Sunday Long Read: Stranger Than Fiction

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from Vulture, where multiple TV writers and showrunner legends ranging from Norman Lear to Tina Fey to Christopher Lloyd give us the plots for how their characters would handle the coronavirus and lockdown.

Archie Bunker would prefer you stand six miles from him. Sawyer from Lost will probably face criminal charges for hoarding and reselling precious items. Elmo is playing musical chairs with his parents. The coronavirus hasn’t seeped into the shows we’re all bingeing to pass the time — and it won’t for a while since the industry is shut down — but how would TV’s most beloved characters navigate social distancing in these dark days? 

We posed that question to dozens of showrunners, creators, and writers; 37 of them responded with scene scripts, monologues, and episode outlines, including a hilarious Skype session between Frasier and Niles, a classic locker-room speech from Coach Taylor, an excerpt from Selina Meyer’s biography, and a vlog for Rogelio De La Vega’s biggest fans. We even learned what caused the whole pandemic — you can blame it on Veep’s Mike McLintock.

Some of these are really hysterical, some down-to-earth, and some are just weird.  But it's nice change of pace from the usual fare these days, and it's good for what ails you.

Last Call For Labour Pains

Screaming anti-Semite and racist Jeremy Corbyn is finally out as UK Labour Party leader, and his reign entirely made it possible for Boris Johnson to take over in a massive Tory uprising that made Brexit a foregone conclusion and could keep conservatives in power for a very long time.  Now Corbyn's replacement, Sir Keir Starmer, is trying to pick up the pieces of the British Left.

After a decade in the political wasteland, members of Britain’s main opposition Labour Party have chosen a moderate, un-flashy lawyer as their new leader. Their hope is that turning the page on the socialist radical Jeremy Corbyn, who was resoundingly rejected by voters last year, will see them re-take power.

Keir Starmer, 57, offers dry competence and seriousness after a turbulent five years under the firebrand Corbyn. At a time when the U.K. is grappling with the global coronavirus crisis and its own exit from the European Union, a steady hand could prove popular.

“Maybe being boringly competent is a magical thing -- because we haven’t got many boringly competent politicians at the moment, particularly in government,” said Steven Fielding, a professor at Nottingham University and historian of the Labour party. “People just flock to him like a safety raft from a sinking ship.”

Starmer faces one urgent decision before he embarks on his long-term mission. First he must decide how far he should support Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s strategy for countering the pandemic and how stridently he should speak out against the government’s mistakes. There has been speculation that he could even join a government of national unity to see the country through the crisis, as happened in World War II.

In the years ahead, Starmer’s defining task will be to revive a battered opposition party, broken by its worst election defeat in 80 years, and then persuade Britain’s 47 million voters that he is the prime minister the country needs to put itself back together. 

Starmer was born in 1962 in south London to a nurse and a toolmaker. He was the first member of his family to go to an academically selective grammar school. After studying at the universities of Leeds and Oxford he began the 30-year campaigning career in human rights law that would set him up for front-line politics. 

He represented peace activists and environmental campaigners, and led a legal challenge against the sinking of an oil rig. 

Gavin Millar, a top lawyer who interviewed the young Starmer for a junior position in the late 80s, remembers him as “very radical” with strong views about the law. In a legal world of high intellects, Starmer’s first-rate brain stood out, but so too did his commitment to the protesters and activists fighting the powerful during Margaret Thatcher’s decade of Tory rule. 

The two shared an office, where Starmer, who loved indie-pop bands such as The Smiths, was known for working long hours. “I got a lot of two-in-the-morning emails from him,” Millar said.

Competency. What a concept.

Wish we had it here.

The Worst-Case Scenario, Con't

The Pentagon had a detailed plan for a novel coronavirus global pandemic scenario back in the last days of the Obama administration, because the US military operates in dozens of countries around the globe.  They predicted unprepared countries would have shortages of equipment and hospital beds, disrupted recessionary economies, restrictions on freedom of movement, and a populace that could require military personnel to maintain order.

They didn't so much as say the US would be one of those countries, but they did put forth the possibility that the US would be overwhelmed logistically and economically.  You know, if the country was say, led by a adderall-addicted malignant narcissist con man of a reality TV game show host.

Despite President Trump’s repeated assertions that the Covid-19 epidemic was “unforeseen” and “came out of nowhere,” the Pentagon was well aware of not just the threat of a novel influenza, but even anticipated the consequent scarcity of ventilators, face masks, and hospital beds, according to a 2017 Pentagon plan obtained by The Nation. 

“The most likely and significant threat is a novel respiratory disease, particularly a novel influenza disease,” the military plan states. Covid-19 is a respiratory disease caused by the novel (meaning new to humans) coronavirus. The document specifically references coronavirus on several occasions, in one instance saying, “Coronavirus infections [are] common around the world.” 

The plan represents an update to an earlier Department of Defense pandemic influenza response plan, noting that it “incorporates insights from several recent outbreaks including…2012 Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus.” 

Titled “USNORTHCOM Branch Plan 3560: Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Disease Response,” the draft plan is marked for official use only and dated January 6, 2017. The plan was provided to The Nation by a Pentagon official who requested anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. 

Denis Kaufman, who served as head of the Infectious Diseases and Countermeasures Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2014 to 2017, stressed that US intelligence had been well-aware of the dangers of coronaviruses for years. (Kaufman retired from his decades-long career in the military in December of 2017.) 

“The Intelligence Community has warned about the threat from highly pathogenic influenza viruses for two decades at least. They have warned about coronaviruses for at least five years,” Kaufman explained in an interview. 

“There have been recent pronouncements that the coronavirus pandemic represents an intelligence failure…. it’s letting people who ignored intelligence warnings off the hook.” 

In addition to anticipating the coronavirus pandemic, the military plan predicted with uncanny accuracy many of the medical supply shortages that it now appears will soon cause untold deaths. 

The plan states: “Competition for, and scarcity of resources will include…non-pharmaceutical MCM [Medical Countermeasures] (e.g., ventilators, devices, personal protective equipment such as face masks and gloves), medical equipment, and logistical support. This will have a significant impact on the availability of the global workforce.”

They knew.  Trump ignored them.

And now thousands, perhaps millions will die as a direct result.

A Race Against The Virus

On top of everything else going on right now, there's stark evidence that COVID-19 is disproportionately killing African-Americans because we're more likely to be "essential employees" like nurses, delivery drivers, warehouse workers, maintenance and cleaning staff, and far less likely to be in a position to work from home, to have health resources or any kind, or to practice social distancing, and that the virus has a much higher mortality rate among us to boot.

The coronavirus entered Milwaukee from a white, affluent suburb. Then it took root in the city’s black community and erupted. 

As public health officials watched cases rise in March, too many in the community shrugged off warnings. Rumors and conspiracy theories proliferated on social media, pushing the bogus idea that black people are somehow immune to the disease. And much of the initial focus was on international travel, so those who knew no one returning from Asia or Europe were quick to dismiss the risk. 

Then, when the shelter-in-place order came, there was a natural pushback among those who recalled other painful government restrictions — including segregation and mass incarceration — on where black people could walk and gather. 

“We’re like, ‘We have to wake people up,’” said Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik. 

As the disease spread at a higher rate in the black community, it made an even deeper cut. Environmental, economic and political factors have compounded for generations, putting black people at higher risk of chronic conditions that leave lungs weak and immune systems vulnerable: asthma, heart disease, hypertension and diabetes. In Milwaukee, simply being black means your life expectancy is 14 years shorter, on average, than someone white. 

As of Friday morning, African Americans made up almost half of Milwaukee County’s 945 cases and 81% of its 27 deaths in a county whose population is 26% black. Milwaukee is one of the few places in the United States that is tracking the racial breakdown of people who have been infected by the novel coronavirus, offering a glimpse at the disproportionate destruction it is inflicting on black communities nationwide. 

In Michigan, where the state’s population is 14% black, African Americans made up 35% of cases and 40% of deaths as of Friday morning. Detroit, where a majority of residents are black, has emerged as a hot spot with a high death toll. As has New Orleans. Louisiana has not published case breakdowns by race, but 40% of the state’s deaths have happened in Orleans Parish, where the majority of residents are black.
Illinois and North Carolina are two of the few areas publishing statistics on COVID-19 cases by race, and their data shows a disproportionate number of African Americans were infected.

“It will be unimaginable pretty soon,” said Dr. Celia J. Maxwell, an infectious disease physician and associate dean at Howard University College of Medicine, a school and hospital in Washington dedicated to the education and care of the black community. “And anything that comes around is going to be worse in our patients. Period. Many of our patients have so many problems, but this is kind of like the nail in the coffin.”

The poorest black neighborhoods, with the highest population density, with the least public health resources and most chronic health problems, dependent on mass transit or stuck in rural food deserts where we have to travel miles to get groceries, absolutely results in African-Americans being the most vulnerable to the virus and having the fewest options for dealing with travel restrictions and business and school closures.

There's little doubt in my mind that we'll look back on this and see that black neighborhoods had a mortality rate several times higher than the general US public, it's only a factor of what the multiplier will end up being.

Like every other instance of systemic racism in America, this one will be fatal.

Last Call For Red Dead Eruption

We have a new winner in the "Worst Governor Who Will Kill Their Constituents" now that Florida's Ron DeSantis has finally issued a stay-at-home order: Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds is now the planet's leading pandemic authority, apparently.

While numerous governors have enacted stay-at-home orders shutting down nonessential businesses and ordering residents to shelter in their homes for all but necessary outings, one holdout is Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA). 

On Friday, Reynolds complained that the whole issue has become “divisive” — and lashed out at Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease expert on President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force, for saying that all states need such an order.

“I would say that maybe he doesn’t have all the information,” said Reynolds, according to the Associated Press’ Ryan Foley. 

Fauci has been a critical public voice for information amid the coronavirus pandemic, giving important advice for containing the infection and sometimes appearing at odds with the president.

Dr. Fauci was dropped from today's Trump Virus Funtime Hour at the last minute, mainly because he went on FOX this morning to dump cold water on using anti-malaria drugs for COVID-19.

Top infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci left the hosts of Fox & Friends disappointed and frustrated Friday when he threw cold water on their insistence that the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine is a game-changing cure for the coronavirus. 

Citing a recent poll showing that 37 percent of doctors around the world feel the drug is currently the most effective treatment of COVID-19, co-host Steve Doocy added that frequent Fox News guest Dr. Mehmet Oz recently touted a small Chinese study that found the drug had some efficacy in treating the virus.

Doocy went on to play a clip of Dr. Oz wondering whether Fauci was impressed with the results of that study. The Fox host asked the top physician to respond to the TV doctor.
“That was not a very robust study,” replied Fauci, a member of the White House coronavirus task force. He also pointed out that while there’s still a possibility of a “beneficial effect,” the scale and strength of the evidence is not “overwhelmingly strong.” 

“But getting back to what you said just a moment ago that ‘X percent’—I think you said 37 percent—of doctors feel that it’s beneficial. We don’t operate on how you feel. We operate on what evidence is, and data is,” he continued. “So although there is some suggestion with the study that was just mentioned by Dr. Oz—granted that there is a suggestion that there is a benefit there—I think we’ve got to be careful that we don’t make that majestic leap to assume that this is a knockout drug.”

We won't be seeing Dr. Fauci anytime soon, would be my guess.

I Want My Trump State TV, Con't

FOX News is lawyering up big time over possible lawsuits resulting from their COVID-19 "coverage".

Amid the mushrooming coronavirus crisis, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch are girding for a pandemic of public-interest lawsuits over misinformation and conspiracy theories dispensed by certain Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network personalities such as Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Trish Regan. 

According to a top Murdoch executive, the father-and-son media moguls are ready to go to war with potential plaintiffs such as the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics—aka WASHLITE—an activist non-profit that filed suit on Thursday against Rupert Murdoch, Fox News and other defendants. 

The 10-page complaint, first reported by The Times of San Diego and filed in the superior court of Washington state’s King County, seeks a judgment that the Murdoch-controlled outlets violated the state’s consumer protection laws by “falsely and deceptively disseminating ‘News’ via cable news contracts that the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19 was a ‘Hoax,’ and that the virus was otherwise not a danger to public health and safety.” 

The lawsuit, which seeks “nominal damages” and “reasonable attorneys’ fees,” demands an injunction to prevent Fox outlets from “otherwise interfering with or undermining the legitimate control measures imposed within the State of Washington for the limited time period under which the pandemic is brought under control and until the pandemic is brought under control.” 

The lawsuit doesn’t list specific examples of the alleged “campaign of deception spread by the Defendants”—who also include the AT&T and Comcast cable services—but WASHLITE plans to do so in a future court filing. 

The conservative outlet fired back—in a statement provided to The Daily Beast, and attributed to Lily Fu Claffee, Fox News Media’s general counsel—that WASHLITE’s lawsuit is “Wrong on the facts, frivolous on the law.” 

Claffee added: “We will defend vigorously and seek sanctions as appropriate.” 

WASHLITE board member Arthur West, a non-lawyer and former automobile mechanic who earns what he describes as a handsome living as a professional public-interest plaintiff, told The Daily Beast that he’s not impressed by Claffee’s vow to seek retribution: “We are not afraid of the big bad Fox.”

This will be nothing more than a nuisance for FOX News, but if they aren't careful, this is going to snowball into an avalanche of bad press.  I would expect Trump to have Bill Barr step in if things get too hairy for FOX, but we'll see.  Trump needs FOX as much as FOX needs Trump.

Kushner Goes Viral

The President's useless son-in-law Jared Kushner is now in charge of the federal government's "response" to COVID-19. I wish I was joking, that this was Saturday Night Live or an episode of Arrested Development, but sadly, this is our reality in 2020. Michelle Goldberg at the NY Times:

Even now, it’s hard to believe that someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”

Kushner has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians — have been failures.

Undeterred, he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.

The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in 2006.

Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.

His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”

Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.

Jared Kushner is the obsequious little troll that gets in-between the boss and the guys in the trenches, demanding that the little people give him "better metrics" before any additional help is coming.  He is cutting the public health experts out of the equation fully, and his "cost benefit analysis" means millions will be slaughtered in a corporate genocide the likes of which demands this man sitting in chains on national television, facing a furious nation.

JARED KUSHNER: "The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states stockpiles that they then use." pic.twitter.com/9Q7j8QBCMv

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 2, 2020

The experts are gone.  Fauci, Brix, they are now the sideshow.  Failson-in-law Number One is runing the show.  He'll find efficiencies.  Efficiencies like "It's not supposed to be the states' stockpiles that they then use."

You people are costing us more than it's worth to keep you alive.

Therefore we have to let a certain percentage of you go.  Good luck in your future endeavors.

Nuremberg trials are too good for these jackals.

StupidiNews!

• IRS officials tell House Democrats that direct payment checks for Americans might take until late August to finish printing millions of paper checks per week for those without direct deposit.
• The Trump Organization is requesting loan payments to creditor Deutsche Bank be delayed as COVID-19 concerns are shutting down Trump's resorts.
• The Trump regime is invoking the Defense Production Act to ramp up ventilator production, but it will takes weeks or months to retool manufacturing lines.
• Detroit, Hartford, Connecticut, and Indianapolis are all considered to be the next "hot spots" for COVID-19 outbreaks as the US death toll has now exceeded 6,000.
• Weather forecasters are predicting a busy Atlantic hurricane season with eight hurricanes and 16 named storms expected from June 1 through November 1.

Last Call For Captain, And Then Kneel

The US Naval aircraft carrier captain who pleaded with the Pentagon to evacuate his vessel, ravaged by a COVID-19 infection, has been relived of duty for speaking publicly.

The Navy on Thursday removed the captain of an aircraft carrier crippled by the coronavirus, two days after a blunt letter the officer wrote warning the service of the need to get more sailors off the vessel created a furor.

Navy Capt. Brett Crozier, the commanding officer of the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was relieved of command at the direction of acting Navy secretary Thomas Modly.

The Navy had become increasingly convinced that Crozier was involved in leaking the letter to the news media to force the service to address his concerns over the outbreak on his ship, a defense official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Modly said that Crozier showed “poor judgment” by sending the letter by email to 20 or 30 people. He did not directly accuse Crozier of leaking the letter but noted that it appeared in Crozier’s hometown newspaper.

“I could reach no other conclusion than that Capt. Crozier had allowed the complexity of his challenge with the covid breakout on his ship to overwhelm his ability to act professionally, when acting professionally was what was needed most at the time,” Modly said at the Pentagon. “We do and we should expect more from the commanding officers of our aircraft carriers.”

Modly added a few minutes later that he did not mean to insinuate that he knew Crozier leaked the letter and believed the captain “did what he thought was in the best interest of the safety and the well-being of his crew.”

But Modly said the letter, first reported by the San Francisco Chronicle on Tuesday, undermined more senior Navy leaders and could have emboldened adversaries of the United States in the Pacific region. Modly said that Crozier had been told that he could communicate directly with Modly’s office.

There's no doubt in my mind of two things:

One, Captain Crozier wrote that letter because he knew the Pentagon expected him to remain on his carrier with COVID-19 ripping his crew apart, and that he was not going to get help in time. 

Two, Captain Crozier sent that letter to multiple people, knowing it would be shared, knowing it would become public, knowing it would cost him his command and his career, in order to save his crew from the Trump regime who is willing to sacrifice millions of us to stay in power.

He did the right thing.  He should be a hero.  He sacrificed himself to save the people under his command.

That is something that the people currently running our government and our military have no intent on doing for any of us.  We are all statistics to them, and we will die in droves as a result.

Tales Of The Trump Depression

There's nothing else to call it but what it is: The Trump Depression.

More than 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits last week — a record — as political and public health leaders put the economy in a deep freeze, keeping people at home and trying to slow the spread of the deadly coronavirus.

The past two weeks have seen more people file for unemployed claims than during the first six months of the Great Recession, a sign of how rapid, deep and painful the economic shutdown has been on many American families who are struggling to pay rent and health insurance costs in the midst of a pandemic.

Job losses have skyrocketed as restaurants, hotels, gyms, and travel have shut down across the nation, but layoffs are also rising in manufacturing, warehousing and transportation, a sign of how widespread the pain of the coronavirus recession is.

In March, 10.4 million Americans lost their jobs and applied for government aid, according to the latest Labor Department data, which includes claims filed through March 28. Many economists say the real number of people out work is likely even higher, since a lot of newly unemployed Americans haven’t been able to fill out a claim yet.

The U.S. government has not released an official unemployment rate yet, but economists say it has likely jumped to about 10 percent and could easily hit the highest level since the Great Depression in the coming months.

It will only get worse in the weeks ahead.  The $1200 check Americans are going to get plus unemployment benefits is it.  There's no more help coming. Republicans are tired of it and refuse.

One week after the Senate unanimously passed a $2 trillion emergency relief bill aimed at limiting the financial trauma from the coronavirus pandemic, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said he would move slowly on considering any follow-up legislation and would ignore the latest efforts by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to jump-start talks.

McConnell’s sweeping dismissal of Pelosi’s urgent call for action underscored the uncertainty and fierce political warfare in Congress as the coronavirus outbreak shuts down much of the nation and throttles the economy, with little consensus on what should follow the biggest rescue package in U.S. history and lingering tensions from those negotiations between McConnell and Pelosi.

“She needs to stand down on the notion that we’re going to go along with taking advantage of the crisis to do things that are unrelated to the crisis,” McConnell said in an interview with The Washington Post, calling the speaker’s recent comments about a fourth round of virus-related legislation “premature.”

In response, Pelosi said she would carry on.

"We can't pay for it."  We could pay for $1.5 trillion in giveaways to corporations and the 1% though.  Imagine that.  Now we're in the opening stages of a global depression that will last years.

The small business loan program created by the CARES act?  It's going to be a disaster, because it was never meant to work.

Banks are warning that a $350 billion lending program for struggling small businesses won't be ready when it launches Friday because the Trump administration has failed to provide them with the necessary guidelines and set requirements for the loans that are unworkable.

The lenders complain that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin boxed them in with an unrealistic deadline and that the ground rules they've been given for the program, which is intended to deliver rapid aid to a huge number of ailing businesses, could delay the assistance for weeks or longer.

The banks, which will be responsible for processing loan applications and doling out money, are expecting millions of applications from businesses. Some fear a disaster that could dwarf the failed kickoff of the Obamacare enrollment web site in 2013.

“Banks are ready and willing to lend, but they need clear rules of the road and a streamlined process to be able to get funding into the hands of small business owners in the coming days,” said Greg Baer, president and CEO of the Bank Policy Institute, which represents the nation's biggest lenders.

Ten million out of work.  Millions more coming.  All will lose their health insurance.  And Trump won't open up the ACA so that millions can sign up for Obamacare, because Republican states are still in the middle of trying to have the Supreme Court throw the entire law out.

The Great Recession lasted as long as it did because Republicans dragged their feet on the stimulus bill to make sure sufficient time was available to transfer wealth to the top.  They did it again with the Trump Trillion Dollar Tax Scam in January 2018.

Americans have nothing to fall back on now.  The month ahead will be the most miserable in American history, and the Republicans responsible are going to find out that yes, the American people have their limits.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Trump regime absolutely knew a pandemic would kill hundreds of thousands and throw us into a depression, because the White House economic team drew up the scenario just seven months ago.

White House economists published a study last September that warned a pandemic disease could kill a half million Americans and devastate the economy.

It went unheeded inside the administration.

In late February and early March, as the coronavirus pandemic began to spread from China to the rest of the world, President Trump’s top economic advisers played down the threat the virus posed to the U.S. economy and public health.

“I don’t think corona is as big a threat as people make it out to be,” the acting chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Tomas Philipson, told reporters during a Feb. 18 briefing, on the same day that more than a dozen American cruise ship passengers who had contracted the virus were evacuated home. Public health threats did not typically hurt the economy, Mr. Philipson said. He suggested the virus would not be nearly as bad as a normal flu season.

The 2019 study warned otherwise — specifically urging Americans not to conflate the risks of a typical flu and a pandemic. The existence of that warning undermines administration officials’ contentions in recent weeks that no one could have seen the virus damaging the economy as it has. The study was requested by the National Security Council, according to two people familiar with the matter.

One of the authors of the study, who has since left the White House, now says it would make sense for the administration to effectively shut down most economic activity for two to eight months to slow the virus.

The coronavirus has spread rapidly through the United States and its economy, killing more than 3,000 Americans and plunging the country into what economists roundly predict will be a deep recession. A mounting number of governors and local officials have effectively shut down large amounts of economic activity and ordered people to stay in their homes in most situations, in hopes of slowing the spread and relieving pressure on hospitals.

Administration officials on Tuesday released public health models that have driven those decisions, including projections of when infection rates might peak nationally and in local areas. Government officials estimated Tuesday that the deadly pathogen could kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans.

The 100k-240k death toll is again, a best-case scenario dependent on all 50 states going into lockdown for months.  We're nowhere near that level of defensive preparation. The death toll will be much, much higher than these umbers, quite possibly into the millions.

Let me say this again.

A million Americans or more will die from this.

And what is Donald Trump doing?

He's going golfing this weekend.

The Secret Service this week signed a $45,000 contract to rent a fleet of golf carts in Northern Virginia, saying it needed them quickly to protect a “dignitary” in the town of Sterling, home to one of President Trump’s golf clubs, according to federal contracting data.

The contract was signed Monday and took effect Wednesday, records show. The Secret Service paid a West Virginia-registered company, Capitol Golf Cars and Utility Vehicles, to rent 30 carts until the end of September.

The new contract, which the Secret Service described as an “emergency order,” does not mention Trump or the golf club by name. But it closely mirrors past contracts signed by the Secret Service, for agents accompanying Trump to his golf clubs in New Jersey and Florida.

The White House declined to comment Wednesday. Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, did not respond to questions.

Meanwhile he's sending out campaign text messages demanding his followers jam the phones to make sure his "daily coronavirus task force briefings" are carried live, wall-to-wall, when our media is finally realizing they are nothing but daily campaign rallies that they are carrying for free.

There have been a lot more empty seats at President Trump’s daily press briefings — but no, news organizations aren’t boycotting the events in protest or attempting to silence him, despite what he suggested at a briefing earlier this week.

Instead, something else is afoot: Reporters are keeping their distance because they are concerned about the health risks at a time when many consider the president’s evening news conferences to have become increasingly less newsworthy.
The decision by such outlets as The Washington Post, New York Times and CNBC to stay away may be fundamentally changing the character of the briefings. With veteran White House reporters on the sidelines, the president has primarily engaged with TV journalists, including one from a small, far-right conservative news channel that rarely gets such a prominent stage.

The Post, Times and CNBC stopped sending reporters to the briefings — which have taken place in the Rose Garden as well as the more cramped confines of the West Wing’s James S. Brady Press Briefing Room — after two White House correspondents were suspected of having contracted covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. (One of the reporters, who hasn’t been publicly identified, tested negative on Tuesday, according to ABC News’s Jonathan Karl, the president of the White House Correspondents' Association).

Executive Editor Dean Baquet said the Times has withdrawn its reporters from the briefings, both because of health considerations and the uncertain newsworthiness. Reporters continue to monitor them on TV and report anything worthwhile.

“Nowadays, it seems they make little news,” he said. “We, of course, reserve the right to show them live [via Web streaming] if we believe they will actually make news. But that hasn’t happened in quite some time.”

It's finally beginning to sink in just how wretched this is going to be over the next month or two. We need tens of millions of tests, and tens of millions of masks, and for the folks on the front lines we need tens of millions of sets of personal protective equipment (PPE).  And the ventilators we do have?  Broken, of course.

President Trump has repeatedly assured Americans that the federal government is holding 10,000 ventilators in reserve to ship to the hardest-hit hospitals around the nation as they struggle to keep the most critically ill patients alive.

But what federal officials have neglected to mention is that an additional 2,109 lifesaving devices are unavailable after the contract to maintain the government’s stockpile lapsed late last summer, and a contracting dispute meant that a new firm did not begin its work until late January. By then, the coronavirus crisis was already underway.

The revelation came in response to inquiries to the Department of Health and Human Services after state officials reported that some of the ventilators they received were not operational, stoking speculation that the administration had not kept up with the task of maintaining the stockpile.

In fact, the contract with a company that was maintaining the machines expired at the end of last summer, and a contract protest delayed handing the job to Agiliti, a Minneapolis-based provider of medical equipment services and maintenance. Agiliti was not given the $38 million task until late January, when the scope of the global coronavirus crisis was first becoming clear.
It is not known whether problems with the ventilators predated the contract lapse, but maintenance of the machines did halt. That delay may become a potentially deadly lapse.

“We were given a stop-work order before we’d even started,” said Tom Leonard, the chief executive of Agiliti, which had won the contract to service the ventilators in the stockpile. “Between the time of the original and the time of this contract award, I don’t know who was responsible or if anybody was responsible for those devices. But it was not us.”

Mr. Leonard said confidentiality agreements with the government over the stockpile prohibited him from giving specific figures on the number of ventilators the company was now working on.

Thousands, maybe more are broken.  Thousands, maybe more lives will be lost as a result. We are nowhere, nowhere close to being able to handle the next month.  It will be death like the world hasn't seen in decades.  And the bearers of the truth?  They are already paying for it.

Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-diseases expert and the face of the U.S. response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, is facing growing threats to his personal safety, prompting the government to step up his security, according to people familiar with the matter.
The concerns include threats as well as unwelcome communications from fervent admirers, according to people with knowledge of deliberations inside the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice.

Fauci, 79, is the most outspoken member of the administration in favor of sweeping public health guidelines and is among the few officials willing to correct President Trump’s misstatements. Along with Deborah Birx, the coordinator for the White House’s task force, Fauci has encouraged the president to extend the timeline for social-distancing guidelines, presenting him with grim models about the possible toll of the pandemic.

“Now is the time, whenever you’re having an effect, not to take your foot off the accelerator and on the brake, but to just press it down on the accelerator,” he said Tuesday as the White House’s task force made some of those models public, warning of 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the United States.

The exact nature of the threats against him was not clear. Greater exposure has led to more praise for the doctor but also more criticism.

Fauci has become a public target for some right-wing commentators and bloggers, who exercise influence over parts of the president’s base. As they press for the president to ease restrictions to reinvigorate economic activity, some of these figures have assailed Fauci and questioned his expertise.

Last month, an article depicting him as an agent of the “deep state” gained nearly 25,000 interactions on Facebook — meaning likes, comments and shares — as it was posted to large pro-Trump groups with titles such as “Trump Strong” and “Tampa Bay Trump Club.”

Of course the nutjobs are coming for Dr. Fauci.  He made Dear Leader look bad, and for that, he must pay!  And as for the Democratic governors?  They get nothing.  The tests and masks are going to red states that are salvageable in order to save Trump's base.

As Abbott Laboratories began shipping its new rapid-response tests across the country Wednesday, a new flash point emerged in the nation’s handling of the pandemic: where to deploy the covid-19 diagnostics that could be one of the most effective tools in combating the outbreak.

Some White House officials want to ship many of the tests, which were approved Friday and can deliver results in five to 13 minutes, to areas where there are fewer cases, such as rural states and parts of the South. But officials in hard-hit areas and some public health experts favor directing them to the outbreak’s current hotspots, arguing that delays in test readings have sidelined many first responders and health-care workers and made it harder to isolate the most contagious patients.
During a Tuesday meeting of the White House coronavirus task force in the Situation Room, Vice President Pence and other officials discussed diverting new tests to areas where there are relatively few cases, according to two individuals familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

They said the administration needs “to figure out the spread in places where we don’t quite understand it now,” according to one of the individuals present. The final consensus seemed to be, “Let’s send it to the South and low density areas.”

The lag in delivering test results is taking a toll on communities across the country, depriving them of workers who can respond to medical emergencies and sowing uncertainty among hospital officials deciding what precautions to take. The competition for machines is so intense that governors and mayors have begun personally calling Abbott executives to negotiate orders.

Everyone, please stay safe, please follow your local orders,  please practice social distancing, please please please be smart about this. The better we are about things now, the easier it will be to recover from this nightmare.

If we can recover.  I have my doubts.

StupidiNews!

• The FDA is ordering that heartburn medication Zantac be pulled from the market immediately after finding the drug can be carcinogenic of stored for long periods of time.
• The death toll from COVID-19 has topped 30,000 in Europe as EU officials say the pandemic is the worst event on the continent since WWII.
• Donald Trump says he expects a Russia-Saudi oil deal "soon" in order to reinflate the oil market as Trump plans to meet with the nation's oil company CEOs at the White House on Friday.
• The Pentagon says it will be setting aside 100,000 body bags for civilian use in field hospitals as the US death toll from COVID-19 is expected to continue to rise exponentially.
• Frontier Communication is expected to file for bankruptcy imminently, the internet service provider says failure to invest in fiber optic internet will mean the loss of millions of customers.

Last Call For Climate Of Destruction, Con't

Never let that crisis go to waste.

The Trump administration rolled back ambitious Obama-era vehicle mileage standards Tuesday, raising the ceiling on damaging fossil fuel emissions for years to come and gutting one of the United States’ biggest efforts against climate change. 

The Trump administration released a final rule Tuesday on mileage standards through 2026. The change — after two years of Trump threatening and fighting states and a faction of automakers that opposed the move — waters down a tough Obama mileage standard that would have encouraged automakers to ramp up production of electric vehicles and more fuel-efficient gas and diesel vehicles.

“We are delivering on President Trump’s promise to correct the current fuel economy and greenhouse gas emissions standards,” Andrew Wheeler, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a statement Tuesday marking the release. 

He said the final rule “puts in place a sensible” national program that “strikes the right regulatory balance that protects our environment, and sets reasonable targets for the auto industry. This rule supports our economy, and the safety of American families.” 

Opponents contend the change — gutting his predecessor’s legacy effort against climate-changing fossil fuel emissions — appears driven by Trump’s push to undo regulatory initiatives of former President Barack Obama and say even the administration has had difficulty pointing to the kind of specific, demonstrable benefits to drivers, public health and safety or the economy that normally accompany standards changes. 

The Trump administration says the looser mileage standards will allow consumers to keep buying the less fuel-efficient SUVs that U.S. drivers have favored for years. Opponents say it will kill several hundred more Americans a year through dirtier air, compared to the Obama standards. 

Even “given the catastrophe they’re in with the coronavirus, they’re pursuing a policy that’s going to hurt public health and kill people,” said Chet France, a former 39-year veteran of the EPA, where he served as a senior official over emissions and mileage standards.

The EPA mileage rollback is just the first blow. COVID-19 is already being used as the excuse to suspend enforcement of EPA regulations on clear water and air, and to suspend FDA food safety inspections.  These regulations will never be reinstated under Trump.  In fact, the Trump regime will say that industries have proven they can police themselves, and they will, right down to hundreds of thousands of Americans getting sick every year because of health violations.

And all this happening while COVID-19 is going on.

Rent's Due And The Devil's, Too

It's April 1.  Rent's due.  And millions of Americans don't have it.

New York hair stylist Vanessa Karim has not worked since March 21, when the state closed all salons to slow the spread of the coronavirus. She only has enough cash on hand to cover half of her $1,400 April rent.
“It all feels like a bad dream,” said Karim, 36, who planned to ask her landlord if he would be willing to accept a partial payment. “Every day I’m like, ‘Is this really happening?’ I’m trying not to stress out.”

As the pandemic wreaks havoc on the U.S. economy and transforms Americans’ daily lives, the start of April brings a moment of reckoning for millions: rent checks are due.

Many Americans have already lost their jobs – last week’s national unemployment claims exceeded 3 million, shattering previous records – and huge swaths of the country have essentially shut down, with more than half of U.S. states now under some version of a stay-at-home order to curb the disease’s spread.
One third of the nation’s 328 million residents live in rental homes, according to U.S. Census data. In New York City, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, the proportion of those who rent is much higher.

Some states have instituted a moratorium on residential evictions. Housing advocates, however, have called for more dramatic action, including putting rent payments on hold altogether until the economy can restart.

Alfa Cristina Morales, 21, lost her job as a line cook at an Oakland, California, coffee shop, along with her health insurance, three weeks ago.

Now she has been forced to take the money she had saved for a U.S. citizenship application and use it to pay bills, including her April rent. She is not sure how she and her 2-year-old son will make it through May. She has applied for unemployment benefits, which could take weeks to arrive.

“We’re worried that it won’t be enough,” she said.

For millions of Americans, it won't be enough. Moratoriums on evictions won't be enough either, because landlords in nearly every state will still be able to initiate eviction procedures if there's cause. Landlords will absolutely pursue "material violations" of leases.  In Kentucky that means you get evicted after 14 days instead of the 7 for non-payment. Eviction still requires a court order, but it's not like a tenant is going to have the money to fight it.

So yeah, if a landlord decides to boot you for non-payment, you're still getting kicked out onto the street during a pandemic.

And it's going to happen to millions.

StupidiNews!

• GOP Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina has officially resigned from the House to begin his job as White House chief of staff, Trump's fifth in four years.
• The Trump regime is offering to relax sanctions on Venezuela if the country ousts President Nicolas Maduro and forms a transitional government that excludes opposition leader Juan Guaido.
• The captain of the USS Teddy Roosevelt is begging the Pentagon for COVID-19 help in a rare public letter as the naval aircraft carrier has dozens of cases of the virus among a crew of 4,000.
• California and Texas are joining New York in releasing non-violent offenders from jails as COVID-19 threatens to turn prisons into breeding grounds for the virus.
• The FDA has granted emergency approval for chloroquine to treat COVID-19, despite limited supply, a need for the drug to treat lupus sufferers, and no real evidence the drug is effective.