Month: March 2020

This “principled libertarian” supports the spendthrift grifter Donald Trump as if he’s his fourth wife. But this is how he reacts to a national public health crisis:

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking from the Senate floor Thursday morning, Paul said that “I think we should not let fear or urgency cause us to lose our minds and cause us to act in an irresponsible fashion.”

“I’m not opposed to the emergency funding, but I think the emergency funding should be gotten from elsewhere in the budget,” Paul said.

“We want to respond and make sure we are providing resources to our medical professionals and researchers,” he added. “That’s important, and I support that.”

Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., spoke in opposition to Paul’s amendment, saying that it would “decimate programs that fund the foreign policy priorities of both the administration and the Congress.”

The Senate ended up voting 80-16 to kill the amendment, with a vote on the coronavirus bill scheduled for 1:45 p.m. on Thursday.Think big. Read local.Subscribers get exclusive news about local investigations and politics. 

Previously, Paul said he would hold up the coronavirus bill if he did not have the chance to present and get a vote on his amendment.

“If we don’t get the amendment, we can stay here all weekend for all I care,” Paul told Trish Turner of ABC News on Wednesday.

“We will have an amendment to pay for it,” Paul told me. “We’ve talked to the powers that be and let them know…that we’ll have an amendment to offset it. If we dont get the amendment, we can stay here all weekend for all I care.” Paul says he thinks he’ll get a vote, though.

Read this fatuously tone-deaf bullshit from Paul’s spokesperson:

Kelsey Cooper, Paul’s communications director, told The Courier Journal on Thursday that Paul was “elected to the Senate because Kentuckians know he will always put them first, and that means holding government accountable for wasteful spending that would be much better served funding dire and immediate issues here at home.”

“Sen. Paul understands the importance of funding specific issues, especially emergency needs, which is why he has consistently provided solutions to pay for them, as is the case today with his amendment,” Cooper said.

What a show-boating nincompoop. If we can afford to spend billions on unnecessary military spending and Trump’s stupid wall — which, you’ll notice, Paul didn’t tap for any money — we can afford to spend what it takes to keep millions of people from coming down with a novel virus and a bunch of elderly and health compromised citizens dying. He’ll do anything to be contrarian jerk.

Let’s see how this plays when the virus hits Kentucky. And it will.

He’s quietly selling his stake in one of his companies that benefited from Trump policies. And he’s pocketing some serious pocket change:

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has sold his stake in a company investing in Opportunity Zone projects offering tax breaks he had pushed for in Washington, sparking criticism that he was benefiting from his White House role.

A filing at the Office of Government Ethics released Monday shows that Kushner received permission to defer capital gains taxes on the sale of his stake in Cadre, a digital platform for smaller investors in commercial properties. Kushner’s holding in the private Cadre was worth between $25 million and $50 million, according to a financial disclosure report he filed with federal ethics officials last year.

A person familiar with the sale said Cadre asked Kushner last summer to consider selling because of worries that some potential new investors in the firm might raise conflict-of-interest issues. The person was not authorized to speak of Kushner’s personal finances and spoke only on a condition of anonymity.

Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, pushed for the Opportunity Zone tax breaks to be included in Trump’s 2017 tax overhaul. The breaks offer investors big cuts in capital gains taxes if they put money into businesses and buildings in 8,700 poor, struggling neighborhoods across the country that otherwise might not attract the money.

Cadre has said it plans to invest heavily in those neighborhoods, though it is unclear just how much it has done so. Kushner also has stakes in more than a dozen properties in Opportunity Zones owned by his family firm, Kushner Cos. It is not clear if the company has taken advantage of the breaks.

Three years ago his stake was 5 million. It’s estimated to be 25 million today.

Sweet.

Update: The first family is just one big grift.

BREAKING: We won a 3-year battle for Trump admin. public records.

The records help @Fahrenthold show that Trump’s company has charged the Secret Service more than *$628,000* since he took office.

Taxpayer money shouldn't be Trump's private bank account. https://t.co/3eiletbXJq

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) March 5, 2020

When Warren dropped out it became the cue for the Biden vs. Sanders fight to begin.

The media LOVE a two person fight. The main stream media can do horse races and “Dems in Disarray!” stories.

The cable news can dig into the numbers of voters and delegates by percentage points and demographic and go back to 2016 numbers. (I watched Rachel Maddow question Bernie on specific numbers of voter percentages by demographics on Super Tuesday vs. 2016 for an hour last night.)

The right-wing media love to see democratic candidates fight each other and will hype old fights and emphasize new ones. They use the classic. “Let’s you and him fight.”

When I see this happening my first impulse is to ask three questions,

1) Who wants ALL DEMOCRATIC CANDIDATES TO FAIL?

Trump, the GOP establishment, Russian propaganda and Right Wing media.

2)  What can we do to weaken THOSE people and groups?

Demand reinvigorated investigations into Trump’s crimes. 

We have seen the democratic establishment slow down on investigating Trump’s crimes. They are giving a number of reasons like, “The conviction didn’t work, the public has investigation fatigue.”  Some are giving the reason that the right wing uses to stop the investigation, “Let the public decide in the election.”

The election is MONTHS away. Trump is using EVERYTHING to slow and stop information from getting out.  We can’t let old norms of letting information about criminal behavior be held up until after the election because of the potential to bias the voters.

Pushing hard on investigation now is important because the main stream media has bought into the right wing narrative and will be holding up info using the, “We can’t reveal new information this close to the election it might bias the voters!” We can’t let that happen.

3) Who is our true enemy? 

One of the things we know is that it is easier to fight with people who are around us. Fighting with friends and family members can be especially brutal because they know us and know how to push our buttons. Lots of people don’t like conflict, especially if it involves people they love, and it is harder to take conflict with them verse people we hate or don’t care about.

Most people on the left aren’t going to go out and start arguing with supporters of Trump. They have already removed them from their Facebook feed. They don’t talk politics with them. So people go after the people that they see day to day.

To those people I want to say, when you start you discussion about one candidate vs. another stop and think, “Who can I attack on the right?” What group wants any Democratic candidate fail? What can I do now to weaken the right? Then make it specific action.

What action can I take TODAY to weaken the right instead of attacking my friends on the left?

Final Reminder:

 It will be easier to

beat Trump

if he’s not the President.

LLAP, 

Spocko

My God, this is so, so bad:

On the same day that the World Health Organization (WHO) pegged the global death rate of the novel coronavirus at 3.4 percent — a figure higher than earlier estimates — President Donald Trump went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and insisted it’s actually not that bad.

As cases spread across the United States (in part because of expanding testing) and states declare public health emergencies, Trump cited a “hunch” to make a case that the mortality rate is actually “a fraction of 1 percent.” He recklessly dismissed the WHO mortality rate as “really a false number,” used bogus numbers to compare the coronavirus to the much less deadly seasonal flu, and didn’t discourage people with Covid-19 (the disease caused by coronavirus) from going to work.

It was a blizzard of dangerous, irresponsible misinformation, all delivered within a span of just over two minutes. Hannity responded not by challenging the president, but by quickly changing the topic.

In this clip, Trump:
1. Denies WHO's coronavirus death rate based on “hunch"
2. Calls coronavirus "corona flu"
3. Suggests it's fine for people w/ Covid-19 to go to work
4. Compares coronavirus to "the regular flu," indicating he doesn't get the difference pic.twitter.com/uC9c03zX31

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 5, 2020

I think the 3.4 percent [number] is really a false number. Now, this is just my hunch, but based on and lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this, because a lot of people will have this and it is very mild. They will get better very rapidly, they don’t even see a doctor or call doctor, you never hear about those people so you can’t put them down in the category, in overall population in terms of this corona flu, or virus. So you just can’t do that.

So if, you know, 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 and then, when you do have a death like you had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York, you know, all of a sudden it seems like 3 or 4 percent, which is a very high number, as opposed to a fraction of 1 percent.

But again, they don’t know about the easy cases because the easy cases don’t go to the hospital, they don’t report to doctors or the hospital in many cases so I think that [the WHO] number is very high. I think the number, personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent.

Now, with the regular flu, we average from 27,000 to 77,000 deaths a year. Who would think that? I never knew that until six or eight weeks ago, I asked that question, I said, ‘How many people die of the flu?’ You know, you keep hearing about ‘flu shot, flu shot, take your flu shot,’ but how many people die of the flu? And they said, ‘sir, we lose between 27,000 and, you know, somewhere in the 70s’ — I think we went as high as 100,000 people died in 1990, if you can believe that, but a lot much people regardless. I think it averages about 36,000 people a year. So I said, ‘Wow, that is a percentage that is under 1 percent, very substantially.’ So it’d be interesting to see what difference is but again, a lot of people don’t report.

This is what happens when you put a narcissistic imbecile in the White House.

Keep in mind that he has been schooled over and over and over again the last couple of weeks about this virus and the danger involved and he just can’t get it. All he cares about is downplaying the danger so it doesn’t affect the stock market and his re-election. And the result is that he has failed miserably to deal with this crisis and has let it spread unabated despite having weeks of lead time to get prepared.

And he’s still doing it. Because he’s a vindictive ignoramus and will punish anyone who doesn’t lick his boots, everyone in the public health apparatus of the United States government is having to downplay the risk in ways that go beyond simply telling people not to panic. They have to say that everything’s going great and fluff the president for his “great leadership.”

Trump appears to have let the window for containing coronavirus in the U.S. close on purpose, because he thought that might buoy the stock market and thus his re-election odds. I lack the words. From an honoring-the-oath perspective, it’s probably the worst thing he’s done.

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) March 5, 2020

Warren is dropping out. It’s too bad. In my mind she would have been a truly great president. She has all the attributes: intelligence, energy, empathy and skills. But it was not to be.

“When voters were asked whom they’d pick if the primaries were held today, Mr. Biden came out ahead. When asked whom they would make president with the wave of a magic wand, without the candidate needing to win an election, voters went with Ms. Warren.”https://t.co/Z6N8W8zE0V

— Jonathan Korman 🟣 (@miniver) March 4, 2020

https://twitter.com/AnnieLinskey/status/1235536959608631296

Here is her statement:

I’m sure those of you of a certain age will know to what that final line alludes: Ted Kennedy’s famous line when he ended his campaign for president in 1980.

Warren holds the Kennedy seat in the Senate. He was known as the Lion of the Senate.

The Lioness will not let us down.

Flying in the U.S. is about to get better for all the wrong reasons.

Consider, in the vicinity of our acting president’s former home town:

NEW YORK — First, a lawyer who commutes between the suburbs and his midtown Manhattan office was diagnosed with the coronavirus. Then, his wife and two children tested positive, along with a neighbor who drove him to the hospital.

By Wednesday afternoon, another friend, his wife and three of their children were also infected.

In the span of 48 hours, what began as one family’s medical crisis had spiraled well beyond their Westchester County home, shuttering Jewish schools and synagogues and crystallizing the virus’s power to propel anxiety across a region that is among the nation’s most densely populated.

The acting infectious disease expert called into Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Thursday night. He claimed the death rate from the novel coronavirus  COVID-19 was not 3.4% as the World Health Organization estimated on Tuesday. WHO’s original estimate was 2.3%.

“Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-19 cases have died; by comparison, seasonal flu generally kills far fewer than 1 percent of those infected,” said WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a Tuesday briefing.

But the U.S. chief executive who believes his amazing genes keep him svelte and vigorous told Hannity he disagrees:

“Well, I think the 3.4% is really a false number,” Trump said. “Now, this is just my hunch but based on a lot of conversation with a lot of people who do this, because a lot of people will have this and it’s very mild. They’ll get better very rapidly. They don’t even see a doctor.”

“Personally, I would say the number is way under 1 percent,” the acting health expert told viewers.

The acting president is less worried about people’s health than about what a pandemic could do to economic output (CNN):

Trump continued by discarding his own administration’s advice to stay home if you’re feeling sick: “If 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, and then when you do have a death, like you’ve had in the state of Washington, like you had one in California, I believe you had one in New York.” No deaths have been reported in New York.

It’s difficult to wrap your head around the fact that the president called into a TV show & made a series of statements during a pandemic directly contradicting public health advice. The mind boggles at how reckless & dangerous that is. People who follow his bad advice could die.

— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) March 5, 2020

A friend returned last night from Arizona. By plane, naturally, like the gentleman who returned to Raleigh on February 22 after visiting that infamous Seattle nursing home. He just tested positive for the coronavirus.

Airlines are bracing for a turndown in travel. British Airways is reducing flights between London and New York. United Airlines is cutting April scheduled flights between the U.S. and Canada by 10 percent, and its remaining international schedule by 20 percent.

Josh Barro writes for New York magazine’s Intelligencer:

Demand for air travel is falling in part because many non-airline companies are telling employees to cancel or postpone travel plans. Google, Twitter, Amazon, Salesforce, Nestle, L’Oreal, Cargill, Ford, General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and many others have imposed restrictions on business trips. Company and industry conferences are being canceled. It will take longer to learn how the crisis has been affecting leisure travel — individuals don’t announce in the newspaper when they’re not traveling — but business travelers are especially important to airline profitability because they tend to buy expensive tickets in premium cabins and often book close to the date of travel.

Airlines are increasing ticketing flexibility and lowering fees for ticket changes. These adjustments could be just the beginning, Barro writes, but “won’t do much for the airlines if and when we come to a point in the epidemic where social distancing measures make reducing air travel a necessity in the U.S.”

I haven’t booked a flight for August’s Netroots Nation conference in Denver for obvious reasons. Another is that I was exposed to Legionnaires’ disease last September and was sick as a dog for a week before news broke of the outbreak. I didn’t have the pneumonia, but a 103 degree fever got my attention. The doctor believed I might have had Pontiac fever, a milder form of Legionnaires’. The incident put me on notice I am now of a certain age at risk from such infections.

On the upside, flying may soon resemble the days after the September 11 attacks, only without the SWAT teams with submachine guns. It was actually the best time to fly. I wrote once about departing Boston’s Airport of the Living Dead 10 days after the attacks. Walking down the empty jetway onto the plane, brother, was that flight attendant happy to see me.

“Hi! Welcome to Delta!” she said, smiling with more than normal enthusiasm.

“Can I help you find your seat?” she asked.

Then, looking at the empty plane, she said, “Sit anywhere you like.”

“What are you drinking? I’ll bring you two,” she said. “Complimentary.”

And she did.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

You have to read this whole thing to believe it:

When Anthony Fauci, clad in a white lab coat, invited an “NBC Nightly News” correspondent into his offices this week and described the coronavirus as an “outbreak” that was reaching “likely pandemic proportions,” the immunologist was acting as he long has during public health crises: delivering a fact-based warning to the public.

But at the White House, the more politically minded officials overseeing the administration’s response were irritated that Fauci — the veteran director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — had used the word “pandemic” without giving anyone on Vice President Pence’s staff a heads-up, according to two people familiar with the situation…

The White House is handling the rapidly expanding coronavirus as a public relations problem as much as a public health crisis. Officials are insisting on message discipline among government scientists and political aides alike, part of what they say is a responsible effort to try to calm jittery Americans and provide uniform and transparent information.

Trump — who has closely monitored news coverage and the gyrating financial markets, which he sees as a barometer of his reelection chances — has privately griped about what he considers to be hysteria from both the media and his own public health officials, according to people familiar with his complaints, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments. White House aides managing the response have also sought to focus on tamping down what they consider to be alarmist rhetoric.

[…]

As Trump toured a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health on Tuesday afternoon, he and Fauci appeared chummy. The president heaped praise on the infectious-diseases expert, telling him, “The world is extremely happy that you’re involved.”

But their bonhomie belied the tensions in an administration where the president tolerates only one star: himself. Public health experts and other government officials have found themselves struggling to manage the delicate balance of performing their jobs while not angering the president or his political aides.

A Tuesday profile of Fauci in Politico, for example, was generally viewed dismissively inside the West Wing as an unnecessary and self-promoting distraction amid the crisis.

Pence allies say the vice president is perhaps uniquely equipped to lead the administration’s response — which involves not only traditional crisis ­management and bureaucratic streamlining, but also managing Trump’s shifting moods.

Trump trusts Pence, who routinely seizes opportunities to demonstrate his fealty, and therefore the vice president is able to present the president with tough information in private, these people said.

Several people within and close to the Department of Health and Human Services said Pence’s office was micromanaging communications related to the administration’s response, and was overly concerned with day-to-day news cycles and public perception rather than long-term strategy about how to contain the growing outbreak.

Two HHS officials said Pence’s office had implemented a top-down structure by dictating to the agency how it should be communicating with the public, emphasizing that officials should be honest and open but refrain from using “alarmist” language about the outbreak in interviews.

Some close to the administration were advising Pence’s staff to worry less about day-to-day news cycles and headlines. Instead, they have counseled the vice president’s office to be fully transparent with the public about why certain mitigation measures may be needed, such as closing schools, rather than worrying whether those precautions would spook the public, adding that the best thing to ensure the president’s reelection was to stamp out the outbreak…

At a Monday roundtable meeting at the White House, Trump prodded pharmaceutical executives about how quickly they could get a coronavirus vaccine to market. He appeared not to understand the vaccine testing process, despite efforts by some executives to clarify the timeline, and incorrectly asserted that a vaccine could be ready “over the next few months” or “within a year.”

It fell to Fauci to correct the president.

“A year to a year and a half,” Fauci said.

Later on in the conversation, Trump chimed in, “I like the sound of a couple of months better, I must be honest with you.”

Fauci then asked that the pharmaceutical executives educate the president.

“Would you make sure you get the president the information that a vaccine that you make and start testing in a year is not a vaccine that’s deployable?” Fauci said. “So he’s asking the question, ‘When is it going to be deployable?’ And that is going to be, at the earliest, a year to a year and a half, no matter how fast you go.”

But on Tuesday, during a gathering of the National Association of Counties, Trump presented a rosy outlook. “We’re moving at a maximum speed to develop the therapies, not only the vaccines, but therapies,” he said. “Therapies is sort of another word for cure.

And he claimed that during his meeting with pharmaceutical executives, he had pressed the leaders to expedite the vaccine process.

“I said, ‘Do me a favor. Speed it up, speed it up,’ he said. “And they will. They are working really hard and quick.”

Every time I see Fauci he’s struggling to find words to describe what’s going on without offending the president. It’s stunning to watch it. This phenomenon may not be the sole reason we are behind the curve in dealing with this outbreak. But it sure as hell isn’t helping.

Update:

We know, irrefutably, one thing about the coronavirus in the United States: The number of cases reported in every chart and table is far too low.

The data are untrustworthy because the processes we used to get them were flawed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s testing procedures missed the bulk of the cases. They focused exclusively on travelers, rather than testing more broadly, because that seemed like the best way to catch cases entering the country.

California just declared a health emergency.

We are in trouble.

It is important to fight for the issues, advance your argument, and grow the cause.

To do so, the questions that organizers or anyone seeking to advance a cause or campaign should always ask themselves are: who else can we include, and how can we listen and include them?

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 4, 2020

If you are interested in hearing my thoughts on the primary you can listen in to Sam Seder’s show on Ring of Fire later in the week. (I appear on it every week, btw.)

I don’t really feel like writing a lot about it. I voted for Warren and I’m disappointed, of course. But for me, that’s just business as usual. My choices almost never win so I long ago accepted that I’m just not in the American political mainstream. Primaries are more than just contests, they are the voters’ way of sending messages to the Party about their priorities and what they care about. So even if your choice didn’t win in the end, they will have had an effect on the platform and the issues.

As for last night, I guess I’m alone in remembering that it was just a couple of months ago that we assumed the fight would come down to Sanders vs Biden. They had been the top two contenders for most of the last year. Biden’s weakness in the first three elections made people think it might not go that way, but it shouldn’t be such a shock that it came back to that again. It’s what we saw throughout 2019 and it just reasserted itself last night.

I’m waiting to see how it all unfolds and will vote for whomever the electorate decides will face Trump. Nothing in my political life has ever been more important.

And just when we thought Donald Trump the great peacemaker was going to win that Nobel Prize:

The United States conducted an airstrike against Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday just hours after President Trump spoke by phone to one of the group’s senior leaders.

Trump spoke to Taliban political leader Abdul Ghani Baradar on Tuesday, just days after the signing of a U.S.-Taliban peace deal. Trump said the two “had a good conversation” and agreed on “no violence, we don’t want violence.”

But violence across Afghanistan has spiked in recent days following a Taliban announcement Monday that it had resumed offensive operations against Afghan security forces.

A drop in violence was a critical precondition in the lead-up to the deal’s signing, but the agreement did not specify violence levels moving forward. After the signing, U.S. officials have repeatedly said, their forces reserve the right to defend themselves and their allies.

The U.S. strike Wednesday was carried out after Taliban fighters attacked an Afghan security force outpost in Helmand, according to Col. Sonny Leggett, the U.S. military spokesman in Kabul.

“This was a defensive strike to disrupt the attack. This was our 1st strike against the Taliban in 11 days,” Leggett said in a statement on Twitter.

Over the past 24 hours, the Taliban has conducted 30 attacks that have killed four civilians and 11 security force members and wounded 18 others, said Nasrat Rahimi, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior Affairs.

In one attack in Kunduz, at least eight soldiers were killed overnight, said Ghulam Rabbani, a local lawmaker.

The attack started around midnight and lasted more than two hours, and “the sound of rocket fire and light weapons could be heard throughout the city,” he said.AD

Following the U.S. airstrike Wednesday, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen said the group “is committed to act on all parts of the deal one by one to control the intensity of war.” He added: “The opposite side should also remove the hurdles in the deal to pave the way for complete peace.”

Shaheen did not respond to requests to clarify what he meant by “hurdles in the deal.”

Leggett said Taliban leadership promised the international community it would “reduce violence and not increase attacks.” He called on the group to “stop needless attacks and uphold their commitments. As we have demonstrated, we will defend our partners when required.”

The Afghan government and Taliban leaders are also locked in a disagreement about a controversial prisoner exchange that could determine the future of peace talks.

Don’t worry. It’s all good:

There's always a tweet, striking deals with the Taliban edition https://t.co/2MZqGlE5QC

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 3, 2020