Last Call For Ukraine In The Membrame, Con't

Senate Republicans are making it very clear the goal now is to bury Joe Biden under the Burisma nonsense in an effort to help Bernie Sanders, their preferred candidate.

Just hours after Joe Biden surged to the top of the Democratic presidential pack, Senate Republicans announced a new phase of their investigation targeting the former vice president and his son Hunter.

Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told reporters on Wednesday that he is likely to release an interim report within one to two months on his panel’s probe of Hunter Biden’s ties to a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma.

“These are questions that Joe Biden has not adequately answered,” Johnson said. “And if I were a Democrat primary voter, I’d want these questions satisfactorily answered before I cast my final vote.”

Johnson insisted that the timing of his probe has nothing to do with the election calendar. But the renewed focus on Biden, coinciding with his surge to frontrunner status, has alarmed House Democrats as they brace for an all-out GOP assault on Biden and his son over an issue that was litigated at length during President Donald Trump's impeachment trial.

Sure.  Just like Hillary's "homebrew email server" in 2016, just like Benghazi in 2014, just like Obama's Kenyan birth certificate in 2008, just like Swift Boat Veterans for "truth" in 2004.

Democrats are now warily eyeing Trump’s Twitter feed — and his Republican allies in the Senate like Johnson — for the return of the widely discredited corruption charges against Biden that had seemed to fade from consciousness along with Biden’s flagging campaign. But after Biden’s Super Tuesday romp, the Democrats who led the impeachment drive against Trump for his efforts to get Ukraine to investigate the Bidens are preparing for Burisma to make a return to the GOP playbook.

“After hearing nothing about Burisma over the course of the last couple weeks, the Republicans will revive it in a perfect demonstration of what this means to them, which is to be a cudgel to beat Joe Biden with,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

House Democrats are gearing up to charge Republicans who probe the Burisma matter with aiding a potential Russian disinformation campaign. Democrats raised alarms last year when reports, citing a third-party security firm, indicated Burisma had been hacked by Russian military operatives using tactics similar to those used to infiltrate the Democratic National Committee in 2016.

“I am concerned to see that in the Senate there seems to be a renewed interest in furthering these bogus Russian narratives through the use of their investigative powers,” said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “I just think it’s so deeply destructive to be effectively working in a concert with Russian propaganda artists.”

Schiff said he would use his perch on the committee to call out adversaries for “furthering Kremlin narratives.”

Good, because they are.  

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Meanwhile, Republicans are holding up new emergency legislation to combat COVID-19 because the bill House Democrats are putting forward sets a limit on how much drug companies can charge for a vaccine.

House and Senate leaders have run into last-minute snags on a $7.5 billion emergency package to combat the U.S. spread of coronavirus, including disputes over vaccine availability and hospital reimbursement costs.

Top Democrats say the House is still expected to vote on the package Wednesday, with the Senate likely to follow suit as soon as Thursday. But the timeline for unveiling that legislation has slipped, possibly as late as Wednesday morning, amid policy fights between the two parties.

With the number of U.S. cases steadily rising, Speaker Nancy Pelosi is negotiating with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to find a deal that could pass both chambers this week, doling out money quickly to state and local health departments.

The biggest issue, according to several people familiar with negotiations, involves a Democratic attempt to control the costs of vaccines and other treatments that are developed in response to the outbreak. Other issues include details of hospital reimbursement for uninsured patients and whether to pay for a provision to help expand telemedicine, which would cost roughly $500 million.
“Vaccines should be affordable. It’s just as simple as that,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a top appropriator, said as she left a Democratic leadership meeting on Tuesday night.

“It’s going back and forth. That’s where we are,” DeLauro added. “There are no firm answers at the moment, but we’re moving toward getting this done and getting it done this week because the need is so critical. We have to get it done this week.”

Pelosi and her top deputies briefed their fellow Democrats on the status of the emergency funding package on Tuesday night and outlined the remaining issues. A final deal could still be reached Tuesday night, they said, but could take until Wednesday morning.

Republicans still want people who can't afford the vaccine to get sick and die.  Period.  Full stop.  And yes, COVID-19 is deadlier than originally thought.  Surprise!

World health officials said Tuesday the mortality rate for COVID-19 is 3.4% globally, higher than previous estimates of about 2%.

“Globally, about 3.4% of reported COVID-19 cases have died,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press briefing at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. In comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1% of those infected, he said.

The World Health Organization had said last week that the mortality rate of COVID-19 can differ, ranging from 0.7% to up to 4%, depending on the quality of the health-care system where it’s treated. Early in the outbreak, scientists had concluded the death rate was around 2.3%.

During a press briefing Monday, WHO officials said they don’t know how COVID-19 behaves, saying it’s not like influenza. They added that while much is known about the seasonal flu, such as how it’s transmitted and what treatments work to suppress the disease, that same information is still in question when it comes to the coronavirus.

Even a lowball estimate of 40% of adults infected and an 0.7% mortality rate, that's 600,000 dead.  Even if only 1% get infected and it's not an epidemic, that's still 15,000 dead, an extra 50% of a bad flu season's casualties.

And the high end, well...70% of the country's adults infected and 3.4% dead, well that's a number roughly the size of the Boston metro area.

The only question is how bad this is going to be.

Primary Positions, Con't

Joe Biden had a very good night last night on Super Tuesday, winning several Southern states (including Texas!) as well as Massachusetts and Minnesota, while Bernie Sanders won Vermont, Colorado, and Utah and the primary's biggest prize, California.  Five Thirty Eight's Sarah Frostenson recaps the Night Joe Came Back.

Well, it’ll still be days or weeks before we have the full vote total in California, and it’s still too close to call in Maine, but with Texas now in the win column for Biden, this evening’s top-line takeaway is even clearer: Biden mounted a comeback and won Super Tuesday.

In total, Biden won nine of the 15 primary contests at stake tonight, pulling off a number of upset victories, including a win in Minnesota (we’d projected Sanders would win there), a win in Massachusetts (Sanders again), and a win in Texas (that was more of a toss-up going into tonight), but basically Biden cleaned up across the board. He performed well in states where he wasn’t even really competing, and he proved he’s more than a regional candidate.

Sanders, on the other hand, did not have a great evening. He won just three states outright (Colorado, Utah and Vermont) and underperformed expectations. So far, he does seem on track to win delegate-rich California, though we won’t know the exact margin for a while yet.

Once all the Super Tuesday results are fully counted, 38 percent of delegates will have been awarded in the primary race, but this nomination fight is far from over, and there’s a real question about where it will go from here.

The big story from Super Tuesday was that young Democratic voters didn't show up for Bernie's revolution.  Not even close.

Exit polls for five southern states that Biden won – Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia – found that young voters did not show up at the polls in the numbers they did in 2016.

In addition, the Vermont senator has been grabbing a smaller share of them in most cases.

•  In Alabama, only 7% of the voters were in the 17-29 range compared to 14% in 2016. Sanders won six of every 10 of those voters Tuesday compared to four of 10 in 2016.
•  In North Carolina, 13% of Tuesday’s electorate were young voters, compared to 16% four years ago. Of those, 57% went for Sanders in 2020 compared to 69% in 2016.
•  In South Carolina, young voters made up 11% of the electorate Tuesday compared to 15% in 2016. Sanders won 43% of those voters Tuesday compared to 54% four years ago.
•  In Tennessee, 11% of those voters showed up Tuesday versus 15% in 2016. Sanders did better among that group Tuesday winning 65% compared to 61% four years ago.
•  In Virginia, young voters comprised 13% of Tuesday’s vote compared to 16% in 2016. Sanders won 57% of those voters Tuesday compared to 69% four years ago.

Even Sanders’ home state of Vermont showed a lackluster turnout of young millennials and 'Gen Zers.' Only 10% of the state’s electorate were under 30 compared to 15% when he ran against Clinton, according to exit polls.

And a similar trend was playing out in Texas where 16% of voters were between 17 and 29 compared to 20% in 2016.

Sanders couldn't get the numbers he got from four years ago, even in his home state.  The why of that is two words: Liz Warren.  She split Sanders's votes far more than Bloomberg split Biden's haul.

And speaking of Liz Warren, she came in a distant third pretty much everywhere last night, even in her home state of Massachusetts.

Elizabeth Warren had a plan for winning. It didn't work: In 18 nomination contests, she hasn't finished above third place — including in her home state.

Now, she's facing political and financial pressures to get out.

Warren's campaign declined to comment on her next steps after her dismal Super Tuesday performance. But allies who speak regularly with the campaign say the mood was bleak. A small wave of last-minute endorsements from groups like EMILY’s List, along with late financial help from a super PAC, did not significantly move the needle.

That's left the Warren campaign to wonder whether a path forward exists. While the campaign had insisted it still saw an opening by going to the convention — she will likely collect at least several dozen delegates Tuesday — the results were far below their own publicly-released projections.

How well Bernie Sanders does from here depends on how long Liz Warren stays in the race.  As I said after Nevada, unless something happened that changed the entire trajectory of the primary race on Super Tuesday, Bernie was going to be the presumptive nominee.

That something was "Joe Biden winning in SC and both Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropping out and endorsing him."

It's a fight now.  Sanders remains ahead in national polling.  But Joe did something I thought that couldn't happen: he most likely ended up with more total delegates last night.  The resurrection of his campaign is something unprecedented. A week ago we were counting Biden out and Bernie running the table seemed all but assured.

The "all but" happened.

Let the battle commence.

[UPDATE] Bloomberg is out.

BREAKING: Michael Bloomberg suspends campaign https://t.co/yNCVUDNe1g

— Axios (@axios) March 4, 2020

Bye, Mike.

StupidiNews!

• Virginia Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam has signed a bill banning "conversion therapy" for minors, calling it a "discriminatory practice that has been widely discredited".
• The city of San Diego has filed a restraining order against an AWOL Marine based in Camp Pendleton after purchases of a 50-round drum for an AR-15 and more.
• The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Tuesday on the SEC's power to use the courts to force defendants to surrender profits obtained through fraud.
• US officials are saying Russian disinformation meant to affect the 2020 election is continuing both online and through broadcast media.
• Facebook is denying multiple reports that the company plans to shelve its Libra cryptocurrency project, possibly converting it into a digital wallet and payment division.

Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Federal Reserve gave into Trump's screaming of DO SOMETHING and cut interest rates by a half-point today, and the markets immediately took it as a sign that markets are now somewhere between "unrestrained panic that Trump in charge during a pandemic" and "Is it 2008 again?"

The U.S. Federal Reserve cut interest rates on Tuesday in an emergency move to shield the world’s largest economy from the impact of the coronavirus, as Group of Seven finance officials pledged unspecified “appropriate” policy moves.

The Fed said it was cutting rates by a half percentage point to a target range of 1.00% to 1.25%. The decision was unanimous.

“The fundamentals of the U.S. economy remain strong. However, the coronavirus poses evolving risks to economic activity,” it said in a statement.

President Donald Trump said a half point cut was not enough.

After a record 1,200+ point rise Monday, the Dow basically gave most of that back Tuesday. 

Stocks had initially jumped more than 1%, but then dropped as traders worried whether pumping more money into financial markets would address the central problem - a drop in business activity as workers and consumers stay home.

“The rate cut underscores the magnitude of the problem that the global economy is facing,” said Peter Kenny, founder of Kenny’s Commentary LLC and Strategic Board Solutions LLC in New York.

“Normally, markets would welcome a rate cut, and they were hoping for it. Now that we’ve got it, the question is, what’s next?”

The 10-year Treasury yield fell below 1% for the first time ever as nervous investors moved money out of the stock market.

The S&P financials index tumbled 3.7%, reflecting banks’ difficulty in making profits in low-interest rate environments.

Wall Street on Friday had its biggest weekly decline in more than a decade as growing cases of the flu-like virus outside China fanned fears of a global recession.

The reality is setting in that the Trump regime will not only not be any help at the federal level against COVID-19, but that Trump himself will continue to spread misinformation in order to cover his own ass.

No wonder then the markets are in freefall with the death toll up to nine and growing.

It's About Suppression, Con't

In 2018, then Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, now Governor, alleged that Democrats hacked the state's election information database in order to "steal" the 2018 election in the state.  Today, the state's Republican attorney general closed the case because Democrats didn't do anything, and there was no evidence whatsoever to support Kemp's claims.

Georgia investigators found no evidence to support Gov. Brian Kemp’s allegation just before Election Day in 2018 that the Democratic Party tried to hack election information, according to a report released Tuesday by the attorney general’s office.

The attorney general’s office closed the case that Kemp had opened when he was secretary of state, overseeing the same election he was running for. Kemp made the hacking accusation two days before the election.

Kemp, a Republican, defeated Democrat Stacey Abrams by about 55,000 votes.

No election information was damaged, stolen or lost, according to the attorney general’s report. Nor were any crimes committed by the person who reported vulnerabilities with Georgia’s election registration websites to the Democratic Party and an attorney who is suing the state.

Democratic Party of Georgia Chairwoman Nikema Williams said Kemp made “outright lies” to attack his political opponents and help his election.

“More than a year after the sitting secretary of state leveraged baseless accusations against his political opponents, we’re finally receiving closure on an ‘investigation’ that has been a sham from the start,” said Williams, a state senator from Atlanta. “As we have since well before these outright lies came to light in the first place, Georgia Democrats will continue to do everything in our power to fight back against voter suppression.

A spokeswoman for Kemp said his office did the right thing by asking law enforcement agencies, including the FBI and GBI, to investigate.

“We appreciate the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and attorney general’s office for investigating a failed cyber intrusion before the November 2018 election,” said Candice Broce, a spokeswoman for Kemp. “More importantly, we are grateful that the systems put in place by Brian Kemp as Georgia’s secretary of state kept voter data safe and secure.”

The report from the office of Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, found that there were some vulnerabilities with the state’s online voter registration systems. Those issues were corrected by contractors for the secretary of state’s office.

However, the vulnerabilities were different from those alleged by Richard Wright, the Georgia resident who called attention to them, according to the report. Wright had said that anyone could download state voter registration information and any voter's registration card.

Wright was wrong when he claimed that election systems weren't secure, Broce said. She said Wright refused to cooperate with the investigation.

“While the evidence in this case properly gave rise to concerns that were appropriately addressed by law enforcement, the investigation did not reveal any evidence to support the criminal prosecution of Mr. Wright,” according to a memo from Senior Assistant Attorney General Laura Pfister. “Therefore, I recommend closing the file at this time.”

The vulnerabilities under Kemp's run as Secretary of State get fixed, he gets to remain governor after alleging massive election fraud two days before the vote, and he gets away with it in a close race with Stacey Abrams.

If Abrams had ended up winning, bet your life Kemp would have "found evidence" that the Democrats had "hacked" the election.

Another #MeToo Moment

Last night after 20 years, Chris Matthews quits on air and leaves his MSNBC show Hardball.

pic.twitter.com/ZKwShVaTWE

— Hardball (@hardball) March 3, 2020

Over the weekend, GQ political reporter Laura Bassett published her own #MeToo moment about Matthews.

In 2017, I wrote a personal essay about a much older, married cable-news host who inappropriately flirted with me in the makeup room a few times before we went live on his show, making me noticeably uncomfortable on air. I was afraid to name him at the time for fear of retaliation from the network; I’m not anymore. It was Chris Matthews. In 2016, right before I had to go on his show and talk about sexual-assault allegations against Donald Trump, Matthews looked over at me in the makeup chair next to him and said, “Why haven’t I fallen in love with you yet?”

When I laughed nervously and said nothing, he followed up to the makeup artist. “Keep putting makeup on her, I’ll fall in love with her.”

Another time, he stood between me and the mirror and complimented the red dress I was wearing for the segment. “You going out tonight?” he asked.

I said I didn’t know, and he said—again to the makeup artist—“Make sure you wipe this off her face after the show. We don’t make her up so some guy at a bar can look at her like this.”

Again—Matthews was never my boss. I’m pretty sure that behavior doesn’t rise to the level of illegal sexual harassment. But it undermined my ability to do my job well. And after I published a story about it, even though I didn’t name him, dozens of people reached out to say they knew exactly who it was. Many had similar stories.

A fellow cable-news pundit, who doesn’t want to be named for professional reasons, said Matthews invited her on to talk about misogyny in the Republican Party, telling her that he planned to draw a comparison to the ’60s ad-men show Mad Men. Right before going on air, he turned to her and asked “whether Joan’s proportions are real,” referring to the body of a curvy character on the show, before seamlessly transitioning into a supposedly feminist segment. She was shaken, like I was. (At the time of publication, MSNBC had not yet responded to GQ with comment on either incident.)
In fact, Matthews’s whole modus operandi seems to be inviting smart women onto his show, flirting with them or otherwise making them uncomfortable before or while the camera rolls, asking them a question on air and then immediately interrupting them to tell them why they’re wrong. He repeated this playbook with Warren this week. The fact that this kind of behavior has not lost him his primetime cable-news show in the year 2020—even aside from his egregious “Bill Cosby pill” joke and the sexual-harassment allegation against him—speaks to how far the #MeToo movement still has to go to change the standards for what kind of attitudes toward women in the workplace are acceptable and even rewarded.

There is a worthy journalistic line of inquiry Matthews could take about nondisclosure agreements and the role they play in muzzling women and upholding abusive power structures. Instead of exploring that, Matthews attacked Warren's clarity on whether she believes another woman’s corroborated testimony. He seems constitutionally incapable of probing these hyper-relevant topics with anything approaching intellectual curiosity or open-mindedness. In that way, he's also unfit for his job.

Beyond the question of Matthews’s employment, there is the decision of keeping a man with this flagrant bias as the anchor of a major cable-news evening show. His position affords him the ability to affect public opinion, both sweeping away documented behavior of male presidential candidates and casting doubt on corroborated women’s accusations against those men. Having a news anchor who calls women “she-devil” and treats their assessments with infantilizing suspicion while conducting post-debate interviews builds in a major disadvantage for female candidates. And that’s downright irresponsible.

Last night, Matthews did the right thing and quit, on air.

I don't think he was given a choice.

Nor should he have been.

StupidiNews!

• The city government of San Antonio is suing the Trump regime to prevent any more coronavirus quarantine cases from being sent to nearby Lakeland Air Force Base for observation.
• House Intelligence ranking member Republican Devin Nunes is suing the Washington Post for a $250 million libel lawsuit over the Post's reporting on Nunes assiting the Trump regime's spying.
• Poll results from Sunday's election in Israel shows indicted PM Benjamin Netanyahu ahead but for the third time in 12 months without a majority to form a government.
• The Dow Jones rose nearly 1300 points Monday as buyers waded into the market on the heels of a new Trump regime response plan to the COVID-19 virus.
• Google's Waymo self-driving  car project has gained billions in outside investor money to compete with rival start-ups Argo and Cruise.

Last Call For Primary Positions, Con't

Ahead of tomorrow's Super Tuesday primary voting, Sen. Amy Klobuchar is leaving the race and endorsing Joe Biden.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar will end her presidential bid on Monday and endorse Joe Biden, a campaign aide tells CNN. 

The Klobuchar campaign confirmed that the senator is flying to Dallas to join the former vice president at his rally, where she will suspend her campaign and give her endorsement on the eve of Super Tuesday. Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg also will endorse Biden at the rally, a source familiar told CNN. 

Klobuchar's path to the nomination all but closed after she posted sixth-place finishes in Nevada and South Carolina, a sign that the Minnesota senator's surprising showing in New Hampshire would not be nearly enough to propel her toward the nomination. 

A Democratic official told CNN that the Klobuchar campaign was worried that the senator would lose her home state of Minnesota on Tuesday. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the race's front-runner, is holding a rally in the state on Monday night. 

The high point of Klobuchar's campaign came in mid-February, when a strong debate days before the New Hampshire primary led to a third-place finish in the state. But the showing even caught Klobuchar's campaign off guard, and a lack of organization on the ground in Nevada and South Carolina, along with the senator's inability to win over Latino and black voters, ultimately stalled her candidacy.

Former Democratic Senate majority leader Harry Reid also endorsed Biden today, and the timing could not be better for the former VP.

Democratic primary voters appear to be giving former Vice President Joe Biden another look after his victory in the South Carolina presidential primary and ahead of the key Super Tuesday contests.

A Morning Consult poll conducted Sunday found 26 percent of Democratic primary voters nationwide said they’d vote for Biden if the Democratic primary or caucus were held in their state today, up 7 percentage points since polling conducted ahead of Saturday’s first-in-the-South primary in the Palmetto State.

National support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) fell 3 points, to 29 percent, while former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg remained in third place, with 17 percent.

Sanders saw his first-choice support shrink among black voters, leaving him in a tie with Biden, at 31 percent. Among Hispanic voters, who will play a prominent role in Tuesday’s contests in Texas and California, Biden’s first-choice support increased 9 points, to 21 percent, though he still trailed far behind Sanders, who has more than twice that share of support with the voting bloc.

With 33 percent, Sanders leads in an average of polling from the 14 Super Tuesday states, while Biden saw a 7-point boost, to 24 percent, following his South Carolina victory. Bloomberg, who’s staked his campaign on victories in Tuesday’s contests, is backed by 16 percent of Super Tuesday voters, down 4 points from the previous polling.

The latest poll of 2,656 voters who indicated they may vote in the Democratic primary or caucus in their state, which has a 2-point margin of error, was mostly conducted before former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg of Indiana ended his campaign on Sunday night. Billionaire Tom Steyer, who dropped out of the race on Saturday night, was also included in the poll, coming in with 1 percent of the vote.

The issue for Biden is now Michael Bloomberg is on the ballot in the Super Tuesday states tomorrow, Michigan and 5 other states next week, Big Tuesday states of Florida, Illinois, and Ohio in two weeks, and Georgia in three.  That will be over half the states and nearly two-thirds of delegates decided by then.

How much will Bloomberg cut into Biden's share, and will it be enough to put Bernie in the lead?  Will Warren stay in or drop out and endorse Sanders? We'll find out a big chunk of that picture this week.

They're Coming For Obamacare Again, Con't

The US Supreme Court will take up the Republican lawsuit to invalidate the Affordable Care Act, just not this term that ends in June. Unfortunately, that means they could hear the lawsuit say, right before the election in November.

The Supreme Court on Monday said it will take up a Republican challenge to Obamacare, in a move that boosts Democrats who want to highlight the lawsuit’s threat to health care coverage during campaign season.

The justices said they would hear the case, likely later this year, after turning down an earlier request from Democrats to fast-track a ruling by June. The decision increases pressure on President Donald Trump over health care, a top concern for voters and an issue that has benefited Democrats since the GOP's failed effort to repeal Obamacare during Trump's first year in office.
However, it’s unlikely the justices will rule before the election on the lawsuit, which could wipe out the Affordable Care Act’s insurance protections and coverage for millions of people. The court is expected to hear the case during its next term starting in October, but the court did not yet say when it will hear oral arguments.

The suit, brought by more than a dozen red states, emerged as a threat to Obamacare in December, when a panel of federal appeals court judges found the law unconstitutional. Instead of ruling on the entire law, the appellate panel sent the challenge back to a federal judge in Texas who previously invalidated the entire law, jolting Democrats who feared the move would extend the legal fight over Obamacare for years.

Democratic state attorneys general and the Democratic-led House of Representatives, who are defending the law in court, quickly asked the Supreme Court to intercept the case. The Trump administration, which supports the Texas-led lawsuit, and the states challenging Obamacare urged the justices against intervening right away.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who's leading the Democrats' Obamacare defense, hailed the court's decision to take the case.

"As Texas and the Trump Administration fight to disrupt our healthcare system and the coverage that millions of people rely upon, we look forward to making our case in defense of the ACA. American lives depend upon it,' he said in a statement.

Although the justices last month rejected Democrats’ request to expedite a ruling on the case by June, at the time they left open the possibility they would take the case on a regular schedule.

Though the court doesn’t disclose how justices vote on whether to review a case, legal observers believed the bench’s four liberal members likely supported Democrats’ petition. To accept a case, at least four justices must agree.

Still, it's rare that justices review a case before it's received full consideration in lower courts — and the decision to do so underscores the monumental stakes of a case could upend coverage for millions of people and create chaos across the health care system.

Republican states want out of Obamacare because they want their people with no private health insurance to, you know, go away.  The problem is now, ten years later, Obamacare is popular among even Republican voters.

A Kaiser Family Foundation poll finds that 55 percent of the public views the health law favorably, the highest level since KFF began polling the question about 10 years ago. Just 37 percent said they view it unfavorably.
ObamaCare was long viewed more unfavorably than favorably, especially during the troubled rollout of the healthcare.gov website in late 2013.

But that changed with President Trump’s election in 2016, when favorability began rising amid the Republican push to repeal the law in 2017.

The health care law has now become a political asset for Democrats, who highlighted Republican repeal attempts to help win back the House in 2018. The law's protections for people with pre-existing conditions have been particularly popular.

The push by the GOP to get rid of Obamacare in 2017 set the stage for them losing the House in 2018.  The push in 2020 to do the same through the courts will hopefully help cost Trump his current job.

We'll see what the Roberts Court decides, but don't expect a decision on this until June 2021.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

As new cases of COVID-19 are showing up in Rhode Island as well as in Florida and also in Chicago and in Manhattan and much worse, could have been spreading undetected for weeks in Washington State, the Trump regime response goals remain protection of Trump's reelection chances, and not public safety.

Minutes before President Trump was preparing Wednesday to reassure a skittish nation about the coronavirus threat, he received a piece of crucial information: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had identified in California the first U.S. case of the illness not tied to foreign travel, a sign that the virus’s spread in the United States was likely to explode.

But when Trump took to the lectern for a news conference intended to bring transparency to the spiraling global crisis, he made no explicit mention of the California case and its implications — and falsely suggested the virus might soon be eradicated in the United States.

“And again, when you have 15 people — and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero — that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” he said.

Trump’s playing down of the California patient at his news conference underscores the administration’s slapdash and often misleading attempts to contain not just the virus, but also potential political damage from the outbreak — which has tanked financial markets, slowed global commerce and killed some 3,000 people worldwide, including the first U.S. death, announced Saturday.

Since Trump touched down from a two-day trip to India early Wednesday morning, the administration struggled to cope with the fallout from the crisis — shaking up and centralizing its coronavirus response team under the leadership of Vice President Pence, floating plans to stabilize the markets and publicly seeking to minimize the threat posed by the potential pandemic.

Interviews with nearly two dozen administration officials, former White House aides, public health experts and lawmakers — many speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments and details — portray a White House scrambling to gain control of a rudderless response defined by bureaucratic infighting, confusion and misinformation.

“It’s complete chaos,” a senior administration official said. “Everyone is just trying to get a handle on what the [expletive] is going on.” 

I don't agree at all that the Trump regime is in chaos on this.  They absolutely have a message for the American people and a unified front.  And what is the message coming from the White House on COVID-19?  That the "alarmist" coverage is a plot to hurt Donald Trump and that Democrats want millions of people to die.

When Donald Trump Jr said Democrats hope coronavirus “kills millions of people” in the US because they want to bring his father down, he was merely “pushing back” at politicisation of the viral outbreak by Trump opponents, Mike Pence claimed in an interview broadcast on Sunday.

“It’s time for the other side to turn down the volume,” the vice-president told NBC’s Meet the Press.
At a White House press conference on Saturday, Trump was forced to defend his use of the word “hoax” in reference to the outbreak. Harshly criticised by contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination, the president said he had been referring to politicisation of coronavirus, not the outbreak itself.

In the interview broadcast on Sunday, NBC host Chuck Todd played Pence clips of Trump allies discussing the outbreak which on Saturday claimed its first US death, a man in Washington state.

Rush Limbaugh, the conservative shock jock to whom Trump gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom, said: “The coronavirus is being weaponized, as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.”

Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel said: “Democrats are using this for their political gain to try and stoke fear in the American people, which is shameful, wrong, and I think un-American.”

And Donald Trump Jr, appearing on Fox News, said: “For them to try to take a pandemic and seemingly hope that it comes here and kills millions of people so that they could end Donald Trump’s streak of winning is a new level of sickness.”

On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, host Jake Tapper twice asked Pence if he agreed with Trump Jr’s claim that Democrats want coronavirus to “kill millions of people”.

Pence avoided the question, instead saying people need to set politics aside in the response to the outbreak and insisting Trump, who at his Friday rally claimed “the Democrat policy of open borders is a direct threat to the health and wellbeing of all Americans”, was directing all sides to take politics out of the equation.

Pence is in charge of White House efforts in response to the outbreak. Saying he was leading “decisive action to protect the American people”, he told NBC: “And when you see voices on our side pushing back on outrageous and irresponsible rhetoric on the other side, I think that’s important, and I think it’s justified.”

That's why Mike Pence is in charge of both the response and the messaging about the response.  The Trump regime response to COVID-19 is "Blame the Democrats when people die, and take your rage, anger, and vitriol out on them."

But in red states especially, states that have already trashed science, health, and preparedness program, the misinformation from the Trump regime is only compounding the problem, places like Anniston, Alabama, population 22,000.

Not long before local leaders decided, in the words of one of them, that federal health officials “didn’t know what they were doing" with their plan to quarantine novel coronavirus patients in town, a doctor here set out in a biohazard suit to stage a one-man protest along the highway with a sign. “The virus has arrived. Are you ready?” it asked.

The town didn’t think it was. Residents already were unnerved by strange stories posted on Facebook and shared via text messages about helicopters secretly flying in sick patients, that the virus was grown in a Chinese lab, that someone — either the media or the government — was lying to them about what was really going on.
The quarantine plan hastily hatched by the federal Department of Health and Human Services was soon scrapped by President Trump, who faced intense pushback from Alabama’s congressional delegation, led by Republican Rep. Mike D. Rogers. Americans evacuated after falling ill aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan would not be coming to Anniston, a town of 22,000 people in north-central Alabama, after all. They would remain in the same Texas and California sites where they were taken after leaving the cruise ship.

What happened here over the past week illustrates how poor planning by federal health officials and a rumor mill fueled by social media, polarized politics and a lack of clear communication can undermine public confidence in the response to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease named covid-19. The rapidly spreading virus has rattled economies worldwide in recent weeks and caused the deaths of more than 2,900 people, mostly in China.

The panic and problems that burned through Anniston also provided a preview of what could unfold in other communities, as the spread of the virus is considered by health experts to be inevitable.

“Their little plan sketched out in D.C. was not thought out,” said Michael Barton, director of the emergency management agency in Calhoun County, where Anniston is located.

As local officials learned more, Barton added, “We knew then —”

“We were in trouble,” said Tim Hodges, chairman of the county commission.

In Anniston, local leaders were stunned to discover serious problems with the federal government’s plan for dealing with patients infected with the virus — starting with how the patients would get to Alabama, according to interviews with county and city officials, along with business leaders who dealt with the federal response.

“I was shocked,” Anniston Mayor Jack Draper said. “I was shocked by the lack of planning. I was shocked by the manner in which it was presented to us.”

Be very, very scared of what the Trump regime will do once things start going very badly for this country in the weeks and months ahead.  Should we survive this intact, it will be in spite of Trump, not because of him.

But if you thought the violations of the Constitution were bad before, just wait until we're deep into a pandemic scenario.  Places like Anniston aren't going to be given a choice about where to house the sick.  The Trump regime will use the full force of the federal government against the very people who voted for them and won't hesitate to use it against the rest of us.

After all, Trump's inevitable autocratic and dictatorial response will be justified because the Democrats said bad things about him.

All of us will suffer, sick or not.

StupidiNews!

• South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has suspended his 2020 presidential campaign ahead of Super Tuesday tomorrow.
• A federal judge has ruled that immigration head Ken Cuccinelli was improperly installed by the Trump regime and that everything he has authorized is null and void.
• COVID-19 has now been confirmed in Egypt according the country's health ministry, two cases have been detected as the global spread of the virus continues.
• French President Emmanuel Macron's decision to force state pension reform through without a vote is causing calls for a vote of no confidence by the French parliament.
• Tens of thousands of comments are against a proposed Trump FAA rule that would require nearly all drones to broadcast their positions.

Last Call For Social Engineering

Tired of still having Twitter run by fascism-curious glibertarian douchebag Jack Dorsey, the Trump regime's GOP lackies are considering buying the company out and replacing Dorsey with somebody more friendly to the Trump proaganda machine.

Activist investor Elliott Management Corp. has taken a sizable stake in Twitter Inc. and plans to push for changes at the social media company, including replacing Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey, according to people familiar with the matter.

The New York-based firm has nominated four directors to Twitter’s board, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public.

There are only three seats becoming available at this year’s annual meeting but Elliott wanted to ensure that it nominated enough directors to fill all three seats or any other vacancies that may arise, the people said. The exact size of Elliott’s stake couldn’t be determined.

Elliott approached San Francisco-based Twitter about its concerns privately and has had constructive discussions with it since then, the people said.

Representatives for Elliott and Twitter declined to comment.

Sounds pretty anodyne there, but the reality is Elliott Management is owned by GOP billionaire donor Paul Singer, who was a Never Trumper until converted to the faithful last year.

Republican megadonor and hedge fund executive Paul Singer went into attack mode at a dinner honoring Education Secretary Betsy DeVos this week, targeting what he described as a rising threat of socialism within the Democratic Party.

The comments offered a glimpse into the mentality of a powerful GOP donor as he decides how he’s going to contribute to the 2020 election. Singer is a billionaire and the founder of Elliott Management.

Singer, speaking at the Manhattan Institute’s Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner on Wednesday, warned conservatives that policies pushed by Democratic presidential candidates pose a risk to U.S. economic growth under President Donald Trump.

“Yet despite all this, socialism is on the march again,” said Singer, who is chairman of the conservative think tank.

“They call it socialism, but it is more accurately described as left-wing statism lubricated by showers of free stuff promised by politicians who believe that money comes from a printing press rather than the productive efforts of businesspeople and workers,” he added.
An Elliott Management spokesman confirmed the remarks to CNBC and declined to comment further.

Singer also attacked the Green New Deal, a sweeping set of policies aimed at creating jobs and curtailing the threats of climate change.

“The so-called Green New Deal, the latest progressive attempt to engineer our way of life and vest power in the administrative state, is now the standard of nearly every Democratic candidate for president,” he said. “Setting out to sell this utopia to the American people isn’t merely irresponsible political rhetoric, it is outright deceit.”

Singer rarely discusses his political ideologies in public but appears to have been more comfortable in front of a group people largely associated with his organization. During the 2016 presidential election, Singer was a vocal opponent of then-candidate Trump and, a year earlier, was the financier of a conservative website that hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on the business executive-turned-Republican nominee for president.

People forget that the Steele Dossier was originally financed as Republican Never Trumper oppo research against The Donald.  Singer was the man who bankrolled it.  Now, Singer is making a move to oust Twitter's CEO and take over just before the 2020 election.

This is not by accident.

You can't trust anyone these days, it seems.

 

Meanwhile, Back In The House...

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have gone silent as Trump has rampaged across the executive branch claiming heads, and it doesn't look like they're going to do much of anything heading into election season.

The change in posture is an acknowledgment, House Democrats say, that in a world where Senate Republicans are bear-hugging Trump, and the courts are declining to operate at the speed of the congressional calendar, there are very few options that a single chamber of Congress can pursue short of withholding funds for agencies like the Justice Department — particularly when impeachment is no longer in their election-year arsenal.
"There is nothing that Donald Trump can do that would cause [Senate Republicans] to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors," said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who serves on the House Judiciary Committee. "So that has caused everybody in the House to take a deep breath and figure out what our next steps are."

"That leaves us legislative and political answers," Raskin added.

In other words, the end of the impeachment process has become the advent of a new, narrower focus on what Democrats say is a crucial theme revealed by their efforts: Trump's indifference to, or even encouragement of, foreign interference in the 2020 election. It's a throughline, they say, of Trump's behavior toward Russia, his treatment of Ukraine and his public comments on whether he would reject foreign help in future elections.

Now, rather than revive the smashmouth impeachment approach that they adopted throughout the fall and winter, Democrats say they intend to use their investigative weapons to highlight these election security themes and keep pressure on Republicans who chided Trump for his behavior in Ukraine but ultimately acquitted him for it.

"I would argue that impeachment actually served its purpose. It highlighted for people what we're dealing with here and what the stakes are," said Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.). "I would say it set the table for people to take a good hard look at what I think impeachment helped to remind us of, what a threat that represents, and conveniently for us his behavior subsequently has only made our case for us."

Democrats are pondering whether to pass new election security measures, putting them in the Senate's court as the primary gets underway. And they're planning to drive a consistent election security message as the nation's focus shifts toward the November election.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced a March 10 intelligence community briefing for lawmakers, and she's slammed Trump for what she says is politicizing the intelligence community, in part by installing Richard Grenell, a loyalist ambassador, as the acting director of national intelligence. News reports that Russia is already interfering in the upcoming election have returned the issue to the fore.

Separately, Democrats on Friday dusted off their Trump oversight tools and took the first steps to confront the president's campaign of post-acquittal retribution. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) requested testimony from a slew of high-profile Justice Department officials about political interference in criminal cases — including four career prosecutors who quit the case of longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone earlier this month after the president intervened in his sentencing. 

Here's what's going to happen:  The House will pass another round of election security measures and the Senate will ignore them.  Jerry Nadler will subpoena Justice Department prosecutors involved in Trump crony cases and the White House will block testimony claiming executive privilege of people who have never worked in the actual White House.  Trump has basically fired everyone who testified in the impeachment hearings.  Nobody else will voluntarily come forward.  The courts will offer no relief.

Democrats will fret and do nothing.

They especially won't turn to inherent contempt of executive officers.

Maybe things will heat up after July and the Democratic nominee is official, but I doubt it.

And remember, the COVID-19 virus means all future bets are off.

Sunday Long Read: Viral Information

James Hamblin at the Atlantic gives us this week's Sunday Long Read on COVID-19, the Wuhan coronavirus, and what an epidemic scenario in the US would really mean.

The Harvard epidemiology professor Marc Lipsitch is exacting in his diction, even for an epidemiologist. Twice in our conversation he started to say something, then paused and said, “Actually, let me start again.” So it’s striking when one of the points he wanted to get exactly right was this: “I think the likely outcome is that it will ultimately not be containable.”

Containment is the first step in responding to any outbreak. In the case of COVID-19, the possibility (however implausible) of preventing a pandemic seemed to play out in a matter of days. Starting in January, China began cordoning off progressively larger areas, radiating outward from the city of Wuhan and eventually encapsulating some 100 million people. People were barred from leaving home, and lectured by drones if they were caught outside. Nonetheless, the virus has now been found in 24 countries.

Despite the apparent ineffectiveness of such measures—relative to their inordinate social and economic cost, at least—the crackdown continues to escalate. Under political pressure to “stop” the virus, last Thursday the Chinese government announced that officials in Hubei province would be going door-to-door, testing people for fevers and looking for signs of illness, then sending all potential cases to quarantine camps. But even with the ideal containment, the virus’s spread may have been inevitable. Testing people who are already extremely sick is an imperfect strategy if people can spread the virus without even feeling bad enough to stay home from work.

Lipsitch predicts that within the coming year, some 40 to 70 percent of people around the world will be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19. But, he clarifies emphatically, this does not mean that all will have severe illnesses. “It’s likely that many will have mild disease, or may be asymptomatic,” he said. As with influenza, which is often life-threatening to people with chronic health conditions and of older age, most cases pass without medical care. (Overall, about 14 percent of people with influenza have no symptoms.)

Lipsitch is far from alone in his belief that this virus will continue to spread widely. The emerging consensus among epidemiologists is that the most likely outcome of this outbreak is a new seasonal disease—a fifth “endemic” coronavirus. With the other four, people are not known to develop long-lasting immunity. If this one follows suit, and if the disease continues to be as severe as it is now, “cold and flu season” could become “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.”

At this point, it is not even known how many people are infected. As of Sunday, there have been 35 confirmed cases in the U.S., according to the World Health Organization. But Lipsitch’s “very, very rough” estimate when we spoke a week ago (banking on “multiple assumptions piled on top of each other,” he said) was that 100 or 200 people in the U.S. were infected. That’s all it would take to seed the disease widely. The rate of spread would depend on how contagious the disease is in milder cases. On Friday, Chinese scientists reported in the medical journal JAMA an apparent case of asymptomatic spread of the virus, from a patient with a normal chest CT scan. The researchers concluded with stolid understatement that if this finding is not a bizarre abnormality, “the prevention of COVID-19 infection would prove challenging.”

Even if Lipsitch’s estimates were off by orders of magnitude, they wouldn’t likely change the overall prognosis. “Two hundred cases of a flu-like illness during flu season—when you’re not testing for it—is very hard to detect,” Lipsitch said. “But it would be really good to know sooner rather than later whether that’s correct, or whether we’ve miscalculated something. The only way to do that is by testing.”

Originally, doctors in the U.S. were advised not to test people unless they had been to China or had contact with someone who had been diagnosed with the disease. Within the past two weeks, the CDC said it would start screening people in five U.S. cities, in an effort to give some idea of how many cases are actually out there. But tests are still not widely available. As of Friday, the Association of Public Health Laboratories said that only California, Nebraska, and Illinois had the capacity to test people for the virus.

With so little data, prognosis is difficult. But the concern that this virus is beyond containment—that it will be with us indefinitely—is nowhere more apparent than in the global race to find a vaccine, one of the clearest strategies for saving lives in the years to come.

The new normal is that COVID-19 hits the global population like a truck, and then becomes one of the many flu-like strains that are with us year after year, mutating, then reappearing. If Lipsitch's numbers are right, US fatalities could well be into the hundreds of thousands, and that's not counting the follow-on fatalities from complications from the illness, a hospital system overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients, and a just-in-time delivery system of supplies and basic staples when people suddenly find themselves unable to get things they need.

I'm not trying to panic people.  I want people to get good information, because lord knows there's a lot of bad information already out there.  But people need to take this seriously.