Last Call For The GOP Goes Viral, Con't

As the Trump Depression becomes more apparent by the day and Trump needs a steady stream of villains to blame for it all, some Republican governors and senators are starting to get, well, pretty sick, of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Anthony Fauci came to the Senate, virtually, to issue a dire warning against reopening the country too soon amid the deadly coronavirus pandemic. But his message fell flat with some of his intended audience. 

Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, are eager to revive the flailing economy. And resuming commerce at some level this spring and summer is central to the GOP’s message that it can turn around the economy before November. They’re also aiming to do so without adopting House Democrats’ plans for more multi-trillion-dollar stimulus bills. 

But Fauci’s Tuesday testimony clashes with the GOP’s vision, and it’s fueling growing fatigue among Republicans with one of the government’s most trusted public health leaders at a critical moment.

“There’s a spectrum of everything. And I think he’s on the overly cautious end of the spectrum,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said after parrying with Fauci at the hearing. “I don’t think he’s doing it because he’s a bad person, but if we’re overly cautious and we wait until all infectious disease goes away… we’ll wait forever and the country is going to be destroyed.” 

Sen. Mike Braun said Paul's view will be vindicated. 

“When we get this in the rearview mirror and do the dispassionate debrief, Sen. Paul’s going to be closer to right than Fauci,” said the Indiana Republican, who also attended the hearing. “I never did like the idea that you treated the entirety of the country, and even counties within a state, the same way.” 

The nation’s top infectious disease expert testified to the Republican-controlled Senate that there could be “serious” consequences if states open up too early, and he urged them to follow federal guidelines to prevent a second wave of outbreaks. Fauci also downplayed the prospects of a quick vaccine or treatment for the disease this fall. 

Meanwhile, GOP senators and governors in both parties say that lifting stay-at-home orders can be done safely and have begun to crack open a diverse array of states before meeting federal benchmarks. 

Fauci’s testimony comes as House Democrats are preparing to pass a $3 trillion relief bill later this week. But rather than plunge immediately into talks with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his members are banking on the idea that as states reopen, less money will need to come from Washington.

Asked whether Americans should be listening to Fauci’s caution or Trump’s economic-focused optimism, McConnell said they can do both. 

“We can’t spend enough money to prop this economy up forever. People need to be able to begin to be productive again,” McConnell told reporters. 

Fauci has served six presidents and knows how to offer advice in Washington without being thrown overboard. And aside from Paul, few senators took direct shots at him in interviews with a wide array of lawmakers on Tuesday afternoon. 

The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases has been viewed by both parties as a plain-spoken, commonsense guide during the frightening coronavirus crisis even as Trump himself has oscillated between urging a quick reopening to adopting Fauci’s approach. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called Fauci “the gold standard” and said he will “continue to listen to him.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Fauci and other public experts have “spoken truth to power as best they can, obviously with some degree of diplomacy and qualification.” 

Yet as Americans grow weary of isolation, with some states’ shutdowns entering their third month, Paul showed that sentiment is extending toward Fauci himself in some parts of the GOP. 

At one point, Paul questioned Fauci’s methodology on coronavirus’ effects on children and said that he is not “the end all" of decison-making. Fauci responded that he has “never made myself out to be the end all and only voice on this.” 

“He has a very valuable voice in this discussion. He’s got a field of expertise that’s important to hear from,” said Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.). “But it’s only one of many considerations we have to make as a society. Because we have to make trade-offs.”

Senate Republicans and governors don't want to go down with the SS Trumptanic in November, but they are starting to look at maybe Fauci as being a possible fall guy.  At the very least, Fauci still has support of most of DC, but some Senate Republicans are openly signaling that they won't be sad to see him go should Trump cut him loose.

We'll see how long he lasts.  My guess is much like Alex Azar, he won't be around much longer.  Azar has survived one storm at least, but again, Trump will need a constant stream of scapegoats, and November is a long, long way off as far as daily news cycles to be controlled.

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion, Con't

Time magazine interviewed Trump Regime VP of Fraud, Jared Kushner, about COVID-19 and the election, and while Kushner is still a deeply sociopathic automaton with no capability of empathy other than to fake it, it's his response on the November election that should have all of us in the streets with pitchforks and tumbrels.

While much of the country remains locked down, Congress has passed a series of stimulus measures and sent checks to millions of Americans to help stabilize the economy as it suffers the worst unemployment levels since the Great Depression. Critics have noted that certain provisions in the CARES Act, like the joint tax break in Section 2304, will disproportionately benefit wealthy Americans.

When asked if he personally stands to benefit from the bill, Kushner said he doesn’t know how it will affect him, because he doesn’t manage his personal finances and has recused himself from his businesses. “I have no knowledge of any of this that was designed to help me personally, or the President,” Kushner said. (Kushner also denied that the volunteer force he organized to work on procuring medical supplies kept a “V.I.P.” spreadsheet to prioritize tips from political allies, as the New York Times had reported.)

Americans’ economic distress could hurt Trump’s re-election prospects. Kushner himself had previously told TIME that Trump’s pitch to voters this fall was going to focus on a booming economy. Now, Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in both national and swing-state polls. Kushner said Trump is “looking forward” to debating Biden and dismissed the polls as “inaccurate.” Kushner said he believes the choice in the election will come down to: “Who do you trust to build the economy back?”

When asked if there was a chance the presidential election could be postponed past November 3 due to the pandemic, Kushner said that isn’t his decision. “I’m not sure I can commit one way or the other, but right now that’s the plan,” he said.

“Hopefully by the time we get to September, October, November, we’ve done enough work with testing and with all the different things we’re trying to do to prevent a future outbreak of the magnitude that would make us shut down again,” Kushner continued. “I really believe that once America opens up, it’ll be very hard for America to ever lock down again.”

Wait, what?

He's not sure if he can commit to free and fair elections in November?

Nobody in their right mind would say this unless there's a plan to not commit to having an election.

I mean, states decide this, we've been over this, but what?  It's not up to Kushner or even Trump at all here, but this is something you say if you've been giving an awful lot of thought about not having an election.

A Supreme Disappointment, Con't

The best we can hope for at this point on the Supreme Court and Trump's taxes is that Trump is defeated in November, because oral arguments in the cases went so badly for House Democrats it was comical.  The reality is that Trump should lose both cases 9-0, as Vox's Ian Millhiser points out.

It’s tough to exaggerate just how thoroughly current Supreme Court precedents cut against Trump. The Court has repeatedly emphasized that Congress must have a broad power to conduct investigations, because it is not possible for Congress to make informed law-making decisions without such investigations.

As the Supreme Court explained in Eastland v. United States Servicemen’s Fund (1975), “the power to investigate and to do so through compulsory process ... is inherent in the power to make laws.” Without such a power, “a legislative body cannot legislate wisely or effectively in the absence of information respecting the conditions which the legislation is intended to affect or change.”

Eastland is one of many Supreme Court decisions emphasizing that Congress may conduct nearly any investigation, so long as that investigation is “intended to gather information about a subject on which legislation may be had.”

Courts, moreover, are forbidden to dig into the legislature’s reasons for conducting a particular investigation. “So long as Congress acts in pursuance of its constitutional power,” the Court held in Barenblatt v. United States (1959), “the Judiciary lacks authority to intervene on the basis of the motives which spurred the exercise of that power.”

So that’s what the law says. And under that law, the House wins both Mazars and Deutsche Bank. The first case involves a House Oversight Committee investigation targeting the president’s accounting firm, Mazars USA. It seeks information on whether existing presidential financial disclosure laws are sufficiently robust, or whether they need to be stricter.

Similarly, the Deutsche Bank case involves two parallel House investigations targeting banks that possess some of Trump’s financial records. Among other things, those investigations seek information on whether there are “any links and/or coordination between the Russian government, or related foreign actors, and individuals associated with Donald Trump’s campaign, transition, administration, or business interests, in furtherance of the Russian government’s interests.” These investigations could inform legislation seeking to reduce foreign money laundering and to reduce foreign interference in US elections.

But the court, or at least five justices on it, are purely political creatures now.

Not long after Letter began his argument, Chief Justice Roberts revealed just how sympathetic he is to Trump’s position. Letter’s brief, Roberts noted, states that a congressional investigation must “concern a subject on which legislation can be had.” According to Roberts, this “test is really not much of a test” because it doesn’t impose significant limits on congressional investigations of the president.

Roberts isn’t wrong that the test laid out in Letter’s brief is very permissive of congressional investigations. But it’s not like Letter just made that test up. The idea that Congress may conduct any investigation that concerns “a subject on which legislation can be had” was endorsed by many prior Supreme Court decisions over the course of many decades.

Roberts’s disdain for this longstanding standard was echoed by several of his colleagues. Justice Neil Gorsuch dismissed it as “limitless.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh worried that it would permit congress to declare “open season” on presidents. And Letter was unable to offer a new limit on congressional investigations that would satisfy these justices.

Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito repeatedly accused the House of issuing these subpoenas to harass the president — a fact that is irrelevant under Barenblatt’s holding that “the Judiciary lacks authority to intervene on the basis of the motives which spurred the exercise of that power.”

Even Justice Stephen Breyer, a Clinton appointee, appeared to lose confidence in Letter’s arguments. Shortly before those torturous arguments came to an end, Breyer said that he’s concerned that the House is seeking “a lot of information and some of it is pretty vague,” and that the task of sorting through these requests and figuring out what information is being turned over could prove too much of a distraction.

It would be hard to sugarcoat this: It was a disaster for Letter and the House. Letter began his argument with a wealth of precedents that clearly support his client’s position, and he appeared completely unprepared for a Court that just does not believe that existing law should apply to President Trump.

So yes, absolute best case scenario here is that Roberts punts this back to the lower courts to examine the question of if an Congressional investigation is just too hard for the Executive to put up with unless Congress can specify before the investigation what it should have found, or some other time travel/psychic nonsense, after the election.

By then it'll either be moot because of a President Biden, or moot because we won't have a democracy.

StupidiNews!

• The NBA is considering resuming the 2019-2020 season through rigorous player and official testing and having games televised but with no fans in the stands.
• The FBI has charged a 20-year-old Cleveland man with a plot to kidnap law enforcement officers and use their weapons to start an "uprising" against Gov. Mike DeWine.
• LA Mayor Eric Garcetti is backing off from a proposal by the county health department that would extend current shelter-in-place orders through July. 
• House Democrats have unveiled a $3 trillion COVID-19 aid package called the HEROES Act, Republicans have already declared the measure dead on arrival in the Senate.
• COVID-19 is resurging in previously "cleared" countries prompting swift lockdowns and testing of tens of millions as new outbreaks have been detected in China and South Korea.

Last Call For Food For Thought, Con't

Growing food shortages around the country as COVID-19 wreaks havoc with our food supply chains and as more Americans stock up as eating out is now a thing of the past are now spiking prices at grocery stores by the most in 45 years.

Prices Americans paid for eggs, meat, cereal and milk shot higher in April as people flocked to grocery stores to stock up on food amid government lockdowns designed to slow the spread of Covid-19.

The Labor Department reported Tuesday that prices U.S. consumers paid for groceries jumped 2.6% in April, the largest one-month pop since February 1974. The spike in supermarket prices was broad based and impacted items from broccoli and ham to oatmeal and tuna.

The price of the meats, poultry, fish and eggs category rose 4.3%, fruits and vegetables climbed 1.5%, cereals and bakery products advanced 2.9%, and dairy goods gained 1.5%.

The grocery numbers stand in stark contrast to the broader trend in U.S. prices, which fell 0.8% in April and clinched their largest one-month decline since 2008 as a swoon in oil and gasoline dragged the headline CPI number lower.

“Food price gains were robust as we know there are empty shelves out there,” Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group, wrote in an email. “Demand we know in most areas of the economy has collapsed and prices are falling in response.”

Excluding the volatile food and energy components, so-called core CPI dropped 0.4%, its largest slump ever through records kept since 1957.

“In areas where demand has hung in, like ‘food at home’ we have inflation because the supply side has been damaged, whether directly via infected facilities or because of the higher costs of finding freight capacity,” Boockvar added.

In other words, the Trump Depression is making it harder to find food because farmers, truckers, food processors, warehouses and grocery chains themselves are dealing with the economic chaos.

This is only going to get worse in the months ahead as more parts of the food supply chain are disrupted by the pandemic or disintegrate entirely due to the Trump Depression's economic effects.

The people elected to "break the government" have broken it.

We may not be able to fix it.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

As Donald Trump's emotional breakdown continues, we've now reached the Nixon in the Bunker moment that we all knew was coming.

Most White House officials will be asked to wear masks or face coverings in public spaces on complex grounds, a move to prevent the novel coronavirus from spreading further inside the presidential compound, according to three administration officials with knowledge of a directive to be issued Monday.

The request does not apply to offices, however, and President Trump is still unlikely to wear a mask or face covering, aides say.
Here are some significant developments:

• At a Rose Garden news conference, President Trump declared that the United States has “prevailed” in terms of testing for the novel coronavirus. Later, Trump walked out after a tense exchange with two reporters.
• Democratic senators are preparing to grill top federal health officials at a highly-anticipated hearing scheduled for Tuesday on the coronavirus, with much of the questioning centered on whether the nation is ready to reopen parts of the country.
• Tesla chief executive Elon Musk announced that he would defy Alameda Country orders and reopen a factory, daring officials to arrest him and threatening to move business to Texas or Nevada.
• Even if scientists find an effective vaccine against covid-19, medical experts say there almost certainly will not be enough global supply for several years.
• China is struggling to put an end to transmission, with new cases reported in the cities of Wuhan and Shulan.

White House press corps reporters Weijia Jiang of CBS News and CNN's Kaitlan Collins were too much for Trump to handle Monday afternoon and he stormed out of the Rose Garden.

Referring to Trump’s repeated declarations that the United States is “doing far better than any other country” on coronavirus testing, CBS News’s Weijia Jiang asked the president: “Why does that matter? Why is this a global competition to you if every day Americans are still losing their lives and we’re still seeing more cases every day?”

Trump did not answer directly, instead telling Jiang, “Maybe that’s a question you should ask China.”

Jiang, who is Chinese American, responded by asking the president why he had aimed that remark specifically at her. Trump again deflected, telling Jiang that it was because she had asked a “nasty question.”

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins then approached the microphone and attempted to ask a question, noting that Trump had called on her. But the president sought to ignore her and instead called on a reporter in the back. After Collins continued pressing him, Trump quickly ended the news conference.

“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much,” he said, before turning and leaving the Rose Garden.

Indeed, things are getting much worse as the days go on and Trump knows it.

Coronavirus infection rates are spiking to new highs in several metropolitan areas and smaller communities across the country, according to undisclosed data the White House's pandemic task force is using to track rates of infection, which was obtained by NBC News.

The data contained in a May 7 coronavirus task force report are at odds with President Donald Trump's Monday declaration that "all throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly."

The top 10 areas saw surges of 72.4 percent or greater over a seven-day period compared to the prior week, according to a set of tables produced for the task force by its Data and Analytics unit. They include Nashville, Tennessee; Des Moines, Iowa; Amarillo, Texas; and — atop the list with a 650 percent increase — Central City, Kentucky.

On a separate list of "locations to watch," which didn't meet the precise criteria for the first set: Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Montgomery, Alabama; Columbus, Ohio; and Phoenix, Arizona. The rate of new cases in Charlotte and Kansas City represented an increase of more than 200 percent over the prior week, and other tables included in the data show clusters in neighboring counties that don't form a geographic area on their own, like Wisconsin's Kenosha and Racine counties, which neighbor each other between Chicago and Milwaukee.

So instead of one New York City/Boston megaplex sized outbreak, we'll have a dozen Charlotte, Nashville, and Omaha sized outbreaks with scores of Central City, KY (population 6,000 and an hour north of Nashville) sized outbreaks with the butcher bill rising across the US.

By the end of the month it's going to be readily apparent just how failed "reopening the economy" will be.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

After Donald Trump spent Mother's Day on Sunday screaming on Twitter about all this being Obama's fault somehow and that he needs to go to jail, the adults in the room are calling on Bill Barr to resign (again) over Michael Flynn's meta-pardon.

Nearly 2000 Justice Department officials have signed onto a letter calling for Attorney General William Barr to resign over what they describe as his improper intervention in the criminal case of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Last week, the DOJ moved to drop charges against Flynn who had pleaded guilty twice to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition.

The letter, signed mostly by former career officials in the department, accuses Barr of joining with President Trump in "political interference in the Department’s law enforcement decisions."

"Attorney General Barr’s repeated actions to use the Department as a tool to further President Trump’s personal and political interests have undermined any claim to the deference that courts usually apply to the Department’s decisions about whether or not to prosecute a case," reads the letter, which was organized by the group 'Protect Democracy'.

Barr, in an interview last week, denied he was acting at the president's behest in his support of the move to drop the charges against Flynn.

The federal judge in the case as of Monday morning had not yet responded to the DOJ filing.

The letter is the latest in a wave of backlash among former officials to the DOJ's surprise reversal in the Flynn case.

Barr has said he supported dropping the charges based on a recommendation from the U.S. attorney from the Eastern District of Missouri Jeffrey Jensen, who was tasked by Barr with reviewing how FBI agents handled their interview of Flynn at the White House in January of 2017.

The filing last Thursday by the U.S. Attorney in D.C. Timothy Shea cited new evidence uncovered in Jensen's review that the department said rendered the investigation into Flynn illegitimate at the time of his interview.

Mary McCord, who served as the former acting assistant Attorney General for National Security during the early stages of the Russia investigation, said in a New York Times op-ed Sunday that the DOJ's filing to dismiss the charges cited comments she made in an interview "more than 25 times."

McCord accused the department of "twisting" her comments in a misleading effort to undercut the department's case against Flynn.

"The report of my interview is no support for Mr. Barr’s dismissal of the Flynn case," McCord said. "It does not suggest that the F.B.I. had no counterintelligence reason for investigating Mr. Flynn. It does not suggest that the F.B.I.’s interview of Mr. Flynn — which led to the false-statements charge — was unlawful or unjustified."

I'm glad that this is all being said, but like the last time this happened, I don't expect anything to come of it because our institutions that we're trying so hard to protect here have been broken for decades.

Nothing has changed from three months ago when Bill Barr stepped in on Roger Stone's sentence and reassigned all the US attorneys on all Trump-related federal cases, and then announced an investigation into the prosecution on the Michael Flynn case, which only prompted 1,100 former Justice Department officials to sign on to the call for Barr to resign.

When Barr then said "oops, my bad, if Trump ever ordered me to do anything illegal I'd resign" everyone bought it and the calls for resignation stopped, and yet here we are again because apparently former Justice Department officials are pretty goddamn bad judges of character.

Meanwhile, Barr's efforts to shatter rule of law in the US will get a major assist from Trump's new Director of National Intelligence.

Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell has declassified a list of former Obama administration officials who were allegedly involved in the so-called “unmasking” of former national security adviser Michael Flynn in his conversations with the former Russian ambassador during the presidential transition, a senior U.S. official tells ABC News.

Grenell, who remains the U.S. ambassador to Germany along with being the acting DNI, visited the Justice Department last week and brought the list with him, according to the official.

His visit indicates his focus on an issue previously highlighted in 2017 by skeptics of the investigation into the Trump campaign's contacts with Russia, specifically allegations that former officials improperly unveiled Flynn's identity from intercepts of his call with former Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

Grenell's visit came the same week that Attorney General William Barr moved to dismiss the criminal case against Flynn following his guilty plea for lying to the FBI about his conversations with Kislyak.

So yeah, Lucy and the football, legal edition.  And Barr's next inevitable awful enabling of Trump's fascism will be worse, I guarantee.

Last Call For Austerity Hy-CARES-ia

House Democrats could pass a $1.2 trillion "Phase 4" COVID-19 stimulus package before the end of the month, if not sooner, at least if WIN THE MORNING 2.0™ is to be believed.

House Democrats could bring their phase 4 coronavirus relief package (CARES 2) to the floor for a vote as early as this week — but, for now at least, it's going nowhere.

The state of play: Democrats have crafted a $1.2 trillion+ package without input from the White House or Hill Republicans, congressional aides familiar with their plans tell Axios. 

GOP leadership says it's still waiting for billions of aid allocated in the first $2.2 trillion CARES Act to go out the door. 

The White House says it wants to evaluate the economic impact of reopening before passing another large stimulus package.

But House Democrats see the proposal as a way to lay down a marker of their priorities and prod congressional Republicans and the White House toward more economic relief for individuals, state and local governments, and the U.S. Postal Service. 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her caucus also want to show voters that they're still working, despite members remaining in their districts. 

Those optics could be important politically given the Senate's decision to return to Washington last week. (House Republicans have been chiding Democrats for staying home in their districts when, they say, they should be at work.)

So what's in the new bill? Some good stuff.

Details: The legislation, which is still being drafted and is subject to change, is expected to include: 

• Roughly $1 trillion for state and local governments. They want to split this money into separate revenue streams to ensure each community can access it.
• More money for hospitals and COVID-19 testing.
• Roughly $25 billion to keep the U.S. Postal Service afloat.
• Expanded nutritional benefits, Medicaid funding and unemployment insurance (which they call “paycheck guarantee”).
• Another round of direct payments to Americans.

If Pelosi and the Dems can get this passed, that throws down the gauntlet in an election year with tens of thousands of Americans dying per week and tens of millions losing their jobs.

But Mitch McConnell has simply ignored grand House bills before, and up until now Senate Republicans haven't been made to pay any sort of price whatsoever, remember they gained Senate seats in 2018 as Pelosi took the gavel.

Of course, that looks like it's going to change.

Republicans are increasingly nervous they could lose control of the Senate this fall as a potent combination of a cratering economy, President Trump’s handling of the pandemic and rising enthusiasm among Democratic voters dims their electoral prospects.

In recent weeks, GOP senators have been forced into a difficult political dance as polling shifts in favor of Democrats: touting their own response to the coronavirus outbreak without overtly distancing themselves from a president whose management of the crisis is under intense scrutiny but who still holds significant sway with Republican voters.

“It is a bleak picture right now all across the map, to be honest with you,” said one Republican strategist closely involved in Senate races who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss concerns within the party. “This whole conversation is a referendum on Trump, and that is a bad place for Republicans to be. But it’s also not a forever place.”

Republicans have privately become alarmed at the situation in key races where they are counting on GOP incumbents such as Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Thom Tillis (N.C.) to hold the line.

Multiple strategists said they believe GOP candidates will recover once the nation — and the presidential campaign — returns to a more normal footing, casting the November elections as a contest between Trump and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Democratic Senate candidates in the most closely watched races also could be benefiting from a lack of scrutiny and negative ads with the nation’s attention consumed by the pandemic.

But a return to normalcy ahead of the elections is far from a given as the death toll continues to rise and economic data paints a grim picture, meaning the president’s handling of the pandemic could be the determining factor not only for his reelection but for Republicans’ ability to hold on to the Senate. In short, as goes Trump, so probably goes the Senate majority. 

Trump wants to be the hero here, and as with the original CARES package, it's possible that something might actually get passed.  But I also expect that as with the first CARES bill, the devil will be in the details, specifically in how the White House actually implements the bill.

They botched literally everything in the first CARES bill, ranging from the Paycheck Protection Program loans for small businesses being a complete disaster, to Trump demanding his signature be on the stimulus checks, delaying printing,  to the bulk of the money going to hedge funds and large corporations who turned around and announced massive layoffs.

So no, I don't expect anything like this bill to actually pass, if anything passes at all.  Odds are all but guaranteed that this bill will sit in the Senate until McConnell is replaced as majority leader and not a moment before.

Unfortunately by the time that happens, our economy may well have cratered beyond saving.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

With two White House staffers testing positive for COVID-19 last week, the Trump regime is in full panic mode as they've found a political enemy that Trump is powerless to stop.

The Trump administration is racing to contain an outbreak of the coronavirus inside the White House, as some senior officials believe that the disease is already spreading rapidly through the warren of cramped offices that make up the three floors of the West Wing.

Three top officials leading the government’s coronavirus response have begun two weeks of self-quarantine after two members of the White House staff — one of President Trump’s personal valets and Katie Miller, the spokeswoman for Vice President Mike Pence — tested positive. But others who came into contact with Ms. Miller and the valet are continuing to report to work at the White House.

“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday. Mr. Hassett said he wore a mask at times at the White House, but conceded that “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”

He added: “It’s a small, crowded place. It’s, you know, it’s a little bit risky. But you have to do it because you have to serve your country.”

The discovery of the two infected employees has prompted the White House to ramp up its procedures to combat the virus, asking more staff members to work from home, increasing usage of masks and more rigorously screening people who enter the complex.

It is not clear how many other White House officials Ms. Miller or the valet might have come into contact with in recent days, but many members of the West Wing staff who were most likely in meetings with Ms. Miller before she tested positive are still coming to work, according to senior administration officials.

Late Sunday, the White House put out a statement saying that Mr. Pence would not alter his routine or self-quarantine. The vice president “has tested negative every single day and plans to be at the White House tomorrow,” said Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Mr. Pence.

The concern about an outbreak of the virus at the White House — and the swift testing and contact tracing being done to contain it — underscores the broader challenge for Americans as Mr. Trump urges them to begin returning to their workplaces despite warnings from public health officials that the virus continues to ravage communities across the country.

Most restaurants, offices and retail stores do not have the ability to regularly test all their employees and quickly track down and quarantine the contacts of anyone who gets infected. At the White House, all employees are being tested at least weekly, officials said, and a handful of top aides who regularly interact with the president are being tested daily.

“To get in with the president, you have to test negative,” Mr. Hassett said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

Mr. Trump continues to reject guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to wear a mask when meeting with groups of people. But a senior administration official said the president was spooked that his valet, who is among those who serve him food, had not been wearing a mask. And he was annoyed to learn that Ms. Miller tested positive and has been growing irritated with people who get too close to him, the official said.

Trump can't bully or threaten the virus, but he can sure threaten and bully the people around him on a daily basis. That won't save him this time though, will it? Sooner or later somebody very close to Trump and Pence is going to get sick, maybe badly ill.

We know Trump surrounds himself with sycophants, not geniuses. They are loyal to his power, yes, but they also believe in his myths. They don't think they'll get sick. They don't think anything bad will happen to them.

But the virus doesn't care.

They are going to screw up, and somebody important is going to get extremely sick.

That's the wild card in all of this.

It's going to get past the daily testing and the measures because the number one factor in spreading COVID-19 is human behavior, and Donald Trump can't cut himself off from people because he feeds on adoration and praise. He has to surround himself with sycophants. He has a pathological need for it.

And it's going to bit him in his orange ass.

Watch.

Boris And The Virus

As bad as things are in the US with Trump's ridiculous lack of response to COVID-19, it's far worse in the UK, where PM Boris Johnson's refusal to lock down the nation quickly enough is now responsible for 32,000 deaths in a country of 67 million, roughly .05% of the nation has died to it, with a third of a percent of the entire country infected, and that's just the confirmed cases.

The coronavirus lockdown will not end yet, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday, urging people to “stay alert” to the risks as he outlined plans to begin slowly easing measures that have closed much of the economy for seven weeks.

While his directions were for England, the government wants the United Kingdom’s other nations to take the same approach. But there were immediate divisions, with the leaders of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland saying they were sticking with the existing “stay-at-home” message.

In a televised address, Johnson announced a limited easing of restrictions, including allowing people to exercise outside more often and encouraging some people to return to work.
“This is not the time simply to end the lockdown,” he said. “Instead we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures.”

The government has faced criticism over its handling of the pandemic and Johnson is wary of taking the brakes off too soon. Britain’s coronavirus death toll - 31,855 - is the second highest in the world, behind the United States.

With both the death rate and hospital admissions falling, it would be “madness” to allow a second spike in infections, he said.

But the decision to replace the government’s “stay-at-home” slogan, drummed into the public for weeks, was criticised by opposition parties who called the new “stay alert” message ambiguous.

Johnson said people should continue to work from home if they could, but those who cannot, such people working in construction and manufacturing, should be “actively encouraged to go to work”.
From Wednesday, people will be allowed to take unlimited amounts of outdoor exercise, he said, and can sit in the sun in their local park, drive to other destinations, and play sports with members of their own household.

Until now, people have been told only to exercise outdoors once a day and do so locally. Social distancing rules must still be obeyed, Johnson said, adding that fines would be increased for those who break them.

Johnson said he would set out further details to parliament on Monday, when a “roadmap” document will be published.

But opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer said Johnson had raised more questions than he had answered and there was now the prospect of different parts of the United Kingdom pulling in different directions.

“What the country wanted tonight was clarity and consensus, but we haven’t got either of those,” he said in a statement.

Only the dead get both clarity and consensus, it seems.

The death toll per capita is twice as high in the UK as it is here in the US, but it's nearly as bad as here if not even worse in Spain, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden.  Johnson and Trump are far from alone in their failures.

Keep that in mind as they try to rewrite history in Europe, too.

StupidiNews!

• Vice-President Mike Pence says he does not plan to self-quarantine after his press secretary tested positive for COVID-19 this weekend and will be at the White House as usual today.
• The White House says as a result of the positive test, it will postpone any "large-scale events" until later this summer.
• Japan may end the national state of emergency this week for areas with a stable number of COVID-19 cases as PM Shinzo Abe remains under heavy pressure to get people back to work.
• The US Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday over Donald Trump's tax returns, with a ruling that could come as soon as the end of next month.
• Google sibling Sidewalk Labs is scrapping its ambitious $50 million investment in Toronto's waterfront blaming COVID-19, critics say privacy and finance concerns torpedoed the project.

Last Call For Biden, His Time, Con't

CNN polling guru Harry Enten notes that Joe Biden's six-point lead over Donald Trump has been steady as a rock since January, which means COVID-19 and the Trump Depression might not be affecting how people vote.

Yet.

A new Monmouth University poll finds that former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump 50% to 41%. When Rep. Justin Amash is included as the Libertarian Party candidate, it's Biden 47%, Trump 40% and Amash 5%.

The poll is largely in line with the average poll since April that puts Biden 6 points ahead of Trump nationally.

What's the point: Biden's lead is about as steady as it can possibly be. Not only is he up 6 points over the last month or so, but the average of polls since the beginning of the year has him ahead by 6 points. Moreover, all the polls taken since the beginning of 2019 have him up 6 points.

The steadiness in the polls is record breaking. Biden's advantage is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944. That could mean it'll be harder to change the trajectory of the race going forward, though this remains more than close enough that either candidate could easily win.

To know this, I went back and looked at how all the national polls deviated from each other during January to early May of the election year.

This year, 95% of all the individual polls so far have shown a result within 6 points of the average. That's basically what you'd expect if you took a lot of polls and the race wasn't moving (i.e. the only shifts are statistical noise from sampling). It's a ridiculously small range historically speaking.

The previous low for a similarly constructed 95% confidence interval was 8 points (2012). The median cycle featured a 95% interval of 13 points from the average of polls. In other words, about double the range of the polls we have seen so far in 2020.

Sometimes, of course, the range of results can be even wider than the median cycle. Lyndon Johnson had anywhere from about a 35-point advantage to a more than 60-point lead over Barry Goldwater in the early months of 1964. Jimmy Carter opened 1980 with a 30-point or greater lead in some of the polls over Ronald Reagan. By early May, his lead was down to single digits, and he even trailed Reagan in a few polls.

The 1964, 1980 and 2004 campaigns are of particular interest because they both had shocks to the system within a few months of the beginning of the election year. John Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Iranians took Americans hostage in November 1979 and the US captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003. The first two were especially volatile, while 2004 saw some change. George W. Bush's polling edge climbed into the double digits and sometimes north of 15 points in early January 2004. By the end of April, he was trading leads with John Kerry.

This year, we've seen pretty much none of those shifts in the national polls, even as we've had a once-in-a-lifetime health pandemic. That might make you doubt that the polls will move a lot going forward in 2020.

So are the polls wrong?  The national polls were pretty much spot on in 2016, Clinton won the national vote by 3 points, but lost the electoral college because the state polls in 2016 were off by miles, especially in the Rust Belt. State polls in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were catastrophically wrong because there were still tons of undecided voters that came in at the last minute for Trump.

But "Biden by six" has been where the national polls have been for nearly 18 months now, and not even a deadly global pandemic and a global depression seems to be shaking that up much at all.

I expect that to change.  People are still in survival mode now, and before that, well, before that the election was more than six months off. People are going to be paying attention, and the question will be how many people are motivated to actually vote in November, or in mail balloting before Election Day.

There's a reason why the GOP is trying to stop voting by mail. It dooms them as a party, and they know it. Turnlut will be more important than the polls this year, and finding a solution to voting in the era of COVID is key. For the GOP, stopping that is their only means of survival and they will do anything to end it.

Just sayin'.

The Revenge Of Austerity Hysteria

Trump's COVID-19 incompetence forced California to shut down, and now the state has gone from a $16 billion surplus to a $54 billion hole in just two months.  It's not a rainy day, it's a typhoon.

California faces a $54.3 billion deficit as the coronavirus pandemic hammers the economy, the state's worst budget gap since the Great Recession, state finance officials said Thursday.

The shortfall is almost 37 percent of the current $147.8 billion general fund budget and foretells widespread program cuts absent a federal bailout. K-12 schools and community colleges stand to lose $18 billion alone and are clamoring for money to adapt campuses to a new social distancing reality.
The Department of Finance released its projections in a rare fiscal update a week before Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to roll out his May budget revision, his first post-coronavirus spending plan. The deficit projection extends to the remainder of this fiscal year and through the 2020-21 period that starts July 1.

Newsom said Wednesday that he expects a prolonged economic downturn. The Finance document suggests that income losses will be far deeper than during the Great Recession more than a decade ago.

“It’s going to take longer than I think a lot of people think,” Newsom said.

"We’ve never experienced anything like this in our lifetime,” he said, adding that the national unemployment rate will soar to “Depression-era numbers.”

The bulk of the deficit comes from a projected $41.2 billion revenue decline over the next 14 months, a drop from the ebullient outlook the state had just four months earlier, according to the Department of Finance. Forecasters believe the state's big three tax sources — personal income, sales and corporations — will plunge about 25 percent.

As usually happens in a recession, the state will likely see soaring demand for health and human services programs, adding $7.1 billion in costs, the Finance Department said. California can expect to spend $6 billion on other new expenditures, most related to the coronavirus response.

The numbers are staggering, but they can be viewed with a grain of salt. No fiscal forecaster has a confident handle on how the next year — let alone the next several years — will play out, because so much depends on how Covid-19 affects economic activity. The virus is unpredictable, as are the health care and government responses.

While Newsom sees a long downturn, some economists believe a V-shaped rebound is possible after a painful year.

California budget experts say it is likely the Legislature will have to build in contingencies, such as trigger cuts, in case the revenue decline worsens. The Legislature might have to rewrite the budget at least once in the fiscal year, as happened in 2008-09 during the last recession.

The new forecast marks a stark reversal for a state that had been riding high on surpluses and growing reserves in recent years, building confidence before Covid-19 that California might have recession-proofed itself.

The state can count on roughly $16 billion in savings to buffer the deficit impacts — much more than other states — but the budget gap is still nearly three-and-a-half times the size of that rainy day stockpile, Finance points out.

The $54.3 billion estimate is far higher than the roughly $35 billion figure that Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek presented to lawmakers in April. Still, the new projection nominally falls below the roughly $60 billion gap the state dealt with in 2009 in two separate budget actions. And as a percentage of the state general fund, the new deficit is still smaller than the one the state faced that year.

This is frankly a rosy outlook.  I think it's going to be tens of billions of dollars worse than predicted because revenues are not going to recover until there's a vaccine, and that could take a year, 18 months, maybe more.  Systemic economic effects as the Trump Depression spreads will multiply the revenue losses.

A housing crash on top of everything else -- almost expected at this point and I don't understand why people aren't admitting it will happen -- plus long-term unemployment for millions of Californians, will knock the blocks out from under states.

Trump won't lift a finger to help, either.  There's no "Phase 4" bill coming.  Not to help states, which will need at least a half-trillion to stave off massive cuts and that's just for starters. And for the rest of us, Trump and the GOP will finally get what they've been looking to get for decades now: massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Senior Trump administration officials are growing increasingly wary of the massive federal spending to combat the economic downturn and are considering ways to limit the impact of future stimulus efforts on the national debt, according to six administration officials and four external advisers familiar with the matter.

While no one in the administration is advocating immediate cuts, the unease among senior Trump advisers about federal spending comes as the White House halts talks with Congress on additional emergency measures to rescue a U.S. economy facing its worst crisis in generations.

Some White House officials have gone as far as exploring policies such as automatic spending cuts as the economy improves, or prepaying Social Security benefits to workers before they become eligible, although these measures are unlikely to advance given the political stakes, said these officials and advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal deliberations.

The concerns about the deficit are coming from traditional conservatives at the White House, including new chief of staff Mark Meadows and acting budget director Russ Vought. But officials say they are likely to face much more skepticism from President Trump himself. Trump has shown little interest since becoming president in shrinking the deficit and has so far stood firm on his campaign pledge not to alter Social Security.

It’s unclear how hard conservatives will push Trump on the deficit. As the novel coronavirus crisis has intensified, Trump has cut deals with congressional Democrats that largely ignored the impact on the federal debt, approving more than $2 trillion in spending already.

Trump doesn't want to lose so some spending has already happened (most of it to the rich, mind you), but congressional Republicans are clearly betting on saddling Joe Biden with a deficit so large that it guarantees Biden will have to be the axe man in the future.

We'll see what happens, but the worse this gets, the less I see any help to the states coming.

Sunday Long Read: Fed To The Mammon Machine

This week's Sunday Long Read is simply the essential Adam Serwer on COVID-19 and the racial contract.

Six weeks ago, Ahmaud Arbery went out and never came home. Gregory and Travis McMichael, who saw Arbery running through their neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, and who told authorities they thought he was a burglary suspect, armed themselves, pursued Arbery, and then shot him dead.

The local prosecutor, George E. Barnhill, concluded that no crime had been committed. Arbery had tried to wrest a shotgun from Travis McMichael before being shot, Barnhill wrote in a letter to the police chief. The two men who had seen a stranger running, and decided to pick up their firearms and chase him, had therefore acted in self-defense when they confronted and shot him, Barnhill concluded. On Tuesday, as video of the shooting emerged on social media, a different Georgia prosecutor announced that the case would be put to a grand jury; the two men were arrested and charged with murder yesterday evening after video of the incident sparked national outrage across the political spectrum.

To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.

But Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.

The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.” If the social contract is the implicit agreement among members of a society to follow the rules—for example, acting lawfully, adhering to the results of elections, and contesting the agreed-upon rules by nonviolent means—then the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property. The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them. “The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

The racial contract is not partisan—it guides staunch conservatives and sensitive liberals alike—but it works most effectively when it remains imperceptible to its beneficiaries. As long as it is invisible, members of society can proceed as though the provisions of the social contract apply equally to everyone. But when an injustice pushes the racial contract into the open, it forces people to choose whether to embrace, contest, or deny its existence. Video evidence of unjustified shootings of black people is so jarring in part because it exposes the terms of the racial contract so vividly. But as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.

The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty. Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens. Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy. Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience. Temporary measures meant to prevent the spread of the disease by restricting movement, mandating the wearing of masks, or barring large social gatherings have become the foulest tyranny. The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions. In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence. Trump’s administration, in carrying out an explicitly discriminatory agenda that valorizes cruelty, war crimes, and the entrenchment of white political power, represents a revitalized commitment to the racial contract.

But the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

Trump is murdering us. And history always tells us that in times of economic collapse, there is civil unrest. As long as there are enough black and brown "essential workers" to keep the supply chains running and enough holes in the safety net for us to slip through and permanently stumble out of whatever middle class aspirations we had, we will be fed to the Mammon Machine.

God I sure hope there is some civil unrest, or we're going to die.

That Old Kentucky Revival Spirit

A federal judge has sided with a group of Kentucky pastors halting Gov. Beshear's COVID-19 order preventing mass gatherings of ten or more at church services, saying it violates the First Amendment.

A federal court halted the Kentucky governor’s temporary ban on mass gatherings from applying to in-person religious services, clearing the way for Sunday church services.

U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove on Friday issued a temporary restraining order enjoining Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration from enforcing the ban on mass gatherings at “any in-person religious service which adheres to applicable social distancing and hygiene guidelines.”

The ruling from the Eastern District of Kentucky sided with the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Nicholasville, but applies to all places of worship around the commonwealth. Two other federal judges, including U.S. District Judge David Hale, had previously ruled the ban was constitutional. But also on Friday, Hale, of Kentucky’s western district, granted Maryville Baptist Church an injunction allowing in-person services at that specific church, provided it abide by public health requirements.

Exceptions to the Democratic governor’s shutdown order include trips to the grocery store, bank, pharmacy and hardware store. Beshear had previously announced that places of worship in Kentucky will be able to once again hold in-person services starting May 20, as part of a broader plan to gradually reopen the state’s economy. Earlier Friday, he outlined requirements for places of worship to reopen, including limiting attendance at in-person services to 33% of building occupancy capacity and maintaining 6 feet (2 meters) of distance between household units.

The federal judge’s order in the Tabernacle Baptist Church case said Beshear had “an honest motive” in wanting to safeguard Kentuckians’ health and lives, but didn’t provide “a compelling reason for using his authority to limit a citizen’s right to freely exercise something we value greatly — the right of every American to follow their conscience on matters related to religion.”

Tabernacle had broadcast services on Facebook and held drive-in services, but the substitutes offered “cold comfort,” according to the opinion. The opinion went on to say that Tabernacle alleged irreparable injury and was likely to succeed on the merits of its federal constitutional claim, as the defendants didn’t “dispute the challenged orders place a burden on the free exercise of religion in Kentucky.”

“The Constitution will endure. It would be easy to put it on the shelf in times like this, to be pulled down and dusted off when more convenient,” Van Tatenhove’s opinion read. “But that is not our tradition. Its enduring quality requires that it be respected even when it is hard.”

His opinion says Kentucky’s attorney general urged the court to apply the injunction statewide, and since the executive order challenged didn’t solely apply to Tabernacle, the injunction granted would also have a similar scope.

“Both rulings affirm that the law prohibits the government from treating houses of worship differently than secular activities during this pandemic,” Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican, said in a statement late Friday.

The "If you can go to the grocery store, you can go to church" argument is now in effect in Kentucky, and what better gift to Mom this Mother's Day than a good ol' heaping helping of COVID-19 at services today, right?

It's a moot point, really, Beshear was going to reopen churches in two weeks anyway, this just advances the date to this weekend. The greater point is when Beshear issues the next round of closures -- and I guarantee you that is coming soon -- churches will remain open, and people will meet God in more ways than one.