StupidiNews!

• More than two dozen people have been indicted in connection with a thoroughbred doping scheme involving last year's disqualified Kentucky Derby winner, Maximum Security.
• A newly-discovered 14th century burial cave in Gabon may contain hundreds of artifacts shedding light on African culture during the medieval era.
• All of Italy is now under quarantine as COVID-19 cases continue to spread in Europe with over 300 dead and thousands of cases reported, all public gatherings have been canceled.
• Mexico's "Day Without Women" protests closed schools and workplaces across the country as thousands of women walked out in observation of International Women's Day.
• Amazon is planning to license its no checkout store technology to other retailers in a bid to "streamline the retail experience".

Last Call For It's The Jobs, Stupid

Eric Levitz at New York Magazine explains why people younger than me love Bernie, and that's because of how screwed they are over college loans and the job market that no longer needs white collar workers.

Thanks to a combination of the Obama era’s slow but steady wage and employment gains – and the Trump presidency’s bonanza of deficit-spending and loose money – America has returned to something resembling full employment. The percentage of Americans who are looking for a job but can’t find one is now near half-century lows. And yet, the “full employment economy” that awaits this year’s graduating class looks quite different than the one that welcomed their Gen-X and Boomer predecessors. In earlier boom-times, the labor market evinced an insatiable demand for white-collar workers. Today’s, by contrast, has more aspiring professionals than it knows what to do with. And the same can be said of the economy that greeted matriculating Corbynites in the U.K.

Put differently: Even as the price of a college diploma has risen nigh-exponentially (thereby forcing the rising generation of college graduates to saddle themselves with onerous debts), the value of such diplomas on the U.S. job market has rapidly depreciated. And there is little reason to believe that this state of affairs will change, no matter how long the present boom is sustained. According to the Labor Department’s estimates, the five fastest-growing occupations in the United States over the next ten years will be solar panel installers, wind turbine technicians, home health aides, personal care aides, and occupational therapy assistants. Not a single one of those jobs requires a four-year college diploma. Only occupational therapy assistants need an associate’s degree.

Throughout my (1990s) childhood and adolescence, leaders in both major parties heralded the arrival of a “knowledge economy,” and attributed rising income inequality to a “skills gap.” Our economic system was still capable of providing a broad middle-class with high-wage, high-quality jobs; it just needed more Americans to accrue the levels of skill and education that the jobs of tomorrow required. There was an endless supply of cushy, professional-class posts awaiting those who answered our economy’s demand for highly educated workers. Economic security would come to those who did their homework.

But this story has proven to be little more than a self-flattering delusion of our (highly educated) political class. Our economy only needs so many lawyers, consultants, and financial analysts (let alone, journalists). Nor, as presently structured, can it sustain an ever-growing caste of well-remunerated coders. We have a lot of elderly people who need help going to the bathroom, and a lot of manual labor that our robots aren’t dexterous enough to perform. Most of the work that our society truly needs to get done every day doesn’t require elite academic or intellectual capacities. And thanks to the collapse of the American labor movement, most that blue and pink-collar work pays terribly. The two occupations poised to add the most jobs to our economy over the next 10 years — home and personal care aides — pay an average salary of about $24,000 a year.

A vulgar Marxist looking at Bloomberg’s chart might predict that the college students and graduates of less prestigious, public universities – who have been most disserved by the “knowledge economy” myth – would be even more inclined towards leftwing politics than their Ivy League peers. And the results of the New Hamshire primary lend creedence to that view: While Pete Buttigieg held his own in the town of Hanover, home to Dartmouth, Sanders cleaned his clock in the precincts surrounding the University of New Hampshire.

To be sure, college graduates still account for a minority of Americans under 35. But whereas this white-collar subsection of previous rising generations was predisposed to view the market economy more favorably than their less educated peers, millennial matriculators largely don’t. In fact, the overeducated, precariously employed college graduate is the modal millennial socialist.

Which makes sense: Tell a subset of your population that they are entitled to economic security if they play by certain rules, provide them with four years of training in critical thinking and access to a world-class library – then deny them the opportunities they were promised, while affixing an anchor of debt around their necks – and you’ve got a recipe for a revolutionary vanguard.

So yes, I see why Millennials love Bernie Sanders.

The problem is Boomers and even Gen Xers are far, far more likely to vote.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

The NYSE hit limit down, 7% loss, about 15 minutes into the session today.  Trading resumed and the bloodbath ended up with the Dow down some 2,000 points and some $5 trillion in market value up in smoke since last month's highs.

Meanwhile Trump is losing his marbles. Gabe Sherman:

Trump’s efforts to take control of the story himself have so far failed. A source said Trump was pleased with ratings for the Fox News town hall last Thursday, but he was furious with how he looked on television. “Trump said afterwards that the lighting was bad,” a source briefed on the conversation said. “He said, ‘We need Bill Shine back in here. Bill would never allow this.’”

Trump’s press conference on Friday at the CDC was a Trumpian classic, heavy on braggadocio and almost entirely lacking a sense of the seriousness of the crisis. “I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump told reporters, his face partly hidden under a red “Keep America Great” hat. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.” At another point Trump compared the situation to the Ukraine shakedown. “The [coronavirus] tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect,” he said.

By now many of the president’s advisers are numb to this kind of performance. “There’s very little that fazes anyone now,” a former official said. But one person who spoke to the president over the weekend saw the press conference as an ominous sign. “He’s just now waking up to the fact that this is bad, and he doesn’t know how to respond.”

As Trump pushes a nothing-to-see-here message in public, sources said he’s privately terrified about getting the virus. “Donald is a famous germaphobe. He hates it if someone is eating nachos and dips a chip back in after taking a bite. He calls them ‘double dippers,’” a prominent Republican said. Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg recalled Trump’s response to the last major outbreak in 2014. “When I worked for Trump, he was obsessed with Ebola,” Nunberg told me. (One Mar-a-Lago guest disputed this and said Trump was handshaking with gusto this past weekend. “He was acting like the opposite of a germaphobe,” the source said.)

Stories about Trump’s coronavirus fears have spread through the White House. Last week Trump told aides he’s afraid journalists will try to purposefully contract coronavirus to give it to him on Air Force One, a person close to the administration told me. The source also said Trump has asked the Secret Service to set up a screening program and bar anyone who has a cough from the White House grounds. “He’s definitely melting down over this,” the source said.

 Trump is going to crack and soon.  When he does, all bets are off.

Spies Like Us, Con't

With no sign that Rep. John Ratcliffe will be denied Senate confirmation by Mitch McConnell for Trump's new Director of National Intelligence, the nation's intelligence agencies brace for their new boss, and to see how they will be gutted to "drain the swamp", leaving our already badly damaged post-Snowden intelligence apparatus reeling and turning them into useless shells full of cronies loyal only to Trump and the nation vulnerable to outside meddling.

If confirmed, Ratcliffe will not only have to allay public concerns about the politicization of intelligence during an election year, he’ll also have to strike a delicate balance inside the administration between a demanding president seeking to rein in the so-called “deep state” and intelligence agencies that have long resented and resisted any perceived overreach from ODNI.
“When ODNI was first created, some of its proponents harbored grand ambitions, believing that the DNI could forcefully herd the 17 cats that make up the modern Intelligence Community,” said David Kris, the former assistant attorney general for DOJ’s national security division and a founder of Culper Partners.

But Kris said the role had since evolved, with subsequent DNIs focusing more on day-to-day bureaucratic issues, inter-agency coordination, and, sometimes, providing support in political battles.

John McLaughlin, who was serving as acting CIA director when the ODNI was established, initially opposed the concept when it was being debated in 2003-2004.

But, he said in an interview, the office “went through an evolution from 2004 through four directors,” reaching maximum effectiveness under James Clapper, who served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency before taking over as DNI in 2010.

“Clapper figured out the secret,” McLaughlin said. “Let the agencies do their jobs and do only the things that the DNI alone is empowered (and authorized by the president) to do — mainly shaping the budget, coordinating tasking, briefing the president and Congress.”

How a Ratcliffe-led ODNI will view its responsibilities, however—and how Trump will empower the office as he seeks to tighten his grip on the intelligence community—is anyone’s guess.

The issue is particularly fraught given Russia’s continued interference in the presidential election, Trump’s reluctance to engage with his advisers on Russia’s malign activities, and his reported anger over Maguire’s willingness to brief congressional Democrats on the ongoing meddling.
What vexes intelligence veterans most, Priess said, is the prospect that a partisan director like Ratcliffe might take an active role in managing the President’s Daily Brief instead of letting analysts do their job -- substituting his personal opinions for the consensus view of the $70-plus billion intelligence community.

“That's the kind of thing that could prompt resignations of senior officials within the agencies,” Priess said, noting that Ratcliffe’s status as an outsider will make it more difficult to establish trust with the career officials.

Another concern “that’s not discussed nearly enough” is the role of ODNI’s legislative affairs office, said a former senior intelligence official.

“All of the legislative affairs offices in the intelligence community coordinate with, and often work through, ODNI legislative affairs,” the former official said. “So with a very partisan DNI, there could be some risk that you end up with a partisan shaping of what information goes to Congress.”

The risk is there even without a partisan leader. Maguire, the former acting DNI, pushed to cancel a public worldwide threats briefing to Congress last month because he did not want senior intelligence officials to be seen on-camera as disagreeing with the president on big issues such as Iran, Russia or North Korea, sources told POLITICO.

There's a very good chance that as ODNI, Ratcliffe will simply leave House Intelligence Committee Democrats out of the loop completely and only deal with Senate Republicans.  The Results would be disastrous to say the least, especially if Ratcliffe feeds Trump what he wants to hear and not what he needs to.

If you thought Trump was vulnerable to Russian manipulation before, wait until Ratcliffe throws out intelligence and substitutes his own opinions, analysis, and judgment on what intelligence agencies have to say.  Mass resignations of career intel professionals is exactly what Trump...and Putin...want.

StupidiNews!

• Confirmed COVID-19 cases are now in 34 US states and the District of Columbia with over 500 known infected as officials have asked at least 2,500 individuals to self-quarantine.
• Pope Francis will stream Sunday's mass to screens in St. Peter's Square rather than attend the service in person as the Vatican is working to deal with church services across the globe.
• Airplane maker Boeing's proposal to leave wiring bundles in place on its grounded 737 MAX fleet is not winning support of FAA regulators, who want Boeing to check the safety of hardware as well.
• UK PM Boris Johnson has announced a $6.5 billion broadband internet package to bring broadband service to rural Brits as part of a post-Brexit budget deal expected this week.
• NASA says its Boeing Starliner test flight in December had not one by two "close calls" that could have meant the loss of the spacecraft.

Last Call For Oil's Well That Ends Well, Con't

The Saudis are terrified of the economic slowdown from a global COVID-19 recession, and they are flooding the market to put the Russians and the US out of business in an all out oil price war.

Saudi Arabia slashed its export oil prices over the weekend in what is likely to be the start of a price war aimed at Russia but with potentially devastating repercussions for Russia’s ally Venezuela, Saudi Arabia’s enemy Iran and even American oil companies.

The Saudi decision to cut prices by nearly 10 percent on Saturday was a dramatic move in retaliation for Russia’s refusal on Friday to join the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries in a large production cut as the coronavirus continues to slow the global economy and, with it, demand for oil.
The break in a three-year alliance between the Saudi-led oil cartel and Russia to support prices may be temporary. The moves over the weekend may well have been part of a negotiating chess game, and the Saudis and Russians can still reach a compromise. But if the collapse is lasting, oil executives say there is nothing to stop oil prices from tumbling to the lowest levels in at least five years.

“If a true price war ensues, there will be plenty of pain in the oil markets,” said Badr Jafar, president of Crescent Petroleum, a United Arab Emirates oil company. “Many will be bracing for the economic and geopolitical shocks of a low-price environment.”

A major drop in oil prices would hurt producers around the world, particularly Venezuela and Iran, whose oil-based economies are already under pressure from American sanctions. Export earnings of both countries have already been reduced to a trickle, and a further decline would stretch their abilities to pay for vital services and security.

The one bright spot may be at the gas pump. The average price of a gallon of regular gasoline in the United States, according to the AAA Motor Club, has already fallen five cents in the last week, to $2.40 from $2.45, and prices could easily drop below $2 a gallon in some states in the coming weeks. Lower-income drivers, who typically own older, less fuel-efficient vehicles and spend a higher percentage of their wages on energy, stand to gain the most.

But a prolonged price collapse would add to financial pressure on highly indebted American oil companies, dozens of which have gone out of business in recent years, with a decline in American oil production likely to follow. Oil companies have been laying off workers in Texas and other oil producing states.
Canadian oil sands development, already lagging because of environmental concerns and costs, stands to be hit hard by a price war. And developing countries that depend on oil, like Nigeria, Angola and Brazil, may suffer significant economic slowdowns.

US West Texas Intermediate crude was at $53 a barrel back on February 20 and $63 a barrel at the start of the year.

As of Sunday night, WTI was trading at half that.  $32-$34 a barrel. Brent Sea Crude, the international benchmark, was at $36 a barrel or so.

The oil market has collapsed.

Russia cannot be happy.  Trump cannot be happy.  It's going to be a goddamn insane week on the markets and we're already into correction territory, headed into bear market and the end of the 12-year stock market rally.

It's gonna get nuts.  Fast.  Dow futures are trading limit down right now, over 1,000 points.  10-year tresuries are not only below 15, they are below 0.5%.  It is a *complete meltdown* of the markets.

Monday is going to be a slaughter.

The Blue Wave Rises, Con't

Political scientist Rachel Bitecofer nailed her 2018 midterm predictions by challenging a fundamental theory of voting: it's not who people decide to vote for, it's who decides to vote at all.

What if everything you think you know about politics is wrong? What if there aren’t really American swing voters—or not enough, anyway, to pick the next president? What if it doesn’t matter much who the Democratic nominee is? What if there is no such thing as “the center,” and the party in power can govern however it wants for two years, because the results of that first midterm are going to be bad regardless? What if the Democrats' big 41-seat midterm victory in 2018 didn’t happen because candidates focused on health care and kitchen-table issues, but simply because they were running against the party in the White House? What if the outcome in 2020 is pretty much foreordained, too?
To the political scientist Rachel Bitecofer, all of that is almost certainly true, and that has made her one of the most intriguing new figures in political forecasting this year.

Bitecofer, a 42-year-old professor at Christopher Newport University in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, was little known in the extremely online, extremely male-dominated world of political forecasting until November 2018. That’s when she nailed almost to the number the nature and size of the Democrats’ win in the House, even as other forecasters went wobbly in the race’s final days. Not only that, but she put out her forecast back in July, and then stuck by it while polling shifted throughout the summer and fall.

And today her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate. If she’s right, we are now in a post-economy, post-incumbency, post record-while-in-office era of politics. Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”

Her analysis, as Bitecofer puts it with characteristic immodesty, amounts to nothing less than “flipping giant paradigms of electoral theory upside down.”

Bitecofer’s theory, when you boil it down, is that modern American elections are rarely shaped by voters changing their minds, but rather by shifts in who decides to vote in the first place. To her critics, she’s an extreme apostle of the old saw that “turnout explains everything,” taking a long victory lap after getting lucky one time. She sees things slightly differently: That the last few elections show that American politics really has changed, and other experts have been slow to process what it means.

If she’s right, it wouldn’t just blow up the conventional wisdom; it would mean that much of the lucrative cottage industry of political experts—the consultants and pollsters and (ahem) the reporters—is superfluous, an army of bit players with little influence over the outcome. Actually, worse than superfluous: That whole industry of experts is generally wrong.

The classic view is that the pool of American voters is basically fixed: About 55 percent of eligible voters are likely to go to the polls, and the winner is determined by the 15 percent or so of “swing voters” who flit between the parties. So a general election campaign amounts to a long effort to pull those voters in to your side.

Bitecofer has a nickname for this view. She calls it, with disdain, the “Chuck Todd theory of American politics”: “The idea that there is this informed, engaged American population that is watching these political events and watching their elected leaders and assessing their behavior and making a judgment.”

“And it is just not true.”

In other words, Nate Silver dominated the last decade or so of political prognostication because the assumptions his models made of the electorate were the most accurate.  What Bitecofer is proposing is that the electorate itself changes depending on the situation and the models of the electorate must change too.

You know who absolutely believes in Bitecofer's theory that it's all about the people you can get to the polls who want to vote for your side when they would otherwise stay home?  Republicans.  Specifically the Republicans of the last 12 years, the ones that saw Obama activate people who had never voted before, or who hadn't voted in 20 years, and said "We need to do this."

This is why they are so hellbent on voter suppression and putting up barriers to voting.  The old school tells you it's the "Obama-Trump" voters who matter, a tiny slice of the electorate (less than on-half of one percent!) in an era where fewer than 500,000 votes in 3 states decided the entire presidency.

The new school says you'll win if you get the far higher number of people in battleground states who sat out 2016 altogether back into the race.  That's what Bitecofer predicted in 2018 and the Democrats did very, very well.

Still, in red states, Democrats lost Senate seats and the model shows that Republicans will be activated too.  But Bitecofer's model says far more of us will turn out for the Democrats in response.

It's the "vote blue no matter who" theory.  If she's right, we're gonna win.

If she's wrong, it's McGovern, Dukakis, Mondale, Kerry all over again.

Sunday Long Read: Kickstart My Heart

Crowdfunding can be a good thing.  It's gotten products I've bought off the ground.  But when done badly, it's a disaster, and done badly enough, it leads to lawsuits and worse as it's nothing but a giant scam, as the Verge's Ashley Carman recounts the sordid tale of Doug Monahan and his magical backpack.

Lots of people want a word with Doug Monahan — government lawyers, crowdfunding backers, people from his past, and me.

I’d been trying to find him for over a year. As a reporter interested in crowdfunding disasters, I thought Monahan’s failed iBackpack project was one of the ultimate gadget pipe dreams gone bad. The beats were familiar: an idea that raised more than half a million dollars, only to never ship and leave behind thousands of angry backers. The difference in this story, however, is that for only the second time, the Federal Trade Commission is coming for the creator.

The agency claims Monahan took his backpack funds and spent them on “personal expenses,” including bitcoin purchases, ATM withdrawals, and credit card debt. The agency says he threatened backers who pursued him for their bags. The state of Texas is suing him, too. A lot of people want a piece of Monahan, but he’s not going down without a fight. He’s serving as his own lawyer to dispute the claims in court, and he invited me down to Texas to clear his name and reputation.

We meet at a Tex-Mex restaurant chain called Pappasito’s in Houston. It opened at 11AM, when we planned to meet, and by the time Monahan hobbles in a half-hour late, the restaurant is already closing because of tropical storm Imelda’s rain and flooding. The staff lets us stay. Monahan calls the place, which has a similar vibe to Chevys or Chili’s, the “best Tex-Mex restaurant in the world,” even though there are 16 locations in the Houston area alone.

Monahan is frailer and older than I imagined. In the few online photos I’d ever seen, he looks young with brown, spunky hair and wears a sweater layered over a collared shirt with a tie. Professional, a bit conservative. When Monahan shows up to our Tex-Mex meeting, he’s in light brown pants with an elastic waistband. His hair is overgrown, graying, and scraggly. To complement the pants, he wears an Andy Warhol-esque shirt with black-and-white flowers. The petals are blurred, as if being viewed through a kaleidoscope. The shirt has a stronger Austin energy than a Houston one, which makes some sense. Monahan spent years in Austin before moving back to Houston to handle this court case and be near his 92-year-old mother.

I ask why he thinks the FTC is going after him. “I am the poster child for fraud and crowdfunding,” he says sarcastically. “You’re looking at the Jesse James, the John Dillinger.”

He sold iBackpack as a high-tech wonder that would “revolutionize” backpacks and improve people’s lives, whether they’re eight or 80. On Indiegogo in 2015 and again on Kickstarter in 2016, Monahan advertised the backpack as the bag of people’s dreams: it’d feature more than 50 pockets, include multiple external battery packs, RFID-blocking pouches, a precipitation hood, a USB hub, charging cables, a Bluetooth speaker, and a mobile hotspot for a portable Wi-Fi connection. That’s a lot of stuff in one bag that you could seemingly be talked into believing is useful. Yes, it does rain by me sometimes. Occasionally, I do wish I had a Bluetooth speaker in my bag. What IF I had a constant Wi-Fi connection? But the reality is that most of these things could be bought on their own and crammed into any old backpack. Monahan doesn’t see it that way; the iBackpack needed to exist. “The whole backpack is built for power,” he tells me.

Thousands of people bought into Monahan’s project, netting him nearly $800,000 to bring the bag to life. He shipped a few beta units, but the vast majority of people never received anything. They haven’t seen the backpack in person. They don’t believe it’s real, and they started a Facebook group to organize ways to recoup their money and get the FTC’s attention. As far as they’re concerned, Monahan’s a grifter, and the FTC lawsuit was long-awaited and necessary. They track the case in the group, too. “Clearly Doug is a snake in the grass and hopefully the Federal Trade Commission hammers him,” one member of the group wrote.

Meanwhile, Monahan says they just don’t understand him or crowdfunding, in general. He’s not a bad guy, he says. It’s just that businesses fail sometimes, which is what he invited me to Texas to prove. Poking at Monahan’s past, however, suggests this isn’t a man with a one-time flub, but rather someone with a trail of failures. Is he a con-artist? An irresponsible businessman? Does the difference even matter?

Doug Monahan crowdfunded a backpack.  The people who never got their product or their money back crowdfunded a lawsuit against him in return.

I'd say that's fair.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Trump voters simply don't believe coronavirus is a problem, so they don't care about it, won't change their behavior, and they certainly won't blame Donald Trump when it spreads.

Americans who now find themselves politically divided over seemingly everything are now forming two very different views of another major issue: the dangers of the new coronavirus.

Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent threat to the United States, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this week.

And more Democrats than Republicans say they are taking steps to be prepared, including washing their hands more often or limiting their travel plans.

Poll respondents who described themselves as Republicans and did not see the coronavirus as a threat said it still felt remote because cases had not been detected close to home and their friends and neighbors did not seem to be worried, either.

“I haven’t changed a single thing,” Cindi Hogue, who lives outside Little Rock, Arkansas, told Reuters. “It’s not a reality to me yet. It hasn’t become a threat enough yet in my world.”

Many of the U.S. cases that have been reported so far have been in Washington state and California, more than 1,000 miles away from Arkansas.

COVID-19 is something those filthy blue states and their immigrants have to worry about, not Real Americans In The Heartland™.   Steve M. explains the theory:

Here's what I wrote late last month:

Most Americans never travel. Trumpism is popular among the untraveled; they're suspicious of people who gad about the planet rather than settling into a small town or gated retirement village. They'll regard this as a disease of rootless cosmopolitanism -- or, rather, as a disease rootless cosmopolitans have spread to simple, decent, travel-averse Volk.  

And if they never get real numbers from the federal government, they'll learn to mistrust the numbers from state and local governments, from "the fake news," and from private organizations. If they don't have real numbers from the one source they trust -- Trump and his government -- they'll experience a combination of denial and (if the virus shows up where they live) scapegoat-blaming.

Trump might not be able to avoid coronavirus accountability forever -- but with some lucky breaks and careful misdirection, he might avoid it until November, the way Bush avoided accountability on Iraq in November 2004. Avoiding accountability is all that matters to Trump.

The rush to blame Democrats, specifically immigrants and those people for COVID-19 is going to be the name of the game. Trump voters believe it's a Chinese bioweapon that Beijing lost control of.

Conspiracy theories infect us faster than the virus itself, it seems. This time, the basic idea behind all of them is that the origins of COVID-19 in Wuhan, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, is suspicious. From there, some claim that it escaped the lab accidentally after being used in a regular, if risky, experiment, or a bioweapons program. Others suggest it was released intentionally, though it gets convoluted when you try to determine who, exactly, was being attacked: As the podcast Knowledge Fight has documented, Alex Jones has said that COVID-19 is both a false-flag style attack by the Chinese government against its own people and a “ChiCom” (that is, Chinese communist) plot to attack the West, a conspiracy repeated by Rush Limbaugh.

Responsible outlets have covered the conspiracy theories, attempting to debunk them. But even some experts don’t seem immune here. One rejected the idea of the virus being a biological weapon and praised the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a “world-class research institution that does world-class research” to the Washington Post at the end of January. Less than a month later, he was tweeting sympathetically about a New York Post opinion piece claiming the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19, had escaped from the same lab. 

So no, Trump voters will never blame Trump for COVID-19 even as the illness ravages both red and blue states.  They will be mobilized to vote against those people who "brought the virus into America".

If you think racism and anti-immigrant fervor was bad before, it will absolutely get much, much worse.

Meanwhile in Italy, the government there is quarantining the entire Lombardy region of 16 million.

Italy's prime minister has said at least 16 million people are in mandatory quarantine in Lombardy region and also in 14 provinces.

The lock-down will last until early April.

The dramatic escalation in the country's efforts to contain the new coronavirus will close gyms, pools, museums and ski resorts.

Italy is Europe's worst-hit country and reported a steep rise in virus infections on Saturday.

The new measures, which also apply to financial centre Milan and tourist hotspot Venice will last until 3 April.

The death toll in Italy has passed 230, with officials reporting more than 50 deaths in 24 hours. The number of confirmed cases jumped by more than 1,200 to 5,883 on Saturday.

Imagine all of the mid-Atlantic and New England locked down from Philly to Maine, a quarter of the US population, and you have an idea of what Italy is going through.  Here in the states, the White House refuses to quarantine anyone, or even recommend safety procedures of any sort.

The White House overruled health officials who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the new coronavirus, a federal official told The Associated Press.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention submitted the plan this week as a way of trying to control the virus, but White House officials ordered the air travel recommendation be removed, said the official who had direct knowledge of the plan. Trump administration officials have since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but they have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.

The person who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity did not have authorization to talk about the matter. The person did not have direct knowledge about why the decision to kill the language was made.

On Friday, the CDC quietly updated its website to tell older adults and people with severe medical conditions such as heart, lung or kidney disease to “stay home as much as possible” and avoid crowds. It urges those people to “take actions to reduce your risk of exposure,” but it doesn’t specifically address flying.

Vice President Mike Pence, speaking Saturday after meeting with cruise ship industry leaders in Florida, targeted his travel advice to a narrower group: older people with serious health problems.

“If you’re a senior citizen with a serious underlying health condition, this would be a good time to practice common sense and to avoid activities including traveling on a cruise line,” Pence said, adding they were looking to cruise line officials for action, guidance and flexibility with those passengers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar suggested older Americans and those with health problems should avoid crowds “especially in poorly ventilated spaces.”

What does the White House want to do?

Give tax cuts to airlines and cruise lines.

We've known for years that a pandemic scenario of a flu-like disease with a higher contagion and mortality rate was always likely.  It was just a matter of when. 

"When" is now.

Prince Of Darkness, Con't

Our old friend Erik Prince is at it again, this time hiring out his mercenaries for a different kind of warfare here in the '20s: disinformation warfare and infiltration of liberal groups through James O'Keefe and his Operation Veritas project.

Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents.

One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the largest teachers’ unions in the nation. Mr. Seddon directed an undercover operative to secretly tape the union’s local leaders and try to gather information that could be made public to damage the organization, documents show.

Using a different alias the next year, the same undercover operative infiltrated the congressional campaign of Abigail Spanberger, then a former C.I.A. officer who went on to win an important House seat in Virginia as a Democrat. The campaign discovered the operative and fired her.

Both operations were run by Project Veritas, a conservative group that has gained attention using hidden cameras and microphones for sting operations on news organizations, Democratic politicians and liberal advocacy groups. Mr. Seddon’s role in the teachers’ union operation — detailed in internal Project Veritas emails that have emerged from the discovery process of a court battle between the group and the union — has not previously been reported, nor has Mr. Prince’s role in recruiting Mr. Seddon for the group’s activities.

Both Project Veritas and Mr. Prince have ties to President Trump’s aides and family. Whether any Trump administration officials or advisers to the president were involved in the operations, even tacitly, is unclear. But the effort is a glimpse of a vigorous private campaign to try to undermine political groups or individuals perceived to be in opposition to Mr. Trump’s agenda.

Mr. Prince, the former head of Blackwater Worldwide and the brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, has at times served as an informal adviser to Trump administration officials. He worked with the former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn during the presidential transition. In 2017, he met with White House and Pentagon officials to pitch a plan to privatize the Afghan war using contractors in lieu of American troops. Jim Mattis, then the defense secretary, rejected the idea.

Mr. Prince appears to have become interested in using former spies to train Project Veritas operatives in espionage tactics sometime during the 2016 presidential campaign. Reaching out to several intelligence veterans — and occasionally using Mr. Seddon to make the pitch — Mr. Prince said he wanted the Project Veritas employees to learn skills like how to recruit sources and how to conduct clandestine recordings, among other surveillance techniques.

James O’Keefe, the head of Project Veritas, declined to answer detailed questions about Mr. Prince, Mr. Seddon and other topics, but he called his group a “proud independent news organization” that is involved in dozens of investigations. He said that numerous sources were coming to the group “providing confidential documents, insights into internal processes and wearing hidden cameras to expose corruption and misconduct.”

“No one tells Project Veritas who or what to investigate,” he said.

A spokesman for Mr. Prince declined to comment. Emails sent to Mr. Seddon went unanswered.

To recap, a major private military contractor, who happens to be the brother of the Secretary of Education, is bankrolling, recruiting and training operatives to infiltrate labor unions, activist organizations, news outlets and, I cannot stress this enough, Democratic campaign staff, in order to damage their credibility and spread disinformation.

They are doing this with the tacit permission of the White House.

Disgraced paramilitary leader aligned with regime party pays spies to infiltrate and suppress domestic political opposition on behalf of the head of state https://t.co/UQ9Hvv47JJ

— Adam Serwer🍝 (@AdamSerwer) March 7, 2020

It would make a great Tom Clancy novel if it wasn't 100% real.  If this was happening in any other putative democracy on Earth, the US would call for UN election observers and threaten sanctions.

They gave O'Keefe and his merry band of gotcha "journalists" real actual spies to use against Democrats and their allies, to spy on Trump's political foes.  It worked, too.  They stole information, they got people fired, they spread chaos.

And they're still doing it.  If you don't think these guys have folks in the Bernie and Biden campaigns, you're not paying attention.  The US Senate campaigns and key House races? Absolutely. Unions, Black Lives Matter, women's groups, Latino groups, LGBTQ groups, you name it, they've got people in or heading in.

We're up against a mob boss willing to do anything to crush his foes.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

Expect to see more major events and conferences canceled due to COVID-19 in the months ahead like this year's SXSW festival in Austin, Texas.

South by Southwest — the tech, music, and film conference held every year in Austin, Texas, and which drew more than 73,000 people last year — is officially canceled.

The reason that the event, which was set to take place from March 13-22, has been nixed this year should come as no surprise. Austin city officials remain concerned about the spread of coronavirus, and a lengthy statement has been issued explaining the decision, which you can read below.

This is a major blow to the city, where the conference last year brought in a few hundred million dollars. The cancellation was announced during a Friday afternoon press conference, at which city mayor Steve Adler added that he’d declared a “local disaster” in Austin as a result of the continued spread of the virus. 

Rescheduling is going to be a tough road, I think.  COVID-19 is going to be with us for months. Everyone badly underestimated what would have been needed to contain the virus in a country like the United States, most of all that failure lies on the shoulders of Donald Trump.

Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.

To arrive at our estimate, we contacted the public-health departments of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We gathered data on websites, and we corresponded with dozens of state officials. All 50 states and D.C. have made some information available, though the quality and timeliness of the data varied widely. Some states have only committed to releasing their numbers once or three times a week. Most are focused on the number of confirmed cases; only a few have publicized the number of people they are capable of testing.

The Atlantic’s numbers reflect the best available portrait of the country’s testing capacity as of early this morning. These numbers provide an accurate baseline, but they are incomplete. Scattered on state websites, the data available are not useful to citizens or political leaders. State-based tallies lack the reliability of the CDC’s traditional—but now abandoned—method of reporting. Several states—including New Jersey, Texas, and Louisiana—have not shared the number of coronavirus tests they have conducted overall, meaning their number of positive results lacks crucial context.

The net effect of these choices is that the country’s true capacity for testing has not been made clear to its residents. This level of obfuscation is unexpected in the United States, which has long been a global leader in public-health transparency.

The figures we gathered suggest that the American response to the coronavirus and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has been shockingly sluggish, especially compared with that of other developed countries. The CDC confirmed eight days ago that the virus was in community transmission in the United States—that it was infecting Americans who had neither traveled abroad nor were in contact with others who had. In South Korea, more than 66,650 people were tested within a week of its first case of community transmission, and it quickly became able to test 10,000 people a day. The United Kingdom, which has only 115 positive cases, has so far tested 18,083 people for the virus.

Normally, the job of gathering these types of data in the U.S. would be left to epidemiologists at the CDC. The agency regularly collects and publishes positive and negative test results for several pathogens, including multiple types of the seasonal flu. But earlier this week, the agency announced that it would stop publishing negative results for the coronavirus, an extraordinary step that essentially keeps Americans from knowing how many people have been tested overall.

Read: What you can do right now about the coronavirus

“With more and more testing done at states, these numbers would not be representative of the testing being done nationally,” Nancy Messonnier, the chief CDC official for respiratory diseases, said at the time. “States are reporting results quickly, and in the event of a discrepancy between CDC and state case counts, the state case counts should always be considered more up to date.”

Then, last night, the CDC resumed reporting the number of tests that the agency itself has completed, but did not include testing by state public-health departments or other laboratories. Asked to respond to our own tally and reporting, the CDC directed us to Messonnier’s statement from Tuesday.

Our reporting found that disorder has followed the CDC’s decision not to publish state data. Messonnier’s statement itself implies that, as highly populous states like California increase their own testing, the number of people the CDC reports as having been tested and the actual number of people tested will become ever more divergent. The federal tally of positive cases is now also badly out of date: While the CDC is reporting 99 positive cases of the coronavirus in the United States, our data, and separate data from Johns Hopkins University, show that the true number is well above 200, including those on the Diamond Princess cruise ship.

The White House declined to comment.

The haphazard debut of the tests—and the ensuing absence of widespread data about the epidemic—has hamstrung doctors, politicians, and public-health officials as they try to act prudently during the most important week for the epidemic in the United States so far.

Please remember that Donald Trump knows exactly what he's doing.

President Trump likes to say that he fell into politics almost by accident, and on Friday, as he sought to calm a nation gripped with fears over coronavirus, he suggested he would have thrived in another profession — medical expert.

“I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump boasted to reporters during a tour of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where he met with actual doctors and scientists who are feverishly scrambling to contain and combat the deadly illness. Citing a “great, super-genius uncle” who taught at MIT, Trump professed that it must run in the family genes.

“People are really surprised I understand this stuff,” he said. “Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”

He's lying. He can't control it, just like he can't control his malignant narcissism.  He doesn't know a damn thing.  He;s silencing the experts on purpose to contain panic.

And absolute panic is necessary right now.

More below the fold.

Orange Meltdown, Con't

Last night, Donald Trump replaced Acting WH Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney with retiring GOP Rep. Mark Meadows.

President Donald Trump announced late Friday that he was replacing his acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, with Republican Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, a shake-up in the top echelons of the West Wing just as the President confronts a growing public health crisis and girds for reelection. 

Meadows, who had previously announced he was leaving Congress, will become Trump's fourth chief of staff in a little more than three years in office. In a tweet, Trump did not denote him "acting," a designation Mulvaney never graduated from in the turbulent 14 months he spent in the job. 

"I am pleased to announce that Congressman Mark Meadows will become White House Chief of Staff. I have long known and worked with Mark, and the relationship is a very good one," Trump tweeted Friday just after arriving at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida. 

Trump, who did not immediately offer an explanation for the swap, thanked Mulvaney and said he said would become special envoy for Northern Ireland. 

"I want to thank Acting Chief Mick Mulvaney for having served the Administration so well. He will become the United States Special Envoy for Northern Ireland," Trump added. "Thank you!" 

It was an abrupt announcement of news that had been anticipated for weeks. It continues a churn of staffing changes that followed Trump's impeachment acquittal a month ago. 

Trump offered the position to Meadows on Thursday, people familiar with the matter said. Mulvaney was on a personal trip and not at work Friday, two officials said. Some staffers found it odd that the acting chief of staff would leave Washington during such a critical time while the administration is dealing with the coronavirus crisis. 

But Mulvaney also did not attend several of Trump's recent trips -- including a campaign swing in the Western United States and his state visit to India -- which is a pattern his predecessors also followed before they were dismissed. 

Though Mulvaney had been a fixture of Trump's administration in various roles over the past three years, the President effectively lost confidence in him months ago, a combination of personality conflicts and frustration at his handling of the impeachment ordeal. 

Trump, who had considered dismissing Mulvaney at various junctures, was convinced not to act by close aides, who argued that a leadership change in the White House during impeachment could cause unnecessary chaos.

Booting Mulvaney out to be envoy to Northern Ireland isn't firing him, but it's close.  Firing him of course would mean he's no longer protected by executive privilege should Dems get the wild idea to subpoena Mulvaney again.

I figured Mulvaney would be the scapegoat for COVID-19, but apparently Trump has Alex Azar in mind still for that one, so we'll see what happens with Mark Meadows, the fourth WH Chief of Staff in three years.

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

With Bernie Sanders taking on Joe Biden for the Democratic nomination, the forces of Trumpy darkness (orangeness maybe?) are descending on events held for both candidates, and don't expect the White House to agree to extending badly needed Secret Service protection to either one, particularly Sanders, who would be the nation's first Jewish president.

Moments after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) took the stage at his campaign rally in Phoenix on Thursday night, the crowd was on its feet cheering madly for the Democratic presidential candidate.

But those cheers were swiftly replaced by deafening boos when Sanders’s supporters noticed that one man standing behind the senator in an upper section of the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum wasn’t waving a “Bernie” sign like many of those around him.

Instead, the man was holding a red flag above his head — and it was emblazoned with a swastika.

“It was absolutely wild,” Brianna Westbrook, a national surrogate for the Sanders campaign, told The Washington Post. “I never thought I would have seen a swastika at a political event. It’s gross.”

While people near the protester quickly ripped the offending item out of his hands and he was removed from the arena, the mere appearance of a Nazi flag at an event dedicated to a democratic socialist who could become the country’s first Jewish president sparked outcry. The moment, captured in videos and photos that circulated on social media Thursday night, was denounced as an act of anti-Semitism and prompted increased concerns about Sanders’s safety on the campaign trail.

“We can argue about which candidate should get the Dem nomination, but anti-Semitic acts have no place in this world,” tweeted Steven Slugocki, chairman of the Maricopa County Democratic Party. “This is absolutely abhorrent.”

It's abhorrent, completely.  It's also Trump's America.  This is only a taste of what I expect from Trump's twisted followers, all while Republicans are screaming that they are the victims.

We don't punch Nazis anymore.

We elect them.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

In an unprecedented situation, a federal judge has ordered a review of Attorney General Bill Barr's redactions of the Mueller Report, because he doesn't trust Barr to be impartial at all.

A federal judge in Washington sharply criticized Attorney General William P. Barr on Thursday for a “lack of candor,” questioning the truthfulness of the nation’s top law enforcement official in his handling of last year’s report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton, overseeing a lawsuit brought by EPIC, a watchdog group, and BuzzFeed News, said he saw serious discrepancies between Barr’s public statements about Mueller’s findings and the public, partially redacted version of that report detailing the special counsel’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Because of those discrepancies, Walton ruled, the judge would conduct an independent review of Mueller’s full report to see whether the Justice Department’s redactions were appropriate.

“In the Court’s view, Attorney General Barr’s representation that the Mueller Report would be ‘subject only to those redactions required by law or by compelling law enforcement, national security, or personal privacy interests’ cannot be credited without the Court’s independent verification in light of Attorney General Barr’s conduct and misleading public statements about the findings in the Mueller Report,” Walton wrote.

A spokeswoman for Barr declined to comment on the ruling.

Walton rips into Barr in his opinion, all but saying that Barr's redactions are covering for Donald Trump's misdeeds.  Marcy Wheeler explains that Walton has long since tired of Trump's antics:

Before the Trump Administration started really politicizing justice, Reggie Walton had already proven himself willing to stand up to the Executive Branch. During the George W Bush Administration, he presided over the Scooter Libby trial, never shirking from attacks from the defendant. And in the first year of the Obama Administration, as presiding FISA Judge, he shut down parts of the phone dragnet and the entire Internet dragnet because they were so far out of compliance with court orders.

And Walton had already showed his impatience with Trump’s stunts, most notably when presiding over a FOIA for materials related to the firing of Andrew McCabe. He finally forced DOJ to give the former Deputy FBI Director a prosecution declination so he could proceed with the FOIA lawsuit.

So it’s unsurprising he’s unpersuaded by DOJ’s request to dismiss the EPIC/BuzzFeed lawsuits over their FOIAs to liberate the Mueller Report, and has ordered DOJ to provide him a copy of the Report before the end of the month to do an in camera review of redactions in it.

What does this mean going forward in Wheeler's view?

Walton doesn’t say it explicitly, but he seems to believe what the unredacted portions of the report show amount to “collusion,” the kind of collusion Trump would want to and did (and still is) covering up.

Be warned, however, that this review is not going to lead to big revelations in the short term.

There are several reasons for that. Many of the most substantive redactions pertain to the Internet Research Agency and Roger Stone cases. Gags remain on both. While Walton is not an Article II pushover, he does take national security claims very seriously, and so should be expected to defer to DOJ’s judgments about those redactions.

Where this ruling may matter, though, is in four areas:

• DOJ hid the circumstances of how both Trump and Don Jr managed to avoid testifying under a grand jury redaction. Walton may judge that these discussions were not truly grand jury materials.
• DOJ is currently hiding details of people — like KT McFarland — who lied, but then cleaned up their story (Sam Clovis is another person this may be true of). There’s no reason someone as senior as McFarland should have her lies protected. All the more so, because DOJ is withholding some of the 302s that show her lies. So Walton may release some of this information.
• Because Walton will have already read the Stone material — that part that most implicates Trump — by the time Judge Amy Berman Jackson releases the gag in that case, he will have a view on what would still need to be redacted. That may mean more of it will be released quickly than otherwise might happen.
• In very short order, the two sides in this case will start arguing over DOJ’s withholding of 302s under very aggressive b5 claims. These claims, unlike most of the redactions in the Mueller Report, are substantively bogus and in many ways serve to cover up the details of Trump’s activities. While this won’t happen in the near term, I expect this ruling will serve as the basis for a similar in camera review on 302s down the road.

In other words, the judicial is doing its job.  Those wheels keep turning, slowly, towards November.

Rand Paul Goes Viral

As usual, Republican glibertarian asshole Rand Paul has decided that being the lone vote against anything that would actually prove the federal government should help people in a time of national crisis by voting against a coronavirus emergency funding package in the Senate yesterday will somehow endear him to the people here in Kentucky.

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul voted against an emergency response coronavirus bill Thursday afternoon after his proposed amendment to the bill was turned down.

The bill had already received more than 60 affirmative votes, which was more than it needed to pass, when Paul voted against it. The bill passed 96-1.

"Earlier today on the Senate floor, I said that while I support an all-hands-on-deck response to the coronavirus, we should cut out waste and take money from less urgent spending, such as what we are wasting overseas, to put into that response effort," Paul said in a statement after his vote. "We don’t have to borrow more money. We just have to start setting our own priorities."

We can't afford coronavirus testing because GOP tax cuts, which Rand Paul voted for, knowing they would cost the federal government trillions in revenue.  I'm sure that will help.

The U.S. Senate voted earlier Thursday to table an amendment from Paul after the junior senator from Kentucky threatened to hold up the legislation if his amendment did not receive a vote.

The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to approve $8.3 billion in emergency aid Wednesday to combat the novel coronavirus, which has caused 11 deaths in the United States so far.

Before a scheduled Thursday afternoon vote on the bill, Paul put forth the amendment, which proposed cuts to State Department Cultural Exchange programs and reduces funding for the United States Agency for International Development, among other things.

The amendment died screaming, but Paul continues to remain in office. If Amy McGrath can't beat Mitch in November, I sincerely hope she goes for Paul's seat in 2022.

Meanwhile in DC, the Trump regime's response continues to be bafflingly inadequate and incompetent to the point of venality.

There will be a notable omission when Vice President Mike Pence visits Washington state Thursday as part of the Trump administration's coronavirus response: health Secretary Alex Azar.

The White House on Wednesday also benched Azar from a coronavirus task force press briefing, the latest sign of diminished standing for an official who was the face of the U.S. response to the disease just a week ago.

Four of Azar’s deputies — including Medicare chief Seema Verma and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Steve Hahn, who were both added to the task force after Pence took over the federal response — joined the vice president and other officials at the White House on Wednesday.

Azar's absence didn't go unnoticed by allies worried about his standing in the administration and the way he's catching more flak for missteps. Azar was front and center Thursday at a Capitol Hill briefing with House members, during which he took heat from some lawmakers over transparency and whether his department is adequately prepared for the stealthy disease.

Asked why Azar didn’t attend Wednesday's televised briefing, a Pence spokesperson said that Azar left for his office after the task force meeting, and officials wanted to make room on stage for Ben Carson, the Housing and Urban Development secretary and also a task force member. A spokesperson for Azar said that members of the task force will be “rotating through as necessary” now that the group is doing daily briefings.

Azar is being kept on until he can take the maximum amount of blame for the failed response, and everyone knows it.  It won't be long until the epidemic phase kicks in, end of the month at best.  April is going to be a nightmare.

And again, Trump is in charge.