We're Not Safe Yet: Easter Sunday 2020 Edition

Remember a while back, trump was insisting that the COVID-19 / Coronavirus emergency would be over by Easter weekend and he wanted to see churches packed with people... and ultimately let the matter drop because enough experts were warning him that the United States won't be safe enough for large crowds by today. (Never mind the fact a lot of governors left church gathering exceptions in their Stay-At-Home orders, exposing hundreds to COVID anyway)

However, trump is STILL calling for "a return to normalcy" in order to "get America back to work" by opening stores and restaurants and schools and a lot of other places while the exposure rates show no signs of slowing down. Even as these are things not entirely under his control, via Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to “reopen” the economy, but it’s not clear exactly what this means, or what he can do about it. Governors and mayors have issued the orders shutting down public spaces. Trump can’t overrule those, though if he wants to pry them open, he does have some tools: He can urge his supporters to resist, or use federal resources to pressure states and localities that resist his advice.

Public-health experts have argued that social-distancing measures can only be relaxed after several benchmarks are reached. Community spread has to be contained, and the government needs to have the capacity to conduct mass testing and to be able to trace the contacts of anybody who tests positive. This is not just some liberal-weenie precaution. The conservative American Enterprise Institute made this case in March, and CDC director Robert Redfield confirms it in a new NPR interview.

The notion that we’re going to be ready to do this within a few weeks seems utterly fanciful. At a recent press briefing, reporters tried to drill down on how much testing Trump planned to have available to accommodate the reopening. Trump simply denied the premise that testing to scale was even necessary. “Do you need it? No. Is it a nice thing to do? Yes. We’re talking 325 million people. That’s not going to happen, as you can imagine,” he said at one point. Asked about the number of tests his former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb has said would be needed, Trump scoffed, “I don’t like using the word needed, because I don’t think it’s needed...”

No matter how the scientists and doctors are trying to talk trump through this crisis, he's seemingly trying to push the federal government towards forcing the governors of all 50 states into this path he wants:

Rather than ramping up a massive national testing regime, the federal government has been signaling to states that they’re soon going to be on their own. And as for contact tracing — like a cell-phone app, or an army of public-health officials, to track down every contact of a person who tests positive — well, there’s simply no sign whatsoever that either project is even in the works, let alone ready for an early May rollout. And if the government doesn’t have the capacity to quickly identify and isolate new cases, relaxing social distancing will simply lead to renewed outbreaks.

So, given the government’s utter unreadiness to transition away from social distancing, what does Trump have in mind when he talks about reopening? The answer seems to be retreating into denial...

Lumped into all of this - something Chait covers in one paragraph - is how trump and his Fox Not-News cohorts have been trumpeting miracle cures - in particular a lupus/malaria drug that doesn't have confirmed medical studies proving it works on COVID - as though said cure is a home run for him to claim victory if it works. Even though that drug in the wrong dosage is lethal, it carries serious side effects, and there's again no actual confirmation from multiple trials - necessary for ANY drug treatment - that it will work.

trump, in short, wants this crisis to be over.

Partly because it's something he knows deep down he's not in control of (and trump is an obsessive control freak), partly because his own attention span can't handle anything taking more than a week to resolve (and COVID is something that will be with us for months), and mostly because he knows the longer this crisis takes the likelier he's not going to resolve it and tie it all up in a pretty bow before November's Election Day. Back to Chait:

It is irrational for Trump to believe he can restart the economy without first putting into place a robust public-health apparatus to contain new outbreaks. But it is not irrational for Trump to worry about his reelection. The state of public opinion may be even grimmer than even the top-line numbers would indicate. The public believes Trump was unprepared to deal with the virus by overwhelming margins — 63 percent to 22 percent, according to YouGov, and 71 percent to 29 percent, per CBS. YouGov also asks if Trump could have reduced the damage had he acted sooner, and 40 percent say “a lot,” while 25 percent say “somewhat.”

Two-thirds of the country believes Trump bungled the early stages of the crisis and subjected the country to unnecessary pain. So, on what everybody expects to be the single question that decides the election, Trump has lost the entire premise. Trump is already losing, and the current course seems far more likely to widen the gap than to shrink it. Whatever slim benefit of the doubt the public was willing to cede as he tackles the crisis is quickly expiring, and he stands (justifiably) to be blamed for the hardships that will follow.

We're already looking at April-May unemployment numbers for roughly 30 percent of the available workforce in America. Given how long it takes for businesses shut down to re-open, even if we resolve COVID-19 with widespread testing - which we can't, we still don't have enough tests - there's a slow slog towards rehiring. Businesses that furloughed workers could arguably bring them back, but again that takes time (and other resources). The economic contraction that happened with the pandemic just for the United States took a huge chuck out of the money needed to rebuild anyway.

Schools are likely not reopening until September, meaning a lost spring for students - high school seniors in particular struggling towards college enrollment - across the board. Universities may have to delay enrollments.

And we're not even looking at the emotional impact this pandemic is leaving on millions of Americans: The loss of loved ones and friends at the scale of thousands, the social isolation that's been causing "cabin fever" issues for people, a lot of personal turmoil that won't be resolved any time soon. There's a dour mood across the landscape... and trump and his Republican allies have to know they're going to be the targets of that mood.

But what trump hopes to do to avert that blame - pushing for re-opening everything before our nation is even safe to do so - is going to re-trigger all the problems that led to us self-isolating and closed down in the first place. Places like Singapore and South Korea are reporting their infection numbers going back up after easing up their extensive isolation policies that had earlier kept their rates "flattened". Until there's a vaccine in place - and that could be September at the earliest - we are not going back to normal.

But trump wants that "normal" - where the stock markets went up, where his tariffs were "winning", where business was booming while millions of workers were NOT - in place before November.

Otherwise, he and his buddies are going to have to cheat harder to steal the 2020 election.

And you know how trump HATES to do more work.

Gods help us.

P.S. Happy Easter Sunday to my Christian peeps. I took care of my Unitarian obligations this morning with a scrambled egg sacrifice (I burned the toast, so be it O Lord).

trump's Literal Easter Deadline

Tonight in WHAT THE EVER-LOVING FCK IS trump SAYING NOW:

trump wants to speed up the "Stay at Home" efforts to flatten the curve on Coronavirus infections and have everybody back at work and school and every other place of catching the damn bug by the time Easter Sunday rolls around, which is in three weeks.

Even though a ton of medical - and even a few economic experts - are screaming that we're nowhere near the end of this crisis, and that re-opening everything can make things worse. Via German Lopez at Vox:

In recent days, Trump has been walking back previous suggestions from public officials — including his own remarks at earlier press briefings — that social distancing will be required for months. He said on Monday, “America will, again, and soon, be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. Lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself.”

But experts are clear about the massive risk that ending social distancing early — in weeks instead of months — could pose.

“Everybody living through this wants to not be in this situation,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, told me. “But the call to end it soon — and saying that’s his intention — is not based on public health. There’s nothing to suggest that ending it soon will have any good impact at all.”

Instead, ending social distancing prematurely could cause more deaths. “More people will become infected. More people will get sick. More people will die,” Kates said.

Epidemiological models back this up. They indicate that coronavirus cases will rise if social distancing measures are relaxed, potentially causing hundreds of thousands if not millions of deaths in the US alone...

trump does not know nor does he care to know that the Christian churches he's hoping to pack can be vectors for infecting tens of people at a time, if not hundreds. We've already got evidence across the globe that religious gatherings as well as any other gatherings like business conferences, music concerts, bar nights, what have you will be places where COVID will show up as well and go from one person to three (or six, or fifteen, or 34, or...)

And trump is latching onto Easter Sunday weekend because, obviously, it's a date on the calendar he can't forget, even as he himself ignores going to church while he stumbles to his own damn golf courses every weekend.

trump - along with a scary number of Republicans and Far Right pundits - are more terrified of a consumer-driven economy shutting down than they are of the COVID outbreak killing hundreds to thousands of our loved ones. CHRIST, the Texan Lt. Governor openly claimed older people would rather die than let the economy tumble, we've got Glenn Beck offering himself up like a "noble sacrifice" as though he'll ever truly risk crawling out of his studio safe place and expose himself to any poor infected soul.

There's a level of sociopathy - Go Ahead And Kill Grandma! - to the Republican fears of an economic downturn during an election cycle that chills the bone. Remember when the "Tea Party" Republicans were all screaming about Obamacare "Death Panels" for our grandparents back in 2010? They turned out to be wrong about that... and here they are willingly lining up our grandparents in 2020 as a Death Panel unto themselves.

Say again: CHRIST, this is evil.

And if trump does this, orders all the states to end their Shelter-In-Place orders, force restaurants and bars and public places to open during Good Friday through Easter itself... we will be doing it while the medical predictive models still have us with tens of thousands carrying the virus and infectious enough to spread COVID even more.

We are so Honest-To-God fucked right now.

Some Thoughts This Monday Night March 2020

Images, by Tyrone Green Witty Librarian:

Look, I have a lot of schadenfreude watching the Dow Jones drop like a stone over the last month, but we're at the point - probably way past it - where a lot of middle-class 401k and mutual fund portfolios are getting nuked. Isn't there a way to close down the markets for two weeks, let things cool off, like the banking holiday FDR ordered back when he took office at the height of the Great Depression? Those trading floors will be one less place for people to pick up the COVID19.

My library closed to the public back on March 17, we spent the remainder of the week getting our holds into Books-by-Mail for those we could contact, the rest are stuck here until late April when we *hope* to re-open. We're still coming to work until further notice, depending on what the state does, and in the meantime we're using the closed time to re-arrange office space and catch up on paperwork. We DO have ebooks available through Overdrive...

Most libraries - public and college - have closed, almost all the schools have closed here in Florida... and yet our governor DeSantis, obsessing over the economic hit that would happen, isn't doing anything to get the state to block off the beaches and reduce public gatherings there. He's resisting calls for stronger "Shelter In Place" emergency orders to get more residents to stay at home and not spread contact by infectees. Even as we're getting a shitton of New Yorkers fleeing a locked-down New York City and bringing more infectees with them.

For all my science fiction/fantasy and horror readings, for growing up on Stephen King's The Stand, for all the zombie apocalypse movies I've seen, I still can't believe that when a global pandemic finally hit the first thing to go was all the toilet paper. (I kid. Hand sanitizer and eggs disappeared just as quick)

I just found out today that the TV show Supernatural predicted it back in 2009!

We're looking at a possibility of the number of people filing for unemployment - due to layoffs at a lot of tourism, travel, retail, education, restaurant/bar, luxury service jobs because we HAVE to avoid these places of business now - jumping into the 30 percent range during this month. We need to remember a few things: 1) unemployment figures relied a lot on people claiming that, which was lower than actual numbers that can no longer live off-the-books as it were 2) we're looking at a collapse of several industries that will take YEARS to recover meaning those numbers are going to stay up well into 2021 (and 2022 for that matter).
We are looking at both funding unemployment and other social aid services way more than we already are (which wasn't all that great to begin with), AND we are looking at the reality of a Universal Basic Income - a monthly payout by the federal government to help cover the basics like rent/mortgage and food - getting implemented for a long period of time (if not set up permanently). THIS means one thing: The Federal government has to pay for this, and our nation is going to HAVE to raise taxes on upper incomes to balance this out.

None of this would be happening if trump took his job seriously, recognized the warning signs from JANUARY, and prompted both Congress and the Executive branch into funding and manufacturing the medical supplies - not just masks and gloves but also ventilators and respirators - so that when we got to here in March we'd have the bare minimum of those supplies to keep our hospitals functioning. Instead for reasons of his own - either sheer laziness, ignorance of the severity, some twisted idea this crisis would work to his advantage this year of election - trump fiddled while Rome got burned.

Gods help us, this is where we're at tonight.

The trumpian Failure at Presidential Accountability

(update 3/16/20: dammit as always when I least expect it, Batocchio adds me as a link to Crooks & Liars' Mike's Blog Round-Up. Sigh. I DID NOT HAVE CAKE OR PIE READY... nevermind, just hope you enjoy the site, please leave valid and life-affirming comments, and learn the Vulcan greeting salute because handshakes are no longer safe)

Still dealing with a number of real-life issues - things are changing at work, not to mention how my work at a public library is going to get affected by the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic - to where the best I can blog about right now is WHAT THE EVERLOVING F-CK DID trump SAY NOW???

This past week we witnessed trump's White House try to control the messaging on the likely spread of COVID-19 while doing little to nothing about pressing for more testing kits and isolation policies to reduce the risk of that spread. He performed a televised speech to allay fears... during which he ad-libbed falsehoods that caused more panic than calm.

By trying to play to the concerns of Wall Street, trump actually caused two of the greatest stock market crashes in financial history within three days of each other. And as this all went on, most Americans went on a panic run at the grocery store buying up all the hand sanitizer (they should have bought more soap, that helps better) and toilet paper on the shelves (to be fair, if you end up stuck at home for more than two weeks if a quarantine becomes necessary, you'd want the security of reliable bathroom trips too).

So for this Friday, in order to present himself as in charge and in control, trump scheduled a big televised press conference, timed exactly just as the stock markets were closing... just so he could end up showing how little control he had and even worse openly admit he was in charge of nothing.

Think I'm exaggerating? Here's the ABC News clip about it:

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all." Doesn't matter what he's avoiding responsibility for, the fact that he's AVOIDING responsibility ought to anger every American living and past.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, RESPONSIBILITY FOR SERVING AND PROTECTING THIS NATION IS IN THE JOB DESCRIPTION.

Let's look back at all the Presidents confronted with the demands of responsibility.

Harry S. Truman, a personal fave, famously had a desk sign:


This photo of Harry S. Truman Library and Museum is courtesy of Tripadvisor

"The BUCK STOPS HERE!" This is now a required meme for anyone sitting in the Oval Office (except of course for the cowardly current occupant who dares not utter it).

Here's somebody that trump won't like to hear from: President Barack Obama taking responsibility for intelligence failures back in 2010. Via Josh Gerstein at Politico:

President Barack Obama on Thursday accepted responsibility for intelligence shortcomings that led to a failed Christmas Day bombing plot on a Detroit-bound airliner, saying, “Ultimately, the buck stops with me.

“As president, I have a solemn responsibility to protect our nation and our people, and when the system fails, it is my responsibility,” Obama said...

Obama’s buck-stops-here message marks a change in tone from earlier statements in which Obama and other officials repeatedly noted that the watch-listing system that failed to flag the suspect, Umar AbdulMatallab, was put in place under the Bush administration.

But while Obama promised to bring more accountability into the counterterrorism system, he indicated he had no plans to fire anyone involved in the missteps prior to Christmas.

“It appears this incident was not the fault of a single individual or organization but rather a systemic failure across organizations and agencies. … I am less interested in passing out blame than I am in learning from and correcting these mistakes to make us safer,” Obama said...

Want more?

While this isn't a quote that happened during his Presidency, Dwight D. "Ike" Eisenhower spoke of responsibility serving as the Allied Commander overseeing the Western European theater. For the Normandy Invasion he wrote two letters. The First Letter congratulated the Allied troops and exhorted them to victory. The Second Letter was in case the landings failed (given the harsh weather and stout German defenses, this was a legitimate concern):

"Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops... My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone."

The letter wasn't needed: D-Day was a bloody but successful landing and led to the Liberation of France within months. Less than a year later, the Nazis fell between the pincers of Ike's forces in the West and the Soviets to the East. However, that letter highlighted character of the man: Eisenhower accepted the responsibility of leadership... and the people knew it. That's one reason "I Like Ike" worked as a slogan, that's a reason why Americans elected him President.

So here comes trump, facing a global pandemic health care crisis that requires bold thinking, getting out ahead of the problem, staying in touch with all players to make sure things get done properly and to the good of all.

Unfortunately, trump's spent the last three years dismantling the government systems, understaffing agencies if not outright sabotaging them. Redirecting efforts towards projects that won't help in this crisis or any other. He oversaw the dismantling of a National Security panel tasked with coordinating pandemic responses, which left much of the federal and state agencies in the dark on who was in charge during the first months of this crisis (starting back in December 2019).

trump's response to all of this? Shifting blame on Obama instead of admitting his own involvement. Arguing that it's Obama's fault there's not enough test kits for this crisis when it should have been something trump's administration ordered done the minute it became clear - mid-January - that the coronavirus was going global. Like Obama would have known back in 2016 this particular virus was going to erupt three years after he left office.

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all."

This isn't even the first time trump has shifted blame in his life. He avoided accountability for his many bankruptcies, he avoided accountability by settling out of his many fraud trials, he avoided accountability for his destruction of a sports league, he avoided accountability for every broken promise and every theft made. And these were all before he ran for the Presidency.

"I'm not taking any responsibility at all."

Here's the one thing required by law in the Constitution, written out as the Oath one must take when entering the Oval Office:

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Those words REQUIRE the oath-taker to execute the office of the Presidency, to preserve protect and defend the Constitution of the United States which means ensuring the safety of the People - all of US - who keep that Constitution standing. These are words, this is an Oath that REQUIRES responsibility out of the person who swears to it.

trump won't take that responsibility. he's openly admitting to it now, something a lot of us knew for years and we saw this moment coming.

We're in a major crisis this month and the person most responsible to lead us through it won't be responsible at all.

We are so very royally extremely sickeningly fucked.

Oh God No Not Now! I Was Gonna Go Hand Obama My Resume!

Cough.

Sniffle.

Cough cough cough.

Gahhhhh, sore throat.

...NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooo...

Damn you, flu season!  I was going to go see Obama in Tampa today!  I was going to pass along my resume, and get hired in the West Wing, and hopefully get Josh's office and flirt shamelessly with a Donna-type, except you know more brunette-ish, and you know get off the unemployed schnide and everything!  But the Secret Service isn't gonna let my sick ass anywhere near the guy!  NOOOOOoooooooooo...

Off to the walk-in clinic.  Sob cough cough.

If Obama ever reads this, be grateful I was thinking of your well-being.  Now, HIRE ME!!!  (glances about) there's gotta be a way to attach mah resume here...