap after he and only he was able to get personal protective equipment for his eastern Long Island district.

Elections:  If you haven’t done so already, APPLY FOR AN ABSENTEE BALLOT FOR NOVEMBER.  They’re easier than ever to get.  If you are a New Yorker, one application allows you to get a ballot for the both the November general election and the June primary.  As to primaries, Alaska held theirs over the weekend, given the pandemic it was done solely vote by mail something that Trump, who votes by mail, continues to diss as does House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who said it’s “disgusting” that Democrats are pushing to include money for mail-in voting in the next coronavirus relief bill.  For the record a lot of red-states do have expanded mail-in voting, and in fact, New Hampshire’s Republican Governor Chris Sununu has announced that his state will allow voters to cast mail-in ballots in the November general election if the coronavirus is still a factor this fall.  Getting back to Alaska, Joe Biden won and not surprisingly given his success, a woman who previously claimed that he had inappropriately touched her has now come out of the shadows to broaden her claim to sexual assault, something that Biden denies.  It’s ugly out there and getting uglier.