The USA's In The ICU

Unless Congress gets their shit together fast, there's not going to be an American economy left after COVID-19 lockdowns.

The U.S. economy is deteriorating more quickly than was expected just days ago as extraordinary measures designed to curb the coronavirus keep 84 million Americans penned in their homes and cause the near-total shutdown of most businesses.
In a single 24-hour period, governors of three of the largest states — California, New York and Illinois — ordered residents to stay home except to buy food and medicine, while the governor of Pennsylvania ordered the closure of nonessential businesses. Across the globe, health officials are struggling to cope with the growing number of patients, with the World Health Organization noting that while it required three months to reach 100,000 cases, it took only 12 days to hit another 100,000.

The resulting economic meltdown, which is sending several million workers streaming into the unemployment line, is outpacing the federal government’s efforts to respond. As the Senate on Friday raced to complete work on a financial rescue package, the White House and key lawmakers were dramatically expanding its scope, pushing the legislation far beyond the original $1 trillion price tag. 

With each day, an unprecedented stoppage gathers force as restaurants, movie theaters, sports arenas and offices close to shield themselves from the disease. Already, it is clear that the initial economic decline will be sharper and more painful than during the 2008 financial crisis.

Next week, the Labor Department will likely report that roughly 3 million Americans have filed first-time claims for unemployment assistance, more than four times the record high set in the depths of the 1982 recession, according to Bank of America Merrill Lynch. That is just the start of a surge that could send the jobless rate spiking to 20 percent from today’s 3.5 percent, a JPMorgan Chase economist told clients on a conference call Friday.

Estimates of the pandemic’s overall cost are staggering. Bridgewater Associates, a hedge fund manager, says the economy will shrink over the next three months at an annual rate of 30 percent. Goldman Sachs pegs the drop at 24 percent. JPMorgan Chase says 14 percent.

Amazingly enough, despite everything I've been warning about since Trump took over, the reality is far, far worse.  Unless Congress passes the mother of all stimulus packages and mobilizes things within days, not weeks or months, we're in a no-shit depression that will last years.

We're talking hundreds of small businesses go away for good, they don't come back, and 25% of the workforce is out of work, and the solution at that point is going to be "as much stuff gets automated as possible because it'll be cheaper."

So either we take a deep breath and take the plunge into a multi-trillion dollar economic rescue package, or the economy collapses and we use that as the starting point once COVID-19 is dealt with.

The NY Times makes is very clear:

Any bailout plan will come too late to avoid a large increase in unemployment. The federal government’s failure to prepare for the arrival of the coronavirus, particularly the lack of large-scale testing, has forced policymakers to shut down many kinds of commercial activity. California and New York have ordered most workers to stay home.

A proposal to send $2,000 to every American would help, but the government needs to do more for those who lose jobs by expanding unemployment benefits. In most states, the benefits cover about 45 percent of lost wages for low-income workers, and a lot of workers don’t qualify. Congress can get help to those who need it most by requiring states to raise the minimum benefit and to expand eligibility, both at federal expense. The government also should offer partial unemployment benefits: Companies could shift some workers to part-time arrangements, and the government could supplement their salaries.

There is no need to choose among the various kinds of aid that Congress is considering. The abrupt plunge in the nation’s economic fortunes has no obvious precedents; it requires a massive response. Send checks to every American. Lend money to every business. Strengthen the social safety net. The risk of doing too much is greatly outweighed in this moment by the consequences of failing to do enough.

The correct answer right now is D) All of the Above.

But remember and keep in mind the most critical part of this disaster: Donald Trump is in charge.  He's lost control, and as I've said for weeks now, he's going to overreact with astonishing federal emergency powers and some sort of national quarantine order, or worse, do nothing more than what the GOP is offering, a mealy-mouthed bailout where the rich get the money and tens of millions get nothing whatsoever, because doing anything more would be a tacit admission of his place as the absolute worst leader in the country's history.

Some people aren't going to survive the national lockdown, should it come to that. Shortages and being unable to deal with the new normal are going to cause hardships for those with no ability to adapt, and it's going to be something people aren't going to be able to handle. Even without COVID-19, they're going to be evicted, lose everything, and end up on the streets in the middle of a depression caused by a pandemic with no safety net.

And they will be lost.

Good luck, everyone.

We're going to need a miracle.

Odds are very good that the cost of that miracle will be mind-numbing.

Last Call For Rest In Peace, Corps

The US Peace Corps is done, and odds are it's not coming back for a very long time, if ever.

Because of the coronavirus, the Peace Corps is doing more than evacuating its 7,300 volunteers from 61 countries.

It’s also firing them.

In a March 15 open letter to the volunteers, the agency’s director, Jody Olsen, said, “We are acting now to safeguard your well-being and prevent a situation where Volunteers are unable to leave their host countries.”

But nowhere in the statement posted on the agency’s website does it tell the public that all the volunteers are being dismissed. That information is in the agency’s “frequently asked questions” about the evacuations.

“All evacuated Volunteers and trainees, regardless of length of service, will be classified as having undergone a Completion of Service (COS),” it says.

That leaves volunteers like Kimberly Ruck — who have sacrificed in service to two nations, at home and abroad — upset, dismayed and angry.

Although the volunteers received dismissal notifications separate from the open letter, “Director Jody Olsen’s statement is very misleading to the public as well as the volunteers,” Ruck said by email Friday, her last day as a volunteer in her post in Windhoek, Namibia, in southwestern Africa. “What is really happening is she has ended the service of ALL volunteers and there will be no volunteer activity in any of the 61 countries until the Corona Virus is over, until countries open borders, until countries issue visas and until Peace Corps begins accepting applications to join.”

An agency statement to the Federal Insider said volunteers were dismissed, instead of being allowed paid leave, because “it is logistically impossible for the agency to place each of them on administrative hold for an indeterminate period of time.” Peace Corps volunteers typically serve for about two years. The Peace Corps is an independent agency of the U.S. government.

Ruck’s annual stipend was less than $14,000 for her economic-development duties in a Windhoek community center that serves orphans and vulnerable children. She said her evacuation and dismissal mean that “I abandon them when they need me the most.” Ruck, 51, now describes herself as “currently homeless, former residence Carefree, Arizona.”

I fully expect the Peace Corps to be quietly buried in the next budget battle.  Certainly the administrative staff won't be funded with no volunteers to administrate.

And just like that, the Trump regime has ended the Peace Corps.

Poof.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

A tale of two press conferences, first, Tang The Conqueror.

Trump starts his daily crash the stock market coronavirus briefing by calling the coronavirus the "Chinese virus." pic.twitter.com/kJiceCGPpa

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 20, 2020

Trump went on to answer NBC reporter Peter Alexander's question of "What do you say to Americans who are scared?" with "I think you're a terrible reporter" and that it was a "nasty question".

Trump has an epic meltdown and goes on a screed about the media when he is asked what he would tell people who are scared. Trump called NBC's Peter Alexander a terrible reporter and started yelling and ranting. pic.twitter.com/dko6pIHrUt

— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 20, 2020

Compare that to New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who joined California Gov. Gavin Newsom in issuing a shelter-in-place order for the state this morning. Chuck Pierce:

“Blame me.”

With two remarkable words, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo established himself as the leader the country needs during these plague days. On Friday, Cuomo essentially shut down the economy of his state, and of its largest city, which happens to be the largest city in this country. He did so in order to fight the public-health catastrophe that is engulfing his state and the country.

These were not words we ever will hear from the country’s president*, or, likely, anyone who works for him. Cuomo’s press conference announcing this new policy was a master class in leveling with the public, and it put Cuomo at the head of a group of governors—including Gavin Newsom of California,Andy Beshear of Kentucky, and Jay Inslee of Washington—who have grasped the enormity of what’s happening to their people. At the same time, Cuomo is clearly pleading for the federal government for help, begging the administration* to do its damn job so he can do his.

For years, Cuomo has looked like everything that was wrong with the Democratic party. He leaned toward the money power and he arranged the New York legislature in a way that empowered Republicans against the more progressive elements of his own party. It made any plans he had for running for president dead on arrival every four years. But over the past months, and especially in his press conferences, Cuomo has demonstrated a knack for the kind of leadership that rallies people rather than frightens them, and that has not relied upon the fouler elements of American politics to get the job done. He has become someone upon whom everyone can rely.
These are strange times, indeed.

Not that "displaying better leadership than Donald Trump in a time of crisis" is difficult by any means, but even Cuomo gets it, and he's a blockheaded dipstick who openly argues with his brother on CNN.

Strange times, indeed.

Oh, and the Dow Jones lost another 900 points, down only 2100 points for the week, 10 grand since Feb 12 highs, or almost 34%.

Israeli A Problem, Con't

Israel, now in trying to form a government a third time, is stuck firmly in a legal no man's land as PM Benjamin Netanyahu, facing indictment for corruption and bribery, is holding on to power for his dear political life and using COVID-19 as the justification for extraordinary powers that will never be surrendered.

Israel appeared to be barreling toward a constitutional crisis Thursday as opponents took to the streets and turned to the Supreme Court to fight a series of unprecedented steps taken by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while confronting the coronavirus pandemic.

In recent days, Netanyahu and his surrogates have shut down the court system, approved the use of sophisticated phone-surveillance technology on the general public and temporarily suspended the activities of parliament. While Netanyahu has defended the moves as extraordinary steps in extraordinary times, his opponents accuse him of undermining Israel’s democratic foundations in a desperate bid to cement his grip on power and derail a looming criminal trial after coming up short in parliamentary elections this month.

“The state of Israel must do two very important things right now: Deal with the coronavirus crisis from its health, economic and social perspective and at the same time preserve Israeli democracy,” Benny Gantz, his opponent and leader of the Blue and White Party, told Israeli Channel 12 TV. “We need to be very careful not to even approach the margins of dictatorship.”

Demonstrators are taking to the streets, and Netanyahu is ordering everyone home for safety reasons, but Israel is now firmly on its way to becoming a dictatorship.

The crisis has given Netanyahu the opportunity to flaunt his legendary leadership skills and, critics say, to thwart Gantz from moving forward with his agenda.

Nearly every evening, Netanyahu gives a televised address, sternly telling the nation that he is imposing tough new restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus. He has ordered people to stay indoors, ordered tens of thousands of people into home quarantine and virtually sealed its borders.

In Thursday’s address, he said he was further tightening restrictions on movement, with exceptions only to go out for food or other urgent matters. “You must stay home. It’s no longer a request,” he said.

While other countries have taken similar steps, some of his decisions have been unprecedented.

Citing the coronavirus crisis, hiss hand-picked justice minister all but closed the court system in a middle-of-the-night order just two days before Netanyahu’s trial on corruption charges was to begin.

In another overnight move, Netanyahu’s Cabinet authorized the Shin Bet security agency to use phone-tracking technology to retrace the movements of infected people and identify those who had come into contact with them. The technology had previously only been used as a surveillance tool against Palestinian targets. The decision was blasted by opposition politicians and civil rights groups as a violation of privacy.

Then, on Wednesday, Parliament Speaker Yuli Edelstein abruptly suspended activities at the Knesset, preventing Gantz’s allies from forming key committees to press ahead with their legislative agenda. Edelstein cited procedural issues, but critics accused him of working on behalf of Netanyahu. Edelstein has rejected the charges and vowed to reconvene the Knesset on Monday.

Dan Meridor, a former justice minister and one-time member of Netanyahu’s Cabinet, said that Netanyahu’s recent decisions were not “well considered.” He said even if such steps are justifiable responses to the coronavirus, the decision making was flawed because the government’s traditional checks and balances, such as parliamentary oversight and an active court system, were not functioning.

“Even in a time of crisis, one should not lose the basic structure of the government,” Meridor said. “He still has to remember that he’s not a ruler of a country.”

But he is the ruler now.  And nobody seems willing to stop him.  This is a full-bore dictatorship move happening right in front of our eyes and he's almost got everything he needs to stay in power indefinitely.

This is not a drill, guys.

You'd better believe Donald Trump is paying attention, too.

StupidiNews!

• With projections that more than half of California's 42 million residents will be infected with COVID-19, Gov. Gavin Newsom has ordered all non-essential residents to stay home.
• The Trump regime is demanding that states hide unemployment figures until further notice as the economy nosedives in the wake of the virus.
• Donald Trump is canceling this year's G7 economic summit at Camp David and asking world leaders to hold video conferencing to meet instead.
• The US State Department is advising Americans to hold off on any non-essential international travel at this time, citing COVID-19's global pandemic spread.
• Video game retailer GameStop says it should be allowed to remain open in order to sell "at-home work solutions" and be reclassified as an essential in order to avoid state closure orders.

Last Call For Primary Positions, Con't

Tulsi Gabbard is finally dropping out of the race, and good riddance.

Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s longshot presidential bid is over.

Gabbard’s decision to drop out, announced March 19, was long in the works. She had consistently averaged around 1 to 2 percent in national polls and performed poorly in primaries; her candidacy largely served as a single-issue protest run against American military adventurism rather than a serious bid for the presidency. Her most notable moment, a devastating attack on California Sen. Kamala Harris’s record as a prosecutor in the CNN’s July debate, didn’t move the dial much in her favor. So on Thursday, she dropped out an endorsed Joe Biden for president.

The irony is that Gabbard could have been a real contender. She’s a strong communicator with an interesting biography, an Iraq war veteran and the first Hindu member of Congress. Yet thanks to a series of choices she had made since getting elected to Congress in 2012 — most notably an inexplicable trip to Syria to meet the country’s murderous leader Bashar al-Assad — she managed to alienate herself from Democratic Party’s leadership and base. Her continued ties to a strange religious group called “Science of Identity” didn’t help matters either, nor did frequent clashes with the party elite during the 2020 campaign (including filing a lawsuit against Hillary Clinton).

The result is that Gabbard’s campaign never had much of a chance: She was unable to play a significant role in the Democratic primary, even on her single issue of opposing wars of regime change, due to her past missteps. She stayed in the race for a long time, but accomplished very little.

Gabbard is giving up her Hawaii US House seat too, not that she would have survived a primary anyway, for precisely the reasons above.  She's managed to alienate every key constituency in the Democratic party in record time and she has no future in it and knows it..and she endorsed Biden anyway.  You know, before Liz Warren did.

Meanwhile, Bernie Sanders is supposedly "clear-eyed" about Joe Biden's presumptive nominee status and is concentrating on COVID-19 legislation along with Liz Warren.

Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign is signaling that he is clear-eyed about the road ahead, with his campaign manager saying he would use the lull in primary voting to have "conversations with supporters to assess his campaign."

But the statement goes on to say that Sanders will be focused on the national emergency around the novel coronavirus -- specifically "ensuring that we take care of working people and the most vulnerable."
It's largely an accident of the calendar that former Vice President Joe Biden is emerging as the all-but-certain Democratic nominee at the same time that American society has been upended.

That coincidence is a potential opportunity for the progressive moment, with once-in-a-lifetime-level federal responses being debated in Washington.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren -- still officially neutral in the presidential race -- has been taking a leadership role in crafting possible responses. She is proposing ideas like canceling student debt, boosting Social Security and forcing leadership changes at companies that accept bailout funds, as part of what she is calling "meaningful, grassroots relief directly to American families."

With the next giant bailout package being tailored largely by Senate Republicans, Sanders and Warren are likely to be go-to voices when Democrats have their say.

The Trump administration will need Democratic votes in the House as well as the Senate. Progressives could see disappointment turned into opportunity in the days ahead -- particularly if Sanders and Warren work together.

I still don't expect Sanders to suspend his campaign until the convention, and I still expect him to ruthlessly attack Joe Biden for another four months, because it's what he did to Hillary Clinton four years ago.  What I expect in fact is for Sanders to work on COVID-19 legislation that's very progressive along with Warren, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, get it passed, and praise Donald Trump for signing it.

In fact, what I expect from Sanders is what he did four years ago: all but say that if he can't be the nominee, the best chance of getting individual policies of his platform enacted will be through Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, and that his voters should once again "vote their conscience" rather than endorse the Democratic nominee in the race, while pointing to a Trump-signed COVID-19 package as an argument.

I'm being cynical as hell.  I have the right to be, frankly, after what happened in 2016.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I actually agree with right-wing scold Josh Barro on COVID-19.

The idea is setting in this week: We’re not going to be done with this coronavirus thing in a month or two. If you lock down society to beat the epidemic, and succeed in drastically slowing new infections, but then go back to what you were doing before, the epidemic can just come raging back. In that scenario, society would remain full of people without antibodies who remain vulnerable to COVID-19, and they would be engaging in the social contacts that allowed the virus to spread so rapidly in the first place. That beating this epidemic will not be a one-and-done thing is an important realization; it’s good that the president leveled with people on Monday in saying he expected disruptions to persist into July or August. People should be prepared to deal with a lot of change to their lives for a long time, with significant economic and social costs.

But, for the first time in a while, I think part of the coronavirus conventional wisdom has become too pessimistic. Yes, the fight to stop the spread of the virus is going to have to be ongoing unless, and until, we develop a vaccine or highly effective medical treatments, which is to say for at least several months. But the nature of the disruption does not have to stay constant. It is necessary now to close schools and businesses, and tell people to drastically reduce social contacts in a way that is economically devastating to many businesses and workers. But there is a trade-off: The better we get at interventions to identify and isolate specific people with the virus, the less we should need to rely on interventions that isolate the entire population. That’s a reason the ramp-up of widely available testing remains such an important goal for the U.S.: More testing should, in time, allow for more normal living.

We are seeing this already in other countries: South Korea and Singapore have been successfully addressing their coronavirus epidemics with less extensive social-distancing measures than are currently seen in Italy, France, and parts of the U.S., in part because of their effective testing and surveillance regimes. The Financial Times reports today on the town of Vò, Italy, which successfully stopped its local outbreak though a strategy that involved widespread testing of the population and isolation of those who tested positive, even as the rest of Northern Italy did not fare so well.

If an outbreak becomes widespread enough, it becomes impractical to conduct effective surveillance and isolation of an infected population that is simply too large to track. So my suggestion is not that if you dropped a massive testing capability into New York City today, it would be fine to reopen the Broadway theaters. But at some point, the massive shutdowns we are undertaking in much of the U.S. (and ought to be undertaking in more of it) should make it possible to sharply reduce the rate of new infections to a point where widespread testing and monitoring can become a cornerstone of a strategy to prevent uncontrolled outbreaks — if we actually have the capability to do such testing and monitoring. This would not mean a complete end to the need for social distancing measures, but it could allow for a reduction in their intensity.

Shutting down businesses, schools, restaurants and theaters is necessary, but it can't be a viable long-term solution.  Part of the solution is what House Financial Services chair Maxine Waters wants to do: direct cash stimulus to Americans on a monthly basis and stopping debt collection, credit card payments, student loan payments, and small business loan payments so people can survive in a scenario where millions of jobs are going to be lost for good otherwise. Americans are going to be booted out into the streets by the millions, especially renters, unless something happens in the meantime.

But part of that has to be testing, and lots of it.  People have to be tested, identified, and treated. We're so far behind on the curve that months of closings may not alleviate the problems, and medical staff and hospitals and clinics will be inundated with infected Americans dying on gurneys and in homes because they have nowhere to go.

So if testing is absolutely key to recovery, why are we so far behind?  We're behind because the Trump regime doesn't give a damn and never did.

The outbreak of the respiratory virus began in China and was quickly spread around the world by air travelers, who ran high fevers. In the United States, it was first detected in Chicago, and 47 days later the World Health Organization declared a pandemic. By then it was too late: 110 million Americans were expected to become ill, leading to 7.7 million hospitalized and 586,000 dead.

That scenario, code-named “Crimson Contagion,’’ was simulated by the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services in a series of exercises that ran from last January to August.

The simulation’s sobering results — contained in a draft report dated October 2019 that has not previously been reported — drove home just how underfunded, underprepared and uncoordinated the federal government would be for a life-or-death battle with a virus for which no treatment existed.
The draft report, marked “not to be disclosed,” laid out in stark detail repeated cases of “confusion” in the exercise. Federal agencies jockeyed over who was in charge. State officials and local hospitals struggled to figure out what kind of equipment was stockpiled or available. Cities and states went their own way on school closings.

Many of the potentially deadly consequences of a failure to address the shortcomings are now playing out in all-too-real fashion across the country. And it was hardly the first warning for the nation’s leaders. Three times over the past four years the U.S. government, across two administrations, had grappled in depth with what a pandemic would look like, identifying likely shortcomings and in some cases recommending specific action.

In 2016 the Obama administration produced a comprehensive report on the lessons learned by the government from battling Ebola. In January 2017 outgoing Obama administration officials ran an extensive exercise on responding to a pandemic for incoming senior officials of the Trump administration.

The full story of the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus is still playing out. Government officials, health professionals, journalists and historians will spend years looking back on the muddled messages and missed opportunities of the past three months, as President Trump moved from dismissing the coronavirus as a few cases that would soon be “under control” to his revisionist announcement Monday that he had known all along that a pandemic was on the way.

What the scenario makes clear, however, is that his own administration had already modeled a similar pandemic and understood its potential trajectory.

The White House defended its record, saying it responded to the 2019 exercise with an executive order to improve the availability and quality of flu vaccines, and that it moved early this year to increase funding for the Health and Human Service Department’s program that focuses on global pandemic threats.

But officials have declined to say why the administration was so slow to roll out broad testing, or move faster, as the simulations all indicated it should, to urge social distancing and school closings.

The work done over the past five years demonstrates that the government had considerable knowledge about the risks of a pandemic and accurately predicted the very types of problems Mr. Trump is now scrambling belatedly to address.

“Crimson Contagion,” the exercise conducted last year in Washington and 12 states including New York and Illinois, showed that federal agencies under Mr. Trump continued the Obama-era effort to think ahead about a pandemic.

But the planning and thinking happened many layers down in the bureaucracy. The knowledge and sense of urgency about the peril appear never to have gotten sufficient attention at the highest level of the executive branch or from Congress, leaving the nation with funding shortfalls, equipment shortages and disorganization within and among various branches and levels of government.

The time to get rolling on that was six weeks ago and they knew it.

They knew it last month and they still did nothing.

Well, they told their high-level donors.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee warned a small group of well-connected constituents three weeks ago to prepare for dire economic and societal effects of the coronavirus, according to a secret recording obtained by NPR.
The remarks from U.S. Sen. Richard Burr were more stark than any he had delivered in more public forums.

On Feb. 27, when the United States had 15 confirmed cases of COVID-19, President Trump was tamping down fears and suggesting the virus could be seasonal.

"It's going to disappear. One day, It's like a miracle. It will disappear," the president said then, before adding, "it could get worse before it gets better. It could maybe go away. We'll see what happens."

On that same day, Burr attended a luncheon held at a social club called the Capitol Hill Club. And he delivered a much more alarming message.

"There's one thing that I can tell you about this: It is much more aggressive in its transmission than anything that we have seen in recent history," he said, according to a secret recording of the remarks obtained by NPR. "It is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic."

The luncheon had been organized by the Tar Heel Circle, a nonpartisan group whose membership consists of businesses and organizations in North Carolina, the state Burr represents. Membership to join the Tar Heel Circle costs between $500 and $10,000, and promises that members "enjoy interaction with top leaders and staff from Congress, the administration, and the private sector," according to the group's website.

In attendance, according to a copy of the RSVP list obtained by NPR, were dozens of invited guests representing companies and organizations from North Carolina. And according to federal records, those companies or their political committees donated more than $100,000 to Burr's election campaign in 2015 and 2016. (Burr announced previously he was not planning to run for reelection in 2022).

The message Burr delivered to the group was dire.

Thirteen days before the State Department began to warn against travel to Europe, and fifteen days before the Trump administration banned European travelers, Burr warned those in the room to reconsider.

"Every company should be cognizant of the fact that you may have to alter your travel. You may have to look at your employees and judge whether the trip they're making to Europe is essential or whether it can be done on video conference. Why risk it?" Burr said.
Sixteen days before North Carolina closed its schools due to the threat of Coronavirus, Burr warned it could happen.

"There will be, I'm sure, times that communities, probably some in North Carolina, have a transmission rate where they say, let's close schools for two weeks, everybody stay home," he said.

These incompetent, greedy buffoons knew.  They knew all along.  They did nothing because they figured if they knew before others, they could profit from it both politically and financially.

So now the rest of us? We now have to get through tomorrow and next week, but we have to get through 2, 4, 6 weeks from now, and keeping everything closed isn't going to work.  We need a Marshall Plan-sized package for the US.  Today.

Trump has utterly failed the country.  We wouldn't be in this hell if it wasn't for him.

We will all pay a deleterious price as a result.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime's purge of the non-loyal continues even unabated by COVID-19 as the White House proceeds with its plans to put as much of the country's intelligence apparatus under control of people loyal to Trump personally. Washington Post's David Ignatius:

The Trump administration is continuing its shake-up of the intelligence community with a potentially disruptive change of leadership at the National Counterterrorism Center, the agency that coordinates government efforts to guard the homeland.

The White House announced its plan to nominate as NCTC director Christopher Miller, a former Army Special Forces officer who had overseen counterterrorism efforts in the Trump White House before moving to a similar position at the Pentagon.

Miller gets solid marks from former colleagues, but the move has increased fears within the intelligence community that the administration has embarked on a politically motivated campaign against career professionals.

The move came hours after I reported that Richard Grenell, the acting director of national intelligence, had begun a “review” of the NCTC and was weighing staff cuts there and in other parts of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Congress created both in 2003 as part of its effort to coordinate intelligence activities after the failure to “connect the dots” that allowed the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Miller, if confirmed, would take over from Russell Travers, who has been acting director since the departure of Joseph Maguire last August to become acting DNI. Travers, a widely respected career intelligence officer, was told that he could remain as Miller’s deputy, according to a Senate source who had been briefed by the ODNI leadership.

The timing of the proposed change was surprising, since it came as President Trump and most of the country were focused on the coronavirus threat that has preoccupied the world. But Grenell and the new team overseeing intelligence apparently couldn’t wait. An intelligence source told me that Miller received a call about 10 p.m. Tuesday from the White House, asking if he would take the job.

Travers didn’t learn about the move until Wednesday morning, when he was briefed by an aide, the intelligence source said. Despite Travers’s long record of service, Grenell apparently didn’t notify him personally in advance that the White House had selected someone else for the top job. This treatment of a career officer will grate among his colleagues.

Again, these are people being put into top positions purely out of their loyalty to Trump. COVID-19 has definitely moved Bill Barr and the intelligence agency fiasco off the front pages, and he's going to make maximum use of them to cover his tracks.

StupidiNews!

• Florida Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart is the first member of Congress to test positive for COVID-19, his office says the Congressman is recovering and "is feeling better".
• Wisconsin Democrats are suing the state to make vote-by-mail available to all state voters, not just absentee ballots and the elderly.
• The US Senate has passed and Donald Trump has signed into law the House Democratic COVID-19 bill granting sick leave and small business relief to millions, more legislation is being considered.
• UK PM Boris Johnson will close all schools Friday as the British government considers shelter-in-place measures for greater London in order to halt the spread of COVID-19.
• The big three automakers, GM, Ford, and Fiat Chrysler, will close all plants through March 30, but Tesla and other automakers will remain open.

Last Call For The Worst-Case Scenario

Yes, the US government has a worst-case scenario plan, specifically the post-9/11 US military forces that would be activated on US soil in a national disaster scenario, NORTHCOM, has a number of plans, and pray they are never implemented by Donald Trump.

All of these plans are the responsibility of U.S. Northern Command (or NORTHCOM), the homeland defense military authority created after 9/11. Air Force General O'Shaughnessy is NORTHCOM's Colorado Springs-based commander.

On February 1, Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper signed orders directing NORTHCOM to execute nationwide pandemic plans. Secretly, he signed Warning Orders (the WARNORD as it's called) alerting NORTHCOM and a host of east coast units to "prepare to deploy" in support of potential extraordinary missions.

Seven secret plans – some highly compartmented – exist to prepare for these extraordinary missions. Three are transportation related, just to move and support the White House and the federal government as it evacuates and operates from alternate sites. The first is called the Rescue & Evacuation of the Occupants of the Executive Mansion (or RESEM) plan, responsible for protecting President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence, and their families--whether that means moving them at the direction of the Secret Service or, in a catastrophe, digging them out of the rubble of the White House.

The second is called the Joint Emergency Evacuation Plan (or JEEP), and it organizes transportation for the Secretary of Defense and other national security leaders so that they can leave the Washington area. The Atlas Plan is a third, moving non-military leaders – Congressional leadership, the Supreme Court and other important figures – to their emergency relocation sites. Under Atlas, a still- secret bunker would be activated and cordoned, with government operations shifting to Maryland.

The three most compartmented contingencies – Octagon, Freejack, and Zodiac – call upon various military units in Washington DC, North Carolina and eastern Maryland to defend government operations if there is a total breakdown. The seventh plan – codenamed Granite Shadow – lays out the playbook for extraordinary domestic missions that involve weapons of mass destruction. (I disclosed the existence of this plan in 2005, and its associated "national mission force"--a force that is on alert at all times, even in peacetime, to respond to a terrorist attack or threat with the nuclear weapon.)

Most of these plans have been quietly activated during presidential inaugurals and State of the Union addresses, the centrality of the weapons of mass destruction scenario seen in the annual Capital Shield exercise in Washington. Last year's exercise posited a WMD attack on Metro Station. Military sources say that only the massive destruction caused by a nuclear device – or the enormous loss of life that could be caused by a biological agent – present catastrophic pressure great enough to justify movement into extra-Constitutional actions and extraordinary circumstances plans.

"WMD is such an important scenario," a former NORTHCOM commander told me, "not because it is the greatest risk, but because it stresses the system most severely."

According to another senior retired officer, who told me about Granite Shadow and is now working as a defense contractor, the national mission force goes out on its missions with "special authorities" pre-delegated by the president and the attorney general. These special authorities are needed because under regulations and the law, federal military forces can supplant civil authority or engage in law enforcement only under the strictest conditions.

When might the military's "emergency authority" be needed? Traditionally, it's thought of after a nuclear device goes off in an American city. But now, planners are looking at military response to urban violence as people seek protection and fight over food. And, according to one senior officer, in the contingency of the complete evacuation of Washington.

Under Defense department regulations, military commanders are authorized to take action on their own – in extraordinary circumstances – where "duly constituted local authorities are unable to control the situation." The conditions include "large-scale, unexpected civil disturbances" involving "significant loss of life or wanton destruction of property." The Joint Chiefs of Staff codified these rules in October 2018, reminding commanders that they could decide, on their own authority, to "engage temporarily" in military control in circumstances "where prior authorization by the President is impossible" or where local authorities "are unable to control the situation." A new Trump-era Pentagon directive calls it "extreme situations." In all cases, even where a military commander declares martial law, the directives say that civil rule has to be restored as soon as possible.

"In scenarios where one city or one region is devastated, that's a pretty straightforward process," the military planner told me. "But with coronavirus, where the effect is nationwide, we're in territory we've never been in before."

If things get bad, really, really bad, then yeah, all bets are off.  The military is ready in case multiple local systems or federal government breaks down, and frankly that's a non-zero possibility at this point.

Again, pray these are never used.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

The White House's "war footing" plan for COVID-19 would take us back to the days of WW II and national mobilization of manufacturing, the era of Rosie the Riveter, and under any other president, I wouldn't hesitate to say "Full Steam Ahead!"  But the person in the White House is Donald Trump.

A federal government plan to combat the coronavirus warned policymakers last week that a pandemic “will last 18 months or longer” and could include “multiple waves,” resulting in widespread shortages that would strain consumers and the nation’s health care system.

The 100-page plan, dated Friday, the same day President Trump declared a national emergency, laid out a grim prognosis for the spread of the virus and outlined a response that would activate agencies across the government and potentially employ special presidential powers to mobilize the private sector.

Among the “additional key federal decisions” listed among the options for Mr. Trump was invoking the Defense Production Act of 1950, a Korean War-era law that authorizes a president to take extraordinary action to force American industry to ramp up production of critical equipment and supplies such as ventilators, respirators and protective gear for health care workers.

“Shortages of products may occur, impacting health care, emergency services, and other elements of critical infrastructure,” the plan warned. “This includes potentially critical shortages of diagnostics, medical supplies (including PPE and pharmaceuticals), and staffing in some locations.” P.P.E. refers to personal protective equipment.
The plan continued: “State and local governments, as well as critical infrastructure and communications channels, will be stressed and potentially less reliable. These stresses may also increase the challenges of getting updated messages and coordinating guidance to these jurisdictions directly.”

The plan, which was unclassified but marked “For Official Use Only // Not For Public Distribution or Release,” was shared with The New York Times as Mr. Trump escalated his efforts to curb the spread of the virus. After weeks of playing down the seriousness of the pandemic, saying it would miraculously disappear, Mr. Trump began shifting to a more sober tone during a news conference on Friday announcing the national emergency.

Much of the plan is bureaucratic in nature, describing coordination among agencies and actions that in some cases have already been taken, like urging schools to close and large events to be canceled. But its discussion of the Defense Production Act came as lawmakers and others urged Mr. Trump to invoke its powers.

“While the administration’s response has so far lacked the urgency this crisis has called for, there are still steps you can take to mitigate the damage,” Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump on Tuesday. “Invoking the powers vested in the DPA will enable the federal government to step up and take the type of aggressive steps needed in this time of uncertainty.”

Another letter sent last week by 57 House Democrats led by Representative Andy Levin of Michigan made similar points: “During World War II, our country adapted to the demands of the time to produce mass quantities of bombers, tanks, and many smaller items needed to save democracy and freedom in the world. We know what the demands of this time are, and we must act now to meet these demands.”

Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said that Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper told him on Tuesday that the Pentagon would provide federal health workers with five million respirator masks and 2,000 specialized ventilators. “The American public is on wartime footing in terms of battling the spread of this disease, and the Pentagon has to be part of the effort to help protect the health and safety of the American people,” Mr. Reed said.

But Mr. Trump said on Tuesday that he was not ready to invoke the Defense Production Act. “We’re able to do that if we have to,” he told reporters. “Right now, we haven’t had to, but it’s certainly ready. If I want it, we can do it very quickly. We’ve studied it very closely over two weeks ago, actually. We’ll make that decision pretty quickly if we need it. We hope we don’t need it. It’s a big step.”

One one hand, Trump invoking the DPA would be a tacit admission that the private sector and capitalism in the US has utterly failed in peacetime, and that the solution of last resort to the final developed and industrialized nation that has rejected the basic health and social safety nets applicable on other continents is massive intervention of federal government power, the likes which haven't been seen in 65 years.

This country used to take pride in things like the Interstate Highway System and the Tennessee Valley Authority, public works projects that put the Hoover Dam and the Kennedy Space Center on the map for all the world to see.

And then 40 years ago we decided the federal government's promise of doing good for all Americans meant it was evil.  All my life I've been told that government was the problem, from Reagan to Newt Gingrich to Rush Limbaugh to Dubya to Matt Drudge to Grover Norquist to Andrew Breitbart to Donald Trump.

Now we need it more than ever.

And that brings us to the other hand, where Trump is already pillaging the government to make himself rich, and giving a man like this control over the entire American economic juggernaut is a recipe for abuse of legendary proportions, a cautionary tale people hundreds of years will be discussing as one of the great failures in world history.

We'll see.

[UPDATE] Trump activated the DPA this afternoon.

President Donald Trump said he is invoking the Defense Production Act, which allows the administration to expedite and expand the supply of resources. Trump did not say specifically what powers he would execute, but the act could allow him to step up production of respirators and other medical equipment.

Trump declined to say how, precisely, the Defense Production Act would be used and he suggested that the administration is still deciding. He said the administration had “targets” for equipment it wanted but did not say what those targets were.

“We need millions of masks,” Trump said. “We need respirators.”

We do.  

Primary Positions, Con't

It's time to start referring to Joe Biden as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, and everyone knows it except for Bernie Sanders and his dead-enders.

Joe Biden’s decisive victories in Florida, Illinois and Arizona Tuesday effectively put the Democratic nomination out of reach for Bernie Sanders.

The former vice president won all three states by wide enough margins that he now has a majority of all delegates pledged so far, and more than half of the almost 2,000 he needs to secure the nomination at the party’s national convention this summer.

As in past victories, Biden was propelled by strong support from women, African-Americans, older voters and those who described themselves as moderates or conservatives, according to surveys conducted by the Associated Press. But he also won half of all voters aged 30-44, cutting into Sanders’s claim to younger voters. Sanders still won two-thirds of voters under 30, however.

“It’s clear, I think, the first day of the general election will start tomorrow,” said former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, who has endorsed Biden.

With the spreading coronavirus forcing businesses to send workers home and campaigns to abandon traditional rallies and events, Biden delivered televised remarks from his house in Delaware rather than give a victory speech in a crowded ballroom.

He spoke mostly about what the country needs to do to confront the crisis of the pandemic, “calling it a national emergency akin to a war.” But he also made an appeal for unity to the core of Sanders supporters whose votes he’ll need in the general election.
Unity Message

“To the young voters who have been inspired by Senator Sanders, I hear you, I know what’s at stake, I know what we have to do,” Biden said in his remarks. “Our goal as a campaign and my goal as a candidate for president is to unify this party and then to unify the nation.”

Biden won black and Latino voters, white and Asian voters, urban, rural, and suburban voters.  The only category where Sanders actually beat Biden was voters under 30, and you can see by the 40-point margins Biden had in the overall total how much of a difference that made.

It's time for Sanders to wrap it up, but he won't because he didn't four years ago, just like the Hillary PUMAs didn't 12 years ago, because we can't stop spending six or seven months of a contested election year tearing each other down rather than the GOP.

So Bernie will continue to snipe at Biden for four more months while the country literally burns with fever and disease, when instead those resources could be used to go after Trump, but what do I know, I'm just a dude with a blog.

StupidiNews!

• Joe Biden swept primaries in Florida, Illinois, and Arizona to expand his delegate lead over Bernie Sanders, Ohio's primary has been delayed by Gov. Mike DeWine over COVID-19 issues.
• Eight-term pro-life Democratic Rep. Dan Lipinski has lost his primary to pro-choice challenger Marie Newman, Newman was able to win the Illinois district 48-44%.
• Six-time Super Bowl champ QB Tom Brady is leaving the New England Patriots after 20 seasons for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Brady has spent his entire career in Boston.
• The European Union is closing its borders in order to fight the COVID-19 virus, major outbreaks in Spain, Italy, and Germany are expected to sweep across Europe.
• Ride-sharing giant Uber will no longer be sharing rides in the US and Canada in an effort to protect drivers and reduce the spread of COVID-19

Last Call For Trump Trades Blows, Con't

The GOP's increasingly bellicose rhetoric about COVID-19 being a Chinese bioweapon is really pissing Beijing off, to the point where they are starting to expel American journalists.

In a sharp escalation of tensions between the two superpowers, China announced on Tuesday that it would expel American journalists working for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. It also demanded that those outlets, as well as the Voice of America and Time magazine, provide the Chinese government with detailed information about their operations.

The announcement, made by China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, came weeks after the Trump administration limited to 100 the number of Chinese citizens who can work in the United States for five state-run Chinese news organizations that are widely considered propaganda outlets.

China instructed American journalists for the three news organizations whose press credentials are due to expire this year to “notify the Department of Information of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs within four calendar days starting from today and hand back their press cards within ten calendar days.” Almost all the China-based journalists for the three organizations have press cards that expire this year.

The announcement went on to say that the American journalists now working in mainland China “will not be allowed to continue working as journalists in the People’s Republic of China, including its Hong Kong and Macao Special Administrative Regions.” The two territories are semiautonomous and in theory have greater press freedoms than the mainland.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the decisions “are entirely necessary and reciprocal countermeasures that China is compelled to take in response to the unreasonable oppression the Chinese media organizations experience in the U.S.”

The statement also accused the United States of “exclusively targeting Chinese media organizations,” adding that it was “driven by a Cold War mentality.” The new limits imposed by the Trump administration effectively forced 60 Chinese employees of the state-run organizations to leave the country.

Reporters at foreign news outlets in China were among those who aggressively reported on the coronavirus epidemic in January and February, including in its earliest days, when it was a regionalized outbreak in central China and the Chinese government sought to play down its severity.

The news organizations have also reported in the past year on other issues deemed extremely sensitive by Chinese officials, including the mass internment of Muslims in the Xinjiang region and the shadowy business dealings of family members of leaders, including President Xi Jinping.

Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The Times, condemned the expulsion of U.S. reporters in a statement, calling it “especially irresponsible at a time when the world needs the free and open flow of credible information about the coronavirus pandemic.”

“It is critical that the governments of the United States and China move quickly to resolve this dispute and allow journalists to do the important work of informing the public,” he said. He noted that The Times has more journalists in China than anywhere else internationally.

So we'll see.  But right now it's just all raining down now, and there's no shelter.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

In the White House in mid-January 2017, the outgoing Obama team met with Trump's incoming transition team and went over three major disaster scenarios: a Class 5 hurricane directly hitting a major US city, a cyber incident that knocked out multiple infrastructure systems and businesses, and a novel virus pandemic.

The Trump people essentially ignored the exercise as a complete waste of time, and the people who did pay attention are all long gone.

The briefing was intended to hammer home a new, terrifying reality facing the Trump administration, and the incoming president’s responsibility to protect Americans amid a crisis. But unlike the coronavirus pandemic currently ravaging the globe, this 2017 crisis didn’t really happen — it was among a handful of scenarios presented to Trump’s top aides as part of a legally required transition exercise with members of the outgoing administration of Barack Obama. 

And in the words of several attendees, the atmosphere was “weird” at best, chilly at worst. 

POLITICO obtained documents from the meeting and spoke with more than a dozen attendees to help provide the most detailed reconstruction of the closed-door session yet. It was perhaps the most concrete and visible transition exercise that dealt with the possibility of pandemics, and top officials from both sides — whether they wanted to be there or not — were forced to confront a whole-of-government response to a crisis. The Trump team was told it could face specific challenges, such as shortages of ventilators, anti-viral drugs and other medical essentials, and that having a coordinated, unified national response was “paramount” — warnings that seem eerily prescient given the ongoing coronavirus crisis. 

But roughly two-thirds of the Trump representatives in that room are no longer serving in the administration. That extraordinary turnover in the months and years that followed is likely one reason his administration has struggled to handle the very real pandemic it faces now, former Obama administration officials said. 

“The advantage we had under Obama was that during the first four years we had the same White House staff, the same Cabinet,” said former deputy labor secretary Chris Lu, who attended the gathering. “Just having the continuity makes all the difference in the world.” 

Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press secretary, was among those who participated in the meeting. He said he understood the reasons such exercises could be useful, but described the encounter as a massive transfer of information that ultimately felt very theoretical. In real life, things are never as simple as what’s presented in a table-top exercise, he said. 

“There’s no briefing that can prepare you for a worldwide pandemic,” added Spicer, who left the administration in mid-2017. 

The outgoing Obama aides and incoming Trump aides gathered for roughly three hours on the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 13, 2017, in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House. 

At least 30 representatives of Trump’s team — many of them soon-to-be Cabinet members — were present, each sitting next to their closest Obama administration counterpart. Incoming Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross appeared to keep dozing off. Incoming Energy Secretary Rick Perry was getting along famously with Ernest Moniz, the man he was replacing, several fellow participants said. 

But it was clear some on the Trump team had barely, if ever, spoken with the people they were replacing. News had broken that same day about national security adviser Michael Flynn’s unusual contacts with Russia’s ambassador to the United States, so his presence in the meeting added to the surrealness. Some members of both groups kept going in and out of the room, but most paid quiet attention to the presentations, which were led by top Obama aides. 

Obama aides, in op-eds and essays ripping the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus, officially called COVID-19, have pointed to the Jan. 13, 2017, session as a key example of their effort to press the importance of pandemic preparedness to their successors.

It fell on deaf ears.  All of it.  The top Trump people didn't pay a single word of attention to any of it, and the people who did left the disaster area long before 2020.

The people who would have had a plan?  We were told they were no different from Trump, and the country elected a racist mobbed-up game show host, because fuck that Clinton bitch, right boys?

And now?

Now we're headed over the cliff and there's no coming back from this.

Meanwhile, Trump's people are concentrating on the important stuff during this time of crisis:  more ICE raids to make sure the people we're still keeping in internement camps get introduced to exciting new friends like COVID-19.

“We’re out here trying to protect the public by getting these criminal aliens off the street and out of our communities,” said David Marin, the director of Enforcement and Removal Operations for ICE in L.A. “Asking us to stop doing that basically gives those criminals another opportunity to maybe commit more crimes, to create more victims.”

In the parking lot, the group of agents stood in a loose circle — not quite six feet apart — as they reviewed the target list. That morning, they were searching for four people, including two registered sex offenders.

Among the gathered officers were two U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers — identifiable only by a patch on their vest with their agency’s name. They were among nine total CBP agents and officers deployed to the L.A. area in the last few weeks to assist ICE in making arrests.

They rattled off the height, weight and daily routines of the people they sought to arrest. Nearly all the targets lived within a one-mile radius. With many schools closed due to coronavirus and some people staying home from work, it was unclear how arrests would go that morning.

“We couldn’t factor this in, right? This COVID-19 and the precautions that everybody’s taking,” Marin said. “We just have to continue to go with the same game plan that we’ve been doing.”
All of the officers had been issued the protective masks over the past few weeks. In his car, Marin kept packets of hand sanitizer wipes, which he’d used that morning to wipe down his steering wheel, his keys and his hands after pumping gas.

Trump wants an $850 billion stimulus package, and Republicans think it's a great idea, unlike the same Senate Republicans who almost all voted down the same package 11 years ago, mainly because it's a payroll tax cut that would literally steal hundreds of billions from Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid.

Democrats have their own $750 billion plan, but it has no chance of getting past Mitch.  Hopefully negotiations are in order, but whatever happens it needs to happen this week.  Time is running out.

The problem is America is still full of partisan disinformation and distrust thanks to Trump.

Inside the Republican Party and the conservative movement that Trump commands, there is now a deep divide as the nation confronts the coronavirus. For weeks, many on the right, including Trump, minimized the virus, if they considered it at all. Even in recent days, as much of the world shuts down to try to stop its spread, some Republicans mocked what they saw as a media-generated frenzy.

Their reaction reflected how the American right has evolved under Trump, moving from a bloc of small-government advocates to a grievance coalition highly skeptical of government, science, the news and federal warnings.

Their conspiratorial unrest is particularly acute within right-wing media, where Fox Business removed a prime-time anchor for casting the coronavirus as “another attempt to impeach the president.” Other right-wing personalities continue to call the coronavirus a “hoax” or falsely blame George Soros, the billionaire investor and liberal donor, for causing it.

But conservatives and Republicans now face an undeniable reality as the pandemic’s death count here and abroad climbs — and the worldwide reach of the coronavirus defies the bounds of political debate.

“It’s damn clear that this is no hoax and should be taken seriously,” said Jason Miller, a former Trump campaign adviser who co-hosts a podcast with former White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon called “War Room: Pandemic,” which has documented the economic and health fallout of the coronavirus for weeks.

“The right underestimated this and thought the media was beating up on Trump again,” added GOP strategist Ed Rollins, who chairs a pro-Trump super PAC. “That was yesterday. Today is, ‘Life in America is changing before our eyes.’ ”

Trump has suddenly and markedly recalibrated his own approach, after weeks of blasé comments about the virus that spurred some of his allies to dismiss the danger of the pandemic.

When asked Monday about Nunes’s comment to Fox News, Trump did not echo him. Instead, Trump said he had not heard about the remarks, but would “disagree” with anyone calling on Americans to congregate in restaurants.

“I think it’s probably better that you don’t,” Trump told reporters.

Hours later, Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said, “I’m pleased that the president and the public-health officials seem to now be on the same page. I think there was a gap in the early days.”

Again, all this means is that Trump and the right will start blaming China and blue-state governors specifically instead of Democrats in general and the media, and then when Democrats and the media call them on it, then they will blame Democrats in general and the media again.

America is going to be a very, very different place three months from now.  Far different still six and nine months from now.  Believe me, I started ZVTS in August of 2008 because we were headed off a cliff then and November 2008 was different, and March 2009 different still.

I have the same feeling in my gut again, only it's much, much worse.