Thursday Reads

Good Morning!!

Today is another agonizing day in the ongoing disaster of the dying Trump Administration. We still have to make it through another 62 days until he has to leave the White House. Long after that day, we’ll be paying the price for Trump’s godawful reign.

Yesterday, deaths from the coronavirus in the U.S. passed a quarter of a million. The New York Times: The Coronavirus Has Now Killed 250,000 People in the U.S.

The United States passed a grim milestone on Wednesday, hitting 250,000 coronavirus-related deaths, with the number expected to keep climbing steeply as infections surge nationwide.

Experts predict that the country could soon be reporting 2,000 deaths a day or more, matching or exceeding the spring peak, and that 100,000 to 200,000 more Americans could die in the coming months.

Just how bad it gets will depend on a variety of factors, including how well preventive measures are followed and when a vaccine is introduced.

“It all depends on what we do and how we address this outbreak,” said Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University professor of environmental health sciences who has modeled the spread of the disease. “That is going to determine how much it runs through us.”

Back in March, when the virus was still relatively new and limited mainly to a few significant pockets like New York, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the top infectious disease expert in the country, predicted that it might kill up to 240,000 Americans.

It has now passed that mark, with no end in sight.

Since the very beginning, preventive measures like wearing masks have been caught up in a political divide, and that remains the case today, as the Trump administration resists beginning a transition of power to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and cooperating on a pandemic strategy….

There is always a lag in deaths, compared with the rate of infection and hospitalizations, and with the latter measure now hitting records every day — 76,830 Americans were hospitalized on Tuesday, according to the Covid Tracking Project — the death toll is certain to go on rising.

Also from The New York Times: States That Imposed Few Restrictions Now Have the Worst Outbreaks. Click on the link to see explanatory charts.

Coronavirus cases are rising in almost every U.S. state. But the surge is worst now in places where leaders neglected to keep up forceful virus containment efforts or failed to implement basic measures like mask mandates in the first place, according to a New York Times analysis of data from the University of Oxford….

The index comes from Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government, where researchers track the policies — or lack thereof — governments use to contain the virus and protect residents, such as contact tracing, mask mandates and restrictions on businesses and gatherings. Researchers aggregate those indicators and assign a number from 0 to 100 to each government’s total response….Most states imposed tight restrictions in the spring even if they did not have bad outbreaks then. After reopening early, some Sun Belt states, including Arizona and Texas, imposed restrictions again after case counts climbed. Now, Midwestern states have among the worst outbreaks. Many have also done the least to contain the virus.

When cases first peaked in the United States in the spring, there was no clear correlation between containment strategies and case counts, because most states enacted similar lockdown policies at the same time. And in New York and some other states, “those lockdowns came too late to prevent a big outbreak, because that’s where the virus hit first,” said Thomas Hale, associate professor of global public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, who leads the Oxford tracking effort.

A relationship between policies and the outbreak’s severity has become more clear as the pandemic has progressed.

“States that have kept more control policies in a more consistent way — New England states, for example — have avoided a summer surge and are now having a smaller fall surge, as opposed to states that rolled them back very quickly like Florida or Texas,” Mr. Hale said. “I think timing really matters for the decisions.”

The worst outbreaks in the country now are in places where policymakers did the least to prevent transmission, according to the Oxford index. States with stronger policy responses over the long run are seeing comparatively smaller outbreaks.

Iowa, North Dakota, and Utah have finally mandated masks, but the Governor of South Dakota is still resisting.

The Guardian: Kristi Noem rigidly follows Trump strategy of denial as Covid ravages South Dakota. Noem has been sucking up to Trump for a long time, and she is still doing it even though he lost the election.

The actual lives of many South Dakotans could depend, in turn, upon that decision given the terrifying surge of Covid-19 cases that is battering the state under Noem’s contentious leadership. South Dakota has been listed by Forbes as one of the 10 most dangerous states in the Union, all of them in the Midwest.

Coronavirus in South Dakota is running at an intensity only surpassed in the US by its neighbor North Dakota. The state has an alarming positivity rate of almost 60% – nearly six out of 10 people who take a Covid test are infected – second only to another neighbor, Wyoming.

Viewed through the lens of cases and deaths, South Dakota is also at the top of the league table. More than 66,000 South Dakotans have contracted the disease and at least 644 have died, a number likely to rise as hospitals reach breaking point.

Amid this devastating contagion, Noem is rigidly sticking to the strategy she has adopted since the pandemic began. It consists of a refusal to accept mask mandates and repeated denial of the science around the efficacy of wearing masks; resistance to imposing any restrictions on bars and restaurants; no limits on gatherings in churches or other places of worship; and no orders to stay at home.

While the statistics are clear – the virus is running wild in South Dakota – Noem has turned a public health emergency into an issue of “freedom” and “liberty”, consistently lying about the trajectory of the disease under her watch. “We’re doing really good in South Dakota. We’re managing Covid-19,” she has said.

She has also embraced the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for Covid, even after it was proven to be ineffective and potentially dangerous.

If all of this sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Since the start of the pandemic, Noem has consciously adopted the posture of a mini-Trump, following the president’s every move in the handling of the health crisis.

Read the rest at The Guardian.

Meanwhile, Trump is hunkered down in the White House, tweeting and trying to find some way to steal the election.

Eric Lutz at Vanity Fair: As His Bogus Election Fraud Charges Go Up in Flames, Trump goes into Hiding.

Still yet to concede to Biden, Donald Trump and his allies are continuing to hold up his successor’s transition team, putting America’s national security at risk and threatening to complicate the rollout of the forthcoming COVID vaccine while his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, fights his hopeless legal battle against the election results. (It isn’t going great.) Giuliani, working his first federal case in nearly two decades, wasn’t much sharper in court than he was in the Four Seasons Total Landscaping parking lot the day the race was called for Biden. His arguments—a tangle of easily disproved lies and already-debunked conspiracy theories—seem exceedingly unlikely to succeed, something he may be aware of himself. According to the Washington Post’s Robert Costa, Giuliani has privately suggested his real strategy isn’t so much to land a long-shot victory in court, but to push the fight to Capitol Hill by getting officials in key states to refuse to certify the results. GOP members of the board of canvassers in Wayne County, Michigan, tried to do just that Tuesday, voting against certifying the election results there, with one official saying she’d sign off on other jurisdictions but not Detroit, a majority Black, Democratic-voting city. But after public outrage, the board reversed course and unanimously certified the results later that night.

With Giuliani losing his games of 3-D and regular chess, Trump’s campaign and legal teams have reportedly been thrown into disarray, with backstabbing and chaos and power struggles. Trump himself, meanwhile, has been pretty much AWOL since he lost the election. He’s only made two public appearances—showing up late to Arlington National Cemetery on November 11 to spend 10 minutes at a Veterans Day ceremony; remarks touting recent progress on the COVID vaccine—since his despotic rant in the briefing room of the White House on November 5, when he baselessly alleged a massive voter fraud conspiracy was being perpetrated against him. 

“It feels like bunker mentality,” an administration official told CNN on Tuesday. Indeed, the Trump White House these days has been more like Grey Gardens, with the reclusive president emerging only to play golf at his nearby Virginia club. Appearing to have largely abandoned his presidential duties, to the extent he ever sought to fulfill them, Trump’s only activities of late have been settling scores with insufficiently loyal officials—Chris Krebs, the top cybersecurity official in the Department of Homeland Security, became the latest purge victim after defending the integrity of the election—and wailing on and on about voter fraud on Twitter, which has slapped a warning label on a majority of his posts in recent days.

Click the link to read the rest.

Today those Michigan Republicans are trying to take back their votes to certify the election. The Washington Post: Wayne County Republicans ask to ‘rescind’ their votes certifying election results.

Tuesday Reads: “While the Rest of Us Die”

1897, from Retrospective Exhibition of Wada Eisaku

Good Morning!!

Last night I watched a fascinating, disturbing program on Vice TV, “While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America’s Shadow Government. It was the first of a series of six episodes about the U.S. Government’s secret plans to save elite government officials in the event of a nuclear attack or other massive global disaster. Like maybe an out-of-control pandemic that overwhelms the health care system and kills millions of people? Here’s a trailer:

The series is based on a book by Garrett Graff: Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government’s Secret Plan to Save Itself–While the Rest of Us Die.

From Variety: Vice TV Sets Debut of ‘While the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America’s Shadow Government’ With Jeffrey Wright.

Based on the book by Garrett M. Graff, the six-part series exposes the U.S. government’s flawed plans to protect its citizens. The show unpacks America’s national security spending on hidden underground cities, a secret air force and a plan to suspend democracy in order to serve the interests of the elite class.

The series features interviews with political figures including former Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson and former National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure, Protection and Counter-terrorism Richard Clarke, and national security experts Malcolm Nance, Elizabeth Goitien and Paul Rieckhoff. It will be narrated by “Westworld” star Jeffrey Wright.

“The events of this last year have laid bare the economic, political and health inequities at the core of American society,” said Graff. “Our hope with ‘While The Rest Of Us Die’ is to show Americans how those inequities are central to the way our supposedly egalitarian society and democratic government operates. From Puerto Rico to COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter, America has long treated some American lives as more worthy than others. This isn’t new, and in fact, in the seventy years since the Cold War, the U.S. has long prioritized spending trillions of dollars in the wrong places in the wrong ways, a problem that has been felt from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan to the streets of American cities.”

By Françoise Vadon

Take a look at what Trump has been up to lately. He decapitated the top leadership of the Department of Defense, and he apparently has been fantasizing about how he can unleash destruction on the world before his lame duck period ends.

The New York Times: Trump Sought Options for Attacking Iran to Stop Its Growing Nuclear Program.

Georgette Agutte, Marcel Sembat lisant, 1910-20

 

Trump also wants to pull U.S. troops out of foreign conflicts without any serious planning for the consequences. The New York Times: Trump Is Said to Be Preparing to Withdraw Troops From Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia.

President Trump is expected to order the U.S. military to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia by the time he leaves office in January, using the end of his time in power to significantly pull back American forces from far-flung conflicts around the world.

Under a draft order circulating at the Pentagon on Monday, the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan would be halved from the current deployment of 4,500 troops, officials said.

In Iraq, the Pentagon would trim force levels slightly below the 3,000 troops that commanders had previously announced. And in Somalia, virtually all of the more than 700 troops conducting training and counterterrorism missions would leave.

Taken together, the cuts reflect Mr. Trump’s longstanding desire to stop shouldering the cost of long-running military engagements against Islamist insurgencies in failed and fragile countries in Africa and the Middle East, a grinding mission that has spread since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

But the president’s aspirations have long run into resistance, as his own national security officials argued that abandonment of such troubled countries could have catastrophic consequences — such as when the United States pulled out of Iraq at the end of 2011, leaving a vacuum that fostered the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

It would be great for us to get out of these endless wars, but doing so without planning for what happens next could lead to disaster, and it would also interfere with Joe Biden’s ability to deal with these conflicts in more serious ways than Trump is capable of.

Camille Pissarro Jeanne Pissarro reading, 1899

And then there’s Trump’s attempted coup.

Historian Federico Finchelstein at The Washington Post: What the history of coups tells us about Trump’s refusal to concede.

Historically across Latin America, when constitutionally elected leaders were denied their legitimate mandate, there was just one word for it: coup. Just think of the emblematic cases of Salvador Allende in Chile (1973) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954) — both democratically elected leaders who were toppled by the military. In other cases, such as in Uruguay in 1973, Peru in 1992 and Venezuela in 2017, presidents decided to ignore the law and attempted to stay in power indefinitely via self-coup.

A coup against a democratic regime can be defined as any political action by state actors that aims to either maintain or take over power by unconstitutional means. In short, there is a coup when military renegades or democratically elected leaders suspend the democratic process.

This definition — and global history — is why Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his electoral defeat and his refusal to initiate a transition of power has alarmed so many, and led some to question whether a coup was in progress.\To be sure, Trump’s clumsy attempts to deny President-elect Joe Biden’s win already look to be failing. But his actions — denying and attempting to overturn the results of the election and getting top Republicans and Attorney General William P. Barr to indulge these dangerous efforts — are still symptoms of the fragility of American democracy at this moment.

And this is exactly why we should be talking about the history of coups: how they happened and, most importantly, how they have been stopped. Trump’s refusal to concede is an attack on the state and democratic government. While his actions may be dismissed as merely tantrums, the history of dictators in Latin America over the past century suggests the need to take this dangerous moment seriously.

Read the whole thing at the WaPo. 

Porfiry Lebedev, Morning News, 1950s

Keep in mind that the continuity of government plans discussed in the Vice documentary give Trump vast powers to declare martial law and take other dictatorial actions in case of a national emergency. Remember Trump has already declared a national emergency in the case of the coronavirus pandemic–which he and his thugs are deliberately exacerbating.

Case in point: Scott Atlas. The Washington Post Editorial Board: Scott Atlas’s rabble-rousing will lead to illness and death. He should be fired.

Scott Atlas is a neuroradiologist, not an infectious disease expert, nor an epidemiologist. As President Trump’s leading adviser on the coronavirus pandemic, he continues to make statements that will cause more illness and death. He ought to be fired immediately.

This weekend he was speaking about Michigan, which, like other states in the Upper Midwest, is struggling with the raging virus. Hospitalizations are way up, new cases are shooting ever higher, deaths are four times greater than in September, and the test positivity rate is 9.8 percent, indicating the virus is spreading. On Sunday, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) announced reasonable new restrictions in an effort to slow the spread, including closing bars and restaurants, casinos and bowling alleys; sending college and high school students to remote classrooms; and ordering all but essential workers to labor from home.

“We are in the worst moment of this pandemic to date,” she said in words that could apply to the entire country. “The situation has never been more dire. We are at the precipice and we need to take some action because as the weather gets colder and people spend more time indoors, the virus will spread, more people will get sick, and there will be more fatalities.”

Dr. Atlas has frequently belittled lockdowns and pandemic restrictions, saying they have deleterious knock-on effects and are unnecessary, and that only the “vulnerable” need protection. Of the Michigan restrictions, he wrote on Twitter: “The only way this stops is if people rise up. You get what you accept. #FreedomMatters #StepUp.” So, while the governor was desperately trying to save lives by slowing the virus transmission, Dr. Atlas was urging people to disobey and revolt. This is incendiary talk, especially since the governor was the target of a kidnapping plot foiled by the FBI before the election. Dr. Atlas later insisted he would never encourage violence and was talking about voting and peaceful protest.

Poul Friis Nybo, (1869-1929) A favorite author

But the damage was done. His message was that people should ignore the governor and resist the pandemic restrictions, as Mr. Trump did with his “LIBERATE” tweets in April. If Dr. Atlas’s advice is followed, more people will get sick and die. The nation is engulfed in coronavirus infections; the spread is extremely alarming, with more than 100,000 new cases every day since Nov. 4. The tidal wave of disease is stressing hospital systems to their limit and all but ensures that deaths will be increasing in the weeks to come.

Trump’s disinformation campaign against public health recommendations has convinced many of his followers that the virus either does not exist or is not dangerous.

Alternet: A ‘horror movie that never ends’: Nurse says she’s had patients dying of COVID-19 who think it’s a hoax.

On Saturday, South Dakota nurse Jodi Doering had a night off and decided to tweet about what she was seeing as her state. Doering’s tweets were about COVID-19 patients who are literally dying from contracting the virus but still do not believe that the virus is real, or that they have it. She explained how sad and frustrating it was to watch people in such angry denial, furious that this hoax was being perpetrated on them, only to “stop yelling at you when they get intubated. It’s like a fucking horror movie that never ends.” On Monday, Doering was on CNN to talk about her experience. It was tragic and eye-opening.

In the interview, Doering explained that she really hadn’t expected her tweets to go viral like this and was not blaming the victims of this virus or making a political statement. She was just reporting on some of what she was seeing. She explained she just became so sad thinking about the many patients she has seen who are in such denial and so angry that they are missing out on what is in many cases their final chances to speak with their families before passing away. And because Doering is an adult and a professional, she held CNN’s Alisyn Camerota’s hand to explain to her that she didn’t take the anger of her patients personally. “I think it’s just a belief that it’s not real and nursing happens to be on the receiving end of that. And that’s okay. That’s where we’re there for. It’s just, in the bigger picture, when you try to reason with people, can I call your family, your kids, your wife, your friend, your brother? And they say, no, because I’m going to be fine,” it really hits hard.

She said that since they first started seeing cases of COVID-19 in March, while they have gotten better at treating and alleviating some of the cases, they cannot defeat the surges in the virus and the political bullshit that comes with fighting against basic public health protections like social distancing and wearing masks. 

The pandemic is certainly a national (and global) emergency at this point, and Trump is actively making it worse. Will he use it to exert dictatorial powers that are available to him? Maybe. Maybe not.

Okay, I’m probably just catastrophizing and none of this will end up leading to a Trump dictatorship. But he can do immense damage over the next couple of months until Biden’s inauguration. I’m just putting this out there for your consideration.

Let me know what you think, and as always, please take care of yourself and those you love today and always.