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.