Last Call For Our Little Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

For the first time, the Trump State Department is designating a white supremacist group as terrorists, and of course the group is Russian in origin.

The Trump administration is expected to announce on Monday that it is designating an ultranationalist group based in Russia as a terrorist organization, according to officials. It is the first time the government will apply the label to a white supremacist group.
While the label of specially designated global terrorist has been frequently used for Islamist extremists, there have been growing concerns among U.S. officials about violent white supremacists with transnational links over the past five years. In 2018, the White House added that threat to the government’s National Strategy for Counterterrorism.

“These designations are unprecedented,” said Ambassador Nathan A. Sales, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator. “This is the first time the United States has ever designated white supremacists as terrorists, and this illustrates how seriously this administration takes the white supremacist terrorist threat. We are doing things no previous administration has done to counter this threat.”

The State Department’s designation for the organization, the Russian Imperial Movement, sets up the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control to block any American property or assets belonging to the group. It will also bar Americans from financial dealings with the organization and make it easier to ban its members from traveling to the United States.

The United States is also designating three of the group’s leaders — Stanislav Anatolyevich Vorobyev, Denis Valliullovich Gariev and Nikolay Nikolayevich Trushchalov — as individual terrorists who will face similar sanctions, the officials said.

The authority for either the Treasury Department or the State Department to deem a group or an individual a specially designated global terrorist traces back to an executive order issued by President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. President Trump in September signed an executive order expanding that authority to cover groups that provide training for terrorists even if the groups are not directly linked to any attack.

The system parallels in some ways but is different from when the government designates a group as a foreign terrorist organization, which has separate criteria and applies only to groups rather than individuals.

The move could cut against criticism that the Trump administration has played down the threat of white nationalist violence for political reasons, based on the so-called alt-right’s support for Mr. Trump and his statement in 2017 that there were “very fine people on both sides” of a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

The Russian Imperial Movement is not considered to be sponsored by the Russian government, officials said, although President Vladimir V. Putin has tolerated its activities and it has helped advance the Russian government’s external goals by recruiting Russian fighters to aid pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.

On one side, yeah, this is Trump saying "See, we're not racists, and we are tough on Russia!"  On the other hand, it's even easier to imagine that Putin has told Trump that RIM's political usefulness has come to an end, and that Putin wants help in pressuring them.  Besides, it's win-win for both of them.

Concerns have been escalating for several years that there is a growing transnational white supremacist or alt-right movement, as illustrated by the 2019 mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, by an Australian man who streamed the killings of 51 people on Facebook Live.

Against that backdrop, national security officials are said to have been searching for a neo-Nazi-style group that the U.S. government could designate as a foreign terrorist organization.

One challenge to finding an appropriate candidate was that designating a group with significant American ties would also raise major First Amendment issues, officials said. Although a Russian Imperial Movement member has visited the United States, the organization does not appear to have domestic members. It is not clear if the group has provided training to U.S.-based neo-Nazis.

So domestic white supremacist terrorists can carry on as normal, and Trump can say he's doing something about foreign white supremacist terrorists.

Surprise!

Plugged In, Dropped Out

Forcing thousands of school districts into online learning for the rest of the school year is turning into a complete disaster, especially for the students without broadband access, and it's one that will almost certainly cost an entire generation of post-Millennials a year of education or more.

Chronic absenteeism is a problem in American education during the best of times, but now, with the vast majority of the nation’s school buildings closed and lessons being conducted remotely, more students than ever are missing class — not logging on, not checking in or not completing assignments.

The absence rate appears particularly high in schools with many low-income students, whose access to home computers and internet connections can be spotty. Some teachers report that less than half their students are regularly participating.

The trend is leading to widespread concern among educators, with talk of a potential need for summer sessions, an early start in the fall, or perhaps having some or even all students repeat a grade once Americans are able to return to classrooms.

Students are struggling to connect in districts large and small. Los Angeles said last week that about a third of its high school students were not logging in for classes. And there are daunting challenges for rural communities like Minford, Ohio, where many students live in remote wooded areas unserved by internet providers.

Educators say that a subset of students and their parents have dropped out of touch with schools completely — unavailable by phone, email or any other form of communication — as families struggle with the broader economic and health effects of the coronavirus outbreak.

Even before the outbreak, chronic absenteeism was a problem in many schools, especially those with a lot of low-income students. Many obstacles can prevent children who live in poverty from making it to class: a parent’s broken-down car or a teenager’s need to babysit siblings, for example. But online learning presents new obstacles, particularly with uneven levels of technology and adult supervision.

Titilayo Aluko, 18, a junior at Landmark High School in Manhattan, is one of the students trying hard to keep up with her classes who has been thwarted by her lack of access to technology. She has a district-issued laptop, but no home Wi-Fi network any more. The cable company removed the router from her family’s Bronx apartment after they had trouble paying the monthly bill.

For classes like statistics and neuroscience, Ms. Aluko has tried to complete assignments and participate in video conferences using her cellphone, but that is sometimes impossible.

“I actually need my teachers, who know me and understand me, to help me, and I don’t have that,” she said. “I just keep thinking, ‘Oh, my God, I might not pass.’ I’m just really scared for the future.”

Cratering attendance in some districts contrasts with reports from several selective or affluent schools where close to 100 percent of students are participating in online learning. The dramatic split promises to further deepen the typical academic achievement gaps between poor, middle-class and wealthy students.

The gap is essentially going to be permanent.  Imagine trying to graduate in this catastrophe, let alone dealing with not knowing if your family can get power, water, food, or the money to pay for it right now.  Then imagine trying to apply for colleges on top of that.  Now try to imagine competing for admission slots with students who can easily transition to online learning without skipping a beat.

We're going to see dropout rates through the roof in a lot of districts this year and next.  We will have failed a generation of kids.

Retribution Execution, Con't

As I mentioned last week, Donald Trump has fired Inspector General for the Intelligence Community Michael Atkinson, saying he "no longer has confidence" in Atkinson to do his job.  Leave it to Trump to do it while the world is paying attention to COVID-19, but there's no doubt that Atkinson was fired because of his role in the Ukraine whistleblower scandal that led to Trump's impeachment.

The intelligence community watchdog removed abruptly late Friday by President Donald Trump says he believes Trump ousted him because of his evenhanded handling of a whistleblower complaint that ultimately led to the president's impeachment. 

"It is hard not to think that the President’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General," Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general said in a statement Sunday, "and from my commitment to continue to do so."

Atkinson was the federal official who revealed to Congress in September the existence of a whistleblower complaint against Trump, which indicated that the president improperly pressured Ukraine to investigate his political rivals. When Atkinson sought to share that complaint with Congress under a federal whistleblower law, the White House and Justice Department intervened and blocked the transmission of the complaint for days.

Ultimately, amid withering pressure, Trump provided the whistleblower complaint to Congress, as well as a transcript of a July 2019 call with Ukraine's president, two pieces of evidence that became crucial factors in the House's decision to impeach Trump for abuse of power. The Senate later acquitted him on a nearly party-line vote. 

"As an Inspector General, I was legally obligated to ensure that whistleblowers had an effective and authorized means to disclose urgent matters involving classified information to the congressional intelligence committees, and that when they did blow the whistle in an authorized manner, their identities would be protected as a guard against reprisals," Atkinson said in his statement. "Inspectors General are able to fulfill their critical watchdog functions because, by law, they are supposed to be independent of both the Executive agencies they oversee and of Congress." 

Trump informed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees late Friday that he would be removing Atkinson after a required 30-day wait. But Atkinson was immediately placed on administrative leave, according to congressional sources, effectively circumventing the one-month delay. The move has prompted some Senate Republicans to demand more details about Atkinson's removal.

Sadly, Trump now has the perfect political cover to make sure his retribution against Atkinson goes unpunished.  Congress is going to have a much bigger problem on its hands in April than a fired Inspector General.  It's worth noting that under nearly any other scenario, Trump would be getting fried right now by the press over this, but Congress is in recess, and frankly nobody has time right now with a deadly pandemic killing thousands of Americans daily.

Just another day in the Trump regime, I suppose.

StupidiNews!

• After days of COVID-19 symptoms and announcing he tested positive for the virus last week, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been admitted to a London hospital for additional tests.
• Chile is facing widespread drought on top of COVID-19 as farmers are losing crops and social distancing is keeping supplies from getting to rural areas.
• Japan is expected to announce a state of emergency this week as community spreading of COVID-19 is making its way through Tokyo.
• Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers has called a legislative special session to delay the state's Tuesday primary and move to vote-by-mail, but state Republicans are blocking the move.
• As more Americans are moving work to online business meeting services like Zoom, prosecutors are warning that "Zoombombing", disrupting meetings by obtaining the meeting ID, is criminal.

Last Call For A Race Against The Virus, Con't

As I said yesterday, the evidence is piling up that decades of environmental, housing, and public health racism means black America is bearing the brunt of COVID-19's fatalities.

The COVID-19 virus is killing black residents in Cook County at disproportionately high rates, according to early data analyzed by WBEZ.

While black residents make up only 23% of the population in the county, they account for 58% of the COVID-19 deaths. And half of the deceased lived in Chicago, according to data from the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office.

As of Saturday, 107 of Cook County’s 183 deaths from COVID-19 were black. In Chicago, 61 of the 86 recorded deaths – or 70% – were black residents. Blacks make up 29% of Chicago’s population. 

The majority of the black COVID-19 patients who died had underlying health conditions including respiratory problems and diabetes. Eighty-one percent of them had hypertension, or high blood pressure, diabetes or both. 

As the virus continues to spread, the high mortality rate for black residents is alarming.
“It’s disturbing and upsetting, but not surprising,” said Linda Rae Murray, health policy professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “This is just a reflection of the facts that we already know about these pandemics. People who are vulnerable will die quicker and won’t have as many resources.” 

It’s still early in the pandemic and health officials are assessing information on which groups of people are being affected, Dr. Ngozi Ezike, director of the Illinois Department of Public Health, said Saturday. Ezike said she “would not be entirely surprised” if a disproportionate number of deaths were occuring in black communities. 

“As we put on our health equity lenses, we already know [that] before COVID was ever established that the health outcomes for various communities are already different,” she said. “So if you know those disparities exist in terms of health outcomes, you can imagine that overlaying a new disease is only going to exacerbate whatever inequities already exist.” 

Historically, Chicago’s black communities have been disproportionately affected by health-related issues including poverty, environmental pollution, segregation and limited access to medical care. 

These conditions contribute to high rates of hypertension and diabetes. In Illinois, the rate of high blood pressure for black residents is around 48%.

And it's not just black America, either.  It's actually even worse for Native Americans.

They hastily piled all the dumbbells and treadmills in the back of a gym to make room for 23 extra hospital beds. The beds aren’t needed yet, but on a reservation where residents suffer high rates of diseases that exist throughout Indian Country, the Lummi Tribal Health Clinic is taking every precaution to prepare for the deadly coronavirus.

Two thousand miles away at the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma, where 11 people have tested positive for the virus as of Friday and one has died, Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. said: “We’re preparing for the worst.” Health workers plan to move hospital beds into a nearby university and a job-training facility shuttered because of the pandemic. “This is the worst public health crisis we’ve had in a generation.”

At the Navajo Nation that crosses three western states, 321 people were infected as of Saturday, an increase of 51 cases in a single day with 13 fatalities, the most in Indian Country. Police started issuing citations to anyone who violates a stay-at-home order.

“This is a matter of life and death," President Jonathan Nez said in a statement, "especially for those who have underlying health issues. Before you consider going out for any reason, think of the well-being of your elders and your children. Be mindful that the numbers we are seeing are two to three days old due to the delay in test results for covid-19.”

The coronavirus is ravaging the United States, but experts say more than 5 million people who identify as American Indian and Alaskan Native are especially vulnerable.

“When you look at the health disparities in Indian Country — high rates of diabetes, cancer, heart disease, asthma and then you combine that with the overcrowded housing situation where you have a lot of people in homes with an elder population who may be exposed or carriers — this could be like a wildfire on a reservation and get out of control in a heartbeat,” said Kevin Allis, chief executive of the National Congress of American Indians. 

“We could get wiped out,” Allis said.

The genocide is a feature, not a bug.  And everything this regime is doing is making the death toll higher, especially among non-white Americans.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The Washington Post has put together a pretty informative and revealing timeline of the Trump regime's multiple failure points on COVID-19, and how at every given opportunity Donald Trump deliberately chose the most awful path to take.

The Trump administration received its first formal notification of the outbreak of the coronavirus in China on Jan. 3. Within days, U.S. spy agencies were signaling the seriousness of the threat to Trump by including a warning about the coronavirus — the first of many — in the President’s Daily Brief. 

And yet, it took 70 days from that initial notification for Trump to treat the coronavirus not as a distant threat or harmless flu strain well under control, but as a lethal force that had outflanked America’s defenses and was poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. That more-than-two-month stretch now stands as critical time that was squandered. 

Trump’s baseless assertions in those weeks, including his claim that it would all just “miraculously” go away, sowed significant public confusion and contradicted the urgent messages of public health experts. 

“While the media would rather speculate about outrageous claims of palace intrigue, President Trump and this Administration remain completely focused on the health and safety of the American people with around the clock work to slow the spread of the virus, expand testing, and expedite vaccine development," said Judd Deere, a spokesman for the president. "Because of the President’s leadership we will emerge from this challenge healthy, stronger, and with a prosperous and growing economy.” 

The president’s behavior and combative statements were merely a visible layer on top of deeper levels of dysfunction.

The most consequential failure involved a breakdown in efforts to develop a diagnostic test that could be mass produced and distributed across the United States, enabling agencies to map early outbreaks of the disease, and impose quarantine measure to contain them. At one point, a Food and Drug Administration official tore into lab officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, telling them their lapses in protocol, including concerns that the lab did not meet the criteria for sterile conditions, were so serious that the FDA would “shut you down” if the CDC were a commercial, rather than government, entity. 

Other failures cascaded through the system. The administration often seemed weeks behind the curve in reacting to the viral spread, closing doors that were already contaminated. Protracted arguments between the White House and public health agencies over funding, combined with a meager existing stockpile of emergency supplies, left vast stretches of the country’s health-care system without protective gear until the outbreak had become a pandemic. Infighting, turf wars and abrupt leadership changes hobbled the work of the coronavirus task force.

It may never be known how many thousands of deaths, or millions of infections, might have been prevented with a response that was more coherent, urgent and effective. But even now, there are many indications that the administration’s handling of the crisis had potentially devastating consequences. 

Even the president’s base has begun to confront this reality. In mid-March, as Trump was rebranding himself a wartime president and belatedly urging the public to help slow the spread of the virus, Republican leaders were poring over grim polling data that suggested Trump was lulling his followers into a false sense of security in the face of a lethal threat.

The poll showed that far more Republicans than Democrats were being influenced by Trump’s dismissive depictions of the virus and the comparably scornful coverage on Fox News and other conservative networks. As a result, Republicans were in distressingly large numbers refusing to change travel plans, follow “social distancing” guidelines, stock up on supplies or otherwise take the coronavirus threat seriously.

And they still are not.  A good 8-10 Republican-led states still refuse stay-at-home orders like Iowa and Utah, another dozen are chafing at the bonds and have moved to weaken them, like Georgia and Florida, after being dragged kicking and screaming.  Kentucky, Ohio, and Washington state were well ahead of the curve.

Meanwhile Trump is pressuring governors to reopen businesses, schools, and tourist areas demanding that America get back to work, and no, he hasn't actually dropped his "Easter miracle" timeline fantasy, either.

President Donald Trump pushed to reopen the country Saturday, despite warning Americans "it's not going to be a good-looking situation" as the number of deaths approach their peak in the coming days while talking at a briefing with the White House coronavirus task force. 

The president also responded to questions about a tweet that suggested creating another White House coronavirus task force that would focus on the economy and reopening the country, he said that it is something he is thinking about.

"I started by saying that, and I continue to say it. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself. We've got to get our country open," Trump said. 

The president discussed a Saturday morning call he had with commissioners of most of the major sports to discuss the effects of coronavirus to the industry, emphasizing that he wants fans "back in the arena" as soon as they can be. 

"You know, they want to see basketball and baseball and football and hockey. They want to see their sports. They want to go out onto the golf courses and breathe nice clean, beautiful fresh air," Trump said. "No, I can't tell you a date, but I think it's going to be sooner rather than later." 

He said that sports aren't "designed" for closures, which he said is also true of the country, emphasizing that he wants citizens to get back to work. 

"It has to get open. This country was not designed to be closed," Trump said. "Think of it. We're paying people not to go to work, how about that? How does that play?" 

Trump had responded to a tweet by George W. Bush's former White House press secretary Dana Perino earlier in the day saying he agreed with the idea of another task force examining how the country's economy can reopen and get back on track.

Trump wants things back to normal.  He doesn't care how many people he has to infect in order for it to happen, and eventually he's going to do something precipitous that forces the hands of America's governors. And remember, the official case count and death count are, if anything, far, far too low.

The fast-spreading novel coronavirus is almost certainly killing Americans who are not included in the nation’s growing death toll, according to public health experts and government officials involved in the tally.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts only deaths in which the presence of the coronavirus is confirmed in a laboratory test, agency spokeswoman Kristen Nordlund said. “We know that it is an underestimation.”

A widespread lack of access to testing in the early weeks of the U.S. outbreak means people with respiratory illnesses died without being counted, epidemiologists say. Even now, some people who die at home or in overburdened nursing homes are not being tested, according to funeral directors, medical examiners and nursing home representatives.

Postmortem testing by medical examiners varies widely across the country, and some officials say testing the dead is a misuse of scarce resources that could be used on the living. In addition, some people who have the virus test negative, experts say.

As a result, public health officials and government leaders lack a complete view of the pandemic’s death toll as they assess its course and scramble to respond.

Scientists who analyze mortality statistics from influenza and other respiratory illnesses say it is too early to estimate how many fatalities have gone unrecorded. For a disease with common symptoms such as covid-19, they said, deaths with positive results almost certainly represent only a fraction of the total caused by the disease.

We're already to the point where people are dying without being tested, as COVID-19 causes multiple organ failure.  The number of cases is far higher than the official numbers.  The number of deaths are far higher than are being recorded.  Social distancing is still not happening in a many places.

And at every juncture, Democratic-led states are finding their equipment taken by Trump and given to who knows. Even Kentucky isn't safe anymore, Mitch McConnell or not.

Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear says his administration is doing everything it can to prepare hospitals to be inundated with cases of COVID-19, but nearly every time the state has placed an order for medical protective gear, the federal government has prevented its transfer. 

Kentucky is scaling up the number of hospital beds, enlisting state manufacturers to make protective equipment and doing its best to acquire supplies for medical workers amid a critical shortage. 

State officials have also requested additional gloves, masks and other personal protective equipment (PPE) from the Strategic National Stockpile, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and through private contracts. 

But in most cases, Beshear said the federal government got it first. 

“Our biggest problem is that just about every single order that we have out there for PPE, we get a call right when it’s supposed to be shipped and it’s typically the federal government has bought it,” Beshear said during a Saturday press conference. “It’s very hard to buy things when the federal government is there and anytime they want to buy it, they get it first.”

This is not going to be over by Easter.  It's not going to be over by April.  It's not going to be over by May.  It's going to be a serious problem for a long, long time.

Sunday Long Read: Stranger Than Fiction

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

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

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

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

Last Call For Labour Pains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Competency. What a concept.

Wish we had it here.

The Worst-Case Scenario, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They knew.  Trump ignored them.

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

A Race Against The Virus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Call For Red Dead Eruption

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Want My Trump State TV, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kushner Goes Viral

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 2, 2020

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

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

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

Nuremberg trials are too good for these jackals.

StupidiNews!

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

Last Call For Captain, And Then Kneel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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