Lazy Caturday Reads: Trump Administration Gaslights As Coronavirus Spreads
Posted: March 7, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Barry McCaffrey, CDC, Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, coronavirus, coronavirus testing, Donald Trump, Gaslighting, Juan Andres, Moderna, Richard Hatchett, Robert Redfield, vaccine development, WHO 27 Comments
(Original Caption) 3/23/1959- Worcester Park, Surrey, England: Hep cat. A real live kitten on the keys, this music-loving feline lends vocal accompaniment to his mistress in Worcester Park, England. As Marion Holland 15, plays the piano “Money” the cat joins in the singing. Some people might consider it mere “cat-erwauling,” not Marion thinks it’s really the cat’s meow.
Good Morning!!
After Trump’s disgraceful performance at the CDC yesterday, along with the pathetic sicophancy of the CDC director Robert Redfield, I’m beginning to get really frightened about growing spread coronavirus here in the U.S. Please watch this video of Richard Hatchett, Chief Executive of the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations.
Now take a look at how the Trump administration is responding to the crisis. First, the CDC Director sucking up to the idiot in chief.
I know it’s hard to watch Trump, but please do watch these clips. He is getting more dangerous.
He is treating an epidemic like he did the Russia investigation–lying and covering up. He couldn’t care less how many people get sick and die; he just wants to keep the numbers down so he doesn’t look bad. He doesn’t seem to understand that this won’t work with a public health crisis.
This is quite literally insane, and yet the people around Trump are afraid to correct him or ask him to step back and let the experts handle the situation.
Retired General Barry McCaffrey doesn’t mince words.
Phillip Bump at The Washington Post: Which is Trump more worried about: Coronavirus numbers or coronavirus patients?
A comment President Trump made during his visit to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday brought into focus a unifying theory of his administration’s fumbling response to the growing spread of the coronavirus.
He was asked if passengers on a cruise ship anchored near San Francisco, some of whom have been exposed to the virus, should be brought ashore.
A cat sitting in a field in September 1918
“From my standpoint, I want to rely on people. I have great experts, including our vice president who is working 24 hours a day on this stuff. They would like to have the people come off,” he said, wearing a baseball cap promoting his reelection campaign. “I’d rather have the people stay, but I’d go with them. I told them to make the final decision.”
“I would rather because I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump continued. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault. And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either, okay? It wasn’t their fault either and they’re mostly Americans. So, I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”
Trump can live with patients with coronavirus staying on a cruise ship with uninfected passengers. Whether those patients or future patients can live with that decision is entirely the point.
David Nakamura at The Washington Post: ‘Maybe I have a natural ability’: Trump plays medical expert on coronavirus by second-guessing the professionals.
President Trump likes to say that he fell into politics almost by accident, and on Friday, as he sought to calm a nation gripped with fears over coronavirus, he suggested he would have thrived in another profession — medical expert.
“I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump boasted to reporters during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he met with actual doctors and scientists who are feverishly scrambling to contain and combat the deadly illness. Citing a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at MIT, Trump professed that it must run in the family genes.
This cat’s name was Whisky, and he was the “pet and mascot of HMS Duke of York,” a Royal Navy vessel from the late 1930s.
“People are really surprised I understand this stuff,” he said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.” [….]
Sporting his trademark red 2020 campaign hat with the slogan “Keep America Great,” the president repeatedly second-guessed and waved off the actual medical professionals standing next to him. He attacked his Democratic rivals — including calling Washington Gov. Jay Inslee a “snake” for criticizing his response — and chided a CNN reporter for smiling and called her network “fake news.”
And he described coronavirus testing kits — which his administration has been criticized for being slow to distribute — as “beautiful” and said they were as “perfect” as his Ukraine phone call last summer that led him to be impeached.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
Trump appears very worried about the U.S. economy, but he thinks he knows better than the experts about that too. John Harwood at CNN: Trump waves off economists’ prescriptions for preventing US coronavirus slowdown.
President Donald Trump sent a message Friday to anyone expecting major economic aid to head off a coronavirus recession: Don’t hold your breath.
From the book Sam by Edward Quigley (photographs) and John Crawford (text) • 1937
With financial markets reeling, some economists back direct bailouts for affected workers and businesses to prevent a contraction of the already-slowing American economy. But as he signed the $8.3-billion emergency coronavirus spending bill passed by Congress — more than triple the amount the White House had requested — Trump waved off the idea of a new fiscal stimulus to protect America’s record-breaking economic expansion, again calling on the Federal Reserve to use its monetary policy tools.
“The Fed should cut and the Fed should stimulate,” Trump told me before leaving the White House to tour tornado damage in Tennessee. And he evinced little concern about the chance of recession anytime soon, declaring, “I think we’re in great shape.”
The President’s characteristically upbeat assessment does not match the darkening mood among business analysts as the coronavirus crisis deepens in the US and around the world. Mark Zandi, an economist with Moody’s Analytics, now pegs the odds of recession this year at 50%.
Economic stimulus is going to be needed, but Trump thinks he knows better.
Offsetting the coronavirus threat would require a package in the range of $100 billion, Swonk says — comparable to what President George W. Bush and Congress enacted to combat the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Jason Furman, President Barack Obama’s former top economic adviser, has called for a $350 billion stimulus that would send $1,000 to every taxpaying US resident and $500 to each of their children.
The feline mascot of the Australian light cruiser HMAS Encounter peering from the muzzle of a six-inch gun, sometime during World War I
Yet comments by Trump and his top economic aide made clear the White House does not currently back anything close to that scale.
“We’re not looking at these massive, federal, throw-money-at-people plans,” National Economic Council director Larry Kudlow told reporters. “We are looking at timely and targeted (efforts) where we can do the most good.”
With airlines already suffering from canceled flights, Kudlow cited “micro forms of assistance” that could help sectors including transportation, manufacturing, farming and small businesses. He offered no details.
What we need most of all is widespread testing, but the Trump administration doesn’t seem interested in letting that happen. It looks like they are just going to try to keep gaslighting us.
The New York Times: With Test Kits in Short Supply, Health Officials Sound Alarms.
President Trump claimed again on Friday that anyone who needed a coronavirus test “gets a test.” But from Washington State to Florida to New York, doctors and patients are clamoring for tests that they say are in woefully short supply, and their frustration is mounting alongside the growing number of cases around the country.
In California, where thousands are being monitored for the virus, only 516 tests had been conducted by the state as of Thursday. Washington health officials have more cases than they can currently process. And in New York, where cases have quadrupled this week, a New York City official pleaded for more test kits from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Woman holding young cat, likely 1920s
“The slow federal action on this matter has impeded our ability to beat back this epidemic,” the official said in a letter Friday.
More than 300 cases have been confirmed, at least 17 have died, and thousands are in self-quarantine. Public health officials are warning that no one knows how deeply the virus will spread, in part because the federal government’s flawed rollout of tests three weeks ago has snowballed into an embarrassing fiasco of national proportions.
The latest two deaths were announced late Friday night in Florida, marking the first time fatal cases were not on the West Coast.
In the last week, Mr. Trump and his top officials repeatedly promised that 1 million to 1.5 million tests would be sent around the country, even though labs — government and private ones alike — have struggled to get the tests running amid a growing number of infections and rising demand for tests. Despite an order Wednesday by the C.D.C. to greatly expand criteria for who can be tested, many hospitals and state health authorities continued to limit tests to those at the highest risk for infection, adding to the confusion and frustration, especially in hot spots like California and Washington.
Politico: How testing failures allowed coronavirus to sweep the U.S.
On Saturday Jan. 11 — a month and a half before the first Covid-19 case not linked to travel was diagnosed in the United States — Chinese scientists posted the genome of the mysterious new virus, and within a week virologists in Berlin had produced the first diagnostic test for the disease.
Hulda Lundager, daughter of photographer Jens Hansen Lundager
Soon after, researchers in other nations rolled out their own tests, too, sometimes with different genetic targets. By the end of February, the World Health Organization had shipped tests to nearly 60 countries.
The United States was not among them.
Why the United States declined to use the WHO test, even temporarily as a bridge until the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention could produce its own test, remains a perplexing question and the key to the Trump administration’s failure to provide enough tests to identify the coronavirus infections before they could be passed on, according to POLITICO interviews with dozens of viral-disease experts, former officials and some officials within the administration’s health agencies.
The slowness of the testing regimen — which, administration officials acknowledged this week, is still not producing enough tests to meet the national demand — was the first, and most sweeping, of many failures. So far there have been confirmed cases in at least 23 states, and at least 15 deaths, while the stock market plunged and an otherwise healthy economy braced for a major disruption.
But neither the CDC nor the coronavirus task force chaired by Vice President Mike Pence would say who made the decision to forgo the WHO test and instead begin a protracted process of producing an American test, one that got delayed by manufacturing problems, possible lab contamination and logistical delays.
A cat perched on a radio, photo by Sam Hood
I’ll end with this long piece at the Financial Times on the efforts to develop a coronavirus vaccine: Coronavirus and the $2bn race to find a vaccine.
Juan Andres woke up three times during the night after putting his precious vials of vaccine on the back of a delivery lorry. In late February, Moderna, a biotech group based outside Boston, smashed the record for the fastest time between identifying a virus — in this case Covid-19 coronavirus — and creating a vaccine ready to test in humans: just 42 days.
In the lab, the team had been excited but in the early hours Mr Andres, a 30-year pharma veteran in charge of manufacturing, was nervously checking his phone to track the lorry carrying the potential vaccine to a discreet location. There the US National Institutes of Health would start the trial to test whether it works.
“The pride comes from this [being] a race,” he says. “Doing this as fast as possible is something that is a duty.” Once they were sure the vaccine had arrived safely, the team celebrated with ice cream. At least 100 Moderna staff worked on the project but Mr Andres says everyone is excited to be involved, even people’s families. “I can’t remember the last time my 15-year-old thought I did something cool,” he laughs.
Moderna is one of more than 20 companies and public sector organisations worldwide racing to develop a vaccine against Covid-19, which in little more than two months has exploded from a few people suffering from respiratory disease in the Chinese city of Wuhan to a near-pandemic with 95,000 cases and 3,300 deaths worldwide so far….
The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations [see the first video in this post] — a partnership of governments, industry and charities, created three years ago to fight emerging diseases that threaten global health — is already sponsoring four Covid-19 vaccine projects, including Moderna’s. It is also on the point of signing contracts for four more, says Richard Hatchett, CEPI chief executive. He estimates that developing Covid-19 vaccines at the speed required will cost about $2bn over the next 12-18 months.
Moderna is off to the fastest start, Dr Hatchett believes, but several others are close behind. “We received 48 applications from all over the world following our call for proposals in February,” he adds. “There is a real sense of urgency . . . because the threat we are facing is unprecedented in the last 100 years in terms of its speed and potential severity,” he says, referring to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic.
That’s it for me. Sorry I’m so obsessed with coronavirus. Feel free to discuss any other topic in the comments! This is an open thread.
Friday Reads: Disassembling the People’s Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Justice
Posted: March 6, 2020 Filed under: just because | Tags: 1970 the year of women judges, Bill Barr, Bill Barr's Department of INjustice, corona virus, Mueller Report "not exonerated" 33 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
The Republicans are doing everything they can to appoint unqualified judges and agency and cabinet heads to ensure nothing more than white, straight, “christian” hegemony with a radical right bend. Many appointments are political and strictly related to monetizing public goods for the very few. What has gone on in the Department of Justice, the Department of State, and most of the other institutes of major importance should be criminal and quite possibly is. Today, the headlines tell us we see the failure of our agencies and the failure of the Trumpist regime. However, isn’t this what they–under the influence of the likes of Steven Bannon– planned all along? Wasn’t the destruction of our democratic institutions the plan and not the bug?
So much relies on the courts these days that it’s now quite apparent that Moscow Mitch’s wrangling to dominate SCOTUS may pay off big in the fall. But today, we still see some good coming out of some Federal Judges and today’s news shows that Barr’s justice department may be headed for some trouble. “Judge cites Barr’s ‘misleading’ statements in ordering review of Mueller report redactions” is the headline from WAPO.
A federal judge in Washington sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr on Thursday for a “lack of candor,” questioning the truthfulness of the nation’s top law enforcement official in his handling of last year’s report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, overseeing a lawsuit brought by EPIC, a watchdog group, and BuzzFeed News, said he saw serious discrepancies between Barr’s public statements about Mueller’s findings and the public, partially redacted version of that report detailing the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Because of those discrepancies, Walton ruled, the judge would conduct an independent review of Mueller’s full report to see whether the Justice Department’s redactions were appropriate
“In the Court’s view, Attorney General Barr’s representation that the Mueller Report would be ‘subject only to those redactions required by law or by compelling law enforcement, national security, or personal privacy interests’ cannot be credited without the Court’s independent verification in light of Attorney General Barr’s conduct and misleading public statements about the findings in the Mueller Report,” Walton wrote.
It is highly unusual for a federal judge to publicly question the honesty of the attorney general, but Walton’s opinion comes amid growing rancor between the judicial branch of the government and the executive and legislative branches. Earlier on Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he regretted comments he had made about two conservative Supreme Court justices — comments that drew a rare rebuke from Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. after many Republicans called them threatening. President Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly attacked federal judges, drawing condemnation from Democrats.
From the NYTimes’ Charlie Savage:
A federal judge on Thursday sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr’s handling of the report by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, saying that Mr. Barr put forward a “distorted” and “misleading” account of its findings and lacked credibility on the topic.
Mr. Barr could not be trusted, Judge Reggie B. Walton said, citing “inconsistencies” between the attorney general’s statements about the report when it was secret and its actual contents that turned out to be more damaging to President Trump. Mr. Barr’s “lack of candor” called into question his “credibility and, in turn, the department’s” assurances to the court, Judge Walton said.
The judge ordered the Justice Department to privately show him the portions of the report that were censored in the publicly released version so he could independently verify the justifications for those redactions. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking a full-text version of the report.
In 1979, 23 women were appointed to the federal bench—more than doubling the number of women appointed to life-tenured judgeships in the previous 190 year history of the United States. The doors they opened never swung shut again. Forty years later, women make up one-third of the courts’ full-time, active Article III judges
Here’s some further analysis from Marcie Wheeler of Empty Wheel.
Where this ruling may matter, though, is in four areas:
- DOJ hid the circumstances of how both Trump and Don Jr managed to avoid testifying under a grand jury redaction. Walton may judge that these discussions were not truly grand jury materials.
- DOJ is currently hiding details of people — like KT McFarland — who lied, but then cleaned up their story (Sam Clovis is another person this may be true of). There’s no reason someone as senior as McFarland should have her lies protected. All the more so, because DOJ is withholding some of the 302s that show her lies. So Walton may release some of this information.
- Because Walton will have already read the Stone material — that part that most implicates Trump — by the time Judge Amy Berman Jackson releases the gag in that case, he will have a view on what would still need to be redacted. That may mean more of it will be released quickly than otherwise might happen.
- In very short order, the two sides in this case will start arguing over DOJ’s withholding of 302s under very aggressive b5 claims. These claims, unlike most of the redactions in the Mueller Report, are substantively bogus and in many ways serve to cover up the details of Trump’s activities. While this won’t happen in the near term, I expect this ruling will serve as the basis for a similar in camera review on 302s down the road.
And we continue to learn that that the Trumpist response to the Coronoa Virus was doomed from the start. This is from Time magazine.
“We have contained this. I won’t say airtight but pretty close to airtight,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said in a television interview on Feb. 25, echoing Trump’s tweeted declaration that the virus was “very much under control” in the United States.
But it wasn’t, and the administration’s rosy messaging was fundamentally at odds with a growing cacophony of alarm bells inside and outside the U.S. government. Since January, epidemiologists, former U.S. public health officials and experts have been warning, publicly and privately, that the administration’s insistence that containment was—and should remain—the primary way to confront an emerging infectious disease was a grave mistake.
In congressional testimony, in medical webcasts and in private discussions with health officials, they warned that the unique features of this flu-like virus made it impossible to control, and that the administration must use any time that containment measures might buy to prepare the country for an inevitable outbreak. The administration was using all its resources to blockade the doors, they warned, but the enemy was likely already in the house.
“The current U.S. policy to deny visas to travelers from China and to quarantine returning Americans is not the right approach,” Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist and expert in disease outbreak detection and response at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, testified to Congress on February 5. “I am deeply concerned that these measures will make us less safe by diverting public health resources from higher priority disease mitigation approaches.”
Two days earlier, former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb had warned “we have to assume it’s already here and circulating.”
When it finally became indisputable that an outbreak was underway in Washington state, the administration was slow to catch up. There were not enough COVID-19 testing kits, hotlines were overwhelmed, and hospitals and public health departments were hobbled by a lack of reliable statistics on the spread of the disease. Experts say the U.S. response is now likely weeks—if not months—behind schedule.
Taking the Political view point is this from WAPO: “The Trump administration’s greatest obstacle to sending a clear message on coronavirus may be Trump himself”.By
As leading public health experts from across the government have tried to provide clear and consistent information about the deadly coronavirus, they have found their messages undercut, drowned out and muddled by President Trump’s push to downplay the outbreak with a mix of optimism, bombast and pseudoscience.
Speaking almost daily to the public about an outbreak that has spread across states and rocked the markets, Trump has promoted his opinions and at times contradicted the public health experts tasked with keeping Americans safe.
The president has repeatedly misstated the number of Americans who have tested positive for the virus and claimed it would “miraculously” disappear in the spring. He has given a false timeline for the development of a vaccine, publicly questioned whether vaccinations for the flu could be used to treat the novel coronavirus and dismissed the World Health Organization’s coronavirus death rate estimate, substituting a much lower figure and citing a “hunch.”
On Wednesday night, Trump made an uncritical reference to people who continue to go to work while infected with the coronavirus — placing himself at odds with doctors who have strongly urged those with even minor symptoms to stay home.
“If, you know, we have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better just by sitting around, and even going to work — some of them go to work, but they get better,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity in which he disputed the WHO fatality rate.
On Thursday morning, Trump said his comments were misconstrued and blamed the Democrats and the media. “I NEVER said people that are feeling sick should go to work,” he tweeted.
Why can’t he just shut up?
So that’s the two stories I’m following today. I have to go have lunch with a colleague but I’ll be back to check the thread!
In 1979, the number of women serving as federal judges more than doubled. In this series, learn more about the trailblazers who reshaped the Judiciary.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads
Posted: March 5, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics 62 Comments
Painting by Charles Burton Barber
Good Morning!!
Corononavirus is still the top news story. Cases are popping up all over and the fake “president” is busy lying about the risks. But before I get to that, here’s the latest in the Democratic primary. Any dreams you had of a woman president in 2020 are now dead.
The New York Times: Elizabeth Warren, Once a Front-Runner, Will Drop Out of Presidential Race.
BOSTON — Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts plans to drop out of the presidential race on Thursday and will inform her staff of her plans later this morning, according to a person close to her, ending a run defined by an avalanche of policy plans that aimed to pull the Democratic Party to the left and appealed to enough voters to make her briefly a front-runner last fall, but that proved unable to translate excitement from elite progressives into backing from the party’s more working-class and diverse base.
Though her support had eroded by Super Tuesday, in her final weeks as a candidate she effectively drove the centrist billionaire, former New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, out of the race with debate performances that flashed her evident skills and political potential.
She entered the race railing against the corrosive power of big money, and one long-term consequence of her campaign is that Ms. Warren demonstrated that someone other than Senator Bernie Sanders, and his intensely loyal small-dollar donors, could fund a credible presidential campaign without holding fund-raisers.
Her potential endorsement is highly sought after in the race and both Mr. Sanders and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. have spoken with Ms. Warren since Super Tuesday, when the end of her campaign appeared imminent….
The news clarifies that a Democratic field that began with a record number of female candidates has now become a contest between Mr. Biden, 77, and Mr. Sanders, 78.
I’d be very surprised if Warren endorsed Biden, but IMHO she would be making a big mistake to endorse Sanders. I don’t think that many of her supporters would go over to him anyway, but that’s just based on my anecdotal observations.
Unfortunately, we really missed our chance in 2016. None of the women running in 2020 had the gravitas, the experience in domestic and foreign policy, or the strong ties to the African American community that Hillary Clinton had. Thanks to Putin, Comey, and the media’s “her emails” coverage, we lost a golden opportunity.
Also from The New York Times, Mara Gay explains Why Southern Democrats Saved Biden.
Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina explained this in visceral terms when he announced his support for Joe Biden late last month, an endorsement that began with Mr. Clyburn, 79, talking about the first time he was arrested protesting for civil rights decades ago. “When I sat in jail that day, I wondered whether we were doing the right thing, but I was never fearful for the future,” he said. “As I stand before you today I am fearful of the future of this country. I’m fearful for my daughters and their futures, and their children, and their children’s futures.”
By Albrogio Antonio Alciati
Mr. Clyburn said he was sure Mr. Biden was the right choice. “I know Joe. We know Joe. But most importantly, Joe knows us,” he said. Three days later, Mr. Biden won a convincing victory in the South Carolina primary, launching him into his Super Tuesday triumph and the front-runner status he enjoys today.
My friends in New York, many of them Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders supporters who see Mr. Biden as deeply uninspiring, were mystified. But after traveling through the South this past week though, I began to understand. Through Southern eyes, this election is not about policy or personality. It’s about something much darker.
Not long ago, these Americans lived under violent, anti-democraticI governments. Now, many here say they see in President Trump and his supporters the same hostility and zeal for authoritarianism that marked life under Jim Crow.
For those who lived through the trauma of racial terrorism and segregation, or grew up in its long shadow, this history haunts the campaign trail. And Mr. Trump has summoned old ghosts.
And this is why Bernie Sanders will lose to Joe Biden.
The Washington Post: Bernie Sanders’s political movement faces a reckoning after Super Tuesday setbacks.
By Wednesday, Sanders sought to regain his footing from primary election defeats in several key states as his campaign advisers looked to address his glaring inability to win African Americans and traditional Democrats….
Sanders’s reset attempt, coming less than a week before another critical set of primaries, reflected a divide among some of his supporters about how to proceed.
John White Alexander (American, 1856-1915): Portrait of Frederick Beasley Alexander, 1888.
In some parts of the Sanders orbit, there have been private discussions about how to reassure Democrats that Sanders — a democratic socialist who frequently lambastes the party establishment — is an ally of the party.
The campaign released an ad featuring an audio clip of former president Barack Obama praising Sanders, a clear attempt to undercut the benefit that has accrued to Biden, particularly among black voters, as the loyal lieutenant to the country’s first African American president.
The flurry of activity amounted to the clearest acknowledgment yet that the coalition Sanders has built — which is composed largely of young people, liberals, working-class voters and Latino voters — has failed to expand since Sanders’s upstart 2016 bid, all as the rest of the party has coalesced behind Biden.
Bernie still thinks African Americans are “low information” voters who will fall for his sudden embrace of Barack Obama. It’s not going to work.
In Coronavirus news, Trump is lying about the incipient pandemic and his administration caused the problems we’re having now. Among the lies:
Greg Sargent at The Washington Post: Trump’s latest coronavirus lies have a galling subtext.
Harold Knight (1874-1961), Mrs Dorothy May Hoover with her Chow Chow Choonam Brilliantine, 1927
Each of those things is profoundly galling on its own. But if you put them together, they add up to something substantially worse than the sum of their parts.
To wit: It is now falling to Democratic elected officials to correct Trump’s lies to the American people about something that poses a dire threat to them. At times Democrats are literally going around Trump to get the real truth out to the public.
Read the rest at the WaPo.
NBC News: Scientists were close to a coronavirus vaccine years ago. Then the money dried up.
HOUSTON — Dr. Peter Hotez says he made the pitch to anyone who would listen. After years of research, his team of scientists in Texas had helped develop a vaccine to protect against a deadly strain of coronavirus. Now they needed money to begin testing it in humans.
But this was 2016. More than a decade had passed since the viral disease known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, had spread through China, killing more than 770 people. That disease, an earlier coronavirus similar to the one now sweeping the globe, was a distant memory by the time Hotez and his team sought funding to test whether their vaccine would work in humans.
“We tried like heck to see if we could get investors or grants to move this into the clinic,” said Hotez, co-director of the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. “But we just could not generate much interest.” [….]
Instead, the SARS vaccine that Hotez’s team created in collaboration with scientists at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston is sitting in a freezer, no closer to commercial production than it was four years ago.
By Robert Sauber, 1868-1936
“We could have had this ready to go and been testing the vaccine’s efficacy at the start of this new outbreak in China,” said Hotez, who believes the vaccine could provide cross-protection against the new coronavirus, which causes a respiratory disease known as COVID-19. “There is a problem with the ecosystem in vaccine development, and we’ve got to fix this.”
More coronavirus stories:
The Washington Post: Live updates: Cruise ship held off California coast; coronavirus turmoil widens as U.S. death toll mounts.
The Washington Post: U.S. health system is showing why it’s not ready for a coronavirus pandemic.
NBC News: Seattle feels like ‘ghost town,’ business owners say as they face life in coronavirus hot spot.
The New York Times: After Family Gets Coronavirus, New York Suburb Is Gripped by Anxiety.
Two more important articles I want to call attention to about Trump’s takeover of the U.S. Intelligence community and John Roberts’ hypocritical attack on Chuck Schumer.
Ryan Goodman at Just Security: The Gravity of Michael Ellis’ Promotion to Senior Director for Intelligence at the White House
Michael Ellis, a White House lawyer accused of serious ethical misconduct in the Ukraine scandal, has been picked by President Donald Trump to be senior director for intelligence on the National Security Council (NSC). He reportedly started the job this week, replacing a career official who served in that role. What makes the elevation of Ellis to this new post especially surprising is that the most specific charges against Ellis in the Ukraine matter involve his allegedly abusing the government’s national security classification system in a manner that not even Republicans in Congress were willing to defend.
The role of senior director for intelligence can be a pivotal one within the Intelligence Community. Brett Holmgren, who held the position under President Barack Obama, told Just Security, “The position serves as the focal point for coordination between the White House and the [Director of National Intelligence (DNI)] on a range of issues — from setting the president’s intelligence priorities and providing guidance to the DNI on policy matters, to determining who in the U.S. government is granted access to covert action programs and other sensitive operations.” Ellis will now be working hand-in-hand with acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell, as well as Kash Patel, who recently moved from the NSC to the DNI’s office.
Woman on a Striped Sofa with a Dog (Oil on Canvas), by Mary Cassatt
Both Patel and Ellis previously worked for Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), as staffers on the House Intelligence Committee. In March 2017, Ellis became caught up in the White House scandal of sharing intelligence information with Nunes in an apparent effort to discredit the Russia investigation. At the time, Ellis was deputy legal adviser to the NSC and an associate involved in the scandal was reportedly Ezra Cohen-Watkin, the Senior Director for Intelligence at the time. “Though neither has been accused of breaking any laws, they do appear to have sought to use intelligence to advance the political goals of the Trump administration,” the New York Times reported (see also Wall Street Journal and Washington Post). Cohen-Watkin’s attorney, Mark Zaid denied his client’s role (Zaid later became the Ukraine whistleblower’s attorney).
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate: Roberts Denounces Schumer for Talking About Kavanaugh the Way Kavanaugh Talked About the Senate.
On Wednesday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer had a message for Donald Trump’s two nominees to the Supreme Court as the court heard oral arguments in a landmark abortion case that threatens one of the underpinnings of Roe v. Wade. “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price!” Schumer warned of the pair’s jurisprudence since arriving on the bench. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
By Wednesday afternoon, Chief Justice John Roberts had the Supreme Court’s press office issue a stunningly rare and stinging rebuke under his signature:
Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.
If Schumer’s repudiated words sounded at all familiar to you, or to the chief justice, it might be because at his confirmation hearing, then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh turned to the Senate Democrats on the Judiciary Committee and pledged as follows:
Since my nomination in July, there’s been a frenzy on the left to come up with something, anything, to block my confirmation. You sowed the wind and the country will reap the whirlwind.
The upshot here is that Schumer didn’t necessarily start this fight and maybe the guy whose honor Roberts just jumped in to defend bears some responsibility for the threatening rhetoric. Since striding onto the national stage, Roberts has claimed the mantle of being the balls-and-strikes guy at the high court. This is one of those instances, though, in which Umpire Roberts clearly can only see one side of the plate.
Have a great day everyone! Please share your thoughts and the stories that have caught your interest today.
Super Tuesday Reads
Posted: March 3, 2020 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Chris Matthews, coronavirus, Donald Trump, Super Tuesday 46 Comments
Good Afternoon!!
Super Tuesday has arrived, and by tonight we should have a better idea of how the Democratic race for the nomination is going. If you live in Alabama, American Samoa, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, or Virginia, today is your day to vote. Here’s the state of the race after Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Beto O’Rourke endorsed Joe Biden last night.
The Washington Post: Power Up: Is this a two-person race or a slog? Waiting on Super Tuesday results.
YOUR (PROACTIVE) GUIDE TO SUPERDELEGATES: With 1,357 pledged delegates at stake today, Super Tuesday will go a ways in determining if there’s a clear front-runner in the Democratic primary or if we have a long slog ahead.
Meaning there’s still a chance the nomination battle drags on through the Democratic convention in Milwaukee this summer, resulting in a rare contested convention that hasn’t occurred for either major party in almost 70 years.
That became less likely as the moderate wing of the party moved rapidly to coalesce behind former vice president Joe Biden after his South Carolina win over fears that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the front-runner so far, is gaining unstoppable momentum. But Biden’s push to make this a two-person race isn’t guaranteed, and the party is still fractured enough that there could very well be a muddled picture and continued infighting moving ahead.
Nonetheless, Biden’s campaign rolled out endorsements all yesterday from party bigwigs and ex-rivals and appeared in Dallas last night with former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), as well as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke (Texas).
“We need a politics that’s about decency, a politics that brings back dignity. That’s what Joe Biden has been practicing his entire life,” Buttigieg said at an event ahead of Biden’s rally.
Klobuchar declared at the rally: “I cannot think of a better way to end my campaign than joining his.”Yet former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) remain in the race and might very well prevent Biden’s push to make this a two-man race. Depending on the delegate picture in a post-Super Tuesday world, it’s possible no candidate successfully captures a clear majority of delegates (1,991) necessary to secure the Democratic nomination.
Read more at the WaPo.
MSNBC host Chris Matthews shocked viewers at 7 last night by announcing his “retirement.”
The Daily Beast: MSNBC Host Chris Matthews Resigns After Accusations of Sexism and Harassment.
Longtime MSNBC host Chris Matthews announced on air Monday night that he was resigning following a slew of on-air fumbles and allegations that he made sexually inappropriate remarks to a political columnist in 2016.
“I’m retiring,” he said. “This is the last Hardball on MSNBC, and obviously this isn’t for lack of interest in politics.”
Over the past several weeks, the cable news veteran has been under increasing scrutiny due to allegations about previous offscreen conduct, as well as a number of eyebrow-raising on-air statements. Observers took note when Matthews, normally a staple of election coverage, did not appear on air on Saturday during the South Carolina primary.
“After my conversation with MSNBC, I decided tonight will be my last Hardball,” Matthews said on his show Monday night. “So let me tell you why. The younger generations are ready to take the reins. We see them in politics, the media, and fighting for their causes. They’re improving the workplace. We’re talking about better standards than we grew up with, fair standards… Compliments on a woman’s appearance some men, including me, might have once incorrectly thought were OK were never OK. Certainly not today. For making such comments in the past, I’m sorry.” [….]
After Matthews delivered his resignation announcement, Steve Kornacki took over for the remainder of the hour, expressing shock over his colleague’s retirement.
The New York Times: Chris Matthews Out at MSNBC.
Chris Matthews, the veteran political anchor and voluble host of the long-running MSNBC talk show “Hardball,” resigned on Monday night, an abrupt departure from a television perch that made him a fixture of politics and the news media over the past quarter-century.
Mr. Matthews, 74, had faced mounting criticism in recent days over a spate of embarrassing on-air moments, including a comparison of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign to the Nazi invasion of France and an interview with Senator Elizabeth Warren in which the anchor was criticized for a condescending and disbelieving tone.
On Saturday, the journalist Laura Bassett published an essay accusing Mr. Matthews of making multiple inappropriate comments about her appearance, reviving longstanding allegations about the anchor’s sexist behavior. By Monday, his position at the news network he helped build had become untenable.
Accompanied by his family, Mr. Matthews walked onto the “Hardball” set inside NBC’s Washington bureau shortly before 7 p.m. to deliver a brief farewell. His longtime crew members, who had been told of his plans roughly an hour earlier, looked on stunned.
“I’m retiring,” Mr. Matthews told viewers in a solemn and brief monologue as his broadcast began at 7. “This is the last ‘Hardball’ on MSNBC.”
His sudden signoff took many colleagues by surprise — “Wait. What?” the MSNBC anchor Katy Tur wrote on Twitter — but it followed days of discussions with Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC and one of the early executive producers of “Hardball.”
Unfortunately, most of the news today is still about the coronavirus, which appears to be spreading rapidly in the U.S. and the testing situation is still problematic.
Last night a woman in Seattle posted her experience on Twitter. She says she has chronic bronchitis and is immunosuppressed. She works in a health care facility in Seattle and has symptoms.
As of this morning, she still has no further information. What’s in the headlines about the virus:
Associated Press: More testing sheds light on how virus is spreading in US.
SEATTLE (AP) — An increase in testing for the coronavirus began shedding light Monday on how the illness has spread in the United States, including in Washington state, where four people died at a nursing home and some schools were closed for disinfection.
New diagnoses in several states pushed the tally of COVID-19 cases past 100, and New Hampshire reported its first case, raising the total of affected states to 11. Seattle officials announced four more deaths, bringing the total in the U.S. to six.
In Seattle, King County Executive Dow Constantine declared an emergency and said the county was buying a hotel to be used as a hospital for patients who need to be isolated. He said the facility should be available by the end of the week.
“We have moved to a new stage in the fight,” he said.
Vice President Mike Pence met with the nation’s governors and pledged to continue updating them weekly by teleconference. President Donald Trump met with pharmaceutical companies to talk about progress toward a vaccine.
The deaths at a nursing home in suburban Kirkland, Washington, were especially troubling to health care experts because of the vulnerability of sick and elderly people to the illness and existing problems in nursing facilities.
“It’s going to be a disaster,” said Charlene Harrington, who studies nursing homes at the University of California, San Francisco. Infection is already a huge problem in U.S. nursing homes because of a lack of nurses and training.
In Texas, tension between U.S. and local officials brewed over the planned release Monday of more than 120 ex-passengers of the Diamond Princess cruise ship in quarantine in San Antonio. Mayor Ron Nirenberg declared a public safety emergency in an attempt to continue the quarantine. He and other officials in San Antonio called for more lab testing of the passengers after one woman tested positive after release.
Read the rest at AP.
The New York Times: Defense Secretary Warns Commanders Not to Surprise Trump on Coronavirus.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper has urged American military commanders overseas not to make any decisions related to the coronavirus that might surprise the White House or run afoul of President Trump’s messaging on the growing health challenge, American officials said.
Mr. Esper’s directive, delivered last week during a video teleconference call with combatant commanders around the world, is the latest iteration of Mr. Trump’s efforts to manage public fears over the disease, even as it continues to spread around the world.
Mr. Trump has said Democrats and the news media are stoking fear about the disease, even calling their concerns a “hoax” during one rally last week….
Mr. Esper told commanders deployed overseas that they should check in before making decisions related to protecting their troops.
In one exchange during last Wednesday’s video teleconference, Gen. Robert B. Abrams, the commander of American forces in South Korea, where more than 4,000 coronavirus cases have been detected, discussed his options to protect American military personnel against the virus, said one American official briefed on the call.
In response, Mr. Esper said he wanted advance notice before General Abrams or any other commander made decisions related to protecting their troops.
So it sounds like pacifying Trump is still the top priority–not protecting Americans.
Anthony Fauci might be the one person everyone in Washington trusts right now.
But at 79, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is in the thick of one of the biggest battles of 35 years in the role: The race to contain coronavirus when the nation is deeply polarized and misinformation can spread with one tweet — sometimes, from the president himself.
“You should never destroy your own credibility. And you don’t want to go to war with a president,” Fauci, who has been the country’s top infectious diseases expert through a dozen outbreaks and six presidents, told POLITICO in an interview Friday. “But you got to walk the fine balance of making sure you continue to tell the truth.”
And the truth about coronavirus? “I don’t think that we are going to get out of this completely unscathed,” he said. “I think that this is going to be one of those things we look back on and say boy, that was bad.”
The plainspoken scientist with a heavy Brooklyn accent has navigated outbreaks from HIV to Ebola, Zika and the anthrax scare with an ability to talk frankly yet reassuringly about threats, to explain science, public health and risk to the public in a way few can match.
But in this outbreak, he’s not always the comforting public face amid crisis.
More headlines, links only:
The New York Times: As Coronavirus Numbers Rise, C.D.C. Testing Comes Under Fire.
Business Insider: The Trump administration says Medicare and Medicaid might not cover all healthcare for coronavirus patients.
The Washington Post: Major airlines, U.S. officials clash over passenger tracking related to coronavirus cases.
The Daily Beast: Defense Intelligence Agency Bans Some Domestic Travel, Sources Say.
The Atlantic: Trump’s Playbook Is Terribly Ill-Suited to a Pandemic.
That’s all I have for today. What stories are you following?
Middling Monday Reads: Adulting in what passes for the USA these days
Posted: March 2, 2020 Filed under: 2020 Elections, Affordable Care Act (ACA), Afghanistan 48 Comments
Good Day Sky Dancers!
There are several story lines cooking their way to the news day. None of them are particularly uplifting which just about matches stuff I’ve been going through lately too. I wish I could give up adulting but Spring Break and Carnival have ended not that I could truly enjoy either with this ever lingering flu. I’m going to fill the pages today with imaginary creatures since I’ve pretty much had it with the real ones. They are from Danish Illustrator/Artist Kay Nielsen whose primary works are illustrations for Fairy Tales and are stylistically Art Deco but many have Asian influences. He is best known for doing the Bald Mountain Scene in Disney’s Fantasia.
Super Tuesday is tomorrow and we’re down two candidates today as Pete Buttigieg just bumped Tom Steyer out of the last man out of the race place. His race was historic no matter what you thought of his chances or his positions. From the AP:
He opened February by sharing victory with one of the Democratic Party’s best-known figures and ended it with a humbling defeat at the hands of another. Yet Pete Buttigieg’s unlikely path over the last 30 days exceeded virtually everyone’s expectations of his presidential ambitions, except perhaps his own.
The former mayor of Indiana’s fourth largest city, an openly gay 38-year-old whose name most voters still can’t pronounce, formally suspended his White House bid Sunday night. He did so acknowledging that he no longer had a viable path to the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, even after finishing in the top four in each of the first four contests of the 2020 primary season.
“By every historical measure, we were never supposed to get anywhere at all,” Buttigieg reminded his hometown crowd, which was disappointed and hopeful at the same time. The crowd interrupted his speech with chants of “2024.”
Buttigieg began the month effectively in a first-place tie with progressive powerhouse Bernie Sanders in Iowa’s presidential caucuses. The mayor made history as the first openly gay candidate to earn a presidential delegate, never mind becoming the first to finish on top in any presidential primary contest.
And now we hear Amy’s out and gone over to the Biden side via NYT.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who entered the Democratic presidential race with an appeal to moderate voters and offered herself as a candidate who could win in Midwestern swing states, has decided to quit the race and endorse a rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr., according to a person close to Ms. Klobuchar.
Ms. Klobuchar will appear with Mr. Biden at his rally in Dallas Monday night. The decision comes one day after former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., departed the race, and after weeks of Democratic Party hand-wringing about a crowded field of moderate candidates splitting a finite field of centrist votes, allowing Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to march forward unopposed among progressives and amass delegates.
From the fairy tale ‘Mother Among Thorns’ Kay Nielsen Danish illustrator 1886-1957
What would year would it be without the Republicans trying to get rid of the old Republican cum American Enterprise Institute cum ChaffeyCare cum Dole cum Care/Romney care relabeled and passed as ObamaCare? The odd thing thing about this is that it will likely kill off their most ardent Trumperz which is why they’ve got it to the Supreme Court but the Court won’t actually here it until after the Election because, well, you know that’s what the Trumpist regime requested. I’m headed for Medicare about that time so my ObamaCare is safely in place until then but all I can say is that those of us with pre-existing conditions are evidently just supposed to die so they can get on with it. This is the headline from WAPO: “Supreme Court will once again consider fate of Affordable Care Act”. written by Robert Barnes. It will also be a test of Republican Court Stacking efforts since they’ve managed to get another Religious Inquisitor on their Bench.
The Supreme Court will hear a third challenge to the Affordable Care Act, this time at the request of Democratic-controlled states that are fighting a lower court decision that said the entire law must fall.
The court’s review will come in the term that begins in October, which would not leave time for a decision before the November presidential election. The law remains in effect during the legal challenges.
Democrats are eager to keep public attention on the fate of the act, sometimes called Obamacare, which has features voters value, such as required coverage for preexisting conditions. Health care is a leading concern, especially among Democratic voters, and many considered it a persuasive argument when the party won control of the House in 2018.
The House and Democratic-led states asked the court to review a decision last year by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
Hearing a challenge from Texas and other Republican-led states and backed by the Trump administration, the panel struck down the law’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance but sent back to a lower court the question of whether the rest of the statute can stand without it. The lower court had said the entire law must fall.
The House told the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit decision “poses a severe, immediate, and ongoing threat to the orderly operation of health-care markets throughout the country, casts considerable doubt over whether millions of individuals will continue to be able to afford vitally important care, and leaves a critical sector of the nation’s economy in unacceptable limbo.”
he House and Democratic states also have been eager to get the issue before the Supreme Court because the majority that has upheld the ACA in two previous challenges remains.
Sheherazade offers to marry the Sultan
Texas is leading the efforts in voter suppression yet again. This is from the UK Guardian: “Texas closes hundreds of polling sites, making it harder for minorities to vote. Guardian analysis finds that places where black and Latino population is growing by the largest numbers experienced the majority of closures and could benefit Republicans”
Long considered a Republican bastion, changing racial demographics in the state have caused leading Democrats to recast Texas as a potential swing state. Texas Democratic party official Manny Garcia has called it “the biggest battleground state in the country”.
The closures could exacerbate Texas’s already chronically low voter turnout rates, to the advantage of incumbent Republicans. Ongoing research by University of Houston political scientists Jeronimo Cortina and Brandon Rottinghaus indicates that people are less likely to vote if they have to travel farther to do so, and the effect is disproportionately greater for some groups of voters, such as Latinxs.
“The fact of the matter is that Texas is not a red state,” said Antonio Arellano of Jolt, a progressive Latino political organization. “Texas is a nonvoting state.”
On a local level, the changes can be stark. McLennan county, home to Waco, Texas, closed 44% of its polling places from 2012 to 2018, despite the fact that its population grew by more than 15,000 people during the same time period, with more than two-thirds of that growth coming from Black and Latinx residents.
In 2012, there was one polling place for every 4,000 residents. By 2018 that figure had dropped to one polling place per 7,700 residents. A 2019 paper by University of Houston political scientists found that after the county’s transition to vote centers, more voting locations were closed in Latinx neighborhoods than in non-Latinx neighborhoods, and that Latinx people had to travel farther to vote than non-Hispanic whites.
Super Tuesday is the biggest day of the Democratic primary campaign. Fourteen states will hold nominating contests to pick who they think should square off this fall against likely GOP nominee President Trump.
There are 1,357 delegates at stake, about a third of all delegates. So far, fewer than 4% of the delegates have been allocated.
People will head to the polls all across the country, from Virginia to California, Tennessee to Texas. The states and voters are diverse. Almost half have significant black populations, and Latinos figure to be an important factor in the two states with the biggest delegate hauls, California and Texas.
Rosanie or the Inconstant Prince by Kay Nielson
And who’d have thunk it? The Taliban have already broken their “peace” agreement signed with the Trumpist Regime on Saturday via Agence France-Presse.
A deadly blast shattered a period of relative calm in Afghanistan on Monday and the Taliban ordered fighters to resume operations against Afghan forces just two days after signing a deal to usher in peace.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack at a football ground in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, where three brothers were killed, officials told AFP.
The blast occurred around the same time the Taliban ordered fighters to recommence attacks against Afghan army and police forces, apparently ending an official “reduction in violence” that had seen a dramatic drop in bloodshed and given Afghans a welcome taste of peace.
The partial truce between the US, the insurgents and Afghan forces lasted for the week running up to the signing of the US-Taliban accord in Doha on Saturday, and was extended over the weekend.
and the entire thing under the watchful eye of this guy which doesn’t seem to know about it even though French Journalists obviously do …
https://twitter.com/owillis/status/1234519901894828032
Night in a Chinese Garden by Kay Nielsen
And, I want to go back to Fairy Tales again. I’m tired of this adulting stuff. This article in The Atlantic has just about done me in: “The President Is Winning His War on American Institutions. How Trump is destroying the civil service and bending the government to his will.” by George Packer.
But a simple intuition had propelled Trump throughout his life: Human beings are weak. They have their illusions, appetites, vanities, fears. They can be cowed, corrupted, or crushed. A government is composed of human beings. This was the flaw in the brilliant design of the Framers, and Trump learned how to exploit it. The wreckage began to pile up. He needed only a few years to warp his administration into a tool for his own benefit. If he’s given a few more years, the damage to American democracy will be irreversible
This is the story of how a great republic went soft in the middle, lost the integrity of its guts and fell in on itself—told through government officials whose names under any other president would have remained unknown, who wanted no fame, and who faced existential questions when Trump set out to break them.
Read each of these stories please. Unfortunately, they are not fairy tales.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
peej
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bostonboomer
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ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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