Monday Reads: “Unprecedented Crisis”
Posted: August 17, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Afternoon Reads | Tags: Trumpist Regime 31 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
You must read this piece in The New Republic by Walter Shapiro “Joe Biden’s Great Reclamation Project.” It’s coupled with this great illustration by Zohar Lazar. It’s difficult to deal with the level of indecency, corruption, lawlessness, and incompetency that have be the predominant features of these last four years. None of us can wait to get rid of it but I keep trying to imagine the incredible task of rebuilding alliances, trade agreements, confidence in institutions, normalcy and functionality. This is what Shapiro tackles. It’s all about the chaos in everything awaiting the Biden/Harris administration.
Only Franklin Roosevelt, taking the oath on a cloudy and gloomy March day in 1933, inherited comparable challenges. But the Depression was only an economic catastrophe, and Herbert Hoover, paralyzed though he may have been as president, was an honorable man. Barring a dramatic turnabout in the country’s fortunes, Biden will confront joblessness, disease, and the hateful legacy of the most lawless president in history. Much as in 1933, when establishment figures such as Walter Lippmann suggested that America required a dictator for the duration of the economic emergency, the country will greet Biden’s first year in office as a crucial test of whether our battered democracy can again flourish.
These existential questions mean that the pundit’s traditional late-campaign thought experiment of envisioning a Biden presidency requires an imaginative leap far beyond position papers and policy speeches. So many issues that were points of conflict during the Democratic primaries now seem—in the midst of a pandemic—as peripheral as John Kennedy and Richard Nixon squabbling over Quemoy and Matsu, two insignificant islands off the Chinese coast, during their 1960 debates. With Trump in apparent free fall after his disastrous Tulsa rally and his race-baiting embrace of Confederate statues, Biden, for the most part, has traded policy specifics for periodic reminders that he is neither a hate-monger nor a low-rent huckster peddling miracle virus cures from the White House.
Specifics are also in short supply for the simple reason that these days everyone in the Democratic Party, with the possible exception of John Edwards, can claim to be a Biden policy adviser. Like any traditional presidential candidate running a big-tent campaign, Biden distributes titles with the lavishness of a shady trace-your-British-ancestry firm. In addition to the campaign’s policy staffers and longtime outside advisers to the former vice president, Biden and Bernie Sanders with great fanfare in May announced unity task forces to supposedly meld the centrist and progressive wings of the party. In mid-July, the task forces unveiled an ambitious $2 trillion climate change plan (without explaining how it would get through a closely divided Senate) that prompted Trump to risibly claim that Biden wanted to “abolish the suburbs.” (The president did not explain where he thought Biden planned to put the existing land around cities.)
After nearly four years of Trump, it is hard to remember what a normal presidency feels like.
Indeed. But, it’s going to take a lot more than a normal president to handle this task. There is so much on the list that it’s amazing Shapiro doesn’t need a book volume to list them all. Each of the cabinet officers have been corrupt and incompetent. Every Department will have to be reset at their replacement. Then there are the two big problems of the economy and the Pandemic. Will he appoint czars for these? And then there’s the crisis in Justice and policing, will he hand this to Vice President Harris to work with congress on appropriate legislation and systemic change? What role will she play and what will land on her desk?
Former Admiral William McRaven writes today a WAPO Op Ed about the current attack on democracy and our federal government. “Trump is actively working to undermine the Postal Service — and every major U.S. institution” Trump has shown his willingness to do every legal and illegal dirty trick in the book to get elected. We have continuing Russian interference, Republican States blocking access to voting, and now this.
Today, as we struggle with social upheaval, soaring debt, record unemployment, a runaway pandemic, and rising threats from China and Russia, President Trump is actively working to undermine every major institution in this country. He has planted the seeds of doubt in the minds of many Americans that our institutions aren’t functioning properly. And, if the president doesn’t trust the intelligence community, law enforcement, the press, the military, the Supreme Court, the medical professionals, election officials and the postal workers, then why should we? And if Americans stop believing in the system of institutions, then what is left but chaos and who can bring order out of chaos: only Trump. It is the theme of every autocrat who ever seized power or tried to hold onto it.
Our institutions are the foundation of a functioning democracy. While they are not perfect, they are still the strongest bulwark against overzealous authority figures. The institutions give the people a voice; a voice in the information we receive, a voice in the laws we pass, a voice in the wars we fight, the money we spend and the justice we uphold. And a voice in the people we elect.
As Trump seeks to undermine the U.S. Postal Service and stop mail-in voting, he is taking away our voice to decide who will lead America. It is not hyperbole to say that the future of the country could depend on those remarkable men and women who brave the elements to bring us our mail and deliver our vote. Let us ensure they have every resource possible to provide the citizens of this country the information they need, the ballots that they request and the Postal Service they deserve.
Trump may have a war on the Post office, but Republicans in states have a direct war on voting. Take this headline today from The Advocate’s Sam Karlin here in Louisiana. “Louisiana mail-in voting would be rolled back in November under new proposal”. I’m pretty sure Republican leges are trying to do this every where possible.
Louisiana Sec. of State Kyle Ardoin has proposed a plan for the Nov. 3 presidential election that rolls back mail-in voting significantly from the recently-held summer elections, allowing only one category of people to vote by mail if they don’t meet the normal requirements–those who have tested positive for COVID-19.
The plan, submitted to lawmakers Monday morning, is surely to spark a new round of outcry from Democrats and advocacy groups who have sued the state for not doing enough to accommodate people at risk from the virus. If it passes, it will ensure Louisiana is one of eight states to require an excuse for voters to obtain an absentee ballot; the rest either mail all voters a ballot or make them available to everyone.
Then there’s this continuing nightmare of school openings.
This is eyepopping for our once great nation. “Only 17 states meet the WHO’s criteria for safely reopening a community.”
The U.S. attempt to return children to the classroom this fall has turned into a slow-motion train wreck, with at least 2,400 students and staff either infected with COVID-19 or self-isolating because of exposure, and the vast majority of large school districts opting to go online this summer amid rising cases of the virus.
President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos have mostly waved off the situation unraveling this week in states like Georgia, Alabama, Indiana and Tennessee, where schools opened their doors after a months-long hiatus due to the pandemic — only to quickly backtrack as soon as infections popped back up.
Trump and DeVos have demanded that schools stay open full-time and threatened to pull federal funding if the institutions fail to do so. At a White House event this week, DeVos made no mention of the crisis in Georgia and elsewhere and said families shouldn’t be held “captive to other people’s fears or agendas.”
DeVos has “consistently said the decision to reopen should be made at the local level, and some schools may need to temporarily remain virtual based on local public health situation,” Angela Morabito, a spokesperson for the Education Department, told ABC News late Thursday in an emailed response to questions about the recent school closures.
“She’s also, for the last 30 years maintained that parents and families need options when it comes to the child’s education and that has never been more evident than now,” Morabito wrote. “Parents need to have access to safe, in-person options as well as distant or remote learning options if that is what is best for their family. The key word here is safe.”
But what is “safe” is not at all clear to most school officials and at the heart of a bitter debate unfolding just months ahead of the presidential election.
As all of this continues to take up the air waves, there’s stuff sneaking under and around them. There’s some coverage of this today but not enough. “US approves oil, gas leasing plan for Alaska Wildlife refuge. The Department of the Interior has approved an oil and gas leasing program within Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’. We got too much of the stuff now! Why do we need this?
The Trump administration on Monday took another step to opening Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling for oil and gas, potentially fulfilling a decades-long dream for Republicans.
Environmentalists, however, promised to fight opening up the coast plain of the refuge, a 1.56-million acre swath of land along Alaska’s northern Beaufort Sea coast, home to polar bears, caribous and other wildlife, after the Department of the Interior approved an oil and gas leasing program.
Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt signed the Record of Decision, which will determine a program for where oil and gas leasing will take place in the refuge’s coastal plain.
“The establishment of this program marks a new chapter in American energy independence,” Bernhardt said during a conference call with reporters.
“Years of inaction have given away to an informed and determined plan to responsibly tap ANWR’s energy potential for the American people for generations to come,” he said.
President Trump insisted Congress include a mandate providing for leasing in the refuge in a 2017 tax bill.
Over the last four decades, Republicans have attempted to open the refuge to drilling. President Bill Clinton vetoed a Republican bill to allow drilling in 1995, and Democrats blocked a similar plan 10 years later.
There’s just only so much we can all put up with. This is all outrageous and it’s draining and exhausting. It’s difficult to deal right now with my twin threats of a dead ac evaporator coil in 90 degree weather and what looks like termites that have moved into the water heater shack. Where am I supposed to get money and time and patience for any of this? I ‘m anxious and stressed and depressed. Certainly, no help is coming from the US Senate under Mitch McConnell. From CNBC “‘We will lose everything:’ Americans express frustration at Congress adjourning without a stimulus deal.”
Though Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has said members will return to vote if a deal is reached, that could still be weeks away, CNBC reported. In the meantime, around 28 million Americans are currently collecting jobless benefits, and as many as 40 million could face eviction if Congress does not pass a relief bill soon, according to Emily Benfer, a housing expert.
Hundreds of readers — from all over the country and across the political spectrum — wrote into CNBC Make It to detail how the Senate’s failure to pass another aid package is affecting them and their families. Many expressed outrage at Congress’s inaction. Others simply wanted to vent to someone about their situation, they said.
“When I saw them ignore the desperate need for a new stimulus for almost two months, I was stunned,” Hugh Wasson, 66, writes to CNBC Make It. Wasson is currently unable to find work, and lives off of his Social Security payments and jobless benefits from Florida, which do not cover all of his bills. “I am still unable to believe anyone could be so callous, let alone a whole roomful of them.”
Here’s how seven other unemployed Americans across the country are faring.
Before Covid-19, Jane, who asked to be identified by a pseudonym for privacy purposes, made a good living as a waitress in Southern Indiana, taking home around $600 to $800 per week. Now, with her restaurant still closed, she receives $141 per week, after taxes, in state jobless benefits.
With so little money, her rent, electric and cable bills have gone unpaid this month, and she has let her car and rental insurance policies lapse. Waiting for Congress to do something, she says, has turned her into “a ball of stress.”
“Literally the only thing[s] I think about [are] money, bills, money, debt, food,” she says. “I wake up thinking about these things, and I go to bed, struggling to fall asleep, thinking about these things.”
The 33-year-old has been working since she was 15, she says, and this is the longest period of time she’s been without a job. She says that if any member of Congress were in her place — unsure of how’d they’d pay rent or be able to buy groceries — they’d come to a deal fast.
“I get that [Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] wants $600 extended benefits, I’d love that, when I was getting that I was able to keep up with all of my bills,” she says. “But at this point, I’d take anything.”
So, let me return to Shapiro. Of all the things on his list, this tugged at me. What do we do with this mad, lawless man once we extricate him?
Once in office, Biden will immediately confront a legal question that has only a single precedent in American history: How does an incoming president handle his immediate predecessor’s suspected abuse of office? Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon—although it helped end the national nightmare—was unpopular at the time and precluded any trial. But Nixon as president did not shield his underlings from federal investigation, which is why there was enough evidence early in Ford’s presidency to convict former Attorney General John Mitchell and former top White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman of illegally covering up the Watergate break-in and the broader scandals surrounding it
There will be a political argument that going after Trump after he slinks out of the White House will only add to national divisions. But if you can’t prosecute a lawless president when he is in office and it is in bad taste to prosecute him after he has left office, about the only remaining legal option would be to prosecute him for thought crimes before he takes office
I’m still thinking on this.
Anyway, it’s getting very hot in my room. I did go out to buy a small window unit to keep the back and center part of the house cooler. It wasn’t something really on the budget but it was 93 yesterday and it’s hard to function in that kind of heat.
I hope you are safe and able to stay someplace to stay that way. We have to find a way to vote and fight this despite our individual and shared exhaustion. They want us that way. It’s what autocratic wannabes do so we just give in and go along.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: Neither Snow nor Rain … But can a Greedy Pair of Sociopaths stop the Mail?
Posted: August 14, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, morning reads | Tags: election interfence, US Postal Service 15 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The sabotage of the US Postal Service by the Trumpist Regime is just another one of those things that’s beyond the pale! The Republicans have always wanted to privatize the constitutionally mandated service which always confused me because their rural constituents would likely be without delivery. I mean, that’s why it was mandated in the constitution to begin with so all citizens everywhere get their mail. Any poor rural citizen wouldn’t get service or would pay a tremendous amount of money for it.
No one could possibly make a profit out of a delivery service without completely cherrypicking who gets routes and who doesn’t and that’s basically what we economists call a market friction that implies a public service if it’s a necessity. You provide it or heavily subsidize some other entity to do it because a huge portion of the business is not ever going to turn a profit without getting rid of the unprofitable parts. I have no idea how this simple Economics 101 explanation never seems to get through to them. Trying to force a market model onto a situation like that basically means depriving people of the service. But, this attack is not the usual Republican trype. It’s another example of Donald Trump’s favorite past time; election interference.
Why Susan Collins was so riled about this eventually (cough, cough) she sent a letter!
The worst instances of the mess up is the amount of necessary prescriptions that are not getting to people but especially to veterans and active service members who use the VA system for health care. Of course, this is just to mess up any voting by mail. Trump just announced his evil intent directly yesterday in a presser. But, hell what’s bad for the rest of us is just fine for Donald Trump who has invented the bugbear “universal voting by mail” to describe a bunch of different ways of getting your ballot to the election counting offices. But, per the NYT: 2020 Election Live Updates: Trump Requests Mail-In Ballot Even as He Assails Voting by Mail.” Fortunately we also have Judges getting orders out trying to stops this while the senate just took it’s labor day holiday for an entire month which also has horrible ramifications for any relief from the Trumpist Pandemic and Economic recession..
With President Trump and congressional Democrats fighting over funding the Postal Service, many states — and politicians up for re-election this fall — are grappling with the uncertainty around the expansion of mail-in balloting prompted by the pandemic.
Some key developments in the last 24 hours:
A federal judge in Pittsburgh ordered the Trump campaign to produce proof of voter fraud claims. District Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan on Thursday ordered Republicans who have challenged Pennsylvania’s expansion of mail-in voting to turn over evidence by the end of today that the system has led to ballot irregularities or face the possible dismissal of their suit.
The state Democratic Party and the Sierra Club, which intervened in the case, requested that the plaintiffs — the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and Pennsylvania’s Republican Party — turn over specific evidence of fraud, after the Republicans claimed the changes provided “fraudsters an easy opportunity to engage in ballot harvesting” and other manipulations.
“Plaintiffs shall produce such evidence in their possession, and if they have none, state as much,” wrote Mr. Ranjan, a Trump appointee.
Postal Service warns Pennsylvania on deadlines. In a separate Pennsylvania lawsuit, the general counsel of the Postal Service sent a stark warning to state officials late last month over their last-minute attempt expand voting by mail, according to documents released on Thursday.
Thomas J. Marshall, the counsel, wrote in a letter to Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, Kathy Boockvar, whose department oversees elections, that some mail ballots might not be delivered on time because the state’s pre-existing deadlines for sending out ballots were too tight for its “delivery standards,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.
In response, Pennsylvania officials petitioned the State Supreme Court to extend the deadlines.
You may also read about brave and bold Susan Collins there. (Do you see my tongue in my check?}
A USA Today Op Ed puts it bluntly: “Trump is determined to rig this election, defraud voters and thwart the will of the people. We need bipartisan election observers to ensure fairness and transparency, and all of us must report abuses in real time if we see them at the polls.” This was written by David Rothkopf and Bernard L. Schwartz.
We can no longer trust that our federal government will oversee fair elections this November. The repeated statements and actions of the president, his attorney general and leaders in the Republican Party have demonstrated that not only will they seek to cheat to ensure their “victory,” they will do so in multiple ways as part of a massive, systematic effort to defraud the American people and undermine our democracy.
The time has come for those of us who seek to protect and preserve democracy in America to step up. We must commit ourselves to ensuring the results of these elections represent the will of the people. And since we can’t trust the government to protect our elections, that means we must organize independent efforts to do so now.
Our efforts should begin with a statement from our four living past presidents identifying the threat, underscoring that it is real, condemning it and announcing their support for an extraordinary national effort to ensure we have the fair elections our people deserve. The threat we face is so great, it requires this kind of show of resolve and unity from past national leaders to protect what is at risk and to commit themselves to putting their considerable political weight behind identifying, opposing and undoing efforts by the president and his allies to rig the elections or muddle the results.
There are some excellent suggestions beyond this and it’s a short read.
And a Trumpist regime attack on the government would not be complete without a side deal. This is from CNBC: “Sen. Elizabeth Warren demands ‘corruption’ probe after report of Amazon options purchase by Postal Service chief Louis DeJoy” as reported by Dan Mangan. The Post Master General just put a side bet via Options on Amazon–one of Trump’s other Bugbears– and used to be a large holder of UPS stock.
A USPS spokesman, when asked for comment about Warren’s tweet, in an email reply pointed to a statement issued by DeJoy last week.
“I take my ethical obligations seriously, and I have done what is necessary to ensure that I am and will remain in compliance with those obligations,” DeJoy said in that statement.”
Warren’s tweet linked to a CNN report on Wednesday, which said that DeJoy continues to hold at least at least $30 million in holdings in his former company XPO Logistics, which is a United States Postal Service contractor.
CNN reported that those holdings likely created “a major conflict of interest, according to newly obtained financial disclosures and ethics experts,” who the news site said “were shocked that ethics officials at the postal service approved this arrangement.”
CNN, citing government financial disclosures, also reported that on the same day in June that “DeJoy divested large amounts of Amazon shares, he purchased stock options giving him the right to buy new shares of Amazon at a price much lower than their current market price.”
“This could lead to a separate conflict, given President Donald Trump’s disdain for Amazon, and his reported effort in 2018 to pressure DeJoy’s predecessor to raise prices on Amazon and other firms, while complaining about its founder Jeff Bezos,” CNN noted.
DeJoy, who previously worked as chairman and CEO of New Breed Logistics, a company that had contracted with the U.S. Postal Service, was selected as Postmaster General in May by the USPS’s board of governors. DeJoy before his selection also had been a major Republican Party fundraiser.
In June, The Washington Post had reported that “DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, the ambassador-nominee to Canada, have between $30.1 million and $75.3 million in assets in USPS competitors or contractors, according to Wos’s financial disclosure paperwork filed with the Office of Government Ethics.”
The Post noted that the “vast majority” of those holdings were in XPO Logistics, which acquired New Breed Logistics in 2014.
But the couple’s “combined stake in competitors UPS and trucking company J.B. Hunt is roughly $265,000.”
CNN’s article on Wednesday said that records show that “DeJoy owned between $265,000 and $550,000 in UPS stock, but divested them after becoming postmaster general.”
This is a complete lie or a sign of just one more individual unsuited for his job in the Trumpist Regime. Who couldn’t have seen some of this happen if you actually asked a few people that do this job for a living and not a political payback? Unintended Consequences my fat old lady ass!
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy acknowledged to United States Postal Service employees this week that recent procedural changes have had “unintended consequences,” but described them as necessary.
“Unfortunately, this transformative initiative has had unintended consequences that impacted our overall service levels,” DeJoy wrote in a memo sent this week and obtained by CNN.
However, recent changes are not the only contributing factors. Over the years we have grown undisciplined in our mail and package processing schedules, causing an increase in delayed mail between processing facilities and delivery units.”
As he faces mounting criticism for changes that have slowed delivery and capacity ahead of the November election, DeJoy also claimed in the letter the policy moves would increase “performance for the election and upcoming peak season and maintain the high level of public trust we have earned for dedication and commitment to our customers throughout our history.”
He even has the audacity to use the royal “we” here. Well, “we” know he’s never walked a route or sorted mail.
Vice has this “Internal USPS Documents Outline Plans to Hobble Mail Sorting. ‘This will slow mail processing,’ a union official wrote on one of the documents announcing the machine removals.”
The United States Postal Service proposed removing 20 percent of letter sorting machines it uses around the country before revising the plan weeks later to closer to 15 percent of all machines, meaning 502 will be taken out of service, according to documents obtained by Motherboard outlining the agency’s plans. USPS workers told Motherboard this will slow their ability to sort mail.
One of the documents also suggests these changes were in the works before Louis DeJoy, a top Trump donor and Republican fundraiser, became postmaster general, because it is dated May 15, a month before DeJoy assumed office and only nine days after the Board of Governors announced his selection.
The title of the presentation, as well as language used in the notice to union officials, undermines the Postal Service’s narrative that the organization is simply “mov[ing] equipment around its network” to optimize processing, as spokesperson Dave Partenheimer told Motherboard on Thursday. The May document clearly calls the initiative an “equipment reduction.” It makes no mention of the machines being moved to other facilities. And the notice to union officials repeatedly uses the same phrase. Multiple sources within the postal service told Motherboard they have personally witnessed the machines, which cost millions of dollars, being destroyed or thrown in the dumpster. USPS did not respond to a request for comment.
In May, the USPS planned to remove a total of 969 sorting machines out of the 4,926 it had in operation as of February for all types of letters and flat mail. The vast majority of them—746 out of 3,765 in use—were delivery bar code sorters (DBCS), the type that sort letters, postcards, ballots, marketing mail and other similarly sized pieces. But a subsequent document distributed to union officials in mid-June said 502 of those machines would be removed from facilities.
The May document, titled “Equipment Reduction,” breaks down the exact number of machines the USPS slated to remove by region and facility. Although the document uses terms like “proposed reduction” and “reduction plan” and does not reflect the USPS’s final plan, it provides a general picture of the sweeping changes previously reported by Motherboard about mail sorting machines being removed around the country. It also shows that USPS management is undertaking a broad reduction of the agency’s ability to sort and process all types of mail, except for packages which have been steadily increasing in recent years before booming during the pandemic.
Thankfully, an Inspector General is looking in to this and hopefully, won’t be thwarted by the Trumpists.
Anyway, we need stay on top of this as well as the other election shenanigans.
What’s on your reading and blogging list?
Monday Reads: School House Covid 19 Rock
Posted: August 10, 2020 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: coronavirus pandemic Covid-19, Schools Opening 14 Comments
Quiver School by Jeff Burton captures the degeneration of an old school building outside Havana, Illinois that once housed scores of children. The cold winter’s day and overcast skies create an atmosphere of desolation and solitude surrounding the old school. The school established in 1917, was one of the last one-room schools in operation before it closed.
Good Day Sky Dancers
The amount and content of the news right now is overwhelming. It’s hard for me not to want to find a way to Rip Van Winkle myself to the future. Maybe some kindle gentle version of a Dr Who will come give me a lift. No story has stuck with me so much as the absolute chaos we’re creating by tossing children back into schools with very little resources, health care plans, and thought. I can’t get the cartoon out of my head that BB shared when she discussed this topic this week. Children were drawn as the new classroom guinea pigs. They may also be the sacrificial lambs for the Trumpist Agenda.
I can’t help but wondering about all those folks involved in what it takes to run schools too. Children are not immune from the virus. They are not immune from dying from it or suffering long term effects because of it. This CNN article this morning held the usual shocking but not surprising given the state of affairs in our country under the most inept and destructive US federal government ever. “More than 97,000 children tested positive for Covid-19 in the last two weeks of July, report says”. Christina Maxouris has the byline.
More than 97,000 children in the US tested positive for coronavirus in the last two weeks of July, a new report says.
The report, published by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association, said in those two weeks, there was a 40% increase in child cases across the states and cities that were studied.
The age range for children differed by state, with some defining children as only those up to age 14 and one state — Alabama — pushing the limit to 24.
The compiled data comes during back-to-school season as health officials are trying to understand the effects of the virus on children and the role young people play in its spread. Some schools have begun welcoming crowds back to class and others have had to readjust their reopening plans in response to infections.
Schools provide an amazing number of functions and services for our children besides just pouring information into them and giving them skills. They feed children. They monitor children for potential issues at home. They provide play and social interaction along with the guidance one needs to function in a society. All of this is missed if children are kept in isolation or in front of a screen. But, the massive funds and commitment it takes to return children to school safely and protect the elders who support them is just not present at the Federal level. Every school district should not be left to itself.
You can read a variety of local papers to figure out what’s going in each of the Districts all over the country. True, some needs of kids can be geographically specific like children out in the most rural areas have slightly different challenges then kids growing up in huge city centers. However, classroom safety for a public health issue should come with complete, detailed instructions from our Federal Resources. First and foremost the CDC should and has taken as much of a lead as it can. We also have a Department of Education but the Secretary of that is about as useful as a comb is to a bald person.
There’s been more planning for school athletics programs–especially at the college and high school level–than for the academic environment itself. We all have seen and read about the Georgia School opening with its crowded hallways captured by one their young students Hannah Watters. Now this headline (via the Hill): “9 people test positive for coronavirus at Georgia school where viral photos showed packed hallways.” (Update: the young woman is no longer suspended but now she’s getting death threats).
Nine people have tested positive for the novel coronavirus at the Georgia high school that gained national attention after photos surfaced online showing dozens of students crowding into hallways.
North Paulding High School Principal Gabe Carmona said in a letter to parents on Saturday that at least six students and three faculty members who were in school for “at least some time” last week have since contracted COVID-19, according to a copy obtained by The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
In the note, Carmona said that the Paulding County School District was working with the state’s Department of Public Health (DPH) to implement “safety precautions and response plans.” He said the custodial staff would continue to clean and disinfect the school buildings daily. However, he did not mention whether any quarantine guidance would be released for students and faculty who may have come into contact with the infected individuals.
The Paulding County School District did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Hill.
Some backward sliding for the fall is happening. Even the Big 10 have decided no college football. From the Detroit Free Press: “Sources: Big Ten votes to cancel football season; no games for Michigan, Michigan State in 2020.” Which braindead states voted to play?
See you later, college football.
The Big Ten has voted to cancel the 2020 college football season in a historic move that stems from concerns related to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, multiple people with knowledge of the decision confirmed to the Free Press.
The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the decision. A formal announcement is expected to Tuesday, the sources said.
The presidents voted, 12-2, Sunday to end the fall sports in the conference. Michigan and Michigan State — which both has physicians as presidents — voted to end the season, sources said. Only Nebraska and Iowa voted to play, Dan Patrick said on his radio show Monday.
The move comes two days after the Mid-American Conference became the first in the FBS to cancel ts season, and sources told the Free Press the Big Ten is trying to coordinate its announcement with other Power Five conferences.
Maybe we should take a hint from the disaster of School Openings in Israel.
The Washington Post characterizes it as “chaos from coast to coast”.
It’s going to be screen time all the time for kindergartners and graduate students alike. Teachers are threatening strikes. And students are already coming home with covid-19, the disease that has upended American education.
The 2020-2021 school year has dawned and it’s more chaotic than any before.
Plans are changing so fast that students and parents can hardly keep up. Districts that spent all summer planning hybrid systems, in which children would be in school part of the week, ditched them as coronavirus cases surged. Universities changed their teaching models, their start dates and their rules for housing, all with scant notice.
And many districts and colleges have yet to make final decisions, even now, with the fall term already underway in some parts of the country.
Desegregation in the 1970s
The one thing that is certain is that these responses being so varied and so underfunded will cause an even greater education gap between poor and rich school districts. This is from Market Watch: “Inside the struggle to close the education equality gap exacerbated by COVID-19.”
Indeed, a whole industry of firms — including tutoring companies, nanny agencies and teacher placement services — has popped up across the country in the past several weeks, offering to help parents hire an educator to teach a handful of students, siblings or a child one-on-one to compensate for or even replace remote classes.
But these services are largely available only to those who can afford them. Some companies are charging five-figure placement fees, and even parents who find a tutor or nanny on their own could pay up to $100 per hour.
“It made me very upset,” Messenger said of discovering this dynamic.So instead of cashing in, she decided to try to do something about it. At Spread Tutoring, the business she launched just a few weeks ago, families who can afford it buy an hour of tutoring at competitive rates — $50 per hour for one child or $30 per hour, per child for small groups — and an hour of tutoring is provided to a low-income family.
There are a few options available from nonprofits but more are likely needed.
Still, some organizations stepping into the void have already had success, or at least interest. In Tennessee, nearly 3,000 students in kindergarten through sixth grade this summer participated in the Tennessee Tutor Corps, a program that, like Spread, took advantage of a less-than-ideal summer for college students to help serve younger students who lost out on valuable schooling in the spring.
Through the program, run by the Bill and Crissy Haslam Foundation, an organization founded by the state’s former governor and his wife, more than 600 college students like Emma Crownover tutored younger students from a masked social distance at Boys & Girls Clubs across the state.
“It just felt like the best thing for me to do with my summer that was a little bit derailed because of COVID,” Crownover said. The 20-year-old aspiring teacher wasn’t sure of her plans for this summer before the pandemic hit, but she “wasn’t exactly planning to be in Nashville,” her hometown.
“That all changed when college got cut off in the middle,” she said. For six weeks, the Scripps College student worked from 10 a.m. to noon, Monday through Friday with the same group of rising first graders for the first hour and sixth graders for the second hour.
They worked through a binder of materials provided by the program, and Crownover could set the pace — if students had progressed beyond that week’s lesson, they could move ahead. Still, she could see the impact of the time away from school, particularly with some of the sixth graders who, during the first few weeks, struggled with reading comprehension.
“When you’re that age, it’s a muscle,” she said. “Reading is something that you have to practice every single day.”
Leslie Yossarian, the membership coordinator at the branch of the Boys & Girls Club in Sevierville, Tenn., enrolled her 7- and 8-year-old daughters in the program to help ease concerns she had about them being prepared to resume school in the fall, when they’re planning to attend in person.
When her children were sent home in the spring, Yossarian worked with them on the learning packets provided by the school. But, as she puts it, “I’m not a teacher; I’m not a homeschooler. I did the best I could to try to do their assignments and turn them in and keep them on track.”
Then there’s Oklahoma: “Tulsa World editorial: Stitt uses federal COVID-19 relief to help private school students”.
Gov. Kevin Stitt’s program to underwrite private school tuition could help families earning up to 450% of the federal poverty level if they can demonstrate significant income decrease because of COVID-19. The income ceiling for a family of four increases then to $117,900. . Sue Ogrocki/AP file
So, I’m worried about this and about of thousand other things today. And here’s some perpsective.
Unsettling as these transitions and circumstances will be, short of a complete economic collapse, none stands out as a turning point in history. But what surely does is the absolutely devastating impact that the pandemic has had on the reputation and international standing of the United States of America.
In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.
For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.
No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die.
What’s on your reading and blogging today?
Friday Reads: Even First Ladies Get the Blues
Posted: August 7, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, morning reads | Tags: even first ladies get the blues, What fresh hell is this 20 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
I continue to wake and wonder what fresh hell awaits us today. There’s a lot of it but I’m finding some comfort in Michelle Obama’s openness about her mild depression in her new podcasts. I would really like to return to the day and age where there was less yelling and incoherent sentences and a lot more humanly shared experience. Empathetic people get the blues while witnessing human suffering. This is from E.
The former first lady spurred concern from supporters this week after mentioning in a new episode of her eponymous podcast that she is “dealing with some form of low-grade depression” as a result of these historic times.
However, a day later, she addressed the worry about her head on with a message directly to fans via social media. “I just wanted to check in with you all because a lot of you have been checking in on me after hearing this week’s podcast. First things first—I’m doing just fine,” she assured on Instagram. “There’s no reason to worry about me.”
As Obama elaborated, her concern is with frontline workers, Black Lives Matter activists and families making decisions about school amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Like I said in that conversation with @Michele__Norris, I’m thinking about the folks out there risking themselves for the rest of us—the doctors and nurses and essential workers of all kinds,” she explained. “I’m thinking about the teachers and students and parents who are just trying to figure out school for the fall. I’m thinking about the people out there protesting and organizing for a little more justice in our country.”
Obama also took a moment to comfort anyone who is struggling with how things are presently—because times are indeed hard.
“The idea that what this country is going through shouldn’t have any effect on us—that we all should just feel OK all the time—that just doesn’t feel real to me,” she wrote. “So I hope you all are allowing yourselves to feel whatever it is you’re feeling.”
“I hope you’re listening to yourselves and taking a moment to reflect on everything that’s coming at us,” Obama encouraged, “and what you might be able to do about it.”
As the public figure concluded, Obama left readers with one last suggestion. “And to all of you who’ve reached out—thank you,” she said. “I hope you’re also reaching out to all those you’re closest with, not just with a text, but maybe with a call or a video chat. Don’t be afraid to offer them a shoulder to lean on, or to ask for one yourself. Love you all.”
These are the words in her podcast that drew strong empathy from me.
“These are not…fulfilling times spiritually, so I know that I am dealing with some form of low-grade depression,” she shared, “not just because of the quarantine, but because of the racial strife and just seeing this administration, watching the hypocrisy of it, day in and day out, is dispiriting. So, I’ve had to kind of give myself that—those days, those moments.”
I keep saying it but these are wretched times. Nothing feels normal about any of this. Susan Glasser–writing for the New Yorker–describes this President’s lack of vision and priorities. Clearly, he’s interested in only ego stroking attention and grifting. Actually doing his job or thinking about it isn’t particularly interesting to him. His short attention span and inability to think outside of his visceral needs shows how uniquely unsuitable he is for his job.
It was not supposed to be a trick question, or even all that tricky. For any other candidate, it would have been the softest of softballs, the slowest of pitches. But when the Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt asked Donald Trump the other morning, “Mr. President, what is your second-term agenda? What are your top priorities?,” his inability to answer was one of the most revealing moments of his reëlection campaign so far. “I want to take where we left,” Trump said. “We were better than we were ever,” he added, wistfully conjuring the booming pre-pandemic America of his fantasies, where everybody had a job and the stock market was great. Facing uncontrolled death from the coronavirus and an economy that is cratering because of it, Trump is desperate for a do-over. Other than that, he had pretty much nothing to say about why he should be elected to a second term, although he took more than three hundred words to say it. The bottom line seemed to be that Trump is promising four more years of “jobs” and of stopping U.S. allies, especially Germany, from “ripping us off.” And that’s it.
This painful exchange, which even the Fox hosts eventually cut off, after a few cringe-inducing minutes, was little noted among the many whoppers, distortions, and outrages offered up by Trump this week. It wasn’t even the big news out of that particular Fox interview, the coverage of which rightfully focussed on the President’s absurd claims that the coronavirus is just “going away” and that schools should reopen because children are “almost immune” to covid-19. Throughout the week, Trump’s near-delusional state about the pandemic has been on awkward display, most notably in his instant classic of an interview with the Axios journalist Jonathan Swan, whose simple but skeptical queries about the virus revealed a President unable to comprehend basic facts about the public-health crisis or devise a national plan for combatting it. “It is what it is,” Trump told Swan, when asked about the large, and growing, American death toll—a line that may well go down as one of his most chillingly callous.
But Trump’s struggle to answer such an important and straightforward question about what he would do in a second term should not be overlooked, because it goes to the heart of why his campaign— and the country that he nominally governs—is in such trouble. As an incumbent, Trump is certainly in a bind: he can hardly campaign on his record, when the United States is in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and close to a hundred and sixty thousand Americans are dead of the coronavirus. There’s only so much blame that Trump can deflect; this is a catastrophe that happened on his watch, and—no matter how many times he calls it the “China virus” or warns Americans that Joe Biden will turn the country into a godless hellscape—he knows it.
Trump’s vapid answer is more than a reflection of a political-messaging dilemma—it’s a sign of decline, both in terms of the President’s ability to respond cogently to a simple query and as a warning for American democracy, given that such a large segment of the electorate apparently finds it acceptable to support a leader whose only campaign selling point is himself. Is Trump’s inability to come up with something to say about the next four years a reflection of the fact that even he thinks he is going to lose? Perhaps, but it’s also a measure of how far Trump has descended into full “l’état, c’est moi”-ism. Running for reëlection without offering even a hint of a program is a sure indicator of at least aspirational authoritarianism.
Still, watching polls and interviews with former Hair Furor devotees does give me hope that we my eventually be rid of him. This is from Prevail: “The Great Escape: Donald John Trump’s Exit Strategy. Where does the President go from here?” It’s written by Greg Olear.
A thousand Americans are dying of the novel coronavirus every day. Volume Five of the Senate Intelligence Committee Report is due for release any day now. Senators, Congressmen, and emeritus members of the intelligence community have stopped pulling punches and are sounding the alarms. Cy Vance announced that his investigation is wider than originally thought, and likely includes tax fraud; the New York Times reported that Deutsche Bank has already turned over Trump’s financial documents to prosecutors. The vaunted economy is falling along with the president’s poll numbers. And the presumptive guy in charge gave the most unflattering interview of all time ever, unequivocally exposing himself as a complete and total moron:
Even the Trump people know they can’t win the election without banana-republic-level fuckery, as the indefatigable historian Heather Cox Richardson writes:
No one is pretending that Trump is going to win the popular vote. He’s not even trying to. He’s doubling down on the culture wars that excite his base in the hopes of getting them to turn out in strong numbers, most recently by sending federal law enforcement officers into cities led by Democrats in order to create images of what looks like rioting, to enable him to set himself up as defending “law and order.”
At the same time, he and his supporters in the Republican Party are working to guarantee an undercount of votes for his opponent by attacking mail-in voting, shutting down polling places, kicking people off voter rolls, undercutting the United States Postal Service, and even, perhaps, by permitting a wave of evictions that will make it significantly harder for displaced people to vote.
It is notable that, as a country, we are not talking about policies or winning majorities. We are talking about how Trump can win by gaming the Electoral College, or by cheating.
Even so, enthusiasm for cheating to keep a low-IQ mobster in office seems to be on the wane, even among Republicans, who must be sick of the guy. There have been many cracks in the facade these last few weeks. Sure, Bill Barr is boss at torpedoing investigations, but he can only do so much—and as Lincoln’s Bible pointed out during his embarrassing House hearing, the AG is not nearly as smart as he thinks he is:
(Sidenote: Being not nearly as smart as one thinks one is is the prevailing character trait of everyone involved with this White House. Other than, you know, pure uncut greed).
So, like, now what? Where does Trump go from here?
We’ll know more by the end of the month. The Republican National Convention is scheduled for August 24-27. Whether it’s in Charlotte, Jacksonville, the South Lawn of the White House (illegally, but whatevs), or the back nine of Bedminster, that’s the moment when Republicans will certify the Trump/Pence ticket—or not certify it.
The Republican National Committee, chaired by the ever-mendacious Ronna Romney McDaniel, decided to eschew a proper primary process, likely fearing that some dark horse candidate, perhaps Ronna’s own Uncle Mitt, would prevail. Last week came the curious report that the convention would be closed to the press. While that original announcement has been walked back, it brought up the obvious question: Why would the RNC opt to go dark at the precise moment when it should want every TV channel in the country broadcasting its propaganda program?
This question is answered by the Corona Virus epidemic Trump enabled and created through out the country. Go read the entire biting essay. Oh, and my answer to his question is this: Go directly to Jail. Do not pass Go. Do not Collect $200.
Emily Stewart of Vox tries to understand antimaskers by letting them explain themselves. Yes, it’s that basket of deplorables again.
In recent weeks, I spoke with nearly a dozen people who consider themselves anti-mask to find out just that. What I discovered is that there is certainly a broad spectrum of reasons — some find wearing a mask annoying or just aren’t convinced they work, and others have gone down a rabbit hole of conspiracies that often involve vaccines, Big Pharma, YouTube, and Bill Gates. One man told me he wears a mask when he goes to the store to be polite. A woman got kicked out of a Menards store for refusing to wear a mask amid what she calls the “Covid scam garbage.”
But there are also many commonalities. Most people I talked to noted government officials’ confusing messaging on masks in the pandemic’s early days. They insist that they’re not conspiracy theorists and that they don’t believe the coronavirus is a hoax, but many also expressed doubts about the growing body of scientific knowledge around the virus, opting for cherry-picked and unverified sources of information found on social media rather than traditional news sources. They often said they weren’t political but acknowledged they leaned right.
Most claimed not to know anyone who had contracted Covid-19 or died of it, and when I told them I did, the responses were the same: How old were they? Did they have preexisting conditions? They know their position is unpopular, and most spoke on condition of anonymity and will be referred to only by their first names. Amy told me people are “not very nice about this.”
The mask debate is complex. As much as it’s about science, health, and risk, it’s also about empathy. If someone doesn’t personally know anyone who died from Covid-19, does it mean those lives don’t matter? Are older and immunocompromised people disposable? Does one person’s right to ignore public health advice really trump someone else’s right to live?
“Death is happening in these wards where even family members can’t visit their loved ones when they’re sick with Covid, so the death and the severity of this disease are really invisible to the public,” said Kumi Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who studies infectious diseases.
It leads some people to brush the issue aside.
So, again, I empathize with Michelle Obama and know exactly where she’s at since I’ve struggled with this ever since Trump took office and fucked the country over royally.
Today’s art is from Picasso’s blue period. That would be 1901-1904.
And here’s some Blues.
Be Kind and gentle yourselves and others. Try to relax and stay in the moment and do what you love to do. Check in we love you and worry about you.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: The Utter Failure that is Trump
Posted: August 3, 2020 Filed under: morning reads | Tags: coronavirus pandemic Covid-19, Trump Depression 24 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
It’s hard to read a headline today comparing our country to just about any other and not realize that the Trumpist Regime has been a disastrous and utter failure. This is the headline today from The Atlantic: “How the Pandemic Defeated America. A virus has brought the world’s most powerful country to its knees.” Well, it should have the addendum that this is a virus ignored by an American President who followed up with a botched response. His administration is a cautionary tale of how not to do anything.
Despite ample warning, the U.S. squandered every possible opportunity to control the coronavirus. And despite its considerable advantages—immense resources, biomedical might, scientific expertise—it floundered. While countries as different as South Korea, Thailand, Iceland, Slovakia, and Australia acted decisively to bend the curve of infections downward, the U.S. achieved merely a plateau in the spring, which changed to an appalling upward slope in the summer. “The U.S. fundamentally failed in ways that were worse than I ever could have imagined,” Julia Marcus, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told me.
Since the pandemic began, I have spoken with more than 100 experts in a variety of fields. I’ve learned that almost everything that went wrong with America’s response to the pandemic was predictable and preventable. A sluggish response by a government denuded of expertise allowed the coronavirus to gain a foothold. Chronic underfunding of public health neutered the nation’s ability to prevent the pathogen’s spread. A bloated, inefficient health-care system left hospitals ill-prepared for the ensuing wave of sickness. Racist policies that have endured since the days of colonization and slavery left Indigenous and Black Americans especially vulnerable to COVID‑19. The decades-long process of shredding the nation’s social safety net forced millions of essential workers in low-paying jobs to risk their life for their livelihood. The same social-media platforms that sowed partisanship and misinformation during the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Africa and the 2016 U.S. election became vectors for conspiracy theories during the 2020 pandemic.
It appears most of the country has had it with him and his pathetic, unqualified, and hapless cronies as well as the Republican pols that enable all of his insane policy. But, we’ve got until January to see him gone and he can cause a lot of problems in the mean time. Politico offers some hope as state after state begins to lose all that red. The Ides of November are coming. So is winter. Trump campaign nears point of no return. Early voting begins in several key swing states next month, leaving a ‘dwindling window of time’ for the president to turn the race around.”
Trump’s window is smaller — and his margin for error tighter — because of an expected surge in mail voting due to the coronavirus and because the electorate this year appears more hardened than in 2016, with fewer undecided voters to peel off in the closing days of the contest.
Voters will begin receiving ballots in key swing states as early as next month. In North Carolina, elections officials will start sending ballots to voters on Sept. 4. Four more battleground states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida and Minnesota — will begin mailing ballots or start early voting by the end of September.
All of that will happen before the first presidential debate, on Sept. 29. Arizona, Ohio and Iowa will start early voting right after, in the first seven days of October.
“If I were running the Trump campaign, I would want to see a marked uptick by the beginning of October,” said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania-based Republican strategist.
Gerow, like many Republicans, believes the Republican president will outperform current polls on Election Day. But “clearly, with early voting,” he said, “the timeline is accelerated.”
Trump’s concern about the timing and mechanics of the election was never plainer than on Thursday, when he suggested delaying it because of unsubstantiated claims about widespread mail voting fraud.
The president has no authority to change the date. But he has good reason to be worried. While in a closer contest, the rigors of the election calendar would be felt more evenly by both campaigns, Trump has so much ground to make up in the polls that allowing Biden to lock down even a small portion of the early vote could be debilitating.
Entering August, Trump trailed Biden by 7 percentage points in national polls, according to the RealClearPolitics polling average. Biden also holds an edge in nearly every swing state.
There’s such a huge amount of dysfunction over the public health crisis that the economy is certain to fall off the proverbial cliff and stay there from some time. Trump’s economic team is comprised of a matched set of snake oil salesmen with absolutely no credibility in their field.
Any plan to either retain the pandemic-related unemployment benefits or provide relief in the form of a stimulus check or forgivable loans to small businesses is stalled.
Neel Kashkari, president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, said the nation needs to control the spread of the virus, which is increasing across much of the country, to get back on a path to economic health.
“That’s the only way we’re really going to have a real robust economic recovery. Otherwise, we’re going to have flare-ups, lockdowns and a very halting recovery with many more job losses and many more bankruptcies for an extended period of time unfortunately,” Kashkari said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
To do so, he suggested strict shutdowns, which is contrary to what President Trump and many of his allies have been pushing in recent months as measures to aid the economy.
“I mean if we were to lock down really hard, I know I hate to even suggest it, people will be frustrated by it, but if we were to lock down hard for a month or six weeks, we could get the case count down so that our testing and our contact tracing was actually enough to control it the way that it’s happening in the Northeast right now,” Kashkari said. “They had a rocky start, but they’re doing a pretty good job right now.”
He warned the virus will spread throughout the country with flare-ups and local lockdowns for the “the next year or two,” causing more businesses to fail, without such measures.
“We’re going to see many, many more business bankruptcies, small businesses, big businesses, and that’s going to take a lot of time to recover from to rebuild those businesses and then to bring workers back in and re-engage them in the workforce. That’s going to be a much slower recovery for all of us,” Kashkari said.
He also said that Congress can afford large sums for coronavirus relief efforts, though Republican lawmakers are looking to lessen the amount of supplemental aid for unemployed Americans as part of the next relief bill.
Stephan Moore is out huckstering for Trump to declare an national emergency and then cut payroll taxes because nothing could be more important that starving the Social Security and Medicare programs.
“Last week Mr. Trump acknowledged that compromising with Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a fool’s errand, because the House won’t agree to anything that boosts growth and job creation,” Moore claimed in the article co-authored with Phil Kerpen, head of the free-market nonprofit advocacy group Committee to Unleash Prosperity. The duo added that the Democratic Party’s plan to address economic issues during the coronavirus pandemic “would sink the economy and imperil Mr. Trump’s reelection.”
“The president needs to pull an end run, and there’s a legal way to do that. He should declare a national economic emergency and announce that the Internal Revenue Service will immediately stop collecting the payroll tax,” Moore declared. “This is technically called a deferral of the tax payments.”
Moore went on to say that President Trump “should order Treasury to put bonds into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds,” arguing, “Since Barack Obama did that in 2011, his vice president would have a hard time explaining his opposition to it now,” and claiming that the action “would flip the political tables.”
“Democrats can’t credibly call it a tax cut for the rich,” he wrote, concluding, “Mr. Trump could cap it at, say, $75,000 of income, so the vast majority of the benefit would go to straight into the wallets of middle- and lower-income workers, almost all of whom pay more payroll than income tax.”
Republicans have repeatedly pushed a payroll tax cut as the answer to the economic woes under the coronavirus pandemic, and have generally fought against direct payouts to affected workers through stimulus packages.
Real Economists–like me–have repeatedly shown through peer evaluated studies that tax cuts are generally the weakest form of stimulus possible. They continue to be the panacea for everything some what like an economic spoonful of apple cider vinegar to Republicans who want our government and every program to fail. Navarro does have has terminal degree but mostly appears to have a terminal case of racism when it comes to anything Chinese. He also thinks he’s a doctor which is seriously deluded
CNN host Jim Sciutto took on White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Monday about his evangelism of the drug hydroxychloroquine.
During an interview with Navarro, Sciutto noted that Assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Brett Giroir had recently said that there is no benefit in taking hydroxychloroquine to prevent or treat COVID-19.
“Given your past public support for it,” Sciutto said, “is it time for the administration to focus on proven treatments for COVID rather than one that has not been proven?”
“I take exception to Giroir’s analysis,” Navarro objected. “He hasn’t looked at the data.”
“It’s his job to look at the data,” the CNN host noted.
Navarro replied by encouraging Sciutto to interview several doctors who support the use of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19.
“Doctors opinions are a dime a dozen,” the trade adviser continued. “And you’ve got some doctors who say it doesn’t work, you’ve got some doctors who say it does.”
“But it’s not a both sides thing,” Sciutto observed. “There’s a process for approving drugs in this country. There’s a reason the FDA hasn’t approved it. And this hasn’t passed muster so why all the focus on that drug? Why not focus on things that work like remdesivir?”
Frankly, his opinion isn’t even worth a dime on either economics or medicine. CNN should stop making platforms for these idiots. But then, Trump loved him some doctor who is serious about “Demon Sperm”. John Oliver–the HBO comedian--took that up this weekend.
On Sunday night, John Oliver took a break from dunking on Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson’s racist news coverage to address what was sadly one of the biggest stories of the past week: President Donald Trump’s continued spreading of misinformation surrounding the novel coronavirus, which has killed over 157,000 people in the U.S.
“Recklessness is abounding right now, heightening the need for strong leadership. And unfortunately, we’re getting the opposite of that,” said John Oliver, before pointing to Trump’s “shockingly reckless” co-sign of Dr. Stella Immanuel, aka “Dr. Demon Sperm,” whose video of her cosplaying as a “frontline doctor” racked up tens of millions of views and was shared by both the president and his son. Dr. Immanuel, who only recently acquired a license to practice medicine in the U.S., has been pushing the ineffective COVID-19 “cure” hydroxychloroquine and believes, among other things, that real-life ailments like tumors and cysts stem from the demon sperm that is accumulated after a demon has sex with you in your dreams.
It’s this and the stories about huge parties that make me wonder about exactly how smart most Americans really are.
There’s a lot more examples of these out there and just to give you a clue. Bourbon Street is still hopping with tourists as bars have started rebranding themselves as “restaurants”. One up the street from me had a huge garage sale of sorts along with its usual drug and booze wares. I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like if they start up universities and sports this year. I’m glad my kids are way out of school for sure because their asses would be home with mine if they weren’t adults.
So, again, hello from my desk chair where I stay firmly planted because I do not want to go out and risk getting this stuff from somebody’s stupid children. Plus, I’m holding tight to my money because I heard enough Depression stories in my life to know that hoarding makes the economy worse but makes me feel safer on that account too.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Any of this sound and look familiar?
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