Last Call For Bye Bye Bibi...Maybe

The Netanyahu era in Israel looks like might be finally coming to a close. The key word remains might, however.

The leader of Israel's Blue and White party Benny Gantz has won recommendations from 61 members of the Knesset, paving the way for him to receive the mandate from President Reuven Rivlin to form a new government after Israel’s third elections.
Why it matters: The fact that Gantz managed to secure 61 recommendations means that Rivlin by law has to grant him the mandate. This will allow Gantz to take control of the Knesset, appoint the speaker from his party, control the main committees and start pushing legislation that could prevent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from forming a government due to his corruption indictments.

The big picture: The coronavirus crisis has further destabilized the Israeli political system.Netanyahu, who is heading an interim government, took several extreme measures due to the health crisis — including shutting down the courts and making it impossible for his trial to begin on Tuesday.The Jerusalem district court announced it would postpone the trial until May 24. 

In the last few days, Netanyahu has called on Gantz to join an emergency government or form a unity government in order to combat the coronavirus crisis. Netanyahu’s proposal included him staying on as prime minister for the next two years while his trial is underway. Gantz and his party claimed Netanyahu’s proposal was a nonstarter, deeming it a political trick intended to prevent Gantz from receiving the mandate from the president.

Between the lines: Gantz secured the mandate after the Arab Joint List recommended him to Rivlin. This was a historic move by the Arab Israeli party that many view as a sign that the Arab minority, which turned out to vote in high numbers in the last elections, wants to further integrate into society and have a stake in the government.

The problem is though that while Gantz will get his chance to form a government, there are at least two of the 61 Knesset members recommending Gantz who have said they will refuse to join a coalition that includes the Arab Joint List party, meaning Gantz will fail at forming a coalition.

If Gantz can't talk them into joining, then Netanyahu will remain in charge, and we'd be looking at a fourth round of elections later.  Who knows when they will be with COVID-19 as a legitimate concern?

At least Gantz isn't falling for Bibi's six-month emergency government trick, because he'll never surrender power in that case when the six months are up, I guarantee it.

We'll see what happens.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Trump's role as Liar-in-Chief and the viral disinformation he continues to spread about COVID-19 and the "White House response" that amounts to hoping corporate America will do Trump's job for him is now well past the point of being a national public health crisis.

In the small town of Jonesborough, Tenn., nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, the Parent Teacher Association group text chat normally lights up with news of school dances and car-pooling schedules. Its main focus now is a global pandemic.

Kerrie Aistrop, a 39-year-old mother of two, and her fellow moms exchange death-toll updates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, thought-provoking tweets and a bit of gallows humor. “After seeing how the public panics over coronavirus, I can see why the government would never tell us about Aliens,” reads one shared post.

As people in the group have taken an all-or-nothing approach to the virus, either stocking up on toilet paper or writing the epidemic off entirely, Ms. Aistrop, a Republican and pharmaceutical sales representative, has struggled to find a middle ground for news on the ongoing crisis. And so she is relying on her go-to trusted source: President Trump.

Unlike many in the G.O.P., Ms. Aistrop doesn’t wholly subscribe to the notion of the mainstream news media being out to antagonize the president. When her town’s state House G.O.P. representative, Micah Van Huss, filed a resolution in January to officially recognize CNN and The Washington Post as “fake news,” she was “embarrassed.”

But in this moment, even she doesn’t feel that she can trust the media to present the pandemic’s full picture.

“No matter what outlet you go to about this,” she said, “somebody is always taking a side.”
Much of Mr. Trump’s success has been fueled by his supporters’ distrust of career government officials. Yet as coronavirus cases multiply, many of those same supporters find themselves placing their faith in institutions like the C.D.C. — confident for perhaps the first time in Mr. Trump’s tenure that the experts on call aren’t out to sabotage the president.

In conversations over the course of the past week, as the news and administration action on the virus moved quickly, Mr. Trump’s supporters overwhelmingly have said they trust the president and they trust whom he trusts. They are not, in large part, completely dismissive of the virus, the way some right-wing media outlets have been. But they are comforted because they see the president as a bulwark against outright panic, working with business leaders and experts from within a bureaucracy that both the president and many Republicans still distrust.

“I feel like sometimes the decisions he makes are for his voters, and now it’s about what’s best for the American people,” Ms. Aistrop said. “I think he’s really looking to our government agencies to take the lead on this, he’s listening to them on what to do, and his No. 1 goal is to keep us safe.”

While polling indicates that most Democrats take a sharply negative view of the president and his handling of the virus, and that some Republicans share concerns about Mr. Trump’s performance as well, there are no signs at this point that the epidemic has cut deeply into the bedrock support that he enjoys among his base, even in places where infection rates are high and populations are most at risk.

More after the jump, a lot to cover again this weekend.

Sunday Long Read: A Table For Zero

Seattle's restaurant scene is in meltdown, with dozens of restaurants closing their doors as COVID-19 spreads, and nobody's really sure if any of them will open again.

Faced with the coronavirus pandemic and resultant restrictions against large gatherings, restaurant owners across the Seattle area are closing earlier or shutting down, laying off cooks and servers as they negotiate with landlords and vendors to delay payments while their dining rooms and bars sit empty.

Since Feb. 29, when a Washington resident became the first American to die from COVID-19, the novel coronavirus has spread through the Greater Seattle area and the fallout has been swift. Servers and managers say they were hustling during a lunch rush one afternoon then coming to work the next day to nearly empty dining rooms where, in some cases, staffers outnumbered diners. By The Seattle Times’ informal count, at least 50 restaurants and bars have closed their doors in the past two weeks, though many hope to reopen when the crisis passes.

Across the Seattle area, many bars and restaurants are facing a reality that eerily resembles the Great Recession, only on hyperdrive, with lunch crowds disappearing and a flood of dinner-reservation cancellations and catering events wiped off the books overnight, forcing many companies to slash staff and pivot to takeouts and deliveries to make up for lost revenue, several restaurant owners and investors said.

Breweries and corner pubs that are entrenched in neighborhoods appear to do better, still drawing patrons during happy hour and running close to their usual capacity. But many businesses around downtown, South Lake Union and Capitol Hill haven’t fared as well.

On Wednesday, Tom Douglas, the city’s most celebrated chef, closed a dozen restaurants for at least two months after his management team told him business was down by as much as 90%, informing Douglas that he could not afford to pay his employees beyond March 15. Also, management told Douglas, every single catering event they had booked had been canceled.

Douglas’ announcement underscored just how tough the climate is getting for many restaurant owners. Shawn O’Donnell Jr., who owns four namesake Irish pubs (Pioneer Square, Fremont, Everett and Spokane), has asked family members, from his wife to his 60-year-old dad, to help “tend bar and wash dishes.” 

One one side, supporting these small businesses is exactly what we should be doing.  On the other hand, these eateries and bars remaining open is exactly the wrong thing to do if there's any hope to flatten the curve of the virus spread, which increasingly is looking like won't happen.

Here's hoping Congress is able to come up with help for these businesses instead of funneling all the money to Trump's rich cronies.  It won't happen, of course.  Local small businesses will be wiped out, and the big chains will move in.  It happened in 2002, it happened again in 2008, it'll happen again in 2020.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

What could Trump do with the national emergency he just declared?  Essentially anything he wants to.

President Donald Trump has declared a national emergency to combat the coronavirus — but he could go much further if he wanted.

Federal law gives Trump vast emergency powers in times of pandemic. He could direct the quarantine of people arriving in the United States who exhibit certain symptoms or even if they’re just suspected of having the virus. He could have the federal government detain individuals if their illness might wind up crossing state lines.

And under regulations revised and reissued just before Trump entered office, the government can stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease. Some even interpret the statute as meaning a president could deploy the military to cordon off a city or state.

“The federal public health power is pretty awesome … awe-inspiring in its breadth,” said Wendy Parmet, a law professor at Northeastern University. “But there’s also obviously a lot of danger.”

Indeed, it’s an extraordinary palette of options for a president often mocked as enamored of dictatorial authority and who has claimed, “I have the right to do whatever I want, as president.” And many of these powers remain largely undefined, as they have rarely — if ever — been widely used. It’s a troubling concept for those who are pressing Trump to take more urgent action to combat the coronavirus as it infiltrates American cities, but are wary that he will go too far.

“We can’t divorce this from the context of a president who has shown a willingness to abuse emergency power,” said Elizabeth Goitein of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
The conflict was on display Friday as Trump declared a national emergency to unlock funding and bypass regulations to accelerate the lagging development of coronavirus testing options. While even some of Trump’s most ardent opponents praised the move, they were anxious about what might come next.

“As other steps are considered, the president must not overstep his authority or indulge his autocratic tendencies for purposes not truly related to this public health crisis,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement.

Fresh discussion of Trump’s power to isolate regions of the U.S. was spurred Thursday by his comments in response to a question about whether he was considering travel restrictions to the states experiencing some of the most widespread infections, such as Washington and California.

“We haven’t discussed that yet. Is it a possibility? Yes. If somebody gets a little bit out of control, if an area gets too hot,” the president said during an Oval Office photo-op with the Irish prime minister.

As I've said multiple times, Trump will not relinquish these emergency powers until he is forced to do so.  The odds of that happening peacefully are about the same as me going to Mars on a rocketship I built myself.

We shouldn't be asking "Will Trump do this?" but "What do we do when he does do it?"

Last Call That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

Your political beliefs, like everything else in America in 2020, drives your beliefs involving COVID-19.

Two-thirds of Americans are concerned that they or someone they know will be infected with the novel coronavirus, but in a country with a growing partisan divide, political tribalism is having a large impact when it comes to anxiety over the disease, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll released Friday.

Although unease over the coronavirus is high, it also strongly breaks along partisan lines. Among Democrats, 83% are concerned about getting coronavirus, including 47% who are very concerned, and among Republicans, 56% are concerned, including only 15% who are very concerned. Only 17% of Democrats are not concerned while a larger 44% of Republicans are not concerned.

And here's why there's no hope in flattening the curve to prevent the virus from overwhelming hospital resources:

Partisanship appears to be the most decisive factor of Americans' concerns, even more than age. While 29% of 18-29-year-olds are very concerned about catching the illness, 25% of people over 65 years old said the same. 

Currently in the United States, there are at least 1,663 confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering.

A majority of Americans, 54%, disapprove of the president's handling of the response to the coronavirus, while 43% approve. Still, partisanship continues to fuel attitudes towards the White House's response, with the same amount of Democrats disapproving of Trump's managing of the health crisis as Republicans approving, 86%. Only 14% of Democrats approve, and 11% of Republicans disapprove.

It gets much, much worse.

But overall, relatively few Americans have changed their behavior since the coronavirus has landed here.

Only 3% said they are now working from home due to the coronavirus. And while about one-quarter of Americans said their lives had been disrupted in some way, either by canceling going out to dinner, taking a vacation, or opting to not vote in person, among other options, 73% have not canceled or postponed activities or events in their daily lives.

The vast majority of Americans are going about their daily lives as if there is no virus.  They don't believe they will catch it.  They believe everything is a massive overreaction, especially if they are a GOP voter, and that they believe Trump is doing a great job.

There is no hope of flattening the curve at this point if this is even remotely true.  None.  A week from now everyone will be stir crazy and back at their favorite watering hole, restaurant, movie theater, club, VFW post, gym, whatever.

By the time people realize that we're screwed as a country, it will be far, far too late.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The actual leader of the United States has arrived with a real plan to help all Americans through COVID-19, and that leader is Nancy Goddamn Pelosi.

The House overwhelmingly passed an economic relief bill early Saturday for the coronavirus, dedicating tens of billions of dollars for paid sick leave, unemployment insurance, free testing and other measures to help Americans impacted by the crisis. 

The 363-40 vote — gaveled down just before 1 a.m. — capped two days of volatile negotiations between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that threatened to fall apart entirely for hours Friday amid GOP misgivings. But even after President Trump criticized House Democrats at an afternoon news conference Pelosi and Mnuchin kept at it, speaking by phone 13 times in the course of the day Friday and finally clinching a deal. 

Not long thereafter Trump endorsed the legislation over Twitter, ensuring widespread GOP support.

“This Bill will follow my direction for free CoronaVirus tests, and paid sick leave for our impacted American workers,” Trump wrote, adding that he was directing Cabinet secretaries to issue regulations ensuring small businesses would not be hurt by mandates in the bill.

“I encourage all Republicans and Democrats to come together and VOTE YES! I will always put the health and well-being of American families FIRST,” the president wrote. “Look forward to signing the final Bill, ASAP!”

The House vote sends the legislation to the Senate, which is expected to pass it next week after Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) canceled a planned recess so senators could act on the issue. All of the “no” votes Saturday came from Republicans, while one lawmaker — Rep. Justin Amash (I-Mich.) — voted “present.”

The best part?

The deal was negotiated without Pelosi and Trump ever speaking, with Pelosi telling reporters Friday: “There was no need for that,” as she was working through details with Mnuchin.

The bill does provide both paid sick leave and unemployment benefits due to COVID-19 and requires companies to pay that sick leave to employees.  It also suspends state work requirements for SNAP eligibility, and does a number of other things.

...except that the sick leave isn't a guarantee, and that was the price for Republican cooperation.  The NY Times Editorial Board takes both parties to task on it, and for once, both sides did it actually applies.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi early Saturday celebrated passage of legislation she described as providing paid sick leave to American workers affected by the coronavirus.

She neglected to mention the fine print.

In fact, the bill guarantees sick leave only to about 20 percent of workers. Big employers like McDonald’s and Amazon are not required to provide any paid sick leave, while companies with fewer than 50 employees can seek hardship exemptions from the Trump administration.

“If you are sick, stay home,” Vice President Mike Pence said at a news conference on Saturday afternoon. “You’re not going to miss a pay check.”

But that’s simply not true. Sick workers should stay home, but there is no guarantee in the emergency legislation that most of them will get paid.

The White House and congressional Republicans, who insisted on the exemptions as the price of bipartisan support for the legislation, bear the primary responsibility for the indefensible decision to prioritize corporate profits in the midst of a public health emergency.

Instead of pressing executives to support a comprehensive sick leave law, President Trump held a Rose Garden pep rally for corporate America on Friday afternoon, showering praise on the chief executives of big employers including Walmart, Target and Walgreens.

But House Democrats also failed to act in the public interest. Paying sick workers to stay at home is both good policy and good politics. Why not pass a bill that required all employers to provide paid sick leave and then force Republicans to explain their objections to the public?
The bill does require some employers to provide full-time workers with up to 10 days of paid leave. But the requirement does not apply to the nation’s largest employers — companies with 500 or more workers, who together employ roughly 54 percent of all workers.

After a Waffle House employee tested positive for the coronavirus earlier this month, the company refused to promise it would pay other sick workers to stay home. Now, under the new bill, it would qualify for the big-company exemption. Would Ms. Pelosi please explain why the House decided not to require Waffle House to protect its workers and customers by paying for sick leave?

The legislation also provides some compensation for workers who need to take longer leaves under the Family and Medical Leave Act — but this too excludes workers at big companies.

And the bill allows the Labor Department to grant hardship exemptions to businesses with fewer than 50 employees. That category includes another 26 percent of the work force, meaning that fully 80 percent of workers may not be able to cash in on Ms. Pelosi’s rhetoric.

That sick leave for 20% of workers, at least.  It's something. It's better than nothing.

But man, it's...not optimal, you know?  It was the price demanded by the GOP, as the bill needed a two-thirds majority to pass thanks to arcane congressional appropriations rules.  Republicans took their pound of flesh from American workers and who knows if the Senate GOP will exact more.

It's going to be up to states and local governments to take charge on this.  Congressional Democrats have their hands tied and Republicans are going to do at little as possible.

Most of all though, I agree that the country's reaction to COVID-19 is a vicious and complete indictment of American disaster capitalism. 

You wanted government run like a business?

You got it, America.

I Want My FOX News State TV

The funny thing about the COVID-19 virus is that it's exactly the kind of thing FOX News State TV wants to cover, because it's a ratings gold mine for them, so the last couple of weeks where various FOX cable hosts have been blasting the media for "excessive coverage" of the global reaction to the pandemic as a "hoax" is not going over well with FOX execs, who have pulled the plug and have changed up the lineup.

Fox Business Network said it would scrap most of its primetime schedule by putting two of its programs on hiatus “until further notice” in order to staff coverage of the coronavirus crisis elsewhere within Fox News Media.

The network said in a statement that its 8 p.m. hour, “Trish Regan Primetime,” and 9 p.m. hour, “Kennedy,” would be replaced by long form programming.

“Due to the demands of the evolving pandemic crisis coverage, we are deploying all resources from both shows for staffing needs during critical market hours,” the network’s statement said.

Regan, who hosts a show that tends to focus on the political, has generated some criticism in recent days for hosting segments suggesting that liberals were overstating the effects of the spread of coronavirus to discredit President Donald Trump. A graphic that accompanied one segment that aired Monday read “Coronavirus Impeachment Scam.”
Regan launched her program in the fall of 2018, part of a bid by Fox News Media to add more live programming to the network, which also airs an early-evening program from host Lou Dobbs, and shows focused on business news during the day led by anchors such as Liz Claman, Maria Bartiromo, Stuart Varney and Neil Cavuto. Kennedy, the public name of Lisa Kennedy Montgomery, who first rose to fame as an MTV DJ, joined Fox Business as a contributor in 2012, and then began hosting a show called “The Independents.”

But Fox Media’s top executives made clear in a memo released Thursday that coronavirus coverage was going to take up more bandwidth. Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and Fox News President Jay Wallace urged employees to “keep in mind that viewers rely on us to stay informed during a crisis of this magnitude and we are providing an important public service to our audience by functioning as a resource for all Americans.” The duo said that the network would make some programming change and recalibrate its newsgathering operation to accommodate the change in the news cycle.

FOX wants to amp up the coverage, especially since it's the prime demographic of FOX News State TV viewers -- aging Boomers -- who tune in.  Don't for a second think FOX is going to have actual news on, they're just going to stoke the racist flames of "Wuhan Flu" and blaming Biden and the Democrats and their Chicom Socialist allies for the disease.

It was a "hoax" before Trump declared an emergency.  Now it's fear, fear, fear 24/7, and fear and panic sells these days.

Of course FOX News State TV was going to become the very thing they've accused the rest of the media of being.

Deportation Nation, Con't

How's this for upside-down: Mexico's Health Minister is definitely hinting that they might close the border with the US in order to stop COVID-19.

For once, the conversation over closing the US-Mexico border is being driven by Mexican health officials who say they are considering shutting out Americans to keep coronavirus out of their country.

There are currently more than 2,000 cases of the virus in the US and it is spreading rapidly. Forty-three people have died from it.

By contrast in Mexico, there have only been 16 confirmed cases and no deaths.

At a press conference on Friday, health minister Hugo Lopez-Gatell said: 'Mexico wouldn't bring the virus to the United States, rather the United States would bring it here.

'The possible flow of coronavirus would come from the north to the south.

'If it were technically necessary, we would consider mechanisms of restriction or stronger surveillance,' he said.

I'd close the border with us, too.

I mean, have you seen the guy in charge of that whole America hellhole?

Meanwhile, that whole "deport refugees to Guatemala" thing is shelved indefinitely after the first known cases of COVID-19 were detected today because of undoubtedly the thousands of untested cases of COVID-19 sweeping through ICE detainment camps.

Guatemala will from Monday widen travel restrictions to fight the spread of coronavirus, banning arrivals from the United States and Canada, President Alejandro Giammattei said on Friday. 

"We are therefore announcing that everyone who arrives from Canada and the United States between now and midnight on Monday will be subject to quarantining," Giammattei said in a televised address. 

The president said he had also asked the Mexican government to halt deportations of migrants by land to Guatemala. 

No cruise ships will be allowed to dock, but public events and school classes would go ahead for the time being, he added. 

Yankees, go home!

And stay home. 

Last Call For Orange Meltdown, Con't

In an exquisitely-timed press conference at the White House Rose Garden, Donald Trump announced that he was invoking a national emergency due to the COVID-19 virus and then introduced a slew of CEOs of companies that would be assisting the regime by directly profiting from the outbreak.  This caused stocks to rocket upwards in the last half-hour of trading on the NYSE, and the Dow put back nearly all of its record losses yesterday with a record point gain of nearly 2,000 today.

President Donald Trump on Friday announced a new series of measures to combat the coronavirus and treat those who are affected while pushing back on criticism that his administration was unprepared to confront the pandemic.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden, Trump declared a national emergency that could free up $50 billion to help fight the pandemic and said that he was empowering the secretary of Health and Human Services to waive certain laws and regulations to ensure the virus can be contained and patients treated.

"To unleash the full power of the federal government … I am officially declaring a national emergency," Trump said.

"Two very big words," he added.

Trump said the action would "open up access" to up to $50 billion "for states and territories and localities in our shared fight against this disease."

Flanked by Vice President Mike Pence, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and other top federal officials and corporate executives from companies such as Walmart, Trump said that the ability to waive certain laws and regulations would allow for easier admission to nursing homes and end limits on the length of hospital stays and the number of beds available.

He announced that 1.4 million new tests for coronavirus would be available next week and that 5 million would be available within the next month — although he added that "I doubt we'll need that" quantity. He also said there were plans to allow "drive-thru" virus tests.

In an unusual and lengthy news conference, a parade of business leaders took turns speaking after Trump — before the president and other federal officials made additional key announcements related to the administration’s coronavirus response.

Trump shook hands with several of those business leaders as he introduced them at the lectern — a breach of best practices recommended by public health experts across the U.S.

After corporate leaders spoke, Trump and other officials finally announced additional measures to confront the pandemic, which included the waiving of interest on federal student loans and the purchase of “large quantities” of oil for the U.S. strategic oil reserve. Officials also said they would be offering guidance to suspend all visitations to nursing homes, with exceptions being made only for end-of-life situations.

I don't have much more to add here except that it was basically the best example of disaster capitalism I've ever witnessed in my life.  Trump literally brought out the CEOs of major pharma, medical, retail and tech companies and said these companies, not the government, would be heading the federal response to COVID-19.

Stocks gained over 9% on the news.  It's the most Trumpian thing I've seen, and it worked like a charm.

"Consumers." You hear that, American citizens who contract the novel coronavirus? You need not worry, because your Federal government is making sure you will be taken care of...
AS "CONSUMERS." pic.twitter.com/OfIPZhem0b

— 🌊ⒿⒶⓎ🇺🇸ⒷⓇⓄⓌⓃ🗽 (@TheMrJayBrown) March 13, 2020

We're all "consumers" now.

Welcome to the corporatocracy.

Wal-Mart and CVS are now in charge of COVID-19 testing.

Good luck, America.

Retribution Execution, Con't

Meanwhile, the Trump regime is continuing the policy of targeting "deep state" career intelligence employees that just happen to be those that worked on the Mueller probe and/or the Operation Crossfire Hurricane investigation into then candidate Donald Trump's ties to Russia.

The acting director of national intelligence imposed a hiring freeze and ordered a review of the agency’s personnel and mission, officials announced Thursday, an effort that some intelligence officers viewed as politically motivated.

Though some Republicans have viewed the Office of the Director of National Intelligence skeptically and sought to scale it back, the timing of the review by the acting director, Richard Grenell — after President Trump’s downsizing of the National Security Council staff — caused concern inside the nation’s intelligence agencies. Some current and former officials said they saw the effort as an attempt to oust intelligence officers who disagreed politically with Mr. Trump.

Those officials questioned why Mr. Grenell, in the job temporarily, would undertake a large-scale reorganization, particularly one that previous directors had considered but put aside. Mr. Trump has nominated Representative John Ratcliffe, Republican of Texas, for the director post, though the Senate has not set a date for his confirmation hearing.

Aides to Mr. Grenell denied in a rare public statement any effort to force out intelligence officials.

“This review is not an effort to purge, as some have erroneously suggested,” said Amanda Schoch, an assistant director of national intelligence, adding that Mr. Grenell emphasized the point to top staff. “The goal is to make sure scarce intelligence community resources are used in the best way possible.”

Ms. Schoch said Mr. Grenell and his team were beginning a review of four studies conducted during the past two years that looked at “opportunities to refocus or transfer activities” to other agencies.

The studies, she added, were never fully carried out. Ms. Schoch said that while the review was underway, a temporary and short-term hiring freeze for the office would be put in place as well.

The last hiring freeze occurred in 2018, during a review of the office conducted by Dan Coats, Mr. Trump’s first director of national intelligence. That led to a reorganization and some new hires but left in place intelligence officers who had been detailed to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence from other agencies.

An umbrella for the nation’s 17 intelligence agencies, the office was created after the 9/11 Commission found that the agencies had failed to share information before the attacks. It plays a key role in intelligence, assembling the president’s daily briefing, coordinating the work and spending of various agencies, and overseeing the National Counterterrorism Center. The director of national intelligence oversees the federal intelligence budget and serves as a top adviser to the president and other members of the National Security Council.

The new review, according to intelligence officials, is designed to reduce duplication among the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the C.I.A. and other agencies. It would also send intelligence officers assigned to the director back to their home agencies, with the view that those agencies could better allocate them.

Now, the reason these intelligence analysts were "duplicated" and "loaned out to other agencies" was to build the team to assist in the large-scale investigation of Donald Trump's criminality.  These were, for the most part, the experts in the fields of Russian and Eastern European politics, forensic accounting, racketeering, and international organized crime.

These are the people who are going to be axed, so they can't be used to investigate Donald Trump in the future.

That's it.  That's the plan.  Of course it's a not a purge, it's a targeted removal of the people who would notice Trump was breaking the law again, run by a temp whose job is to clean house (and I guess be the lightning rod) while the new boss is being groomed.

So yeah, pay attention to what Trump is doing in the background while COVID-19 is going on.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Welcome to 2020. The future ain't what it used to be.  GQ's Julia Ioffe:

If you expected anything else, if you expected that on this, 1,146th day of his presidency, Trump would be different—that he would finally become presidential—you have been willfully fooling yourself. If, four years ago, you thought, ‘oh, what’s the difference between a Hillary Clinton and a Donald Trump;’ if you thought that they’re all the same, and that none of it matters anyway because American institutions would just get everyone through on autopilot, this is what you get.

You get a president who shuts down the global health security team in the National Security Council so that there’s no one but his son-in-law to advise him when a global pandemic reaches our country’s shores. You get a president who doesn’t care about whether people live or die, he just wants the numbers to look good for him, wants the number of cases down and the numbers on the stock indices up, and the best way to do that is to keep Covid-19 testing and public information at a minimum. You get a president who doesn’t believe in science when it doesn’t suit him and who, as recently as three days ago, declares a virus that had already claimed thousands of lives around the world a “hoax” and “fake news”—or a president that simply focuses, falsely, on how well his administration is responding to the crisis—because the pandemic might hurt the economy and jeopardize his reelection. You get a president who thinks he can do anything, who off-the-cuff announces a rally in Florida, where the governor has suspended all official travel as medical experts advise people practice “social distancing” by avoiding crowds. You get a president whose response to an invisible virus is to blame foreigners.

We are watching an experiment play out in real time. On one side, you have governments, like those of Singapore, Japan, South Korea, China, and Hong Kong that used the powerful tools at a state’s disposal—surveillance, financial and institutional resources, the bully pulpit—to keep citizens informed, to institute smart and targeted travel restrictions and quarantines, thereby keeping the virus from wreaking wider havoc. Then you have Italy, where a messy, squabbling government and piecemeal approach have led to the whole country being shut down, and Iran, where, after weeks of dissembling and lying by state officials, reality has given way to satellite images of burial trenches being dug for the mounting Covid dead. Thanks to Trump’s narcissistic penchant for lying about anything that doesn’t fit his heroic narrative of himself—and thanks to his eagerness to destroy institutions that aren’t slavish in their loyalty to him— America, the richest, most powerful country in the world, is now firmly in the camp of Italy and Iran.

Some 63 million Americans voted for a man who wanted to smash the system to smithereens, either because they felt it wasn’t doing enough for them or because breaking glass just feels so primitively satisfying. Or maybe it's because the Republican Party has been peddling a dystopian anarchistic anti-government pipe dream to them for the last four decades. Now, it turns out, a functioning government is a good thing to have when a global pandemic arrives on your shores. It turns out that maybe reforming an imperfect system is wiser than just taking a sledgehammer to it, better to trust people who have dedicated their lives to being public servants than trashing them in favor of a one-man, megalomaniacal savior, better to have a functioning system than dancing on its rubble while crowing about the death of the “deep state”—or “the political establishment.”

To those 63 million Americans, I say this: you wanted to smash the system and you got what you wanted—in spades. Now we will all have to pay the price.

Schools are closed all over the country or will be closing next week, including here where I live.
Professional and college sporting events, theme parks, mass transit, concerts, festivals, even religious services are rapidly becoming a thing of the past. 

Our economy is heading for an absolute recession at this point, it's only a matter of how many thousands of businesses, millions of jobs, and trillions of dollars will go poof.  COVID-19 will be with us for quite a long time. The assumption that everything will be okay in April or even May is dangerously wishful thinking at this point.  Various states are fending for themselves with a Trump regime that has so far been useless and even counter-productive with Trump's rampant lies.

The GOP sees COVID-19 as a Trojan horse for "liberal wish lists" of legislation and regulation, and they are doing everything they can to make the situation worse.

Despite mounting pleas from California and other states, the Trump administration isn’t allowing states to use Medicaid more freely to respond to the coronavirus crisis by expanding medical services.

In previous emergencies, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 flu outbreak, both Republican and Democratic administrations loosened Medicaid rules to empower states to meet surging needs.

But months into the current global disease outbreak, the White House and senior federal health officials haven’t taken the necessary steps to give states simple pathways to fully leverage the mammoth safety net program to prevent a wider epidemic.

That’s making it harder for states to quickly sign up poor patients for coverage so they can get necessary testing or treatment if they are exposed to coronavirus.

And it threatens to slow efforts by states to bring on new medical providers, set up emergency clinics or begin quarantining and caring for homeless Americans at high risk from the virus.

“If they wanted to do it, they could do it,” said Cindy Mann, who oversaw the Medicaid program in the Obama administration and worked with states to help respond to the H1N1 flu crisis in 2009.

One reason federal health officials have not acted appears to be President Trump’s reluctance to declare a national emergency. That’s a key step that would clear the way for states to get Medicaid waivers to more nimbly tackle coronavirus, but it would conflict with Trump’s repeated efforts to downplay the seriousness of the epidemic.

Trump will go as long as he can before declaring an emergency, because the second he does, he admits to his cultists that COVID-19 is real and a threat.

But the GOP response is now coming into focus.  They know who to blame for the COVID-19 outbreak, and it's Beijing.

Hawkish Sen. Tom Cotton issued a menacing statement on Thursday vowing that the United States “will hold accountable those who inflicted” the coronavirus on the world, seeming to suggest that the Chinese government is behind the pandemic.

“The Wuhan coronavirus is a grave challenge to our great nation,” said Cotton, who announced he is temporarily closing his Washington, D.C. office as a precautionary measure. “We are a great people. We rise to every challenge, we vanquish every foe, and we come through adversity even better than before.”

In a tweet, the Arkansas Republican left no doubt that his statement was directed at China.

Correct. https://t.co/Kmjv3j0g2K

— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) March 12, 2020

Critics slammed Cotton for exploiting the deadly pandemic to beat the drums of war as the U.S. struggles to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.

Cotton went on Sean Hannity's FOX News State TV Trump White Power Adviser Hour™ last night to not only accuse China of deliberately unleashing COVID-19 (There's a reason I no longer refer to the virus as 'Wuhan Coronavirus' and I never should have)  but to accuse Joe Biden of benefiting from the virus on purpose.

As utterly ridiculous as that sounds, know two things:  One, Donald Trump will absolutely start attacking China and Biden any second now and blaming them as the death toll mounts, and two, all 63 million Trump voters will believe every damn word of it.  He will blame everything, the illness, the economic recession, the job losses, on "Beijing Biden".  If China is "the enemy" here, and Trump uses a national emergency to assume extraordinary powers in a crisis, what will Trump do stop "collaborators" like Joe Biden and the Democrats, and the media?  It's insane.

And you know what?  There's a very damn good chance it works.

StupidiNews!

• US forces used airstrikes to hit multiple Iranian-backed militia targets in Iraq in retaliation for a rocket attack on a US base in Iraq that killed 2 British and one US soldier earlier this week.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is expected to announce a deal with Republicans on COVID-19 on Friday that will provide additional measures for testing and combating the virus nationally.
• A federal judge has ordered former US Army soldier and WikiLeaks source Chelsea Manning released from her contempt of court charge for refusing to testify.
• UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson says the government will no longer attempt COVID-19 containment and switch to triage as over 10,000 people are infected.
• AT&T says it will waive home internet data caps during the COVID-19 outbreak, competitor Comcast says it has no such plans to follow suit.

Last Call For Meanwhile In Not Bevinstan...

Here in Kentucky, Gov. Beshear is not messing around and is joining Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in calling for K-12 schools to close as a COVID-19 response.

Gov. Andy Beshear on Thursday asked public and private schools in Kentucky to, as of Monday, cease in person classes for at least two weeks to curb the coronavirus outbreak.

On Wednesday, Beshear had warned Kentucky school superintendents that they should be ready to close their districts on short notice, within 72 hours if need be. Superintendents have this week been reaching out to the Kentucky Department of Education to apply to the state’s non-traditional instruction program that allows students to learn from home.

Eight confirmed cases of the coronavirus, including five in Harrison County, two in Fayette and one in Jefferson, had been reported by 5 p.m. Thursday. But Beshear said at a news conference he thought there had been two more positive test results in Kentucky, one in Jefferson and one in Fayette.

Kentucky Interim Education Commissioner Kevin Brown appeared at a 5 p.m. news conference that Beshear held and said he supported the recommendation to close schools.

Fayette Superintendent Manny Caulk did not immediately comment.

Caulk previously said that if necessary, the district would be prepared to close, including providing educational activities and learning opportunities for students while they were at home. However, Fayette officials were for several days pointing to advice from local health department officials who previously said there was not a public health risk at district schools.

Several Kentucky school districts announced Thursday that they would be closed for nearly a month and Lexington’s Catholic Christ the King Elementary School is closed on Friday.

Elsewhere in the United States, Ohio public schools will be closed for three weeks, officials announced.

If anyone is wondering what difference it does make having Beshear instead of a Matt Bevin second term, the answer is "COVID-19 response or total lack thereof".

Former Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin appeared to mock growing nationwide concerns over the coronavirus in a tweet Wednesday as the state braces for the closure of schools along with calls to suspend religious services.

"Breaking news: Chicken Little has just confirmed that the sky is indeed falling," he tweeted. "Everyone is advised to take cover immediately and to bring lots of toilet paper with them when they do so."
Bevin, a Republican, could not be immediately reached for comment about the tweet.

Things are not going well for Matt these days.

The former governor was extensively criticized. Responders to the tweet seemed to take it as a shot at Gov. Andy Beshear, who defeated Bevin in the Kentucky gubernatorial election in November.

Most responses claimed Bevin would not be handling the coronavirus situation well, and many said they thought Kentucky voters made the right choice by voting Bevin out of office in November.

There no doubt in my mind that Bevin would refuse to close school or to do anything, leaving it up to KY Republicans in the General Assembly, to pass legislation.  Of course, they're too busy passing unconstitutional anti-choice laws trying to close the last abortion clinic in the state to do anything about COVID-19.

Just because Bevin's gone, doesn't mean Bevinstan is totally gone either.  But it's a nice start.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The Dow cratered after Trump's insane speech last night, going limit down in the first 30 minutes of trading for the second time in a week and losing ten percent in one day.

Amid heightened market turmoil, the New York Federal Reserve stepped in midday Thursday and announced a major asset purchase program, offering $500 billion in three-month repo operations, an additional $500 billion in one-month operations and another at least $220 billion in operations with durations of two weeks or fewer. The New York Fed also said its securities purchases would be along a range of maturities, to match the composition of the Treasury market.

The major infusion of liquidity comes as The World Health Organization officially designated the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on Wednesday, as the virus spread across more than 100 countries and infected well over 100,000 individuals.

Growing alarm about the severity of the pathogen — and the economic toll — has sent markets into a tailspin. Weeks of panic-driven selling has dragged blue-chip stocks into bear market territory at a breathtaking pace, of less than a month from peak to trough.

In a televised address, Trump said he was planning to suspend travel from certain areas of Europe to the U.S. for the next 30 days. He also announced plans for $50 billion of low interest loans to affected businesses and suggested a delay in the April 15 tax filing deadline.

However, the speech sparked widespread confusion — and failed to mollify panic-stricken investors. Major benchmarks sank deeper into correction territory at the open, triggering a circuit-breaker during the regular session shortly after 9:30 a.m. ET.

 
The Fed repo operation did nothing.  Stocks still crashed 10% by the end of the day. We're heading back into 2008 territory with almost all of the guardrails removed, and nothing changes the fact Donald Trump is still in charge during a global pandemic and has no idea what to do.

Stock market indicies have lost 28% in one month.

There is no reason to believe they will recover anytime soon.

Trump can no longer lie his way out of this.

The Trump Crash is here.

Buckle up.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Donald Trump addressed the nation last night, and it did not go well, but a speech written by Jared Kushner and Racist-in-Chief Stephen Miller was never going to be anything other than a call for racist isolationism and a promise to use the executive branch to harm the most vulnerable.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday he was "marshaling the full power of the federal government" to confront a growing public health crisis, including a month-long halt in travel from Europe to the United States. 

Trump said he was overseeing "the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history." 

Trump was speaking during a rare Oval Office address to the nation after facing harsh criticism for his response to the pandemic. 

Earlier Wednesday, Trump would not say whether the US would issue additional travel restrictions on Europe, nor would he answer whether he would issue a national disaster declaration. 

"We'll be talking about that later. All those things we're making a decision on," he added.
Trump's top advisers had discussed potential new travel advisories on Europe during meetings at the White House on Wednesday, according to two officials familiar with the matter. The advisers are considering raising travel alerts on Europe to recommend against all non-essential travel to the continent, which administration officials view as a new epicenter for the pandemic.

Nowhere in his latest hissy fit did he say anything about testing or health solutions and barely mentioned social distancing.  Instead, Trump blew up yesterday behind closed doors in a tirade at Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin, who is almost certainly the next White House firing after stocks tanked again and have now fallen 20% since Feb 12.

President Trump, in an explosive tirade Monday, urged Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to encourage Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell to do more to stimulate the economy, two officials familiar with the exchange said, revealing the president’s mounting fury as his administration struggles to corral economic fallout from the novel coronavirus.

Trump has frequently complained about the Fed in public for at least two years, but his latest effort to pressure Mnuchin to privately push for action has not been previously reported.

During that tense Monday meeting in the Oval Office, Trump fumed that Powell never should have been appointed and is damaging the nation and his presidency

He then told Mnuchin, who had encouraged Trump to nominate Powell in 2017, to engage with the chair and ask him to take more dramatic steps to arrest the stock market’s plummet, according to three White House officials and a senior Republican. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to reveal the exchange.

Mnuchin has not commented publicly on this meeting, but he has said recently that he is in daily contact with Powell during the coronavirus crisis. Trump initially tried to brush aside concerns about the coronavirus’s impact on the economy, saying it would be short-lived, but the Oval Office meeting struck some of his advisers because it showed how furious he had become.

If Mnuchin wanted to arrest the stock market plunge, he'd convince Pence and the cabinet to oust Trump under the 25th Amendment.

Meanwhile, Republicans are doing their best to lose the Senate in November.

Democrats hoping to pass an emergency paid sick leave bill to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus were stymied by Senate Republicans on Wednesday.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) tried to speed the measure up for a vote on the Senate floor through a procedural maneuver, but an objection from Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) prevented the bill from bypassing the Republican-controlled health committee.

Murray noted that many people who don’t have paid leave through their jobs will inevitably miss work due to being sick or quarantined in the coming weeks. She argued that guaranteed paid leave was important both for public health and the good of the broader economy.

“For many of our workers ― restaurant workers, truck drivers, service industry workers ― they may not have an option to take a day off without losing their pay or losing their job,” Murray said. “That’s not a choice we should be asking anyone to make in the United States in the 21st century.”

Alexander said that paid sick leave is a “good idea.” But if lawmakers want to require employers to provide it, then the federal government should have to foot the bill, he argued.

“Employees are struggling, our employers are struggling, and it’s not a cure for the coronavirus to put a big new expensive federal mandate on employers who are struggling in the middle of this matter,” Alexander said.

And when legislation that actually does do what Alexander wants is also blocked by the Senate GOP and never gets a vote, I'm sure all the folks who do have to choose between keeping their job and contracting a potentially lethal virus and spreading it will be fine.