COVID-19 Update

USA

• New Cases:   48,715
• New Deaths:       932

Bloomberg:

A top White House security official, Crede Bailey, is gravely ill with Covid-19 and has been hospitalized since September, according to four people familiar with his condition.

The White House has not publicly disclosed Bailey’s illness. He became sick before the Sept. 26 Rose Garden event President Donald Trump held to announce his Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett that has been connected to more than a dozen cases of the disease.

A White House spokesman declined to comment on Bailey. He is in charge of the White House security office, which handles credentialing for access to the White House and works closely with the U.S. Secret Service on security measures throughout the compound.

A career federal employee who has seldom appeared in the news, Bailey was swept up in a controversy last year over security clearances granted to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Bailey privately testified to the House Oversight Committee that he didn’t face pressure from others at the White House to grant clearances, according to a report by The Hill.

- and -

John Hagee, prominent megachurch pastor, ill with COVID-19

And, entering the realm of Sci-Fi as prophetic messenger, The Times Of Israel:

COVID-19 is harming the sperm of patients, even weeks after recovery, Israeli doctors have concluded, raising concerns that the disease could reduce fertility.

“Men who had the mild disease had a broadly normal sperm quality,” Prof. Dan Aderka of Sheba Medical Center, told The Times of Israel this week. “But those who had the disease in moderate or serious form often didn’t, even after recovery.

“These men had a reduction of around 50% on average of the number of sperm per milliliter, total volume of ejaculate, and motility of sperm,” he said. This figure reflects testing that was carried out around a month after diagnosis.

Fact Check

The debate last night was at least more like a real debate, and not that stoopid brick fight thing they had on last week.

CNN's Daniel Dale does his thing:

No knockouts, but Momala knocked Pence down pretty good with what's becoming her signature slap-back, "I will not be lectured to..."

And that's becoming one of the salient features of this campaign season - ie: Don't bring that mansplainin' bullshit in here again, boys.

So, I think there's a consensus forming that says Harris won it on points.

I'm sure the "conservatives" will piss and moan about "the angry screeching black woman", but y'know, fellas, that's kinda the fuckin' problem women in general have with the GOP now - your dismissive and condescending attitude has worn thin, and they're just not gonna put up with your shit anymore.

Spotted Foot, Shot Same

Trump always makes things worse for Trump -- Bob Cesca

WaPo, Greg Sargent:

When you step back and survey the last two years of U.S. politics, one of the biggest story lines that comes into view is this: One after another, a whole string of deeply corrupt schemes that President Trump has hatched to smooth his reelection hopes have crashed and burned.

In all these cases, Trump has either blown up the schemes himself or compounded the damage they did to him when they self-destructed. In some cases he did both.

Meanwhile, Trump has also managed to wreck numerous opportunities that he could have easily turned to his political advantage if he had reacted to them in a non-depraved manner. Instead, he sought to pervert or corrupt them in ways that ended up backfiring.

When you view these things in one place, the true scale of Trump’s commitment to winning the election through corrupt means becomes a lot more striking. And, since many of them are doing great damage to the country, his sheer destructiveness also comes into much sharper relief.

Let’s take these in reverse chronological order.

Trump’s vaccine scheme implodes. The White House has now agreed under political duress to the Food and Drug Administration’s guidelines for vaccine trials, after trying to block them for weeks. The FDA timetable requires a median of two months to pass after participants in vaccine trials take their final dose, all but scuttling authorization before the election.

Trump had repeatedly tried to rush the process to boost his reelection. This made it politically more damaging: It forced many stakeholders (the biotech industry, administration scientists) to loudly demand an uncorrupted process, reverse-spotlighting his own corruption.

Trump blows up stimulus lifeline. Trump angrily terminated talks over a new stimulus package on Tuesday, only to abruptly reverse course and tweet out demands that Congress approve aid to the airline industry and direct cash payments to individuals.

Signing a big stimulus would have delivered a political boost. Trump knows this: He corruptly insisted on putting his signature on a previous round of checks. Now Trump has placed himself on the hook for killing desperately needed aid just as the economy further tanks, while also reminding voters of his tendency to try to make complex, consequential policy via erratic, ineffective, self-contradictory rage-tweeting.

Trump wrecks public goodwill toward himself. When he tested positive for the coronavirus, he might have seized the moment to admit error; to show humility and humanity toward its victims. Instead, he launched a display of megalomaniacal propaganda that cast his supposed personal triumph over the virus as a function of his alleged strength, insulting the dead and bereaved.

His cultish theatrics for supporters outside the hospital needlessly put others at risk. And now Trump is still resisting further protective protocols in the White House, even as the coronavirus spreads among his top advisers. All this just reminds Americans of his reckless handling of the virus all throughout.

Amy Coney Barrett implicated in coronavirus event. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, observers proclaimed Trump had an opening to change the subject from coronavirus. But when Trump introduced his replacement nominee at last weekend’s largely mask-free White House event, it may have infected at least eight people with the virus, including two GOP senators.

This further reminds Americans of Trump’s depraved requirement that all Republicans treat the virus either as no biggie or as largely vanquished by his spectacular leadership, and that they act this out by shunning social distancing, putting their own lives at risk.

Efforts to corrupt vote-by-mail backfire. Trump and Attorney General William P. Barr have spent months telling all kinds of lies about vote-by-mail fraud, to lay the groundwork for Trump to declare victory just after Election Day, while seeking to delegitimize millions of uncounted mail ballots.

But the telegraphing of such corrupt designs has helped spur an enormous amount of early voting and early mail-balloting, in which Democrats have a large registration advantage, as Republicans warned would happen. Experts say this will help avert the massive mail-voting overload around Election Day that could have produced delays Trump hoped to exploit.

Trump’s “law and order” agitprop tanks. Trump’s top law enforcement and national security officials used their positions to lend official credence to largely manufactured impressions of a full-scale, organized, violent leftist terror threat, in keeping with Trump’s campaign narratives.

But a Department of Homeland Security whistleblower helped disrupt this effort by revealing that higher-ups had pressed for the manipulation of intelligence to bolster that story line. And polls have since shown Biden favored on crime and safety, surely because voters grasp that Trump is actively working to foment violent civil conflict.

“Hunterghazi” flops. Trump and his propagandists spent months teasing major revelations about Joe Biden’s son Hunter, while openly banking on a transparently phony GOP Senate investigation to manufacture illusions of Biden corruption.

But that probe’s final report was a buffoonish bust. And all the hype only drew more attention to the profound corruption of demanding such blatant perversion of the congressional investigative process.

Which brings us to … impeachment. Let’s not forget that Trump’s zeal to manufacture such Biden corruption led him to try to strong-arm a foreign ally under extreme duress into announcing investigations that would validate those narratives, for which he was impeached.

That’s a reminder that Trump has been working to place the levers of government at all levels at the disposal of his reelection campaign for upward of two years now. In retrospect, the Ukraine scandal set the template for all the corruption that would follow — and for his accompanying string of miserable failures to get away with it as well.

Today's Parody

James Cordin

"... maybe I'm afraid that I might lose this."

COVID-19 Update

For what it's worth, I took a look at Deaths Per Million Population Per Day.

• World:   .6 Deaths/Million/Day
• USA:   2.9 Deaths/Million/Day

So the shock of reality continues. With 4.3% of the world's people, we're zooming along at almost 5 times the world's COVID-19 death rate.

Ain't we just so fucking awesome.

USA yesterday

• New Cases:  43,660
• New Deaths:      790

If we catch a couple of really big breaks, we could see a vaccine some time mid-summer next year. And, of course, they're getting better at dealing with the disease all the time. So anyway, a string of happier occurrences could fall into place.

1. Biden wins
2. Nation-wide plans and policies get put in place
3. Public compliance with safety measures improves
4. We continue to make advances in therapies
5. Vaccination project rolls out next summer

Cutting to the chase now: if we can knock the growth rate down - and keep it down - to about 1.002, then the anticipated "worst case" of over a million dead is reduced to less than 400,000.

And somehow "only 400,000 dead Americans" will be something to celebrate.

This country is fucked up in the head.

Today's Tweet

Because there's always a tweet.

The Ebola doctor who just flew to N.Y. from West Africa and went on the subway, bowling and dining is a very SELFISH man-should have known!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 24, 2014

Today's Pix

click

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Nasty Nature

 The Spider-Tailed Horned Viper

Wondering

Just wondering when the miracle cure that 45* got at Walter Reed will be available to the rest of us.

That would make for such a nice Christmas, dontcha think?

COVID-19 Update

USA

• New Cases:   41,576
• New Deaths:       421

Dana Milbank - WaPo:

Americans showed Trump compassion. He repaid us with contempt.

Americans of all political stripes wished President Trump well in his battle with covid-19. Now he is repaying our compassion with reckless disregard and callous contempt for the well-being of anybody but himself.

Trump, announcing via Twitter on Monday afternoon that he was ending his hospitalization at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center after three days, told Americans that the pandemic is no big deal. “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life,” he wrote. “I feel better than I did 20 years ago!” he added.

A more selfish man has never occupied his high office. He received a cutting-edge treatment, monoclonal antibodies, unavailable to virtually all other Americans. He received an antiviral, remdesivir, that is rationed for ordinary Americans. He required oxygen and steroids.

Yet Trump has the audacity to tell Americans the virus is no biggie. No doubt the families of the 209,000 dead are greatly reassured.

Trump, his doctors say, appears to be recovering. His administration, however, has had so many recurrences of old pathologies in the past four days that it looks like a terminal case.

Recklessness. The White House ceremony for Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett, held in violation of public health guidelines, has made the White House, Trump campaign and Senate Republican caucus look like a nursing home in the early days of the pandemic. On Monday, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany and various junior White House officials joined a list of the infected that includes Trump’s wife, his campaign manager, three Republican senators and several other senior Trump advisers.

Incompetence. Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, contradicted the president’s doctor about Trump’s prognosis. White House officials complain about a lack of direction. Meadows allies attempt Al Haig-like assertions that he’s running the government. “Where are the adults?” a former Secret Service member asked The Post after Trump jeopardized the lives of his security detail by forcing them to take him driving Sunday.

Lies. Trump’s White House physician destroyed his own credibility, misleading the public about the president’s health and omitting crucial information. “I was trying to reflect the upbeat attitude that the team, the president, that his course of illness has had,” he explained when caught. Trump reportedly didn’t disclose his first positive coronavirus test and told one adviser who had tested positive, “Don’t tell anyone.” Even in the hospital he has deceived the public, with staged photos showing the illusion of business as usual.

Above all, we’ve seen Trump’s arrogant disregard for others. He and his lieutenants jeopardized the health of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and others at the debate when Trump’s family and aides broke the rules and took off their masks. He put supporters in Minnesota and donors in New Jersey at risk when he knew, or had reason to suspect, that he and those around him had been exposed.

The recklessness in the White House (McEnany, when she was supposed to quarantine, instead briefed reporters without wearing a mask) has spread the virus to journalists and members of the White House housekeeping staff (who’ve reportedly been told to keep quiet).

Biden respectfully pulled his negative ads after Trump’s diagnosis, but Trump is having Vice President Pence continue holding crowded, maskless campaign events, while Trump has been firing off all-caps tweets and political attacks from his hospital bed.

And of course there was Trump’s joyride to greet supporters outside Walter Reed, endangering health-care workers and the Secret Service. “Commanded by Trump to put their lives at risk for theater,” is how one attending physician at Walter Reed put it.

Trump, who once tweeted that a doctor who went out in public after a potential Ebola exposure “is a very SELFISH man,” has set a new standard for selfishness. And his appointees abuse their positions of public trust to validate the president’s contempt for others.

Sean Conley, the White House physician, wearing his white coat with other doctors outside Walter Reed on Monday afternoon, refused to say when Trump last tested negative — vital information to the Biden campaign and many others potentially exposed. “I don’t want to go backwards,” he said.

Conley also declined to say what quarantine controls would guarantee others’ safety at the White House. He refused to provide details about Trump’s lungs — crucial details four weeks before Election Day. He dismissed any concern about the man with the nuclear codes taking a steroid medication that can increase irritability and impulsivity and induce psychosis.

As for Trump telling people not to fear covid-19, Conley said: “I’m not going to get into what the president says.” If he were looking out for the American public’s well-being and not Trump’s political well-being, he would have given a different answer.

After the past four days, it’s fair to ask: Why should we care about Trump when he obviously doesn’t care about us?

Conley also declined to say what quarantine controls would guarantee others’ safety at the White House. He refused to provide details about Trump’s lungs — crucial details four weeks before Election Day. He dismissed any concern about the man with the nuclear codes taking a steroid medication that can increase irritability and impulsivity and induce psychosis.

As for Trump telling people not to fear covid-19, Conley said: “I’m not going to get into what the president says.” If he were looking out for the American public’s well-being and not Trump’s political well-being, he would have given a different answer.

After the past four days, it’s fair to ask: Why should we care about Trump when he obviously doesn’t care about us?