Skip to content

Month: April 2020

“Opening the economy” means what, exactly?

Published by digby on April 11, 2020

Yesterday he said he has “absolute authority” to open the economy and pretty much threatened that he expects governors to do what he wants or he will exercise it. I’m not sure what exactly he thinks this means but I’m guessing he believes that if he tells everyone it’s time to go back to work and re-open businesses that we will all just immediately go back to normal and the economy will recover and he will be a big hero.

Good luck with that:

Public health officials almost universally agree that the best way to keep coronavirus deaths to a minimum is for Americans to stay at home as much as possible. Yet President Donald Trump keeps wanting to reopen the economy as he tries to weigh economic health and public health.

A look at the polling data reveals, however, why he may want to err on the side of keeping folks at home.Normally, presidential elections depend a lot on the state of the economy. Trump has to be seeing the economy shedding jobs and has to know the economy has historically been linked to a president’s re-election hopes. I, myself, made the connection just last week.

And indeed, the percentage of voters who think the economy is getting worse skyrocketed to 60% in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. That’s up from 28% at the beginning of March. When this many voters think the economy is getting worse historically, incumbents almost always lose.

The same poll, however, found that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is 51%. This is no different than the average of Quinnipiac polls taken since May 2019. Voters, it seems, are not for the moment blaming Trump for any economic downturn.

This lack of attribution follows a general pattern we’ve seen throughout Trump’s presidency. In fact, it’s a trend dating back to Barack Obama’s administration. Both of their approval ratings changed little, even as consumer sentiment moved around. For most presidents, there’s a clear correlation.

Putting aside Obama and Trump, we see that voters are willing to forgive economic downturns in times of crisis. Think back to 2002. George W. Bush’s Republican Party did exceedingly well in that year’s midterms, even as the unemployment rate was hovering around its highest rate from 1995 to 2007.

Meanwhile, everything we see in the polling data suggests that almost no one thinks that we need to reopen the economy right now. In a Fox News poll this week, 80% of voters nationwide say they would favor the federal government announcing a stay at home order for everybody but essential workers. You usually can’t get 80% of voters to agree upon anything, and the 80% is certainly higher than the approval Trump is getting for his handling of the coronavirus.

Voters aren’t concerned Trump is being too proactive. If anything, they think he is being too cautious. The same Fox News poll showed that a mere 4% of voters thought Trump was overreacting to the virus. That compares with 47% who think he isn’t taking the virus seriously enough.

Americans expect to have disruption to their lives for a good while longer. Most voters, 75%, in the Fox News poll believe the worst of the epidemic is yet to come. An ABC News/Ipsos poll found that the vast majority of Americans (91%) have had their daily routines interrupted by the virus, and a majority of those (56%) don’t expect their routines to get back to normal until at least July.

The point is that there’s a lot in the data to indicate that Americans want the President to focus most on the public health issue at hand more so than they are worried about him fixing the economy right now. If people are allowed to go about their normal routine too soon and the number of coronavirus cases rise afterward, there’s a good case to be made that’s far more dangerous to Trump’s reelection chances than a bad economy.

I guess he expects that not only will the Governors blindly follow his order but citizens will also. I don’t know about you but Trump prematurely forcing businesses to re-open isn’t going to make me rush out to shop or eat or do anything else.

The fact is that no matter when he says, people are not going to start going out and behaving normally until the virus is contained and we can be sure we aren’t going to die if we sit in a coffee shop. It’s delusional to believe that the economy will magically recover under these circumstances.

Dancing with Death

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 11, 2020
Image from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)

The list is macabre. Clearly. But one day ahead of Easter Sunday, there is a message behind it.

One week ago, CNN’s Gary Tuchman asked evangelical church members in Ohio if attending services might be putting their lives at risk and those of others in the community.

https://youtu.be/e9VxadGwT_A

Church members cited spiritual insurance from “the blood of Jesus” and dismissed concerns for themselves, for fellow church members, and for others. So faith-filled they are bulletproof.

As it happened, the Christian Post a week earlier reported the deaths of three Christian pastors from COVID-19: from Shreveport, La., from New York City (Harlem), and another from Virginia who died in North Carolina on his way home from Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The last, Larry Spradlin, a minister and blues musician inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2016, had called coverage of the novel coronavirus pandemic politically motivated “mass hysteria” designed to hurt President Trump.

I started a list. Death, it seems, is very ecumenical.

By now there are over two dozen dead Christian pastors on it. From Michigan to Louisiana. From New York to California. Reports say all died from the coronavirus. All presumably as insured by “the blood of Jesus” as the Ohio church members. Many on the list are African American and from communities hit especially hard by the pandemic

Controversy swirls over whether Christians should gather in churches tomorrow to celebrate the Resurrection with a pandemic loose in their communities. With stay-at-home orders in place in many states, most churches will be closed or hold services online tomorrow. There are, however, a few holdouts who plan services in defiance of police orders (Reuters):

Most U.S. churches are expected to be closed on Sunday, and a broad majority of observant Americans are expected to follow authorities’ recommendations to avoid crowds to limit the spread of the potentially lethal COVID-19 respiratory disease caused by the new coronavirus.

But not all of them.

“Satan and a virus will not stop us,” said the Reverend Tony Spell, 42, pastor of the evangelical Life Tabernacle Church near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He expects a crowd of more than 2,000 to gather in worship at his megachurch on Sunday.

“God will shield us from all harm and sickness,” Spell said in an interview. “We are not afraid. We are called by God to stand against the Antichrist creeping into America’s borders. We will spread the Gospel.”

Others plan to dance with Death to prove their faith tomorrow in Idaho, Kentucky, in California, and elsewhere.

And the list above will grow.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

Friday Night Soother

Published by digby on April 10, 2020

Aye Chihuahua!

You might not be able to teach an old dog new tricks but in the coronavirus pandemic even our furry friends are stepping up to the task.

One chihuahua is managing to carry out errands for his quarantined owner. Antonio Munoz from Mexico had been self-isolating for three days when he started craving a bag of Cheetos.

Currently, Mexico’s lockdown measures are similar to those of the UK: Schools, non-essential stores are closed while food shops and restaurants remain open for delivery.

Unable to leave his house as a crisp craving isn’t considered essential (sadly), Anthony decided to see if his beloved pet Chokis would be up to the task. With the store only a stone’s throw away, Chokis was equipped with a note attached to his collar and the exact change needed for the Cheetos.

Though he was a bit nervous at first, he was soon packing the goods. Chokis has done the run three times now. What a clever dog. The note on Chokis’ collar read: ‘Hello sir of the store, can you sell my dog ​​some orange – not red – Cheetos.

In his collar he brings $20. If you don’t take good care of my dog, he will bite. From, the neighbour across the street’. Lo and behold, one bag of Cheetos was delivered to him.

What a very, very good boy.

No Ivanka, no, no, no

Published by digby on April 10, 2020

This is nuts:

On Tuesday, President Trump hosted a call with business leaders to discuss efforts to provide financial relief to small businesses. During that call, he made an astounding claim: that his daughter Ivanka personally created 15 million jobs.

To put this claim in perspective, as of January — before the coronavirus pandemic caused the US economy to start hemorrhaging jobs — about 152 million people in the United States were employed, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So Tr

ump is claiming that his daughter created about 10 percent of all the jobs in the United States.

Ivanka has apparently been working overtime in recent months: During a White House event last November, Trump claimed that his daughter has “gotten jobs for” 14 million people. So, if one takes Trump’s statements at face value, she created a million jobs in just the past six months.

As my colleague Aaron Rupar notes, Trump appears to be referring to Ivanka’s work on an advisory board that she co-chairs, but there’s no evidence that this board has created anywhere close to 15 million jobs.

[…]

It’s unclear how Trump came up with his astounding claim that Ivanka created so many jobs, but he’s been attributing superhuman job-creating powers to his daughter for quite some time. In a November speech to the Economic Club of New York, he claimed that, by working with companies such as Walmart, she had “created 14 million jobs” over the course of the previous two-and-a-half years.

The entire US economy only added a total of 6.2 million jobs from the beginning of Trump’s presidency through November of 2019. So Trump was effectively claiming that, but for the tireless efforts of his daughter, the United States would have lost nearly 8 million jobs before the coronavirus pandemic even began.

Ok. So he’s exaggerating. What else is new?

But this is actually important:

The economic task force will include people from the private sector as well as top administration officials, some of whom also serve on the coronavirus task force — though the two will be separate.

The SBA loan program is royal mess and it needs to be fixed immediately or the long-term economic consequences are going to be severe. We know how Jared has managed to completely botch the disaster response. Now he’s putting his totally unqualified, dilettante daughter to work on this?

There are a lot of Trump voters who own small businesses. They are getting increasingly desperate. And they aren’t the types to think it’s cute that Trump put his daughter on the job of helping them out.

Still crazy, no matter what

Published by digby on April 10, 2020

Trump’s coronavirus rally today was a real doozy. I had thought maybe his reportedly concerned staff had persuaded him to back off, let the expert speak and try to be more statesmanlike because his numbers were not looking good.

But I’ll bet he saw this outlier poll and decided that the country just loves his crude, partisan, insults in a time of crisis and so he went for it.

It’s a political rally not a briefing.

He doesn’t know the difference between bacteria and viruses. I’m so glad he’s making the life an death decisions about America’s health during a global pandemic.

There was a lot more. It went on for hours.

As I’ve said before, I understand why anyone would simply skip these rallies. They are infuriating, anxiety-producing and ultimately depressing considering the stakes. But I also think it’s important to bear witness to this atrocity and so I put up these clips, generously supplied by Vox’s Aaron Rupar so my readers can at least see the highlights.

This is the most astonishing thing I’ve witnessed in my lifetime…

Trump’s top henchmen lie as easily as they breathe

Published by digby on April 10, 2020

If you want a perfect illustration of how the Trump administration can never be trusted, here it is:

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro publicly said Americans had “nothing to worry about” while he privately warned the White House that the coronavirus pandemic could cost trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of American lives.Navarro circulated two memos at the White House in late January and February warning that a full-blown coronavirus outbreak would leave American lives and the economy vulnerable.

But Navarro, a frequent surrogate for President Donald Trump and his administration on television, continued to present a far more optimistic message in public, CNN’s KFile found after reviewing Navarro’s interviews, statements and writings.In the January 29 memo, Navarro wrote that the “increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic” could infect as many as 100 million Americans and kill “as many as 1-2 million souls.” That same day — in which the coronavirus task force was also formed — Navarro made no mention of the possibility when asked a question about the impact of the coronavirus while appearing on CNBC promoting the USMCA trade agreement.

“Not to jump too quickly to the impact of the coronavirus, but obviously there’s the fear that it’s going to unwind some of the potential benefits of phase one,” CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla said. “(Secretary of Agriculture) Sonny Perdue today said he didn’t know whether it would affect ag commitments. How much are you worried about that unwind or potential unwind?””Well, we have a really strong leadership with (Health and Human Services) Secretary (Alex) Azar and the CDC. We’re working very carefully and diligently on this, so, well, let’s see how this unfolds. This is not my lane per se, so I’m going to let others come on CNBC and inform that,” Navarro said.

But in the memo, Navarro had privately urged the White House to impose a travel ban on China. The White House imposed restrictions on — but did not ban — travel from mainland China on January 31, two days after the memo circulated.In a statement to CNN regarding his CNBC appearance, Navarro said, “A question about agricultural purchase commitments is clearly not my lane.”At the White House coronavirus briefing Tuesday, Trump said he didn’t know about Navarro’s memos until a few days ago and still hadn’t read it.”He wrote a memo and he was right and I haven’t seen the memo,” the President said. “I will see it later on, after this. But it didn’t matter whether I saw or not, because I acted on my own. I guess I had the same instincts as Peter.”

In Navarro’s second memo, dated February 23, he urged for immediate funding to “minimize economic and social disruption.””Any member of the Task Force who wants to be cautious about appropriating funds for a crisis that could inflict trillions of dollars in economic damage and take millions of lives has come to the wrong administration,” Navarro wrote.

But at a press gaggle on February 24, Navarro assured that coronavirus was “nothing to worry about for the American people” under Trump’s leadership.”Since the day that President Trump pulled down the flights from China to the US, he has been actively leading the situation in terms of this crisis with the task force. Nothing to worry about for the American people,” Navarro said.”This country’s done a beautiful job under President’s leadership [sic] in terms of managing this situation. He’s working on a daily basis with the task force and we’re taking steps to anticipate — what I like to say — where the puck’s gonna be. We’re skating there in defense of the American people and the American economy. So you can be sure you’re that in great hands with the Trump administration.”

In a statement to CNN, Navarro defended his February 24 statement.”‘Nothing to worry about’ indicates the American people should be confident in the strong leadership of President Trump handling the crisis, NOT the seriousness of the crisis itself. To suggest otherwise is simply mischief and fake news,” said Navarro.

Navarro continued to wave off concern that America’s economy would suffer from the virus.On February 23, while appearing on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Navarro said that the American economy was not “particularly vulnerable to what happens in China” with the virus.”With respect to the economic impacts, Maria, I think what we have learned, with President Trump’s tough stand on China, is that the American economy is extremely strong and not particularly vulnerable to what happens in China. So we’re going to go about our business and try to get what we need in Trump time.”

He knew, he lied and he’s still lying.

The article goes on to show how he also lied continuously about the economy. I think we can be sure he doing that still as well. They all are.

The health experts are trying to walk the line. But they’re getting dragged into the politics too. It’s unavoidable when you are dealing with Dear Leader.

We came so close to getting out of this without a monumental disaster. But here it is and their dishonesty, corruption and ineptitude is even worse than we imagined.

Why we wear masks

Published by digby on April 10, 2020

A new simulation by Finnish researchers showing how far viruses spread when a single person coughs is a startling reminder as to why we should do our best to stay home.

The 3D model was published on Thursday, April 9, on Finland’s Aalto University YouTube channel and has already been viewed more than 750,000 times. In the minute-long video, a person coughs out aerosol particles in a corridor bounded by shelves, much like at a normal grocery or supermarket.

Within two minutes, the air-borne particles spread over to the adjacent corridor. The simulation takes into account normal indoor ventilation air conditions, and also show how high particles travel with a colour-coded representation.

Aerosol particles from a dry cough, which is a symptom of Covid-19, are less than 15 micrometers, so small that they drift through the air rather than sink to the floor.

“Someone infected by the coronavirus, can cough and walk away, but then leave behind extremely small aerosol particles carrying the coronavirus,” Ville Vuorinen, assistant professor at Aalto University, said in a statement. “These particles could then end up in the respiratory tract of others in the vicinity.”

The study, conducted by researchers from a number of Finnish universities, aims to find out how the coronavirus spreads through the air. “Preliminary results indicate that aerosol particles carrying the virus can remain in the air longer than was originally thought,” the statement by Aalto University reads. “So it is important to avoid busy public indoor spaces.”

I have heard that this is somewhat controversial and may not be true. But nonetheless, it’s clear that it’s best that people not be clustered together right now. And if we are, to shop or otherwise use essential services, we should wear masks. Better safe than sorry …

Bill Barr crawls out of his bunker to signal the base

Published by digby on April 10, 2020

New White House chief of staff Mark Meadows announced this week that onetime Trump campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany will become the White House press secretary. The campaign is looking for a replacement and it seems that Attorney General William Barr may be auditioning for the role. Judging from his two-night interview with Laura Ingraham, he is as enthusiastic about the boss as one of the famed Mar-a-Lago Trumpettes.

We hadn’t heard much from Barr since he was scathingly chastised by a federal judge last month for his “lack of candor” in public descriptions of the Mueller report, saying that Barr had “distorted the findings” of the April 2019 report in his notorious press conference and a letter to lawmakers. The judge demanded a full copy of the Mueller report to review in order to decide whether to reveal the entire document, without redactions.

It’s not every day that the attorney general of the United States is personally castigated by a federal judge. But it was obviously too much to hope that Barr had taken his criticism to heart and had decided to play it straight. His return to the spotlight this week showed that while he may not have contracted the coronavirus, his Fox News brain rot is still raging out of control.

Ingraham has two main hobbyhorses at the moment. She believes that the response to the virus is an attack on civil liberties and that the quick cure for the disease is Dr. Trump’s magic elixir, hydroxychloroquine. She also believes that anyone who disagrees with this is part of a plot to take down her beloved president. So it was within that framework that Barr gave his interview, and he did not disappoint.

Under intense questioning about whether freedom of religion was being infringed by the shutdown, he managed to say that public health measures are acceptable for a short period and then went on to parrot Trump’s maxim that “the cure can’t be worse than the disease,” and even suggesting that more people will die of cancer because researchers are unable to continue their work during the shutdown. He made it clear that he thinks the government should be opened sooner rather than later :

I think we have to be very careful to make sure this is — you know, that the draconian measures that are being adopted are fully justified, and there are not alternative ways of protecting people. And I think, you know, when this — when this period of time is — at the end of April expires, I think we have to allow people to adapt more than we have and not just tell people to go home and hide under the bed,

The “adaptations” he had in mind were unclear, recommending vague “protocols” for restaurants and throwing around terms like “PPE” as if he were the head epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health. For all his alleged concern with civil liberties he seemed to indicate that he thinks restrictions on travel would be a positive consequence of this crisis. At least that’s what it sounded like, since he talked about stricter border laws being a good way to prevent pandemics. After all, viruses don’t recognize citizenship or nationality. If you can’t let people come in, in an attempt to protect yourself from infection, you can’t let people out either. Otherwise, they might bring it back.

It was obvious that Barr has been spending a lot of time watching Fox News. Unprompted, he let loose with a ydroxychloroquine rant worthy of Sean Hannity himself:

Barr apparently missed this exchange on his favorite channel the other day in which Dr. William Haseltine, a renowned biologist and retired Harvard professor, took Fox News host Dana Perino to task for pushing this drug with little evidence to back it up.

The blowback over this alleged miracle cure being relentlessly touted by Trump and his friends at Fox News isn’t coming from the press or the Democrats. It’s coming from the medical community, which is appalled that the president of the United States would use his platform to push unproven drugs based on the recommendation of TV quacks and his own “feelings.”

I guess everyone’s an armchair epidemiologist these days, but the Fox News coronavirus coverage is actually dangerous. The fact that the president and the attorney general consider their blather as a basis for policymaking is kind of terrifying.

But Barr did make some more serious news when he went on a tirade about the Russia investigation. Last December, when the inspector general of the Justice Department released his report that took the FBI to task for its FISA process in pursuing a onetime Trump campaign adviser, Barr declared it would be a travesty “to spy on political opponents, but also to use them in a way that could affect the outcome of the election.” He said he would withhold his judgment until the “investigation of the investigation” by special counsel John Durham was complete.

Durham has filed no report, but Barr’s not waiting any longer to say what’s on his mind. He told Ingraham that “what happened to [Trump] was one of the greatest travesties in American history. Without any basis, they started this investigation of his campaign, and even more concerning actually is what happened after the campaign — a whole pattern of events while he was president … to sabotage the presidency — or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

That directly contradicts his own inspector general’s conclusions. And it comes with a serious threat:

There’s a reason Barr came out of his bunker now. Times are tough, people are getting nervous and the Trumpian base needs some inspiration. What could be better than some sweet, sweet revenge?

As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out, this should come as no surprise. Before Barr was even a gleam in Trump’s eye, he wrote a long unsolicited memo to the White House explaining that he didn’t believe the Russia investigation was justified. He even told a reporter later that the predicate for pursuing the supposed scandal around Hillary Clinton and Uranium One was far stronger than that for the Russia probe.

His mind was made up about this long before he became attorney general. It’s why he was hired as Donald Trump’s main legal henchman in the first place.

My Salon column republished with permission

American carnage

Published by Tom Sullivan on April 10, 2020
Drone image of mass grave site in New York.

The “American carnage” Donald Trump described in his 2017 inaugural address was going to stop. Right here. Right now. He would stop it.

“Nobody knows the system better than me,” he told delegates to the Republican National Convention the summer before, “which is why I alone can fix it.”

The bleak images Trump conjured of Americans in poverty amid “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones” were not entirely fanciful, but overall seemed to exist mainly in his own dark imagination. When he’d finished, President George W. Bush muttered, “that was some weird shit.”

Three long years later, workers in New York City are filling mass graves on Hart Island in the Bronx. Drone footage Thursday showed workers in hazmat gear stacking and burying coffins filled with victims of the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump didn’t cause the outbreak, but his lack of anything resembling competence at running “the system” means those deaths occurred on his watch. His autocratic tendencies mean his administration is staffed with loyalists whose main qualification for their positions is “unquestioning loyalty” to him, writes Gary Kasparov, chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative.

Trump gives daily press briefings now, misinforming the public, promoting unproven remedies, and trying to shift responsibility for the chaotic and mismanaged federal response that has resulted in literal carnage. He alone could not fix it and has declared publicly his intention not to accept responsibility for it.

Dahlia Lithwick depicts that inaugural speech as prophetic:

In that speech, Trump promised that above all things, at the center of his presidency lay a “crucial conviction: that a nation exists to serve its citizens.” And yet, as the United States has the highest number of COVID-19 deaths in the world, its citizens wait for tests, for hospital beds, and for relief. Jared Kushner insists that stockpiled emergency equipment that should go to front-line workers in fact belongs to the federal government. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has been hollowed out by Kushner’s disaster hobbyist cronies, and the federal government is backing out of its testing support by week’s end. States unwilling to bow and scrape for supplies don’t get them, while craven politicians use access to Trump to game the distribution channels. This nation is not serving its citizens. It is offering mealy-mouthed promises that private interests will magic up cures, and supplies, and websites, and vaccines while its citizens die and unemployment soars. Federal officials who are supposed to serve citizens have clocked out, even as they gut federal laws that would keep the air clean, and emissions lowered, and environmental degradation at bay. Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is muzzling health officials and distorting public information, such that the American people are left in the dark in the middle of the most devastating public health disaster we’ve seen in a century. The invisible people are no longer merely invisible. Now they are invisible and dying.

Facing a chaotic non-response from the federal government, states with Democratic governors find they must fend for themselves. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is leveraging his state’s bulk purchasing power “as a nation-state” to meet his state’s medical supply needs. He might even “export some of those supplies to states in need,” explains Bloomberg News opinion writer Francis Wilkinson:

Newsom is accomplishing a few things here, with what can only be a deliberate lack of subtlety. First and foremost, he is trying to relieve the shortage of personal protective equipment — a crisis the White House has proved incapable of remedying. Details are a little fuzzy, but Newsom, according to news reports, has organized multiple suppliers to deliver roughly 200 million masks monthly.

Second, Newsom is kicking sand in the face of President Donald Trump after Newsom’s previous flattery — the coin of the White House realm — failed to produce results. If Trump can’t manage to deliver supplies, there’s no point in Newsom continuing the charade.

Third, and this may be the most enduring effect, Newsom is sending a powerful message to both political parties. So far, the Republican Party’s war on democratic values, institutions and laws has been a largely one-sided affair, with the GOP assaulting and the Democratic Party defending. The lethal ruling this week by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican bloc, which required Wisconsin residents to vote in person during a pandemic that shut down polling stations, is a preview of the fall campaign. The GOP intends to restrict vote-by-mail and other legitimate enfranchisement to suppress turnout amid fear, uncertainty and disease.

Republicans mean to subvert majority rule and sabotage the rescue plan by any means necessary. Democrats must provide a visible model of competence and public service that serves the public. They must make sure Trump’s daily, blame-shifting floor show does not dominate the national conversation. That is a tall order in normal times, but Newsom is providing one example of how to lead on that.

This also means Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, must raise his voice not just in opposition to Trump but in support of Americans Trump supports only in rhetoric. With Sen. Bernie Sanders effectively out of the nomination hunt, Biden is rushing to court Sanders voters with proposals to expand Medicare to Americans 60 and older, and to forgive some student debt as Sanders advocated. He’s not likely to go full-Sanders, but he’s moving left.

Democrats everywhere need to make some noise about it. Americans groaning under the weight of pandemic-driven economic collapse need someone to give them hope of relief that actually helps them.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

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.

The virus is a Democrat?

Published by digby on April 9, 2020

That’s what they’re saying. And it’s killing people to troll Trump.

Its agent in this nefarious partisan assault in Dr Anthony Fauci:

Right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh baselessly accused Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, of being a “Hillary Clinton sympathizer” who wants “to get rid of Donald Trump” during a Tuesday broadcast.

After claiming that the media tries to use its press briefings to undermine President Donald Trump, Limbaugh accused ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl of bringing in a reporter from Phoenix TV, a privately owned company stationed in Hong Kong with connections to the Chinese government. Limbaugh claimed that Fauci “gave Karl a-thumbs up, like a ‘job well done’ kind of thing” after the press briefing.

“We’ve got all of these Hillary Clinton sympathizers still in the medical expert team here, and we know that one thing has not changed,” Limbaugh added. “And that is these people’s desire — above everything else — to get rid of Donald Trump.”

“Can you believe these people don’t care about the economy being shut down? It is stunning to me. People are being ruined,” he continued. “I talked to a number of friends of mine. These are people that own their own business. A guy — a good friend of mine in South Carolina — told me he’s losing a million dollars a day. Another friend’s business is totally shut down — he’s ruined. And there’s no end in sight to this.”

Limbaugh concluded his monologue by falsely claiming that “there is an all-out subtle effort for the status quo because it’s going to hurt Donald Trump. That is the objective. That is the only thing at the forefront of some of these people’s minds while they portray themselves as being primarily concerned with public health.”

I don’t know what to say except that if anyone thought people who are facing a serious health challenge, as Limbaugh is with lung cancer, become more philosophical and introspective this should cure them of that illusion.

Crazy, just … crazy.