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.