Egghead Week: Should Have Checked First

The headline:

 "Prominent Virginia pastor who said ‘God is larger than this dreaded virus’ dies of covid-19"

My response:

God is in fact larger than this dreaded virus, but God also says "Don't be an idiot."

Egghead Week: Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Enraged by Monday's announcement of several state governors banding together on both coasts, to form regional compacts to pool resources to fight COVID-19, Donald Trump basically declared himself dictator.

President Donald Trump, hours after governors on both coasts announced regional plans for reopening their states, asserted "total authority" over decisions about when and how to emerge after coronavirus shutdowns. 

“When somebody’s president of the United States, the authority is total," Trump said at a press briefing Monday when asked about the governors' plans. "And that’s the way it’s got to to be. It's total. It’s total. And the governors know that."

"You have a couple bands of Democratic governors, but they will agree to it," Trump continued about the governors, who also include Republican Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. "They will agree to it. But the authority of the president of the United States, having to do with the subject we’re talking about, is total.”

It's not, of course.  We specifically have a Constitution that ensures the opposite.

Our media is beginning to remember that.

I hope that every reporter continues asking him questions like this. @PaulaReidCBS is right—no one who actually cares about the lives he is costing with his willful incompetence wants to hear about his petty rivalries right now.

(And he lied about Biden.) pic.twitter.com/fbjDzsnlRd

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) April 13, 2020

What Trump says isn't true, and some things he can't make true.

Not without a fight, at least.

But a fight is exactly what the ghouls on the right been hoping for, and as the country continues to spiral into chaos, they see the opportunity to light the fuse on the biggest fight of them all.

There are now numerous groups weighing in with different views about what Trump should do. For example, Mnuchin said the 100 business groups would be separated into different groups based on their industry. The conservative groups, meanwhile, are pushing for the White House and GOP lawmakers to push back against health professionals who have urged more caution.

The outside effort from conservative groups is expected to be led by Stephen Moore, a conservative at the Heritage Foundation who is close with White House economic officials; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots; Adam Brandon, president of FreedomWorks, a conservative advocacy organization; and Lisa Nelson, chief executive of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative organization with ties to the Koch brothers, according to the three people, who were granted anonymity to reveal details of an effort that had not been publicly revealed.

“There’s economic risks in both directions,” Mnuchin said, based on what Trump ultimately decides to do. A reporter asked Trump if he would order the economy to reopen by May 1, and Trump said he would give an answer to that question soon.

Mnuchin said his advice to the president was that the economy should reopen “as soon as it’s ready to open and based upon the medical professionals.”

Part of the impetus for the conservative group effort is political. Many conservatives, who had long counted on a roaring economy to lift the GOP in November, are increasingly uneasy about the party’s chances if businesses remain shuttered.

“Obviously, the sooner we get the economy going and back up, the better it’s going to be for conservatives and Republicans in this election year,” veteran tea-party organizer Richard Viguerie said in an interview. “A lot of Republicans and conservatives feel there might be an overreaction to all of this. We’re all anxious to get back. Conservatives feel the government has overreacted, and it’s got to end.”

Multiple other leading conservative groups are expected to join the effort. The coalition started lobbying Republican lawmakers last week and also is working to influence the White House’s thinking.

The conservative mobilization to reopen the economy comes at a pivotal moment in the nation’s fight against the pandemic, as the president and senior administration officials publicly suggest economic life could be largely returned to normal next month. Their push has faced resistance from public health experts, who warn of potentially disastrous consequences should Americans resume daily routines without a clear national plan for doing so safely, creating an enormous power struggle within the Trump administration.

These conservatives warn the sustained economic downturn could do more damage to Americans by destroying their livelihoods, and that the economy can be reopened safely. Numerous other economists and public health experts have pushed back against that assumption.

“There’s a massive movement on the right now, growing exponentially. In the next two weeks, you’ll see protests in the streets of conservatives; you’ll see a big pushback against the lockdown in some states. People are at the boiling point,” said Moore, who declined to comment on the group. “If this were Hillary Clinton doing these things, you already would have riots in the streets.” 

Other conservatives have proposed sidelining the two leading public health experts in the administration, Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Deborah Birx, coronavirus response director. Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), a conservative lawmaker, tweeted Monday that Fauci and Birx “should no longer be the primary voices at the table."

Things are going to come to a head very soon.  What I fear most is a scenario where protests turn violent, even though the thought of armed protests during a pandemic seems too bizarre to even consider, and Trump decides he's going to restore order using force.

I know that seems greatly far-fetched but at this point we have an unstable sociopathic narcissist seeing his power slip away from him during a medical disaster that he no longer has control over.

Who the hell knows what he's going to do at this point?

Egghead Week: Pact Men Versus The Ghost Mobsters

It's okay guys, the experts are here!

Sorry about that, wrong slide.  The actual experts are ignoring the Council to Re-open America Panel (CRAP) and taking it upon themselves to fix the problem.

Today, California Governor Gavin Newsom, Oregon Governor Kate Brown and Washington Governor Jay Inslee announced an agreement on a shared vision for reopening their economies and controlling COVID-19 into the future. 

Joint statement from the Governors: 

COVID-19 has preyed upon our interconnectedness. In the coming weeks, the West Coast will flip the script on COVID-19 – with our states acting in close coordination and collaboration to ensure the virus can never spread wildly in our communities.
We are announcing that California, Oregon and Washington have agreed to work together on a shared approach for reopening our economies – one that identifies clear indicators for communities to restart public life and business. 

While each state is building a state-specific plan, our states have agreed to the following principles as we build out a West Coast framework: 

–Our residents’ health comes first. As home to one in six Americans and gateway to the rest of the world, the West Coast has an outsized stake in controlling and ultimately defeating COVID-19. 

–Health outcomes and science – not politics – will guide these decisions. Modifications to our states’ stay at home orders must be made based off our understanding of the total health impacts of COVID-19, including: the direct impact of the disease on our communities; the health impact of measures introduced to control the spread in communities —particularly felt by those already experiencing social disadvantage prior to COVID-19; and our health care systems’ ability to ensure care for those who may become sick with COVID-19 and other conditions. This effort will be guided by data. We need to see a decline in the rate of spread of the virus before large-scale reopening, and we will be working in coordination to identify the best metrics to guide this. 

–Our states will only be effective by working together. Each state will work with its local leaders and communities within its borders to understand what’s happening on the ground and adhere to our agreed upon approach. 

Through quick and decisive action, each of our states has made significant progress in flattening the curve and slowing the spread of COVID-19 among the broader public. Now, our public health leaders will focus on four goals that will be critical for controlling the virus in the future. 

• Protecting vulnerable populations at risk for severe disease if infected. This includes a concerted effort to prevent and fight outbreaks in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.
• Ensuring an ability to care for those who may become sick with COVID-19 and other conditions. This will require adequate hospital surge capacity and supplies of personal protective equipment.
• Mitigating the non-direct COVID-19 health impacts, particularly on disadvantaged communities.
• Protecting the general public by ensuring any successful lifting of interventions includes the development of a system for testing, tracking and isolating. The states will work together to share best practices.

COVID-19 doesn’t follow state or national boundaries. It will take every level of government, working together, and a full picture of what’s happening on the ground. 

On the East Coast, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is forming a similar pact with New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Maryland are forming a similar pact, and I'd expect Maryland and Massachusetts to join as well [UPDATE: GOP Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts joined today as well.]

That's a good third of the US economy in those nine states, and they're ignoring Trump completely.

Egghead Week: Taking A Break

Going to be on a lighter holiday schedule this week to recharge the batteries a bit and try to get my head around some things.  I should still be posting daily at least, as I'm sure we'll have news to cover.

Take care of yourselves and stay home.

Last Call For The China Syndrome

If Donald Trump is able to convince voters that China is somehow responsible for Trump's dismal performance directing the "federal response" to COVID-19 and connect Joe Biden to it, he wins reelection running away.

President Donald Trump and his allies are leaning heavily into a new 2020 strategy tying Democrats and their presumptive presidential nominee Joe Biden not just to China but to its role in spreading the coronavirus.

Democrats are increasingly worried that the strategy will work.

The Trump re-election campaign released a new ad this week going after Biden over his opposition to restrictions on travel from China designed to control the spread of the coronavirus outbreak. That was followed with a fundraising solicitation on Saturday that hammered home the point: “I am TOUGH ON CHINA and Sleepy Joe Biden is WEAK ON CHINA,” it declared.

Inside the campaign, the strategy is simple: make China the villain of a global pandemic that has complicated well-laid electoral plans and sparked growing criticism of the president.

“[China’s] among many weaknesses, but when people learn about Biden’s attack on the president’s China travel ban, his other weak positions on China, and his conflict with Hunter Biden’s business deal with China, voters are horrified,” John McLaughlin, a Trump pollster, told The Daily Beast on Friday. Other Trump 2020 officials said that the campaign had always intended to hammer Biden on China until the election in November, and the coronavirus “angle” was merely another way to go after the Bidens and China simultaneously.

In one sense it’s simply an extension of Team Trump’s months-long strategy to tie Biden to a country increasingly viewed with suspicion by American voters. The campaign and the Republican National Committee have been hammering Biden for months over his youngest son Hunter’s past business dealings in China.

But the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, has made the country a far more potent political villain. And the massive disruptions in daily life caused by the virus virtually guarantee that China will remain in the headlines—and on the minds of American voters—for months as election day approaches. Polls already indicate that Americans of both parties overwhelmingly blame China for the virus’ initial spread.

For a Trump campaign that’s a potential political goldmine. “China was an effective wedge issue for Trump in 2016,” said one Republican strategist close to the campaign. “Now that it’s at the top of everyone’s mind, and Biden has a long record of being weak on China, just imagine how much more effective it will be in 2020.”

It definitely worked in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Democrats need to be smashing this noise and quickly.   The problem is I'd normally say Joe Biden's Rust Belt retail politics would go a long way, but that's impossible now.  Trump gets 6-12 hours of primetime coverage every week with his "task force briefings" and there no oxygen in the room for Biden or Democratic surrogates.

The question becomes how Biden can compete, and unless Dems come up with an answer soon, Trump is going to get away with this, blame China, and win by 200 electoral votes.

The key here may very well be Biden's old boss.

Red Dawn, Orange Idiot

E-mail exchanges obtained by the NY Times of some of the nation's top infection disease experts show that the experts absolutely knew COVID-19 was going to be a disaster in the hands of Donald Trump, and he proved them right at every turn.

As the coronavirus emerged and headed toward the United States, an extraordinary conversation was hatched among an elite group of infectious disease doctors and medical experts in the federal government and academic institutions around the nation.

Red Dawn — a nod to the 1984 film with Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen — was the nickname for the email chain they built. Different threads in the chain were named Red Dawn Breaking, Red Dawn Rising, Red Dawn Breaking Bad and, as the situation grew more dire, Red Dawn Raging. It was hosted by the chief medical officer at the Department of Homeland Security, Dr. Duane C. Caneva, starting in January with a small core of medical experts and friends that gradually grew to dozens.

The “Red Dawn String,” Dr. Caneva said, was intended “to provide thoughts, concerns, raise issues, share information across various colleagues responding to Covid-19,” including medical experts and doctors from the Health and Human Services Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Homeland Security Department, the Veterans Affairs Department, the Pentagon and other federal agencies tracking the historic health emergency.

Here are key exchanges from the emails, with context and analysis, that show the experts’ rising sense of frustration and then anger as their advice seemingly failed to break through to the administration, raising the odds that more people would likely die.

As the US now tops half million COVID-19 cases and 20,000 deaths, the toll is only growing.

One of the most active participants in the group was Dr. Carter E. Mecher, a senior medical adviser at the Veterans Affairs Department who helped write a key Bush-era pandemic plan. That document focused in particular on what to do if the government was unable to contain a contagious disease and there was no available vaccine, like with the coronavirus.
The next step is called mitigation, and it relies on unsophisticated steps such as closing schools, businesses, shutting down sporting events or large public gatherings, to try to slow the spread by keeping people away from one another. As of late January, Dr. Mecher was already discussing the likelihood that the United States would soon need to turn to mitigation efforts, including perhaps to “close the colleges and universities.”

Dr. James Lawler, an infectious disease doctor at the University of Nebraska who served in the White House under President George W. Bush and as an adviser to President Barack Obama, was also a regular participant in the email chain. He stayed in regular communication with federal officials as the United States attempted to figure out how to respond to the virus. From the beginning he predicted this would be a major public health event.

Convincing governors and mayors to intentionally cause economic harm by ordering or promoting mitigation efforts — such as closing businesses — is always a difficult task. That is why it is so important, these medical experts said, for the federal government to take the lead, providing cover for the local officials to kick off the so-called Nonpharmaceutical Interventions, such as school and business closures. Again, this group of doctors and medical experts recognized from early on that this step was all but inevitable, even if the administration was slow to recognize the need.
Strong evidence was emerging as of mid-February — with the first cases of Covid-19 already in the United States — that the nation was about to be hit hard. These doctors and medical experts researched how quickly the virus spread on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was quarantined in the port of Yokohama, Japan, on Feb. 3 before hundreds of United States citizens on the ship returned home.

Dr. Eva Lee, a researcher at Georgia Institute of Technology who has frequently worked with the federal government to create infectious disease projections, helped the Red Dawn group do modeling, based on the virus spread on the cruise ship. (Dr. Lee is facing sentencing on federal charges that she improperly applied for a federal grant for unrelated research.)

The concern these medical experts had been raising in late January and early February turned to alarm by the third week in February. That was when they effectively concluded that the United States had already lost the fight to contain the virus, and that it needed to switch to mitigation. One critical element in that shift was the realization that many people in the country were likely already infected and capable of spreading the virus, but not showing any symptoms. Here Dr. Lee discusses this conclusion with Dr. Robert Kadlec, the head of the virus response effort at the Department of Health and Human Services and a key White House adviser.

Dr. Kadlec and other administration officials decided the next day to recommend to Mr. Trump that he publicly support the start of these mitigation efforts, such as school closings. But before they could discuss it with the president, who was returning from India, another official went public with a warning, sending the stock market down sharply and angering Mr. Trump. The meeting to brief him on the recommendation was canceled and it was three weeks before Mr. Trump would reluctantly come around to the need for mitigation.

This slow pace of action was confusing to the medical experts on the Red Dawn email chain, who were increasingly alarmed that cities and states that were getting hit hard by the virus needed to move faster to take aggressive steps.

Report after report, story after story, they all say the same thing: the largest impediment to dealing with COVID-19 in America is Donald Trump.

Sunday Long Read: On A Mission From God

This week's Sunday Long Read is Ariel Levy's spectacular read in the New Yorker about Renee Bach, the woman accused of mass murder in Uganda with her church-funded medical clinic. Hundreds of sick children died in her care, because she had no medical training whatsoever and instead felt she was chosen by God to "help".

In the summer of 2013, Ziria Namutamba heard that there was a missionary health facility a few hours from her village, in southeastern Uganda, where a white doctor was treating children. She decided to go there with her grandson Twalali Kifabi, who was unwell. At three, he weighed as much as an average four-month-old. His head looked massive above his emaciated limbs; his abdomen and feet were swollen like water balloons. All over his tiny body, patches of darkened skin were peeling off. At a rural clinic six months earlier, he had been diagnosed as having malnutrition, but the family couldn’t afford the foods that were recommended. Twalali was his mother’s sixth child, and she was pregnant again—too far along to accompany him to the missionary facility, which was called Serving His Children.

“We were received by a white woman, later known to me as ‘aunt Renee,’ ” Namutamba attested in an affidavit, which she signed with her thumbprint, in 2019. At Serving His Children, Namutamba “saw the same woman inject something on the late Twalali’s head, she connected tubes and wires from baby Twalali to a machine.” Days later, while Namutamba was doing laundry in the clinic’s courtyard, she overheard another woman saying, “What a pity her child has died.” Soon, the person called Aunt Renée “came downstairs holding Twalali’s lifeless body, wrapped in white clothes.”

Twalali was one of more than a hundred babies who died at Serving His Children between 2010 and 2015. The facility began not as a registered health clinic but as the home of Renée Bach—who was not a doctor but a homeschooled missionary, and who had arrived in Uganda at the age of nineteen and started an N.G.O. with money raised through her church in Bedford, Virginia. She’d felt called to Africa to help the needy, and she believed that it was Jesus’ will for her to treat malnourished children. Bach told their stories on a blog that she started. “I hooked the baby up to oxygen and got to work,” she wrote in 2011. “I took her temperature, started an IV, checked her blood sugar, tested for malaria, and looked at her HB count.”

In January, 2019, that blog post was submitted as evidence in a lawsuit filed against Bach and Serving His Children in Ugandan civil court. The suit, led by a newly founded legal nonprofit called the Women’s Probono Initiative, lists the mothers of Twalali and another baby as plaintiffs, and includes affidavits from former employees of S.H.C. A gardener who worked there for three years asserts that Bach posed as a doctor: “She dressed in a clinical coat, often had a stethoscope around her neck, and on a daily basis I would see her medicating children.” An American nurse who volunteered at S.H.C. states that Bach “felt God would tell her what to do for a child.” A Ugandan driver says that, for eight years, “on average I would drive at least seven to ten dead bodies of children back to their villages each week.”

The story became an international sensation. “How could a young American with no medical training even contemplate caring for critically ill children in a foreign country?” NPR asked last August. The Guardian pointed to a “growing unease about the behavior of so-called ‘white saviors’ in Africa.” A headline in the Atlanta Black Star charged Bach with “ ‘Playing Doctor’ for Years in Uganda.” The local news in Virginia reported that Bach was accused of actions “leading to the deaths of hundreds of children.”

Bach made only one televised appearance in response, on Fox News. Wearing a puffy cream-colored blouse, with her blond hair half up, she was pictured on a split screen with her attorney David Gibbs, who previously led the effort to keep Terri Schiavo on life support, and now runs the National Center for Life and Liberty, a “legal ministry” that advocates for Christian causes. Over the years, Bach said, she had assisted Ugandan doctors and nurses employed by her organization in “emergency settings and in crisis situations,” but had never practiced medicine or “represented myself as a medical professional.” Bach sounded nervous, but she firmly denied the “tough allegation” against her. She had used the first person on her blog as an act of creative license, because a simple narrative appealed to donors; in fact, she’d had a Ugandan medical team by her side at all times. “I was a young American woman boarding a plane to Africa,” she said—inexperienced and idealistic, working on an intractable problem. “My desire to go to Uganda was to help people and to serve.” 

Bach blames the Ugandan medical team for the deaths.  They blame her.  And the story behind it all is both heartbreaking and informative.  I'm fond of saying "There's a lesson here for those who choose to learn it" but that's never been more applicable to our current situation in this era of global pandemic: the people who think they know better than the medical experts kill when they are wrong.

Separation Of Church And Virus, Con't

Kansas's Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, is one of several governors to ban gatherings of people, including church services, in the era of COVID-19.  Republicans in the state sued to overrule the order and they found a state judge willing to go along.  Gov. Kelly appealed to the state Supreme Court, and yesterday -- in a bizarre tableau of a social distance internet meeting -- the court sided unanimously with Gov. Kelly, but the fight is far from over.

The unanimous decision means Kelly’s order limiting religious gatherings to no more than 10 individuals will be in effect for Easter Sunday services. The court didn’t consider whether Kelly’s order infringes on religious freedom. 

Instead, justices focused on the language of a hastily drafted resolution passed by the Legislature shortly before adjourning in March. 

The resolution granted the governor emergency powers for responding to COVID-19 through May 1 and allows the State Finance Council to extend the emergency by 30 days. If extended, the resolution gives the Legislative Coordinating Council authority to reverse any executive order issued by the governor. 

Justices determined the LCC doesn’t currently have that authority, based on the timetable outlined in the resolution. They declined to consider, as the governor argued, whether the Legislature can delegate such authority to the LCC in the first place. 

Their decision, announced late Saturday, followed arguments held hours earlier, entirely by video conference for the first time in the court’s history, and capped four days of high-stakes political posturing. 

The governor moved to limit church crowds in response to outbreaks of the coronavirus that were connected to church events in Kansas. Across the state, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused 55 deaths and 1,268 infections. 

State Republicans vow to fight the ruling somehow, but Gov. Kelly is correct here.

Kelly said her top priority is the safety and well-being of Kansans. 

“Today’s ruling does not change my commitment to maintaining open lines of communication and collaboration with the Legislature,” Kelly said. “The only way to get through this is by working with, not against, each other in a bipartisan fashion.” 

But as I said, as with churches today all over the country, many people will still attend Easter Sunday services anyway.  And some will get sick.  A few will be hospitalized, and die.

Pastor Aaron Harris, of Calvary Baptist Church in Junction City, said the high court’s decision doesn’t “validate the governor’s order,” which carries the full force of law. 

“The legislative council may not have had legal authority to revoke it, but it is still unconstitutional,” Harris said. “We’ll be having services tomorrow. I hope and pray that our local LE will respect the constitution.”

Again, we remain firmly in uncharted territory here.  Social distancing is only going to be feasible as long as people can meet basic needs like food, shelter, and water.  If that starts breaking down, then civil disobedience will turn uncivil, very very quickly.

History says this all ends extremely badly.

Last Call For The Worst-Case Scenario, Con't

The first step in realizing just how screwed we are is to realize there is no actual coordinated federal response to COVID-19.

In theory, the small flock of task forces are all working toward the same goal: defeating the novel coronavirus and getting the nation back to work — and life — as quickly as possible. But the reality is far more complicated: a bureaucratic nesting doll of groups with frequently competing aims and agendas.

As a result, an administration that has lagged behind at nearly every step of the pandemic still has no consensus plan for when or how to reopen parts of the economy, even as the president and many advisers push to do so as soon as May 1. There is still no concerted plan for getting vital medical supplies to states, which are left to fight among themselves or seek favors from Trump. There is also no developed plan for what happens if cases or deaths spike as people begin to return to work, or how to respond if the coronavirus surges again in the fall, as many public health experts and administration officials fear.
Public health experts say that among the keys to returning to normalcy are nationwide virus testing (to determine who has the virus); serological testing (to allow those who have been exposed to the virus and developed immunity to return to work); and contact tracing (quickly tracking all the contacts of an infected individual, to halt further spread). Two task force officials said that more important even than nationwide testing is surveillance — using data to make informed decisions about public health.

But the administration has not fully grappled with the sheer manpower and resources required for an effort like contact tracing — and right now, there are not even enough coronavirus tests for those who need them, let alone the entire country.

Jack Chow, a former U.S. ambassador for global HIV/AIDS during the George W. Bush administration and former World Health Organization assistant director-general, said the problem is that the administration has yet to decide what the national recovery should look like.

“The whole response has been lagging the curve of the epidemic, and what ought to be happening is the designation of key strategic goals, key accomplishments that can happen within a specified timeline,” Chow said. “It sounds like they’re groping for that. There isn’t any clear direction as to what the strategic goals are in each different line of effort, and what the prospective timeline could be given the assets they have to deploy.”

The second step is realizing there never will be a coordinated federal response, and that is on purpose.  The reason is Donald Trump will kill as many millions of Americans as it takes to secure his reelection.

During one task force meeting in the Situation Room last month, Trump turned to Fauci and challenged him.

It was the day the administration was adding Ireland and the United Kingdom to its travel restrictions, and Trump wanted to understand why talk of “herd immunity” — allowing the coronavirus to sweep a nation largely unchecked, with the belief that those who survived would then be immune — was such a bad idea.

“Why don’t we let this wash over the country?” Trump asked, according to two people familiar with his comments, a question other administration officials say he has raised repeatedly in the Oval Office.

Fauci initially seemed confused by the term “wash over” but became alarmed once he understood what Trump was asking.

“Mr. President, many people would die,” Fauci said.

Trump's complete lack of empathy is so all-consuming, his narcissism so malignant, that the sociopathy is the standard default.

He knows if he loses in November, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Nothing else matters to him.  Therefore, nothing else matters to the federal government that his is in charge of.  Not even keeping basic Constitutionally-required functions running, like a postal service.

Through rain, sleet, hail, and even a pandemic, mail carriers serve every address in the United States, but the coronavirus crisis is shaking the foundation of the U.S. Postal Service in new and dire ways.

The Postal Service’s decades-long financial troubles have worsened dramatically, as the volume of the kind of mail that pays the agency’s bills — first-class and marketing mail — has withered during the pandemic. The USPS needs an infusion of money, and President Trump has blocked potential emergency funding for the agency that employs around 600,000 workers, repeating instead the false claim that higher rates for Internet shipping companies Amazon, FedEx and UPS would right the service’s budget.

Trump threatened to veto the $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or Cares Act, if the legislation contained any money directed to bail out the postal agency, according to a senior Trump administration official and a congressional official who, like others in this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“We told them very clearly that the president was not going to sign the bill if [money for the Postal Service] was in it,” the Trump administration official said. “I don’t know if we used the v-bomb, but the president was not going to sign it, and we told them that.”

Instead, Sens. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) added a last-minute $10 billion Treasury Department loan to the Cares Act to keep the agency on firmer ground through the spring of 2020, according to a Democratic committee aide.

Trump is going to break everything and loot what's left, and become dictator.  That was always the plan from day one.

Mitch Goes Viral

This is one fight GOP Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is going to lose badly.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy vowed Saturday morning to refuse Democratic demands in the GOP’s push for more aid to small businesses. 

“Republicans reject Democrats’ reckless threat to continue blocking job-saving funding unless we renegotiate unrelated programs which are not in similar peril,” McConnell (R-Ky.) and McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a joint statement.

Their comments, coming a day after Democratic leaders said the Trump administration would begin bipartisan talks over the interim relief bill, suggest an end to the deadlock remains far off.

Senate Republicans on Thursday attempted to pass an additional $250 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, a small-business fund established in the $2 trillion rescue package that is projected to run out of money soon. Senate Democrats blocked the effort and sought approval for an alternative plan that would provide money for the small business fund as well as additional funds for local governments and hospitals. McConnell rejected that measure on the floor as well. 

The two Republican leaders reiterated Saturday that they will only support an increase in funding for the small business program and warned it has already used up about half of its funding in its first week. They said Democrats should wait for negotiations on a broader package in the coming weeks to address other issues. 

“This will not be Congress’s last word on COVID-19, but this crucial program needs funding now,” McConnell and McCarthy said. “American workers cannot be used as political hostages.”

So, checkmate GOP, right?  Dems are going to absolutely fold on this and give McConnell and McCarthy 100% of what they want: money for industry bailouts and not a penny more.

Normally, you'd be right, and this would be the end of the story.

Not this time.

Democrats counter that the funding they’re seeking is also desperately needed and that McConnell failed to negotiate with them before moving forward on his small business push. 

In a boost for Democrats' argument, governors in both parties are calling for more federal aid to their states. In a joint statement Saturday, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, urged Congress to provide states with an additional $500 billion to address shortfalls stemming from the pandemic.

Governors like Cuomo and Hogan have approval ratings right now that are astronomical.

Mitch McConnell does...not.

The GOP is screwed on this and they know it.

Separation of Church And Virus

Here in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear is serious about stopping church gatherings for Easter Sunday services in the era of COVID-19 and is directing local law enforcement to get license plates in order to issue quarantine orders.

Expecting that a “handful” of churches and other groups across Kentucky will defy his executive order and have in-person mass gatherings on Easter Sunday, Beshear said local officials are being directed to record license plate numbers of participants to pass to local health departments.

Those who attend these gatherings can expect public health officials to show up at their doors with mandates that they self-quarantine for 14 days, the governor said.
“If you’re going to expose yourself to this virus, it’s not fair to everybody else out there that you might spread it to,” Beshear said. “Understand, this is the only way we can ensure your decision doesn’t kill somebody else.”

This order doesn’t apply to drive-in services.

Kentucky Republicans are livid at the move.

Taking license plates at church? Quarantining someone for being Christian on Easter Sunday? Someone needs to take a step back here.

Kentucky Governor Announces Plan to Record License Plates of Easter Church Goers and Force Them to Quarantine for 14 Days https://t.co/z7U42liQRh

— Senator Rand Paul (@RandPaul) April 11, 2020

What the actual hell?

“Democrat Kentucky Governor Announces Plan to Record License Plates of Easter Church Goers and Force Them to Self-Quarantine for 14 Days”https://t.co/p6bAR8U3M2

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 11, 2020

Frankly, Beshear is 100% correct here and as the state's former Attorney General, he knows he has the law on his side here.  He's not using law enforcement to break these services up, but he's damn sure making it clear he has four million Kentuckians to worry about too.

Compare that to Florida's Ron DeSantis, who is scrambling to give nursing homes blanket immunity from COVID-19 lawsuits.

Just weeks after a coronavirus outbreak in a Florida assisted living facility, the state's most powerful nursing home organization sent a letter to Gov. Ron DeSantis with an urgent request: Grant the homes sweeping protections from legal claims arising from the viral scourge.

The response: DeSantis is considering it.

In one of the first such requests in the country, the governor’s office is consulting with some of the state’s top lawyers to see if such immunity can be provided to nursing homes and other healthcare providers, the chief of Florida’s top healthcare agency told members of the Florida Health Care Association on Thursday.

The letter to the governor, signed April 3 by the industry group’s executive director, Emmett Reed, prompted angry responses from one of the state's most well-known elder advocates, who has long fought to improve conditions in Florida's elder homes.

"It's jaw dropping," said Brian Lee, Florida's former chief long-term care ombudsman. “That they could, in the middle of a worldwide crisis, that they want to protect their interest, that they would make this request just floored me."

If granted, the measure could set up a battle between the governor's office and legal advocates in a state with a booming long-term care industry and the largest percentage of people older than 65 in the country. So far, the state has logged 731 virus cases among residents and staff members in the homes.

Democrats are trying to protect the people.  Republicans are trying to protect businesses who screwed up.

Stay at home, folks.

Last Call For The Worst-Case Scenario, Con't

As Ezra Klein explains, the plans being floated to return America to normal involve a digital surveillance state of breathtaking intrusiveness that absolutely will be used against Americans in the future, and the distrust in the US of both the Trump regime and Big Tech makes anything approaching what we need virtually impossible.

Over the past few days, I’ve been reading the major plans for what comes after social distancing. You can read them, too. There’s one from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, the left-leaning Center for American Progress, Harvard University’s Safra Center for Ethics, and Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer.

I thought, perhaps naively, that reading them would be a comfort — at least then I’d be able to imagine the path back to normal. But it wasn’t. In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the US either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness.

The AEI, CAP, and Harvard plans aren’t identical, but they’re similar. All of them feature a period of national lockdown — in which extreme social distancing is deployed to “flatten the curve” and health and testing capacity is surged to “raise the line.” That’s phase one. Phase two triggers after a set period (45 days for CAP, three months for Harvard) or, in the AEI plan, after 14 days of falling cases and a series of health supply markers.

All of them then imagine a phase two, which relaxes — but does not end — social distancing while implementing testing and surveillance on a mass scale. This is where you must begin imagining the almost unimaginable.

The CAP and Harvard plans both foresee a digital pandemic surveillance state in which virtually every American downloads an app to their phone that geotracks their movements, so if they come into contact with anyone who later is found to have Covid-19, they can be alerted and a period of social quarantine can begin. Similarly, people would scan QR codes when boarding mass transit or entering other high-risk public areas. And GPS tracking could be used to enforce quarantine on those who test positive with the disease, as is being done in Taiwan.

To state the obvious: The technological and political obstacles are massive. While similar efforts have borne fruit in Singapore and South Korea, the US is a very different country, with a more mistrustful, individualistic culture. Already, polling shows that 70 percent of Republicans, and 46 percent of Democrats, strongly oppose using cellphone data to enforce quarantine orders.

There's just no way this works in America.  None.  Zero.  Decades of sowing mistrust in the federal government by everything from pop culture to politicians to conspiracy theories to the internet has made something like this absolutely unworkable in 2020.

That leaves massive social distancing efforts that will continue for months on end, also unworkable.

Something has to fundamentally change in the American people to accept what will be necessary to move forward and it won't happen.  We'll have armed insurrections before it does and we'll have COVID-19 dead on top of gun deaths and they might take turns outpacing each other on a daily basis.

A lot of people are going to end up dead before the country relents.

Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, announced Friday afternoon that he planned to sign an executive order that would lift the coronavirus lockdown in a "safe" way, allowing businesses to reopen.

Though Gov. Abbott didn't reveal details about the executive order, he said he's looking into ways to reopen Texas businesses. He promised that details about the executive order will be available next week, but it is expected to provide businesses with a list of guidelines on how to safely reopen.

"We will focus on protecting lives while restoring livelihoods," Abbott said. "We can and we must do this. We can do both, expand and restore the livelihoods that Texans want to have by helping them return to work. One thing about Texans, they enjoy working and they want to get back into the workforce. We have to come up with strategies on how we can do this safely."

"We will operate strategically," Abbott added. "If we do it too fast without appropriate strategies, it will lead to another potential closure."

Abbott also promised testing for the coronavirus that causes the disease COVID-19 would be part of the plan. On Wednesday, the governor announced that Walgreens locations would soon offer a test that can be administered via the drive-thru window, and will provide results within 15 minutes. Abbott estimates that each Walgreens store could test as many as 3,000 people a day. The tests are developed by Abbott Labs; despite the similar name, Gov. Abbott has no connection to the company.

Three thousand tests a day in a state with 30 million people.

It will soon be three thousand deaths a day.

My fear is that Trump and the GOP will sacrifice as many of their constituents as possible to feed the "economy" and we'll still not make the right choices.

The Blue Wave Runs Into Red Rocks

California's special election next month for CA-25, vacated by Katie Hill over her affair scandal, is a 100% vote-by-mail prospect in the age of COVID-19, and Dems are now in serious trouble of losing the seat as angry Republicans in the LA suburbs are treating the election as a golden opportunity to  pick up a seat in the state that has rejected the party for 20 years now. Republican Mike Garcia is now in a close race with Democrat Christy Smith in a race that should not be competitive at all. Dave Wasserman at Cook:

Garcia, whose father emigrated from Mexico (this district is 38 percent Latino), was nominated to the Naval Academy by longtime former GOP Rep. Buck McKeon, who chaired the House Armed Services Committee and remains popular in the 25th CD. As a Super Hornet Strike Fighter pilot, he flew 30 combat missions in Iraq and later served ten years back home as an executive at Raytheon. 

Smith also has an ideal profile for these swing suburbs: the Santa Clarita resident, former Department of Education analyst and PTA mom rose to president of the Newhall School District before raising $2 million in 2018 to flip a GOP-held Assembly seat. Smith strikes a pragmatic tone, emphasizing her work on charter school accountability and public safety, and entered the race with Hill's strong backing. 

However, unlike Hill in 2018 or Garcia now, Smith isn't a first-time candidate and has a Sacramento record to attack. And unlike Hill, who outspent Knight $8.4 million to $2.5 million in 2018, Smith won't have a massive spending advantage. As of mid-February, as most GOP House candidates badly lagged in fundraising, Garcia narrowly led Smith $1.2 million to $1.1 million raised, owing to a much earlier start. 

Besides Garcia's uniquely strong biography and financial competitiveness, there are three reasons both the DCCC and NRCC are spending heavily, and the race is up for grabs despite California's leftward drift and Trump's low approval. 

First, the March 3 all-party primary was a wake-up call. Even with a competitive Democratic presidential primary driving turnout, the five Democrats on the special election ballot only combined for 51 percent of the vote, while five Republicans accounted for 49 percent. In the 25th CD primary for the November race for the full term, six Republicans actually outpolled six Democrats 50 percent to 49 percent. 

There's reason to believe a lower-turnout, stand-alone special election could further add to Garcia's opportunity on May 12. The district only cast about 157,000 primary votes on March 3, compared to 245,000 when Hill won in 2018 and 274,000 in 2016, when Clinton carried the 25th CD. Lower-propensity voters in these fast-growing suburbs tend to skew non-white and friendlier to Democrats. 

Second, the COVID-19 outbreak adds a lot of uncertainty. On the one hand, all 420,928 voters will automatically receive ballots in the mail, and voters stuck at home may have little else to do but fill them out and send them in. Smith's campaign points to recent mayoral elections as evidence all vote-by-mail elections could actually boost turnout, producing a more diverse, Democratic electorate. 

On the other hand, the mandatory stay-at-home order quashes campaign field organizers' ability to "harvest" ballots at doors and turn them in, a practice made legal by a state law change after 2016 and that some Republicans blamed for close losses in 2018. It's impossible to quantify the impact that had in the midterms, but a smaller turnout that skews towards white and longtime voters would help Garcia. 

Third, Republicans believe they have an effective attack on Smith, who chairs the Joint Legislative Committee on Emergency Management. They contend that Smith skipped a committee hearing scheduled for March 4, the day after the primary and the same day Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency. The most recent meeting's agenda discussed wildfires, with no mention of Coronavirus. 

Smith calls the attack frivolous and maintains that she's been urgently focused on getting PPE to frontline workers and helping small businesses acquire bridge loans instead of holding lengthy hearings. But simultaneously playing up her emergency management credentials and explaining that her committee's role is only to look at crises retroactively might seem curious to voters at a time the virus is all-consuming.

It'll depend entirely on how many residents mail in their ballots.  I'm hoping this is Wasserman admitting that there are so many variables right now that the race is impossible to call right now, but Democrats need to be working to save this seat and maybe this will snap them out of it.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

US Attorney General Bill Barr strongly suggests in a FOX News State TV interview that states don't have the right to shut down businesses and schools during a public health emergency, and hints that the Trump regime may take action against states that don't rescind shelter-at-home orders next month.

Attorney General William P. Barr said Wednesday that some of the government-imposed restrictions meant to control the spread of covid-19 were “draconian” and suggested that they should be eased next month.

In an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Barr, long a proponent of executive power, said the government — and in particular state officials — had broad authority to impose restrictions on people in cases of emergency.

But, he said, the federal government would be “keeping a careful eye on” the situation, and stressed that officials should be “very careful to make sure that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified.”

“When this period of time, at the end of April, expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have, and not just tell people to go home and hide under their bed, but allow them to use other ways — social distancing and other means — to protect themselves,” Barr said.

The White House has advised people to limit the size of social gatherings and practice other social distancing measures through April amid the outbreak of the novel coronavirus that causes the disease covid-19. Most states have imposed even more aggressive measures, ordering residents to gather only in small groups and venture outdoors for only essential trips or possibly face fines or other penalties.

Although Barr has appeared twice at White House coronavirus briefings, his comments to Fox News were the most extensive yet that he has made on the public health crisis and the steps the government has taken to stem it. Repeatedly, Ingraham pressed the country’s top law enforcement official on how the government’s actions comport with Americans constitutional rights to gather and worship freely. Churches, like other businesses, have been essentially closed in the crisis.

Barr said that governments had a right to put restrictions on churches, so long as they were treated no differently than other institutions, but added he was “very concerned” about possible encroachments on Americans’ freedom of religion. Barr said he was also concerned about the “tracking of people” that some experts have advised might be necessary to quickly identify and quarantine those infected.

This is the regime all but promising that states that do not lift orders next month closing down businesses and schools and churches will find themselves facing legal action from the federal government, reduced federal resources, or both.

Barr also attacked the Mueller probe, calling it a step "to sabotage the presidency".

Let me be frank here, this is the clearest sign yet that while Barr is willing to allow states to do what they are doing now, that patience expires at the end of the month. Barr is going to bring the hammer down on states in three weeks unless reined in, and there seems little chance of that.

It's going to take tens of thousands of deaths to get the regime to listen, and even then I expect Trump to cut off states or even send in National Guard before allowing states to continue with stay-at-home orders.  Trump gave the game away yesterday.

.@Acosta: How can the administration discuss the possibility of reopening the country when the administration does not have an adequate nationwide testing system for this virus? Don't you need a nationwide testing system for the virus before you reopen?

TRUMP: "No." pic.twitter.com/JokZYfy97T

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 9, 2020

It will get lethal very quickly if that happens.  The death toll will skyrocket, and public order will be severely tested.  And trust me, your FOX News State TV-watching relatives absolutely believe they'll be back at Golden Corral and the ball park the first weekend in May.

We may not even make it until May before Trump has Barr go after states.

The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month, raising concerns among health experts and economists of a possible covid-19 resurgence if Americans return to their normal lives before the virus is truly stamped out.

Behind closed doors, President Trump — concerned with the sagging economy — has sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1, according to people familiar with the discussions.

In phone calls with outside advisers, Trump has even floated trying to reopen much of the country before the end of this month, when the current federal recommendations to avoid social gatherings and work from home expire, the people said. Trump regularly looks at unemployment and stock market numbers, complaining that they are hurting his presidency and reelection prospects, the people said.

Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions.

Trump said at his daily briefing Thursday that the United States was at the “top of the hill” and added, “Hopefully, we’re going to be opening up — you could call it opening — very, very, very, very soon, I hope.”

Multiple Cabinet secretaries in recent days have publicly expressed hope that the various government orders directing residents to stay at home and forcing nonessential businesses to close could at least be partially eased next month.

Nancy Pelosi, for her part, is warning Trump to back off but the House isn't returning to session anytime soon, meaning the fate of any future aid for Americans is questionable at best.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi signaled Thursday that the House is unlikely to return to session later this month, her clearest indication yet that Congress — like the rest of the country — could remain shuttered for weeks or even longer as the coronavirus crisis continues. 

In a half-hour interview, Pelosi issued a stark warning to President Donald Trump, urging him not to prematurely rush to reopen major segments of the country before the coronavirus is under control, which she said could further send the U.S. economy into a tailspin.

“Nobody can really tell you that and I would never venture a guess. I certainly don’t think we should do it sooner than we should,” Pelosi said when asked if she still planned to bring the House back on April 20, which is the current target date.

“This has taken an acceleration from when we started this…Little did we know then that at this point, we’d be further confined.”

If House Democrats fail to act, then Trump will, and it will be a slaughterhouse. Because what's happening in NYC is coming to cities across the country, especially if we let up on social distancing.  And in any other country, what's happening in NYC right now would be called "mass graves".

New York City officials have hired contract laborers to bury the dead in its potter’s field on Hart Island as the city’s daily death rate from the coronavirus epidemic has reached grim new records in each of the last three days.

The city has used Hart Island to bury New Yorkers with no known next of kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral since the 19th century.

Typically, some 25 bodies are interred each week by low-paid jail inmates working on the island, which sits off the east shore of the city’s Bronx borough and is accessible only by boat.

That number began increasing in March as the new coronavirus spread rapidly, making New York the epicenter of the pandemic. They are now burying about two dozen bodies a day, five days a week, said Jason Kersten, a spokesman for the Department of Correction, which oversees the burials.

For burial on the island, the dead are wrapped in body bags and placed inside pine caskets. The deceased’s name is scrawled in large letters on each casket, which helps should any body need to be disinterred later, and they are buried in long narrow trenches excavated by digging machines.

“They added two new trenches in case we need them,” Kersten said. To help with the surge, and amid an outbreak of the COVID-19 respiratory illness caused by the virus at the city’s main jail, contract laborers have been hired, he said.

We're only in the opening stanzas of this disaster. If Trump uses the federal government to pressure states into reopening businesses and schools in May or even late April, the death toll will skyrocket.

And that's where we are headed. He's betting millions of lives on "saving" his re-election prospects from a Biden win.  Bill Barr is helping him.

Our lives are all on the line.

StupidiNews!

• UK PM Boris Johnson is out of intensive care but remains hospitalized with COVID-19, the British leader is expected to make a full recovery. 
• Donald Trump says that Russian and Saudi Arabia are close to signing off on an OPEC production deal to raise oil prices after reaching lows not seen in more than two decades.
• Tokyo's local government has reached a deal with Japan's national government under PM Shinzo Abe for business shutdowns in the month-long national COVID-19 emergency period.
• Ethiopia is the first major African nation to declare a state of emergency over COVID-19, businesses and gathering places are expected to be shut down starting this weekend.
• Disney says its Disney Plus streaming service has over 50 million subscribers in April, the company expected to reach 60 million in 2024 but now says it is well ahead of expectations.