Last Call For Primary Causes

New York is officially canceling the June presidential primary election.

The New York State Board of Elections voted to cancel the presidential primary scheduled for June 23 during a call with the board on Monday.

Douglas Kellner, the co-chair of the New York State Board of Elections, told CNN the two Democratic election commissioners — himself and Andrew Spano — have the power under the election law to cancel the election.

“In the budget that was passed by the legislature and signed by the governor on April 3 included a provision that any candidates who have suspended their campaign or requested to be removed from the ballot should be removed from the primary ballot,” Kellner said. “And of course Sen. Sanders had suspended his campaign. He did that five days after the law was enacted. And it basically rendered the primary moot, and at a time when the goal is to avoid unnecessary social contact, our conclusion was that there was no purpose in holding a beauty contest primary that would marginally increase the risk to both voters and poll workers.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order last month moving the primary from its originally scheduled date of April 28 to June.

He responded to the board’s vote in his news conference today, saying, “I’m not going to second guess the board of elections there are a number of, I know there are a lot of election employees, employees of boards of elections who are nervous about conducting elections. But I’ll leave it up to the board of elections.”

Jay Jacobs, chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee, told CNN in a phone interview Monday afternoon that he agreed with the decision to cancel the state's presidential primary contest.

Jacobs said it was a "necessary move" by the New York election officials to protect the health and safety of voters and poll workers.

He noted that the outcome was essentially “pre-determined” since Sen. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the Democratic race and emphasized the need to protect voters amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"We've stopped all non-essential business. This certainly is a non-essential primary if ever there was one," Jacobs said.

The Bernie people are furious, none more than Bernie Sanders himself.

Sanders’ campaign in a statement called the decision “an outrage” and a “blow to American democracy,” urging the Democratic National Committee to overturn it.

“While we understood that we did not have the votes to win the Democratic nomination our campaign was suspended, not ended, because people in every state should have the right to express their preference. What the Board of Elections is ignoring is that the primary process not only leads to a nominee but also the selection of delegates which helps determine the platform and rules of the Democratic Party,” said Bernie 2020 senior advisor Jeff Weaver.

“No one asked New York to cancel the election. The DNC didn’t request it. The Biden campaign didn’t request it. And our campaign communicated that we wanted to remain on the ballot. Given that the primary is months away, the proper response must be to make the election safe — such as going to all vote by mail — rather than to eliminating people’s right to vote completely.”

Our Revolution, a 501(c)(4) organization that was created after Sanders’ first run for president in 2016, has pushed its grassroots army to persuade voters to back the Vermont senator in states that have yet to hold their primaries. It aims to make sure Sanders wins enough delegates to push for key reforms in the Democratic platform.

After the self-described democratic socialist was removed from the ballot, Our Revolution’s leadership told CNBC they plan to reach out to delegates and state party leaders in the remaining primary states to persuade them that if they decide on a similar course, the party will split.

“I would say to state party chairs in other states” not to follow New York, Our Revolution’s chairman, Larry Cohen, said in an interview. “You are better off following the Republican governor in Ohio who extended a mail in ballot, than following a Democratic governor in New York, and that’s a disgrace, but that’s a reality,” he added, while placing the blame entirely on Gov. Andrew Cuomo and what he believes is his control of the state party apparatus.

Threatening the party with a schism is definitely the way to influence decisions made within the party.

Having said that, even Kentucky got its shit together enough for vote by mail this year.

Do better, Cuomo.

A Supreme Pronouncement

In an 8-1 decision, the US Supreme Court took a flamethrower to Republican "risk corridors" that starved insurers of money promised to them in the original ACA, meaning the Trump regime owes back payments on Obamacare.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled the federal government owes health insurers massive payments from an Obamacare program shielding them from financial risks after the companies accused Washington of reneging on its funding promises.

The 8-1 decision could open the floodgates for federal cash to the insurance industry. Insurers who accused the government of a “bait and switch” claimed they’re owed $12 billion from the Affordable Care Act program.

The case concerned a temporary fund in the health care law intended as a buffer for health plans who had sicker customers than expected in the newly overhauled insurance marketplaces. Obamacare’s drafters hoped the program would be funded by industry, but health plans quickly racked up losses when the marketplaces opened in 2014. The next year, Republican lawmakers approved the first in a series of annual appropriations riders barring HHS from using taxpayer dollars to bankroll the program, known as risk corridors.

The high court agreed with insurers that the congressional spending restrictions didn’t release the government from its original promise to fund the Obamacare program. The court said Congress had created "a rare money-mandating obligation" that later appropriations language couldn't repeal.

"These holdings reflect a principle as old as the Nation itself: The Government should honor its obligations," wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in the majority opinion.

Justice Samuel Alito, in a dissenting opinion, criticized the ruling as effectively providing a massive bailout for the insurance industry.

"Under the court’s decision, billions of taxpayer dollars will be turned over to insurance companies that bet unsuccessfully on the success of the program in question," Alito wrote.

The ruling came year too late however, and may not matter at all in a year...

The decision will have little impact on Obamacare. The law faces a legal threat in a separate case brought by Republican-led states challenging the law’s constitutionality, which the Supreme Court has agreed to hear, likely later this year. But the ruling represents a loss for the Trump administration, which argued it wasn’t obligated to make the risk corridor payments and is supporting the red states’ lawsuit.

The three-year risk corridors program closed in 2016. Insurance experts said the program’s $12 billion shortfall contributed to turbulence in Obamacare’s early years, as health plans jacked up premiums to cover their losses or abandoned the marketplaces.

So again, it's effectively a moot point now as risk corridors are gone, and probably a moot point later as all of Obamacare could be gone in 12 months.

Thanks GOP!

Food For Thought, Con't

The looming food shortages across the country, scenes of thousands of car lining up daily for food bank distribution, crops rotting in the fields and chickens being killed because there's no workers to process them, all of this is under the Trump regime and Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue is just as incompetent as the rest of them.

Tens of millions of pounds of American-grown produce is rotting in fields as food banks across the country scramble to meet a massive surge in demand, a two-pronged disaster that has deprived farmers of billions of dollars in revenue while millions of newly jobless Americans struggle to feed their families. 

While other federal agencies quickly adapted their programs to the coronavirus crisis, the Agriculture Department took more than a month to make its first significant move to buy up surplus fruits and vegetables — despite repeated entreaties. 

“It’s frustrating,” said Nikki Fried, commissioner of agriculture in Florida. Fried, who is a Democrat, and much of the Florida congressional delegation asked Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue nearly a month ago to use his broad authority and funding to get more Florida farmers plugged into federal food purchasing and distribution programs as the food service market collapsed. “Unfortunately, USDA didn’t move until [last week].”

Tom Vilsack, who served as agriculture secretary during the Obama administration, put it this way: “It’s not a lack of food, it’s that the food is in one place and the demand is somewhere else and they haven’t been able to connect the dots. You’ve got to galvanize people.” 

It has been six weeks since President Donald Trump and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first urged Americans to avoid restaurants as part of national social distancing guidelines to slow the spread of Covid-19 — a move that immediately severed demand for millions of pounds of food earmarked for professional kitchens across the country.

Just 50 miles from Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida growers, much of whose produce was destined for restaurant chains, faced an immediate crisis: Find customers for surplus crops or plow the fields under to avoid attracting pests. 

Images of farmers destroying tomatoes, piling up squash, burying onions and dumping milk shocked many Americans who remain fearful of supply shortages. At the same time, people who recently lost their jobs lined up for miles outside some food banks, raising questions about why there has been no coordinated response at the federal level to get the surplus of perishable food to more people in need, even as commodity groups, state leaders and lawmakers repeatedly urged the Agriculture Department to step in.

Demand at food banks has increased an average of 70 percent, according to Feeding America, which represents about 200 major food banks across the country. The group estimates that 40 percent of those being served are new to the system. 

In mid-April, USDA unveiled a long-awaited $19 billion aid program with $3 billion set aside to buy excess food, a pot of money that would cover a major ramp-up of fresh produce purchases, along with dairy and meats. But federal officials predicted it would take the better part of a month before that food is packed and shipped to food banks and other nonprofits in need. At that point, it will be too late for many produce growers who saw a huge drop in demand right at the peak of their season. 

“By the time that comes through, it won’t help Florida,” said Brittany Lee, a blueberry farmer and executive director of the Florida Blueberry Growers Association. Blueberry prices are about half of what they were this time last year, she said.

Sonny Perdue is the former governor of Georgia and cousin to current GOP Sen. David Purdue of Georgia.  He was brought on to the Trump regime to do two things: act as the lightning rod for Trump's Chinese tariffs on farm products, and to get as many Americans off SNAP and other food benefit programs as possible.

He was never hired to handle a national food crisis, and make no mistake, we're deep into one.  The USDA should have had a handle on this six weeks ago and it should have been a top priority.

But now, we've got tens of millions of people needing basic foodstuffs, and tens of millions of pounds of food going to waste. As poultry producer Tyson Foods warns, "The food supply chain is breaking."

The board chairman of Tyson Foods is warning that "millions of pounds of meat will disappear" from the national food supply chain as the coronavirus outbreak forces food processing plants to shutter. 

"The food supply chain is breaking," John Tyson wrote in a full-page advertisement published Sunday in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

"There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we are able to reopen our facilities that are currently closed," he wrote in the advertisement, which was also published as a blog post on the company's website. 

In recent weeks, the major poultry producer has temporarily suspended operations at plants across the country. The company halted operations Wednesday at an Iowa plant that is crucial to the nation's pork supply. 

"In addition to meat shortages, this is a serious food waste issue. Farmers across the nation simply will not have anywhere to sell their livestock to be processed, when they could have fed the nation," John Tyson wrote. 

"Millions of animals — chickens, pigs and cattle — will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities," he added. 

Four employees of Tyson's operations in rural southwest Georgia died earlier this month after becoming infected with the coronavirus, a company spokesman told The Associated Press. 

Tyson has told NBC News that it is taking steps to protect its workers, including installing dividers between workers and relaxing its attendance policy to allow sick workers to stay home.

 
Great job, guys.

StupidiNews!

• The White House is denying multiple reports that Donald Trump is planning to fire Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar over the regime's botched COVID-19 response.
• Donald Trump is planning on requiring over 1,000 West Point cadets travel back to the academy in order to be the audience at his commencement speech.
• Five more states plan to join Texas, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina this week in reopening businesses and public locations despite warnings from health officials.
• UK PM Boris Johnson returns to work this week after getting the green light over his COVID-19 infection, British businesses are demanding a timeline to reopen across the nation.
• Japanese video game historians shared 100 Super Famicom consoles with families across the country to help bring people together during the pandemic.

Last Call For Biden, His Time Con't

Joe Biden's brilliant strategy of "Letting Trump screw up daily for six weeks during a massive pandemic crisis" is paying political dividends as people are kind of noticing that Trump was never fit for real leadership.  The COVID-19 death toll is heading for 55,000 and Biden does need to engage voters on that, but nowhere near the level as on Trump's daily egofests. CNN polling guru and FiveThirtyEight.com stats man Harry Enten:

A new Fox News poll from Michigan finds former Vice President Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump by a 49% to 41% margin. Other Fox News polls from Florida and Pennsylvania also showed Biden clearly ahead. 

In all three cases, Biden's doing better than he is in the long-term polling average in those states. 

What's the point: A lot of Democrats have been hankering for Biden to try and get out to be more part of the daily media conversation. The latest numbers suggest that these voices are likely wrong. Biden's proving that the less media he receives, the better it is for his electoral prospects. 

Over the last month and a half, Trump has had the political spotlight shone on him. He's had daily press conferences that the media has extensively covered. Meanwhile, Biden's struggling to attract much of an audience as he is stuck at home. 

You can see this really well in media mentions in the top paragraph of stories, as measured by NewsLibrary.com. Four years ago from March 20 to April 20, Trump had about 65% of the mentions between Hillary Clinton and him. This year during the same period, Trump's gotten about 90% of the coverage dedicated to Biden or him. That is, Biden's turned a 2:1 disadvantage into a 9:1 disadvantage.

This is why the Biden opposition on the Trump side and on the Sanders side (because let's be honest, there is now a concerted effort to sink Joe Biden by the dirtbag left before the convention to replace him with Sanders, regardless of what Democratic primary voters actually want) are both covering the 1993 sexual assault allegations against Biden by a woman named Tara Reade.

Everyone from Double G's shop The Intercept to the Daily Caller and FOX News State TV are running with "new evidence" against Biden.

A 1993 video has surfaced that appears to show the mother of Tara Reade, the former aide to Joe Biden who has accused him of sexual assault, talking about "problems" her daughter faced on CNN’s "Larry King Live." 

As first reported by the Intercept, an unnamed woman from San Luis Obispo, California, called into King's show and said, "I’m wondering what a staffer would do besides go to the press in Washington? My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him."

Reade confirmed to POLITICO it was her mother's voice.

King asked the woman, “She had a story to tell but, out of respect for the person she worked for, she didn’t tell it?" 

The caller replied, "That's true." 

In March, Reade accused Biden of digitally penetrating her in 1993 without her consent. Last year, she told reporters that Biden inappropriately touched her at the time, including on her neck and shoulder, but did not talk about an alleged assault. 

Before the King video was discovered, Reade told media outlets, including POLITICO, that her mother had called into his show. She did not remember the date of the show at the time.

Biden has to deal with this directly and soon, or he'll be hounded out of the race.  Al Franken found out the hard way that this is a career-ending accusation at this level of politics...and Donald Trump of course found out that career-ending sexual assault only applies to Democrats.

Press The Meat, Con't

White House journalists are finally, finally taking a stand against the Orange toddler as his treatment of the press as "enemies of the people" becomes full-on treatment of them as actual enemies of the state.

Later on Friday, CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins received a strange request from a White House official, one that she subsequently detailed on Twitter:

Tonight the White House tried to have me, and only me, swap seats with another reporter several rows back. We both refused to move from our seats that were assigned well in advance. The briefing was short, the president took no questions and it proceeded as planned.

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 24, 2020

A more detailed report came from Washington Blade Chief Political & White House Reporter Chris Johnson, who filed this pool report on the incident:

Earlier today before the briefing, a White House official instructed the print pooler to take CNN’s seat in the briefing room because the seating would be swapped for the briefing. Given the seating assignment is under the jurisdiction of the White House Correspondents’ Association, not the White House, pooler refused to move. 

The White House official then informed the print pooler swapping wasn’t an option and the Secret Service was involved. Again, pooler refused to move, citing guidance from the WHCA. The briefing proceeded with both CNN and print pooler sitting in their respective assigned seats.

Secret Service, huh? Let’s pause for a moment on that one. The U.S. Secret Service protects top U.S. leaders as well as visiting foreign dignitaries, such as the pope. “Using advanced countermeasures, the Secret Service executes security operations that deter, minimize and decisively respond to identified threats and vulnerabilities," its website says.

Where does the assignment of seats in the White House briefing room fit into that scheme? It appears not to, according to Jonathan Karl, president of the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA). In an email sent to Johnson on Friday evening, Karl wrote, “The Secret Service tells the WHCA they were not involved whatsoever in this effort by the WH to change seating assignments.” 

A Secret Service representative emailed the Erik Wemple Blog this statement: “The U.S. Secret Service was not involved in this matter.”

So it seems that the White House was so intent on Collins’s positional demotion as to invoke the Secret Service for the purposes of intimidation. Collins and Johnson were wise to stand their ground.

What's this?  Jon Karl and the WHCA finally developing a spine after Trump tries to banish CNN to the back of the room and invokes the USSS to intimidate a young woman reporter?

Our White House press betters are finally catching on that Trump isn't playing around and never was.  He will put reporters in jail or worse if he believes for a moment that it will save his re-election, and the closer to November we get, the more obvious this will become.

The time to stand up to Trump manipulating the WHCA was three years ago, but what is past is past. If there's a future for journalism in this country, it starts with holding Trump accountable and going to the mat to defend their own people.

We're finally starting to see that.

The Erik Wemple Blog has asked the White House who hatched the idea to suddenly attack Collins’s front-row perch in the briefing room. It’s not clear, though we do know this: It’s a petty, personal act that was hastily and mendaciously executed. What happened here was nothing short of an abject attempt to professionally humiliate a young, female journalist. Sure, Trump has targeted men plenty of times in the briefing room and elsewhere. But hear the words of CNN Chief Political Correspondent Dana Bash earlier this month: “As a woman who covered the White House, as a woman who covers politics and policy in Washington, we have to just say, the way he treats the female reporters is just different.”

If even Wemple gets it (and let's not forget Wemple spent months trying to debunk the Mueller Report over the last three months only to run headlong into last week's Senate Intelligence Committee report, and he's silent on it) then Trump is in real trouble.

Sunday Long Read: Ordering Out

NYC restaurateur and owner of now former Bowery staple eatery Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton, tells her story in this week's Sunday Long Read.  After 20 years, the mainstay closed its doors and Hamilton now wonders openly about if the restaurant model of business could or even should survive in the Big Apple in the post-COVID era.

On the night before I laid off all 30 of my employees, I dreamed that my two children had perished, buried alive in dirt, while I dug in the wrong place, just five feet away from where they were actually smothered. I turned and spotted the royal blue heel of my youngest’s socked foot poking out of the black soil only after it was too late.

For 10 days, everyone in my orbit had been tilting one way one hour, the other the next. Ten days of being waterboarded by the news, by tweets, by friends, by my waiters. Of being inundated by texts from fellow chefs and managers — former employees, now at the helm of their own restaurants but still eager for guidance. Of gentle but nervous pleas from my operations manager to consider signing up with a third-party delivery service like Caviar. Of being rattled even by my own wife, Ashley, and her anxious compulsion to act, to reduce our restaurant’s operating hours, to close at 9 p.m., cut shifts.

With no clear directive from any authority — public schools were still open — I spent those 10 days sorting through the conflicting chatter, trying to decide what to do. And now I understood abruptly: I would lay everybody off, even my wife. Prune, my Manhattan restaurant, would close at 11:59 p.m. on March 15. I had only one piece of unemotional data to work with: the checking-account balance. If I triaged the collected sales tax that was sitting in its own dedicated savings account and left unpaid the stack of vendor invoices, I could fully cover this one last week of payroll.

By the time of the all-staff meeting after brunch that day, I knew I was right. After a couple of weeks of watching the daily sales dwindle — a $12,141 Saturday to a $4,188 Monday to a $2,093 Thursday — it was a relief to decide to pull the parachute cord. I didn’t want to have waited too long, didn’t want to crash into the trees. Our sous chef FaceTimed in, as did our lead line cook, while nearly everyone else gathered in the dining room. I looked everybody in the eye and said, “I’ve decided not to wait to see what will happen; I encourage you to call first thing in the morning for unemployment, and you have a week’s paycheck from me coming.”

After the meeting, there was some directionless shuffling. Should we collect our things? Grab our knives? Stay and have a drink? There was still one last dinner, so four of us — Ashley and I; our general manager, Anna; and Jake, a beloved line cook — worked the last shift at Prune for who knows how long. Some staff members remained behind to eat with one another, spending their money in house. As word trickled out, some long-ago alumnae reached out to place orders for meals they would never eat. From Lauren Kois, who waited tables at Prune all through her Ph.D. program and is now an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Alabama:

2 dark and stormies
shrimp w anchovy
fried oysters (we’re pretending it’s a special tonight)
Leo Steen Jurassic Chenin Blanc
skate wing
treviso salad
potatoes in duck fat
brothy beans
breton butter cake
2 black coffees
+ 50 percent TIP

Ashley worked the grill station and cold appetizers, while also bartending and expediting. Anna waited and hosted and answered the phone. Jake worked all 10 burners alone. I was in a yellow apron handling the dish pit, clearing the tables and running bus tubs, and I broke into tears for a second when I learned of Kois’s order. The word “family” is thrown around in restaurants for good reason. We banked $1,144 in total sales.

As our staff left that night, we waved across the room to one another with a strange mixture of longing and eye-rolling, still in the self-conscious phase of having to act so distant from one another, all of us still so unaware of what was coming. Then, as I was running a last tray of glassware before mopping the floors, Ashley leaned over to announce: “Hey, he just called it. De Blasio. It’s a shutdown. You beat it by five hours, babe.”

The next day, a Monday, Ashley started assembling 30 boxes of survival-food kits for the staff. She packed Ziploc bags of nuts, rice, pasta, cans of curry paste and cartons of eggs, while music played from her cellphone tucked into a plastic quart container — an old line-cook trick for amplifying sound. I texted a clip of her mini-operation to José Andrés, who called immediately with encouragement: We will win this together! We feed the world one plate at a time!

Ashley had placed a last large order from our wholesaler: jarred peanut butter, canned tuna, coconut milk and other unlikely items that had never appeared on our order history. And our account rep, Marie Elena Corrao — we met when I was her first account 20 years ago; she came to our wedding in 2016 — put the order through without even clearing her throat, sending the truck to a now-shuttered business. She knew as well as we did that it would be a long while before the bill was paid. Leo, from the family-owned butchery we’ve used for 20 years, Pino’s Prime Meat Market, called not to diplomatically inquire about our plans but to immediately offer tangibles: “What meats do you ladies need for the home?” He offered this even though he knew that there were 30 days’ worth of his invoices in a pile on my desk, totaling thousands of dollars. And all day a string of neighborhood regulars passed by on the sidewalk outside and made heart hands at us through the locked French doors.

It turned out that abruptly closing a restaurant is a weeklong, full-time job. I was bombarded with an astonishing volume of texts. The phone rang throughout the day, overwhelmingly well-wishers and regretful cancellations, but there was a woman who apparently hadn’t followed the coronavirus news. She cut me off in the middle of my greeting with, “Yeah, you guys open for brunch?” Then she hung up before I could even finish saying, “Take care out there.”

As I said, a lot of things will permanently change in the US because of this pandemic. How and where we eat is just one consideration...

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Trump is rolling back on the Traveling Snake Oil™ show from the White House briefing room podium, but this means he has more time for his second-favorite pastime, petty vengeance and scapegoating.

White House officials are weighing a plan to replace Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, according to four people familiar with the discussions.

Among the names on the short list to replace Azar are White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx, Medicare chief Seema Verma and deputy HHS Secretary Eric Hargan, said the four people familiar with the talks.

Senior officials’ long-standing frustrations with the health chief have mounted during the pressure-packed response to the Covid-19 outbreak, with White House aides angry this week about Azar’s handling of the ouster of vaccine expert Rick Bright. At a recent task force meeting, Azar assured Vice President Mike Pence that Bright’s move to the National Institutes of Health was a promotion — only for Bright and his lawyers to release a statement that he would soon file a whistleblower complaint against HHS leadership, blindsiding White House officials, according to three officials familiar with the meeting.

White House officials also have blamed Azar for long-running turmoil at the health department and a series of media reports that portrayed him as urging Trump to act on the Covid-19 outbreak in January, only for the president and his aides to disregard Azar’s warnings as alarmist. Azar has denied the reports, saying that Trump “never once rejected, turned down or dismissed a recommendation” of his or the task force’s.

The White House disputed that officials were considering a plan to replace Azar.

I told you two months ago that Azar was going to be the scapegoat for Trump's failed COVID-19 response.

The Trump regime believes they have this election in the bag already, but they are publicly admitting the scenario where Trump gets crushed by any and every Democrat in November involves a big economic slump brought on by the Wuhan coronavirus.  They're so scared of this happening that they already have their scapegoat trussed and ready for the chopping block: HHS Secretary Alex Azar.

Azar was always going to have his card pulled, but not until the time was right.  After all, these Trump regime subgenii thought they were going to nail this "virus thing" out of the gate, and it was only a problem for them once it became clear that this time their incompetence was going to cost tens, if not hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars.

The funny thing is despite waiting two months to gank him, Azar's sacrifice probably won't even buy Trump a news cycle.  Not with the daily butcher's bill coming in right now.

Also note that Dr. Fauci has been largely AWOL this week.  That's not an accident.

Until this week, Dr. Anthony Fauci was a near-constant presence at the daily coronavirus task force briefings at the White House. As the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 35 years, his expertise on the global pandemic has been a reassuring force for millions of Americans concerned about how COVID-19 has uprooted their lives.

Of the roughly 50 press conferences on the health crisis so far, Fauci had only missed a handful. But now, for the first time since regular press conferences began on the topic, Fauci was only present for one of seven briefings this week.

While Fauci gave media interviews throughout the week, his absence at the podium was notable given the president’s controversial remarks a day earlier about using light and disinfectants to possibly treat the deadly respiratory illness.

And though Fauci regularly shares his decades-long infectious disease knowledge publicly, one administration official suggested there’s a preference that Fauci do more of that behind closed doors so it doesn’t appear he’s on such a different page from the president.

“You are here in a certain role, you’ve got to give advice privately,” this official said.

And finally, the Trump regime is declaring full-on war against the World Health Organization.

President Trump and his top aides are working behind the scenes to sideline the World Health Organization on several new fronts as they seek to shift blame for the coronavirus pandemic to the world body, according to U.S. and foreign officials involved in the discussions.

Last week, the president announced a 60-day hold on U.S. money to the WHO, but other steps by his top officials go beyond a temporary funding freeze, raising concerns about the permanent weakening of the organization amid a rapidly spreading crisis.

At the State Department, officials are stripping references to the WHO from coronavirus fact sheets, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has instructed his employees to “cut out the middle man” when it comes to public health initiatives the United States previously supported through the WHO.

The United States will now attempt to reroute the WHO funds to nongovernment organizations involved in public health issues, according to interviews with U.S. officials and an internal memo obtained by The Washington Post.

“The Secretary has asked the State Department and USAID to identify and utilize alternative implementers for foreign assistance programs beyond the WHO,” read a memo sent to State Department employees in recent days.

At the United Nations Security Council, the Trump administration has delayed a resolution responding to the health crisis, which the French have been trying to advance for weeks, because it disagrees with draft language that expresses support for the WHO, European officials said.

U.S. opposition to the WHO also prevented health ministers at a virtual G-20 meeting from issuing a joint statement on the pandemic earlier this month.

The White House is imploring allies to question the organization’s credibility and push claims that its employees routinely go on excessive “luxury travel,” as one White House official, Sarah Makin Acciani, told a group of surrogates in a recent phone call without offering evidence, a transcript of which has been obtained by The Post.

“It has been impossible to find a common ground with the U.S. about the views on the work and role of WHO,” said a senior European official, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe diplomatic discussions.

WHO officials initially hoped they could stave off a halt in U.S. funding and a messy public confrontation by making a symbolic concession to Trump, but discussions between the organization and the U.S. ambassador to the WHO, Andrew Bremberg, failed to ease tensions. 

Azar's toast, Fauci is on his way out, and the WHO is being systematically dismantled.

Damn shame, that is.  On several levels.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Even as little as six weeks ago, the notion that Democrats had any serious chance of winning the Senate back given Doug Jones near-guaranteed impending loss and how Dems lost seats even in a midterm wave year like 2018, would have been laughed off the politics page of any news website.

President Trump’s erratic handling of the coronavirus outbreak, the worsening economy and a cascade of ominous public and private polling have Republicans increasingly nervous that they are at risk of losing the presidency and the Senate if Mr. Trump does not put the nation on a radically improved course.

The scale of the G.O.P.’s challenge has crystallized in the last week. With 26 million Americans now having filed for unemployment benefits, Mr. Trump’s standing in states that he carried in 2016 looks increasingly wobbly: New surveys show him trailing significantly in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, and he is even narrowly behind in must-win Florida.

Democrats raised substantially more money than Republicans did in the first quarter in the most pivotal congressional races, according to recent campaign finance reports. And while Mr. Trump is well ahead in money compared with the presumptive Democratic nominee, Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democratic donors are only beginning to focus on the general election, and several super PACs plan to spend heavily on behalf of him and the party.

Perhaps most significantly, Mr. Trump’s single best advantage as an incumbent — his access to the bully pulpit — has effectively become a platform for self-sabotage.

His daily news briefings on the coronavirus outbreak are inflicting grave damage on his political standing, Republicans believe, and his recent remarks about combating the virus with sunlight and disinfectant were a breaking point for a number of senior party officials.

On Friday evening, Mr. Trump conducted only a short briefing and took no questions, a format that a senior administration official said was being discussed as the best option for the president going forward.

Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster, said the landscape for his party had become far grimmer compared with the pre-virus plan to run almost singularly around the country’s prosperity.

“With the economy in free-fall, Republicans face a very challenging environment and it’s a total shift from where we were a few months ago,” Mr. Bolger said. “Democrats are angry, and now we have the foundation of the campaign yanked out from underneath us.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies have often blamed external events for his most self-destructive acts, such as his repeated outbursts during the two-year investigation into his campaign’s dealings with Russia. Now, there is no such explanation — and, so far, there have been exceedingly few successful interventions regarding Mr. Trump’s behavior at the podium.

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said the president had to change his tone and offer more than a campaign of grievance.

“You got to have some hope to sell people,” Mr. Cole said. “But Trump usually sells anger, division and ‘we’re the victim.’”

Thom Tillis (NC) , Susan Collins (ME), and Cory Gardner (CO) are pretty much done.  Joni Ernst (IA) and Martha McSally (AZ) are in dire straits.  Those five alone would give the Dems 51 even with a Doug Jones loss in Alabama, and none of that takes into account Lindsey Graham (SC), Kelly Ayotte (GA), and Steve Daines (MT) all drawing serious challenges.

And then there's Mitch here in Kentucky.

Suddenly, the firewall is crumbling.

Deportation Nation, Con't

Trump's "emergency" coronoavirus green card executive order making it tougher to legally immigrate and ending family immigration was always part of the plan, and now Herrenvolk Purity Officer Stephen Miller is running with the concept into the endgame, not even bothering to hide the fact anymore.

Trump senior policy adviser Stephen Miller told White House supporters in a private call this week that the president’s new executive order curbing immigration will usher the kind of broader long-term changes to American society he has advocated for years, even though the 60-day measures were publicly characterized as a “pause” during the coronavirus pandemic.

Miller, the chief architect of the president’s immigration agenda and one of his longest-serving and most trusted advisers, spoke to a group of Trump surrogates Thursday in an off-the-record call about the new executive order, which had been signed the night before. Though the White House had seen the move as something that would resonate with Trump’s political base, the administration instead was facing criticism from immigration hard-liners who were disappointed that the order does not apply to temporary foreigner workers despite Trump pitching it as helping to protect jobs for Americans.

Miller told the group that subsequent measures were under consideration that would restrict guest worker programs, but the “the most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor,” he said, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Post. Miller indicated that the strategy was part of a long-term vision and was not seen only as a stopgap.

“As a numerical proposition, when you suspend the entry of a new immigrant from abroad, you're also reducing immigration further because the chains of follow-on migration that are disrupted,” said Miller, one of the executive order’s main authors. “So the benefit to American workers compounds with time.”

Miller declined to comment Friday. A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has been trying for years to scrap the family-based U.S. immigration model, which Miller and other restrictionists call “chain migration.” Instead, the White House favors a more restrictive system based on job skills and U.S. labor market demands.

Though Trump described his order this week as a temporary “pause,” he also said it is an open-ended move that will remain in place until he decides the U.S. labor market has sufficiently improved once the coronavirus crisis subsides. He said he would reevaluate after 60 days and could extend the immigration restrictions to help Americans find jobs when states reopen their economies.

Understand that it will never be reinstated under Trump.  If anything, legal immigration will be effectively ended for 99% of cases.

The other side of the equation is finding a way to resume mass deportations that were happening before COVID-19 hit, and that involves making "getting ICE virus test kits" the priority.

U.S. immigration officials say they plan to begin testing some foreign nationals for the coronavirus before deporting them from the United States.

ICE said it will acquire approximately 2,000 tests a month from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to screen detainees with final orders of removal who are in its custody.

But given the nationwide shortages of testing kits, “the agency likely won’t have enough to test all aliens scheduled for future removals and will prioritize testing based on evolving operational considerations.”

ICE did not say what those considerations were.

But the change comes after a visit by a team from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to Guatemala, where officials last week announced they were indefinitely suspending deportations from the United States after more than 70 deportees on two recent ICE flights had tested positive for COVID-19. Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei said it would not allow deportations from the United States unless ICE begins testing migrants before they are deported.
The Trump administration, which has been pressuring Latin America and Caribbean governments to take back their nationals, immediately deployed the CDC to “review and validate the COVID-19 tests performed on those arriving from ICE Air flights.”

CDC Spokesman Scott Pauley said the agency has “conveyed the results of the review to colleagues in the Ministry of Health and continues to work with them on various aspects of the COVID-19 response.”

Pauley did not provide any additional information on what those results were and said he had no other information available at the moment.

Carlos Sandoval, spokesperson for the Guatemalan president’s office, told the Miami Herald that the CDC did indeed confirm “that there were deportees on those flights who were infected.” Guatemalan health officials were told by the CDC that there were 26 cases of COVID-19 on the two flights that arrived on April 13 carrying a total of 182 Guatemalan deportees. In a national address, President Giammattei had indicated that the CDC’s validation of its testing involved randomly selecting deportees who had tested positive for COVID-19.

Sandoval said there are currently 84 deportees who have tested positive for novel coronavirus, and who did not get it in Guatemala.

The CDC and the Trump administration have been accused of exporting the virus that causes the deadly COVID-19 respiratory disease to vulnerable and poor countries like Guatemala and Haiti, which face a collapse of their already weak health systems with the spreading pandemic.

So ICE has a real problem, even if you are the kind of Trump regime monster looking to find a way to deport thousands of people who may be infected with a deadly virus during a pandemic.  A massive, widespread pandemic rampaging through ICE detention camps means those "scheduled for future removals" cannot be "removed".

Of course, it could very well mean that they perish in the facilities, but given that the regime hasn't exactly seen any real blowback having hundreds of thousands of detainees in cages anyway, having thousands of dead detainees probably doesn't present itself as a problem to these bastards anyhow.

The point is that mass deportations or even mass casualties in ICE facilities aren't going to be noticed with the rest of us trying to make it through this nightmare ourselves.

 

Last Call For The State Of The Pandemic, Con't

Here in Kentucky as Gov. Beshear's initiative to increase testing means more cases are being confirmed, the long, slow fight against COVID-19 continues as the state reaches 200 deaths amid 3,800 cases.

Gov. Andy Beshear announced 322 new cases of coronavirus in Kentucky Friday, the largest daily increase so far. Beshear said the increase is partly due to the state’s efforts to expand testing and that he still believes Kentucky is in the “plateau” of the pandemic. 

There are 3,779 confirmed coronavirus cases in Kentucky as of Friday evening. Beshear reported nine new deaths associated with the illness, for a total of 200. 

The governor said the uptick in cases shows that Kentuckians need to keep practicing social distancing guidelines. 

“We’ve got to stay at it, we’ve got to stay strong. This is a reminder, or even a wake up, of what we’re dealing with,” Beshear said. 

Nursing homes have been hit especially hard by the pandemic, with 578 residents and 268 staff testing positive for coronavirus. There have been 91 coronavirus deaths in Kentucky long-term facilities. 

Beshear also announced that an additional 352 state prisoners convicted of non-violent, non-sexual crimes near the end of their sentences have been released from state custody. Beshear said all of the prisoners had five years or fewer remaining on their punishments and that 339 of them were state inmates serving out their punishments in local jails. 

Beshear said it might be possible that some coronavirus restrictions will be lifted by Memorial Day on May 25, but that Kentuckians need to be prepared to still engage in social distancing and wear masks in public. 

“At best we’ll be dealing with a new normal,” Beshear said. “We’ll be able to do many more things, but the way we do them is dramatically changed. I think it’s really important for people to know we will reach something akin to an old normal once we have a vaccine or a very effective treatment.”

Beshear is making it clear this is a marathon, not a sprint.  It's going to be months before we're out of this pandemic, and then years before we can emerge from the economic carnage.  Just about everything will be different in America.  3800 cases and 200 deaths is bad, but Kentucky as an entire state is actually in better shape than neighboring Indiana, where Indianapolis/Marion County by itself has 4250 cases and 217 deaths alone.

The good news is that Kentucky isn't going to repeat the mistakes of Ohio and Michigan.  All Kentuckians will be able to request a mail-in ballot for the June primaries, GOP Secretary of State Michael Adams is fully backing Beshear on this.  Adams is still a Republican, but it seems that with the state in no danger of failing to vote for Trump and 99% certain to vote for McConnell, it's not a fight that the KY GOP figures it has to have now.

Besides, the real fight is going to be the coming massive austerity cuts to the state budget, and it won't be much of a fight with state veto override provisions in the constitution only requiring 50% +1 in the General Assembly and Senate to override anything Beshear does, tying Beshear's hands completely and the KY GOP easily has those numbers, even without the conservative Democrats in rural parts of the state.

It won't be much of a fight.  The cuts Bevin wanted but the KY GOP didn't want to be blamed for will happen thanks to COVID-19 and while Republicans are largely content with their ongoing failed attempts trying to close the state's last abortion clinic, the goal is to pin all of the state's economic woes on Beshear himself.

This era of "cooperation" will not last, I guarantee you that.

Food For Thought

The disruptions in America's food supply chain caused by COVID-19 shutdowns are going to be noticed starting in a few weeks.

Americans could start to see shortages of pork, chicken and beef on grocery shelves as soon as May as major packing plants swept by the coronavirus remain shuttered and the nation’s massive stockpiles of frozen meat begin to dwindle.

Any empty shelves to date have been the result of bumps in the supply chain, with stores being unable to restock as quickly as customers are buying. But bacon, pork chops and ham could be the first to face actual shortages: The amount of frozen pork in storage nationwide — more than 621 million pounds — dropped 4 percent from March to April, the USDA reported this week. Slaughter rates are down 25 percent, and 400,000 animals are backed up in slaughterhouses.

And with meat plants of all kinds operating at 60 percent of capacity, shortages loom for beef and poultry as well. That could also lead to higher prices and a financial squeeze for farmers, who are collecting less per animal slaughtered.

“If we start to see more closures and these facilities remain offline for a prolonged period of time, it’s hard to imagine a scenario in which consumers don’t see changes at the supermarket,” said David Ortega, an agricultural economist at Michigan State University.

Multiple economists who spoke with POLITICO said May could be when consumers have fewer options when buying meat.

There is enough — for now. The Agriculture Department’s monthly tally of meat in warehouse freezers showed total pounds of beef — about 502 million — were up 2 percent. Poultry in storage went up 4 percent, to 1.3 billion pounds. The amount of chicken in storage dipped slightly to about 921 million pounds.

But the pipeline bringing meat from farms to stores is slowing. The dip in daily pork slaughter rates “is troubling, especially for producers,” said Scott Brown, a University of Missouri agricultural economist. “If these keep declining at the rate we have seen recently then we need to worry,” he added.

The shutdown of restaurants and schools have wrecked the market for both produce and for dairy products as well. Prices are going to start spiking on food pretty quickly. Having 500 million pounds of beef sounds like a lot, and it is, but in a country of 330 million people, that won't last long, even factoring in all the folks that don't eat beef. The same goes for chicken and pork.

The nation's food processing companies turn a profit by taking out as much of the slack from the system that they can, and the system's now entering week six of major disruptions in both supply and demand.  This wouldn't be an issue if it was one, two, or even a few states experiencing something like hurricanes or ice storms that knocked out power to a region for a week.  This is the entire country, for months, and no real end in sight.

We're seeing spikes now in egg prices to start, due to industry consolidation.  Costs will be passed along as the market gets smashed on both the supply side and the demand side.

I've talked about systemic cascade failures before.  You can only break so many bits of the system before the entire system collapses and no longer works.  The more complex the interactions are between the parts, the easier it is to push the entire system over the edge.  We saw it in 2008, and we're seeing it again now, only this time a lot more systems are involved.

And yet we have Trump's "leadership" at the top.

Sigh.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

As the US death toll from COVID-19 now approaches 50,000 this weekend, Trump's once unbreakable bastion of support from his base, while still strong, is starting to show some ugly cracks.

President Donald Trump has made himself the daily spokesman for the nation’s coronavirus response. Yet few Americans regularly look to or trust Trump as a source of information on the pandemic, according to a new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. 

Just 28% of Americans say they’re regularly getting information from Trump about the coronavirus and only 23% say they have high levels of trust in what the president is telling the public. Another 21% trust him a moderate amount. 

Confidence in Trump is higher among his supporters, though only about half of Republicans say they have a lot of trust in Trump’s information on the pandemic — and 22% say they have little or no trust in what he says about the COVID-19 outbreak. 

But even as many Republicans question Trump’s credibility during the pandemic, the overwhelming majority — 82% — say they still approve of how he’s doing. That’s helped keep the president’s overall approval rating steady at 42%, about where it’s been for the past few months. 

Lynn Sanchez of Jacksonville, Texas, is among those who backs Trump despite reservations about his credibility. Sanchez, who identifies as a political independent, said she trusts “only a little” of what the president says about the crisis, but believes he’s “doing the best he can.” 

“He’s contradicted his own health experts a couple of times. I believe he gets carried away and doesn’t sit down and think things through,” said Sanchez, a 66-year-old retired truck stop manager.

The survey’s findings underscore Trump’s rock-solid backing from Republicans, who have been unwavering in their overall support throughout his presidency, despite reservations about his credibility and temperament. If that support holds through the November election, Trump would still have a narrow — but feasible — path to victory.

It's that last part, the "support through the November election" part, that I don't see happening.  A lot has happened in just the last six months, let alone the last six weeks.  We're now up to 26 million jobless claims since March 15. There's no real end to this mess in sight, despite the wishful thinking of Republican governors wanting to open restaurants and beaches. 

Trump has no clue how to handle this situation, he is almost uniquely and aggressively unqualified compared to even the average American, let alone past chief executives. He's just throwing things at the wall six days a week and seeing what sticks and what tests well among his base, no matter how outlandish and ridiculous the statements are. There remains no coherent national response, it's 100% up to the states at this point as far as the "boots on the ground" actions of dealing with the virus.

It's going to become pretty clear that extended shelter-in-place orders aren't going to be tolerated by the truly dangerous end of Trump's base much longer.  Stirring up a couple hundred "grassroots" supporters on Facebook to go harass the governor's mansion is one thing, but the violent white supremacist terrorists aren't going to sit around and play Animal Crossing all day.

And while the virus may be more prevalent in NYC than in Des Moines or Flagstaff or Mobile, the economic damage to red state economies that are already dependent on the federal government is going to be much more devastating. We're looking at a perfect storm situation where a lot of bad things could possibly happen all at once on both a pandemic and social unrest scale and given that the last month or so has felt like a year, we still have six months and change to the election.

A lot can happen in six months, and I expect very little of it will qualify as good.  It's going to get to the point where the lack of leadership from the White House is going to result in something breaking down deep in the gears of society and at that point all bets are off once we hit that systemic failure scenario.

Things didn't really go bad in 2008 until Bear Stearns went under, and even then it still took a year before the economy stopped bleeding.  We've seen more damage than 2008 to our economy by a factor of three in just six weeks.  We're just plodding along trying to get through the next 24 hours and repeating that right now and it's taking all we have just to do that.

And I think very, very soon something fundamental will change all this and then we see how long we can juggle bottles of nitroglycerin before the whole thing blows.   I don't know what comes next, and anyone who says they do is lying.

StupidiNews!

• FBI Director Christopher Wray says the agency is increasing investigations into preventing COVID-19 hate crimes by white supremacist groups against Asian-Americans blamed for the virus.
• Amazon faces a new round of sharp criticism from congressional Democrats after a new report suggests the company misled House Judiciary committee members about third-party data.
• Indonesian President Joko Widodo's multi-billion dollar project to relocate the country's capital from Java to Borneo is on hold as the country struggles to deal with COVID-19.
• Britain is preparing for a second wave of COVID-19 infections with testing and tracing, but critics say that the government of Boris Johnson can no longer be trusted to handle the pandemic properly.
• The FCC and NASA are battling it out over space debris and the future of satellites as SpaceX plans to put thousands of broadband internet satellites in orbit over the next several years.

Last Call For Going Postal, Con't

The White House is making its move to "save" the US Postal Service by amputating its limbs for a infected, festering wound that Republicans inflicted on it a decade ago. 

The Treasury Department is considering taking unprecedented control over key operations of the U.S. Postal Service by imposing tough terms on an emergency coronavirus loan from Congress, which would fulfill President Trump’s longtime goal of changing how the service does business, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Officials working under Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who must approve the $10 billion loan, have told senior officials at the USPS in recent weeks that he could use the loan as leverage to give the administration influence over how much the agency charges for delivering packages and how it manages its finances, according to the two people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the talks are preliminary.

Trump has railed for years against what he sees as mismanagement at the Postal Service, which he argues has been exploited by e-commerce sites such as Amazon, and has sought to change how much the agency charges for the delivery of packages. (Amazon’s founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Under the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus relief passed last month, the Treasury was authorized to loan $10 billion to the USPS, which says it may not be able to make payroll and continue mail service uninterrupted past September. Mnuchin rejected a bipartisan Senate proposal to give the Postal Service a bailout amid the negotiations over that legislation, a senior Trump administration official and a congressional official previously told The Post.

The borrowing terms have only been discussed among both agencies’ leadership and have not been made public because the Postal Service hasn’t officially requested the loan, the two people familiar with the matter said. Mnuchin could still decide not to pursue tough terms as the September deadline nears. The Postal Service would not have to use the entire $10 billion loan at one time, but could borrow up to that amount at any given time.

In discussions with senior USPS personnel, Treasury officials have said they are interested in raising rates on the Postal Service’s lucrative package business, its sole area of profitability in recent years. Treasury also could review all large postal contracts with package companies to push for greater margins on deliveries.

Treasury officials have said they may press the agency to demand tougher concessions from its powerful postal unions — among the public-sector unions that still retain significant leverage in negotiations with the government.

The officials have also said Mnuchin wants the authority to review hiring decisions at the agency’s senior levels, including the selection of the next postmaster general, a decision that until now has been left to the Postal Service’s five-member board of governors.

USPS spokesman David Partenheimer confirmed in an email that the agency and Treasury have begun “preliminary discussions” over the loan, but that the Treasury had not yet asked “to impose any of those conditions on that borrowing authority.” He declined to say whether these or any other terms were under discussion.

In 2006, Republicans rammed through the Postal Accountability and Enhacement Act, which mandated that unlike any other US corporation, the US Post Office was required to pre-fund all employee retiree benefits for 50 years.

The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make. If that doesn’t meet the definition of insanity, I don’t know what does. Without this obligation, the Post Office actually turns a profit. Some have called this a “manufactured crisis.” It’s also significant that lots of companies benefit from a burden that makes the USPS less competitive; these same companies might also would benefit from full USPS privatization, a goal that has been pushed by several conservative think tanks for years.

Trump's plan is Hostage-Taking 101: either the House and Senate pass legislation to put the USPS under the control of the Treasury Department, or Trump stands by and watches the postal system fail. The collapse of the postal service would hurt Trump's voters the most, but so did Chinese and EU tariffs and they still love him for it.

We'll see very quickly if Trump is this deranged, and betting against "Trump being willing to go this far" never ends well.