The Village Is Still Full Of Idiots

As Greg Sargent reminds us, our media is 100% unequipped to handle Donald Trump on a daily basis and are already falling into the false equivalencies and clickbait strawmen that defined Hillary Clinton losing.

The latest developments in the Michael Flynn case should prompt us to revisit one of the most glaring failures in political journalism, one that lends credibility to baseless narratives pushed for purely instrumental purposes, perversely rewarding bad-faith actors in the process.

News accounts constantly claim with no basis that new information “boosts” or “lends ammunition” to a particular political attack, or “raises new questions” about its target. These journalistic conventions are so all-pervasive that we barely notice them.

But they’re extremely pernicious, and they need to stop. They both reflect and grotesquely amplify a tendency that badly misleads readers. That happened widely in 2016, to President Trump’s great benefit. It’s now happening again.
Republican senators have just released a declassified list of Obama administration officials — including Trump opponent Joe Biden — who requested information that ended up “unmasking” Flynn during the transition.

Trump and his campaign have seized on this to further their claim that the Russia investigation was corrupt, and that Biden was key to that. Trump rails that this “unmasking is a massive thing” that raises new questions about Biden’s role.

Meanwhile, Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale insists this illustrates “the depth of Biden’s involvement in the setup of Gen. Flynn to further the Russia collusion hoax.”

This is steaming nonsense. But news accounts are reporting on this in purportedly objective ways that subtly place an editorial thumb on the scale in favor of those attacks.

For instance, the Associated Press ran this headline: “Flynn case boosts Trump’s bid to undo Russia probe narrative.” Axios told us:

Biden’s presence on the list could turn it into an election year issue, though the document itself does not show any evidence of wrongdoing.

CNN informed us that this is “the latest salvo to discredit the FBI’s Russia investigation and accuse the previous administration of wrongdoing.”

But here’s the problem: These formulations do not constitute a neutral transmission of information, even though they are supposed to come across that way.

The new information actually does not “boost” Trump’s claims about the Russia investigation or “discredit” it. And if there is “no evidence of wrongdoing,” then it cannot legitimately be “turned into an election issue.”

There’s no way to neutrally assert that new info “boosts” an attack or constitutes a “salvo” or is “becoming an issue.” The information is being used in a fashion that is either legitimate or not, based on the known facts. Such pronouncements in a from-on-high tone of journalistic objectivity lend the dishonest weaponizing of new info an aura of credibility.

Obamagate is being sold as a product for ratings, clicks, and subscriptions.

It worked for But Her Emails.

It will work for this too.

Searching For A Whitewash

So it turns out Google's depressing lack of diversity during the Trump years, especially among female employees and African-American employees in particular, isn't just a failed commitment from the internet giant to meet its own stated goals, it's now a 100% deliberate choice to reverse those goals as the company is now dismantling diversity programs completely to keep the Trump regime happy.

Google has significantly rolled back its diversity and inclusion initiatives in an apparent effort to avoid being perceived as anti-conservative, according to eight current and former employees.

Since 2018, internal diversity and inclusion training programs have been scaled back or cut entirely, four Google employees and two people who recently left the company told NBC News in interviews. In addition, they said, the team responsible for those programs has been reduced in size, and positions previously held by full-time employees have been outsourced or not refilled after members of the diversity teams left the company.

One well-liked diversity training program at Google called Sojourn, a comprehensive racial justice program created for employees to learn about implicit bias and how to navigate conversations about race and inequality, was cut entirely, according to seven former and current employees. Sojourn offered its last training to Google workers in 2018, four current employees said, and by 2019 it was cut completely.

Seven current and former employees from across a range of teams and roles at the company said separately that they all believed the reason behind cutting Sojourn and taking employees off diversity projects to move them elsewhere at Google was to shield the company from backlash from conservatives.

The current and former employees agreed to speak to NBC News on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal for speaking to the press.

“One of the major motivations for cutting Sojourn is that the company doesn’t want to be seen as anti-conservative,” one Google employee familiar with the company’s diversity programming said in an interview. “It does not want to invite lawsuits or claims by right-wing white employees about Google discriminating against them.”
Melonie Parker, Google’s chief diversity officer, disputed the allegation that Google has scaled back its diversity and inclusion efforts. “We’re really maturing our programs to make sure we’re building our capability,” she said.

Parker added that changes Google is making to its diversity and inclusion work is focused on the need to “provide a scalable solution across the globe.”

Google acknowledged it had ended Sojourn, but said it was not in reaction to conservative criticism. Sojourn ran for three years, Google said, and it was too difficult to scale globally, since it was focused on issues of racism in the United States and didn’t apply to the rest of the world where Google has offices. Google and the majority of its workforce are based in the U.S.

It's apparently not only too hard to teach American employees to not be racist assholes, it's too hard to keep them from doing it around the globe.  Awesome.

It's inconceivable that this isn't a direct capitulation to former Google engineer James Damore, who went on a public tirade about why Google shouldn't bother with "weak" diversity candidates and was fired for it in 2017.  Turns out, the Damores are the majority of the company, because all techbro companies filled with white asshole racist techbros are going to eventually decide to embrace their inner reich.

The right-wing news website Breitbart began covering the internal tensions about Google’s efforts to become more diverse, publishing a July 2018 article on a speaker event hosted by Google on the topic of how white people can better navigate conversations about racism and privilege in the workplace. Breitbart accused Google of breaking its internal policy against using blanket statements about categories of people, such as about employees in certain racial groups.

“There was a meme going around that said white fragility shuts down discussions of white fragility,” a person involved with the event said in an interview, referring to a meme that circulated on an internal employee message board. The event wasn’t ultimately shut down, but additional security was provided.

“A hundred black employees could testify to the pain they feel in a climate that’s inadvertently hostile towards them and management will go back and say, ‘I need to get more data,’ and then three angry white men complain and everything comes to a halt,” the person close to the planning of the event said.

After the Breitbart article that summer, a raft of changes aimed at reducing the diversity and inclusion work ramped up across the entire company, according to three current and former employees. Even talking about the issue of diversity at work became strained, four sources said.

“In 2018, after all the Damore stuff, the higher-ups stopped saying the word diversity and were instead saying D&I, as in D ampersand I,” one current employee active in diversity advocacy at Google said. D&I is an acronym for diversity and inclusion initiatives.

Google has a hundred black employees?  Who are engineers?

I don't believe that for a second.

StupidiNews!

• Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred says the league is near a deal with the MLB Players' Association to start a shortened baseball season later this summer.
• Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti says residents will have to use face masks when outside their homes in public as COVID-19 cases approach 35,000 in LA County.
• The global death toll from COVID-19 has exceeded 300,000 with more than a quarter of those deaths, 85,000, in the United States alone.
• The CDC has posted updated guidelines for local and state governments to reopen restaurants, bars, and other workplaces, but multiple states are falling well short of requiring these best practices.
• New digital hate speech laws in France require social media to remove flagged content from their platforms within 24 hours of being notified or face millions in euros in fines.

Last Call For Dangerous Cheesy Cheeseheads

Wisconsin's Supreme Court has voided Democratic Gov. Tony Evers stay-at-home order, declaring it to be a rule that has to first be passed by the state legislature before the governor can put it into effect, meaning that at this point, who knows because the decision was basically written in crayon by children.

On Wednesday evening, Republicans on the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued a broad order striking down that state’s stay-at-home order, which was issued by the head of the state’s health department to prevent the spread of coronavirus. Among other things, the court’s decision concludes that the state health department exceeded its authority by instructing people to stay at home, and by “forbidding travel and closing businesses” deemed nonessential.
The case is Wisconsin Legislature v. Palm.

The Court’s order was 4-3, with Justice Brian Hagedorn, a Republican initially appointed to a lower state court by former Gov. Scott Walker (R), writing one of three dissenting opinions. Justice Daniel Kelly, a lame duck who recently lost an election to retain his seat by nearly 11 points, cast the key fourth vote to strike down the stay-at-home order. If not for a Wisconsin law that allows Kelly to serve until August, the stay-at-home order may well have been upheld.

The decision appears to be animated by the kind of political considerations that are more at home on conservative talk radio than in a court of law. During oral arguments last week, when a lawyer defending the stay-at-home order pointed out that there was recently an outbreak of coronavirus in Brown County, Wisconsin, Chief Justice Patience Roggensack dismissed the significance of that outbreak because it primarily impacted factory workers.

“These were due to the meatpacking, though,” Roggensack said. “That’s where Brown County got the flare. It wasn’t just the regular folks in Brown County.”

At that same oral argument, Justice Rebecca Bradley compared the state’s stay-at-home order to “‘assembling together and placing under guard all those of Japanese ancestry in assembly centers’ during World War II.”

The majority opinion, by Chief Justice Roggensack, is not at all clear as to whether this decision takes effect immediately, or whether the stay-at-home order remains in effect for another week. Roggensack also concludes that Andrea Palm, the head of the state’s health department, exceeded her lawful authority. But then Roggensack’s opinion contains this extraordinary line: “We do not define the precise scope of DHS authority under Wis. Stat. § 252.02(3), (4) and (6) because clearly Order 28 went too far.”

Thus, as Hagedorn notes in dissent, the majority opinion “has failed to provide almost any guidance for what the relevant laws mean, and how our state is to govern through this crisis moving forward.” Wisconsin now has no stay-at-home order preventing the spread of coronavirus — or maybe it does have such an order for just one more week. And it is not at all clear which powers the state health department still has to fight the spread of a pandemic.

Moreover, one consequence of the Court’s decision is that if Palm does want to take additional steps to fight the spread of a deadly disease, she will likely need to jump through a series of procedural hoops that, at best, take weeks to complete. And her decisions can now be overridden by Republicans in the state legislature.

In the meantime, there is no court decision ordering coronavirus to stop spreading.

It's a complete disaster, and Wisconsin's residents are in jeopardy of a global pandemic more than ever now.

Wisconsin law gives the state Department of Health Services extraordinarily broad power — or, at least, it did until today — to confront a public health crisis.

Among other things, the department may “close schools and forbid public gatherings in schools, churches, and other places to control outbreaks and epidemics.” It may “issue orders ... for the control and suppression of communicable diseases,” and these orders “may be made applicable to the whole or any specified part of the state.” And, on top of all that, an additional provision permits the health department to “authorize and implement all emergency measures necessary to control communicable diseases.”

Yet the majority opinion in Wisconsin Legislature diminishes this power considerably by imposing procedural limits on Palm’s authority. Much of Roggensack’s majority opinion rests on a distinction between “rules” and mere “orders.”

The reason this distinction matters is that a mere “order” from a state agency can go into effect immediately, but a “rule” can take weeks or even months to promulgate. Even under an expedited process for “emergency” rules, a state agency must first draft a “statement of the scope of the proposed emergency rule.” That statement must be reviewed and approved by the governor and the state Department of Administration, and then appear in an official state publication that only publishes once a week.

After the statement is published, the agency must complete a 10-day waiting period before it is allowed to move forward, with no apparent way to waive this requirement. And then the rule can be delayed even longer if certain legislative leaders require the agency to hold a public hearing on the new rule. Then the new rule can potentially be suspended by a legislative committee — which may require the agency to start this process all over again.

In other words, the state's Public Health legislative committee can suspend any public health emergency orders, and any orders that are issued will now take at least ten days to go into effect at a minimum.  The state is now handcuffed in dealing with the virus by politics.

And Wisconsin's residents will pay a brutal price almost immediately.

On Wednesday night in the heart of downtown Platteville, Wis., just hours after the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the state’s stay-at-home order, Nick’s on 2nd was packed wall to wall, standing room only.

It was sometime after 10 p.m. when “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” by the Hollies came over the sound system and a bartender took out his camera. In a Twitter broadcast, he surveyed the room of maskless patrons crammed together, partying like it was 2019. A few were pounding on the bar to the beat. Some were clapping their hands in the air and some were fist-pumping, a scene so joyous they could have been celebrating the end of the worst pandemic in a century.

Instead, as Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) knew, they were just celebrating the apparent end of his power over them — at least for now.

“We’re the Wild West,” Evers told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Wednesday night, reacting to the state Supreme Court’s ruling and the scenes of people partying in bars all across Wisconsin. “There are no restrictions at all across the state of Wisconsin. … So at this point in time … there is nothing that’s compelling people to do anything other than having chaos here.”

Chaos it was.

Right after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a 4-to-3 ruling, invalidating the extension of the stay-at-home order issued by Evers’s appointed state health chief, the Tavern League of Wisconsin instructed its members to feel free to “OPEN IMMEDIATELY!”

With Evers’s statewide orders kaput, local health authorities scrambled to issue or extend citywide or countywide stay-at-home orders, creating a hodgepodge of rules and regulations all across the state that are bound to cause confusion, not to mention some traffic across county lines. It’s a situation unlike any in the United States as the pandemic rages on. But most of all, Evers feared that the court’s order would cause the one thing he was trying to prevent: more death.

As cases grow and spread and deaths mount in the weeks ahead, understand that Republicans have now firmly come down on that portion of the American public have to die in order to preserve "freedoms".

Most of all, the person deciding that is Donald Trump.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

GOP senators Richard Burr and Kelly Loeffler have both been caught up in insider trading scandals related to dumping stocks after COVID-19 briefings.  Trump hates both of them, Burr for being Senate Intel chair and subpoenaing Republicans on occasion (and even Trump's son Donald Jr.) and refusing to spike the investigation into Trump's Russia and Ukraine criminality, and Loeffler for buying her way into the Senate through Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp over Trump's preferred choice to fill Sen, Johnny Isakson's seat, Rep. Doug Collins.

Loeffler is now facing a brutal primary challenge ahead of the special election for Isakson's seat and is almost certainly doomed, but she's still stinking rich, so putting her in prison isn't going to help Trump in the long run.  She'll be gone from the Senate by January.

But putting Burr in jail for that insider trading scandal is a win-win for Trump and everyone knows it.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., on Thursday temporarily stepped down as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the FBI seized his cellphone and questioned Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as part of a possible insider trading investigation.

Burr faced pressure to step aside as head of the powerful committee after the FBI seized his cellphone as part of a search warrant, senior law enforcement official confirmed to NBC News.

"This is a distraction to the hard work of the committee, and the members and I think that the security of the country is too important to have a distraction," Burr told reporters Thursday. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Burr would step aside "during the pendency of the investigation" effective at the end of the day on Friday.

Feinstein also answered questions from the FBI about stock trades that her husband made and she provided documents to the FBI, her spokesman said Thursday.

The Los Angeles Times first reported Wednesday night that federal agents had obtained Burr's phone, indicating a major escalation of the Justice Department investigation.

A senior Department of Justice official confirms that the search warrant for Burr's phone was actually served on his attorney. But the official says the phone itself needed to be picked up by FBI agents at Burr’s home but that there was not a “raid” on the senator’s residence. Agents took possession of the cell phone and then left Burr’s home.

That same official says the search warrant was approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department, meaning Attorney General William Barr signed off on executing the warrant.

Now, regardless of the outcome of the investigation, Burr is now sidelined as Senate Intel chair. I'm not defending Barr on the trading, it's clear he and his wife dumped stocks, called his brother-in-law, and told him to dump stocks too.  But he's not being investigated for the insider trading, not in a regime where Trump regularly profits off his political knowledge. He's being removed from a position of power and oversight over this regime for a reason.

Just as the Trump regime is trying to warm up the OBAMAGATE!!!! machine.  Lindsey Graham doesn't want to dig too deep, he's trying to save his senate seat right now. Somebody is needed to spearhead the senate's efforts.  Graham is loyal for his own reasons, but Burr was not. It doesn't take a genius, guys.  Burr will be replaced by someone loyal to Trump. Or by someone who needs to prove their loyalty to Trump.

It's not immediately clear who will take over as chairman of the committee. Committee members Sens. Jim Risch of Idaho, Marco Rubio of Florida and Susan Collins of Maine are next in line in seniority, though all currently lead other committees. 

Senate Republicans reacted cautiously to the news of Burr's search warrant on Thursday, saying that the matter of his chairmanship was between Burr and McConnell. 

"There's due process he deserves like everybody else that he'll be going through, but I think ultimately that's a conversation probably between him and the leader," said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the Senate's No. 2 Republican. 

McConnell did not respond to questions about Burr in the Capitol on Thursday. Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate's top Democrat, also declined to weigh in ahead of the news Burr would step aside.

Can you imagine Rubio or Collins or as chairs?  Whoever it is will get the key into the big vault of secrets.  Collins is facing the fight of her political life right now, and Rubio's penchant for stupid grandstanding has gotten him into real trouble before. Risch might actually be the safest choice, but there's no doubt he serves Trump.

I've got zero doubts that Burr is being pushed aside for a reason related to Barr and Trump weaponizing the intelligence community against Joe Biden and Barack Obama. I don't know exactly what it is, but given the voluminous evidence we have of Barr's serving Trump instead of justice, I can't imagine it's going to be a good thing.

Burr may have been the last obstacle to whatever's coming. If Trump wanted Burr to stay, this FBI investigation would not be happening as it is right now. It sure as hell wouldn't involve Burr being issued an FBI warrant for his cell phone and a public shaming signed off on by the Attorney General against the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The final chapter of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Trump/Russia is due soon too.  The more I think about it, the more this looks like Burr is being cashiered because some major shit is coming.

It's going to get much worse from here.

Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

Armed white supremacist terrorist militias in the Trump Depression era are something that is going to get demonstrably and catastrophically worse in the months ahead.

Armed members of the Michigan Home Guard stood outside Karl Manke's barber shop, ready to blockade the door if police arrived. They were determined to help Manke, 77, reopen his shop Monday, in defiance of state orders, and dozens joined them, wearing Trump sweatshirts and Trump cowboy hats and waving Trump flags.

They gathered not because they desperately needed haircuts but to rail against Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s approach to fighting the coronavirus outbreak in Michigan, one of the nation’s worst hot spots. They were channeling President Trump’s support of such protests, but some also were taking aim at the state’s Republicans, who they say have not done enough to “liberate” the state from safety measures that have ground life to a halt.

Michelle Gregoire, a 29-year-old school bus driver from Battle Creek who is running as a Republican for a seat in the state House, waved a yellow “Don’t tread on me” flag at passing traffic. She derided Whitmer as “a tyrant.” But she also urged Republicans “to get in line and get it together.”

The protest and others like it — including two last month that included demonstrators with swastikas, Confederate flags and some with long guns inside the capitol — have alarmed lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. But after Trump appeared to urge the militia members on, tweeting that they are “very good people” who “want their lives back again,” they have forced Michigan’s Republican lawmakers to strike a delicate balance, managing a deadly virus while also being careful not to contradict Trump or alienate their conservative supporters.

Though the coronavirus has infected more than 48,000 people in Michigan and has killed 4,674 as of Tuesday — the fourth-highest total in the nation — many of the protesters live in areas that have barely been touched by the virus but have been struggling with economic collapse because of it. GOP state lawmakers, who hold narrow margins in both the state House and Senate, have tried distancing themselves from the most vocal protesters while being careful not to appear to hew too closely to Whitmer’s shutdown policies.

“The less partisan we can be through this entire process, the sooner we’ll get out of it,” said Lee Chatfield (R), the 31-year-old speaker of the House who was working on the floor to adopt some of the governor’s restrictions when armed militiamen entered the capitol building. “There are people who want to take covid-19 seriously but believe the governor’s approach is the wrong call for our state,” he said, referring to the disease caused by the virus.

Generally, residents of Michigan agree with Whitmer’s approach, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Tuesday, in which 72 percent approve of her handling of the outbreak, and 25 percent disapprove. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) got the highest marks — 86 percent approval — but in general, Republican governors did not fare well in the poll, with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who moved to open the state early, getting an approval rating of just 39 percent.

Whitmer said in an interview Tuesday that she worries Republican state lawmakers, who have said she does not have the authority to continue her coronavirus executive order, are pushing people to violate it.

“They are feeding a lot into the behavior,” Whitmer said. “We would be so much better off if everyone with a platform focused on the science and less about politics.”

Protesters in Michigan have sought a radical turnabout in the state’s response to the pandemic, with some demanding that Whitmer lift all restrictions. Many come from fringe movements and harbor deep suspicion of health officials and their warnings; the activists insist that the government has inflated the death toll and blown the dangers out of proportion. The event’s main organizer, Ryan Kelley, a real estate agent from outside Grand Rapids, said he invited members of a local militia to the protests in Lansing as “security.”

Chatfield, who appeared onstage with Trump at a rally in Battle Creek in December, said he disagrees with protesters who believe the death toll reported by the state is inflated. He worries that the activists are making it difficult for Republicans pitching more pragmatic reopening plans to be heard.

“Those voices are getting drowned by those who are being over the line and derogatory,” Chatfield said.

Mike Shirkey (R), the state Senate’s majority leader, was more direct, condemning protesters who “used threats of violence to stir up fear and rancor.” Some lawmakers, frightened by the heavily armed demonstrators, wore bulletproof vests during the protests April 30.

“They do not represent Senate Republicans,” Shirkey said in a statement. “At best, those so-called protesters are a bunch of jackasses.”

Kelley, the organizer of the protest, said he was disappointed that many Republican lawmakers did not want to lift all restrictions immediately.

“You’re elected to serve the people,” he said. “You’re not elected to serve yourself.”

So far the militias are limited to preening demonstrations of toxic rage and impotent foolishness, but with white supremacist domestic terrorist groups actively recruiting exactly these "very good people" the capacity for both a serious miscalculation in a confrontation with law enforcement as well as a purposeful terrorist attack remains ludicrously high and will for a very long time.

The Trump Depression will absolutely be accompanied by armed and deadly unrest, especially as rural areas are hit hard by COVID-19 and economic depression. All this would be bad enough without an actively racist autocrat facing crushing defeat in November and growing more desperate by the day, egging on groups like this in order to maintain his power.

It would be a miracle for that to not be the case, and if you haven't looked around lately, we're fresh out of goddamn miracles these days.

StupidiNews!

• The famed Hollywood Bowl amphitheater is canceling its entire 2020 season in an effort to "protect artists, audiences, and staff" from COVID-19.
• NC GOP Sen. Richard Burr has been served an FBI warrant for his cell phone in connection with possible insider trading earlier this year.
• An amendment that would have stopped law enforcement from collecting internet data on any US resident without a warrant under the PATRIOT Act failed by one vote in the Senate on Wednesday.
• A fourth USDA meat inspector has died from COVID-19 as the industry and food safety officials are struggling to find enough protective equipment at US meat-packing plants.
• Ousted US vaccine scientist and whistleblower Rick Bright will testify in front the House today, he is expected to warn that America faces the "darkest winter in modern history" over COVID-19.

Last Call For The GOP Goes Viral, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, what?

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

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

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

A Supreme Disappointment, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StupidiNews!

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

Last Call For Food For Thought, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We may not be able to fix it.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lowering The Barr, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Call For Austerity Hy-CARES-ia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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