Last Call For The GOP Goes Viral, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Milepost On The Road To Oblivion, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wait, what?

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

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

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

A Supreme Disappointment, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

StupidiNews!

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

Last Call For Food For Thought, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We may not be able to fix it.

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lowering The Barr, Con't

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last Call For Austerity Hy-CARES-ia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump Goes Viral, Con't

With two White House staffers testing positive for COVID-19 last week, the Trump regime is in full panic mode as they've found a political enemy that Trump is powerless to stop.

The Trump administration is racing to contain an outbreak of the coronavirus inside the White House, as some senior officials believe that the disease is already spreading rapidly through the warren of cramped offices that make up the three floors of the West Wing.

Three top officials leading the government’s coronavirus response have begun two weeks of self-quarantine after two members of the White House staff — one of President Trump’s personal valets and Katie Miller, the spokeswoman for Vice President Mike Pence — tested positive. But others who came into contact with Ms. Miller and the valet are continuing to report to work at the White House.

“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” program on Sunday. Mr. Hassett said he wore a mask at times at the White House, but conceded that “I think that I’d be a lot safer if I was sitting at home than I would be going to the West Wing.”

He added: “It’s a small, crowded place. It’s, you know, it’s a little bit risky. But you have to do it because you have to serve your country.”

The discovery of the two infected employees has prompted the White House to ramp up its procedures to combat the virus, asking more staff members to work from home, increasing usage of masks and more rigorously screening people who enter the complex.

It is not clear how many other White House officials Ms. Miller or the valet might have come into contact with in recent days, but many members of the West Wing staff who were most likely in meetings with Ms. Miller before she tested positive are still coming to work, according to senior administration officials.

Late Sunday, the White House put out a statement saying that Mr. Pence would not alter his routine or self-quarantine. The vice president “has tested negative every single day and plans to be at the White House tomorrow,” said Devin O’Malley, a spokesman for Mr. Pence.

The concern about an outbreak of the virus at the White House — and the swift testing and contact tracing being done to contain it — underscores the broader challenge for Americans as Mr. Trump urges them to begin returning to their workplaces despite warnings from public health officials that the virus continues to ravage communities across the country.

Most restaurants, offices and retail stores do not have the ability to regularly test all their employees and quickly track down and quarantine the contacts of anyone who gets infected. At the White House, all employees are being tested at least weekly, officials said, and a handful of top aides who regularly interact with the president are being tested daily.

“To get in with the president, you have to test negative,” Mr. Hassett said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program.

Mr. Trump continues to reject guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to wear a mask when meeting with groups of people. But a senior administration official said the president was spooked that his valet, who is among those who serve him food, had not been wearing a mask. And he was annoyed to learn that Ms. Miller tested positive and has been growing irritated with people who get too close to him, the official said.

Trump can't bully or threaten the virus, but he can sure threaten and bully the people around him on a daily basis. That won't save him this time though, will it? Sooner or later somebody very close to Trump and Pence is going to get sick, maybe badly ill.

We know Trump surrounds himself with sycophants, not geniuses. They are loyal to his power, yes, but they also believe in his myths. They don't think they'll get sick. They don't think anything bad will happen to them.

But the virus doesn't care.

They are going to screw up, and somebody important is going to get extremely sick.

That's the wild card in all of this.

It's going to get past the daily testing and the measures because the number one factor in spreading COVID-19 is human behavior, and Donald Trump can't cut himself off from people because he feeds on adoration and praise. He has to surround himself with sycophants. He has a pathological need for it.

And it's going to bit him in his orange ass.

Watch.

Boris And The Virus

As bad as things are in the US with Trump's ridiculous lack of response to COVID-19, it's far worse in the UK, where PM Boris Johnson's refusal to lock down the nation quickly enough is now responsible for 32,000 deaths in a country of 67 million, roughly .05% of the nation has died to it, with a third of a percent of the entire country infected, and that's just the confirmed cases.

The coronavirus lockdown will not end yet, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Sunday, urging people to “stay alert” to the risks as he outlined plans to begin slowly easing measures that have closed much of the economy for seven weeks.

While his directions were for England, the government wants the United Kingdom’s other nations to take the same approach. But there were immediate divisions, with the leaders of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland saying they were sticking with the existing “stay-at-home” message.

In a televised address, Johnson announced a limited easing of restrictions, including allowing people to exercise outside more often and encouraging some people to return to work.
“This is not the time simply to end the lockdown,” he said. “Instead we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures.”

The government has faced criticism over its handling of the pandemic and Johnson is wary of taking the brakes off too soon. Britain’s coronavirus death toll - 31,855 - is the second highest in the world, behind the United States.

With both the death rate and hospital admissions falling, it would be “madness” to allow a second spike in infections, he said.

But the decision to replace the government’s “stay-at-home” slogan, drummed into the public for weeks, was criticised by opposition parties who called the new “stay alert” message ambiguous.

Johnson said people should continue to work from home if they could, but those who cannot, such people working in construction and manufacturing, should be “actively encouraged to go to work”.
From Wednesday, people will be allowed to take unlimited amounts of outdoor exercise, he said, and can sit in the sun in their local park, drive to other destinations, and play sports with members of their own household.

Until now, people have been told only to exercise outdoors once a day and do so locally. Social distancing rules must still be obeyed, Johnson said, adding that fines would be increased for those who break them.

Johnson said he would set out further details to parliament on Monday, when a “roadmap” document will be published.

But opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer said Johnson had raised more questions than he had answered and there was now the prospect of different parts of the United Kingdom pulling in different directions.

“What the country wanted tonight was clarity and consensus, but we haven’t got either of those,” he said in a statement.

Only the dead get both clarity and consensus, it seems.

The death toll per capita is twice as high in the UK as it is here in the US, but it's nearly as bad as here if not even worse in Spain, Belgium, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden.  Johnson and Trump are far from alone in their failures.

Keep that in mind as they try to rewrite history in Europe, too.

StupidiNews!

• Vice-President Mike Pence says he does not plan to self-quarantine after his press secretary tested positive for COVID-19 this weekend and will be at the White House as usual today.
• The White House says as a result of the positive test, it will postpone any "large-scale events" until later this summer.
• Japan may end the national state of emergency this week for areas with a stable number of COVID-19 cases as PM Shinzo Abe remains under heavy pressure to get people back to work.
• The US Supreme Court will hear arguments Tuesday over Donald Trump's tax returns, with a ruling that could come as soon as the end of next month.
• Google sibling Sidewalk Labs is scrapping its ambitious $50 million investment in Toronto's waterfront blaming COVID-19, critics say privacy and finance concerns torpedoed the project.

Last Call For Biden, His Time, Con't

CNN polling guru Harry Enten notes that Joe Biden's six-point lead over Donald Trump has been steady as a rock since January, which means COVID-19 and the Trump Depression might not be affecting how people vote.

Yet.

A new Monmouth University poll finds that former Vice President Joe Biden leads President Donald Trump 50% to 41%. When Rep. Justin Amash is included as the Libertarian Party candidate, it's Biden 47%, Trump 40% and Amash 5%.

The poll is largely in line with the average poll since April that puts Biden 6 points ahead of Trump nationally.

What's the point: Biden's lead is about as steady as it can possibly be. Not only is he up 6 points over the last month or so, but the average of polls since the beginning of the year has him ahead by 6 points. Moreover, all the polls taken since the beginning of 2019 have him up 6 points.

The steadiness in the polls is record breaking. Biden's advantage is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944. That could mean it'll be harder to change the trajectory of the race going forward, though this remains more than close enough that either candidate could easily win.

To know this, I went back and looked at how all the national polls deviated from each other during January to early May of the election year.

This year, 95% of all the individual polls so far have shown a result within 6 points of the average. That's basically what you'd expect if you took a lot of polls and the race wasn't moving (i.e. the only shifts are statistical noise from sampling). It's a ridiculously small range historically speaking.

The previous low for a similarly constructed 95% confidence interval was 8 points (2012). The median cycle featured a 95% interval of 13 points from the average of polls. In other words, about double the range of the polls we have seen so far in 2020.

Sometimes, of course, the range of results can be even wider than the median cycle. Lyndon Johnson had anywhere from about a 35-point advantage to a more than 60-point lead over Barry Goldwater in the early months of 1964. Jimmy Carter opened 1980 with a 30-point or greater lead in some of the polls over Ronald Reagan. By early May, his lead was down to single digits, and he even trailed Reagan in a few polls.

The 1964, 1980 and 2004 campaigns are of particular interest because they both had shocks to the system within a few months of the beginning of the election year. John Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, Iranians took Americans hostage in November 1979 and the US captured Saddam Hussein in December 2003. The first two were especially volatile, while 2004 saw some change. George W. Bush's polling edge climbed into the double digits and sometimes north of 15 points in early January 2004. By the end of April, he was trading leads with John Kerry.

This year, we've seen pretty much none of those shifts in the national polls, even as we've had a once-in-a-lifetime health pandemic. That might make you doubt that the polls will move a lot going forward in 2020.

So are the polls wrong?  The national polls were pretty much spot on in 2016, Clinton won the national vote by 3 points, but lost the electoral college because the state polls in 2016 were off by miles, especially in the Rust Belt. State polls in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were catastrophically wrong because there were still tons of undecided voters that came in at the last minute for Trump.

But "Biden by six" has been where the national polls have been for nearly 18 months now, and not even a deadly global pandemic and a global depression seems to be shaking that up much at all.

I expect that to change.  People are still in survival mode now, and before that, well, before that the election was more than six months off. People are going to be paying attention, and the question will be how many people are motivated to actually vote in November, or in mail balloting before Election Day.

There's a reason why the GOP is trying to stop voting by mail. It dooms them as a party, and they know it. Turnlut will be more important than the polls this year, and finding a solution to voting in the era of COVID is key. For the GOP, stopping that is their only means of survival and they will do anything to end it.

Just sayin'.

The Revenge Of Austerity Hysteria

Trump's COVID-19 incompetence forced California to shut down, and now the state has gone from a $16 billion surplus to a $54 billion hole in just two months.  It's not a rainy day, it's a typhoon.

California faces a $54.3 billion deficit as the coronavirus pandemic hammers the economy, the state's worst budget gap since the Great Recession, state finance officials said Thursday.

The shortfall is almost 37 percent of the current $147.8 billion general fund budget and foretells widespread program cuts absent a federal bailout. K-12 schools and community colleges stand to lose $18 billion alone and are clamoring for money to adapt campuses to a new social distancing reality.
The Department of Finance released its projections in a rare fiscal update a week before Gov. Gavin Newsom is expected to roll out his May budget revision, his first post-coronavirus spending plan. The deficit projection extends to the remainder of this fiscal year and through the 2020-21 period that starts July 1.

Newsom said Wednesday that he expects a prolonged economic downturn. The Finance document suggests that income losses will be far deeper than during the Great Recession more than a decade ago.

“It’s going to take longer than I think a lot of people think,” Newsom said.

"We’ve never experienced anything like this in our lifetime,” he said, adding that the national unemployment rate will soar to “Depression-era numbers.”

The bulk of the deficit comes from a projected $41.2 billion revenue decline over the next 14 months, a drop from the ebullient outlook the state had just four months earlier, according to the Department of Finance. Forecasters believe the state's big three tax sources — personal income, sales and corporations — will plunge about 25 percent.

As usually happens in a recession, the state will likely see soaring demand for health and human services programs, adding $7.1 billion in costs, the Finance Department said. California can expect to spend $6 billion on other new expenditures, most related to the coronavirus response.

The numbers are staggering, but they can be viewed with a grain of salt. No fiscal forecaster has a confident handle on how the next year — let alone the next several years — will play out, because so much depends on how Covid-19 affects economic activity. The virus is unpredictable, as are the health care and government responses.

While Newsom sees a long downturn, some economists believe a V-shaped rebound is possible after a painful year.

California budget experts say it is likely the Legislature will have to build in contingencies, such as trigger cuts, in case the revenue decline worsens. The Legislature might have to rewrite the budget at least once in the fiscal year, as happened in 2008-09 during the last recession.

The new forecast marks a stark reversal for a state that had been riding high on surpluses and growing reserves in recent years, building confidence before Covid-19 that California might have recession-proofed itself.

The state can count on roughly $16 billion in savings to buffer the deficit impacts — much more than other states — but the budget gap is still nearly three-and-a-half times the size of that rainy day stockpile, Finance points out.

The $54.3 billion estimate is far higher than the roughly $35 billion figure that Legislative Analyst Gabriel Petek presented to lawmakers in April. Still, the new projection nominally falls below the roughly $60 billion gap the state dealt with in 2009 in two separate budget actions. And as a percentage of the state general fund, the new deficit is still smaller than the one the state faced that year.

This is frankly a rosy outlook.  I think it's going to be tens of billions of dollars worse than predicted because revenues are not going to recover until there's a vaccine, and that could take a year, 18 months, maybe more.  Systemic economic effects as the Trump Depression spreads will multiply the revenue losses.

A housing crash on top of everything else -- almost expected at this point and I don't understand why people aren't admitting it will happen -- plus long-term unemployment for millions of Californians, will knock the blocks out from under states.

Trump won't lift a finger to help, either.  There's no "Phase 4" bill coming.  Not to help states, which will need at least a half-trillion to stave off massive cuts and that's just for starters. And for the rest of us, Trump and the GOP will finally get what they've been looking to get for decades now: massive cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

Senior Trump administration officials are growing increasingly wary of the massive federal spending to combat the economic downturn and are considering ways to limit the impact of future stimulus efforts on the national debt, according to six administration officials and four external advisers familiar with the matter.

While no one in the administration is advocating immediate cuts, the unease among senior Trump advisers about federal spending comes as the White House halts talks with Congress on additional emergency measures to rescue a U.S. economy facing its worst crisis in generations.

Some White House officials have gone as far as exploring policies such as automatic spending cuts as the economy improves, or prepaying Social Security benefits to workers before they become eligible, although these measures are unlikely to advance given the political stakes, said these officials and advisers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal deliberations.

The concerns about the deficit are coming from traditional conservatives at the White House, including new chief of staff Mark Meadows and acting budget director Russ Vought. But officials say they are likely to face much more skepticism from President Trump himself. Trump has shown little interest since becoming president in shrinking the deficit and has so far stood firm on his campaign pledge not to alter Social Security.

It’s unclear how hard conservatives will push Trump on the deficit. As the novel coronavirus crisis has intensified, Trump has cut deals with congressional Democrats that largely ignored the impact on the federal debt, approving more than $2 trillion in spending already.

Trump doesn't want to lose so some spending has already happened (most of it to the rich, mind you), but congressional Republicans are clearly betting on saddling Joe Biden with a deficit so large that it guarantees Biden will have to be the axe man in the future.

We'll see what happens, but the worse this gets, the less I see any help to the states coming.

Sunday Long Read: Fed To The Mammon Machine

This week's Sunday Long Read is simply the essential Adam Serwer on COVID-19 and the racial contract.

Six weeks ago, Ahmaud Arbery went out and never came home. Gregory and Travis McMichael, who saw Arbery running through their neighborhood just outside of Brunswick, Georgia, and who told authorities they thought he was a burglary suspect, armed themselves, pursued Arbery, and then shot him dead.

The local prosecutor, George E. Barnhill, concluded that no crime had been committed. Arbery had tried to wrest a shotgun from Travis McMichael before being shot, Barnhill wrote in a letter to the police chief. The two men who had seen a stranger running, and decided to pick up their firearms and chase him, had therefore acted in self-defense when they confronted and shot him, Barnhill concluded. On Tuesday, as video of the shooting emerged on social media, a different Georgia prosecutor announced that the case would be put to a grand jury; the two men were arrested and charged with murder yesterday evening after video of the incident sparked national outrage across the political spectrum.

To see the sequence of events that led to Arbery’s death as benign requires a cascade of assumptions. One must assume that two men arming themselves and chasing down a stranger running through their neighborhood is a normal occurrence. One must assume that the two armed white men had a right to self-defense, and that the black man suddenly confronted by armed strangers did not. One must assume that state laws are meant to justify an encounter in which two people can decide of their own volition to chase, confront, and kill a person they’ve never met.

But Barnhill’s leniency is selective—as The Appeal’s Josie Duffy Rice notes, Barnhill attempted to prosecute Olivia Pearson, a black woman, for helping another black voter use an electronic voting machine. A crime does not occur when white men stalk and kill a black stranger. A crime does occur when black people vote.

The underlying assumptions of white innocence and black guilt are all part of what the philosopher Charles Mills calls the “racial contract.” If the social contract is the implicit agreement among members of a society to follow the rules—for example, acting lawfully, adhering to the results of elections, and contesting the agreed-upon rules by nonviolent means—then the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way. The Declaration of Independence states that all men are created equal; the racial contract limits this to white men with property. The law says murder is illegal; the racial contract says it’s fine for white people to chase and murder black people if they have decided that those black people scare them. “The terms of the Racial Contract,” Mills wrote, “mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.”

The racial contract is not partisan—it guides staunch conservatives and sensitive liberals alike—but it works most effectively when it remains imperceptible to its beneficiaries. As long as it is invisible, members of society can proceed as though the provisions of the social contract apply equally to everyone. But when an injustice pushes the racial contract into the open, it forces people to choose whether to embrace, contest, or deny its existence. Video evidence of unjustified shootings of black people is so jarring in part because it exposes the terms of the racial contract so vividly. But as the process in the Arbery case shows, the racial contract most often operates unnoticed, relying on Americans to have an implicit understanding of who is bound by the rules, and who is exempt from them.

The implied terms of the racial contract are visible everywhere for those willing to see them. A 12-year-old with a toy gun is a dangerous threat who must be met with lethal force; armed militias drawing beads on federal agents are heroes of liberty. Struggling white farmers in Iowa taking billions in federal assistance are hardworking Americans down on their luck; struggling single parents in cities using food stamps are welfare queens. Black Americans struggling in the cocaine epidemic are a “bio-underclass” created by a pathological culture; white Americans struggling with opioid addiction are a national tragedy. Poor European immigrants who flocked to an America with virtually no immigration restrictions came “the right way”; poor Central American immigrants evading a baroque and unforgiving system are gang members and terrorists.

The coronavirus epidemic has rendered the racial contract visible in multiple ways. Once the disproportionate impact of the epidemic was revealed to the American political and financial elite, many began to regard the rising death toll less as a national emergency than as an inconvenience. Temporary measures meant to prevent the spread of the disease by restricting movement, mandating the wearing of masks, or barring large social gatherings have become the foulest tyranny. The lives of workers at the front lines of the pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability even as they force them to work under unsafe conditions. In East New York, police assault black residents for violating social-distancing rules; in Lower Manhattan, they dole out masks and smiles to white pedestrians.

Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign, with its vows to enforce state violence against Mexican immigrants, Muslims, and black Americans, was built on a promise to enforce terms of the racial contract that Barack Obama had ostensibly neglected, or violated by his presence. Trump’s administration, in carrying out an explicitly discriminatory agenda that valorizes cruelty, war crimes, and the entrenchment of white political power, represents a revitalized commitment to the racial contract.

But the pandemic has introduced a new clause to the racial contract. The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy, by a president who disdains them. This is the COVID contract.

Trump is murdering us. And history always tells us that in times of economic collapse, there is civil unrest. As long as there are enough black and brown "essential workers" to keep the supply chains running and enough holes in the safety net for us to slip through and permanently stumble out of whatever middle class aspirations we had, we will be fed to the Mammon Machine.

God I sure hope there is some civil unrest, or we're going to die.

That Old Kentucky Revival Spirit

A federal judge has sided with a group of Kentucky pastors halting Gov. Beshear's COVID-19 order preventing mass gatherings of ten or more at church services, saying it violates the First Amendment.

A federal court halted the Kentucky governor’s temporary ban on mass gatherings from applying to in-person religious services, clearing the way for Sunday church services.

U.S. District Judge Gregory F. Van Tatenhove on Friday issued a temporary restraining order enjoining Gov. Andy Beshear’s administration from enforcing the ban on mass gatherings at “any in-person religious service which adheres to applicable social distancing and hygiene guidelines.”

The ruling from the Eastern District of Kentucky sided with the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Nicholasville, but applies to all places of worship around the commonwealth. Two other federal judges, including U.S. District Judge David Hale, had previously ruled the ban was constitutional. But also on Friday, Hale, of Kentucky’s western district, granted Maryville Baptist Church an injunction allowing in-person services at that specific church, provided it abide by public health requirements.

Exceptions to the Democratic governor’s shutdown order include trips to the grocery store, bank, pharmacy and hardware store. Beshear had previously announced that places of worship in Kentucky will be able to once again hold in-person services starting May 20, as part of a broader plan to gradually reopen the state’s economy. Earlier Friday, he outlined requirements for places of worship to reopen, including limiting attendance at in-person services to 33% of building occupancy capacity and maintaining 6 feet (2 meters) of distance between household units.

The federal judge’s order in the Tabernacle Baptist Church case said Beshear had “an honest motive” in wanting to safeguard Kentuckians’ health and lives, but didn’t provide “a compelling reason for using his authority to limit a citizen’s right to freely exercise something we value greatly — the right of every American to follow their conscience on matters related to religion.”

Tabernacle had broadcast services on Facebook and held drive-in services, but the substitutes offered “cold comfort,” according to the opinion. The opinion went on to say that Tabernacle alleged irreparable injury and was likely to succeed on the merits of its federal constitutional claim, as the defendants didn’t “dispute the challenged orders place a burden on the free exercise of religion in Kentucky.”

“The Constitution will endure. It would be easy to put it on the shelf in times like this, to be pulled down and dusted off when more convenient,” Van Tatenhove’s opinion read. “But that is not our tradition. Its enduring quality requires that it be respected even when it is hard.”

His opinion says Kentucky’s attorney general urged the court to apply the injunction statewide, and since the executive order challenged didn’t solely apply to Tabernacle, the injunction granted would also have a similar scope.

“Both rulings affirm that the law prohibits the government from treating houses of worship differently than secular activities during this pandemic,” Attorney General Daniel Cameron, a Republican, said in a statement late Friday.

The "If you can go to the grocery store, you can go to church" argument is now in effect in Kentucky, and what better gift to Mom this Mother's Day than a good ol' heaping helping of COVID-19 at services today, right?

It's a moot point, really, Beshear was going to reopen churches in two weeks anyway, this just advances the date to this weekend. The greater point is when Beshear issues the next round of closures -- and I guarantee you that is coming soon -- churches will remain open, and people will meet God in more ways than one.

Last Call For Trump Goes Viral, Con't

As Greg Sargent calls out, the White House has exactly the kind of rapid, through and robust COVID-19 testing protocols that Donald Trump refuses to make available for the American people because they're not necessary for the rest of us serfs.

Katie Miller, the wife of adviser Stephen Miller, has tested positive for the coronavirus. The infection of Ms. Miller, a close adviser to Vice President Pence, means potential exposure to President Trump’s inner circle — so reporters are raising questions about White House internal testing policies.

The White House has indicated to reporters that Pence and many members of his staff have been getting tested daily, and Pence and Trump appear not to have had contact with Katie Miller recently.

Meanwhile, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany sought to reassure the news media that the White House testing procedures are sound. I wanted to draw attention to this quote from McEnany:

“We have put in place the guidelines that our experts have put forward to keep this building safe, which means contact tracing," McEnany told reporters during Friday’s news briefing. "All of the recommended guidelines we have for businesses that have essential workers, we are now putting them in place here in the White House. So as America reopens safely, the White House is continuing to operate safely.”

The careful reader will note a jarring juxtaposition here. McEnany claims both that the United States is reopening safely and that the White House is operating safely. But only one of these two — the White House — actually has the sort of testing regime the White House itself is now implicitly acknowledging is a prerequisite to safety.
The rest of the country largely lacks this level of testing — because Trump doesn’t want to take the steps necessary to stand up a robust federal testing regime.

The rub here is that the guidelines by themselves (which McEnany referenced) aren’t enough. Equipment and resources are also necessary.

Trump, Pence and their aides have access to rapid and regular testing, which is also given to those who meet with them. They have access to the resources that enable the very sort of safe testing regime McEnany described here.

It’s true that the fact that Miller tested positive — as one of Trump’s valets did earlier this week — shows that having robust testing isn’t absolutely foolproof. The coronavirus can still get in. But as Philip Bump notes, having that intensity of testing is exactly what prevented it from spreading.

Trump and his staff get tested and tested regularly.  We on the other hand get to wait in line for tests that just aren't available and never will be.

And remember, Trump's own rabid base is being told testing is not needed to be a Real American Warrior and to go back to work without a mask.  They either don't notice the ridiculous hypocrisy or they are glad to die for the God-Emperor of Stupid.

And if you still think we don't need testing:

How do we fix the U.S. #SupplyChain in the wake of #COVID19? It might be more complicated than you think. We examined travel paths of mobile devices from some of the nation's top #meatpacking plants and what we saw was eye-opening... (data courtesy of @xmodesocial) pic.twitter.com/aCYuq1n3jT

— Tectonix GEO (@TectonixGEO) May 6, 2020

These plants have hundreds of sick workers each.  These workers have traveled all over the Midwest.  Cases and deaths will continue to rise. And Donald Trump is both mentally and emotionally unable to lead the country out of this disaster...a disaster the White House now officially believes is over.

In a week when the novel coronavirus ravaged new communities across the country and the number of dead soared past 78,000, President Trump and his advisers shifted from hour-by-hour crisis management to what they characterize as a long-term strategy aimed at reviving the decimated economy and preparing for additional outbreaks this fall.

But in doing so, the administration is effectively bowing to — and asking Americans to accept — a devastating proposition: that a steady, daily accumulation of lonely deaths is the grim cost of reopening the nation.

Inside the West Wing, some officials talk about the federal government’s mitigation mission as largely accomplished because they believe the nation’s hospitals are now equipped to meet anticipated demand — even as health officials warn the number of coronavirus cases could increase considerably in May and June as more states and localities loosen restrictions, and some mitigation efforts are still recommended as states begin to reopen.

The administration is struggling to expand the scale of testing to what experts say is necessary to reopen businesses safely, and officials have not announced any national plan for contact tracing. Trump and some of his advisers are prioritizing the psychology of the pandemic as much as, if not more than, plans to combat the virus, some aides and outside advisers said — striving to instill confidence that people can comfortably return to daily life despite the rising death toll.

On Friday, as the unemployment rate reached a historically high 14.7 percent, Trump urged Americans to think of this period as a “transition to greatness,” adding during a meeting with Republican members of Congress: “We’re going to do something very fast, and we’re going to have a phenomenal year next year.” The president predicted the virus eventually would disappear even without a vaccine — a prediction at odds with his own science officials.

A White House spokesman defended the status of testing by pointing to comments in mid-April by two of the medical professionals on the task force, Anthony S. Fauci and Adm. Brett Giroir, saying there have been enough tests to safely reopen the country.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany also backed the administration’s response, saying, “President Trump is committed to a data-driven approach to safely reopening the country. His steadfast leadership has saved American lives, and the American people recognize his leadership.”

Some of Trump’s advisers described the president as glum and shell-shocked by his declining popularity. In private conversations, he has struggled to process how his fortunes suddenly changed from believing he was on a glide path to reelection to realizing that he is losing to the likely Democratic nominee, former vice president Joe Biden, in virtually every poll, including his own campaign’s internal surveys, advisers said. He also has been fretting about the possibility that a bad outbreak of the virus this fall could damage his standing in the November election, said the advisers, who along with other aides and allies requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

The president is also eager to resume political travel in June, including holding his signature rallies by the end of the summer in areas where there are few cases, advisers said. Trump’s political team has begun discussions about organizing a high-dollar, in-person fundraiser next month, as well as preliminary planning about staging rallies and what sort of screenings might be necessary, according to Republican National Committee officials and outsider advisers. One option being considered is holding rallies outdoors, rather than in enclosed arenas, a senior administration official said.

Officials also are forging ahead with the Republican National Convention planned for late August in Charlotte, albeit a potentially scaled-back version.

Once again:

We are being sacrificed for Trump.  We are being told to accept 2,000 deaths a day as the New Normal, and that toll is going to increase dramatically over the next few weeks as the true cost of "re-opening the economy" becomes bloodily apparent.

When do we say hell no to this?

Black Lives Still Matter, Con't

The investigation into the race-driven murder of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia continues, as the suspects, Greg McMichael and his son Travis, were arrested Thursday afternoon for the February murder, and now we know exactly why it took so long: The elder McMichael worked for and was friends with the county DA, Jackie Johnson.

Two Glynn County commissioners say District Attorney Jackie Johnson’s office refused to allow the Glynn County Police Department to make arrests immediately after the Feb. 23 shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery.

The GBI announced the arrests of Travis McMichael, 34, and his father Greg McMichael, 64, on Thursday - more than two months after the fatal shooting. They were denied bond Friday afternoon.

“The police at the scene went to her, saying they were ready to arrest both of them. These were the police at the scene who had done the investigation,” Commissioner Allen Booker, who has spoken with Glynn County police, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “She shut them down to protect her friend McMichael.”

Greg McMichael, now retired, once worked as an investigator in Johnson’s office.

Commissioner Peter Murphy, who also said he spoke directly to Glynn County police about the incident, said officers at the scene concluded they had probable cause to make arrests and contacted Johnson’s office to inform the prosecutor of their decision.

“They were told not to make the arrest,” Murphy said.

Johnson recused herself from the case within days of the shooting. Her office has not responded to a request to comment on the commissioners’ account of what happened, or on the case in general.

Arbery would have turned 26 today.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation has taken over the case.

Friday morning, GBI Director Vic Reynolds told reporters another arrest could be forthcoming. He also noted that by statute, the GBI’s involvement in a local case must be requested and declined to comment on how other agencies have handled the case.

“In a perfect world would we have liked to have been involved in February? Of course,” Reynolds said. “But it’s not a perfect world.” 

Reynolds confirmed the harrowing video capturing Ahmaud Arbery’s death on Feb. 23 was made by William Bryan, who had helped Greg and Travis McMichael pursue Arbery as he ran through the Satilla Shores community just south of Brunswick.

“We’re investigating everyone involved in the case, including the individual who shot the video,” Reynolds said.

Again, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in cold blood would have never been prosecuted or even investigated if the video trophy hadn't been leaked, and frankly the case would have been closed under Georgia's stand your ground laws if the video hadn't been taken in the first place.

The McMichaels (and Bryan) would have 100% gotten away with murder otherwise.  Greg McMichael was a retired cop.  Retired cops don't get charged with murder.

As a side note, county prosecutor/district attorney/judge advocate elections matter. A local DA who dropped a felony murder charge because the suspect worked for her at one time and the victim was black should be facing a lifetime in prison along with the killers.

Johnson, the DA, recused herself because she had worked with Greg McMichael before.  But the second prosecutor, George Barnhill, also came to the conclusion that there was no evidence to charge the McMichaels and then recused himself after the Arbery family asked him to because Barnhill's son also worked for Jackie Johnson in the DA's office.  It went to a third DA, Tom Durden.

The NY Times picked up the story shortly after Durden became involved, then NBC News picked it up at the end of April.

And then the video spread Tuesday after Shaun King posted it on Twitter (side note numero dos, it may be the first real Black Lives Matter activist thing King has done in years in a career marked by grift and lies)  The police and the DA's office had the video all along, but again, nothing was going to be done about it. It was only after the video leaked and caused outrage across the country that Durden brought in the GBI, the arrests were made, and he pushed for the grand jury proceedings.

Without the video, the McMichaels get away with this. We were never, ever meant to see it, the case was never, ever supposed to go to grand jury, let alone trial.

This is 2020.  This level of massive injustice still exists daily.

Black Lives Still Matter.

Lowering The Barr, Con't

Barack Obama has weighed in on the Flynn meta-pardon, and as a legal scholar, Obama is brutal in his assessment.

Former President Barack Obama, talking privately to ex-members of his administration, said Friday that the “rule of law is at risk” in the wake of what he called an unprecedented move by the Justice Department to drop charges against former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In the same chat, a tape of which was obtained by Yahoo News, Obama also lashed out at the Trump administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as “an absolute chaotic disaster.”

“The news over the last 24 hours I think has been somewhat downplayed — about the Justice Department dropping charges against Michael Flynn,” Obama said in a web talk with members of the Obama Alumni Association.

“And the fact that there is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. That’s the kind of stuff where you begin to get worried that basic — not just institutional norms — but our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk. And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
The Flynn case was invoked by Obama as a principal reason that his former administration officials needed to make sure former Vice President Joe Biden wins the November election against President Trump. “So I am hoping that all of you feel the same sense of urgency that I do,” he said. “Whenever I campaign, I’ve always said, ‘Ah, this is the most important election.’ Especially obviously when I was on the ballot, that always feels like it's the most important election. This one — I’m not on the ballot — but I am pretty darn invested. We got to make this happen.”

Obama misstated the charge to which Flynn had previously pleaded guilty. He was charged with false statements to the FBI, not perjury. But the Justice Department, in a filing with a federal judge on Thursday, asked that the case brought by special counsel Robert Mueller be dismissed, arguing that FBI agents did not have a justifiable reason to question the then national security adviser about his conversations with Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak — talks FBI agents and Mueller’s prosecutors concluded he had lied about.

Still, Obama’s unvarnished remarks were some of his sharpest yet about the Trump administration and appeared to forecast a dramatically stepped-up political role he intends to play in this year’s election. The comments came during a lengthy chat in which he also sharply criticized the response to the coronavirus pandemic, blaming it on the “tribal” trends that have been stoked by the president and his allies.

“This election that’s coming up on every level is so important because what we’re going to be battling is not just a particular individual or a political party. What we’re fighting against is these long-term trends in which being selfish, being tribal, being divided, and seeing others as an enemy — that has become a stronger impulse in American life. And by the way, we’re seeing that internationally as well. It’s part of the reason why the response to this global crisis has been so anemic and spotty. It would have been bad even with the best of governments. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government.

“That’s why, I, by the way, am going to be spending as much time as necessary and campaigning as hard as I can for Joe Biden,” he added.

Once again President Obama makes it very clear what the choice is in November, and I'm glad that the gloves are finally off.  We didn't listen to him last time, but something makes me thing we may actually not make the same mistake twice.

It's About Suppression, Con't

For all the endless complaining that Republicans do about how voting by mail is "fraud", the GOP sure does like to steal elections.

Colorado Republican Party Chair Ken Buck, a U.S. representative from Windsor, pressured a local party official to submit incorrect election results to set the primary ballot for a state Senate seat, according to an audio recording of a conference call obtained by The Denver Post. 

“You’ve got a sitting congressman, a sitting state party chair, who is trying to bully a volunteer — I’m a volunteer; I don’t get paid for this — into committing a crime,” Eli Bremer, the GOP chairman for state Senate District 10, told The Post on Wednesday, confirming the authenticity of the recording. “To say it’s damning is an understatement.”

Buck says he was merely asking Bremer to abide by a committee decision. 

At issue is the Republican primary for the District 10 seat currently held by Sen. Owen Hill, who’s term-limited. State Rep. Larry Liston and GOP activist David Stiver both ran for it. To qualify for the November ballot via the caucus and assembly process, a candidate must receive 30% of the vote from Republicans within the district. 

During a district assembly in March, Liston received 75% of the vote and Stiver just 24%, according to documents filed later in Denver District Court. Stiver complained the election was unfair, and the issue was taken up with the state central committee, which agreed, Buck said in an interview Wednesday. 

The central committee consists of nearly 500 members, including elected officials and county officers. About 200 were on the line during an April 17 conference call in which the group voted to place Stiver on the ballot for the seat, even though he failed to receive 30% of the district’s votes. After the vote, Buck asked Bremer, the District 10 chair, whether he would comply with the committee’s decision. 

“Do you understand the order of the executive committee and the central committee that you will submit the paperwork to include Mr. Stiver and Mr. Liston on the ballot, with Mr. Liston receiving the top-line vote?” Buck said on the call. 

“Uh, yes, sir, I understand the central committee has adopted a resolution that requires me to sign a false affidavit to the state,” Bremer replied. 

“And will you do so?” Buck said. 

Bremer: “I will seek legal counsel as I am being asked to sign an affidavit that states Mr. Stiver received 30% of the vote. I need to seek legal counsel to find out if I am putting myself in jeopardy of a misdemeanor for doing that. ” 

Buck: “And you understand that it is the order of the central committee that you do so?”
Bremer: “I will consult with counsel. Yes, sir, I understand the central committee has ordered me to sign an affidavit stating that a candidate got 30% who did not. And I will seek legal counsel and determine if I am legally able to follow that.” 

Buck: “All right, Mr. Bremer, I understand your position; we will now move on.” 

Buck, a lawyer, told The Post on Wednesday that it has been the tradition in both parties for their committees to make such decisions.

Note here Buck isn't denying he basically committed a felony. His excuse is that COVID-19 makes elections hard and besides the Democrats do it too, so who cares?

But hey, the Supreme Court made it clear today that convicting state officials on fraud charges is no good.

The Supreme Court threw out fraud convictions on Thursday against two New Jersey officials involved in the "Bridgegate" political scandal, the George Washington Bridge traffic jam that rocked the administration of then-Gov. Chris Christie. 

Writing for a unanimous court, Justice Elena Kagan said that "for no reason" other than "political payback" the aides "used deception" to cut access lanes from Fort Lee, New Jersey, to the bridge. 

The move "jeopardized the safety of the town's residents," Kagan wrote, but concluded that "not every corrupt act by state or local officials is a federal crime." 

Bridget Anne Kelly, who served as an aide to Christie, and Bill Baroni, the deputy director of the Port Authority, were convicted for their roles in the scandal and ultimately sentenced to 13 and 18 months in 2017. Currently out on bond, they asked the Supreme Court to reverse their convictions.

The ruling is the latest example of the court narrowing the type of conduct by public officials that can be considered fraud under federal law. 

In recent years, the court has decisively narrowed the government's ability to charge public officials with federal crimes for corruption offenses, most notably in 2016 after former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell took hundreds of thousands of dollars from a businessman who wanted the governor to intervene on his behalf with state officials to benefit his business. 

"Once again, the Supreme Court has thrown out federal criminal convictions of public officials who, by their own admission, abused their power for corrupt and illegitimate purposes," said Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law. 

"The harder question is whether Congress will respond to rulings like this one by expanding the scope of these laws, or whether we're going to end up with a world in which criminal liability for such nefarious conduct depends upon the color of one's collar," Vladeck added. 

Christie's aides argued that they were wrongly convicted and that prosecutors overreached when they charged them under various federal fraud statutes.
Kagan added that the aides' scheme did not aim to obtain money or property, and therefore they could not have violated wire fraud laws. 

In a statement to CNN, Christie says members of his administration were "dragged through the mud" since the case was first taken up by the Justice Department. 

"As many contended from the beginning, and as the court confirmed today, no federal crimes were ever committed in this matter by anyone in my administration. It is good for all involved that today justice has finally been done," Christie said.

So even if Buck was charged, corruption isn't a federal crime.  Colorado's state Supreme Court is refusing to hear the case for the same reason.

Finally, let's not forget that the Trump regime is now openly stating that it will sue Democratic states "into oblivion" to stop voting by mail.

President Donald Trump’s political operation is expanding its legal effort to stop Democrats from overhauling voting laws in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The Republican National Committee and Trump reelection campaign are doubling their legal budget to $20 million as litigation spreads to an array of battleground states. With the virus likely to complicate in-person balloting in November, Democrats have been pushing to substantially ease remote voting restrictions — something the Trump campaign and RNC are aggressively fighting in the courts.

Trump, who has long been fixated on voter fraud, has taken a personal interest in the project. He is expected to discuss the legal maneuvering during a meeting with his political team Thursday.

The battle over voting laws — specifically Democrats' efforts to make it easier for people to vote remotely during the pandemic — has emerged as a key front in the general election showdown between the parties.

More than two dozen Republican operatives are focusing on the legal battles and have been closely coordinating with party officials at the state and local levels. The Trump campaign and RNC recently intervened in Nevada, where Democrats are pushing for the state to ease restrictions by mailing ballots to all registered voters. Republicans have also been active in New Mexico, where they fought back a similar Democratic-led lawsuit.

The legal skirmishing has also been taking place in such battlegrounds as Pennsylvania and Georgia. While Republicans say they are open to some changes amid the pandemic, they are opposed to many of the farther-reaching reforms Democrats are pursuing.

“We will not stand idly by while Democrats try to sue their way to victory in 2020,” said RNC chief of staff Richard Walters. “Democrats may be using the coronavirus as an excuse to strip away important election safeguards, but the American people continue to support commonsense protections that defend the integrity of our democratic processes.”

The RNC and Trump campaign initially announced in February that they would direct $10 million to legal fights. But the party, Walters said, is prepared to sue Democrats “into oblivion and spend whatever is necessary.”

Democrats have long pushed to ease voting restrictions. Marc Elias, a prominent election law attorney who is leading the party’s effort, said Democrats were currently focused on litigation in more than a dozen states, including Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Many of the lawsuits, he said, involve expanding vote-by-mail rules.

He acknowledged, however, that the Republican Party’s massive investment is a hurdle.

“We’re not unrealistic about the fight that is ahead,” Elias said. “There is no question that Donald Trump and the Republican Party have made opposing voting rights a top priority for their campaign.”

We just have to accept that massive corruption and voter fraud by the GOP is standard in America, as one of the lawyers for the New Jersey plaintiffs argued.

"In an ideal world, public officials would always act solely in the best interest of the public," Roth argued. "But our world is decidedly not ideal, and politics is one of its inherent features, accepted as the cost of democratic accountability."

You play the game, you pay the cost.  Welcome to America.