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Month: February 2020

Trump can’t handle a crisis. Can the media?

Published by digby on February 27, 2020

If you haven’t subscribed yet to Eric Boehlert’s great new newsletter PRESSRUN, now is the time. We are in the midst of a major public health story and I think people will be following the news on this subject more closely than ever. It’s important to recognize the role the press is going to play in this and be a thoughtful consumer.

Here’s an excerpt of Boehlert’s piece looking back at the media’s response to the ebola crisis in 2014:

As the debacle spreads, I’ve been struck in recent weeks by the press coverage of coronavirus, and specifically Trump’s ineffectual response, compared to how the 2014 Ebola scare in the U.S. under President Barack Obama was covered by the same Beltway press corps. As you may recall, prompted by partisan hysteria voiced by Republicans, the press lost its collective mind covering Ebola and crucified Obama for months, hyping concerns that a deadly domestic outbreak was imminent. By contrast, the press has spent weeks sleepwalking through the Trump coronavirus coverage.

Context: In 2014 there were two cases of Ebola in the United States, total. Already, there have been 14 confirmed cases of coronavirus here, according to the CDC. Yet to date, the coronavirus coverage has produced just a fraction of the Ebola media attention from 2014.

During the height of the Ebola story, in a single week the topic was mentioned nearly 4,000 on the cable news channels, according to TVeyes.com. By comparison, over the last week, “coronavirus” has been mentioned approximately 500 times on the same cable news channels.

Weeks into the coronavirus story, the Washington Post this week finally put a story on its front page about how the spreading epidemic might pose a political problem for Trump, as his administration tries to play catch-up on the health crisis. The media’s slow-footed response fits a larger, well-known pattern that has defined the Trump era, where his shocking behavior routinely produces a fraction of the coverage and condemnation as compared to a Democratic administration. (For instance, do you think if the Obama White House had canceled all White House press briefings the move would be met with shrugs?)

Normalization doesn’t explain this. It’s way beyond that. The media has just thrown up its hands.

Boehlert continues:

As time has passed, I think lots of people forget how often unfair Obama’s press coverage was during his eight years in office. The Ebola scare certainly represented one of the most extreme examples of the D.C. press completely losing its moral compass, as journalists did Republican bidding for weeks with unhinged reporting and commentary.  

“The major broadcast and cable networks ran nearly 1000 evening news segments about the Ebola virus in the four weeks leading up to the midterm elections in November, tracking the diagnosis of a handful of U.S. patients,” Media Matters reported in 2014. You read that number correctly — “nearly 1000 evening news segments about Ebola” in four weeks.

Incredibly, the not-so-subtle theme for much of the Ebola coverage was that Obama wasn’t protecting Americans and that ‘big government’ was putting the population at peril. In other words, Ebola was, inexplicably, a political story. Why? Because Republicans went all in during the fall campaign season to turn Ebola into a political story by ginning up wild claims that a Democratic administration could not keep Americans safe from the disease. From Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY): Ebola is “incredibly contagious.” (Hint: It’s not.)

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza dubbed the Ebola virus the “October surprise” of the 2014 election season and stressed that the panic and anxiety associated with the story was bound to swing votes.

But guess what? It turns out the news media completely lost interest in Ebola right after Republicans lost interest in the story, which is to say right after November’s midterm elections. In May of 2015, when the World Health Organization announced the Ebola health crisis was officially over, most American news outlets covered the story only in passing, compared to the orgy of coverage they produced just months earlier…

So much has happened since then that I think we forget what an impact that crisis had on the 2014 election. There’s evidence that it was substantial.

There’s more at the link. And do sign up for Boehlert’s free newsletter. You’re going to need his sharp media analysis over the next few months. It’s getting crazier out here.

“He turned to prayer”

Published by digby on February 27, 2020

AOC is right:

When President Donald Trump announced that Vice President Mike Pence would lead federal efforts against the spread of the coronavirus, he said Pence was the right person for the task because of his experience.

“He’s got a certain talent for this,” Trump said at a White House briefing about the virus, which has infected nearly five dozen people in the United States so far.

The announcement has cast light on Pence’s record as a lawmaker and his handling of a major public health crisis during his time as governor of Indiana. The worst HIV outbreak in the state’s history happened on his watch in 2015, which critics blamed on Pence’s belated response and his opposition to authorizing a needle-exchange program.

In 2011, as a member of Congress, he voted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood. Two years later, a Planned Parenthood clinic that had been the only HIV-testing center in Scott County, Ind., closed after public health spending cuts, HuffPost reported.

Two months passed from the start of the outbreak in 2015 before Pence declared a public state of emergency.

The spread of the disease was attributed to people injecting Opana, an addictive painkiller, with shared needles. But Pence didn’t agree with federal health experts that distributing clean needles was a good idea.

“I don’t believe effective anti-drug policy involves handing out drug paraphernalia,” he told the Indianapolis Star at the time. Despite assurances from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it is an effective way to halt the spread of infections and diseases such as HIV and hepatitis B and C, Pence said if state lawmakers tried to send him a bill for a needle-exchange program, he would veto it.

As cases spiked, Pence reportedly turned to prayer.

After 75 people were confirmed to be HIV-positive, Pence announced he would allow a 30-day needle exchange.

Public health officials weren’t the only ones to warn Pence about delaying action. State Rep. Ed Clere, a fellow Republican, also pushed Pence to approve a needle exchange.

“It was disappointing that it took so much effort to bring the governor on board,” Clere told the New York Times.

In 2018, researchers at Yale University found the epidemic could have been prevented if Pence and state officials had acted faster. The study received financial support from the federal government.

He is literally the worst person Trump could have put in charge. Of course.

“Liberals Tend to Be Suckers”

Published by tristero on February 27, 2020
Image result for lucy pulls the football away

Tim Wu is 100% right. Read every single word:

For many traditional liberals, respect for difference is understood as a sacred duty. Consider, for example, Joe Biden’s warm words for his Republican colleagues, or the left’s many paeans to the virtues of empathy. Why demonize your opponents rather than presume that, as fellow human beings, what they want should be given respect and the dignity of fair evaluation?

Such tolerant pluralism has a long and distinguished pedigree, from writings of figures like James Madison and John Locke to the broader Christian ideal of loving one’s enemies; great, high-minded stuff. Many high-profile Republican leaders once also embraced such values, like the recently passed Senator John McCain and President George H.W. Bush.

But as a posture for negotiation, unilateral open-mindedness is a disaster. Facing an uncompromising opponent, it yields a predictable result: getting repeatedly defeated.

Go read the rest. It’s great.

This’ll be the day that I die

Published by Tom Sullivan on February 27, 2020

People of a certain age may recall “Beat the Reaper,” a game show send-up on Firesign Theater’s 1968 (vinyl!) album, “Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him.” Contestants administered biotoxins on stage had 10 seconds to correctly identify what disease they’d contracted and receive an antidote.

Today, it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate host to such a grim reality show than our own other-worldly colored and coiffed president, Donald J. Trump.

Commenting on Ebola’s near-100% death rate at a Tuesday press conference in India, Trump dismissed concerns over a coronavirus pandemic, saying, “There’s a very good chance you’re not going to die.”

The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah was not put at ease:

Imagining a pilot speaking to passengers, Stephen Colbert told his studio audience, “We are beginning our final descent into Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. Put your tray tables up because we have a solid chance of landing this sucker. I say odds are 60-40 we walk away from this.”

Trump, of course, is more worried about what the virus will do to the stock market and his reelection prospects than he is in what it could do to you. He blamed media outlets’ reporting on the virus for the market tumbling 2,000 points this week.

In a rare press briefing Wednesday, Trump said the United States is “rated No. 1” among countries for being prepared, holding up a chart as evidence. Trump’s own experts predicted more cases occurring nationwide. Trump contradicted them, claiming they few announced cases would be cured in no time.

“We could be just one or two people over the next short period of time,” Trump said, announcing he had put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the administration’s coronavirus response. Pence is the fall guy.

As Digby noted last night, putting Vice President Mike Pence in charge of the administration’s outbreak response was hardly reassuring. Pence is known for having mishandled an HIV outbreak as governor of Indiana.

“Mike Pence has a lot of experience in this area,” Noah said. “He’s been quarantining himself from women his whole life.”

Twitter had a field day:

“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. You didn’t beat the Reaper,” Firesign’s pre-Trump tells the contestant.

The show’s physician brings the patient out of the isolation booth to tells the contestant and studio audience, “According to my careful prosthesis, this man has The Plague.”

“Well, isn’t he a good sport, folks.”

God knows where we’ll be 28 Days Later.

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Dumb

Published by tristero on February 26, 2020

Wow, Pence is dumb. I mean, seriously dumb.

You’d have to be dumb as a post to accept a job as Trump’s Coronavirus Czar if you cared at all about your political future — and Pence does.

When this goes south — and tragically, it will — Trump will have the perfect excuse to pick a new running mate. Someone like this.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, there’s another thing about Pence. He’s completely incompetent, especially when it comes to health crises:

In late 2014, health officials belatedly became aware of an HIV outbreak in Scott County, Indiana,” The Nation reported in 2018. “With fewer than 24,000 people, this rural county rarely saw a single new case in a year, according to The New York Times. But by the time government agencies tried to stop the transmission of the virus a few months later, some 215 people had tested positive.”

“One man seemed responsible for needlessly letting the situation get out of control: Indiana’s then-Governor Mike Pence. In 2015, when the virus was seeming to rapidly move through networks of people who use intravenous drugs, even the reluctant local sheriff encouraged the governor to authorize a clean-needle exchange, a proven tool to reduce such an outbreak.”

That New York Times article was titled: “Mike Pence’s Response to H.I.V. Outbreak: Prayer, Then a Change of Heart.” It mentioned prayer five times.

Jeebus.

Shameless Ratf**kers

Published by digby on February 26, 2020

Who needs Roger Stone?

The ad hitting Biden from the Committee to Defend the President is a remarkable piece of work: It weaponizes audio of former president Barack Obama against Biden, in what is clearly an effort to turn African American voters against him.

Obama himself is now denouncing the ad. Katie Hill, a spokesperson for Obama, told us his office is calling on TV stations to stop airing the spot, denouncing it as an effort to “sow division and confusion” and “suppress turnout among minority voters in South Carolina.”AD

The ad is pure disinformation of the ugliest sort.

“Joe Biden promised to help our community,” the ad’s narrator intones. “It was a lie — here’s Barack Obama.”

The ad then features audio of Obama that sounds as if he’s denouncing Democratic politicians for selling out black people. At the same time, the screen flashes references in white letters to what appears to be the controversy last spring about Biden’s comments about segregationist senators, and his support for the 1994 crime bill.

The ad makes it sound as if Obama is referring to those episodes while denouncing Biden as someone who betrayed the African American community. But it turns out the audio is actually of Obama reading a passage from his 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” which features a character in the book talking about what Chicago politics was like for African Americans long ago.AD

In other words, the ad features Obama reading from his own 25-year-old book, mimicking the words of a separate character, to make it sound as if Obama is denouncing Biden (who you may recall was Obama’s vice president) for selling out African Americans.

Hill, the spokesperson for Obama, told us that “Obama has several friends in this race, including, of course, his own esteemed Vice President,” while stressing Obama isn’t endorsing anyone. Hill added:This despicable ad is straight out of the Republican disinformation playbook, and it’s clearly designed to suppress turnout among minority voters in South Carolina by taking President Obama’s voice out of context and twisting his words to mislead viewers. In the interest of truth in advertising, we are calling on TV stations to take this ad down and stop playing into the hands of bad actors who seek to sow division and confusion among the electorate.

This comes after the same pro-Trump super PAC aired another horribly misleading ad in the run-up to the Nevada caucuses, where Sanders won handily and Biden placed second.

That ad features a Spanish-speaking narrator claiming Obama and Biden walked away from immigration reform and separated families. In reality, during the Obama years, comprehensive immigration reform passed the Senate by a wide bipartisan margin, and died only because the GOP-controlled House refused to act on it.

They seem to be convinced that Biden is a threat. Or maybe they have so much money they just want to fuck with the Democrats for fun. Like their Russian allies, they seek to sow discord more than anything. Either way, this is disgusting. But they no longer have any shame.

And that includes their voters:

Big baby

Published by digby on February 26, 2020

President Toddler:

President Trump’s former doctor reportedly hid cauliflower in his mashed potatoes in an attempt to improve the president’s diet.

Former White House physician Ronny Jackson told The New York Times that he regretted leaving his position before he could implement the diet and exercise regimen planned for Trump.

“The exercise stuff never took off as much as I wanted it to,” he said. “But we were working on his diet. We were making the ice cream less accessible, we were putting cauliflower into the mashed potatoes.”

I wonder if the White House chef could lay in a supply of these:

https://youtu.be/mMDRK-2LtFM

The elusive non-voter

Published by digby on February 26, 2020

This thread by Yascha Mount of The Atlantic is quite interesting and important for progressives to think about. We simply can’t afford to live in a bubble right now:

Leading progressives say that the key to winning in 2020 is to mobilize nonvoters who are overwhelmingly young, non-white and leftist.

But a new study shows that, on average, nonvoters are actually less progressive than voters.

The Truth About Nonvoters Boosting turnout won’t necessarily help the most progressive candidate.https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/truth-about-

This is important: With Bernie the presumptive nominee, Dems will stake their chances of beating Trump on the idea that they can mobilize a lot of nonvoters.

As AOC recently said, “The swing voters that we’re most concerned with are the nonvoters to voters.”

So let’s test it.  

1) Demographics

As a group, nonvoters really are a little less white than voters. But the difference is way smaller than many assume.

Taken together, blacks and Latinos make up 21% of voters and 28% of nonvoters.

➼ Two out of every three nonvoters are white.

2) Ideology

Nonvoters are way, way less progressive than is commonly believed.

While they are somewhat more liberal on economic policy, where they favor things like a higher minimum wage at somewhat stronger levels, they are markedly more conservative on key cultural issues. mentions Nonvoters are marginally more likely to support, and much less likely to oppose, building a wall on America’s southern border.

Nonvoters are markedly less likely than voters to support giving a path to citizenship for undocumented migrants.

Nonvoters are less likely than voters to support abortion being legal in all or most cases.

And nonvoters are also less likely than voters to support stricter gun laws.

 3) Partisan Lean

Given that nonvoters are, on key cultural issues, more conservative than voters, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are also less likely to identify as liberal, to call themselves Democrats, or to think it is urgent to remove Trump from the White House. mentions Only 21% of nonvoters consider themselves liberal.

By contrast, 30% consider themselves moderate and 28% conservative.

 Nonvoters are much less likely than voters to have an unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump or the Republican Party than voters.

And nonvoters are less likely than voters to say that the country is on the wrong track, that the 2020 elections are especially important, or that they are set on voting for the Democratic Party’s nominee in 2020.

 4) Upshot

A certain kind of centrist projects all his hopes on nonvoters. What they (supposedly) want is “fiscally responsible” economic policies and moderately progressive social policies. That’s a self-serving myth.

But the idea of the progressive nonvoter is just as wrong. mentions There’s a lot of debate about who Dems should nominate. But the question of strategy is just as important: How can the Dems beat Trump?

My two cents:

Any candidate for office, moderate or progressive, is unlikely to win if he stakes his strategy on an imaginary electorate. mentions There are some progressive nonvoters. There are also some devoutly conservative nonvoters.

The idea of mobilizing one group without mobilizing the other is, as Ruy Teixeira told me, “magical pixie dust.” And in 2020, the price of believing in magic may turn out to be very high. mentions Please share my article @TheAtlantic!

And please read the excellent study by the @knightfdn
for yourself!

knightfoundation.org/wp-content/upl…

 There is some good evidence that the youth vote may not be as huge as we’d hoped either, at least not so far.

None of this is to say that the Democrats can’t win, be it Sanders or any of the others. But it’s a huge mistake for them to bullshit themselves about the electorate. Donald Trump is a disaster and has never had an approval rating above 45%. There is no reason that the Democrats shouldn’t be able to beat him.

However, his voters are very stoked and he cheats, so he’s more formidable than his numbers show. Democrats can’t win with wishful thinking whether it’s delusions from the center or the left. They need to deal with reality and strategize based upon factual information.

He’s got this

Published by digby on February 26, 2020

As the nation waits on pins and needles for the calm, competent reassurance we can expect from our Dear Leader in a crisis, here’s where we are:

The Trump administration confronted a new threat Tuesday in the mounting coronavirus crisis: a fierce bipartisan backlash amid contradictory statements from the federal government about the severity of the outbreak.

Administration officials sought to swat away concerns their emergency request for $2.5 billion to address the outbreak was inadequate, even as some Republicans joined Democrats in criticizing the amount — and slamming a lack of transparency around efforts to contain the disease on U.S. soil.

The furor came amid new fears of an outbreak in the United States, with a top official from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warning that spread of the respiratory illness in the country is now inevitable. Officials said a burst of new cases in countries like South Korea and Italy prompted the new, urgent warning.

Adding to fears that the virus could continue to spread unabated, a senior member of the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday floated the possibility that the summer games in Tokyo could be canceled if the outbreak isn’t under control by then.

The grim news and the angst on Capitol Hill is threatening to overwhelm the messaging from President Donald Trump and some of his aides, who have been trying to downplay the situation in hopes they can put a lid on the stock market tumble and cable news coverage of mounting deaths around the world. Trump’s advisers and political allies are increasingly concerned that a botched response could hurt the U.S. economy and put his reelection prospects at risk.[…]

Public health and other administration officials fielded questions from more than a dozen senators for about an hour while HHS Secretary Alex Azar and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf faced sharp interrogations at a pair of Senate budget hearings.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee at Azar’s hearing accused the administration of making a “low ball” request.

“It could be an existential threat to a lot of people in this country,” warned Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.). “So money should not be an object. We should try to contain and eradicate this as much as we can, both in the U.S. and helping our friends all over the world.”

At the homeland security budget hearing, Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-La.) criticized Wolf for not providing enough information about risks from the outbreak. “You’re supposed to keep us safe, and the American people deserve some straight answers on the coronavirus, and I’m not getting them from you,” Kennedy said.

At the hearing, Wolf incorrectly told Kennedy that the death rate from the coronavirus is similar to that of the flu, when actually the coronavirus appears to be much more lethal.

Trump, who has sought to downplay the coronavirus risk, during a press conference in India Tuesday appeared to claim that the United States was “very close” on a coronavirus vaccine. However, Republican and Democratic senators after the briefing said a vaccine, under the best scenario, was at least a year to 18 months away. The White House later said the president was referring to the Ebola vaccine, which the FDA approved two months ago.

I know I feel safer already. He’s like, smart.

The latest in creeping fascism

Published by digby on February 26, 2020
https://twitter.com/christor/status/1232728010765164544?s=20

They have created a special section of the Department of Justice dedicated to stripping people of their citizenship.

This is happening. And it’s never happened before.

And then there’s this:

President Donald Trump is tightening his grip on the intelligence community as part of a post-acquittal purge of career officials and political appointees deemed insufficiently loyal, and the abrupt firing of his last intel chief is only the tip of the iceberg, current and former intelligence officials say.

But it also revealed a deeper trend: namely, the steps Trump has taken to shield the public from intelligence that could be politically damaging for him, and keep the flow of information coming out of the agencies firmly under his control.

Maguire and several of his deputies were reportedly fired because an official in his office, election security expert Shelby Pierson, briefed Congress without Trump’s knowledge on Russia’s ongoing election interference, though the White House is disputing that version of events. The NSA, CIA, and Pentagon have been urged by the White House not to share information about Russia and Ukraine with lawmakers, while the “Gang of Eight” senior members of Congress were bypassed leading up to at least one major intelligence operation. And intelligence community leaders have backed out of the public portion of the annual worldwide threats hearing, fearing Trump’s wrath if their assessments don’t align with his.

“We have an enemy of the United States that is conducting information warfare against us and our executive leadership doesn’t want to hear it, doesn’t want the Congress to hear it, and doesn’t want the people to hear it,” said former acting DNI David Gompert, who said he was “aghast” at the hiring of Grenell. “We now have a situation where the principal objective, evidently, of this acting DNI is to ensure that information about Russian interference and Russian preference for this particular president does not get out.”

The purge of the nation’s chief intelligence overseer was swift, and emblematic of Trump’s determination to hastily quash any hint of disloyalty: Maguire had been telling staff just days before his ouster that he believed he could be nominated to serve as permanent director, according to a former senior intelligence official. He then learned about his firing from reporters reaching out for comment before publication, and had to call national security adviser Robert O’Brien to confirm that he’d been replaced by Grenell.

O’Brien denied on Sunday that Maguire’s firing was tied to the briefing. “Admiral Maguire’s time as the acting DNI was up in a week or two,” O’Brien told ABC. “We were looking for someone who was Senate-confirmed under the Vacancy Act. We needed a Senate-confirmed official to come in and replace him. And so we went with a highly qualified person, Ambassador Grenell.“

Maguire’s chief of staff, Viraj Mirani, and DNI principal executive Andrew Hallman, were also both told to leave their positions immediately on orders from the White House, said two former intelligence officials, despite offering to stay on board and help with Grenell’s transition. Mirani, who was chief of staff for Dan Coats when he was DNI and in his Senate office, has stayed at the agency and is considering his career options.

He’s doing all this just 8 months before the election. He is not even pretending to moderate a tiny bit — he’s telling us exactly what he plans to do.

If he wins a second term, it’s going to be a doozy.