Apr 15, 2020
American Horror Stories
Rolling Stone:
While Americans died of the modern plague, President Trump sang happy birthday to a fading Fox News personality. On March 7th, a who’s who of the Republican establishment gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish retreat in Florida, for the 51st-birthday party of Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the former co-hosts of The Five, and now the girlfriend of Donald J. Trump Jr. All the usual suspects were there, including Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham; Tiffany Trump; Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner; and Trump’s younger son Eric and his wife, Lara. They sang happy birthday to Guilfoyle and lit a big sparkler. At the end, she pumped her fist and shouted “Four more years!” This is what passes for a cozy family celebration in Trumpland. But out in the real world, darkness was falling fast.
There were already 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, around the world, and 3,600 people had died. In the U.S., more than 100 new cases had been reported that day, a rate that was doubling every three days. Other nations knew how serious this was: By that time, China had shut down major cities, all but quarantining 760 million people. Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea had put in aggressive travel restrictions and testing procedures. In the U.S., fear was rising. South By Southwest, the giant music/tech conference in Austin had just been canceled. Grocery stores were stripped in panic buying. On Wall Street, stocks were in free fall.
There's also an AUDM version embedded at their site - you can listen or download it.
While Americans died of the modern plague, President Trump sang happy birthday to a fading Fox News personality. On March 7th, a who’s who of the Republican establishment gathered at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s lavish retreat in Florida, for the 51st-birthday party of Kimberly Guilfoyle, one of the former co-hosts of The Five, and now the girlfriend of Donald J. Trump Jr. All the usual suspects were there, including Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Lindsey Graham; Tiffany Trump; Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner; and Trump’s younger son Eric and his wife, Lara. They sang happy birthday to Guilfoyle and lit a big sparkler. At the end, she pumped her fist and shouted “Four more years!” This is what passes for a cozy family celebration in Trumpland. But out in the real world, darkness was falling fast.
There were already 100,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, around the world, and 3,600 people had died. In the U.S., more than 100 new cases had been reported that day, a rate that was doubling every three days. Other nations knew how serious this was: By that time, China had shut down major cities, all but quarantining 760 million people. Singapore and Hong Kong and South Korea had put in aggressive travel restrictions and testing procedures. In the U.S., fear was rising. South By Southwest, the giant music/tech conference in Austin had just been canceled. Grocery stores were stripped in panic buying. On Wall Street, stocks were in free fall.
There's also an AUDM version embedded at their site - you can listen or download it.
Two of the big points:
- 45* is responsible for dismantling the pandemic response team that was in place in the NSC. He let Bolton scrub that whole fucking thing.
- The "China Travel Ban" was a Swiss cheese measure. He blocked travel, but only for Chinese nationals (which is why it was in fact a racist asshole thing to do). Everybody else was free to come and go as they pleased. And he didn't block any manufactured goods coming in from China. It could have given us a little lead time to get something in place before the thing took off, but he sat on his ass doing that stoopid fucking wishful thinking thing he always does.
This is on him, and I've not seen any good evidence that we're not being played - that this is not the standard Shock Doctrine bullshit that the plutocrats have been using to fuck people over for 50 years.
History is not a series of random independent events - and there's not such thing as mere;y coincidental, un-connected happenstance in politics.
If you've got about 9 hours, give a listen to Naomi Klein:
Apr 14, 2020
Go, Joe
Obama talks up Joe Biden
We'll see if Biden is any kind of smart. I have my doubts. I know he's not dumb, but I don't know that's he's smart in the right ways
I know he can work the legislature, but can he motivate us to keep the pressure on the congress critters? Can he teach us how to bring that pressure for him - for us?
We need him to do exactly that, but yeah - we'll see.
Overheard
"...and if you still don't think of him as your president, then you better not cash the check he's sending you..."
Dude - c'mon - not only will I be cashing that check, I'll be laughing my ass off the whole way into town, knowing that every check I get is an open admission from this administration - as well as from every Republican - that trickle-down economics has failed again, and that these clear-eyed steel-nerved social Darwinists have had to fall back on a radical left idea like Minimum Basic Income to keep this joint from goin' tits up for-fuckin'-ever.
Seriously, what part of your feverish brain can make you believe I won't enjoy getting back a thousand of my tax dollars in the form of a check that basically says, "Ya'll were right - we was lyin' about that shit the whole time" on the memo line?
Dude - c'mon - not only will I be cashing that check, I'll be laughing my ass off the whole way into town, knowing that every check I get is an open admission from this administration - as well as from every Republican - that trickle-down economics has failed again, and that these clear-eyed steel-nerved social Darwinists have had to fall back on a radical left idea like Minimum Basic Income to keep this joint from goin' tits up for-fuckin'-ever.
Seriously, what part of your feverish brain can make you believe I won't enjoy getting back a thousand of my tax dollars in the form of a check that basically says, "Ya'll were right - we was lyin' about that shit the whole time" on the memo line?
COVID-19 Update
The first death in the US was reported February 29. Since that day, on average, one American has died of this plague every 3 minutes.
Let's Review
Back in the 90s, Hillary mentioned "a vast right wing conspiracy" and we all laughed and laughed.
So then a lot of seemingly weird random shit went on and "suddenly" here we are, teetering on the brink - possibly tipping into full blown Daddy State.
Quick recap with Nancy MacLean in truthout:
Mark Karlin:
So then a lot of seemingly weird random shit went on and "suddenly" here we are, teetering on the brink - possibly tipping into full blown Daddy State.
Quick recap with Nancy MacLean in truthout:
Mark Karlin:
Can you summarize the importance of James McGill Buchanan to the development of the modern extreme right wing in the United States?
Nancy MacLean:
Nancy MacLean:
The modern extreme right wing I’m talking about, just to be clear, is the libertarian movement that now sails under the Republican flag, particularly but not only the Freedom Caucus, yet goes back to the 1950s in both parties. President Eisenhower called them “stupid” and fashioned his approach — calling it modern Republicanism — as an antidote to them. Goldwater was their first presidential candidate. He bombed. Reagan, they believed, was going to enact their agenda. He didn’t. But beginning in the early 2000s, they became a force to be reckoned with. What had changed? The discovery by their chief funder, Charles Koch, of the approach developed by James McGill Buchanan for how to take apart the liberal state.
Buchanan studied economics at the University of Chicago and belonged to the same milieu as F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, but he used his training to analyze public life. And he supplied what no one else had: an operational strategy to vanquish the model of government they had been criticizing for decades — and prevent it from being recreated. It was Buchanan who taught Koch that for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained.
Buchanan was a very smart man, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from the US South, in fact. But his life’s work was forever shaped by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as the state’s leaders were goading the white South to fight the court’s ruling, a ruling he saw not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all citizens but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states that began with the New Deal. For him what was at stake was the sanctity of private property rights, with northern liberals telling southern owners how to spend their money and behave correctly. Given an institute to run on the campus of the University of Virginia, he promised to devote his academic career to understanding how the other side became so powerful and, ultimately, to figuring out an effective line of attack to break down what they had created and return to what he and the Virginia elite viewed as appropriate for America. In a nutshell, he studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to deny ordinary people — white and Black — the ability to make claims on government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting back. He sought, in his words, to “enchain Leviathan,” which is why I titled the book Democracy in Chains.
Buchanan studied economics at the University of Chicago and belonged to the same milieu as F.A. Hayek, Milton Friedman and Ludwig von Mises, but he used his training to analyze public life. And he supplied what no one else had: an operational strategy to vanquish the model of government they had been criticizing for decades — and prevent it from being recreated. It was Buchanan who taught Koch that for capitalism to thrive, democracy must be enchained.
Buchanan was a very smart man, the only winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics from the US South, in fact. But his life’s work was forever shaped by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision. He arrived in Virginia in 1956, just as the state’s leaders were goading the white South to fight the court’s ruling, a ruling he saw not through the lens of equal protection of the law for all citizens but rather as another wave in a rising tide of unwarranted and illegitimate federal interference in the affairs of the states that began with the New Deal. For him what was at stake was the sanctity of private property rights, with northern liberals telling southern owners how to spend their money and behave correctly. Given an institute to run on the campus of the University of Virginia, he promised to devote his academic career to understanding how the other side became so powerful and, ultimately, to figuring out an effective line of attack to break down what they had created and return to what he and the Virginia elite viewed as appropriate for America. In a nutshell, he studied the workings of the political process to figure out what was needed to deny ordinary people — white and Black — the ability to make claims on government at the expense of private property rights and the wishes of capitalists. And then he identified how to rejigger that political process not only to reverse the gains but also to prevent the system from ever reverting back. He sought, in his words, to “enchain Leviathan,” which is why I titled the book Democracy in Chains.
It goes on, and she summarizes the plan in a way that makes it seem plain and simple. It's a good read.
Apr 13, 2020
COVID-19 LowLights
WaPo:
Navy reports first death of a sailor associated with aircraft carrier crippled by the coronavirus
A Nasal Swab’s Journey
The backlog for Covid-19 testing in New Jersey and other parts of the country is getting worse, not better. From the nose of a patient on a mile-long line to a phone call days later, bottlenecks thwart its progress.
Stop declaring premature victory against coronavirusThe backlog for Covid-19 testing in New Jersey and other parts of the country is getting worse, not better. From the nose of a patient on a mile-long line to a phone call days later, bottlenecks thwart its progress.
Over the past week or so, the direst possible futures for the novel coronavirus pandemic have seemingly receded. Though the U.S. has by far the greatest number of confirmed cases of any country (at time of writing about 558,000 cases and 22,000 deaths, which are almost certainly drastic underestimates), a recent analysis from the University of Washington revised its estimate of the predicted total American death count down to "only" about 60,400.
This has led many to question the necessity of all the social-distancing and lockdown measures that are wreaking economic havoc. But while a possibly lower death count is certainly good news, it would be wildly premature to declare victory now. America is not even close to finished with the first wave of infection, and we have done almost nothing to prevent a second.
Let's deal with the idiots first. Fox News conservatives and pudding-brained contrarians like former New York Times reporter Alex Berensonhave seized on the revised estimates to conclude the experts were wrong all along, and coronavirus is not as bad as they claimed. This is like a firefighter in a burning building saying that because his flesh has not been scorched off his bones, he can safely ditch all his fireproof gear. The researchers are clear that the estimated death toll has declined because all the lockdown measures have drastically cut the infection rate. The appalling failure of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio shows what happens to places that don't get on top of an outbreak quickly — they end up digging mass graves.
Losing
The Guardian:
Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.
Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.
Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.
“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.
“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”
This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.
For the most part, oft-maligned foreign leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel have listened politely, turning the other cheek in the interests of preserving the broader relationship.
But Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.
Erratic behaviour, tolerated in the past, is now seen as downright dangerous. It’s long been plain, at least to many in Europe, that Trump could not be trusted. Now he is seen as a threat. It is not just about failed leadership. It’s about openly hostile, reckless actions.
- and -
Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, said he hoped the crisis would force a fundamental US rethink about “whether the ‘America first’ model really works”. The Trump administration’s response had been too slow, he said. “Hollowing out international connections comes at a high price,” Maas warned.
Lasting resentment over how the US went missing in action in the coronavirus wars of 2020 may change the way the world works.
Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.
Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.
Call it the Trump double-whammy. Diplomatically speaking, the US is on life support.
“The Trump administration’s self-centred, haphazard, and tone-deaf response [to Covid-19] will end up costing Americans trillions of dollars and thousands of otherwise preventable deaths,” wrote Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard.
“But that’s not the only damage the United States will suffer. Far from ‘making America great again’, this epic policy failure will further tarnish [its] reputation as a country that knows how to do things effectively.”
This adverse shift could be permanent, Walt warned. Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.
For the most part, oft-maligned foreign leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel have listened politely, turning the other cheek in the interests of preserving the broader relationship.
But Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.
Erratic behaviour, tolerated in the past, is now seen as downright dangerous. It’s long been plain, at least to many in Europe, that Trump could not be trusted. Now he is seen as a threat. It is not just about failed leadership. It’s about openly hostile, reckless actions.
- and -
Heiko Maas, Germany’s foreign minister, said he hoped the crisis would force a fundamental US rethink about “whether the ‘America first’ model really works”. The Trump administration’s response had been too slow, he said. “Hollowing out international connections comes at a high price,” Maas warned.
Lasting resentment over how the US went missing in action in the coronavirus wars of 2020 may change the way the world works.
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