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.