Month: May 2020

Perhaps the only reason there has not been more political pressure to privatize the U.S. military is because the military-industrial complex, as President Eisenhower dubbed it, already profits handsomely from funds Congress allocates each year. So do states where military bases and defense industries create jobs. The knock-on effects support communities and local businesses. If it were not so , we would hear more from the investor class about the Pentagon’s under-performance in Iraq and Afghanistan, about its “bloated” budgets, and about “lavish” benefits bestowed upon entrenched, under-skilled “government” employees dependent on public largesse. Leaner, private-sector competitors could do the job faster and cheaper through innovation, competition, and increased efficiency.

In other areas where the government spends money, that has been a dominant narrative over the last half century. Pressure to operate government like a business has yielded congressional actions designed to hollow out government to the point where only for-profit enterprises are left to perform its historical functions. (See: US Postal Service.) All that has brought us to where we are now in this lethal pandemic: a pack of grifters with a withered sense of the public interest controls the executive branch. They are themselves less skilled than the dedicated officials who chose public service over maximizing their personal bottom lines. The results are measured in tens of thousands of American dead.

This hollowing out has gone on for years, Dan Balz explains in the Washington Post. It has grown dramatically worse in the last three:

Trump was elected having never served in government or the military. That was one reason he appealed to many of those who backed him. He came to Washington deeply suspicious of what he branded the “deep state.” Promising to drain the swamp, he has vilified career civil servants and the institutions of government now called upon to perform at the highest levels.

His transition was messy and since then his administration has been slow to populate the thousands of political slots atop federal agencies, and the president has seemed to prefer acting agency heads to those who can win confirmation from the Senate and the authority that imprimatur conveys. He has targeted career officials and sought retribution for those who differed with him, particularly those whose job it is to find and expose problems.

“One thing to keep in mind is that government takes on hard problems,” said David E. Lewis, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University. “They’re often problems that can’t be solved by the market and there aren’t private entities to solve them.”

Prior to the election of President Ronald Reagan, says Marc Hetherington, a professor at the University of North Carolina, anti-government rhetoric focused on what functions government ought and ought not perform.

“What changed with Reagan and the decades since,” Hetherington believes, “is that the conversation moves away from what government ought to do to government is incompetent to do things.” Those who believed that set about making it true. Taxation is theft, goes the libertarian argument. “Starve the beast” was born, leading to a “government on the cheap,” and “penny-wise, pound-foolish idea of how we manage government agencies,” Lewis said. Now that it is needed, things are in too much disrepair to deliver.

Furthermore, Trump brought to the White House his habit of surrounding himself with incompetents, ideologues, and brown-nosing sycophants. Among his family members, cabinet, and appointees are all three, often in one body.

Thus, New York Times science and health reporter Donald McNeil Jr. called this week on US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield to resign over mismanagement of the pandemic.

“We completely blew it for the first two months of our response,” McNeil told CNN. “We were in a ‘headless chicken’ phase.” The fault is not China’s, but the president’s.

The result is the flailing federal response to the coronavirus pandemic that Balz describes:

“I think this event is revealing of what governance wonks have been warning about for a long time, namely that we haven’t been very focused on the basic governing systems we need to execute policy successfully,” said William Galston of the Brookings Institution. “The competency of government to serve as an instrument of policy delivery has been weakened substantially. One of our long-term tasks is to rebuild that capacity.”

First, voters will have to relearn that government is designed to operate as a public service, not as a for-profit enterprise.

Former President Barack Obama addressed that issue in his virtual commencement address Saturday to graduates of historically black colleges and universities. (HBCUs).

“[O]ur society and democracy only works when we think not just about ourselves, but about each other,” he said. “More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.”

Balz concludes:

There is much that works well in the federal government, particularly everyday activities that citizens take for granted. Career civil servants on the whole are dedicated and skilled. But when the challenges shift from ordinary to extraordinary, cracks within the system are exposed, demands on leadership rise and the government’s competence is rightly called into question. This has been such a time.

But both the crisis of confidence and government incompetence have come not by the nature of government itself by decades of efforts to rot it out from within. The rot is fed not only by the greed of those intent on selling off the country’s assets for parts, but by their designs on aggregating power to themselves in betrayal of democratic principles in which they never believed.

The British call members of their legislature MPs (Member of Parliament). A Member of Congress (MOC), Wikipedia advises, is “a person who has been appointed or elected and inducted into an official body called a congress.” For some in ours, perhaps the appellation ROT is more appropriate, like the ‘O’ in Roger Thornhill’s monogram. It stands for nothing.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV 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.

In a different world, with different political leadership and a population willing to work together for the common good, we could do the following and save Americans untold amounts of misery and economic and human loss:

With the unemployment rate at its highest level since the Great Depression — 14.7 percent and climbing — many Americans are clamoring to reopen the economy, even if it means that thousands of daily covid-19 deaths become part of the backdrop to life. It’s time to move on as “warriors,” President Trump has said, because “we can’t keep our country closed down for years.” We, too, favor markets and share the president’s eagerness to stop economically ruinous shutdowns. But the choice between saving lives and saving the economy, the latter of which Trump has endorsed implicitly, is a false one.

In fact, framing the issue that way could kill many Americans and kill the economy.

The dangers of reopening without disease control — or a coronavirus vaccine or therapeutic breakthrough — are illustrated by events at the Smithfield Foods meatpacking plant in Sioux Falls, S.D. Smithfield offered workers a bonus if they showed up every day in April. Normally, bonus pay would increase attendance. But in a pandemic, encouraging the sick to haul themselves into work can be disastrous. The plan backfired. Hundreds of Smithfield employees were infected, forcing the plant to shut down for more than three weeks. If we stay the current course, we risk repeating the same mistake across the whole economy.AD

The economy consists of people who have hopes and fears. As long as they are afraid of a lethal virus, they will avoid restaurants, travel and workplaces. (According to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll last week, only 25 percent of all Americans want to “open businesses and get the economy going again, even if that means more people will get the coronavirus.”) The only way to restore the economy is to earn the confidence of both vulnerable industries and vulnerable people through testing, contact tracing and isolation.As covid-19 spreads through Nebraska meat plants, workers feel helpless and afraidWorkers at a Tyson Foods meat-processing plant in Lexington, Nebraska are getting sick with covd-19 and say the company hasn’t done enough to protect them. (Robert Ray/The Washington Post)

There is already a bipartisan plan to achieve this; we helped write it. The plan relies on frequent testing followed by tracing the contacts of people who test positive (and their contacts) until no new positive cases are found. It also encourages voluntary isolation, at home or in hotel rooms, to prevent further disease spread. Isolated patients would receive a federal stipend, like jurors, to discourage them from returning to workplaces too soon.

But our plan also recognizes that rural towns in Montana should not necessarily have to shut down the way New York City has. To pull off this balancing act, the country should be divided into red, yellow and greenzones. The goal is to be a green zone, where fewer than one resident per 36,000 is infected. Here, large gatherings are allowed, and masks aren’t required for those who don’t interact with the elderly or other vulnerable populations. Green zones require a minimum of one test per day for every 10,000 people and a five-person contact tracing team for every 100,000 people. (These are the levels currently maintained in South Korea, which has suppressed covid-19.) Two weeks ago, a modest 1,900 tests a day could have kept 19 million Americans safely in green zones. Today, there are no green zones in the United States.AD

Most Americans — about 298 million — live in yellow zones, where disease prevalence is between .002 percent and 1 percent. But even in yellow zones, the economy could safely reopen with aggressive testing and tracing, coupled with safety measures including mandatory masks. In South Korea, during the peak of its outbreak, it took 25 tests to detect one positive case, and the case fatality rate was 1 percent. Following this model, yellow zones would require 2,500 tests for every daily death. To contain spread, yellow zones also would ramp up contact tracing until a team is available for every new daily coronavirus case. After one tracer conducts an interview, the team would spend 12 hours identifying all those at risk. Speed matters, because the virus spreads quickly; three days is useless for tracing. (Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., are all yellow zones.)

A disease prevalence greater than 1 percent defines red zones. Today, 30 million Americans live in such hot spots — which include Detroit, New Jersey, New Orleans and New York City. In addition to the yellow-zone interventions, these places require stay-at-home orders. But by strictly following guidelines for testing and tracing, red zones could turn yellow within four weeks, moving steadfastly from lockdown to liberty.

Getting to green nationwide is possible by the end of the summer, but it requires ramping up testing radically. The United States now administers more than 300,000 tests a day, but according to our guidelines, 5 million a day are needed (for two to three months). It’s an achievable goal. Researchers estimate that the current system has a latent capacity to produce 2 million tests a day, and a surge in federal funding would spur companies to increase capacity. The key is to do it now, before manageable yellow zones deteriorate to economically ruinous red zones.

States can administer these “test, trace and supported isolation” programs — but Congress would need to fund them. The total cost, we estimate, is $74 billion, to be spent over 12 to 18 months. That sum would cover wages and training for contract tracers, the cost of building voluntary self-isolation facilities, stipends for those in isolation and subsidies to manufacture tests.

That amount is a lot, but not compared to the cost of a crippled economy. In Congress’s latest relief package, $75 billion went to struggling hospitals alone, $380 billion to help small businesses and $25 billion toward testing. But hospitals and businesses will continue to hemorrhage money and seek bailouts as long as they can’t open safely. Not spending on disease control means new waves of infection followed by chaotic spikes in disease and death, followed by more ruinous cycles of economic openings and closures. Economists talk about “multipliers” — an injection of spending that causes even larger increases in gross domestic product. Spending on testing, tracing and paid isolation would produce an indisputable and massive multiplier effect.

States have strong economic incentives to become — and remain — green zones. Nations that have invested the most in disease control have suffered the least economic hardship: Taiwan grew 1.5 percent in the first quarter, whereas the United States’ gross domestic product contracted by 4.8 percent, at an annual adjusted rate. (Taiwan was fortunate to have its vice president, Chen Chien-Jen, a U.S.-trained epidemiologist; under his guidance, the island acted quickly with masks, temperature checks, testing and tracing.) The second quarter will be worse: The projected decline for U.S. GDP, at an annualized rate, is an alarming 40 percent.

Looking forward, we will see stark economic contrasts across states, depending on their investment in disease control. With $74 billion, Congress could close the gap between states and relieve pressure on state budgets hamstrung by collapsing revenues. In the spirit of federalism, states would then become laboratories for discovering the best ways to implement testing, tracing and isolation. States might choose to form interstate compacts that pool and move testing resources across state lines as the disease travels and surges; county health officials might tap firefighters or other municipal workers to build regional contact-tracing workforces (as is happening in Tyler, Tex.). When local and state governments become accountable for adopting strategies that work, we can expect more innovation.

How do we know that testing, tracing and supported isolation would work? It already has worked in New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan — where there have been few to no new daily cases recently. Taiwan never had to shut down its economy, while New Zealand and South Korea are returning to normal. It would work here, too. Since March, Congress has passed relief bills totaling $3.6 trillion to support an economy devastated by a virus — and $3 trillion more is on the table. We should attack the disease directly so we can stop spending to alleviate symptoms. Following this road map, we can defeat the coronavirus and be celebrating life, liberty and livelihood by the Fourth of July.

I’m afraid that ship has sailed, unfortunately. But if we had serious leadership at the top it might have been different. If he had told his base the truth and what was needed from them to tame this virus, they would have done it. But he didn’t. He has actually been working at cross purposes the entire time, failing to understand that in order for the economy to recover in time for him to take his big victory lap in November, he needed to do what this article describes. He was just incapable of being a real leader. He’s a rich, spoiled, D-list performer who accidentally became president, nothing more.

As Obama said today in his commencement speech to the High School class of 2020:

More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing. A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge.

If the world’s going to get better, it’s going to be up to you. 

If we’re going to live through this, it’s going to be up to all of us.

The British medical journal Lancet doesn’t involve itself in American politics. But the American response to the global pandemic has been so bad they felt it necessary t make this statement:

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the USA with 1·3 million cases and an estimated death toll of 80 684 as of May 12. States that were initially the hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, have decelerated the rate of infections and deaths after the implementation of 2 months of lockdown. However, the emergence of new outbreaks in Minnesota, where the stay-at-home order is set to lift in mid-May, and Iowa, which did not enact any restrictions on movement or commerce, has prompted pointed new questions about the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”.

This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

In the decades following its founding in 1946, the CDC became a national pillar of public health and globally respected. It trained cadres of applied epidemiologists to be deployed in the USA and abroad. CDC scientists have helped to discover new viruses and develop accurate tests for them. CDC support was instrumental in helping WHO to eradicate smallpox. However, funding to the CDC for a long time has been subject to conservative politics that have increasingly eroded the agency’s ability to mount effective, evidence-based public health responses.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration resisted providing the sufficient budget that the CDC needed to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis. The George W Bush administration put restrictions on global and domestic HIV prevention and reproductive health programming.

The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge. In a press conference on Feb 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned US citizens to prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life. Messonnier subsequently no longer appeared at White House briefings on COVID-19. More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC’s leadership and its work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is no doubt that the CDC has made mistakes, especially on testing in the early stages of the pandemic. The agency was so convinced that it had contained the virus that it retained control of all diagnostic testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, but this was followed by the admission on Feb 12 that the CDC had developed faulty test kits. The USA is still nowhere near able to provide the basic surveillance or laboratory testing infrastructure needed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

But punishing the agency by marginalising and hobbling it is not the solution. The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort.

The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic.

Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.

I agree with that. I just wish I was sanguine that enough Americans will see it that way next November to ensure that he isn’t given four more years.

I understand that people are hurting economically. And I blame the government for failing to adequately relieve that burden during this emergency. It is penny wise and pound foolish, not to mention cruel and unnecessary.

However, there is also no excuse for people to go around infecting others because of ignorance, obstinance or politics. Donald Trump bears the most blame for that. His cult would listen to him. They worship him. But he has refused to lead them to be responsible and is encouraging them to defy all public health guidelines.

Sadly, it isn’t just the Trump cult. There are a lot of others who just don’t think this virus applies to them and they simply can’t or won’t take even basic precautions like wearing a mask to protect others.

So, here we are, with our society starting to fray badly at the edges:

The complaint came in last month from a resident of Kingston, a city in New York’s Hudson Valley: A local barbershop was still performing haircuts, in violation of New York’s emergency shutdown orders to thwart the coronavirus.

Two days later, a buildings investigator went out to investigate the claim. La Lima Barbershop at 678 Broadway was dark.

Three more visits, on April 13, 17, and 19 turned up the same result: “Appears to be closed,” the inspector wrote on each form.

The complaint was left unresolved until this week, when the proprietor of the shop, Joseph LaLima, was hospitalized for the coronavirus, setting off a furor in the Ulster County city, about 90 miles north of New York City.

Mr. LaLima had never stopped cutting hair, despite Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s order. But he was not doing it in his shop; he was doing in the privacy of his home — in the back of the shop.

“He said do not open up your shops, barbershops, beauty parlors, nail salons, tattoo parlors,” Mr. LaLima said on Friday, referring to the governor. “So I didn’t.”

Mr. LaLima, who spoke just after his release from a four-day hospitalization, began to get agitated. “It said you can work from home,” he said. “678 Broadway is my home!”

But according to state officials, Mr. LaLima’s interpretation of the order does not square with its actual text. The March 21 rule did not just order the closure of the physical spaces where services like manicures and haircuts are performed; it required services like nail-painting and buzz cuts to cease completely.

“These services cannot be provided while maintaining social distance,” the order reads.

In his daily briefing on Friday, Gov. Cuomo denounced Mr. LaLima’s actions without naming him. “You know that is an occupation of close proximity, right? You can’t really socially distance and do a haircut,” the governor said. “That is by definition an up close and personal occupation.”

A few hours after leaving the hospital, Mr. LaLima railed against the governor. He said he had done no wrong, and was simply trying to make a living.

“I am aggravated to the nines,” Mr. LaLima said. “Is Cuomo going to pay me? Is he going to make up the difference? Is he going to pay my taxes? Is he going to pay the heat and electric? Is he going to feed my family?” he asked.

Richard Azzopardi, a senior adviser to the governor, was unmoved by Mr. LaLima’s defense. “There is no excuse to be reckless in a pandemic,” he said.

The coronavirus has killed 31 people in Ulster County, and more than 1,400 people have been infected. Eleven people are currently hospitalized in the county, and health officials fear that some of Mr. LaLima’s clients may be next.

Some of the county’s 55 disease investigators are now trying to trace those customers. According to the barber, many of his clients were police officers and firefighters, whose hair he cut for free.

“I did them a favor!” Mr. LaLima said. “And I didn’t give it to anybody else. I got it from somebody that came into my shop.”

He doesn’t know that, of course. And because he knowingly refused to follow the social distancing guidelines he exposed the health care workers in the hospital to risk and now he’s making contract tracers spend time trying to track down all the people he exposed and those people are going to have to get tested and/or quarantine themselves. And this sort of thing is causing paranoia, anger and suspicion in the community.

Again, I understand the anger and fear associated with the economic distress. I don’t blame people for being upset and worried. But blaming the scientists and the politicians for trying to contain the virus is daft. There’s a lot of misery for which you can blame them but trying to save lives isn’t one of them. It’s immature behavior and frankly embarrassing for these allegedly adult people.

You can’t just put your head in the sand and act as though this emergency isn’t your problem and you can just behave as if it’s normal. This guy was lucky he didn’t die. Good for him. But he easily could have and then what was his family supposed to do? And he could have killed one of his family members as well as the customers and their loved ones as well as total strangers. Why can’t these folks see that?

The social contract in this country has been frayed for a long time. But this has exposed something really awful about too many of us. If we get through this without major social unrest it will be because most Americans are able to understand basic logic and give a damn about their fellow man. It will be no thanks to the minority who don’t.

And by the way:

Polls are showing a significant erosion in support from seniors over Trump’s response to the pandemic, so it’s hard to know whether they are going to like this assault on Biden for being old. Normally, older people tend to support younger candidates because they are aware of having lost some energy as they got older and the presidency is a very stressful job. But the attacks on Biden may just be a bridge too far. They are gross.

Trump was the oldest man in history to assume the presidency. But he seems to think that because he wears more make-up than Tammy Faye Baker and dyes his hair strawberry blond that it makes him young.

But going after Biden for being old when he’s clearly addled himself is really something. It would take hours to show all the times Trump has been doddering, delusional, and dumb. Here’s just one of the weird incidents.

Trump attacking his opponent’s intellectual competence is tried and true. They managed to turn Hillary Clinton into a brain-damaged zombie. The question is whether the press will run with it with the same gleeful gusto they showed in 2016. The jury is still out on that but I have a feeling if we weren’t in the middle of a once in a century global crisis, they’d be following Trump down that rabbit hole all over again. There’s been very little self-reflection on what happened four years ago.

I don’t think Trump can go much longer without his rallies. It’s the only thing he really cares about. Up until now he’s been able to spend virtually all of his time tweeting, watching TV, going to rallies and attending pageants with foreign leaders here and overseas. He is performing the job of a politician running for office but he has no idea how to be a president.

So, naturally, he wants them back even if it kills off some of his fans. I’m sure there are thousands willing to offer themselves as human sacrifices for their Dear Leader:

The coronavirus pandemic forced Trump to halt his public campaign schedule. His last rally was held in March. The events are a significant part of his pitch to voters and played a big role in his successful 2016 run, and his team is busy planning to find a way to recreate that energy in the current environment.

The question is how and in what form a rally would occur. Three campaign officials tell CNN that no concrete plans are in place to a return to in-person campaigning, but a variety of scenarios are being discussed. That includes the possibility of the President appearing as part of a virtual rally before he appears at an in-person event. The Trump livestream broadcasts have become a hit with the base of the campaign, with the campaign saying that the streams draw one million unique viewers a night — and that’s without Trump himself appearing in any of them.

“He loves it, people love being in his presence as well, so we’re very hopeful that as we head towards November we can get back to the rallies,” said Lara Trump, the President’s daughter in law, on a recent press call with reporters. “The President is excited to do that as well, and I don’t think it would feel like a real campaign season, really without them.”

“We’re hopeful to get back out there on the road, but listen, if we do have to shift to something like a virtual rally, we’re looking at that option. We’ve been really successful with all of our virtual events,” Trump said.

Florida State GOP Chairman Joe Gruters said the campaign has been in contact with him to begin the planning process of holding a rally in his state.”I’ve talked to the Trump campaign about getting something set up and they definitely want to make it happen,” Gruters said. “I know the President wants to get back here as soon as possible.

“Trump and his advisers also intend to hold the Republican National Convention in person and as scheduled.In an interview Thursday with the Washington Examiner, Trump said he has every intention of holding the convention in North Carolina but suggested the state’s Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper may attempt to get in the way.

“We’ll have a convention. I’m a traditionalist, but we’ll have to see, like everything else, but I think we’ll be in good shape by that time. We have a great state, North Carolina, that’s been very, very good,” Trump said. “Although, it’s got a Democrat governor, so we have to be a little bit careful. It’s got a Democrat governor, so we have to be a little bit careful with that, because they’re playing politics. They’re playing politics, as you know, by delaying the openings.”

North Carolina officials strongly pushed back on Trump’s claims in a statement to CNN. “As the Governor said, pandemics cannot be political,” said Sadie Weiner, communications director for Cooper. “North Carolina is using the data and the science based on White House guidance to inform our three-phased approach to lifting restrictions. The health and safety of North Carolinians is the top priority as we battle COVID-19.”

Convention planners are already going to great lengths to plan an event that would work under the new reality of the pandemic. The Republican National Convention Committee recently hired a physician to serve as the senior adviser for health and safety planning. Dr. Jeffrey Runge has been tasked with helping convention organizers plan for a convention that will be safe for its participants.

“We recognize this hasn’t been done before, but we remain committed to leading the path forward so that we can safely re-open America and create a five-star event for attendees and guests this August,” said Marcia Lee Kelly, the CEO and President of the Republican National Convention.

While Trump has been unable to get in front of voters, his campaign is attempting to use the power of incumbency to replace the lack of physical rallies. They regularly tout the President’s briefings and press events on coronavirus and have been specifically targeting messages to voters in the battleground states where Trump has been holding official campaign events.

The President himself is also sprinkling politics into these official visits. During his tour of a medical equipment factory in Allentown on Thursday, Trump directly attacked presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden during his remarks.

So they are planning to gather tens of thousands of Trump fanatics together in an enclosed space in the middle of a highly contagious global pandemic?

Huh … ok.

Nightly news coverage of the Vietnam War taught military and political leaders never again to show the American public war that up-close. Bodies and blood don’t sell geopolitical abstractions very well. Nor does a parade of coffins — flag-draped or otherwise — bolster support for endless military adventurism and war profiteering. So the George W. Bush administration turned the Iraq invasion into a video game. The supposed war on COVID-19 is similarly sanitized.

In reading Samuel Pepys (pronounced Peeps) accounts of life during the Great Plague of London (1665), Andrew Sullivan noticed how very in-your-face death was to this member of Parliament and of the Royal Society. It was the last major outbreak of bubonic plague in England. Within seven months one-fifth or more of Londoners were dead. Many deaths went unrecorded. The Great Fire of London destroyed many records the next year. No one knows for sure how many actually died.

Somehow, Pepys survived. He carried on as normally as he might as people around him perished. The bartender at his local pub lost “his wife and three children … all, I think, in a day.”

Sullivan continues:

And then just a little moment that gives us a sense of how lucky, in comparison, we are: “It was dark before I could get home, and so land at church-yard stairs, where, to my great trouble, I met a dead corpse of the plague, in the narrow ally … But I thank God I was not much disturbed by it. However, I shall beware of being late abroad again.” Maybe it’s just the English stiff upper lip as far back as 1665, but the tenacity and composure of the man are impressive, even as he passes by mounds of corpses lying out in the open, piled up against the walls of houses in the streets, dumped into mass graves, and all the doctors dead in Westminster, leaving the dying to fend for themselves.

We are spared all that. “Everything we hear about the impact of this virus is technical,” Sullivan explains. “All the dead are abstractions. We chart graphs. We predict curves.”

Broadcasting etiquette, medical privacy laws, and refrigerated trailers keep stacked bodies from public view. Only drone footage of mass burials on Hart Island give a hint of the scale of death in New York City. Over 27,000 have died statewide at this writing and over 88,000 nationally. Many victims never make it to the hospital. Few but family and FDNY crews see them.

Sujatha Gidla is a conductor for New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) and author of “Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India.” She survived COVID-19, noting there has been minimal or inadequate PPE for MTA workers. (Mustn’t panic the riders.) Gidla’s experience of her city under a pandemic is closer to that of Pepys than many. By May 5, she had already lost dozens of colleagues:

We are stumbling upon dead bodies. I know of two cases. A train operator nearly tripped over one while walking between cars. The other person was sitting upright on a bench right outside the conductor’s window and discovered to be dead only at the end of an eight-hour shift after my co-workers kept noticing the person on each trip.

The conditions created by the pandemic drive home the fact that we essential workers — workers in general — are the ones who keep the social order from sinking into chaos. Yet we are treated with the utmost disrespect, as though we’re expendable. Since March 27, at least 98 New York transit workers have died of Covid-19. My co-workers say bitterly: “We are not essential. We are sacrificial.”

Sujatha Gidla is still recovering.

The rest of us are not encountering bodies in subway cars or in the streets. Nor are we seeing images of what COVID-19 can do to healthy people lucky enough to survive.

“I have yet to see a Covid19 patient in the terminal phase of the illness; I’ve never seen one being forcibly intubated; I haven’t seen video of the coughing fits of the victims,” Sullivan observes. “There are no photos of the dying; and very few that even show the toll of survival.”

Photos a friend texted him of a gay coronavirus patient in his 30s recalled patients Sullivan saw during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Skeletal, shrunken. At least families then (if not their partners or husbands) could visit them in the hospital. Not now.

Now the pandemic is moving out into Trump counties in swing states where the dead will be even less visible, “sacrificial” meat packers among them. And black and brown laborers largely invisible in normal times. Perhaps those insisting on risking themselves and neighbors by refusing to observe social distancing or to wear masks could stand to see more images and hear more stories of what could await them. I quit counting dead pastors after 50.

“The most incredible pain that I’ve ever experienced,” David Anzarouth, 25, of Toronto told the CBC after contracting COVID-19 during a Miami, Florida vacation in early March.

“Models show that if 80 percent of people wear masks that are 60 percent effective, easily achievable with cloth, we can get to an effective R₀ of less than one. That’s enough to halt the spread of the disease,” The Atlantic reported. Reopening for business without masks and distancing could land us right back in shutdown and do more lasting economic damage.

Wearing masks for MAGA red hats is a public admission of Dear Leader’s failure. For Donald Trump and his cult, aversion to masks is also “like a gay man in the late 1980s loathing condoms,” Sullivan writes:

Is mask-wearing some kind of signal of effeminacy? That appears to be Trump’s moronic assumption, which is why his vanity prevents him from wearing one. But taking advice on manliness from an obese president who cannot directly confront someone, lobs insults from a distance, shrinks from any criticism, dodged the draft, cheats at golf, and walks around with a ridiculous bouffant hair-do and an absurd orange fake-tan, is not something a real man would ever do.

[…]

We need a model for men that prizes restraint and courage, prudence and pragmatism, and enfolds this in a model of maleness that is rooted in the defense of our societies from carnage. Looking around, I see plenty of this at work: men with calm and dignity and common sense protecting their families, friends and country. The only place where it obviously isn’t happening is in the White House.

Well, not the only place, as the tweets above demonstrate. They will feel awfully manly tied into hospital beds and sedated with breathing tubes down their throats.

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For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV 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.

In a groundbreaking scientific breakthrough, two Cheetah cubs have been born through in vitro fertilization and embryo transfer into a surrogate mother at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium.

The births are the result of careful planning and innovative medical expertise through a partnership between the Columbus Zoo, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal, Va., and Fossil Rim Wildlife Center in Glen Rose, Texas—three leading institutions with a commitment to conservation. These efforts were also part of a breeding recommendation from the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ (AZA) Species Survival Plan® (SSP) and the Cheetah Sustainability Program (CSP), developed to manage a sustainable population of cheetahs in human care.

While the cubs’ biological mother is Kibibi, the cubs were delivered on Wednesday, February 19, 2020 at 9:50 p.m. and 10:20 p.m. by Isabelle (Izzy). The cheetahs’ care team observed the births through a remote camera and continue to monitor Izzy and her cubs closely. Izzy, a first-time mom, has been providing great care to her cubs at this time. 

Via Zooborns

They keep saying Trump is a branding genius. You be the judge:

This is a man who thinks stealth aircraft are literally invisible so…