Month: April 2020

The 2020 election will be unlike any other in history. We still don’t know how restricted the presidential candidates will be in their ability to campaign, but we won’t be seeing the same competing national tours of campaign rallies we’ve grown accustomed to in recent decades. It might wind up resembling the kinds of elections we had prior to 1932.

To understand what I mean, we need to look at how 1932 changed everything. It was the first time an incumbent president did anything like a modern campaign. Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt delivered an unprecedented number of speeches–over 100 each. Moreover, for the first time radio played a major role, as over 12 million Americans owned one by that time. This meant that the speeches had to be both more varied and more consistent than in the past. No longer could candidates deliver the same stump speech over and over again with minor variations, as this would have bored the mass media audience. Yet, it also became harder to tell one audience one thing and another audience something contradictory.

Hoover was forced out of the White House an onto the trail by the urgency of the Great Depression. The size of the cataclysm demanded a forceful response and an active campaign. Hoover didn’t win the messaging war, but he knew enough to wage it. Many of his appearances did not go well, as he was often greeting with outright hostility. And when it was over, no incumbent president would ever seek reelection again without traveling around the country and actively asking for people’s vote.

Certainly, President Trump would not be an exception to this if he had his druthers. He enjoys campaigning more than governing, and his strategy was built around using rallies as a way to raise money, harvest information about the electorate, and organize supporters for Election Day. He’s already had to rejigger an app his campaign built for these rallies so that it can be used by people at home on their couches.

His challenger, Joe Biden, is accustomed to the same kind of campaigning, but he’s self-isolating in his Delaware home. As Maggie Haberman notes in the New York Times, most Democratic strategists are fine with Biden staying there “so long as Mr. Trump is fumbling as he governs amid a crisis.” If the election is nothing but a referendum on Trump and the condition of the country, “someone else” is going to win in a romp.

The Republicans understand this, but there’s not much they can do to change it.

As they look for ways to regain the advantage, some Republicans believe the party must mount an immediate ad campaign blitzing Mr. Biden, identifying him to their advantage and framing the election as a clear choice.

“If Trump is the issue, he probably loses,” said Mr. [Charles R.] Black [a veteran Republican consultant]. “If he makes it about Biden and the economy is getting better, he has a chance.”

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Grand Canyon. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas.

When last seen the painting appears as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

I have spent time refinig the various buttes and valleys in the image. Things are now starting to have a dimensional structure, with lit and shadowed details. Finally, the sky has been reworked but will be yet again before I am done.

The current state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.

If you took yesterday off from politics to focus on the NFL Draft, you might have woken up this morning wondering what everyone was talking about. Why, for example, is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on NPR saying, “We seemed to have a quack medicine salesman on television. He’s talking about things like disinfectant in the lungs”?

What does that mean? What does the former First Lady mean by this?

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/1253697753479331840

So, the president went on television and told people to poison themselves and put disinfectant in their lungs? Can that be right?

The manufacturer for Lysol, a disinfectant spray and cleaning product, issued a statement warning against any internal use after President Trump suggested that people could get an “injection” of “the disinfectant that knocks coronavirus out in a minute,” NBC News reports.

Wait. What? He told people to slam Lysol into their veins?  What else did he say?

Trump suggested at a White House news briefing Thursday that scientists should test beaming ultraviolet light “inside the body” and injecting disinfectants in an effort to find new coronavirus remedies.

“Supposing you hit the body with ultraviolet or just very powerful light,” Trump said. “And I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it? Then I said supposing that you brought the light inside the body, either through the skin or some other way. And I think you said, you’re going to test that, too.”

Unless you’re going to crack open people’s ribs, there’s only so many orifices to choose from if you want to shine a light “inside the body.” It looks like Trump has been surfing Facebook again:

Facebook pages created in late March sold UV “sanitizer” lights, promising “a proven impact on COVID-19” and to be the “most effective way to kill viruses.” The companies, which had names like “Beam Sanitizer,” ran ads on Instagram and Facebook in March, according to Facebook’s ad library. Some ads, including ones from companies including UV Sanitizers, and Uvlizer, were still active as of Friday morning. The products apparently evaded the company’s ban of ads for coronavirus miracle cures instituted last month.

In an effort to quell the impact of viral social media posts, the World Health Organization released a warning in March stating that “UV lamps should not be used to sterilize hands or other areas of skin as UV radiation can cause skin irritation.”

Fortunately, the president left us a brief clue about where he got these ideas. Someone told him that you can kill the virus on surfaces very quickly by using anti-viral wipes or UV light. I might add that soapy water works just as well, but for some reason he didn’t suggest we inhale soapy water.

“I see the disinfectant that knocks it out in a minute, one minute,” Trump said during Thursday’s coronavirus press briefing. “And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets inside the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”

To say that the president is biology-challenged would be an understatement. The virus does its damage by invading cells, not by living on their surface. You can’t just open up people’s lungs and wipe them down with Clorox wipes.

Dr. Vin Gupta, a pulmonologist and global health policy expert who is an NBC News and MSNBC contributor, told NBC News on Thursday that “injecting or ingesting any type of cleansing product into the body is irresponsible, and it’s dangerous.”

“It’s a common method that people utilize when they want to kill themselves,” Gupta said.

So, Hillary Clinton was right. The president did essentially tell people to poison themselves because he thought it was a good idea. Only an impossibly stupid person would think this was a good idea, but we have an impossibly stupid person running our country.

Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration finally issued a finding that Trump’s “miracle cure” for Covid-19 will get you killed.

The Food and Drug Administration warned Friday that people should not take chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat covid-19 outside of a hospital or formal clinical trial, citing reports of “serious heart rhythm problems.”

Many of those adverse effects occurred in patients with the virus who were treated with the anti-malaria drugs, often in combination with azithromycin, also known as Z-Pak. President Trump has described such drugs as a potential “game-changer,” although results from clinical trials are not yet in to show whether they are effective…

…The adverse events reported include abnormal heart rhythms such as QT interval prolongation, dangerously rapid heart rate called ventricular tachycardia and ventricular fibrillation, and in some cases, death, the agency said.

I’ve often compared Trump to the generic drunk at the end of the bar who spends his time regaling other patrons and the bartender with his unhinged conspiracy theories. That’s who we elected president, and when we had a chance to remove him office while there was still time to save the country, the Republicans balked out of pure cowardice.

Now there’s a body count that just officially surpassed fifty thousand.

 

Perhaps it is taking the politicization of the pandemic to an extreme, but people are wondering if differential death rates could change the outcome of the November presidential election. This article in Politico is particularly dumb, however, because it notes that older voters are disproportionately likely to vote for Trump without even mentioning that African-Americans are even more disproportionately likely to vote for Biden. Both groups are dying in higher numbers than the rest of the population. So, which candidacy benefits? To even begin to answer that, you’d first have to acknowledge that African-Americans are also an at-risk group.

The whole piece is premised on what looks like a badly flawed study that was published in a public administration journal called Administrative Theory & Praxis. And their numbers are pretty underwhelming. Even assuming a much higher death rate than we’re presently seeing, they predict “11,000 more Republicans than Democrats who are 65 and older could die before the election in both Michigan and North Carolina” and “in Pennsylvania, should the state return to using only social distancing to fight infections, it could lose over 13,000 more Republican than Democratic voters in that age category.

Four years ago, we saw some really close election results measuring in the tens of thousands in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. So, anything that would cause 10,000 fewer Republicans than Democrats to turn out in a state would have the potential to change an outcome in 2020. But those numbers wouldn’t have changed the result in these states in 2016. And, as I’ve said, this doesn’t account for higher death rates among younger blacks, which would minimize the effect.

Trump is definitely going to get a lot of his voters killed. He already has. He’s also gotten a lot of Biden voters killed, and that will continue. It’s this feature that should cost him the election, not the differential between the two groups.

“Desperate sadness” pretty well describes the mood that has predominated for me from the moment Donald Trump was elected president of the United States. Most of the time, this percolates below the surface, mainly because I put my hardhat on every day and go to work to do what I can to rectify the situation. This usually staves of the sense of helplessness, but not always. These days, I have other things to be desperate and sad about, but it always comes back to the president. The condition I find my country in today is not some anomaly. It’s more like the physical manifestation of the spiritual rot that I’ve observed every day for almost four years. I can’t say it was inevitable because who knows when a novel virus will emerge? But it is the unavoidable consequence of putting a man like Trump in charge and of letting people like Mitch McConnell control the U.S. Senate. What we’re witnessing is merely the implicit becoming visible so that even foreigners can witness it.

As images of America’s overwhelmed hospital wards and snaking jobless lines have flickered across the world, people on the European side of the Atlantic are looking at the richest and most powerful nation in the world with disbelief.

“When people see these pictures of New York City they say, ‘How can this happen? How is this possible?’” said Henrik Enderlein, president of the Berlin-based Hertie School, a university focused on public policy. “We are all stunned. Look at the jobless lines. Twenty-two million,” he added.

“I feel a desperate sadness,” said Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at Oxford University and a lifelong and ardent Atlanticist.

American football is an exceptional sport, admired if not always appreciated around the world. And the National Football League is a well-oiled machine and moneymaker. In this, the sport is a good analogy for the country as a whole. But if you take some out-of-shape sociopath off the street and ask him to quarterback the New York Jets, the New York Jets are not just going to do badly…they’re going to do exceptionally badly.

“America has not done badly, it has done exceptionally badly,” said Dominique Moïsi, a political scientist and senior adviser at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne.

This isn’t complicated, or it shouldn’t be. Electing Trump was the entire nation deciding to stop doing whatever it was doing and stop being whatever is was, and instead just start punching itself it in face all day, every day, in perpetuity, until somehow it ends.

If we were the Ancient Greeks, we would have long ago concluded that this decision had earned the wrath of the gods. Perhaps Trump killed his father and married his mother. Perhaps he fell in love with his own reflection, like Narcissus. Yet, somehow, when the time came to remove Trump from power, the country couldn’t manage to get the job done. His impeachment acquittal in the Senate was followed immediately by the pandemic, almost as if the gods were exasperated by our decision.

“There is not only no global leadership, there is no national and no federal leadership in the United States,” said Ricardo Hausmann, director of the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development. “In some sense this is the failure of leadership of the U.S. in the U.S.”

The only thing holding me up now is the prospect of getting new leadership next January. If that doesn’t happen, all is lost.

While Russia played a role in convincing the United States to vote for Donald Trump and the United Kingdom to vote for Brexit, it only has so much influence. Ultimately, Putin needed very stupid populations to do very stupid and self-destructive things. So, how did the US and the UK get so stupid?

It’s now an urgent question because stupidity has translated directly into death. The Financial Times reports that twice as many Brits have died as are listed in official reports:

The coronavirus pandemic has already caused as many as 41,000 deaths in the UK, according to a Financial Times analysis of the latest data from the Office for National Statistics. The estimate is more than double the official figure of 17,337 released by ministers on Tuesday, which is updated daily and only counts those who have died in hospitals after testing positive for the virus. The FT extrapolation, based on figures from the ONS that were also published on Tuesday, includes deaths that occurred outside hospitals updated to reflect recent mortality trends.

In fact, the pandemic almost took the life of Boris Johnson, the UK’s “Brexit” prime minister, who insisted on shaking hands as a sign of defiance against the seriousness of the outbreak. On this side of the pond, Donald Trump acted similarly, holding his trademark MAGA rallies through March 2, as the virus silently spread throughout the country.

Even using the official numbers, the US and UK rank 1st and 5th in total Covid-19 deaths, while ranking 42nd and 56th, respectively, in tests per million in population. The actual fatality numbers are surely far worse, but the UK rates 5th and the US 13th in deaths per million in population. Considering the strength of their health care systems, this is an abysmal result. This is only happening because of the stupidity of voters in each country, which enabled cripplingly stupid and inept leadership.

It’s hard to say how the leaders of the Atlantic Alliance become so idiotic, especially when they started out with such well-educated and industrious populations. Some people will blame video games, but every country has video games. Others will point to the influence of right-wing media, but few countries have freer and better-trained journalists. I’m more inclined to blame the end of the Cold War.

Ironically, old school conservative thinking predicts that organizations that don’t face stiff competition will grow bloated, corrupt, inefficient, and lose the ability to innovate. This is one of their biggest arguments against big government and government=run health systems. In the past, it formed their rationale for supporting tough antitrust policies. Competition keeps people sharp, as does the threat of nuclear annihilation and the resulting focus on science that dominated in the West through the mid-to-late 20th Century. Competition keeps people sharp and prevents them from resting on their laurels.

Once the USSR came apart, however, the US and the UK lost their edge. Sitting on top of the global food chain seemed like a reward for virtue, but the work that went into it wasn’t understood or respected. While voluntary armies were sent around the world to invade and occupy peripheral powers, at home we started to lose our educational advantage and the national calling to be first in knowledge.

In the US, the Gingrich Revolution was the first sign that America was turning away from what had put it is such a commanding position. Pretty soon, the country would see leaders like George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Donald Trump emerge, none of whom would have been thinkable to a country that was aware of facing serious global competition.

The resulting destruction is almost unimaginable. The US and the UK are now doing almost the worst job in the world of protecting their citizens from the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, and this is in spite of still maintaining massive advantages over most other countries. It’s entirely attributable to stupid leadership that was enable by stupid voters.

It turns out that waving a flag and boasting that “Were No. 1” is no substitute for being hungry for knowledge and determined to lead the world in education.

I’ll drop the most recent John Oliver segment for you:

As usual, John Oliver provides a healthy dose of information and gallows humor. Seems fitting for our times. I am glad that he is broadcasting regularly, and that these segments get shared so freely on YouTube. HBO could be real jerks and keep them hidden from public view. Thankfully that hasn’t happened – yet.

I need a drink.

Cheers.

It appears likely that Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina used his perch as the chairman of the Senate Inteligence Committee to gather inside information on the coming Covid-19 crisis and then inoculate himself from stock losses by selling companies that stood to lose revenue. That’s a crime, and he should be thoroughly investigated. Having said that, I’ve been impressed with how he’s run his committee. He’s been under extraordinary pressure to shut down his investigation of Russia’s role in the 2016 election, or to at least force it to come to conclusions that cast doubt on the Intelligence Community’s assessment. He has consistently refused to do this, and has now issued a final report that confirms that basic narrative spelled out by Robert Mueller’s investigators.

The simple facts are that Russia had a policy of helping Donald Trump and hurting Hillary Clinton, and that they cultivated numerous contacts within the Trump administration, and that their help was understood and eagerly welcomed by people in Trump’s campaign. Mueller concluded that a conspiracy case couldn’t be won against any particular individuals, so the charges were limited to noncooperation with the investigation (including lying to Congress) or financial or campaign finance/lobbying crimes that that were exposed during the investigation. The Senate Intelligence Committee report isn’t focused on identifying indictable behavior, but it buttresses what Mueller reported and defends the Intelligence Community’s findings.

American intelligence officials’ determination that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election to assist Donald J. Trump’s candidacy was fundamentally sound and untainted by politics, according to a key Republican-led Senate review released on Tuesday. The findings undercut longstanding allegations by Mr. Trump and his allies that the officials were biased against him.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which conducted the three-year study, had already given the work of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. an interim stamp of approval, but the 158-page report on Tuesday presented new detail about the government’s attempts in 2016 and 2017 to make sense of Russia’s attacks. Much of the report’s contents about the so-called Intelligence Community Assessment were considered highly sensitive and blacked out by the Trump administration.

“The I.C.A. reflects strong tradecraft, sound analytical reasoning and proper justification of disagreement in the one analytical line where it occurred,” said Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina and the panel’s chairman. “The committee found no reason to dispute the intelligence community’s conclusions.”

This won’t prevent Trump and his allies from continuing to argue that the allegations are “fake news” and the investigations are part of “a witch hunt,” but it’s important for the historical record and it does undermine the credibility of those arguments.

Richard Burr could probably use some friends right now, and this report isn’t going to help in that respect. For that, he deserves credit even if he’s only done what anyone in his position should do. In Trump’s Republican Party, this kind of behavior is almost unheard of, so I thought I should give credit where it is due.

Photo credit: Nashville Post

Christopher Hale is a Democrat running for Congress in Tennessee. He doesn’t know me from Adam, but when I needed help, he was the first to volunteer. Here’s the backstory.

If I haven’t mentioned it yet (and I’m sure I have) I lost my job due to the coronavirus. I am STILL trying to get my unemployment benefits, just like millions of other Tennesseans. This article is a week old, but it could have been published yesterday, or even this morning.

Tennessee’s unemployment website has been scheduling ‘shut down’ periods in order to process the large spike in claims it has received amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

State officials tell us they processed an unprecedented 114,000 unemployment insurance payments last week – totaling to $33-million. The TN Department of Labor and Workforce Development is expecting those numbers to spike again this week.

To keep up with the large amount of unemployment insurance payments, the website has been temporarily shut down to help speed up with process.

These rolling shutdowns—that’s what they are—have been augmented by “staggering” certification days by Social Security number. This hasn’t worked out so well either. The screenshot you see above? That’s from early midnight last night—when the DOL recommends you apply—and it shows you how reliably bad the site is.

This is what we call a bad joke.

A friend of mine recently joke that if I was a woman eventually someone would call me a bitch, because once I have a bug up my ass about something, I am relentless. I will not let it go. I will not be ignored. I started bitching about the dysfunction at DOL on Facebook, Twitter, anywhere I could find an audience. And believe you me, that audience was an eager one—if anything unites red and blue Tennessee it’s “where’s the money, Lebowksi?”

And then, out of the blue, a message from a stranger: it was Christopher Hale, a Democrat who is running for Congress against a real scumbag, Dick DesJarlais.

My opponent Rep. DesJarlais pulled a gun on his first wife and fired it, pressured her and his mistresses to get three abortions, and illegally prescribed painkillers to a patient he was dating while married.

We deserve better. https://t.co/jCLoLOgnZqhttps://t.co/m1NCoLdXff

— Christopher J. Hale (@chrisjollyhale) April 21, 2020

DesJarlais did, in fact, do all of those things, and all while presenting himself as a pro-life, Christian conservative. But that’s beside the point.

When I needed help from the Tennessee Department of Labor and Workforce Development to file my claim, no one from that office helped. Their website doesn’t work. When you call them on the phone, it rings once and hangs up. Their Facebook page is nonresponsive. Their Twitter feed is moribund. The agency is led by an invisible man who spends most of his time writing bodice-rippers for Christians.

But within a hour of Hale reaching out to me, I had a number to call. And then a call back from the Department of Labor, and a little more clarity on how to apply.

Today, the Tennessee Democratic House Caucus has ALSO gotten involved, on behalf of all Tennesseans who are getting the okie doke about our unemployment—the Tennessee GOP simply does not care about anyone in the state except for their rich friends—but it was Hale that reached out first.

Now, I have to admit that I STILL haven’t gotten my money—the state says my claim is “in review”—but at least I’m in the system now. I have direct phone numbers to people who can help (and who can be harassed if they don’t). And that’s because someone took time to care and took time to help.

That someone was Chris Hale, and once I have an income again, I am going to donate to his campaign. Here’s his ActBlue and his official page.

Fred Rogers once said “look for the helpers” in a time of emergency. Well, Chris Hale helped me, and I am glad to help him back. Let’s kick out these Republican monsters and replace them with decent people.

I once called Carl Paladino an “ethics cement-head” and elected him to my Hall of Scoundrels. I’ve written about the man quite a bit over the years, mainly because he liked to use Roger Stone and Mike Caputo as his campaign advisers. Here’s an example:

Caputo is unique among the suspects in the Russia inquiry in that he’s the only one I know of who has persistently bragged over the years about having worked for the Kremlin. He got his start working to help Boris Yeltsin beat the odds and win reelection. Later on, he had a job burnishing the image of Vladimir Putin in the United Statees as an employee of Gazprom Media. Along the way, he never seems to have strayed too far from Roger Stone’s side, working with on a variety of trollish New York state campaigns, including the long-shot gubernatorial bids of Carl Paladino and Tom Golisano, and the takedown of attorney general Eliot Spitzer.  It’s probably through Stone that Caputo made the acquaintance of Donald Trump and landed a job working as a senior communications adviser for his campaign.

Paladino isn’t particularly interesting in himself, even if you live in New York State where he’s at least somewhat relevant. But his connections are worth paying attention to because they’re always up to no good.

Here’s Paladino’s latest effort to get attention:

https://twitter.com/Freeyourmindkid/status/1252313779733397506

I think the point of that tweet is that racism plays a huge role in the social distancing protests, just as it did when the Tea Party suddenly arrived on the scene in 2009. That’s certainly true, but remember why Mike Caputo is in the news right now:

Health and Human Services Department Secretary Alex Azar confirmed Wednesday that former 2016 Trump campaign adviser Michael Caputo will serve as the department’s new spokesperson, putting a vocal defender of President Donald Trump in a key messaging role.

“I’m delighted to have Michael Caputo join our team at @HHSGov as our Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, especially at this critical time in our nation’s public health history,” Azar tweeted.

Most of the reporting on this ridiculous hire focused on the fact that Secretary Azar was not in fact “delighted” to have a disreputable hack and congressional perjurer like Caputo thrust on him as a spokesperson. For example, this is from Politico:

The move is designed to assert more White House control over Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who officials believe has been behind recent critical reports about President Donald Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two officials with knowledge of the move…

…The high-level move comes after a series of news reports that portrayed Azar as warning Trump about the pending Covid-19 pandemic in January but having the president and his aides dismiss his concerns. Trump on Sunday tweetedthat Azar “told me nothing until later,” appearing to refute those reports.

White House officials believe that Azar has been shaping favorable coverage of his handling of the Covid-19 outbreak and trying to shift blame for the administration’s mishandled response, said two officials with knowledge of the situation.

It’s really impossible to separate Carl Paladino and Mike Caputo. The two Buffalo natives have been thick as thieves for decades, and now we see one of them on the streets protesting social distancing while the other is installed as the spokesperson for the Department of Health & Human Services where his job is to make sure Trump doesn’t get held accountable for his handling of the Covid-19 outbreak.

This is the Roger Stone network at work.