Quick Notes On trump's Schemes for the 2020 Convention

Given the other things to condemn trump for during this pandemic crisis, ignoring the obvious need to cancel a large gathering of his OWN PARTY is three different levels of stupid, but that's what we should expect anymore. Via Daniel Politi at Slate:

President Donald Trump began Memorial Day with a threat, warning that he was seriously considering moving the Republican National Convention from Charlotte if there are no guarantees that the state will have lifted any restrictions on how many people can gather in closed spaces by late August. In a series of tweets on Monday, Trump said he needed guarantees from the Democratic governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, that Republicans would be able to fill Charlotte’s Spectrum Center to capacity during the convention...

Cooper, Trump insisted, must “immediately” give Republicans an answer “as to whether or not the space will be allowed to be fully occupied,” Trump wrote. If he can’t guarantee that then the GOP will have to “reluctantly” another site for the convention, “with all of the jobs and economic development it brings...”

A few points where trump is wrong: Political conventions do not bring a lot of economic development or jobs; It is - even under these risky circumstances where a lot of places have cancelled conventions- difficult to find another large-sized convention facility to move to on short notice, so in some respects trump is bluffing here; and anybody even thinking of showing up at an event with more than ten people - all of whom are coming from 50 states plus territories bringing any variant of coronavirus with them - is basically condemning about two-thirds of fellow attendees with a virus that's gonna wreck their lungs, kidneys, and other major organs.

There's a reason why the comic-cons and library cons and marketing cons are all cancelled or delayed: nobody is stupid enough to host these things right now, no matter how much pressure the CEOs and Republicans are pushing to re-open.

Of course, trump is both projecting and deflecting when making his decisions. Back to Politi:

The president’s tweets also come a few days after the New York Times reported that Trump was open to participating in a smaller convention, although he reportedly often wondered to aides why they couldn’t simply move it to Florida, where the reopening process is moving along more quickly. Trump has also openly wondered whether North Carolina’s Democratic governor would try to hurt Republicans with rules regarding the convention. “It’s got a Democrat governor, so we have to be a little bit careful with that, because they’re playing politics,” Trump told a Washington Examiner columnist earlier this month. “They’re playing politics, as you know, by delaying the openings.”

Cooper has insisted that his decisions regarding COVID-19 restrictions have nothing to do with politics. “A pandemic cannot be political,” Cooper told CNN. “If it is, we lose that ability to work together.”

There are several terrifying aspects at play here. Above all, trump seems to think the pandemic is a partisan hoax meant to embarrass himself and the Republicans who are pushing quick re-openings to re-spark an economy that's nowhere near safe and ready.

Second point, trump's thoughts about Florida is likely not about Orlando or Tampa or Miami's Convention halls - which can handle such events - but likely his Doral resort (trump may say otherwise, but I doubt the heavily Democratic-controlled metros will play ball with him because they'll want the same CDC regulations as North Carolina/Charlotte) so he can make money.

Third point, trump may be accusing the Dems of playing politics but he's the one trying to use this issue to force NC Governor Cooper into speeding up any re-opening schedule to favor trump. Look at how trump is trying to use the threat of "lost jobs and economic opportunity" should the convention move away. That's a stick-no-carrot approach that trump has used before, which doesn't work too often because without that "carrot" Cooper has no reason to submit to trump's whims here.

If anything, should trump and the Republicans try to host ANY kind of gathering while this pandemic is taking place, they are taking a serious risk with not only their health but the health of every resident in Charlotte or elsewhere forced to handle this ill-advised convention.

There are other ways to do this now. Just not with trump's sociopathic ego-stroking need to play to a cheering crowd in front of him.

But this is how trump rolls, isn't it. His ongoing sadistic need to serve his own while everyone else sickens and suffers.

Horrifying stuff, America.

This is not the time for trump's ego to make more of us sick.

Quick Memorial Day 2020 Rage Post

So I know this is Memorial Day weekend, traditionally the start of THE SUMMER SEASON, but this is 2020 and we're three months into an official COVID-19 Pandemic and one of the key things we need to be doing is SOCIAL DISTANCING and avoiding crowded places, which is why there's no Summer Blockbuster Movie Summer to be pining over - I am missing my Wonder Woman sequel, damn you trump - and why whatever meager travel plans I had for my birthday this month are on hold and why for the LOVE OF GOD we need to be avoiding the beaches and water holes and yet here's a bunch of things on Twitter and the news outlets about how FAR TOO MANY of our fellow Americans are breaching the safety guidelines, JESUS CHRIST, such as reports coming out about the turnout at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri:

...They appear to show people gathering at Redhead Lakeside Grill and Yacht Club in Osage Beach at Lake of the Ozarks. We've blurred the faces in the photos, until we learn more about the event, and why so many people were allowed inside.

The pictures show people close together, with no masks...

5 On Your Side reached out to the Camden County Sheriff's Department who said, the state does have social distancing guidelines, but "It doesn't seem people are following it very well here."

The Sheriff's Department has not been called to any incidents so far, and said they do not have any penalty to enforce because there are no orders in place to require social distancing...

For all the morans running around screaming "TYRANNY" about their "FREEDOM" to NOT wear masks in public and all, there's actually few laws in place to enforce these things. It's meant to be voluntary, in that PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO RESPECT THE REALITY THAT SOCIAL CONTACT CAN SPREAD THE VIRUS, SO JUST FCKING DON'T DO IT. /headdesk

And of course Florida - even though we've been better than most in being that voluntary and self-aware about social distancing - even the Sunshine State had to go crazy for Memorial Day weekend because guess what happened out at Daytona Beach already:

...Police believe the crowd that shutdown traffic in the city was part of an unofficial event shared on social media.

“Traffic is completely shut down with probably 200 people in the middle of the road,” a voice from the helicopter said over radio. “Trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s people, looks like they’re climbing on top of a car,” the pilot can be heard saying over the radio...

Subsequent Twitter posts showed mobs of shoulder-to-shoulder crowds.

And this can't be the only place. Think of how many states have famous gathering spots, beaches and parks that thousands go to for the big summertime events... I'm in Florida, from Jacksonville to Daytona to Cocoa to Melbourne to Palm Beach to Pompano Beach to South Beach to the Keys to Sanibel to Sarasota to ALL of Pinellas County's gulf side to Weeki Wachee to Panama Beach to Pensacola, goddamn we are Beach Party Central and I dread how many residents went crazy this weekend just out of decades of social conditioning to party on a three-day weekend.

What the GODDAMN HELL, America.

You're getting told by a number of Republican politicians that "all is well" and you lot go on a Darwin-Award-worthy jaunt that will get half of you showing COVID fevers within the next 5-14 days.

This is the second wave we've been warned about. And we were nowhere near finishing the first wave of the pandemic.

We are so royally fucked.

Florida Pandemic Update: Republicans Caught Fudging the Numbers

This has been breaking since last night, via Langston Taylor at the Tampa Bay Times:

One day before a top Florida Department of Health data manager lost her role maintaining the state’s COVID-19 data, she objected to the removal of records showing people had symptoms or positive tests before the cases were announced, according to internal emails obtained by the Tampa Bay Times.

On Tuesday, a spokeswoman for Gov. Ron DeSantis said she had been fired.

According to the emails, department staff gave the order shortly after reporters requested the same data from the agency on May 5. The data manager, Rebekah Jones, complied with the order, but not before she told her supervisors it was the “wrong call...”

The dashboard that Jones managed is the best official source for in-depth data on how the deadly pandemic is moving through the state. Studying it is the surest way to know where outbreaks are growing and where testing is being done. Without access to the data, Floridians would have to rely on the word of officials and politicians without being able to verify for themselves...

In her Friday email to subscribers of a COVID data listserv, Jones said she was reassigned on May 5 “[f]or reasons beyond my division’s control” and warned that whoever took over may be less straightforward.

“As a word of caution, I would not expect the new team to continue the same level of accessibility and transparency that I made central to the process during the first two months. After all, my commitment to both is largely (arguably entirely) the reason I am no longer managing it,” she wrote.

“They are making a lot of changes. I would advise being diligent in your respective uses of this data.”

Jones also told CBS12 in Tallahassee on Monday that she refused to “manually change data to drum up support for the plan to reopen” the state...

DeSantis did this before when a medical expert challenged the narrative that the GOP Governor was trying to sell to the public a month ago. That narrative, by the by, is that "ALL IS WELL!" and we should re-open the entire state to business so that corporations can resume generating profits at the expense of everyone's health and safety.

For DeSantis to justify reopening just six weeks after shutting things down to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus, he has to have numbers showing a consistent decrease in infectees getting reported. If there's even one day of the numbers going up, it breaks the count and resets to a new one. Given how the virus can flare up - even in contained locations like Singapore and South Korea, a surge can happen - it's next to impossible for the numbers to behave the way DeSantis wants.

So he'll do the next best Republican thing he can think of: Lie about the numbers. And he can only get away with that if he can control the data.

There's a huge problem to all this: Florida, like a lot of places in the U.S., does not have enough testing kits and resources to check the population on a regular basis to identify and isolate hot spots at a given notice. Without that, a high number of our neighbors and coworkers and family members are going to be walking around spreading COVID without warning until it's too late. Flare-ups will be unavoidable.

This is also in violation of what had been a strong set of transparency rules - the famed Sunshine Law - that is supposed to keep our leaders accountable to the voters.

And because DeSantis will now be lying about the numbers, they will be uncountable. Leaving him and his Republican cronies unaccountable.

This is a major scandal for Florida. Our own leadership is intentionally working to hide or fake the numbers of an ongoing health care crisis just so they could force a lot of poor residents back to work, just so the rich can get richer while the rest of us get sick and risk dying.

What the hell can the residents do to fight back against their own government?!

Rat-Tailed Donny Is a Second Hand Hood

Everyone else is documenting the crazy, but what the hell here's my twelve cents after hearing about trump's latest "What The Goddamn HELL Is the Shitgibbon Saying Now?" marathon. Via Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

On Monday afternoon, President Trump told the press that he’s taking a drug called hydroxychloroquine as a preventative to ward off the coronavirus — a practice for which there is no evidence and that could, in theory, have negative side effects as serious as hallucinations and heart failure.

“I take it,” Trump said. “So far, I seem to be okay.”

Hydroxychloroquine is an anti-malarial drug that a non-randomized study from a French lab, publicized in March, initially suggested could be used as a treatment in fighting the coronavirus. In March, Trump frequently touted the drug, calling it “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.” But further studies have concluded that it is not effective in many cases and should not be routinely used to treat patients.

As previously noted at this blog, at Vox, and elsewhere, the hydroxychloroquine doesn't help against COVID and actually increased the death rate, most likely from the negative effects mentioned earlier. In short, it's NOT a drug you should be taking unless you're dealing with an actual condition - malaria, I think lupus - it's meant for. Back to Beauchamp:

Trump seems to be taking it not as a treatment for COVID-19 — he’s apparently tested negative — but as a preventative to protect himself from contracting it. There’s no medical evidence supporting the idea that this would work, and the risk of potential psychiatric and cardiac side effects, which are serious, would likely strongly outweigh any (hypothetical) benefits...

One of two things:

1) Either trump really is taking a drug that has no proven effect in combating COVID-19, which has documented side effects that could leave him (more) brain-damaged and dying from heart attack. He's doing this despite the likely medical advice he's supposed to be getting from the experts supposed to inform him on how to combat the pandemic, which shows AGAIN the poor judgment and obsessive self-destructive behavior trump's been showing for decades.

2) trump is lying. Either to allay any fear he himself is sick, or lying to keep his fanbase ill-informed, dependent on him instead of the experts, and likely getting those ill-informed dupes to buy more of the drug - is there any amazement that a solid number of his critics think he's getting kickbacks on drug sales? - to use without care or concern.

Nearly everybody I know on Twitter pretty much talked me into believing the latter instead of the former. Option 1) is so reckless and lethal that even a moran like trump wouldn't seriously volunteer himself to do. Option 2) fits his modus operandi of bullshitting the public, posing himself as a decisive, gung-ho leader, and then backing off with another round of lies to pretend he never said the first set of lies anyway.

The Twitter hashtag #HESLYING was a popular trend for the whole afternoon.

But this is what trump is stuck with. he refuses to make the hard choices - keep up the social distancing, take the economic hits of closing half our public spaces, spend money on keeping people alive and out of debt - that our nation needs right now to survive not just the next few months but what's looking like the rest of the year (and well into 2021).

trump wants that easy rescue. he wants a magic elixir at the doorstep to cure all ails and solve all woes.

trump is still digging hard for a miracle cure.

Problem is, he's pushing a deadly drug like some street-corner hoodlum that'll kill us faster than the virus.

Problem is, trump is digging our graves instead.

Tell It to the Judge, trumpshirts

There's a lot going on today so I may blog more than once, just letting you know.

One thing I'm waking up to is a follow-up on a thing I blogged last week, about how Attorney General Barr (trump's Roy Cohn) forced the withdrawal from Michael Flynn's plea bargain in order to force the judge overseeing the matter to end the case. In order to make it look like Flynn should never have made a plea deal in the first place, in order to make it look like Obama's Department of Justice and Mueller's investigative team entrapped Flynn without cause.

You have to remember, Flynn was a major contact between a lot of foreign players, not only Russia but also Turkey, and was getting caught in a lot of questionable plots to where the entire Intel Community was waving red flags about him. Flynn was also one of trump's inner circle handlers, which made the connections between trump and Russia a lot harder to ignore.

One of the earliest moves Mueller made during the inquiry into what and how Russia did to meddle in the 2016 election, the special prosecutor was able to get Flynn to plead down to "lying to investigators" in order to avoid jury trials over some of the more flagrant stuff Flynn - and his son - was caught doing. It was a foundation on which a lot of other cases and plea deals involving trump's people was based.

When trump was able to get Barr set up as Attorney General, Flynn changed his mind on the deal, and had been trying to wrangle his way out of it. The move Barr pulled last week was the final step - so it seemed - to let Flynn off the hook. No deal, no case, and then trump and his buddies can start claiming everything Mueller did was a conspiracy, a setup by Obama and the Deep State (the whole #Obamagate thing we've been seeing re-emerge this past week by Russian Twitter Bots) to destroy trump's God-approved destiny.

However, like a lot of trumpian schemes, this one wasn't thought out well enough. Judge Sullivan overseeing this matter had ways to keep the case going, and last night he used those steps and even opened up the availability of another weapon to hold Flynn (and Barr) accountable. To Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine:

First, earlier this week, a retired judge and two former U.S. Attorneys pointed out that this apparent legal coup does not have to end the matter. In an op-ed, the three legal eminences argued that the court has the power to bring in outside legal advisers to argue the case, even if the government has dropped its prosecution, and potentially still sentence the defendant.

Then, earlier this evening, the New York Times reported that Barr’s lawyers misled the court about the testimony of a key figure in the Flynn case. The Justice Department told the judge, Emmet Sullivan, that FBI notes indicated its agents only interviewed Flynn in order to trap him into lying. An FBI agent involved in the Flynn interview told the Department this wasn’t true, a fact the DOJ failed to include in its request to let Flynn go.

Then tonight, Judge Sullivan dropped a bomb. He announced that he would not simply rubber stamp Barr’s maneuver to free Flynn. Instead, he is bringing in a judge to review the case and provide the pushback against Flynn’s defense lawyers that is missing now that the DOJ has essentially joined in with Flynn’s legal team.

What may matter even more is the judge Sullivan picked for this job: John Gleeson, a former mob-busting prosecutor and, more to the point, one of the co-authors of the Post op-ed urging Sullivan to take this step...

I'm not there in person to witness much of this, but I get the impression that Sullivan is pissed.

I get the impression that Sullivan did not like getting lied to by Barr and the DoJ lawyers undercutting their own plea deal. That Times report that lawyers misled the judge on testimony is usually the point where said judge throws people into jail for contempt of his/her court.

I recall Sullivan is someone who, when AG Barr redacted the Mueller Report, fought to get parts of it unredacted for his review of Flynn's plea deal (The Justice Department refused). Sullivan did confront Flynn back in 2018 with the words "you sold out your own country," reportedly due to information Sullivan has on Flynn's corruption that hasn't been made public (yet).

And we're looking at the possibility that Sullivan can add charges regarding Flynn's misconduct in his courtroom. The reality that Flynn changed his testimony - at least once - while the plea deal was still on the table makes him open to a contempt of court perjury charge. Via Adam Gabbatt at The Guardian:

...Sullivan... said he had asked John Gleeson, a former federal judge in New York, to recommend whether Flynn should face a new criminal contempt charge for perjury. Gleeson has also been asked to make the case for why the DoJ’s motion to dismiss the Flynn case should be rejected...

What this does mean is that Flynn's lawyers have more work on their hands. This means Barr and his DoJ team cannot wash their hands of this and walk away. This is being done with an outsider in Gleeson who can't be pressured by Barr or trump to play their game of "loyalty or fired."

What this means is that trump, his inner circle of corrupt bastards, and his Russian cronies cannot pretend this whole thing was a manufactured Obama/Hillary trap. Sullivan seems dead set on making sure someone - Flynn - is held accountable for the sins they caused.

This puts the pressure back on trump. Sure, he could pardon Flynn, he's done that for a number of people undeserving of mercy. I do question if a pardon frees someone held on a judge's contempt order, but we'll find out. And the pardon runs the risk of Flynn being vulnerable to further testimony without Fifth Amendment protections. It also means Flynn has to admit he did (some) of the things he's being pardoned for, meaning trump can't hide the connections his 2016 campaign had with foreign powers (especially Russia).

trump and Roy Cohn Bill Barr are not going to sweep this under the rug like Putin hoped they could.

Where Florida Man and Pandemics Collide. Also Known As "Hey, I cruised down that crazy-ass road when I was a teenager!"

I grew up in Florida, specifically the north end of Pinellas County, so whenever something hits the social media involving anything between Port Richey to, well, Clearwater my ears perk up. Today was one of those days when this started trending (via Heather Monahan at WFLA a local affiliate):

Gyms have been closed since Gov. Ron DeSantis issued a statewide safer-at-home order last month to slow the spread of coronavirus. That executive order expired when the state started the first phase of reopening last week.

But Florida’s gyms – at this point – aren’t allowed to reopen until the state reaches Phase Two of the governor’s reopening plan.

A group of 20 to 30 people gathered outside the Pinellas County Courthouse in Clearwater on Monday morning to protest that, calling for gyms to reopen now so employees can get back to work and customers can return...

It popped up on my Twitter like this:

You should read the retorts. Sad but expected.

I should point out the demographics of my olde stomping grounds: Pinellas' current population - if these protesters were genuinely from the area - is about 969,000 peeps. Clearwater itself is currently around 104,000. Even with that specific a sample (and with Clearwater the county seat, they could have drawn from Tarpon Springs to Gulfport) that's barely nothing.

Seriously . Thirty protesters tops isn't even enough to qualify for a brawl at a Dunedin biker bar.

Anywho, the lack of massive protests is of interest because one thing the national punditry is puzzling over is how below the COVID-19 infection and death rates the Sunshine State has been since mid-March. Considering how 1) Governor DeSantis dropped the ball on early closure announcements, 2) the beaches in particular were open for Spring Break, raising the ire of everyone else in the univeres, and 3) our state is particularly vulnerable with the high number of elders who are most threatened by any pandemic, the fact that our rates are nowhere near similar cases like New York or Georgia caught enough attention even back in April at Vox, and the local paper Tampa Bay Times did an article recently about it (via Adam Playford, Kathleen McGrory, Steve Contorno, Caitlin Johnston and Zachary T. Sampson):

Medical professionals saw a trajectory of cases that tracked alarmingly close to the early days of the outbreak in New York. They implored Gov. Ron DeSantis to swiftly shut down the state. He waited two weeks.

After the state shut down, the predicted tsunami did not arrive. Temporary hospitals sit unused. Ventilators were never in short supply. The death count, though tragically nearing 1,800 today, remains short of what many feared...

The analysis indicates that while Florida’s politicians debated beach closings and stay-at-home orders, residents took matters into their own hands.

By the time each county shut down, there had been large reductions in activity, the cell phone data shows. People in the worst-hit counties were overwhelmingly staying home weeks before DeSantis’ order went out — and even before the much-earlier orders issued by local governments...

I can personally attest to that from where I live. When the news started growing back in January, a lot of public social areas near me saw a drop in turnout. One harbinger IMHO was all the horror stories about cruise ships getting quarantined (Florida is a major departure point with a lot of seniors taking those trips). By first week of February, the local multiplex was mostly empty. When I went to see Birds of Prey its opening weekend, I saw the smallest turnout for a blockbuster comic book movie in ages and it was for a movie that was actually well-received and hyped. I knew right then people were avoiding each other.

And I work in a library, with reasonable attendance numbers especially in the winter when the snow-birds are here... and yet the door count and circ numbers and computer users (!) were halved by the first week of February. March was no better right up until we got the city order to close for public safety. 

The Times reporters went to look for data to back up the anecdotes. They used tracking methods to see where the people went (and didn't go):

Floridians, it turned out, weren’t waiting.

They severely cut back on going out in public before any government forced them to, according to a Times analysis of cell phone tracking data.

The Times obtained information from Google and two other private companies that use location data from apps on millions of cell phones to determine whether people are socially isolating.

Each company’s data works differently. But it all showed the same thing: In every county in the state, significant decreases in movement began before shutdown orders were issued.

Miami-Dade has had the largest outbreak in Florida. But in the five days preceding the county’s March 26 stay-at-home order, more than half the phones tracked by one of the firms never traveled more than a mile. That represented a drop of more than 80 percent compared to data the firm, Descartes Labs, collected from mid-February to early March.

Data from another company, Unacast, showed that the average distance traveled in the county had been cut nearly in half. Visits to businesses Unacast classified as nonessential, based on guidelines issued by various state governments, dropped at least 65 percent.

Similar patterns repeated across Florida...

That is not what epidemiologists expected, said Thomas Hladish, a University of Florida research scientist who specializes in disease modeling and has been advising the state on the outbreak.

"What you see in Florida is that people started social distancing much earlier,” Hladish said. “Whether it’s because their schools closed or they were watching the news, they seemed to have started to act before they were explicitly told, ‘Don’t go out.’ That early action is almost certainly the biggest factor in why things weren’t worse here.”

In short: DeSantis and the other state leaders may have been idiots, but the rest of the state wasn't. We may be crazy, but we're not THAT crazy. So that's my eyewitness testimony.

Back to the Times article.

The state’s sprawling cities and random strokes of good fortune may also have worked in Florida’s favor. But public health experts warned that as Florida reopens, its good luck could change with one asymptomatic disease carrier stepping into a large nursing home.

"The thing that is really easy — because this is silent and because it may not be immediately impacting you — is you get really complacent about it,” said Jeffrey Shaman, professor of environmental health sciences at Columbia University. “There is a lot of opportunity for this virus to grow exponentially, if it's given the opportunity."

Already, residents’ willingness to stay home appears to be shifting...

The sad news?

Even with all this going on, the political pressure to re-open things faster than before is growing. It's not the 30 protesters along Ft. Harrison Ave., it's the lobbyists and GOP leadership in Tallahassee rushing things without concern that we don't have enough testing kits and we're still not ready for a bigger wave of infected.

If you look at the Times charts, they all show the county numbers ticking upward this May, when more and more people chafed at the social isolation. Now with a Phase 1 restart that's reopened a number of businesses - as long as staffs and customers practice masks, gloves, and sanitizing guidelines - we could see a greater uptick as asymptomatic people mingle with the yet-untouched.

I would like to think most of the Floridian residents around me are still savvy enough to recognize the risks. We're nowhere near the safe levels of testing and protection that would justify going to sporting events, concerts, movie theaters, biker bars, and gyms. It's not an impulse toward "freedom" that should push us towards such self-defeating urges. It better be a desire to avoid harming others, a modicum of responsibility to our loved ones and everyone else's.

This is gonna be a rough month in Florida.

Please, fellow crazy folk. Don't go too far into the madness.

A Librarian-Writer-Jedi-Pirate-Wannabe Looks Back at 50

Sigh.

I remember I first wanted to become a writer when I was still in single digits, around maybe 8 or 9 years old, trying to write stories and slowly learning the mechanics of plot, character development, and the need for white-out goo while using an old-style typewriter.

I remember wanting to be a Jedi from A New Hope onward. Too bad my midichlorian count is too low my lack of faith is disturbing.

I didn't get too much into the being a pirate thing even while growing up a Tampa Bay Buccaneers sports fan. I really didn't get into it until I saw Emma Thompson's version of Sense and Sensibility where Edward points out "Piracy is our only option. ...What is swabbing anyway...?"

Becoming a librarian in real-life happened in college, when I worked in the Cataloging department with bindery processing at University of Florida. My Journalism studies were floundering (I graduated with barely a C average in those classes) and it had gotten to where I was there more to work in the library than to take the classes (things might have been different if I was able to switch majors to something I was getting better grades in like History or Political Science, alas my parents were paying out-of-pocket - I missed the scholarship requirements by a single grade in high school - and they needed me to finish as quick as possible). Anyway, long story short, I went to South Florida to get my Masters (THAT I got an A average in) and went straight into working in libraries ever since 1994.

There was that dark period during the Great Recession where I lost my job as a librarian in 2008 and spent four years struggling to regain full-time employment, up until 2013 when Bartow Library took a chance on me and I've been there ever since. There were times I was hoping the Obama administration were hiring, but I kept missing my chances to drop off my resume with him and damn it all I wasn't able to get my shot at being in the room when it happened.

  

In terms of all the other things, I've got the pictures of me being a Jedi, not so many of me being a pirate, and a good number of me being a mostly self-published writer. I keep running into the writer's block - the usual problems with chronic depression, work-related stress, real-world anxieties from horrific political dis-leadership and a current pandemic - of unfinished stories all over the place, and I should be using this time I still have to finish at least one of them to feel the accomplishment of completion again.

There's still a lot in my life I haven't done that I wanted so much to do when I was younger: To travel to places to see the world (Grand Canyon, Prague, London, Ireland, the coasts of Spain to Italy, Japan), to break out of my shell and learn social skills, to be better as a friend, to figure out how to flirt proper with ladies, figure out relationships (how to start one, obviously), stuff like that. There's a lot there that I should have done and figured out when I was younger - the regrets of being 20, and then 30, and then 40... - and part of me knows with all that's going on that I don't have many chances left.

So there's me, looking back at 50. I'll add pictures of the cake for today a little later.

As Though Wiping Away Every Sign of trump's Crimes

This was a hammer dropped today: Attorney General William Barr, in an attempt to negate the early parts of the Mueller investigation into criminal ties between Russia and everyone in trump's Inner Circle, forced the Department of Justice to withdraw from the plea deal agreement with Michael Flynn. Via Emptywheel:

In advance of a status report due tomorrow, Brandon Van Grack withdrew from the Mike Flynn case... (Emptywheel quotes from the AP Newswire for more details)

Van Grack was apparently the point person on the Flynn courtroom case, and without him the government can longer proceed...

While Van Grack has withdrawn from all Flynn-related cases before Emmet Sullivan, he has not yet withdrawn from two other open cases he’s on, and he signed his withdrawal FARA Chief.

As noted in this post, Sullivan has discretion over whether to accept this withdrawal...

Sullivan is the trial judge overseeing all this, including the plea deal. The deal itself apparently is far enough along that the judge can still accept it, but without a prosecutor to argue for that it's unlikely to happen.

Emptywheel covers a lot of the issue with the case standing in a separate article:

Note that just Acting US Attorney Timothy Shea signed this filing, which may create a similar kind of dynamic at the DC US Attorney’s Office regarding this action as Barr’s interference in the Roger Stone sentencing did. Barr transparently removed the Senate approved US Attorney for DC, installed his flunky, and then had his flunky renege on statements that DOJ (even DOJ under Barr) had made in the past. It is a breathtaking abuse of power, and it’s likely that Sullivan will regard it as such.

I encourage you to follow Emptywheel's link, because she lays out the three key parts of Shea's arguments and then spells out how each of them are flawed, and how Barr's DOJ is making arguments that already failed in Sullivan's court room and still fail a lot of legal logic anyway.

This kind of self-sabotage to a court matter that had been in the works for years is an obvious attempt by trump to get his cronies to sweep away the history of his involvement in Russia's actions against the United States during the 2016 elections.

trump has always been upset about the situations involving his campaign helpers like Paul Manafort - found guilty in a trial early on - or Roger Stone - who also risked a trial and was found guilty as well - because while they didn't directly prove what trump did to cheat, the close interconnection of criminal to criminal - all of it tied to either trump or Russia - was a guilt-by-association that could dog trump for whatever time he's got left before his scams run out.

As such, trump would scream and proclaim it was all a conspiracy, all a witch hunt pushed by a Deep State that favored the "more evil" Hillary and Obama.

And now, with the likelihood that Flynn - who had been caught in a web of backroom deals and crazy plots - will walk away with a clean slate, trump is likely going to crow the whole thing was never real. Unlike the risk of pardoning his cronies - because those pardons could compel them to testify against trump himself later on - this creates the wriggle room trump and his media allies can use to hammer at critics until the media - and the rest of the nation - give up and look away from these eyesores.

Criminals love to deny that the crimes they committed - even when caught - never really happened. Even with the pile of bodies and burning wreckage left in their wake.

trump just happens to be at the head of a crime cartel able to force those lies onto our entire nation.

he and his cronies would wipe away every last shred of evidence from the history books if they can.

We dare not let them.

When Cinco De Mayo is on a Taco Tuesday, With Revenge of the Sith On Our Minds

#CincoAtHome, America. General Zaragoza didn't fight off the French at the Battle of Puebla so that you all get sick with COVID-19 today.

If you wanna honor the Sith as they take their Revenge, do your part to pre-order from your local TACO TRUCK AT EVERY CORNER and pick up curbside service to avoid spreading the coronavirus.

To help, the LA Times has Five suggestions to do Cinco right.

These are easy things to do, America. Sith Responsibly.

May The 4th Be With You 2020 Edition

We really shouldn't be comic-conning any time soon, so a brief look back at all the comic-conning I did:

May R2D2 always be your wing man!

I wish I had gotten cleaner pictures of Carrie Fisher when I had the chance :( 

One thing happening is the Disney-Plus streaming service is releasing Rise of Skywalker today, and promoting the hell out of #MayThe4thBeWithYou on social media, which is a reminder for me to someday go back and review both it and The Last Jedi, which is tricky because yes I do have problems with those movies and I have to come to terms with that.

In the meantime, don't let the Sith get you down.

FINISH HIM!!!

Stay safe. It's what Baby Yoda would want you to do.

Why America Is Reopening Its Doors for Hell

Update: Thanks again to Batocchio at Crooks & Liars for adding this blog to Mike's Blog Round-Up! I hope everyone's safe and doing their bit to reduce the risks of coronavirus, and for the LOVE OF GOD STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN...

There is a push right now across a lot of states - after six weeks of Stay-At-Home practices attempting to reduce the spread of COVID-19 - to reopen certain public places (like beaches) and certain businesses (like restaurants) even though the evidence is there that the United States is not in a safe place itself in terms of managing the health care response to the coronavirus.

Why are we even considering putting more customer service and other at-risk workers in harm's way?

1) States cannot cope with their overwhelmed unemployment benefits programs.

Much like Florida, collapsing under the weight of having more than 20 percent of the workforce dropping onto a benefits program that was underfunded and mismanaged to begin with, other states cannot cope with the overwhelming reality of that many people requiring aid all at once, and most of them needing that aid for more months than the state politicians do not want to contemplate. Iowa is doing it, Texas is doing it, Georgia is doing it... To quote the Reuters article by Andy Sullivan:

State unemployment laws generally do not allow workers to collect jobless benefits if they refuse work available to them, said Thomas Smith, an associate professor at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School. That could force workers in Georgia back to their jobs at a time when it is not clear whether the risk of infection has abated, he said.

“You’re asking people to put their life on the line,” he said. “These people aren’t Army Rangers - those people signed up for combat. A barber did not...”

Some critics say the state’s early reopening is an attempt to push people out of a safety-net system that is straining state finances.

“I think that one of the big drivers of this decision by Kemp is to get people off unemployment rolls and having the private sector keeping these people afloat,” said Georgia employment lawyer James Radford...

Some Georgia businesses are opting not to open at all at this point due to employees’ safety concerns.

At Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, general manager Steve Pitts said he and many of staffers are reluctant to come back to work while the pandemic is still not contained. The restaurant remains closed for now.

“I have a daughter and I want to be around for her,” said Pitts, 53. “It’s still too dangerous...”

2) States are terrified of the loss of their tax revenues, due to the drop of sales taxes that would be coming from many of those closed businesses.

Unlike the federal government - which can operate with large deficits no matter how much the Far Right scream about it - state governments ARE required in one form or another to stay within means (some have balanced budget amendments written into their constitutions). As a result, they rely a lot on local revenue either in the form of income (and corporate income) tax and sales tax... both of which are getting hit hard during Stay-At-Home policies. While incomes can remain relatively stable  (most people still self-employed or working at-home can generate that) it's the sales tax part - from restaurants, clothing stores/gift shops, the drop in gas purchases, even a drop in grocery buying, movies and theater entertainment, theme parks, hotels (a lot of tourist-heavy states like Florida have been upping hospitality taxes for a long time), everything else - that's being lost every day that every store front, park gate, and eatery dining room is closed.

This one is a genuine (read: non-partisan) problem. And without more aid from a federal government - Hi Mitch, you obstructionist bastard! - the states have no choice but to force businesses to re-open to try and regain some driblets of tax revenue.

3) And most annoying of all: Minor faction of wingnuts - pushing for "Freedom" when in fact they're marching and shouting in order to make Democrats look bad - hate the inconveniences they are suffering and cannot imagine the health risks that will get dumped onto most low-wage (and usually minority) workers. And so they're making enough noise about it to give their political leaders the excuse to re-open anyway.

Some of those wingnuts don't even believe this coronavirus is that bad compared to other diseases and causes of death floating out there. So what if COVID-19 is an extra 2-to-5 percent risk to your grandparents? Never mind the evidence by the by that this virus is lethal to ALL ages...

There are, however, solid and reasonable arguments for why we NEED to remain shut down and Stay-At-Home for at least the next few months:

A) We do not have enough test kits in place to effectively identify and quarantine affected people. Without that, the asymptomatic carriers of the virus can keep walking around for weeks before showing actual signs of COVID... and be contagious enough to spread the virus without warning to others. Every other country that's been containing the pandemic successfully have an aggressive testing system in place. WE DO NOT. Okay? trump is lying about the number of tests we have available. trump's entire administration is lying. trump is motherfucking lying.

We are going to spread this bug like a zombie plague: Fast, terrifying, and with a pile of bodies in its wake.

B) We do not have enough protective gear and cleaning supplies available. Between the lack of filtering masks, gloves, hand sanitizer and soap, and other required (PPE) items, a lot of employees at public places are going to get exposed. Our own hospitals are short on these supplies, often because trump's own FEMA people keep raiding our states for that equipment which then disappears into someone else's warehouses.

This is not even going into greater detail about the horrors of the food processing - especially the meat - industry with low-wage workers in close-contact, easily-contagious work areas. We're running both the risks of contaminated foods reaching us, but also losing enough workers both short and long-term to create shortages and a food crisis. The food companies are under pressure to stay operating but they don't have the protective gear and testing of staff to keep doing so. We won't see it now but it's coming in another month or two, when the grocery stores still open run out of steak and pork and fresh fruits.

C) We do not have a coordinated and effective health care system to handle a wide-spread pandemic. There are not enough hospital beds and rooms, there are not enough hospitals period in rural areas (and despite all the talk from Republicans and the Far Right about this, COVID is already in these rural Red states and spreading faster...). The lack of adequate funding - many rural states refused the Medicaid expansion of Obamacare, which meant those rural (and poor) hospitals had to close - over the last thirty years has finally caught up to us.

And yet here we are. Even Democratic-controlled states are looking into "soft openings" of certain industries. We're upping the risks and doing little in other ways to bring those risks back down.

The whole point - and effectiveness - of Stay-At-Home is to reduce the risks and "flatten the curve" of the way pandemics come and go. As long as we can keep the bell curve of infection rates/deaths relatively shallow, we're good. But if that bell-curve of infection is steeper than the tall side of a mountain, we are screwed.

And we are at the front-end of that curve. The infection numbers are still going up. We're behaving like we're at the tail-end of the curve when we're nowhere near it!

We are royally sickeningly fucked.

Bleach on the trumpian Brain

I knew going into all this that donald trump would be the most ignorant, ill-informed President Loser of the Popular Vote since Andrew Johnson, but I never imagined it would be THIS bad. Via Aaron Rupar at Vox:

At the briefing, William Bryan, undersecretary for Science and Technology at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), discussed preliminary government research indicating that “heat and humidity suppress Covid-19” and “commonly available disinfectants work to kill the virus.”

After Bryan’s presentation, Trump took to the podium and made a deeply bizarre inference.

“Supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light ... and then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re gonna test that,” Trump said, addressing Bryan. “And then I see disinfectant, where it knocks it [coronavirus] out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning. Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”

There's a video clip of Dr. Birx sitting to one side, listening to what trump is saying, and you can visibly see the moment her body recoils and her brain shuts down from exposure to trump's stupid.

Bryan - an actual expert on things - was talking about how disinfectants work on surfaces as a means of sanitizing stuff to reduce the spread of COVID-19. At no time did Bryan say a disinfectant can be used as a medicinal placed inside a body where those cleaning chemicals would be harmful to our living cells.

And this isn't even getting into the "shining a UV light inside people's bodies" idea he had.

Billy Madison was never this insipidly dumb.

There is a website literally domain-named as whatthefuckjusthappenedtoday.com covering trump-related news and this was at Day 1191 for the nation and world coping with this stupidity. There hasn't been anything this dumb archived at that site, I swear to the Old Gods and the New.

Quick show of hands to the seven blog readers: How many of you were told at a very young age to NOT drink from the cleaning supply bottles? How many of us were taught in chemistry class at school that certain things like bleach and ammonia are toxic to the human body? How many of us read the FCKING warning labels on our Clorox and Tide containers?

Lysol today had to release a public statement begging the citizenry to NOT start injecting their bodies with their cleaning chemicals. Disinfectant doesn't kill the virus inside your body, the disinfectant kills your body.

Why is the thought-addled Shitgibbon even talking about this as a cure-all?

Because the reports coming back on trump's previous hope for a cure - hydroxychloronique - are showing that solution is toxic as well.

Read how trump is bragging how quickly a disinfectant will work - "one minute!" - as a "cure," and this is just another red flag of how trump doesn't know what he's talking about. In his mind - wherever those remaining brain cells are - he's picturing a quick and simple solution to a problem he doesn't want to be confronted with anymore. No matter how wrong he's processing the information and cherry-picking the results.

This is yet another attempt by trump to reach for something, ANYTHING to be a miracle cure against the COVID-19 pandemic, but even this stretches credibility and common sense to its breaking point.

This is Kakistocracy gone public, with no solution in sight except for an open call to any remaining sane people in trump's Administration to get the hell out of there before it's too late.

trump: We award you no points, and may GOD have mercy on our souls.

There Is No trumpian Miracle Cure

As far back as when trump HAD to confront the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, he has clung to this idea that a particular drug already existing - hydroxychloroquine - was a means of fighting the disease.

In the process, thousands of people bought that "miracle" cure up, depriving it from those people who DID need that drug to treat their malaria, Lupus, and other disorders: causing an unwanted shortage for a drug that had actual scant evidence - barely anecdotal - of it working against the coronavirus.

A couple of weeks ago, some medical facilities -desperate on their own terms - decided to use hydroxychloroquine to combat the illness, especially among some veterans' hospitals (I would hope they received informed consent when they did this).

And now, the results are starting to show (from Marilynn Marchione at AP News):

A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported.

The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it’s the largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for COVID-19, which has killed more than 171,000 people as of Tuesday.

The study was posted on an online site for researchers and has not been reviewed by other scientists. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia paid for the work.

Researchers analyzed medical records of 368 male veterans hospitalized with confirmed coronavirus infection at Veterans Health Administration medical centers who died or were discharged by April 11.

About 28% who were given hydroxychloroquine plus usual care died, versus 11% of those getting routine care alone. About 22% of those getting the drug plus azithromycin died too, but the difference between that group and usual care was not considered large enough to rule out other factors that could have affected survival.

Hydroxychloroquine made no difference in the need for a breathing machine, either.
Researchers did not track side effects, but noted a hint that hydroxychloroquine might have damaged other organs. The drug has long been known to have potentially serious side effects, including altering the heartbeat in a way that could lead to sudden death...

If you want anecdote, other reported cases show people taking Hydroxychloroquine died from heart attacks, which is kinda what the article is saying that previous paragraph.

During the earliest stages of this crisis, you could tell trump was eager for this drug to pan out, that having a quick and easy miracle cure on hand would have resolved the pandemic within weeks and he wouldn't have to make hard choices on overseeing nationwide provisions, funding hospitals, providing emergency financial aid to states overwhelmed by the financial impositions of shutting things down to reduce the spread of the virus...

But he wasted all this time, all OUR time, pursuing a quick fix for something - a lethal coronavirus - that does not obey the whims of political leaders or pundits.

And this is all happening as more Red State governors - Gods help us - are pushing to re-open a lot of public businesses before we are ready for it. We don't have enough testing kits to make sure people are safe. We don't have enough medical supplies for our hospitals who are running out of resources and workers (who are falling ill as they are most exposed to the virus). We don't have a cure at hand to reduce the impact of COVID-19, no vaccine ready in time until (hopefully) September (still five months away).

We are deep in the heart of the pandemic, America. Any sign of "flattening" the curve of infection merely means we have to keep doing what we're doing now - Social Distancing and STAYING AT HOME - to keep the risk low.

But trump and the Republicans can't abide that. It disrupts their economic plans, it weakens their arguments about Capitalism and employment, it threatens to shift more burden on a Federal government they DARE NOT allow to work properly.

So trump will distract his followers with calls to protest, accuse others of failing the nation, and push for re-openings that will only spike the infections.

I said back in January 2nd of this year that 2020 escalated pretty quickly. Hell, it's been escalating every day now.

We need to stay alive and healthy by November to fix what's truly broken. You want a miracle cure, America? Vote trump and his Republican cronies out of power. That's the cure we need.

A trumpian Plague of Madness

Let's open with a photo taken of a recent protest organized around "re-opening" the states while in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. It comes from this article of The Columbus Dispatch, the photo is from Joshua A Bickel:

taken by Joshua A. Bickel

If it looks like a photo from the Zombie Apocalypse, it's because we're kind of living through a Real-Life version of one. NOTE: Zombie movies have long been a stand-in for a lot of cultural fears, one of which is the rapid spread of infection. The CDC and other pandemic experts use the "threat" of film zombies to model out how those things can happen for real. And now we're seeing it ourselves.

What do you see, really, in that photo?

I see a bunch of privileged, angry White folk screaming about "their rights" and a desire to have all the businesses and places shut down by the Coronavirus to re-open to serve "their" needs at the expense of everybody else.

It's been a month - ever since March 16 when trump FINALLY gave in to the medical reports that COVID was here and was killing Americans - and all of the MAGA-hat angry people are marching for... "Freedom"?

Freedom to get the virus from other people? Freedom to ignore the social distancing to reduce the risks? Freedom to pass that virus on to others, sending yourself and others to overwhelmed hospitals that STILL are not getting the supplies they need to SAVE LIVES?

This is less a "bite-your-arm turn-into-a-ghoul" type of horror movie and more "a plague of madness" spread by ideology, by this "Don't Tread On Me" libertarian-esque mindset that one's individual rights supersedes everyone else's right to NOT GET SICK.

These recent marches by the Confederate-flag waving rage-driven trumpian voters in many of these states are being pushed by trump and Fox Not-News as both a distraction and a rally cry to their hard-core audience. Take a count of how many of these marches are being done in states with Democratic governors, in an attempt to make those governors seem tyrannical and evil. This isn't about freedom, this is about making Democrats look bad.

And in the process, they're getting more people exposed, not just the protesters themselves but the police who have to patrol these marches, the reporters covering them for stories, any employees and workers there at the state capitals or anybody they meet along the way.

We are getting to the point of the pandemic where the backlash by the naysayers and non-believers - a lot of them having lived in their own physical bubbles for years - are kicking into high gear, all because they haven't been infected (yet) or care about any of the ones who HAVE been infected.

These protesters are basically a bunch of privileged citizens who are more annoyed by the discomfort the lack of public services they're used to having - fancy restaurants, vacation spots, easy travel across the planet - and are now screaming bloody murder to get that all back.

Never mind the costs of what they want, which have already been paid by thousands of low-wage employees who provided those services for years, many of them now sick and dead by exposure to COVID and many more of them threatened with exposure should they ever be forced back to work. Which isn't screaming bloody murder, it IS bloody murder.

Gods help them, those low-wage Americans, because they're being burdened with the demands of the unhappy and unreasonable Far Right cult of death.

When The GOP Narrative Means More Than Our Lives, Florida 2020 Edition

Shit just got real in Florida, via Lawrence Mower at Tampa Bay Times:

Floridians will be keeping their distance and wearing face masks for up to a year until a COVID-19 vaccine exists, Florida Surgeon General Scott Rivkees said Monday before being whisked away by the governor’s spokeswoman.

Rivkees told reporters that Floridians needed to get used to current precautions, such as avoiding crowds of 10 or more and wearing face masks in public.

“Until we get a vaccine, which is a while off, this is going to be our new normal and we need to adapt and protect ourselves,” he said.

And then Gov. DeSantis had the top health care official in the state kicked out of the room.

What.

The.

Fuck.

All because Rivkees was speaking to the reality that we're unable to safely co-mingle until there's a cure? It's the truth: This coronavirus is highly effective at spreading, and reducing the risks is our only means to combat it right now.

Our governor kicked out his key player because said player wasn't on message?

DeSantis is already in a lot of trouble for showing clear ignorance of COVID-19 and his refusals to issue stronger protections for the public - he foolishly kept the beaches opened during Spring Break season even as the theme parks voluntarily shut themselves down - as well as making too-early noises about reopening the schools so that businesses can get back to making money by the start of May.

But DeSantis can't be bothered. Like other Republican leaders - Governors like South Dakota's Kristi Noem, Nebraska's Pete Ricketts, Arkansas' Asa Hutchinson - they don't want to deal with the serious ramifications of what spreading the coronavirus will do to their own states' citizenry.

The lack of empathy stems from the ALMIGHTY REPUBLICAN NARRATIVE that government is "the problem" never a "solution," and that businesses take priority over everyone's health and well-being.

In the process, they're letting their own voting constituents fall prey to a disease that's currently best fought by giving it no targets to hit (US).

Because somehow, some way, these Republican leaders know they'll be let off the hook come election day. That enough of their own base will forgive as long as they're convinced "the libruls" and "the Dread Other" took it worse.

Either that or they'll try cheating some more.

Even though the latest results from the Wisconsin primary and local judicial elections proved that gameplan has a few flaws (i.e., pissed off voters who overwhelming went with the Democratic candidates).

Of course, the Republicans tend to respond to these setbacks with more cheating, more denial, more suffering for others.

Gods help us if the GOP keeps playing this as a game with everyone else as their expendable pawns.

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).