Take A Knee

Crisis Management? For the first few years of the Trump regime he faced few external crises.  Sure he had to deal with the Russia investigation and the impeachment, but despite his assertions to the contrary those were largely self-inflicted crises that he could have averted by showing remorse, going with truth telling, or just not strong arming an ally or cozying up to Putin. Now, with the coronavirus death count, or at least the reported death count, up to 103,000, it’s fair to say that Trump and the rest of us are fully mired in a crisis of major proportions, one that would have been much more manageable had Trump spent less time grievance tweeting and golfing and instead paid attention to all the warnings that he chose to ignore.  By the way, the reason I referred to the death count as “reported” is that certain states, most notably Florida, Georgia and Texas have been significantly undercounting their COVID mortality numbers by conveniently classifying COVID related deaths as deaths from pneumonia, either that or those states are suffering through an unprecedented pneumonia epidemic.  For example, in 2018 from February to May Florida had 935 pneumonia deaths, this year during the same period the state reported 4259 deaths.  The Texas and Georgia numbers are similarly absurd.  Freaked out about his economy and his reelection prospects and bored with the challenges of managing the country through the pandemic, Trump is now diverting attention to other things, so yesterday afternoon, as promised, he issued an “Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship” by social media platforms, his response to Twitter labeling some of his tweets as fact-less. Claiming that companies like Twitter, Facebook and Google have been disproportionately making the lives of right wing crazies like him difficult, he’s directing the Commerce Department to request that the Federal Communications Commission draft new regulations limiting the protections granted to media companies through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  That measure immunizes online platforms against liability for content their users post.  That’s a long way of saying that he wants to punish the platforms, most notably Twitter, for restricting free speech, primarily free speech he likes.  Essentially, Trump, who is concerned that Twitter’s actions will hurt his ability to push disruptive and anti-Biden/anti-Democrat conspiracy theories into the ether, wants to make sure that he and his cronies aren’t stopped from doing so in the run up to the election. To be fair, a number of politicians on both sides of the aisle have raised questions about those Section 230 protections, but if anyone has benefited from them it’s been Trump and his right wing echo chamber.  Of course, Trump who is addicted to Twitter can’t leave it which is why he isn’t following up on his faux threats to do so.

Fueling the Fire:  Trump’s delayed response to the “death by police knee” of Minneapolis resident George Floyd was that it was a sad, sad thing.  However, by last night Trump, who early in his term alarmingly encouraged police to feel free to not so accidentally bash the heads of perps into police cars, had reverted to “normal.” As state and city officials were trying to deal with increasingly violent protests in Minneapolis, demonstrations further fueled by an odd press conference where federal officials said little that was useful and failed to announce the arrest of any of the already fired policemen involved in the Floyd “arrest,”  he used his twitter finger to throw more of that fuel on some very real, deadly fires by tweeting “I can’t stand back & watch this happen to a great American City, Minneapolis. A total lack of leadership. Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right..... “ and then following up with “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!”  Twitter, uncowed by Trump’s threats to rein in social platforms took swift action to his second tweet, flagging it for violating rules about glorifying violence probably because threatening to start the shooting is hardly a way to calm down an incredibly fraught situation.  So now, in the course of just a few days, Trump has given up on fighting COVID, moving instead to threatening the Mayor of Minneapolis, protestors outraged about another race motivated police killing and his one-time favorite platform Twitter.  By the way, the reason the police were sent out to arrest the now very dead George Floyd was due to a report by a local store owner that he had tried to pass a counterfeit $20 bill.  Think about that, the “knee” death penalty for possibly passing a counterfeit bill.  Remember how much trouble Trump gave one time football player Colin Kaepernick for just kneeling?   

Et Cetera:  The White House announced yesterday that it plans to forego issuing the usual mid-year economic update this summer.  That report generally includes updated projections on economic trends such as unemployment, inflation and economic growth so its fair to assume that the unprecedented decision to cancel  its release means even that even Trump’s deceptive economic team doesn’t want to put their ridiculously optimistic predictions of a robust third quarter economic rebound down on paper.  In other news, Trump is still all in on questioning the legitimacy of voting by mail by people other than Republicans so yesterday he tweeted “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed. The Governor of California is sending Ballots to millions of people, anyone.....  “  That’s the same Trump who had no problem bragging about those “signed” stimulus checks that his Treasury mailed out to the millions without bank accounts.     

Cupcake Kelly

Road Trip:  While the COVID headcount crossed the 100,000 mark and the onslaught against Black men continued to throw quarantine jittery cities across the country into turmoil, Trump took his extended family on a taxpayer funded jaunt to Brevard County, Florida to watch the launch of the manned SpaceX rocket.  Ivanka, Jared, the Kushner kidlets, Don Jr, paid girlfriend Kim and the rest of the boondoggle crowd didn’t get to see the rocket head to space since the launch was scratched on account of weather, a not totally surprising outcome and the reason that most presidents don’t spend millions of dollars on such trips but then again Trump needed an excuse to leave Washington, and was hoping the rocket launch would divert from the mortality count while giving him another pep rally moment.  Nothing to worry about there, last night he announced plans to return on Sunday, the rocket’s next possible launch date.  While at the NASA facility, Trump and Melania toured around touching things and breathing their germs into the air.  Ivanka and the Kushner Kids wore color coordinated masks with their oddly festive spring frocks but strangely enough Jared, who traipsed around with them was unmasked.  On the masking front, yesterday virus guru Fauci, who clearly hasn’t gotten the Trump directive, told CNN that he wears a mask because he wants “to protect myself and protect others, and also because I want to make it be a symbol for people to see that that's the kind of thing you should be doing." Even Senate Majority Leader McConnell weighed in on the facemask debate, telling a Kentucky audience that “There’s no stigma attached to wearing a mask. There’s no stigma attached to staying six feet apart,” adding that “you have an obligation to others.” Wow, a moment of clarity from the otherwise devious Mitch.   

Twitter Wars: Trump is not happy about Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to fact check his most egregious tweets, most notably the ones about faux election fraud and Joe Scarborough and the murder that wasn’t.  Those false murder accusation tweets are so offensive that three Republicans, frequent Trump critic Senator Mitt Romney and Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger expressed their dismay, pleading for Trump to stop it already, not that he cares.  Yesterday Trump tweet slammed Twitter writing “Twitter has now shown that everything we have been saying about them (and their other compatriots) is correct. Big action to follow!” Adding “Big Tech is doing everything in their very considerable power to CENSOR in advance of the 2020 Election. If that happens, we no longer have our freedom. I will never let it happen! They tried hard in 2016, and lost. Now they are going absolutely CRAZY. Stay Tuned!!! To that end Trump is expected to issue an executive order directed at Twitter and the other social media companies this morning.  It’s not clear that he can really do anything substantive to them but he’ll try and his Fox echo chamber and a number of elected officials will support his efforts.  And, sadly at least one of those other social companies appears to be on Team Trump; yesterday Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg went with his “private companies” especially these “platforms shouldn’t be the arbiters of truth” argument.  Twitter’s Dorsey slapped back that he’s not trying to be the arbiter of truth, that his intention is to “connect the dots of conflicting statements and show the information in dispute so people can judge for themselves. More transparency from us is critical so folks can clearly see the why behind our actions."  He also made it clear that attacks launched against his fact checker, Yoel Roth, some of which have been cloaked in anti-Semitism, by people such as the reliably awful Kellyanne Conway, are beyond the pale saying  "Please leave our employees out of this. We’ll continue to point out incorrect or disputed information about elections globally. And we will admit to and own any mistakes we make." On the Kellyanne front she’s also throwing out alternative facts and arguments against facilitating voting by absentee ballot.  For some reason that escapes the logic of most sane people she’s now equating voting rights with cupcakes saying people “wait in line at Georgetown Cupcake for an hour to get a cupcake. So I think they can probably wait in line to do something as consequential and critical and constitutionally significant as cast their ballot.”  Wonder if Cupcake Kellyanne has discussed her baked goods theory with any of those Wisconsin voters and poll workers who contracted COVID while waiting hours to cast their primary vote?  She also might want to throw a few stale cupcakes at Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany who lives in the DC area but voted by Florida absentee ballot 11 times in the past 10 years. Fraud?   

Et Cetera:  Brazil is dying, China relations are a mess, Hong Kong residents are on the verge of losing their remaining rights and the administration, with the help of trusty Secretary of State Pompeo is pushing more arms sales to Saudi Arabia.  It hasn’t gone without notice that those insider trading accusations against Georgia’s appointed  Senator Kelly Loeffler were dropped within a week of her husband’s $1 million donation to a Trump PAC.  Weather forecasters are predicting a rougher than usual hurricane season, the virus is spiking in parts of those barely ever closed but early to open states and the newest government projection is that the virus death count will hit 135,000 or much more by August, not that those numbers are ever right.   Also demonstrations broke out last night in Los Angeles over the Minneapolis police “knee to the throat” killing of George Floyd, not to be confused with the “citizen” shooting of Atlanta jogger Ahmaud Arbery.  For his part Trump, who had little to say about the virus headcount passing 100,000 responded to a question about George Floyd by saying it was a “very, very sad situation,” a baby step past his usual “good people on both sides” comment.   For his part candidate Joe Biden said Floyd’s life mattered, he also issued one of his patented genuinely heartfelt statements where he mourned the loss of the 100,000 who didn’t need to die.

Stay safe!  

Virus Stoking

Unmasking Lies:  Over the weekend the Washington Post detailed how Trump hedged and hawed about putting in place his March restriction on flights from Europe.  They laid out how Trump’s delayed action combined with the way that the flight freeze was finally implemented, first opposed by but then guided by son in law Jared who was more focused on maximizing political benefit than an orderly rollout, ended up causing a last minute surge of travelers into the US, feeding the deadly COVID 19 assault on New York, which as Governor Cuomo reminds us daily, got its coronavirus injection from Europe rather than China.  Nevertheless, yesterday, as the death count in the US continued to climb towards 100,000, Trump once again stuck with his oft repeated mantra, that it was his “brave” decision to shut down flights from China while Speaker Pelosi was dancing in Chinatown that saved us from having ten times as many deaths.  For the record the Washington Post article points out that the curtailment of those Chinese flights predated Trump’s announcement, as most flights had been cancelled by the airlines before he took action.  The article also notes that the number of flights and passengers arriving from Europe on any normal day far exceeds the number coming from China. Having amped up the death count, Trump is still at it.  He continues to mock the wearing of facemasks and remains all in on threatening to pull the RNC convention from swing state North Carolina unless the state’s Democratic governor commits by next week to allow 50,000 Republicans from all over the country travel to Charlotte, virus in hand, to celebrate his August re-crowning.  On the facemask front, yesterday he again mocked Democratic challenger Joe Biden for wearing one, and then gave a member of the White House press pool a hard time for wearing one while asking him a question, claiming he couldn’t hear his facemask muffled voice that was clear to everyone else, while suggesting that the reporter was only wearing a mask to be “politically correct.”  Biden who at least for now has replaced his Twitter “egg” picture with one of him wearing a facemask, responded to Trump’s criticism with an appropriately blunt retort, he pointed out that "every leading doc in the world is saying we should wear a mask when you're in a crowd" while calling Trump "a fool, an absolute fool to be talking that way. It's costing people's lives," this is "stoking deaths." That concern about stoking the pandemic is the reason that North Carolina’s Governor Cooper refuses to commit to lifting his state’s restrictions against crowds of more than ten people, an obvious problem for a convention the size that Trump still wants to hold.  Sadly, that doesn’t appear to be a concern to the Republican governors of Texas, Florida and Georgia who have all made it known that they’d be happy to hold a virus infused convention in their states, COVID or no COVID.  Trump continues to deny that he’d ever consider moving the convention to one of his properties, but like a lot of Trump assertions, that one is probably a lie, Florida’s Doral is likely his preferred location.  As to tweeting and lying, yesterday Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey refused to take down Trump’s hateful tweets amplifying the conspiracy theory that the death of “Morning” Joe Scarborough’s former Congressional aide was “very suspicious” even after her husband’s pleading letter request for him to do so was brought to everyone’s attention by well-known media analyst Kara Swisher.  However, late yesterday Twitter did adopt a new policy with regard to Trump’s most absurd, lie filled tweets.  The company is now tagging them with lie notices that link to the facts, and by facts think the truth rather than those Trumpian lies.  Twitter’s fact checkers responded to Dorsey’s announcement by attaching fact check tags to the Scarborough story as well as to Trump’s tweet asserting that expanding mail-in balloting would lead to election fraud.  Suffice it to say, Trump who, like his newest press secretary, refuses to back down from the Morning Joe tweet, is not happy with Twitter’s new “obstructive” policy.

Et Cetera: By now we know that Trump ignored Obama’s pandemic playbook and that together with then national security advisor John Bolton, he got rid of or dispersed all of those pandemic experts from his national security apparatus to nooks and crannies of the government where their shouts of impending doom were muffled.  Yesterday NPR reported that Trump’s team also stopped work on new federal regulations that would have forced the health care industry to prepare for an airborne infectious disease pandemic such as COVID-19.  NPR reports that "If that rule had gone into effect, then every hospital, every nursing home would essentially have to have a plan where they made sure they had enough respirators and they were prepared for this sort of pandemic."  Those OSHA rules, which the Obama administration, had been working on for some time were intended to be a response to inadequacies uncovered at the time of the H1N1 flu epidemic.  The rules were due to go into effect at the beginning of Trump’s term, but were thrown out as part of Trump’s efforts to get rid of “unnecessary” government regulations.  Besides, they came from the Obama era so they couldn’t have been critical, right?  On the insider trading front, the Justice Department is no longer investigating trades made by Senator Kelly Loeffler, the embattled Republican appointee up for election in Georgia, nor are they looking into trades made by  Senators Feinstein and Inhofe, two others who sold stock in the run up to the pandemic, largely because they, unlike Loeffler weren’t even at the intelligence meeting that allegedly spurred the questionable stock sales.  However, Justice is still going after North Carolina Senator/former Intelligence Committee chairman Burr.  On the Inspector General front, Glenn Fine, the Pentagon IG who was supposed to head up the oversight of the trillions being spent to spur the economy but who was pushed aside over Trump fears that he might actually take his job seriously, has resigned but nothing to worry about there because top Senate Republican Chuck Grassley wrote a letter saying that he isn't satisfied with the White House's explanation for Trump’s dismissal of multiple inspectors general.  That ought to make things better? One more thing, having recovered from COVID 19 and having shared her infection with her husband, Trump’s favorite Stephen Miller, Pence Press Secretary Katie Miller is back at work and…..pregnant.  Not clear if Stephen is back yet, but his infection goes a long way towards explaining Trump’s hydroxychloroquine intake.   

Gone Swimming

100,000:  Assuming you weren’t at a pool party at Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri with hundreds of your nearest and dearest friends and a few too many COVID germs you probably had a quieter than usual Memorial Day weekend or at least I hope you did.  By the way the St Louis County Executive has now advised those Ozark poolsters to self-quarantine for 14 days or until they get a negative virus test but it’s probably fair to assume that anyone stupid enough to hang in a tightly pressed crowd won’t follow that instruction so expect a regional virus uptick shortly.  On the modeling behavior front, though Trump did participate in some Memorial Day activities, he spent most of the weekend doing two of his most favorite things, golfing and grievance tweeting.  On the golfing front, I get that he hadn’t been out on one of his courses for a while, but still the image of him hitting the links, two days in a row, as the COVID body count nears 100,000 was rich particularly given how he criticized Obama for playing during the Ebola crisis, the one where two people died in the US.  To that end he actually tweeted out a reminder that Obama golfed a lot in office, twisting the facts to claim that Obama had golfed and vacationed far more than he has.  Obviously, that’s just another Trumpian fabrication.  In addition he attacked Joe Biden, Columbia University, “Morning” Joe Scarborough, swing district Pennsylvania Congressman Conor Lamb and Roy Cooper, the Democratic Governor of North Carolina, among others. He called Columbia University  a “liberal, disgraceful institution” for its projection that 36,000 fewer people would have died from COVID had the US acted just one week earlier to impose social distancing measures.  On Memorial Day of all days, he attacked Marine veteran Conor Lamb, calling him an American fraud, and a puppet for Crazy Nancy Pelosi, he did that while endorsing Lamb’s Republican opponent. He continued to repeat a false but horrendously hurtful accusation that Joe Scarborough had killed one of his aides back in 2001 when he was still a member of Congress.  For the record the aide, Lori Klausutis, died after falling and hitting her head in Scarborough’s Florida Congressional office while he was in Washington, DC and the medical examiner concluded that her fall and subsequent death was due to an undiagnosed heart ailment. In any case the false accusation and constant reminder of her premature passing continue to cause extreme distress to her family, in much the way that the conspiracy crap about the death of DNC aide Seth Rich tortures his family so basically it’s classic Trump. The Republican Convention is scheduled to be held in Charlotte, North Carolina which remains a virus hotbed, so naturally Trump is now threatening to pull the convention, which isn’t scheduled to take place until late August, unless Governor Cooper opens up his state immediately. That threat likely represents a veiled attempt to move the convention to one of his properties, the Miami Doral perhaps?  And then there’s Joe Biden, who Trump went after bigly this weekend.  First he jumped on the former VP’s comment to influential The Breakfast Club radio host, Charlamagne tha God, that Black voters considering Trump over him “ain’t Black enough.”  That comment which was said in jest didn’t go over well so Biden apologized afterwards upon realizing he’d committed one of his gaffes, but the Republican campaign machine jumped on it, as did Trump’s ethnic apologists former UN Ambassador/South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and current South Carolina’s Tim Scott, the Republican party’s sole Black Senator who made it clear that they were offended, as if, or more likely that they have higher political aspirations.  Of course neither one was all that offended when Trump said that "any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat are either uninformed or show "great disloyalty" to Israel. Trump and members of his media echo chamber also jumped on Biden for wearing a mask during his lowkey unannounced visit to a Delaware Veterans Memorial.  Frankly I thought the svelte Biden looked suave with his holiday appropriate black mask, dark sunglasses, and well fitted suit almost Bond like, especially in comparison to the bloviated mask-less Trump but I admit I am biased.  Did I mention, that Trump who has now “mandated” the reopening of religious institutions, and by that think mostly evangelical churches with large aerosol spraying choirs, did not go to church over the weekend.

Et Cetera:  Trump also continued to attack absentee voting, mostly out of fears that facilitating voting will lead to his electoral demise.  He went with his “absentee votes are all fraudulent” argument.  Following his lead, the California Republican Party is now suing Governor Gavin Newsom over his plans to expand  vote by mail with RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel chiming in that “A national vote-by-mail system would open the door to a new set of problems, such as potential election fraud.” Notably her uncle Senator Mitt Romney’s largely Republican home state Utah has had mail in voting for years and despite her claims and Trump’s assertions voter fraud is not a problem.  Even Trump’s voter fraud commission quietly disappeared because there was no notable fraud to uncover.  Democrats and never Trumper Republicans are increasingly  concerned that Trump is looking for a way to discredit any election that he doesn’t win and who doesn’t fear that?  The Michael Flynn case continues to take unexpected turns.  Presiding Judge Emmet Sullivan has now hired lawyer Beth Wilkinson who represented newest Supreme Brett Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing to help him respond to Flynn’s effort to get his case dropped.  It’s worth remembering that lying about his Ambassador Kislyak conversations wasn’t Flynn’s only misdeed, he also misrepresented his work lobbying for Turkey. On the virus front, Dr Debby, who should know better, has been engaging in a lot of double speak lately, warning about the virus while also assuring us all that we should go out and play, but only if we really have to, in opened up states that are failing to meet the open up guidelines that she helped author.  Politico reports that the Trump administration is considering moving pandemic response to Mike Pompeo’s State Department to a new group to be headed up by none other than Dr Debby Birx.  And, finally, Brazilians are no longer welcome, at least for now.  Who would have guessed that President Bolsonaro’s no social distancing but let them eat hydroxychloroquine approach to controlling COVID wouldn’t be effective? That’s the drug that Trump has stopped taking and that the World Health Organization has stopped investigating because it doesn’t help but does have some deadly side effects.         

Positively Negative

Business as Usual:  As expected Trump headed to Michigan yesterday where he visited a Ford factory manned by United Auto Workers.  He gave one of his political speeches where he badmouthed the UAW for endorsing VP Biden, attacked Biden, claimed again that he’d once been awarded a Michigan man of the Year award that he never got and  praised the “good bloodlines” of the family descended from the firm’s founder, Henry Ford, a “notorious anti-Semite and favorite of Adolf Hitler.”  Though Trump did wear a facemask for a part of his facility tour, he took it off before meeting with the press saying that he didn’t want any of them to get him on camera because why would he want to set an example for the nation, but of course one of them did snap a photo so his covered face found its way to the nightly news.  Personally, I prefer him with a mask.  With the COVID 19 mortality count closing in on 100,000, Trump finally ordered that flags be flown at half mast, but don’t be too impressed, he’s only doing that because Speaker Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Schumer shamed him into it by first issuing a public request. While in Michigan Trump continued to press for the opening of the country and all the states are moving in that direction, even NYC is expected to start opening up in early June.  That’s good news, assuming we all continue social distancing and face masking, as if. The more disturbing news is that several states have justified their opening decisions by reporting total virus testing numbers that count both the antigen tests, the ones that indicate that someone is currently COVID positive, and the antibody tests, the ones that indicate that someone once had the disease in one total.  That matters because combining the two tests' results into one total “provides an inaccurate picture of where and when the virus spread and can also overstate a state’s ability to test and track active infections -- a key consideration as states ease coronavirus restrictions.”  The concern is that if the two tests are combined together, you fool yourself into thinking you've done more testing than you have.  It’s not clear that this has been done with nefarious intent, it could just reflect incompetence, but the impact on reopening decisions is concerning. On the heartbreaking side, yesterday Columbia University disease modelers revealed how much the failure of government inaction cost the country, and by cost think loss of lives.  They estimate that had the US begun imposing social distancing measures one week earlier than it did in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died as a result of COVID 19. And “if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than most people started staying home, the vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided.” Although it’s fair to say that a number of state and local politicians should have acted sooner, at the end of the day only one person had the power and the full picture of what was coming.  Never one for remorse, that person, Trump, called the study a “political hit job.”  As to what he knew, he and those around him have taken to blaming his daily intelligence briefer, saying that she understated the virus threat. The NY Times reported yesterday that the team briefing him, currently led by a CIA analyst with three decades of experience, can’t get him to focus, has had to water down and spoon feed him information to maintain his interest and has even reached out to outside consultants for ideas on how to get him to be more attentive.  And worst of all he rejects information that doesn’t conform to his world views, preferring to rely on his friends and Fox news pundits. We’ve kind of known most of this for a while but more than ever the pandemic crisis highlights how having a science denying, set in his ways, mean spirited moron in the Oval Office, one who surrounds himself with fawning toadies and like-minded relatives, endangers the country. Its unlikely that any of this will change as yesterday the Senate confirmed John Ratcliffe as Trump’s newest Director of National Intelligence.  Ratcliffe was previously passed over for the job due to his lack of experience and for misstating his meager qualifications.

VP Sweepstakes:  The Biden team has started interviewing and vetting potential VP candidates;  as promised only women are being considered. The list includes the frequently cited Senators Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren, Michigan’s Governor Gretchen Whitmer, New Mexico’s Governor Michele Lujan Grisham, former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, and Florida Congresswoman Val Demings.  Additionally both New Hampshire Senators Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan have been invited into the group though apparently Shaheen has demurred. The final decision isn’t expected to be released until July but I’d put my money on a woman of color or a Latina, someone younger than 65 and though Kamala Harris appears on the top of lots of lists, don’t be surprised if Biden decides that picking someone from a swing state does a better job of boosting his chances of winning.  So basically it’s still anyone’s guess.  

Et Cetera: It’s not clear that it will matter but the facts behind Secretary of State Pompeo’s request for Trump to fire the State Department’s Inspector General who was investigating his misdeeds keep rolling in.  It turns out that in addition to pushing the disputed Saudi arms deal forward, having staff walk his dog and pick up his cleaning, and holding two dozen questionable fancy dinners for donors, Pompeo also had his security guys move his mother in law into an assisted living facility on our dime.  The Inspector General was also investigating some violent actions by Pompeo’s underlings that he chose to ignore. So much for swamp draining. And it looks like Trump’s former lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen whose early coronavirus release from jail was mysteriously put on hold has finally been let out to serve the rest of his term in home confinement.  Did I mention that Trump has no idea what per capita means and thinks that having a negative COVID test means that he’s positive, or something totally incoherent like that?

Enjoy Memorial Day but stay safe and keep on social distancing! 

Russian Dressing

Dammit: Trump is off to Michigan today, another trip to the swing state that he won in 2016 and needs desperately to win again.  That probably explains why he’s been brutally attacking Michigan’s popular Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer for months now and also why he launched into a tweet attack against the state’s “rogue” Secretary of State yesterday, inaccurately accusing her of abetting voter fraud by “illegally” mailing absentee ballots to everyone in the state. In the same tweet he threatened to hold up funding to Michigan as punishment. Jocelyn Benson, the Secretary of State was quick to point out that she’d done nothing illegal, that she hadn’t sent out absentee ballots to everyone but had sent applications for absentee ballots to registered voters, something that has become an increasingly common practice these days, particularly in Republican led states such as Nebraska, West Virginia and Iowa.  Trump backed off a little, pulling down his initial tweet replacing it with one that attacked absentee voting, something he continued to do later in the day during another one of his press moments. Trump’s opposition to and fear of absentee voting isn’t new, in March he complained that the Democrats had tried to put “things” into legislation that “were crazy,” because they would result in “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”  He’s not the only one who shares that view, which goes far towards explaining why Majority Leader McConnell consistently objects to funding anything that would increase voter turnout.  Getting back to Michigan, while Trump was busy attacking the Secretary of State dam failures in the center of the state forced 10,000 people out of their homes, ironically that part of the state is largely Republican and is now likely to need emergency Federal funding as well as those absentee ballot applications more than ever.  Though polls are notoriously wrong when it comes to Trump, its notable that right now he trails Biden in Michigan by about 5 points depending on the poll, moreover yesterday the newest poll from Quinnipiac shows Biden leading Trump 50 to 39 nationally. We’ve been down this road before, so take these polls with a grain of salt.  Those polls likely reflect wide dissatisfaction with the way Trump’s been handling the virus crisis, that said, yesterday Trump doubled down on his own performance by insisting that he can’t think of anything that he would have done differently.  Why is that not surprising?  By the way, he also said that he only plans to pop  those likely useless but possibly dangerous hydroxychloroquine pills for a few more days. As to foolishly dangerous activities, fresh off his quarantine VP Pence spent some time in Florida yesterday with that state’s Governor Trump mini-me Ron DeSantis.  The two went out for burgers and fries sans masks at a local Florida burger joint.      

Back to the USSR: While Trump was busy slamming Michigan, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee voted, on a purely partisan basis, to authorize chair, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, one of Trump’s favorite toadies, to subpoena Blue Star Strategies, the public affairs firm that represented Ukrainian gas company Burisma, where Joe Biden’s son Hunter once served as a board member because why focus on passing pandemic legislation when going back to all things Ukraine is so much fun. It’s not clear that anyone cares about that mess anymore, most people are far more focused on surviving the virus onslaught but it’s all the Republicans have so they’re going for it.  Separately, in response to the bruhaha about the unmasking of former security advisor/convicted liar Michael Flynn, Senator Mark Warner, the senior Democratic member of the Senate Intelligence Committee has now asked that the transcripts of those problematic calls between Flynn and former Ambassador Kislyak be declassified so that everyone can see what the two of them were talking about. That would be fair, but don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.  By the way, Florida Senator Marco Rubio has now officially stepped into “inside trader” Senator Richard Burr’s shoes, he’s the new Republican Chair of the intel committee. As to alleged insider traders, Senator Kelly Loeffler’s husband just contributed $1 million to one of Trump’s PACs, because nothing insures continued support from Trump then a “modest” donation to his campaign coffers.  Getting back to Russia, yesterday the Supreme Court “temporarily” blocked the release of the grand jury information from Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation in order to give the Trump Justice Department more time to formally appeal the decision of a lower court that the information should be released to Congress. That puts off the release of any of that likely incriminating information until after the November election. Of course. Separately Trump, the king of ventilators, sent 200 to his friend Vlad to help Russia deal with the virus and to “improve relations.”  

Et Cetera:  While states like Florida and Georgia continue to play fast and loose with their virus statistics, a model used by the Trump Virus Task Force that was put together by PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia,  shows that the risk of virus resurgence in southern counties, particularly in Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Virginia, is high over the next four weeks. Those are the states that moved to reopen before meeting the task force’s very own guidelines that few are following largely because Trump wants everything open ASAP.  On the hurry up front, virus Guru Fauci isn’t all that fond of calling the vaccination push Project Warp Speed.  He fears that concerns about rushing willy nilly towards the approval of a vaccine will raise fears about any vaccine’s safety, further feeding the anti-vax movement which already seems to be gaining support from Trump’s right wing flank.

Stay safe!

 

Badge of Honor

Pill Popping:  Remember when VP Pence said that the pandemic would be over by Memorial Day, well here’s a shocker, he was wrong.  On the positive side, he seems to be showing more sense than Trump on at least one front, yesterday he reported that despite Trump’s endorsement, he is not popping hydroxychloroquine.  Trump, however, doubled down on his decision to go with the pills saying that all those studies indicating that hydroxy-C isn’t effective against COVID 19 were either done by people trying to make him look bad or were conducted on really sick people who were due to die anyway.  Notably the biggest study was done at the VA which reports into him but whatever.  At least one Republican Congressman, Kansas obstetrician Roger Marshall endorsed Trump’s decision saying that he and his family having been popping the pills for some time now, and like Trump they’re also taking zinc.  No comment from Marshall on whether he wears a facemask when he’s out and about, but if Trump really wants to protect himself, he’d be far better off wearing one while insisting that everyone around him does too.  And he should try that social distancing thing as well.  On that front he’s scheduled to visit a mask-mandatory Ford ventilator factory tomorrow and though company officials have told him he and everyone in his contingent will have to wear one, so far Trump hasn’t said that he will comply because why model proper behavior to the country you lead?  As to setting bad examples, yesterday after CBS’s Paula Reid asked him why he hasn’t announced a plan to get the 36 million unemployed Americans back to work, he snapped at her saying she  was “just a rude person.”  Trump also said that he was proud that the US leads the world in having the most COVID positive people.  He wears that position as a “badge of honor,” proof that he’s got the best tests. For the record, his good friends Vladimir Putin, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and the UK’s Boris Johnson are next in the infection league tables, notably they all share the dubious of honor of failing to understand just how deadly the pandemic would be.  Bolsonaro is also a big fan of hydroxychloroquine.

90,000 Plus:  As far as getting people back to work and getting the economy back in gear as safely as possible, the CDC finally posted their guidelines, a watered down version of what the White House earlier squashed.  As wishy washy as the guidelines are, even they suggest that certain things like in-restaurant dining should remain off the table for now.  The CDC also calls for fairly rigorous hygiene and separation practices to be employed in schools and daycare centers, aspirational because how do you get kids to stay away from each other?   I am not sure if they mention gyms, but for now they should remain off the table.  In South Korea a group of fitness instructors who attended a training class with a few infected but asymptomatic compatriots ending up spreading the virus to more than 100 people who then attended their classes.  On the state front, it looks like Florida has taken a page out of Georgia’s “lie with statistics” book.  Rebekah Jones, the Florida data scientist who was previously praised by Dr Debbie Birx for creating such a useful and complete coronavirus dashboard, reports that she was pushed aside and ultimately fired after she refused to manipulate her data to make it look like things were rosier in Florida than they really are. By the way, have you noticed that we haven’t seen much of Dr Debbie or virus guru Dr Fauci lately?  Wonder what that’s about. Though they’ve been pushed to the background, Secretary of State Pompeo remains front and center. Last night NBC reported that Steven Linick, the now fired State Department Inspector General, was also looking into two dozen fancy dinners that Pompeo and his wife hosted at the State Department on the government dime for political contributors, the type of people who could fund his future political endeavors.  So much for “drain the swamp.”

UnMasking:  Fox and a number of Republicans in the Senate and House are now making a big deal about how the Obama team unmasked former national security advisor Michael Flynn, part of an effort to make it look like the Obama guys did something beyond the pale.  This is just another one of those shiny objects intended to throw dirt at Biden and to divert from the virus crisis.  Unmasking is a fairly common practice that takes place when senior officials learn about questionable conversations between a targeted surveilled foreign national, someone like Russia Ambassador Kislyak, and an unnamed American and then determine that they better find out who the questionable talkative American is.  For the record the Trump team has unmasked far more people than the Obama team ever did. Getting back to Flynn, upon learning that he was the one talking with Kislyak, the issue was brought to the attention of Obama, Biden, James Comey, Sally Yates and Susan Rice who was then serving as Obama’s security advisor. Before leaving the White House Rice memorialized the conversations about Flynn in an email to herself so that it would be retained in the White House files for posterity.  She mentioned that email in her 2019 book, but left out details that were confidential.  Yesterday, in an effort to make it sound like the Obama team had doe something nefarious, the administration declassified her email. Though the Trump echo chamber is trying to spin it ugly, it turns out that her email just referenced a statement from Obama to Comey that any investigation into Flynn’s actions had to be done “by the book.”  On the Flynn front, his lawyers are now trying to have Judge Emmet Sullivan removed from his case, their pushback against Sullivan’s refusal to immediately drop the charges against Flynn.  Flynn’s lawyers aren’t the only ones trying to rewrite the past.  Apparently Rudy Giuliani is still working at digging up dirt on Ukraine and Joe Biden and though Senator Lindsey Graham, the Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has no plans to subpoena either Obama or Biden, he asserts that he’s going to subpoena everyone else to get to the “bottom” of the Russia investigation so that he can wrap up his investigation before the election.  In other words, more distraction and last minute faux stories are planned for October.  As to Biden, he appears to have won the Oregon presidential primary, yes there are still primaries, and it’s fair to assume that he will also win the upcoming New York Democratic presidential primary which is now back on the schedule for June.                       

Diversionary Tactics

Shiny Objects:  Yesterday, Trump held a meeting with restaurant industry representatives.  They expressed serious concerns over the dire impact of coronavirus on their businesses, pressing for more time to spend their paycheck protection loans.  Trump’s response: haven’t you heard, there’s nothing to worry about anymore, the pandemic is just about over, a vaccination is around the corner, business will be back to normal shortly. Then with little positive to say about the meeting and wanting to distract from the investigations into Secretary Pompeo that prompted the firing of the State Department Inspector General, he threw out one of his shiny objects during the press conference that followed the restaurant meeting announcing that though he’s sure that he hasn’t been exposed to COVID 19 he’s been prophylactically popping hydroxychloroquine pills for around a week and a half because he’s heard from a number of “doctors” that the drug really works.  That week and half timetable corresponds neatly with when he learned that his valet and COVID Katie, close aide Stephen Miller’s wife, had tested positive for the virus. It’s not clear that he’s really taking hydroxychloroquine, to state the obvious with him it’s hard to tell truth from deceptive distraction, but either way his statement is grossly irresponsible.  First, if he’s taking the drug he’s putting his life in jeopardy as he’s hardly the picture of robust health.  As Speaker Pelosi, not one to mince words, commented last night, he’s “morbidly obese.” Even his fawning doctors admit that he suffers from heart disease, not a good thing when taking a drug that can cause arrythmias. Fox News’ Neil Cavuto was so shocked by Trump’s statement that he warned viewers that "If you are in a risky population here, and you are taking this as a preventative treatment to ward off the virus or in a worst-case scenario you are dealing with the virus, and you are in this vulnerable population, it will kill you. I cannot stress enough: This will kill you."  Trump responded to Cavuto by attacking Fox, saying they’re not the same and that he’s looking for another outlet to watch. On a more serious note, no doubt countless Trump fanatics and even a few normal folks are now flooding the phonelines, demanding that their doctors write them Hydroxy-C prescriptions and lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients who rely on the pills will now find their prescriptions difficult to fill.  Nothing like leading from the top.  Late yesterday, Trump’s WH physician issued a statement saying that he and Trump had discussed the pros and cons of taking Hydroxy-C, but like everything else out of the Trump White House, the statement was unclear and did not come out and say whether or not Trump was really taking the pills.  We’ll only know,  if he ends up taking another one of those mysterious, emergency trips to Walter Reed.

Cabinet Swipes:  As to Secretary of State Pompeo, he claims that he didn’t know that he was being investigated by Inspector General Linick, he just wanted him fired because he was “undermining” the department and “wasn’t performing” up to snuff.  It turns out that IG Linick wasn’t just investigating whether or not Pompeo was improperly using government staff to walk his dog and pick up his laundry, he was also investigating whether  Pompeo improperly pushed through an $8 billion plus arms sale to Saudi Arabia, one opposed by Congress following the Istanbul murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s view on all this is that he has the right to fire all of the inspectors general at any time, especially if they are Obama holdovers and that he may just fire the rest of the lot, so there!  None of this is sitting well with Senator Chuck Grassley, the patron saint of IGs, who wrote one of his lukewarm letters demanding an explanation but since that’s probably as far as he’ll go, Trump will get his way.  On the Obama front, despite Trump’s continued assertion that former President Obama and current opponent/former VP Biden should be investigated for their “illegal” activities, that Obamagate nonsense, last week and probably next week’s shiny object, Attorney General Barr said that he doesn’t expect the investigation being undertaken by US Attorney General John Durham, that’s still another investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation, to lead to a criminal investigation of either Obama or Biden;   a kind of snide way of saying that there’s nothing there and that spinning something out of nothing is harder than he thought it would be.  In any case, don’t be too impressed with Barr or his assertion that he doesn’t want to see the Justice department “politicized” because we all know that he has been politicizing the department and it remains highly likely that he will drop a bomb of some sort later in the election cycle because even if Durham fails to come up with anything substantive he’ll spin those conclusions into something.

Et Cetera:  War appears to have broken out in the administration.  On Sunday, Trump’s trade advisor Peter Navarro attacked the CDC, noting that the agency’s virus test development screw-up had delayed the administration’s efforts to get a comprehensive testing system up and running, that’s the testing system that Trump brags about while insisting that tests are so unnecessary.  Yesterday, the CDC pushed back pointing out that an attack on CDC head Redfield is an attack on Trump since he’s a Trump appointee. While the CDC has been underperforming and Redfield is not all that competent, that’s kind of the story of the whole Trump administration so it’s fair to assume that the infighting is Trump sanctioned, just another shiny object.  Similarly, Trump is continuing his war on the World Health Organization.  He rejected an invitation to speak at their virtual conference.  Notably Chinese President Xi accepted his invitation and did speak.  Trump is now threatening to permanently cut funding if WHO doesn’t clean up its “pro Chinese” stance immediately, another destructive act that will limit our ability to influence anything coming out of WHO while also diminishing our world standing.  That’s not to say that WHO didn’t screw up, they did, but Trump had enough information to know that the pandemic was coming he is just engaging in more blaming, shaming and distracting.  Now getting to the vaccination front, yesterday the stock market shot up on the good news that pharma company Moderna’s mRNA vaccination is generating anti-bodies in human participants in a relatively small Phase 1 trial.  That’s really good news, however the trial was small and Moderna’s mRNA technology is new, to date there have been no RNA vaccines approved for human use, so the enthusiasm may be premature.  In any case, assuming things continue on this trajectory and let’s hope they do, there still won’t be a vaccination until next year. So take a deep breath we are far from out of the woods.     

Another One Bites the Dust

   

The Year of the Groundhog: Another weekend behind us and little has changed.  Trump is still making promises he can’t keep,  relying on optics to assert that he’s is doing things that he’s not really doing and firing Inspectors General, willy-nilly.  As to those promises, on Friday he once again said that we’ll have a vaccination by year end, rolling out his new vaccination team, while at the same time saying that if we don’t have a vaccination it won’t matter because this “flu-like” disease, the one that’s killed more than 90,000 people so far and that CDC head Dr Redfield just said will kill 100,000 by June, will go away on it’s own.  The “new” team which includes the former head of vaccines at GlaxoSmithKline, the firm working on one of the vaccine candidates, not that that’s a conflict or anything, and a general in charge of Army readiness, a good thing because the military is skilled at ramping up resources, was likely announced in a hurry to counter the accusations made by dismissed vaccine expert Rick Bright, who enraged Trump by appearing on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.  Not surprisingly Trump is now tweet slapping interviewer Norah O’Donnell, calling her a third place anchor and telling CBS’s Chairwoman Redstone to “make things right,” as in get rid of her.  As to COVID 19 going away on its own, son Eric, proved his Trump chops by telling Fox that the disease is just another Democratic hoax that will “magically vanish” after the November election season which would be awfully nice, but is beyond unlikely given that the real experts believe that we’ll be smack in the middle of double whammy flu and COVID season come November. Ironically, Eric said that to the Fox people who were broadcasting from their safe at home locations.   On the vaccine front, there’s no question that every immunologist worth a dime is pushing full steam ahead.  The effort is unprecedented but even assuming one or more of their efforts results in a safe and effective vaccination a best case scenario wouldn’t result in all of us getting shots until next year, and that’s being optimistic though I’d love to be proven wrong about that.  The bottom line is that you don’t move forward with mass vaccination until you’re sure that that what you have works and that it doesn’t hurt a lot of people so if Trump tries to rush something out, we should make him and the extended Trump family take it first, in front of national TV, the way Governor Cuomo took a deep swab COVID test yesterday.  

Dog Walking:  On the Inspector General front, late Friday, Trump gave notice that he’s firing Steve Linick, the IG for the State Department.  He’s doing so at the request of Secretary of State Pompeo who the IG was investigating for, among other things, having State Department professional staff do personal errands like dog walking on behalf of him and his wife.  Though the law permits Trump to fire IGs when he’s lost confidence in them, firing as an act of retaliation is a bigly no-no, not that anything Trump does ever has consequences.  Linick, an Obama holdover, is known for actually taking his responsibilities seriously, he wasn’t easy on Obama people either but as we all know by now, investigating Democrats is a good thing, going after Trump’s Republican cronies, not so much.  With the exception of Republican outsider Mitt Romney, who called the firing of Inspectors General a “threat to accountable democracy” no other Republicans seemed troubled by the dismissal.  Senate Homeland Committee Chair Ron Johnson, who used to care about IGs when they were investigating Democrats, says it’s okay by him and the usual pearl clutch squad of Senators Susan Collins and Chuck Grassley, a major advocate for IGs, said they are “concerned.”  By the way LInick is the fourth Inspector General fired by Trump, he removed Michael Atkinson as the intelligence community's IG on a Friday in the first week of April; fired acting Pentagon IG Glenn Fine that same weekend; and removed Health and Human Services IG Christi Grimm in early May.  Remember when Senator Collins said that being impeached had taught Trump a lesson, she was right, he learned that he is all powerful.  As to Pompeo, even though he’s knee deep in muck, Senate Majority Leader McConnell is still trying to recruit him to run for the open Kansas Senate seat being vacated by retiring Senator Pat Roberts because he believes his candidacy would give the Republicans their best chance of retaining that seat. That says a lot about the state of the Republican party.

#ObamasGreat: Not the hashtag that Trump wanted to see go viral on twitter but the one that went viral after all of the major channels, including Fox, carried a virtual graduation ceremony celebrating the High School Class of 2020.  Former President Obama was the keynote speaker which is only fitting because these kids deserved a great speech by a skilled speaker and they got one.  Obama told the graduates to “Do what you think is right.  Doing what feels good, what’s convenient, what’s easy, that’s how little kids think.  Unfortunately a lot of so-called grown-ups, including some with fancy titles (hint, hint Trump) and important jobs (more hints) still think that way, which is why things are so screwed up.” (SHADE!) Trump who earlier in the day had retweeted a pirated clip from the movie Independence Day of him poorly photo shopped onto actor Bill Pullman’s head responded to Obama’s speech by calling him grossly incompetent.  That from the man who ignored the oncoming COVID 19 onslaught because he didn’t want to upset his Chinese trade deal and who is now telling us we should be happy that only 90,000 people and counting are gone because it could have been millions?   

Et Cetera:  Justin Amash, the Republican turned Independent, is no longer running for president.  Both Poltiico and PBS New Hour have done stories about Biden accuser Tara Reade.  Based on a large number of interviews, they detail her erratic past, her habit of lying to friends and stiffing landlords, her difficulty in holding jobs and her history of saying only nice things about her experience working for Biden.  PBS even traced the Senate chamber route she said she’d been walking when she was “assaulted,” concluding that there was no way that such an event could have happened unwitnessed in that heavily trafficked area.  Reade responded by once again changing her story.  She also claimed that she’d been contacted by Trump’s campaign, something that her pro-bono Republican donor lawyer, who may be experiencing some remorse or just may be concerned about his reputation, then denied. Paging Megyn Kelly and all those folks at MSNBC and elsewhere who gave life to this story.  Maybe do your homework next time!  On the virus front, numbers are ticking up in opened-up Texas, numbers are also up in Georgia which keeps “accidentally” issuing graphs that “inadvertently” mix up the sequence of dates to show otherwise.  Here in NYC, police cars were streaming down Second Avenue last night blaring out reminders to social distance and wear masks, a warning to the many devil may carers hanging outside the upper east side bar and restaurant strip.  Yikes.     

Stay safe!    

Oh Crap!

Deep Dreck:  Yesterday, ousted vaccine expert Rick Bright testified before Congress reporting that Health and Human Services leadership told him that his January and February pandemic warnings were causing a commotion and that he knew we were in “deep sh-t” when they rejected his pleas to stock more N 95 masks and swabs, ignored his concerns about buying mass quantities of the unproven and subsequently shown to be ineffective hydroxychloroquine from unapproved manufacturers in Pakistan and India and failed and, he believes, are continuing to fail to develop an adequate plan for dealing with the pandemic.  Additionally, although he thinks the odds that a COVID 19 vaccination will eventually be developed are good, he questioned that it will be ready by the end of the year or early next year because for that to happen everything will  have to work perfectly and that rarely if ever happens, especially in Trump land.  Moreover, he doesn’t think that the administration is doing what it needs to do to be in a position to ramp up vaccine production and distribution while also ramping up flu vaccine resources. We’re going to need lots and lots of vials and hypodermic needles.  He did give one shout out to trade advisor Peter Navarro, saying that he was one of the few who took his warnings seriously.  For the most part the Committee’s Republican contingent did what Republicans usually do these days, they questioned why Bright was even testifying, suggested that the visibly stressed out expert wasn’t really suffering from the hypertension that has kept him from showing up to work at his as yet undefined new job for the past few weeks and then provided countless anecdotal reports from their constituents about how that Trump/Fox endorsed wonder drug hydroxychloroquine had saved their lives.  Not surprisingly, Trump spent his morning tweet calling Bright, who he insists he doesn’t know, a disgruntled employee, an opinion he shared again before boarding his helicopter to head to swing state Pennsylvania to visit a personal protection equipment manufacturer. Standing by his side, Health Secretary Alex Azar, who Bright had criticized as unresponsive to his pandemic warnings, asserted that the crochety Bright was out of date because the wonderful and glorious Trump administration had already done all the things he claimed they hadn’t.  Following Azar’s remarks, Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany whipped out a marked up copy of Obama’s pandemic playbook, the one that to date everyone on planet Trump, including Senate Majority Leader McConnell had said didn’t exist, calling it useless and out of date.  She said that while waving a beautiful colorful brochure, saying it was the Trump pandemic playbook and that it was far superior, or at least far more colorful than that piece of crap left by those Obama guys.  For his part, last night McConnell admitted that he’d misspoken when he said that Obama hadn’t left a pandemic playbook.  Oopsy. 

#WearAMask? At the Pennsylvania factory, Trump who of course wasn’t wearing a facemask, called for Pennsylvania to reopen ASAP, patted himself on his back for solving the virus crisis, and called virus testing overrated, saying that even though we have the best tests and everyone who wants one can get one because he’s great and he says so, all testing does is make US infection statistics look bad versus other countries. That last point probably reflects advice he received from his strategery expert/son in law Jared as yesterday the Financial Times reported that earlier this Spring the pale faced genius advised his father in law that “testing too many people or ordering too many ventilators” could “spook” the stock market.  Sadly that attitude, combined with a lack of example setting from the mask avoiding Trump, goes a long way towards explaining the hordes of MAGA hat wearers showing up in places like Michigan, Wisconsin and even eastern Long Island calling for the reopening of everything as well as the fact that after the Republican dominated Wisconsin Supreme Court overturned the state’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers’ stay at home order, a bunch of those red hatted daredevils went on to celebrate in quickly reopened densely packed bars.  Apparently, in their frenzy to get out and chug some brewskis they’d forgotten about the  upsurge in virus cases that took place after the same court ruled that the in-person Wisconsin primary had to go forward virus or no virus.  Either that or maybe they think that drinking beer while wearing MAGA caps provides immunity?

           

Et Cetera:  Speaking of deep doo doo, it looks like North Carolina’s Senator Burr’s insider trading problems are bigly problematic.  He “voluntarily” stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday after turning over his cell phone to the FBI.  Apparently both California Senator Diane Feinstein and Georgia newbie Senator Kelly Loeffler have also spoken with the FBI but neither of them have had to deal with FBI agents showing up at their homes.  Though it’s likely that Burr really did some bad stuff, I am not the only one who fears that he is getting “special” treatment because he’s angered Trump by agreeing with the intelligence community’s assessment that Russian interference helped him in the last election. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s final report is due to be released soon and it’s quite possible that it will either get quashed or that its conclusions will be watered down to meaningless without Burr at the helm. Though its not yet clear who will step into Burr’s chairman shoes, last night Florida’s Senator Rubio and Idaho’s Senator Risch’s names were being bandied about.  In addition to traveling to Pennsylvania, yesterday Trump found time to launch some more attacks against former President Obama, tweeting “If I were a Senator or Congressman, the first person I would call to testify about the biggest political crime and scandal in the history of the US by FAR, is former President Obama. He knew everything.”  At least for now Lindsey Graham, the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has been saying that he wants to get to the “bottom” of the so-called “Flynn Affair” says that while he intends to call some of those nefarious Obama era officials to testify, he doesn’t think that calling on Obama sets a good precedent. Trump of all people should get that but then again he’s Trump.  Sh-t show coming?

False Negatives

Virus Follies:  Well no one except everyone saw this one coming, Trump is no longer even pretending to like virus guru Anthony Fauci anymore.  For weeks now Trump’s Fox echo chamber has been attacking Fauci, then Senator Rand Paul went after him during this week’s hearing and now with the ground softened Trump is saying out loud the things that until now he’d only been saying in private, that Fauci isn’t really the maven everyone thinks he is, because who believes in science anyway. The thing that finally triggered Trump’s public disavowal was Fauci’s statement that opening schools comes with serious risks, as in increased morbidity and mortality.  Fauci didn’t say that schools would have to remain closed next semester, he just said that far more testing and contact tracing resources would have to be made available and that each region would have to make opening decisions based on their own infection rates.  In addition, he talked about the newly uncovered though still rare inflammation disease impacting children, the group that until recently everyone thought was emerging relatively unscathed.  Trump’s view is that Fauci’s comment on schools is unacceptable, out of his purview and, so what if a few kids perish, the economy has to get up and running or else.  He also called Fauci out for “playing all sides of the equation,” a variation of his favorite there are good people on both sides thing?  Additionally, Trump’s highly disturbed that during Tuesday’s zoom Senate Hearing Fauci agreed with Senator Bernie Sanders, that virus mortalities have been undercounted, largely as a result of deaths that took place before adequate testing was available.  That last point undercuts Trump who has consistently questioned mortality rates, claiming that too many deaths are being blamed on the virus, and by extension his failure to act sooner, particularly on the testing front.  As to testing, yesterday during the first hearing of House’s newly formed Select Committee on stimulus spending, Jim “Gym” Jordan attacked the first expert to testify for having the nerve to say that in part the US failure to get ahead of COVID 19 had a lot to do with our testing inadequacies, a fact widely acknowledged by experts who cite South Korea’s early testing capability and commitment to tracing as key to their ability to minimize their infection and death rates.  Jordan called any suggestion that our well documented testing failures have anything to do with the spread of the virus as proof that the Select Committee has been set up to attack Trump.  Of course he did, because why would anyone want to learn anything that might position us to do better going forward.  Also on the testing front, it turns out that the false negatives levels from those quick result Abbott virus testing kits touted by Trump and used at the White House may be as high as 50% which probably explains why Trump is keeping as far away from VP Pence as possible; though Pence is still going to work, he’s interacting with no one and, unlike Trump, is wearing a face mask at all times.  Hmmm. Calling Nikki Haley?

The Usual Suspects:  Early yesterday, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort was released from prison to home confinement “due to his age related vulnerability to the virus” even though he doesn’t have COVID 19, he’s met none of the criteria for early release and there has been no outbreak of COVID at his prison. Notably former fixer/lawyer Michael Cohen, who had been days away from being released from his virus infested prison, had his early release revoked, allegedly because he had not yet served half of his sentence.  Who would have guessed that turning on Trump has consequences but that sticking by him gets you an early release?  Despite Attorney General Barr’s Trump endorsed shenanigans, that other Trump loyalist former national security advisor Michael Flynn may face a bumpy road going forward. Yesterday, Emmet Sullivan, the Judge overseeing his case, appointed a well-respected retired judge to evaluate the events surrounding the Justice Department’s decision to drop the charges against Flynn.  In particular Sullivan wants his appointee to determine if Flynn should face an additional charge of perjury for twice saying under oath that he was guilty of lying to the FBI, the very charge that the Justice Department no longer wants to pursue. Additionally, last night it was revealed that though the Barr Justice Department “based” its decision to drop the charges against Flynn on some notes about interview strategy written by former Head of FBI counterintelligence agent Bill Priestap, they failed to provide Judge Sullivan with their notes from an interview with Priestap.  That interview largely undercuts the Barr/Trump assertion that Flynn was treated unfairly.  On the Obamagate front, the newest incarnation of the blame everything on the nefarious actions of Obama and his team, acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, who in addition to still being the Ambassador to Germany is one of Trump’s most loyal toadies, released the names of the Obama administration individuals who unmasked Michael Flynn’s identity as the individual who had the questionable conversation about lifting sanctions with Russia Ambassador Kislyak.  Grenell provided those names to Republican Senators Ron Johnson and Chuck Grassley.  As expected that list includes a lot of senior level Obama people including Obama, then VP Biden, former FBI Director James Comey and then Acting Attorney General Sally Yates.  That’s not surprising and shouldn’t be controversial, it’s to be expected that senior people would be told that a Trump advisor and possible future Trump official was engaging in possibly treasonous conversations with the Russian Ambassador.  That said, Trump’s echo chamber is trying to turn this into proof that Obama and his team were engaged in a conspiracy against Trump. Don’t be fooled, this is just another attempt by Trump to distract from his virus failure and the economic downturn.  The Obama guys were just doing their job.  By the way, it wasn’t just Obama’s team who were concerned about Flynn, then Trump transition manager former Governor NJ Chris Christie warned Trump not to appoint Flynn to any position, of course Christie was subsequently pushed aside for prosecuting Jared Kushner’s father. And of course Trump fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence.

Et Cetera: Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler isn’t the only one in trouble for insider trading off of the coronavirus pandemic.  Late last night the LA Times reported that the FBI served North Carolina Senator Richard Burr with a warrant for his cell phone.  They are seeking to learn more about the questionable stock trades that he made after learning, as Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, about the expected virus onslaught. Though Burr generally toes the Republican party line, his committee has issued several reports concurring with the intelligence agencies conclusions that Russia weighed in on the 2016 election on behalf on Trump; to state the obvious none of those reports have pleased Trump.  A suspicious sort might think that Trump wouldn’t mind if Burr suffered a little or a lot. In other news, Fed Chair Powell says that now is not the time to hold back on further stimulus, he said that while pointing out that 40% of those with household incomes below $40,000 lost their jobs in March.  Trump and the Republican led Senate aren’t so sure about more stimulus, at least for now they are rejecting the House’s push for another $3 trillion COVID aid package, something about not wanting to help out those blue states or run up more debt.  Remember, debt only matters when it helps blue states.     

Pandemic for Idiots

Viral Musings:  Yesterday’s Senate Health Committee hearing was a bit surreal with Senators and experts beaming in from places around the country. Chaired by the excruciatingly  polite Lamar Alexander who appears to work well with his Democratic partner, the more direct Senator Patty Murray, the committee lived up to its reputation for being more bipartisan than most, there were few of the histrionics we’ve grown accustomed to seeing elsewhere.  Alexander started off by saying a few nice things about the Trump administration’s push to get testing up to speed but then, by pointing out how many more tests would have to be available to get his beloved University of Tennessee open in the fall, he made it clear that he wasn’t all that impressed with Trump’s testing “accomplishments.”  Given the subject of the meeting it’s fair to assume that Trump’s “mission accomplished” press conference was purposely scheduled for Monday to get ahead of this hearing because nothing said at the hearing supported Trump’s assertions. The witnesses, most notably virus guru Fauci, made it clear that we are far from that mission accomplished moment that Trump bragged about. Through his opening remarks and his answers to questions posed by the various senators Fauci said that absent prudent behavior, continued social distancing and masking, far more testing, and the adherence to those CDC opening up guidelines, the ones that have been squelched and that most states appear to be ignoring, the country is in for rough times, as in more virus spikes and far higher morbidities and mortalities which probably explains why the model most rely on now projects 147,000 mortalities by early August.  Though he talked about progress on the vaccination front, Fauci didn’t promise any timing miracles, leaving the impression that while he believes at least one of the various vaccination options will work, even that’s not certain.  He also cautioned that anti-viral Remdesivir is no cure all, just one in what will hopefully be an arsenal of drugs that might make COVID 19 more survivable and anyway, though he didn’t go into details, the availability of Remdesivir is currently limited with reports that the Trump team has been screwing up its allocation, something that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Senator Rand Paul  proved once again that he’s deserving of his reputation, by telling Fauci that he’s not really all that great and doesn’t really resemble Brad Pitt, okay he didn’t say that last part but you know he was thinking it. Paul said that while pushing for the opening of businesses and schools sooner rather than later because most of the people dying are old and disposable and who cares if a few kids die prematurely, most of those rug rats will probably do just fine.  Fauci, who has seen a few asshole politicians in his day didn’t take the bait.  Instead he calmly defended his recommendations and said “I have never made myself out to be the “end all,” warning against “cavalier” thinking that children could be immune.” Notably Mitt Romney, who really has nothing to lose came out swinging too, in addition to slamming Trump’s oft repeated mantra that Obama or Bush for that matter were “responsible” for failing to provide tests for a virus that didn’t exist until late last year he pointed out that testing capabilities are way behind schedule, criticizing Admiral Giroir, one of the experts testifying, for bragging that US testing levels now exceed those of South Korea by saying that South Korea’s testing needs were far lower than ours given how effectively they’d handled their virus outbreak and given that so few South Korean’s have died from virus related illness.  CDC head Redfield and his organization also came in for some criticism for their failure to get those opening up guidelines out to the states.  On a more humorous front, Virginia’s Tim Kaine who was rocking a scarf face cover in lieu of a run of the mill facemask looked cool in a bandito kind of way, Senator Susan Collins seemed obsessed by dental care, possibly dentists are funding her campaign, and Bernie Sanders, who zoomed in from Vermont was surrounded by rock memorabilia. And then there’s Kelly Loeffler, the newbie senator best known for trading on inside information about the coming pandemic, she spent her few minutes kowtowing to Trump, a last ditch effort to improve her standing going into what appears to be a tough primary fight against fellow Republican Doug Collins.

Legalities: The Senate Health care hearing wasn’t the only game in town yesterday.  The Supremes held one of their zoom calls, no toilet flushing this time but plenty of questions and answers about whether or not Trump’s financials should be released.  Though we won’t know what the Court decides for a while, it appears that they may be headed to a split decision.  The general consensus is that they are likely to reject the House’s requests for all of Trump’s financial information as too broad, possibly sending that request back to a lower court for refinement, but that they will direct Mazars, Trump’s  accounting firm, and Deutsche, his bank, to share the financial information they’re holding, assuming they haven’t burned all their records, with a New York grand jury. That’s not great since the public doesn’t generally get to see grand jury information.  In other legal news, Judge Emmet Sullivan doesn’t seem all that happy with the Justice Department and Attorney General Barr.  He’s put their decision to drop charges against former national security advisor Michael Flynn on hold, and in an highly unusual move, has invited outside legal groups to weigh in on the Justice Department’s move.  The Justice Department is not pleased with the Judge but he doesn’t seem to care.

Et Cetera:  Senate Leader Mitch McConnell proved once again just how despicable and deceitful he can be.  At the same time that he criticized Obama for being tasteless for commenting on the pathetic way that Trump is handling the pandemic, he claimed that the Obama administration didn’t leave Trump a  pandemic game plan.  The problem with that is that Obama’s team did leave Trump with a Pandemic Playbook and members of the team who wrote it have now distributed copies on twitter.  Check it out, it specifically deals with what to do in the event of a raging novel virus, one eerily similar to COVID 19.