Every last one of these Trump henchmen have a bad case of arrested development, just as he does.
"what digby sez..."
Month: March 2020
If you want to know why the Director of the CDC is such an ostentatious Trump bootlicker, grinning like a jack-o-lantern as the president spouts gibberish to the nation in the middle of this crisis, wonder no more.
He’s a wingnut. A serious one. When he was nominated for the slot, there was a huge controversy over his pay which was outrageously high and he finally relented and took less. But that’s not the biggest problem. In fact, he’s the last guy who should be in charge of an epidemic:
Redfield’s early engagement with the AIDS epidemic in the US in the 1980s and 90s was controversial. As an Army major at Walter Reed Medical Institute, he designed policies for controlling the disease within the US military that involved placing infected personnel in quarantine and investigating their pasts to identify and track possible sexual partners. Soldiers were routinely discharged and left to die of AIDS, humiliated and jobless, often abandoned by their families.
In the 1980s Redfield worked closely with W. Shepherd Smith, Jr. and his Christian organization, Americans for a Sound AIDS/HIV Policy, or ASAP. The group maintained that AIDS was “God’s judgment” against homosexuals, spread in an America weakened by single-parent households and loss of family values.
Redfield wrote the introduction to a 1990 book, “Christians in the Age of AIDS,” co-written by Smith, in which he denounced distribution of sterile needles to drug users and condoms to sexually active adults, and described anti-discrimination programs as the efforts of “false prophets.”In the early 1990’s, ASAP and Redfield also backed H.R. 2788, a House bill sponsored by deeply conservative Rep. William Dannemeyer (R-California). It would have subjected people with HIV to testing, loss of professional licenses and would have effectively quarantined them. (The bill died in Congress.) In the 2000s, Redfield was a top advocate for the so-called “ABCs of AIDS” in Africa, pressing to prevent HIV infection through sexual abstinence, monogamy and the use of condoms only as a last resort.
In 1992, Redfield, then a colonel, was part of a Walter Reed team backing an AIDS vaccine called VaxSyn, manufactured by a Connecticut company, MicroGeneSys. Redfield claimed that a small clinical trial had shown VaxSyn to protect the immune systems of infected soldiers, limiting the worst outcomes of AIDS.
Because this was a clear exaggeration, the Army investigated Redfield, eventually concluding he had made an innocent mistake. Redfield continued to strongly support VaxSyn, pushing Congress to fund a $20 million clinical trial on HIV-positive men. But VaxSyn never worked, and no fine-tuning in its biochemistry could have made a difference.
Independent scientists showed that the MicroGeneSys compound targeted a part of the HIV virus that mutates so frequently that infected individuals’ bodies are filled with multiple forms, most of which VaxSyn could not affect.
[…]
Burned by the Fitzgerald mess, presumably the White House carefully vetted Redfield, a former Army colonel and a University of Maryland HIV clinician and virologist, before announcing his appointment in April. It is very hard to understand what accomplishments prompted the University of Maryland to consider Redfield worth $827,000 for 15 months.
But it is not hard to see why President Trump would see Redfield’s hardcore, right-wing credentials as a good fit. Giving this doctor such a prominent job at such ridiculous pay — even a lowered sum — is another example of the Trump administration’s willingness to place politics over sensible public policy
He prizes loyalty above all else. And you can see how much this guy worships him above all else. That’s all that matters:
I’m afraid I don’t trust this fellow, do you?
It was raining steadily as I greeted voters outside my polling place Tuesday morning. A stream of cars arrived before 9 a.m. Many voters had waited to vote on Election Day for the first time in years, and for the first time in years more people voted there on Election Day than voted early. Even more stunning was watching neighborhood people walking from up and down the block to vote. In the rain.
Voter turnout there was 62%. In a primary.
A younger man I thanked for coming to vote in such weather said, “You got to. It’s a civic duty.”
Civic duty. How quaint.
A neighbor called on Thursday to ask about being a poll worker for runoff elections here on May 12. She has computers skill, a flexible work schedule, and had served during early voting and the Super Tuesday primary. Her whole life she’d seen retirees working there giving back to the community. Now she looks in the mirror and sees one of them.
It’s hard to pry people out of those 14-hour jobs. They get paid (marginally) for their work, yes, but that’s not why they keep doing it — sometimes beyond their ability to administer the technology. They have a deep connection to the community and to the democratic process. And they feel a sense of patriotic duty.
There were six peopIe working my little precinct on March 3. There are 80 precincts in Buncombe County. In North Carolina there are 2,670 precincts spread among 100 counties, plus the staffs and county boards in each and the state Board of Elections team in the capitol. That’s an army division mobilized for one day to make democracy possible — in one state of which there are 50. Plus the territories and the District of Columbia. And 3,142 counties and county equivalents in the 50 states.
You don’t have to do the math. The Election Assistance Commission (EAC) has done it for you. “During the 2016 elections,” the EAC website reports, “local election officials operated 116,990 polling places, including 8,616 early voting locations, across the country. These polling sites were operated by 917,694 poll workers.” That’s about 75% the size of the U.S. Army in 2016 mobilized for a single day, yet invisible to the typical voter. They see the same handful of retirees each election day and give no thought to the massive logistical effort behind them.
A friend assembled this edgier commentary on civic duty from a Thursday tweet thread by @Stonekettle:
Look here, I get that some of you are disappointed. I would be too. In fact, I am, because the candidate that I happen to prefer isn’t doing very well. And frankly, I’m not huge fan of the current frontrunner. But you know what I’m REALLY not a fan of? Self harm.
I have no intention of lopping off my own nose if the Democrats don’t pick the candidate I want. Yes, of COURSE I’m going to be irritated that I have to vote for another old white guy solely because he’s better than the shitty old white guy currently fucking up the country.
But I’m going to do it. But it’s my duty as a citizen. I’m going to do it because I care more about other people than I do about my own personal desires.
See, here’s the thing: Me? *I* could pass. That’s right. I could. I could pass. It would be easy.
I could pass. I’m white. I’m male. I’m straight. I’m a veteran. I don’t have to put a MAGA sign in my front yard or go to Trump rallies and shout Seig Heil with the rest of them. I could just be … me. I could pass. No one would know.
I could easily benefit from Donald Trump. I mean, I’m not going to need an abortion, they’re not putting limits on my civil rights or my sex organs. It’s not me being shot down in the streets because some amped-up, militarized cop thought I had a gun or bag of candy…
Trump isn’t going to deport me or my family. America isn’t dropping bombs on my religion. When Republicans finally succeed is taking away healthcare from most of America again, it isn’t going to be me who dies from my pre-existing condition, I’m covered…
These pinch-faced assholes aren’t coming for my marriage or the person I love, my gender identity and sexual orientation are the social acceptable norms of fascism. When they get around to proclaiming the Master Race, I’m gonna ace the membership exam, genetically speaking.
And when they start shoveling bodies into the ovens, so long as I keep my mouth shut and give an enthusiastic salute when Big Orange Leader’s motorcade rolls past in the annual Make America Great Again Day parade, I’m probably gonna be good.
I could do like this guy, my correspondent, and throw in with Trump if my candidate isn’t the one. Screw ’em. Screw voting blue no matter who and screw you. Why not? Sure. I mean, really why not? Why the hell not. Give up. There’s nothing in “The Resistance” for me.
I could pass. IF I didn’t give a damn about anybody else. I could pass, if I didn’t care about my friends, my family, my neighbors, the country, the world, the future, or YOU dear reader.
I could pass. If I was a shitty, selfish, spoiled, rotten little brat throwing a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store instead of a citizen of the United States of America, I could that.
I could pass. If I wanted to cut off my own goddamned nose to spite the rest of you. But I am NOT that guy. And I do give a damn about the future.
You’re an American, not a some goddamn Nazi stooge, and it is your responsibility as a citizen of The Republic to put your disappointment — no matter how bitter — aside and DO YOUR DUTY.
You have an obligation to your fellows, to those who are suffering now and who will suffer in the future under the bootheel of oppression. That is your job, Citizen. And it’s time you got after it.
Anyone can be a patriot when it’s easy. Anyone can be a hero when the stormtroopers aren’t coming for them. Anyone can be “The Resistance” when their candidate is on top. But REAL character is defined by what you do in the depths of bitter despair.
If disappointment causes you to cede the moral high ground to oppression and throw in with fascists, then you never held it in the first place. If you want a better nation, you have to be a better citizen.
Nearly a million neighbors will be waiting at polling places to welcome you.
[h/t N.A.]
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
We need something sweet and beautiful after a very long week:
Awww…..
This piece in The Atlantic about the two main problems with the government response to the coronavirus — lack of testing and fudging of numbers — is chilling. Everyone is operating in the dark because the federal government is failing to do the necessary coordination.
It’s one of the most urgent questions in the United States right now: How many people have actually been tested for the coronavirus?
This number would give a sense of how widespread the disease is, and how forceful a response to it the United States is mustering. But for days, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has refused to publish such a count, despite public anxiety and criticism from Congress. On Monday, Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, estimated that “by the end of this week, close to a million tests will be able to be performed” in the United States. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised that “roughly 1.5 million tests” would be available this week.
“The CDC got this right with H1N1 and Zika, and produced huge quantities of test kits that went around the country,” Thomas Frieden, the director of the CDC from 2009 to 2017, told us. “I don’t know what went wrong this time.”
Oh, I think we know, don’t we?
Through interviews with dozens of public-health officials and a survey of local data from across the country, The Atlantic could only verify that 1,895 people have been tested for the coronavirus in the United States, about 10 percent of whom have tested positive. And while the American capacity to test for the coronavirus has ramped up significantly over the past few days, local officials can still test only several thousand people a day, not the tens or hundreds of thousands indicated by the White House’s promises.
To arrive at our estimate, we contacted the public-health departments of all 50 states and the District of Columbia. We gathered data on websites, and we corresponded with dozens of state officials. All 50 states and D.C. have made some information available, though the quality and timeliness of the data varied widely. Some states have only committed to releasing their numbers once or three times a week. Most are focused on the number of confirmed cases; only a few have publicized the number of people they are capable of testing.
The Atlantic’s numbers reflect the best available portrait of the country’s testing capacity as of early this morning. These numbers provide an accurate baseline, but they are incomplete. Scattered on state websites, the data available are not useful to citizens or political leaders. State-based tallies lack the reliability of the CDC’s traditional—but now abandoned—method of reporting. Several states—including New Jersey, Texas, and Louisiana—have not shared the number of coronavirus tests they have conducted overall, meaning their number of positive results lacks crucial context.
The net effect of these choices is that the country’s true capacity for testing has not been made clear to its residents. This level of obfuscation is unexpected in the United States, which has long been a global leader in public-health transparency.
Oh, and even as Trump brags incessantly about how he “closed the borders” and did a better job than any leader has ever done in world history, get a load of this from a VICE news reporter:
When I arrived at New York’s JFK airport Thursday after spending days outside a coronavirus hot zone in Italy, I was expecting a shakedown: a temperature check at customs and some questions about where exactly in the region I’d been and if I had come into contact with any sick people during my stay.
Instead, I breezed right through security, faster than any other time I can remember.
The lack of precautions was jarring considering where I’d just been. Even though I didn’t go inside the exclusion zone out of an abundance of caution, the fact that I’d been in the region of Lombardy should have raised a red flag. According to the Italian government, of the 4,636 people in the country who’ve contracted the virus, around half got it in Lombardy. And Italy as a whole is currently the epicenter of the European outbreak.
Here is your president being a serious leader at a time of crisis:
Here he admits that he’s cooking the numbers:
And how about the evil monster Kellyanne Conway:
Apparently, one-third of all civilian Defense Department jobs are now unfilled. And the Secretary of Defense is being led around by the nose by Trump’s 29-year-old enforcer:
“DoD thinks White House is a rubber stamp, that it’s Esper’s position to fill and the White House is consulted as a courtesy. That may have been true in the previous PPO but that’s not how John McEntee operates,” said one administration official, referring to the head of the Presidential Personnel Office. “It will be a consultation, but the White House is going to play a major, major role in selecting the replacement.”
“McEntee’s going to win,” the official said.
A person close to the Pentagon and Capitol Hill said the White House office “has taken total control over staffing at DoD and anything that they perceive as disloyalty is a disqualification.”
“They want to make sure that there’s no hint or indication of conflicting loyalties,” the person said. “It’s complete and total control. … You have to be a 110 percent Trump supporter and they want nobody else. … The problem is they’re not going to identify, nominate and confirm enough people before November.”
By “conflicting loyalties” they mean loyalty to the United States vs loyalty to Dear Leader. We know from the firing of Pentagon comptroller Elaine McCusker who followed the law in the Ukraine mess, that loyalty also means choosing Trump over the rule of law.
I can’t even imagine what will happen if we have a major terrorist attack. Of wait, yes I can. We’re seeing it right now in the face of a global pandemic. He will demand that everyone spend all their time fluffing him and feting him, including the military and first responders all to make him look good regardless of what’s really going on.
The majority of the public knows he is a pathological liar and the rest are all brainwashed. What could go wrong?
It’s not even noon and I’m already thinking about drinking. I simply cannot believe he actually said this:
Regarding Warren, the deluded, twisted piece of work said this:
I think lack of talent was her problem. She had a tremendous lack of talent … she is a very mean person and people don’t like her. People don’t want that.
They like a person like me that isn’t mean.
How can it be possible that this ignorant barbarian could win a second term? How can we ever look at people who vote for this man the same way again?
President Trump said that Russian interference in the 2016 election a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats to destroy his presidency. He claimed his impeachment was a Democratic hoax too and last week he said the coronavirus — or at least media coverage of the coronavirus — was one as well.
None of those were hoaxes. But that doesn’t mean hoaxes don’t exist. In fact, when it comes to the coronavirus crisis, disinformation, propaganda and hoaxes abound. Ironically, one of the sources is, you guessed it, Russia.
According to the Washington Post:
A top State Department official said Thursday that Russia is behind “swarms of online, false personas” that sought to spread misinformation about coronavirus on social-media sites, stressing the “entire ecosystem of Russian disinformation is at play.” …
The tweets themselves floated a number of harmful conspiracy theories — suggesting, for example, that the coronavirus had been created by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation or was the result of a bioweapon. Some of the tweets linked to YouTube videos, according to the State Department document, suggesting the problem went beyond Twitter
That’s unnerving, to say the least. But the story is confusing, with social media platforms insisting they are uninformed about these activities and the government refusing to share its methodology.
Unsurprisingly, the right wing has eagerly jumped on some of the disinformation, such as the lie that the virus is a Chinese bioweapon. In fact, one of the president’s most fervent supporters, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, went on national TV to spread it, doubling down when called on it by experts. It’s unclear where Cotton got his “hypothesis” but it had already been debunked by numerous sources at the time he was telling millions of people it was possible.
As Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Washington Post, “There’s absolutely nothing in the genome sequence of this virus that indicates the virus was engineered. The possibility this was a deliberately released bioweapon can be firmly excluded.”
The Bill and Melinda Gates conspiracy theory took hold deep in the right-wing fever swamp early on. BuzzFeed reported on it back in January:
A false rumor that the coronavirus outbreak is a plot by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates is being spread by supporters of the pro-Trump QAnon movement and the anti-vax community. A QAnon YouTuber named Jordan Sather warned his followers on Tuesday that the coronavirus was a “new fad disease” and claimed the release of the virus that causes it was “planned.” Following Sather’s heavily retweeted thread, the conspiracy theory traveled across Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
If these rumors and lies were started by the Russian government it just proves, once again, that they know their targets. But the truth is that Americans don’t really need their help. The right-wing media is doing a great job of misleading half the country all by themselves.
Recall that a week or so ago, Rush Limbaugh insisted that the coronavirus was just a common cold and it was being “weaponized” to use against the president. Rush wasn’t the only one spreading this nonsense. According to AFPFactcheck, it turned up on Twitter and Facebook, with people sharing images from old medical textbooks saying that coronavirus is the common cold. (Yes, the common cold is a coronavirus, but the “novel coronavirus” COVID-19 most certainly is not the common cold.)
Half a dozen different Fox News programs have blamed the homeless population for spreading the disease, despite absolutely no evidence that has happened. This fits with their evident programming directive to demean and degrade the homeless population as often as possible, particularly in states that didn’t vote for Donald Trump.
In fact, most of the disinformation coming from the right-wing media is in service of protecting the president’s fake reputation as the greatest leader the world has ever known. Since he is a font of confusion, ignorance and misinformation on the subject, they end up making their audience and all the people their audience comes in contact with vulnerable to the illness.
For instance, Trump appeared on Sean Hannity’s show on Wednesday night and made this daft comment:
We have thousands or hundreds of thousands of people that get better, just by, you know, sitting around and even going to work, some of them go to work, but they get better.
Apparently, Trump thinks that a lot of people going to work while infectious is no big deal, except to the extent that they don’t get counted and all the deaths that occur from exposure to people who don’t know they carry the virus look worse than they really are. Or something.
That tweet makes you wonder if they’re “working very hard to keep these numbers low” on purpose. Unfortunately, the only way to do that is by not testing people — which is what’s happening.
The upshot is that the president continually suggests that the threat of the virus is being overblown and that he’s doing a “fabulous job” in dealing with it anyway. Needless to say, if anyone says otherwise, it’s a hoax.
His minions on Fox News are happy to help spread the good word.
Hannity, sounding more like a North Korean broadcaster extolling the virtues of the Dear Leader than like a member of the free press, claimed that President Obama had ignored the swine flu outbreak until thousands of people had died:
Virtually everything he said is false.
Channeling the president’s view that a miracle might end the pandemic, Fox News host Jesse Watters went with a little Kumbaya:
You want to know how I really feel about the coronavirus, Juan? If I get it, I’ll beat it. I’m not lying. It’s called the power of positive thinking and I think America needs to wake up to that. I live in Manhattan, I got off work the other night, went straight to the subway. Asian guy sits down to me — mask on. What do I do? Finish the ride, then I go home and I order Chinese food. I’m not afraid of the coronavirus and no one else should be that afraid either.
That’s easy for him to say. Pity the vulnerable people he and anyone who listens to him might infect with that cavalier attitude. But I suppose it’s better than this nihilistic greed-head:
Trump held a town-hall meeting on Fox News on Thursday night and once again praised himself to high heaven for his masterful handling of the crisis. Being the sunny optimist that he is, he found the upside in the whole thing:
I suspect that if you see a person wearing a MAGA hat these days, it might be wise to steer clear. If they are watching Fox News or listening to Rush, it’s doubtful they are taking the precautions that would protect themselves, and you, from this virus. Why would they? As far as they know, their very stable genius leader has everything in hand. If anyone says otherwise, it’s just another hoax.
Did you think he wouldn’t?
John Amato caught the exchange in Trump’s Fox Townhall last night:
During the questioning Donald, as usual, bragged about himself and the economy.
Trump: The economy is the best economy we’ve ever had; it’s nothing compared to what it’s going to be when the trade deals kick it.
MacCallum said, “But if you don’t cut something in entitlements, you’ll never really deal with the debt.”
Trump: “Oh, we’ll be cutting, but we’ll also have growth like you’ve never had before”
Every move the Trump administration has made, whether its tax cuts for the very wealthy or force the Fed to cut rates, their sycophants’ favorite talking point is that even though they raised the federal deficit, the real outcome will be to spur economic growth to unparalleled heights.
Just like the “confidence fairy” myth that conservatives use, pro-growth talking points occupy the same space. If anything, the Trump tax cuts for the rich hindered economic growth.
This morning, Trump tweeted that he was going to protect our social safety nets, reversing what he said a few hours before.
Trump has done this over and over again when he discusses Social Security and Medicare. He claims there will be cuts to these programs and then comes back and says he’s protecting it.
Vox writes, “President Donald Trump posted a tweet on Saturday vowing, “We will not be touching your Social Security and Medicare in Fiscal 2021 Budget.” One day later, the Wall Street Journal published a report indicating that Trump is doing exactly that with his budget proposal.
As Amato observes:
One thing we are sure, Donald Trump cannot be trusted to protect and preserve Social Security and Medicare benefits for Americans.
By the way, Trump tweeted this morning that he is going to protect Social Security and Medicare.
You tell me how likely that is in a second term with an exploded deficit.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s post-withdrawal interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Thursday night will draw the most attention for her response to “organized nastiness” online. The Washington Post covers that story this morning.
Maddow asked Warren about online attacks by candidates’ supporters. She asked Sen. Bernie Sanders for his reaction the night before. Sanders said he was “actually disgusted” and “aghast” at online vitriol:
“We condemn that,” Sanders said. “We want our supporters to be [talking] about the issues.
“[We] don’t need ugly, personal attacks against Sen. Warren, or anyone else for that measure,” he added.
Asked if she had spoken to Sanders about the problem, Warren would only say the conversation “was short” and refused to characterize Sanders’s sense of it. Sanders described the conversation as “cordial.”
What will attract less attention is Warren’s prescription for addressing online demonization and for campaigns modeling “fundamental human decency and respect for each other.”
Warren told Maddow [timestamp 8:54]:
Has the time come for us to start thinking more creatively about this? Do you set up something, for example, from the campaign that every single day answers back to this? With the authority of that person’s campaign? And says, ‘We’re not doing this. I’m flagging these. We don’t like this. We don’t want this. We don’t want any part of this. We condemn it. How many times do I have to say this?”
Let’s work on doing this creatively … You don’t have a creative solution until you sit down and try a creative solution. And if the first one doesn’t work, move it aside and let’s try the second. And if that one doesn’t work, move it aside and let’s try a third. But throwing up our hands and saying, no we cannot do this? That cannot be a right answer.
“You’re suggesting there could be a plan for this,” Maddow quipped.
There’s still plenty of time in this cycle to implement that plan and leave vitriol to the Russian bots. It would make them easier for humans to spot.
Watch the last six minutes for Warren’s off-the-cuff analysis of what Maddow describes as a “global economic cliff-dive” precipitated by the coronavirus outbreak. Someone ought to be availing themselves of her expertise. It was masterful.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.