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Month: March 2020

Onward, Randian soldiers

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 24, 2020
Moloch scene from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927).

American conservatives faced with addressing the COVID-19 pandemic are grappling with the Trolley problem before our very eyes. The classic thought experiment in ethics involves a runaway trolley headed towards five people who will be killed on the track ahead. But you can throw a switch sending the trolley down a side track where only one person will be killed. What would you do?

As an American conservative, you save the trolley company.

A variation of the Trolley problem involves pushing a large stranger onto the tracks to stop the trolley, saving the five.

Molly Crockett once reflected in the Guardian why test subjects find pushing someone onto the tracks less acceptable:

Treating others as individuals with their own rights, wishes and needs, rather than simply objects to be used at will, is a key aspect of being a good social partner. And there is evidence that people strongly distrust those who use others as a means to an end. Our moral intuitions seem to accord with this principle.

Eric Levitz writes at New York magazine that the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party has proposed a plan to keep workers paid during the pandemic (and at home amidst Boris Johnson’s national lockdown announced Monday). They would cover 80 percent of workers’ salaries for the duration of the crisis and forbid companies that accept government funds from laying off workers. Budget, smudget, “even they recognize that social welfare must take precedence over budgetary concerns in the context of a historically sudden and deep economic crisis.”

By the contours of the Republican proposal in the U.S. Senate, American conservatives are looking out first for corporations and CEOs. Republicans would give the man who oversaw the Trump Foundation and Trump University oversight of a $500 billion-dollar corporate slush fund with no guarantees he wouldn’t use government funds to help “some of the greatest people,” including “politically connected corporations, GOP donors, and even President Trump’s private business.” There will be “incredible deals,” Trump claimed without evidence, that will “increase exponentially.”

They’d save the trolley company

Levitz explains the difference between the Tory and Republican plans:

Therefore, the gulf between the GOP’s response to the crisis and that of Britain’s Tories is not a product of public opinion or crass electoral concerns. Rather, it reflects the fact that the Republicans are not a normal conservative party, but a uniquely reactionary political formation. No other major party in the Western world rejects the concept of universal health care or disputes the reality of man-made climate change. The GOP is more adamantly opposed to the downward redistribution of resources, or any measure that tips the balance of power between workers and bosses in the former’s direction, than any center-right party in the developed world.

Donald Trump is already toying with ignoring medical advice and suggesting he might lift social distancing recommendations after 15 days to get the shuttered U.S. economy back up and running. The U.S. will “soon be open for business, very soon, a lot sooner than the three or four months that somebody was suggesting,” Trump said at Monday’s coronavirus briefing.

“We can’t let the cure be worse than the problem,” Trump said.

Trump will have support for that proposition.

The tweet above has been deleted.

An article in The Federalist Monday suggested (also without evidence) that damage to the economy would kill more people in the long run. The author cast contemplating sacrificing lives to save the economy as an almost Randian act of courage:

Of course, it sounds very callous to talk about considering the costs. It seems harsh to ask whether the nation might be better off letting a few hundred thousand people die. Probably for that reason, few have been willing to do so publicly thus far. Yet honestly facing reality is not callous, and refusing even to consider whether the present response constitutes an even greater evil than the one it intends to mitigate would be cowardly.

I’ve written often about the Midas cult’s worship of mammon. But it’s still stunning that people are so blinded by greed they would practice their idolatry in public and think themselves both mainstream and moral.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

He alone has fixed it

Published by digby on March 23, 2020

If I’m reading the tea leaves correctly it appears Trump plans to announce that he has personally cured the virus with hydroxychloroquine, the epidemic is pretty much over and everything can now go back to normal. Because he wants that to be true:

Here’s a story from the Daily Beast about who he’s getting advice from:

As the country grapples with the growing number of coronavirus cases and related deaths, President Donald Trump is telling his advisers that he finds the current state of the economy unacceptable and has agitated for yet another controversial course correction.

According to two people who have spoken to the president, Trump has demanded officials put together a plan so that the economic fallout of the public-health emergency does not drag on for even “one month longer,” even as his own health professionals warn that the virus’ spread could last far longer than that.

More than a dozen White House officials, outside advisers, longtime associates of the president, and Trump campaign staffers all described to The Daily Beast a growing sense of urgency in reversing the steep declines in the stock markets—the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dipped below levels when Trump took office—and the impending spike in the unemployment rate. That urgency has been apparent in the president as well, as he has begun pressing informal advisers, TV personalities, and MAGA loyalists outside his administration for their ideas on how to stem economic losses related to the spread of coronavirus, which various economists have projected could be a 30 percent reduction in GDP.

“I had a very serious conversation with [President Trump] and with [top economic adviser] Larry Kudlow and with [Treasury Secretary Steve] Mnuchin as well,” relayed Art Laffer, a longtime conservative economist, who said he had three missed calls from Trump on Thursday night before the two connected. During the phone call, Laffer says he advised the president to back a payroll tax-cut waiver, to guarantee liquidity for successful companies, and that “we should not be bailing out insolvent firms right now. I also advised him against ‘helicopter money.’”

“The president understood exactly what I was saying,” Laffer said.

The change in emphasis illustrates the degree to which Trump continues to view the crises of his presidency—and his own political well being—on short term timelines and through the prism of dollars and cents. It has alarmed health officials, who worry that the administration will abandon measures that have worked in other countries, just as America begins to get into the thick of its own crisis. 

Trump’s eagerness to soften the across-the-board health care recommendations that his own coronavirus task force has pushed has been fed by like-minded allies, as well. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who penned a much-discussed oped from Italy warning Americans to take the virus seriously, says that he has “bombarded” White House officials in recent days encouraging them to start putting in place guidelines to encourage economic activity. 

Oh good. Dr. Newt’s on the case.

I know I’ve been harping on this all day long. Actually all week long. But I think we have to bear witness to what’s happening right now. This is an unprecedented crisis and the president of the United States is completely over his head. I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen.

His daddy’s dead, now it’s the taxpayer’s turn to bail him out

Published by digby on March 23, 2020

Another highlight of Trump’s White House Coronavirus Campaign Rally yesterday inadvertently revealed exactly why Trump is pushing for bailouts and sending peple back to work as soon as possible. Profits.

Check out the little dance he performed to obscure the fact that he is corruptly benefiting from his presidency and will undoubtedly benefit big time from the stimulus.

Q    Mr. President, the bill that is being contemplated by the Senate right now has a fund that has hundreds of billions of dollars for the Treasury Department to use to bail out states and localities, as well as specific industries, such as cruises and hotels.  Will you commit publicly that none of that taxpayer money will go towards your own personal properties?

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, you know, every time I do it — like, for instance, I committed publicly that I wouldn’t take the $450,000 salary.  It’s a lot of money.  Whether you’re rich or not, it’s a lot of money.  And I did it and nobody cared.  Nobody — nobody said, “Thank you.”  Nobody said, “Thank you very much.”

Now, I didn’t commit legally.  I just said, “I don’t want it.  I don’t want my salary.  I work for zero.  I don’t want my salary.”  Nobody said, “Oh, thank you very much.”  But I guarantee you, if I ever took it, you would go out after me — you, in particular, would go out after me like crazy.

So I have no idea what they’re talking about with regard to the one element.  Everything is changing, just so you understand.  It’s all changing.  But I have no idea.  But every time I commit to do something — I’ve committed to do my — look, I ran and everybody knew I was a rich person.  I built a great company and people knew that.  But I agreed to do things I didn’t have to.  I still don’t have to.

But my company — I told the kids, who are running it — I’m not running it.  But I told them, “Don’t deal with foreign companies.  Don’t deal…”  I didn’t have to do that.  I could have just ran and I have — I didn’t have to do that at all.  And instead of being thanked for, again, not agreeing to do, but just not doing it, I get excoriated all the time.

So I’ve learned — let’s just see what happens because we have to save some of these great companies.  They can be great companies, literally, in a matter of weeks.  We have to save them.

Yeah, please.

Q    Did you sell stocks Mr. President?  Did you or your family sell stocks in advance of this epidemic?

THE PRESIDENT:  No, I don’t have stock.  I own things that —

Q    Did you make any alternates to investments in advance of this pandemic?

THE PRESIDENT:  No.  I didn’t even think about it.  You know, it’s very interesting that you ask a question like that — you know, a nasty question.  And yet, it deserves to asked, I guess.

What I’ve done, by deciding to run — and I knew this.  I knew this the first day.  I said, “If I win, it’s going to going to cost a lot of money.”  It cost me billions of dollars to become President — to be President of the United States — in things that would normally be run at a certain thing, even people that don’t like me because they think I’m too tough on the border.  Now, some people love me for it; other people don’t like me at all.  You know, it’s very funny.

My wife — we were at a charity event in New York City.  I had just announced that I was running.  And we were at the Robin Hood Foundation at the Convention Center — which now we’re going to be converting to hospitals for Governor Cuomo, right?  And I was walking in and there was a smattering of boos and a smattering of cheers; I was getting both.  And our very popular First Lady — she’s turned out to be very popular –people have great respect for her.  But our very popular First Lady said to me, “Huh, that’s strange.  I’ve never heard anybody booing you.”

That was very early on — because I think I called for strong borders or I called for something that other people don’t like, you know.  And I knew this would happen.  I knew it was going to happen.  But the fact that I ran — and I knew as soon as I announced.  When I ran, I said, “It’s going to cost me a fortune.”  Not only in terms of actual costs — look at my legal costs.  You people, everybody — everybody is suing me.  I’m being sued by people that I never even heard of.  I’m being sued all over the place — and doing very well, but it’s unfair.

But I’ll say this: In terms of running for President — and I don’t think rich people — Michael Bloomberg spent now, it was determined, almost a billion dollars and look what happened.  I think it’s very hard for rich people to run for office.  It’s — it’s far more costly.  It’s just a — it’s a very tough thing.

Now, with all of that being said, I’m so glad I’ve done it.  Because, you know, there are a lot rich people around.  I’ve got a lot of rich friends, but they can’t help and they can’t do what I’ve done, in terms of helping this country.  We are — we are doing things.  We got sidetracked by the invisible enemy.

But, you know — what — when you look at what we’ve done, I said before, with the veterans, with — with all of the things we’ve done, especially Choice.  But when you look at all of — Accountability — when you look at all of the things that we’ve done — rebuilding the military; the tax cuts, which — thank goodness we had the tax cuts because we had cushion.  Oh, without that, this would have been catastrophic.  We had a big cushion.

I mean, with all of the losses that you’ve seen in the stock market, we’re basically back — and with this horrible thing, if this would have happened before, you would have had nothing left.  This was all cushion.

But I will say that it cost me billions of dollars to be President, and especially with all the money I could have made for the last three, four years — and I didn’t because I was being President.  I have no interest in it.

I’m allowed to.  You know, I don’t know if you know it — George Washington, they say he was a rich man, supposedly.  Relatively rich.  And he ran the presidency and he also ran his business.  They say he had two desks.

Nobody complained until I came along.  I got elected as a rich person, but nobody complained until I came along.  So it cost me billions of dollars to be President and I am so happy I did it.  Because who cares?  Who cares?

I’m really happy with the job we’re doing.  And I’m glad that this team and me are here for this horrible thing.  I mean, it’s — a number of people have said it, but — and I feel it, actually: I’m a wartime president.  This is a war.  This is a war.  A different kind of war than we’ve ever had.

And when you look at the economics of the war — in the past, we used to stimulate to get people jobs.  Now we’re stimulating to protect people because we don’t want them to work, because we want them to stay away from each other.  We don’t want them to gather.  Social — social gathering.  So we’re paying billions of dollars more than that so that they don’t gather, they don’t — because we have to defeat this virus.  And we will.

But it cost me billions and billions of dollars to be President and I am so happy I did it.

He’s going to take the money.

The man has been bailed out of every screw-up he’s ever made and this is the crowning glory of his career. Daddy’s dead and he’s run through his inheritance. Now the taxpayers are stepping up.

He is one of the dumbest leaders in world history but he has a feral survival instinct and a lot of luck. He’ll come out of this richer than he was going in, just you watch.

The ONLY way to save the economy is to turn back the virus

Published by digby on March 23, 2020

With the president and his henchmen starting to waver on combatting the public health crisis in favor of prematurely lifting the CDC guidelines so potential carriers can get out there and infect untold numbers of people unnecessarily, this piece in the New York Times over the week-end is very sobering. They would be doing exactly the opposite of what needs to be done.

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

Whether they can keep it suppressed remains to be seen. But for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.

There is a chance to stop the coronavirus. This contagion has a weakness.

Although there are incidents of rampant spread, as happened on the cruise ship Diamond Princess, the coronavirus more often infects clusters of family members, friends and work colleagues, said Dr. David L. Heymann, who chairs an expert panel advising the World Health Organization on emergencies.

No one is certain why the virus travels in this way, but experts see an opening nonetheless. “You can contain clusters,” Dr. Heymann said. “You need to identify and stop discrete outbreaks, and then do rigorous contact tracing.”

But doing so takes intelligent, rapidly adaptive work by health officials, and near-total cooperation from the populace. Containment becomes realistic only when Americans realize that working together is the only way to protect themselves and their loved ones.

In interviews with a dozen of the world’s leading experts on fighting epidemics, there was wide agreement on the steps that must be taken immediately.

Those experts included international public health officials who have fought AIDS, malaria, tuberculosis, flu and Ebola; scientists and epidemiologists; and former health officials who led major American global health programs in both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Americans must be persuaded to stay home, they said, and a system put in place to isolate the infected and care for them outside the home. Travel restrictions should be extended, they said; productions of masks and ventilators must be accelerated, and testing problems must be resolved.

But tactics like forced isolation, school closings and pervasive GPS tracking of patients brought more divided reactions.

It was not at all clear that a nation so fundamentally committed to individual liberty and distrustful of government could learn to adapt to many of these measures, especially those that smack of state compulsion.

“The American way is to look for better outcomes through a voluntary system,” said Dr. Luciana Borio, who was director of medical and biodefense preparedness for the National Security Council before it was disbanded in 2018.

[…]

What follows are the recommendations offered by the experts interviewed by The Times.

The White House holds frequent media briefings to describe the administration’s progress against the pandemic, often led by President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence, flanked by a rotating cast of officials.

Many experts, some of whom are international civil servants, declined to speak on the record for fear of offending the president. But they were united in the opinion that politicians must step aside and let scientists both lead the effort to contain the virus and explain to Americans what must be done.

Just as generals take the lead in giving daily briefings in wartime — as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did during the Persian Gulf war — medical experts should be at the microphone now to explain complex ideas like epidemic curves, social distancing and off-label use of drugs.

The microphone should not even be at the White House, scientists said, so that briefings of historic importance do not dissolve into angry, politically charged exchanges with the press corps, as happened again on Friday.

[Some of them say there should be no discussion of what went wrong which might make sense if the president were someone other than Trump. But because he is an inveterate liar, that would be giving in to his propaganda which will kill people.]

The next priority, experts said, is extreme social distancing.

If it were possible to wave a magic wand and make all Americans freeze in place for 14 days while sitting six feet apart, epidemiologists say, the whole epidemic would sputter to a halt.

The virus would die out on every contaminated surface and, because almost everyone shows symptoms within two weeks, it would be evident who was infected. If we had enough tests for every American, even the completely asymptomatic cases could be found and isolated.

The crisis would be over.

It’s pulling teeth to get some people to abide by the voluntary guidelines. Cities are having to close down public spaces because people simply refuse to observe the social distancing rules that say you need to stay 6 feet away from anyone you don’t live with when you go out in public. If the administration and the Republicans decide that it’s “worth it” to let the virus run wild it will mean culling the herd by forcing the health care system to make the horrifying decision to allow the elderly and already infirm to die for lack of resources. In America. In 2020.

Here’s what’s happening in Italy already:

The mayor of one town complained that doctors were forced to decide not to treat the very old, leaving them to die. In another town, patients with coronavirus-caused pneumonia were being sent home. Elsewhere, a nurse collapsed with her mask on, her photograph becoming a symbol of overwhelmed medical staff.

If not, even hospitals in developed countries with the world’s best health care risk becoming triage wards, forcing ordinary doctors and nurses to make extraordinary decisions about who may live and who may die. Wealthy northern Italy is facing a version of that nightmare already.

“This is a war,” said Massimo Puoti, the head of infectious medicine at Milan’s Niguarda hospital, one of the largest in Lombardy, the northern Italian region at the heart of the country’s coronavirus epidemic.

He said the goal was to limit infections, stave off the epidemic and learn more about the nature of the enemy. “We need time.”

Italy’s experience has now underscored the need to act decisively — quickly and early — well before case numbers even appear to reach crisis levels. By that point, it may already be too late to prevent a spike in cases that stretches systems beyond their limits.

With Italy having appeared to pass that threshold, its doctors are finding themselves in an extraordinary position largely unseen by developed European nations with public health care systems since the Second World War.

Regular doctors are suddenly shifting to wartime footing. They face questions of triage as surgeries are canceled, respirators become rare resources, and officials propose converting abandoned exposition spaces into vast intensive care wards…

Giorgo Gori, the mayor of Bergamo, said that in some cases in Lombardy the gap between resources and the enormous influx of patients “forced the doctors to decide not to intubate some very old patients,” essentially leaving them to die.

“Were there more intensive care units,” he added, “it would have been possible to save more lives.”

Dr. Di Marco disputed the claim of his mayor, saying that everyone received care, though he added, “it is evident that in this moment, in some cases, it could happen that we have a comparative evaluation between patients.”

On Thursday, Flavia Petrini, the president of the Italian College of Anesthesia, Analgesia, Resuscitation and Intensive Care, said her group had issued guidelines on what to do in a period that bordered on wartime “catastrophe medicine.”

“In a context of grave shortage of health resources,” the guidelines say, intensive care should be given to “patients with the best chance of success” and those with the “best hope of life” should be prioritized.

The guidelines also say that in “in the interests of maximizing benefits for the largest number,” limits could be put on intensive care units to reserve scarce resources to those who have, first, “greater likelihood of survival and secondly who have more potential years of life.”

This could happen anyway since the Trump administration already screwed the pooch on this. He refuses to invoke the Defense Production Act because his big business buddies want to price gouge the states and municipalities. But this outcome is guaranteed if he follows through on lifting the guidelines and issuing bogus happy talk that we’ve “turned the corner” or that they’ve found a “new way” to combat the virus.

Trump doesn’t listen to Lindsey Graham, he just pretends to when Graham says something he likes. But Graham is right about this:

They need to shut him up, STAT

Published by digby on March 23, 2020

Fergawdsakes:

Health officials across the world are issuing warnings over the use of antimalarial drugs after President Trump’s comments about treating the coronavirus with them sparked panic-buying and overdoses.

In recent days, thousands of consumers across Africa and South Asia rushed to stockpile chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, drugs that are usually used to combat malaria, vacuuming up supplies in cities in the developing world, sending prices skyrocketing and prompting panicked warnings from local authorities.

I don’t know what to say about this. It’s just appalling.

Here’s the latest on the various trials of these drugs for possible treatment:

Three months into the novel coronavirus pandemic, it’s still unclear which drugs could combat the viral disease and which won’t — despite public figures like President Donald Trump extolling the unproven promise of some medications. With public health on the line, the scientific community is searching for answers faster than ever.

When the novel coronavirus tore through China in January and February, researchers and doctors quickly launched dozens of clinical trials to test existing medications against COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But the research done so far in China hasn’t generated enough data for conclusive answers.

“We commend the researchers around the world who have come together to systemically evaluate experimental therapeutics,” said Tedros Adhanom, director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), in a press briefing. “Multiple small trials with different methodologies may not give us the clear, strong evidence we need about which treatments help to save lives.”

In their fight for “clear, strong evidence,” the WHO is launching a multicountry clinical trial to test four drug regimens as COIVD-19 therapies: an experimental antiviral drug called remdesivir, the antimalarial drug chloroquine (or the related hydroxychloroquine), a combination of two HIV drugs, and those same two HIV drugs along with the anti-inflammatory interferon beta.

The trial will be flexible and could add or drop additional treatment approaches or locations over time. In that way, it appears to be similar to the adaptive trial that the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases started in the US in February, which initially set out to test remdesivir but could expand to other drugs. The US is not currently involved in the WHO trial.

Hundreds of other clinical trials are underway, and other groups also continue to test the medications that the WHO selected — here’s a breakdown of some of the drugs that researchers are zeroing in on.

Studies found that hydroxychloroquine and the related chloroquine can stop the novel coronavirus from infecting in cells in the lab, and anecdotal evidence suggests that it may help patients with COVID-19. Because the drug has been around for decades as an antimalarial treatment, scientists have experience with it.

“It’s a known medicine,” says Caleb Skipper, an infectious disease postdoctoral fellow at the University of Minnesota who’s working on a smaller trial of the drug. “Little blips of lab data over the last several years show this drug has activity against viruses.”

Skipper’strial is looking to see if hydroxychloroquine can prevent people who are exposed to the virus from developing severe disease. They’re hoping to recruit health care workers, who are at a high risk of exposure to the virus, to participate in the trial.

The goal, Skipper says, is to get the drug in people’s systems early. “Particularly with viruses, the earlier you inhibit their ability to replicate the better off you’re going to be. If a drug is going to work, it is more likely to work early on in disease,” he says. “If you catch someone really early and provide treatment early virus will have replicated a lot less.”

The existing evidence on hydroxychloroquine points in the right direction, Skipper says, but all of the research on the drug is still in very early stages. “It’s a long ways from being proven effective,” he says.

Despite the limited evidence available, public figures, including Elon Musk and Trump, are pushing the message that hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine are the solutions to the outbreaks. “I feel good about it. That’s all it is, just a feeling, you know, smart guy. I feel good about it,” Trump said in a press conference on Friday.

As a result of the hype, demand for the drug has spiked, and manufacturers are increasing production. In Nigeria, two people overdosed on the medication after Trump said it could cure COVID-19. People who take it for other conditions, like lupus, are struggling to access their usual supply.

To be very clear, there is still no conclusive evidence that chloroquine will treat COVID-19. And treatments that appear promising based on anecdotal reports or “feelings” often don’t end up working, which scientists know well: the majority of clinical trials fail, and they’re seeing that reinforced in coronavirus treatment efforts.

They have got to shut him up about this. He’s been a disaster at containing and mitigating the virus, but now he’s actively making people who don’t have the virus sick by talking up unproven therapies for COVID-10 that people with other diseases need.

They are talking about killing millions

Published by digby on March 23, 2020

“It’s gonna be a victory that, in my opinion, will happen much sooner than originally expected.” Donald Trump, press conference, Sunday March 22, 2020

We haven’t even got enough fucking masks or ventilators. We’re still not up to speed on testing and critical cases and deaths are rising exponentially. This crisis is just beginning and they are getting ready to throw in the towel:

Here’s the former CEO of Goldman Sachs:

The New York Times reports:

President Trump on Sunday night said that the government would reassess the recommended period for keeping businesses shut and millions of workers at home after this week, amid millions of job losses caused by the efforts to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus.

“WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” Mr. Trump tweeted in all capital letters shortly before midnight. “AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!”

Officials have said that the initial 15-day period for social distancing — limiting close contact between people by banning gatherings, closing schools and offices, encouraging remote work and urging people to maintain a six-foot distance from one another — is vital to slowing the spread of the virus, for which more than 30,000 people in the United States have tested positive. The 15-day period would end Monday.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, an infectious diseases expert and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, has said in interviews that he believed that it would take several more weeks until people can start going about their lives in a more normal fashion. Other infectious disease experts suggest even harsher measures than social distancing are required to truly beat back the outbreaks in the United States.

But at the White House, in recent days, there has been a growing sentiment that medical experts were allowed to set policy that has hurt the economy, and there has been a push to find ways to let people start returning to work. Some Republican lawmakers have also pleaded with the White House to find ways to restart the economy, as financial markets continue to slide and job losses for April could be in the millions.

Vice President Mike Pence indicated on Sunday at a White House briefing about the virus that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would issue new guidelines on Monday, allowing some people who have been exposed to the coronavirus to resume working outside their homes if they wear masks.

The move could set the stage for states with relatively low numbers of cases to begin to unfreeze their economies, while large states like California and New York — where there are more cases and where state officials have ordered nonessential businesses to close for the time being — could continue remaining in a holding pattern.

While some business owners are eager to end the more draconian measures that have been put in place, others would rather endure the pain at once rather than face repeated, disruptive orders to stop activities.

Mr. Trump’s tweet cast doubt on his confidence in the path to fighting the virus that he so reluctantly approved. For two months he largely dismissed the warnings that the virus would reach American shores, for fear of causing economic disruption, predicting that cases would go down from a handful to “zero” in a few days.

Only when the disruption came anyway, in the form of a historic stock market sell-off, was he convinced to act.

But there could be consequences to ending the measures too quickly. The recent rise of cases in Hong Kong, after there had been an easing of the spread of the virus, is something of an object lesson about how ending strict measures too soon can have dangerous consequences.

In a tweet on Monday morning, Thomas Bossert, the former homeland security adviser who for weeks has been vocal about the need for the U.S. government to take stricter measures, said, “Sadly, the numbers now suggest the U.S. is poised to take the lead in #coronavirus cases. It’s reasonable to plan for the US to top the list of countries with the most cases in approximately 1 week. This does NOT make social intervention futile. It makes it imperative!”

Whatever the president chooses to do, there will be businesses still fearful to reopen — and employees fearful of going to work — as new cases of people infected with the virus are still being diagnosed by the thousands each day.

And the president is facing potential pushback from the public health experts in his administration.

After being slow to publicly react to the spread of the virus, the Trump administration swung in the other direction at the end of February, entrusting the health experts whose counsel had not been heeded in the preceding weeks and letting them help set the policies that hundreds of millions of people would be urged to follow.

But Mr. Trump has become frustrated with Dr. Fauci’s blunt approach at the briefing lectern, which often contradicts things the president has just said, according to two people familiar with the dynamic.

Mr. Trump knows that Dr. Fauci is seen as credible with a large swath of the public and with journalists, and so he has given him more leeway to contradict him than he has other officials. But the president has also resisted portraying the virus as an existential threat in a way that the public health experts have.

In an interview with Science Magazine that was posted online on Sunday evening, Dr. Fauci responded to a question about how he had managed not to get fired by saying that, to Mr. Trump’s “credit, even though we disagree on some things, he listens.”

“He goes his own way,” Dr. Fauci continued. “He has his own style. But on substantive issues, he does listen to what I say.”

But he also said there was a limit to what he could do when Mr. Trump said things that were not true during those briefings.

“I can’t jump in front of the microphone and push him down,” Mr. Fauci said of Mr. Trump’s erroneous statements. “OK, he said it. Let’s try and get it corrected for the next time.”

In an interview with Fox Business Network, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, stressed that the U.S. economy was still functioning.

“I’ve seen a bunch of fake news over the last couple of days about a complete shut down of the economy,” he said. “The president has not made that decision.”

But the president’s interest in potentially easing some of the social behavior guidelines met with pushback from one of his close allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

“President Trump’s best decision was stopping travel from China early on,” Mr. Graham tweeted on Monday. “I hope we will not undercut that decision by suggesting we back off aggressive containment policies within the United States.”

David McIntosh, the president of the anti-tax Club for Growth, suggested Friday that the damage to the economy was severe.

“We need to act to contain the virus, but at the same time more people would be hurt and have terrible health and life consequences if they don’t reopen the economy,” Mr. McIntosh said. “They have to put an end to the social distancing some time in the near future to restore economic activity.”

Let’s face it. Whatever these idiots are saying, Trump still believes that this is all some plot to destroy his re-election chances. He believes he has to get the economy up and running so everyone will think he did a great job. That’s how he approached the crisis in the first two months and now he’s going back to it.

Apparently, he thinks the whole world is in on it, letting people die all over the planet, in order to thwart his ambitions.

If he succeeds in telling his red-hatted cult that they can ignore all this and go back to work many more people will contract the virus, it will grow even more rapidly and many of them will die and they’ll take a bunch of the rest of us with them. And what he doesn’t realize is that many of them will be his own voters, as they will have to start triaging patients and people over 60 will be left to die in order to save the younger ones. That is not hyperbole. It’s happening right now in Italy.

Larry Kudlow is a drunken fool and the rest of these greedheads proved long ago that they care nothing for anyone but themselves. But it’s no surprise that they would end up making the calls when you elect a deranged, ignorant, conman to run the most powerful country on earth.

Update:

A rally around the flag effect in this “war” will kill us

Published by digby on March 23, 2020

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham says it’s wrong to look back at all the mistakes her boss has made in responding to the coronavirus pandemic. She spoke to Fox News’ Howard Kurtz on Sunday morning:

I don’t know why the media has to continue to look backwards. The president didn’t have a crystal ball there. And he has acted appropriately. He has acted appropriately from the beginning. He started back in January. And he has only ramped up those efforts. There’s no reason to go backwards and figure out tick-tocks of what happened when.

That’s very self-serving, but I’ve also heard some thoughtful people express trepidation about holding the president responsible for his mistakes during the emergency. Some feel that one should fall in line behind the president when something like this happens, just as a matter of principle. Others think it’s wrong to cast doubt on his abilities and make members of the public even more nervous than they already are. And then there’s the view that criticizing him may backfire politically on the Democrats because the public doesn’t want to see partisanship during a time of crisis.

I think all those arguments are wrong. Holding an elected official accountable at any time is the right thing to do in a democracy, and pointing out that he is doing a terrible job — when he is obviously doing a terrible job — makes people less nervous. Of course the president’s allies will complain about partisanship if their political opponents point out his failures. But unfortunately, they will refuse to hold him accountable themselves no matter what he does.

In any case, we have enough lies in our political culture already. We are drowning in them. If we can do nothing else in this surreal situation, we must strive to adhere to the truth as we see it or we’ll lose all sense of reason. And the reality, of course, is that President Trump is making things worse.

This should come as no surprise. As Maggie Haberman and Peter Baker of the New York Times put it:

Mr. Trump’s performance on the national stage in recent weeks has put on display the traits that Democrats and some Republicans consider so jarring — the profound need for personal praise, the propensity to blame others, the lack of human empathy, the penchant for rewriting history, the disregard for expertise, the distortion of facts, the impatience with scrutiny or criticism. For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know.

What we know is that he has bungled the job from the beginning. While the White House press secretary may think that’s all water under the bridge, it informs everything he is doing, or not doing, today.

Those mistakes started early. The Washington Post reported on Friday:

U.S. intelligence agencies were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February about the global danger posed by the coronavirus while President Trump and lawmakers played down the threat and failed to take action that might have slowed the spread of the pathogen, according to U.S. officials familiar with spy agency reporting …

“Donald Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were, they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it,” a U.S. official told the Post. “The system was blinking red.”

This flies in the face of one of Trump’s most oft-repeated lies, which is that the virus “snuck up on us” and it was “a very unforeseen thing.” Back in January when he was hobnobbing with the wealthy elite at Davos a reporter asked him if he was concerned about it and he said, “No, not at all. We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.”

He later said, “It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.” He has also said he knew it was a pandemic before anyone else, and also that it was a hoax. In other words, he has been dancing as fast as he can, saying whatever he feels he needs to say in the moment.

The Trump mantra that he “closed the borders” with China early, against everyone’s advice, which every administration official is required to mention in awestruck tones as if it were the decision to launch the Normandy invasion, is also nonsense.

Ron Klain, the Obama administration’s Ebola response coordinator, testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 5:

We don’t have a travel ban. We have a travel Band-Aid right now. First, before it was imposed, 300,000 people came here from China in the previous month. So the horse is out of the barn. There’s no restriction on Americans going back and forth. There are warnings. People should abide by those warnings. But today, 30 planes will land in Los Angeles that either originated in Beijing or came here on one-stops — 30 in San Francisco, 25 in New York City. OK? So unless we think that the color of the passport someone carries is a meaningful public health restriction, we have not placed a meaningful public health restriction.

Maybe we could say it was just a slow start and that harping on Trump’s massive early failures was just sour grapes if it weren’t for the fact that he keeps doing it today. Now that he’s taken to running the coronavirus briefings in place of his beloved campaign rallies, he’s spewing massive amounts of misinformation on a daily basis. When he isn’t crudely insulting reporters for asking him questions he doesn’t want to answer and blaming state governors for failing to properly lick his boots, he’s touting medical information he clearly doesn’t understand.

For instance, there is his insistence that a malaria drug which some people say may help mitigate some symptoms of COVID-19 is a “game-changer,” even without any clinical trials. Even when Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIH, has gently tried to suggest that Trump is talking up anecdotal data that isn’t reliable, he won’t stop , insisting that he’s “a smart guy” who just “feels” that this needs to be used right now:

This is stunningly irresponsible for the president of the United States to be saying at a time like this. It’s possible these drugs may help. But nobody, anywhere, is suggesting they are the greatest “game-changer in the history of medicine.” (This article in Statnews gives a good overview of the current scientific thinking.) Trump is giving people false hope in order to make it seem as if he personally is doing something extraordinary.

His now-daily press conferences have become an anxiety-producing cacophony of lies and confusion, exactly the opposite of their intended purpose. To pretend that this president is behaving normally, or is even vaguely trustworthy, so that people won’t be nervous, or won’t think one is being partisan, would only make this terrifying crisis worse. Telling the truth is all we’ve got.

My Salon column reprinted with permission

Making “nothing” personal

Published by Tom Sullivan on March 23, 2020

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) on Friday issued a shelter-in-place order for his state effective Saturday at 5 p.m. through April 7. Illinois joins other states and municipalities issuing similar orders to slow the spread of COVID-19. It’s an overwhelming disruption to people’s lives for which most of us have no reference. A friend’s mother was a British war bride who sheltered in the London Underground during The Blitz. She’d know. But she’s no longer here to call us wimps at afternoon tea.

Pritzker brought to his announcement Dr. Emily Landon, chief infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Chicago Medicine. Landon put the predicament medical professionals in perspective. She’s been sheltering in place with her family for days and directing emergency efforts from home.

There’s no slack in our health care system, Landon said. No hospitals standing empty for emergencies. During the 1918 pandemic, St. Louis shut itself down, she said. But Philadelphia held a parade for departing Doughboys. A week later, its hospitals were overrun. St. Louis fared measurably better.

Landon made the need for sheltering personal:

There’s no vaccine or readily available antiviral to help stem the tide. All we have to slow the spread is distance. Social distance. And if we let every single patient with this infection infect three more people and then each of them infect two or three more people, there won’t be a hospital bed when my mother can’t breathe very well, or when yours is coughing too much.

The problem is, such measures don’t sound as heroic as sheltering from The Blitz. But that’s not how Landon sees it:

In short, without taking drastic measures, the healthy and optimistic among us will doom the vulnerable. We have to fight this fire before it grows too high. These extreme restrictions may seem, in the end, a little anti-climactic. Because it’s really hard to feel like you’re saving the world while watching Netflix from your couch. But if we do this right, nothing happens. Yeah, a successful shelter-in-place means that you’re going to feel like it was all for nothing. And you’d be right. Because nothing means that nothing happened to your family.

Think she’s not serious?

Natasha Ott via Facebook

Or a piece by Fiona Lowenstein in this morning’s New York Times:

I’m 26. I don’t have any prior autoimmune or respiratory conditions. I work out six times a week, and abstain from cigarettes. I thought my role in the current health crisis would be as an ally to the elderly and compromised. Then, I was hospitalized for Covid-19.

Fiona Lowenstein took a selfie while receiving oxygen treatment for COVID-19.

After a few days with symptoms and gasping for air, she was in a hospital bed on oxygen. Staff told her there was another 30-year-old in the next room, “otherwise healthy, but who had also experienced serious trouble breathing.” Lowenstein lives in New York City.

[h/t DB]

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.
Note: The pandemic will upend standard field tactics in 2020. If enough promising “improvisations” come my way by June, perhaps I can issue a COVID-19 supplement.

Brazilians Get It

Published by tristero on March 22, 2020
Image result for brazil

From The Guardian:

Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, is facing an intensifying public backlash after his muddled reaction to the coronavirus crisis sparked five successive nights of protests and predictions that his political authority had sustained a potentially fatal blow.

Brazil has recorded 1,128 coronavirus cases and 18 deaths, with the country’s health minister last week saying the public health system was likely to collapse by the end of April.

But Bolsonaro has continued to downplay the pandemic, despite more than 20 members of a delegation he recently led to the US becoming infected with Covid-19…

A growing number of Brazil’s 209 million citizens appear to disagree.

Since last Tuesday, cities across the country have witnessed nightly panelaço (pan-banging) protests where dissenters express their dissatisfaction with Bolsonaro by pummelling saucepans from windows and balconies.

Much of the fury has focused on Bolsonaro’s decision to pose for triumphant photographs and mingle with supporters outside the presidential palace last Sunday despite receiving medical advice to self-quarantine because of his possible exposure to the virus during a trip to meet Donald Trump in the US.

Since then, Bolsonaro has come under heavy fire from Brazilian media and political opponents for what they call his reckless and inept behaviour.

The sooner Bolsonaro is removed from power, the more Brazilian lives will be saved.

And the sooner Trump leaves office, the more American lives will be saved.