SCREAM

The Monster is in the House:  A study out of Asia provides “compelling” evidence that social distancing combined with the wearing of face masks really works at keeping the coronavirus at bay.  Of course that’s the kind of science that Trump, who finds face-masking so not cool, rejects, so it’s no surprise that COVID 19 is now running rampant around the White House.  After learning that his press secretary/Stephen Miller’s wife Katie Miller tested COVID positive, a result that seemed to stun Trump who has a hard time understanding how someone can test negative one day and positive just a few days later, VP Pence stayed on his plane and, together with both of Iowa’s Senators continued on to Iowa where he held a number of meetings with the state’s governor and religious leaders before going on to a meat packing plant. By the way, at 86,  Chuck Grassley, Iowa’s senior Senator falls into that really vulnerable cohort as do a number of those religious leaders, including one Rabbi who responded to Pence’s encouragement to call his congregation back by saying, nope it’s too soon and my members are too old to take the risk.   In addition to Katie Miller, somewhere north of ten Secret Service people as well as one of Trump’s valets is COVID positive, and those are just the people we know about.  By Sunday, a number of those who came in contact with “Covid” Katie  have now put themselves into various levels of self-quarantine.  That contingent includes Stephen Miller,  virus guru Dr Fauci, CDC Head Redfield, FDA Head Stephen Hahn, and Admiral GIroir. Some of them are due to testify in front of the Senate’s Health Committee this week and will now appear via Zoom or some other virtual system, which is fine because upon learning that one of his staff members had tested positive, Senator Lamar Alexander, the Committee’s Chair, won’t be there either.  He’ll be chairing from Tennessee.  On Sunday it was also reported that VP Pence, who hangs regularly with all the members of his task force and almost always can be found attached to Trump’s hip was planning to engage in some light quarantining of his own, whatever that means.  However his plans have changed, probably because Trump, who fears the virus but also fears bad optics, put the kibosh on that.  Instead Pence will be working from his office, where he will engage in serious social distancing which probably means that he'll be allowed nowhere near the Oval Office.  A number of other senior military folks are also going into self-quarantine, including Michael Gilday, the Navy’s top Admiral who was exposed to an infected family member.  As to Trump, who met with a whole bunch of unmasked senior military leaders last week and a group of very elderly WW II War veterans none of whom were wearing masks, while most of us spent Sunday down in the dumps because  we couldn’t get together with our families for Mother’s Day, he doesn’t appear to have spent any time with Melania but did spent his day rage tweeting, not focused on the virus or the 80,000 Americans who have fallen victim to it, but citing countless conspiracy theories and, referring to the whole Russian investigation and the “conspiracy” to “trick” former national security advisor Michael Flynn into lying about that conversation he had about sanctions with then Russian Ambassador Kislyak as Obamagate. As to Flynn, at some point in the near future we will learn if his judge, Emmet Sullivan, will be willing to go along with Attorney General Barr’s request to drop the case against him despite his pleading guilty not once but twice.  Without intending to, Barr and his incompetent underlings at Justice may have provided the Judge with a good excuse to demand a hearing on how the nefarious crowd reached their conclusion, a conclusion partially justified by a misrepresented interview with a former senior Justice attorney.  Apparently, although the career prosecutor responsible for the case withdrew instead of signing on to the controversial decision recommendation, his name was kept on the documents filed with the court as the Barr assistant who completed the court filing is not a member of the Washington DC bar.  These guys can’t even do corruption right.  By the way, during an interview with Axios, the ever dutiful Pence  said that it would be fine with him if Trump hired Flynn back even though it was Flynn’s lying to Pence that set the Flynn prosecution in motion.  And as outrageous as that comment is it pales in comparison to Trump’s assertion that the virus will go away on its own making a vaccine unnecessary.  To be clear, the virus could eventually go away but absent a vaccine, a treatment or the continuation of social distancing combined with face-masking the US death toll, now predicted to reach 137,000 by early August will be even more horrendous.  On the vaccine front, the Office of the Special Counsel (the watchdog group not former Special Counsel Mueller’s crowd) has ordered that vaccine expert Rick Bright be temporarily reinstated while they continue their investigation into his removal because so far they’ve found reasonable grounds to believe that he was ousted for resisting the pushing of unproven cures like hydroxychloroquine, the drug that Trump and his friends still believe is a cure all, especially when downed with bleach chasers. Don’t be surprised if Trump is burping white stuff the next time we see him.    

Scream Two:  The CDC’s “how to open up the country” guidelines that Trump’s newest Press Secretary Kristen “I’ll never lie to you” McEnany claimed hadn’t been approved by any higher-ups actually had been signed off on by CDC Head Redfield who wanted them fast tracked but saw them squashed because the guidelines conflicted with Trump’s get the economy going ASAP plans.  A version of those guidelines are now expected to be released, which is a good thing, except that a whole bunch of states that haven’t met any of the triggers have already started opening up haphazardly.   On the Supreme Court front, Trump’s taxes will be front and center this week.  George Conway, who took a lead role in penning the brief that led to former President Clinton having to share his DNA, asserts that the Supremes will rule in favor of the release of the tax filings. It’s not clear whether he fully gets that the current Court is stacked in Trump’s favor.  Conway has made some questionable decisions in his life, after all he is married to Kellyanne, however, he and his Lincoln Project buddies did pull off a spectacular feat last week.  Their “Mourning in America” ad, the one that went viral, throwing Trump into a twitter hissy fit only cost them $5000 to run since, with Trump as their targeted viewing audience, they only paid for it to be aired in Fox’s Washington DC market.