James.galbraith

President Trump tours a Honeywell plant in Phoenix, Arizona, on May 5. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

“I’ll be honest, uh, I have a lot of things going on,” Trump said, trying to explain his lack of coronavirus preparation.

Donald Trump’s interview on ABC Tuesday illustrated why the president rarely strays from the friendly confines of Fox News.

While Fox News hosts are content to let Trump rant and rave with little regard for lies or coherency, World News Tonight host David Muir sent Trump into a tailspin with a question that he should’ve seen coming — why didn’t he do more to prepare for the coronavirus that has now killed more than 72,000 Americans and counting?

It was as if Trump had never thought about it before. And it wasn’t the only moment in which the president was flummoxed. He had no plan for bringing the spread of the virus under control and offered little beyond his widely-criticized idea that states should reopen their economies swiftly — even as none has met the White House coronavirus task force’s criteria for doing so.

The interview took place during Trump’s at times surreal, mask-less trip to a Honeywell plant in Phoenix, Arizona, where masks are produced. It was one of his first public appearances away from the White House since he declared the coronavirus to be a national emergency in mid-March.

The event foreshadows the White House policy ahead: There is no serious, coordinated plan to tackle the crisis. Instead, Trump will spend the summer trying to convince his supporters to ignore the data and believe that he turned the coronavirus crisis into an economic success story. That means opening up businesses, even though no expert believes that will help the economy. At the same time, it’ll cause more Americans to die.

Trump, gallingly, has decided to put his bogus campaign message before the health and safety and lives of Americans. As he said earlier Tuesday: “Will some people be badly affected? Yes.”

“Well, I’ll be honest, uh, I have a lot of things going on”

During the interview with Muir, Trump tried to deflect questions about his administration’s failures with regard to obtaining personal protective equipment and deploying an effective coronavirus test by pinning blame on former President Barack Obama. This talking point is absurd, but he has largely gotten away with making it during press briefings.

It took Muir just one question to demonstrate that Trump has no defense beyond deflection.

“What did you do when you became president to restock those cupboards that you say are bare?” he asked.

“Well, I’ll be honest, uh, I have a lot of things going on,” Trump began, in a soundbite tailor-made for an attack ad. “We had a lot of, uh, people, that refused to allow the country to be successful. They wasted a lot of time on ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ — that turned out to be a total hoax. Then they did ‘Ukraine, Ukraine,’ and that was a total hoax. Then they impeached the president for absolutely no reason.”

Watch:

While Trump may want you to believe the Russia investigation left him too preoccupied to prepare for a pandemic, he still did find time to disband the government’s pandemic preparedness team in 2018 — not to mention regularly vacation at properties he still owns and profits from, and live-tweet countless hours of cable news coverage.

Muir didn’t press any of these points and was widely criticized for not doing so. But remarkably, it didn’t even take a follow-up question to expose Trump.

The same thing happened later, when Muir asked Trump about his infamous February 26 statement about the number of cases of coronavirus in the country, which then stood at 15, “within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero.” (There are more than 1.2 million coronavirus cases in the country as of May 6.)

Trump’s attempt to defend the comment didn’t make sense:

So let me, let me — I said even, you would say, worse than that, I said ‘one person’ one time. And it’s true. There was a time when we had one person in this country. We knew about it, we worked on it, but we have one person. It mushroomed. The 15 people mushroomed. Other people were coming in also from Europe.

As Trump flailed, Muir interjected to note that “we’re over a million cases though.” The president took the opportunity to stop trying to explain his past statements and start talking about how much testing the US is doing now — ignoring that it’s still far short of what experts say is needed to safely reopen businesses, and comes after the virus spread across the country in a largely undetected manner in February and March.

As Trump rambled, he misspoke about which country he’s leading (“I banned people from coming in from China”) and brandished a sheet of paper meant to demonstrate how great the US is in testing compared with other countries (nevermind that the US has more than twice as many coronavirus deaths as the four countries he used for comparison combined.)

None of that was reassuring. But the most terrifying part of the interview came at the beginning, when Trump acknowledged that American lives will have to be sacrificed for the sake of reopening the economy.

Asked by Muir if “lives will be lost to reopen the country,” Trump didn’t try to deny it.

“It’s possible there will be some, because you won’t be locked into an apartment or a house or whatever it is,” he said. “But at the same time, we’re going to practice social distancing. We’re gonna be washing hands, we’re gonna be doing a lot of the things that we’ve learned to do over the last period of time. And — we have to get our country back.”

That line of thinking was also a theme during remarks made at a roundtable event before the ABC interview.

“I’m viewing our great citizens of this country to a certain extent and to a large extent as warriors. They’re warriors. We can’t keep our country closed. We have to open our country,” Trump said. “Will some people be badly affected? Yes.”

By “badly affected,” Trump meant dead — and two new models indicate that tens of thousands of American lives could end in the coming months if the country continues down its current path and social distancing measures are relaxed too soon.

Characteristically, when Trump was asked about those models during a Q&A with reporters just before he boarded Air Force One for Arizona, he lied about them. Muir, however, didn’t press the point.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Dallas salon owner Shelley Luther was jailed for one week and fined $7,000 dollars for continuing to operate her business, Salon a La Mode, in defiance of the Texas governor’s orders.

A judge told Shelley Luther, the salon owner who opened her business in defiance of the governor's orders, that she had the option to avoid jail time if she admitted to the government she was "wrong" and "selfish" for opening.

Here is her response:pic.twitter.com/s5SM2XKYSq

— Sara Gonzales (@SaraGonzalesTX) May 5, 2020

The Dallas Morning News reports: “Luther was taken into custody immediately after the hearing and booked into the Dallas County jail just after 4:30 p.m. Like other businesses deemed nonessential, Luther’s Far North Dallas salon was forced to close March 22 after the county enacted its stay-at-home order. She reopened the salon April 24 despite that order, and tore up a cease-and-desist letter from County Judge Clay Jenkins at a demonstration the next day. The temporary restraining order was signed April 28 by state District Judge Eric Moyé, but Luther continued to operate the business.”

Luther was told by Moyé that she could avoid jail time if she apologized for her “selfish” behavior.

Luther refused, telling the judge, “I have to disagree with you, sir, when you say that I am selfish. Because feeding my kids is not selfish. If you think the law is more important than kids getting fed, then please go ahead with your decision, but I am not going to shut the salon. I have here stylists that are going hungry because they’d rather feed their kids. So, sir, if you think the law is more important than kids getting fed, then please go ahead with your decision, but I am not going to shut the salon.”

The post Dallas Salon Owner Jailed for 7 Days, Fined for Defying Governor’s Orders to Stay Shut Amid Coronavirus Pandemic: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

It’s been more than two months since a former Georgia police officer and his son allegedly followed, shot, and killed an unarmed Black jogger on Feb. 23. But somehow prosecutors are just getting around to seeking charges in the incident, according to a press release from prosecutors Tuesday. District Attorney Pro Tempore Tom Durden said in the release that other prosecutors recused themselves "because of either prior employment and/or familial relationships."

Durden, who was appointed April 13, said after his investigation into the death of Ahmaud Arbery: “I am of the opinion that the case should be presented to the grand jury of Glynn County for consideration of criminal charges.”

Grand juries are, however, prohibited from convening through June 12 in light of the novel coronavirus pandemic. "I have no control over the suspensions due to the pandemic; however, I do intend to present the case to the next available grand jury in Glynn County,” Durden said.

Although the district attorney’s press release failed to name the accused men, they have been identified as ex-police officer Gregory McMichael and his son Travis McMichael, according to CNN. Before Durden’s recent statement, one prosecutor defended Travis and argued that he's protected by a state law that allows citizens to make arrests, the news network reported.

In a 911 call CBS obtained, however, the caller can’t even definitively say that Arbery committed a break-in. By the caller’s own admission, the man later identified as Arbery was doing little more than jogging in front of a southeast Georgia home that had before been broken into. When the dispatcher on the call asked: "And you said someone is breaking into it right now?" The caller responded: "No it's all open. It's under construction, and he's running right now. There he goes right now."

Arbery, a 25-year-old former high school football player, lived near the coastal community in Glynn County that he was accused of trying to burglarize, The New York Times reported. His familiarity, however, didn't protect the athlete from apparent racial profiling. Gregory spotted Arbery in the front yard of a home under construction, called out to his son, and got into a truck to follow Arbery, according to an incident report the Times obtained. The men had a .357 magnum revolver and a shotgun in tow, the Times reported.

“Stop, stop,” they yelled when they caught up to Arbery, “we want to talk to you.” A struggle over the shotgun ensued at some point in the confrontation, and Arbery was shot at least two times, according to the Times. 

Attorney Lee Merritt, who’s representing Arbery’s family, said three shots were fired in the incident. He also mentioned a third unnamed man involved in the incident and released cell phone footage of the moments leading up to Arbery’s death on social media Tuesday.

“#AhmaudArbery was murdered by 3 white men that saw him running & decided to impute criminality on him,” Merritt tweeted. “He did nothing wrong. Still he was stalked, threatened & shot 3x at close range. This was not only murder it was a lynching."

Merritt told civil rights activist Al Sharpton on his MSNBC show, "PoliticsNation with Al Sharpton," that the worst that could be said about Arbery is that he stopped at a home under construction and allegedly looked in the window, but more could be said of prosecutors tasked with holding criminals accountable.

Merritt said Gregory used to work with the very district attorney’s office that would have been responsible for prosecuting him, so that district attorney recused herself. "It passed over to the next county, and there, the district attorney failed to disclose his close ties to this family," Merritt said. Arbery’s mother, Wanda Cooper, discovered the ties and asked the prosecutor to recuse himself, Merritt said. "He did but not before offering a very poor opinion on the state of the law that would have justified this shooting," Merritt said.

Economic stimulus checks are prepared for printing at the Philadelphia Financial Center May 8, 2008 in Philadelphia. | Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

They’re claiming they’re facing unconstitutional discrimination.

Immigrant advocates are arguing in court that American citizens who are married to unauthorized immigrants should still be eligible for stimulus checks along with their children.

The $2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act, or CARES Act, gives most taxpayers up to $1,200 and $500 for each of their children under the age of 17. But even if they pay taxes, unauthorized immigrants are not eligible for the stimulus checks, which the government started sending out in April. Neither is anyone else in their household, including their spouses and children, even if their spouses and children are US citizens.

Advocates from Georgetown Law and Villanova Law filed a class action lawsuit in Maryland federal court on Wednesday challenging the CARES Act on behalf of seven US citizen children of unauthorized immigrant taxpayers. They argued that it unfairly discriminates against these children based on their parents’ immigration status and denies them equal protection under the law in violation of the US Constitution’s due process clause.

Immigrant advocates at the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund also filed a lawsuit last week arguing that the CARES Act is unconstitutional because it “discriminates against mixed-status couples.”

“The refusal to distribute this benefit to US citizen children undermines the CARES Act’s goals of providing assistance to Americans in need, frustrates the Act’s efforts to jumpstart the economy, and punishes citizen children for their parents’ status — punishment that is particularly nonsensical given that undocumented immigrants, collectively, pay billions of dollars each year in taxes,” Mary McCord, legal director of Georgetown Law’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, said in a statement.

How the CARES Act penalizes unauthorized immigrants and their families

The bill excludes those in households with people of mixed immigration status, where some tax filers or their children may use what’s called an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN).

The IRS issues ITINs to unauthorized immigrants so they can pay taxes, even though they don’t have a Social Security number. If anyone in the household uses an ITIN — either a spouse or a dependent child — that means no one in the household will qualify for the stimulus checks unless one spouse served in the military in 2019.

If the law is allowed to stand, it could impact an estimated 16.7 million people who live in mixed-status households nationwide, including 8.2 million US-born or naturalized citizens.

The exclusion for mixed-status households defies current practices: Many other federal programs are designed in such a way that US citizen children of unauthorized immigrants can access necessary benefits, including the child tax credit, food stamps, housing assistance, welfare benefits, and benefits from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.

But there is a precedent for this kind of exclusion. Amid the global financial crisis in 2008, Congress handed out tax rebates to most American taxpayers, except for the spouses of immigrants who didn’t have Social Security numbers.

What the exclusion means for mixed-status families

Most of the families of the children named in Wednesday’s lawsuit have a combined income of no more than $30,000 and, absent financial support from the federal government, are struggling to stay afloat.

One parent, identified only as N.R. in the complaint, lost her job at a restaurant during the pandemic and her partner has also been unable to work because he contracted Covid-19. The family has no income and depends on community support as well as food from her child’s school system in order to survive.

Another parent, C.V., lost her job at a catering company and has had to pick up part-time work at a restaurant, but she fears that she won’t be able to pay rent and will be evicted along with her child. And H.G.T., who has three children, hasn’t been able to afford internet access, which has become necessary as her older children try to attend school online.

Mixed-status couples are also suffering from being denied stimulus checks. Sarah and her husband Juan, who asked to be identified only by their first names to protect their privacy, are one such couple living in Evansville, Indiana. She is a born-and-raised US citizen, but he came to the US 14 years ago from Honduras without authorization, seeking to earn enough money to support his parents and siblings back home.

The couple married three years ago, and shortly thereafter, she started the process of sponsoring him for a green card. He’s still waiting for an interview at a consulate in Honduras, which has been postponed on account of the pandemic. But if all goes to plan, he will soon have permanent residency and be issued a Social Security number.

In the meantime, however, Juan is still living in the US as an unauthorized immigrant, filing taxes under an ITIN. Neither he nor Sarah, therefore, are eligible for stimulus checks.

Sarah is continuing to work from home during the pandemic, working in medical billing and making $45,000 a year. And Juan chose to take a month off from his job in painting and construction because they feared he would contract the virus at work, but he is now back on the job. She said that, together, they make a decent living, but they do have a lot of expenses, including his biweekly $120 remittances for his family in Honduras so they can buy food and pay their water and electric bills.

Still, she’s angry that both she and her husband are being penalized during the pandemic.

“While not receiving the stimulus hasn’t been a burden, it feels like a slap in the face as a US citizen that even I won’t get it,” she said. “I, personally, am not opposed to my tax dollars paying for undocumented immigrants receiving aid during this pandemic, but I can understand why our government wouldn’t do this. But me? A US citizen? I’m insulted and angry. I feel like my country does not care about me in the slightest.”

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

From ADP:

ADP National Employment Report: Private Sector Employment Decreased by 20,236,000 Jobs in April; the April NER Utilizes Data Through April 12 and Does Not Reflect the Full Impact of COVID-19 on the Overall Employment Situation

Private sector employment decreased by 20,236,000 jobs from March to April according to the April ADP National Employment Report®. ... The report utilizes data through the 12th of the month. The NER uses the same time period the Bureau of Labor and Statistics uses for their survey. As such, the April NER does not reflect the full impact of COVID-19 on the overall employment situation
...
“Job losses of this scale are unprecedented. The total number of job losses for the month of April alone was more than double the total jobs lost during the Great Recession,” said Ahu Yildirmaz, co-head of the ADP Research Institute. “Additionally, it is important to note that the report is based on the total number of payroll records for employees who were active on a company’s payroll through the 12th of the month. This is the same time period the Bureau of Labor and Statistics uses for their survey.”

This was close to the consensus forecast for 20,000,000 private sector jobs lost in the ADP report.

The BLS report will be released Friday, and the consensus is for 21,000,000 non-farm payroll jobs lost in April.

This week I was named a Pulitzer Finalist in editorial cartooning. You can see my portfolio here.

Order my new book, We Should Improve Society Somewhat, 184 pages of political cartoons on the last few years of our dystopian world!

Guns N’ Roses’ cover of “Live And Let Die” blasted from speakers as Donald Trump toured a Honeywell factory in Arizona that has been converted to produce N95 face masks on Tuesday.

It’s unclear whether the music was intentional, but considering Trump suggested to reporters in Arizona that “warrior” Americans must die so he can reopen the economy, it was at the least an uncanny coincidence.

The L.A. Times reports that the Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” was played immediately prior to the Paul McCartney penned track, and it was followed by Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger”. Those songs have been noted as tracks played regularly at Trump’s rallies, though “Live and Let Die” was not among a list published back in January.

I can think of no better metaphor for this presidency than Donald Trump not wearing a face mask to a face mask factory while the song “Live and Let Die” blares in the background. pic.twitter.com/mJzU1HW7HA

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) May 5, 2020

The post ‘Live And Let Die’ Thunders from Speakers as Trump Tours Arizona Mask Factory: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday softened his ambitious pledge from just days earlier that there could be a coronavirus vaccine by year’s end.

“You can never be convinced,” Trump, during a trip to Arizona, told ABC News’ David Muir in an interview when asked whether he was still firm in that declaration, contending that “we have a really good shot of having something very, very substantial.”

The backpedaling from the president came 48 hours after Trump said during a Fox News town hall that “we think we’ll have a vaccine by the end of this year and we’re pushing very hard,” a statement that contradicts his own health officials as well as companies developing and testing potential vaccines.

His assertion comes amid fears that the coronavirus will continue to upend the globe — and its economies — until a vaccine for the highly infectious disease can be developed and delivered on a massive scale.

Vaccines often take several years to develop, and Trump’s top health advisers have frequently warned that it may take at least a year before people can begin to receive a coronavirus vaccine.

“I can say this, we’re doing really great,” Trump told Muir on Tuesday, name-dropping Oxford University and the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson, which he said on Sunday was “close” to a vaccine. “I get reports every single day, they’re doing really great.”

Still, he added: “Am I convinced? I can’t be convinced of anything.”

All vaccines currently in development are still in the early phases of clinical trials, and Johnson & Johnson has said the soonest its first batch will be available is in 2021. The company has not yet begun human trials, and doesn’t expect to do so until September of this year. Two other companies have said they have the potential to supply millions of doses by the end of the year if their vaccine candidate shows promising results in trials.

Trump is shepherding an effort within his administration aimed at drastically slashing the timeline for vaccine development, an undertaking his aides have compared to the sprint to develop the atomic bomb. But last week, Trump denied to reporters that he was over-promising with his goal of securing 300 million doses of the eventual vaccine once it’s ready to be administered to the public.

“We’re building supply lines. We even have the final vaccine,” he said on Sunday.

Trump’s top public health experts have expressed cautious optimism that finalizing a vaccine on the president’s declared timeline is possible — with caveats.

The rush to produce a vaccine comes as the number of known cases in the U.S. has passed 1 million and the death toll has topped 70,000, with more infections and deaths projected as states across the country begin to loosen strict social-distancing guidelines in the coming months.

Trump on Tuesday continued to defend his administration’s early actions during the crisis, and his own personal downplaying of the virus’ threat.

Asked why, at the end of February, he asserted that the 15 known cases of coronavirus in the U.S. would quickly go down to zero, the president again fell back on his usual defenses of touting his decision to restrict travel from China a month earlier. He noted that those comments came while flights were still allowed into the country from Europe, another hot spot for the pandemic.

And Trump reiterated his wish to be a “cheerleader” for the country.

“I don’t want to be Mr. Gloom-and-Doom. It’s a very bad subject,” he said on ABC, though he acknowledged that his administration was still unsure of the severity of the outbreak. “I’m not looking to tell the American people when nobody really knows what’s happening yet, ‘Oh, this is going to be so tragic.’”

Even so, confronted by Muir with his varying prognostications of the U.S. death toll, the president insisted that he’d “always felt” that number would range from 60,000 to 70,000, but again pointed to models that showed as many as 2 million dead without mitigation efforts.

Scientists have identified a new strain of the coronavirus that has become dominant worldwide and appears to be more contagious than the versions that spread in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new study led by scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory. From a report: The new strain appeared in February in Europe, migrated quickly to the East Coast of the United States and has been the dominant strain across the world since mid-March, the scientists wrote. In addition to spreading faster, it may make people vulnerable to a second infection after a first bout with the disease, the report warned. The 33-page report was posted Thursday on BioRxiv, a website that researchers use to share their work before it is peer reviewed, an effort to speed up collaborations with scientists working on COVID-19 vaccines or treatments. That research has been largely based on the genetic sequence of earlier strains and might not be effective against the new one. The mutation identified in the new report affects the now infamous spikes on the exterior of the coronavirus, which allow it to enter human respiratory cells. The report's authors said they felt an "urgent need for an early warning" so that vaccines and drugs under development around the world will be effective against the mutated strain. Wherever the new strain appeared, it quickly infected far more people than the earlier strains that came out of Wuhan, China, and within weeks it was the only strain that was prevalent in some nations, according to the report. The new strain's dominance over its predecessors demonstrates that it is more infectious, according to the report, though exactly why is not yet known.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The U.K. surpassed Italy on Tuesday to report the most coronavirus deaths in Europe, according to Johns Hopkins data and its own tracker. Axios reports: The country, which prolonged its lockdown last month until at least the second week of May, has reported more than 196,000 cases compared to Italy's roughly 213,000. Imperial College London is undertaking the randomized testing of 100,000 people in England this week to gain data on when the lockdown might be able to lift, per The Guardian. "Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said Tuesday that 29,427 people have died with Covid-19 since the outbreak began, more than in Italy and lower only than the United States," adds CNN. "The official figure includes 693 new deaths in the most recent 24-hour period, up to 5 p.m. (12 p.m. ET) Monday."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

It’s already known that the United States hates people being on welfare but doesn’t mind giving out billions and trillions in welfare to corporations. It’s also known that unlike most people on the very meager public assistance rolls in our country, corporate welfare queens actually do become lazy after receiving free billions of dollars for doing next to nothing. 

An audit of the Mississippi Department of Human Services shows that Hall of Fame NFL quarterback Brett Favre seems to have received $1.1 million for multiple speaking engagements that he did not actually show up to. The issue here is not that Favre received money but that this money was taken fraudulently from federal welfare reserves.

The AP reports that this new information comes to light months after former director of the Mississippi Department of Human Services (DHS) John Davis and a couple others were arrested and indicted for participating “in a widespread and pervasive conspiracy to circumvent internal controls, state law, and federal regulations.” According to the charges, John Davis—appointed to his position by former Gov. Phil Bryant—and others funneled around $98 million of federal grant money through two nonprofits: the Mississippi Community Education Center and Family Resource Center of North Mississippi.

In February, Mississippi’s Office of the State Auditor had Davis and five others arrested and charged in what officials say might be the single largest embezzlement scam in Mississippi history. Over a three year span, John Davis and five others reportedly used money for themselves as well as for friends and favored organizations, many of which did not come close to meeting the criteria stipulated for that money’s use. The new Brett Favre details do not say that Favre was guilty of anything (and he has faced no charges), but what exactly he was being paid for remains shady.

One of the things that set the state’s auditors on Davis’ trail was money spent on legendary pro wrestler’s Ted DiBiase’s son Brett—who is now a Christian evangelist minister. According to the charges, Davis diverted money from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program in order to pay for DiBiase’s very expensive private rehabilitation program in California. According to the charges, Davis and others tried to hide this money spent, by claiming the money was for “drug awareness classes” DiBiase was teaching in Mississippi. He wasn’t.

The Jackson Free Press reports that Davis and friends also made sure to wet their beaks, “transferring millions in TANF funds to their private businesses. They then converted funds to their personal use and concealed the conversion through various fund transfers, fraudulent documents, at least one forged signature, and deceptive accounting measures.” The embezzlement was so gratuitous it seems that no one could look the other way for much longer.

A cross section of an Impossible Burger. | Sarah Lawrence for Vox

Plant-based meat sales are up 264 percent in US grocery stores.

Retail sales of plant-based food are taking off during the coronavirus pandemic. The last time I braved the grocery store, which was several weeks ago, I unwittingly illustrated two of the main reasons why.

First, I went in search of eggs. The store was all out, but right above the shelf where I usually find them, I spied a bottle of Just Egg, the plant-based substitute made out of beans. I’d never had eggless eggs before, but now, out of necessity, I decided to try something new.

Then I walked through the meat aisle. There was still plenty of beef and chicken to be had — but given that a live-animal market in China may have given rise to Covid-19 and that the giant factory farms that supply 99 percent of America’s meat are a pandemic risk too, meat just seemed very unappealing in that moment. Instead, I grabbed a package of Beyond Meat and went home.

These two factors — spot shortages of animal products in stores and a growing awareness of the problems with our animal agriculture system — are likely driving an increase in retail sales of plant-based meat products during the pandemic. According to a recent Nielsen report, grocery store sales of faux meats rose by 264 percent in the nine weeks ending May 2.

Impossible Foods announced May 5 that because demand for the Impossible Burger has “skyrocketed among home chefs,” the company is accelerating its retail expansion, rolling out the burgers at 1,700 Kroger-owned grocery stores nationwide.

Impossible Foods began 2020 with only about 150 grocery stores selling its flagship burger, so this rollout represents a huge increase. And it’s just the beginning.

“Our existing retail partners have achieved record sales of Impossible Burger in recent weeks,” said the company’s president, Dennis Woodside, in a statement. “We expect our retail footprint to expand more than 50-fold in 2020 alone, and we are moving as quickly as possible to expand with additional outlets and in more retail channels.”

The expansion is being carried out with an eye to the pandemic, which has many of us shopping from behind a computer rather than a shopping cart. You can now order Impossible Burgers online through Kroger.com, which will sync up with an Instacart delivery slot to get the products to your home.

If you prefer not to use Instacart, there’s also a contactless curbside pickup option: You can place your order online, drive to a brick-and-mortar store, pop the trunk of your car, and a store clerk will place the products in there for you.

Impossible Foods’ new partnership with Kroger — as well as its release of a cookbook for home chefs — is part of a push to increasingly sell plant-based meat directly to consumers. This is a crucial pivot at a time when restaurants are grappling with supply-chain disruptions (Wendy’s, for example, had to pull traditional burgers off the menu in some locations due to meat shortages) and overall foodservice demand is down because of stay-at-home orders.

“More Americans are dining in and that’s what’s driving the acceleration in retail grocery store sales. March was by far a record for retail production for us, and April blew past it by a big margin,” Rachel Konrad, Impossible’s chief communication officer, told me. But she added that the company continues to supply Burger King, Qdoba, White Castle, and many other restaurants, which have found ways to adapt. “Our largest customer is Burger King, and while the dine-in service is closed in most states, drive-through service is up.”

Unlike traditional beef, meatless meat has a production process that somewhat insulates it from the ravages of the pandemic, both pragmatically and ethically: Its supply chain is obviously unaffected by recent meat plant closures, and its workers are not contracting Covid-19 at high rates because they do not have to work shoulder to shoulder like their meatpacking counterparts.

What’s Beyond Meat got planned during the coronavirus crisis?

Impossible’s main competitor, Beyond Meat, is also looking to expand. In March, as the pandemic was ramping up, CEO Ethan Brown said, “This is a time of hyper-growth. We are doing everything we can right now to grab as much market share as we possibly can.”

By late April, Bloomberg was reporting that rumors of a looming meat shortage — spurred on by the closure of meat plants that had become Covid-19 hot spots — were helping to lift shares of Beyond Meat. The stock rose 41 percent in one week, its largest weekly jump since the company went public in 2019.

Beyond Meat’s stock likely also rose because the company signed a massive new deal: Starbucks stores in China are beginning to sell its products. It’s hard to overstate the significance of partnering with a chain as huge as Starbucks — or of making inroads in Asian markets.

The company already sells its meatless meat in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. Now, it says it’ll open a production facility in Asia this year to better penetrate China, the second-largest economy in the world and a key market for meat and faux-meat products. Brown says the company will not be deterred from carrying out this plan, despite difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

One challenge facing plant-based meat companies is that their products tend to be a bit pricier than, say, your average burger from McDonald’s. With more than 30 million Americans unemployed and a world pummeled by a major recession, some analysts warned that Beyond Meat’s stock might sink because people won’t be able to afford premium meat alternatives.

Yet Beyond Meat reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2020 on May 5, and they showed a company that’s in good shape despite the pandemic. Although it saw foodservice sales decrease by 23 percent in March, retail sales rose 12 percent. Net revenues increased 141 percent year-over-year. Shares in the company rose immediately after the earning statement’s release.

Konrad was bullish about the prospects for Impossible, too. “Ground beef is one of the most recession-resistant products. It’s something Americans buy in good times and in bad. And it’s amenable to takeout, delivery, and drive-throughs,” she said, adding the same is true of meatless meat.

On an ethical level, Americans who’ve been reading about how thousands of meatpacking workers are contracting Covid-19 due to unsafe working conditions might prefer to opt for plant-based products. While meat plants require workers to stand shoulder to shoulder as they kill and take apart animals, the facilities manufacturing plant-based products don’t need their workers to be so tightly packed together and working at warp speed. Impossible Foods said that workers are able to maintain social distancing and are provided with masks.

There are other reasons why getting meat from plants is ethically preferable to getting it from animals — and the coronavirus crisis is shining a spotlight on them.

“People don’t like to be contributing to climate change and biodiversity collapse and pandemics. It feels icky, so we try not to talk about it,” Konrad said. “But it’s in these moments when the gruesome reality of animal agriculture pierces into our consciousness — because of Covid or whatever else — that we start to wake up.”

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A new Washington Post report gives more detail on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's COVID-19 "response" efforts, and it is just about the most depressing and insane thing you will read all week.

That government effort to obtain vital medical supplies needed for the pandemic that has now killed 70,000 Americans, and only continues to grow? It was staffed by volunteers. Unpaid volunteers Kushner and his allies recruited from "consulting and private equity firms with little expertise in the tasks to which they were assigned."

The people Kushner and team relied on to find supplies to bolster the national stockpile were not the government's own experts, but "private equity" volunteers.

Nearly every paragraph of the Post's story reveals a new horror. Based in large part on an anonymous volunteer's own whistleblower complaint to the House Oversight Committee but backed by numerous other sources, the Post reports, among other things:

• The "volunteer" team responsible for procuring supplies after the Trump administration had pissed away the requisite amount of time pretending the pandemic would go away on its own had no "significant experience in healthcare, procurement or supply-chain operations." Or government rules. Or customs rules. Shockingly, their efforts were reportedly unsuccessful.

• Those inexperienced volunteers were "instructed to fast-track" leads on medical supplies offered by "VIPs" like Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, while others like Fox News host Jeanine Pirro "lobbied" them for a specific New York hospital to be given priority in receiving masks. Again, imagine the worst satirical criticism of Trump’s band of incompetents, reliant on Fox hosts for major government decisions: Yup. It happened.

• Because the volunteers were/are volunteers, they didn’t know relevant federal rules and were, for example, using their own email accounts, leading to "trouble" in procurement efforts—presumably because the people they were contacting would have presumed them to be laughably bad scammers—and possible violations of document preservation laws.

• Just as an aside the Post reports that ABOUT THIRTY ACTUAL PERCENT OF THE PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT IN THE ACTUAL NATIONAL EMERGENCY MEDICAL STOCKPILE WENT TO JARED BUMBLEFLLOK KUSHNER'S FAILED EFFORT TO OPEN “DRIVE-THROUGH” TESTING SITES RATHER THAN TO THE DAMN HOSPITALS THAT HAD DAMN RUN OUT OF THE DAMN EQUIPMENT WHEN TRYING TO SAVE AMERICAN LIVES.

• "Some of the volunteers" were tasked with creating "models projecting how much protective equipment the government would need to address the crisis" and projections of "potential drug shortages." THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS EXPERTS WHO ADDRESSED THOSE PROJECTIONS AND HAD PRODUCED THE RELEVANT REPORTS BUT APPARENTLY KUSHNER'S TEAM OF FKBLORKS COULDN'T FIND THEM OR DIDN'T CARE.

• When the volunteers did produce those models, the administration dismissed them as "too catastrophic" AND ALSO IGNORED THOSE PROJECTIONS, PREFERRING LESS SEVERE ONES BECAUSE JESUS CLOWN COLLEGE CHRIST, THESE PEOPLE ARE THE MOST POMPOUS SELF-ABSORBED CRACKPOT LOSER FAILSONS THIS NATION HAS EVER GIVEN BIRTH TO.

Excuse me—hang on—all right. Sorry, I needed to breathe into a paper bag for a minute there.

At every turn, we find out that the "administration" response to the pandemic has been a clown show of incompetence, with each individual White House-based idiot manchild conducting their own operations based on their own personal friends and allies and making up their own half-assed pandemic projections because they fired the top-level government experts tasked with preparing for these things and have steadfastly rejected any "preparation" expertise from the remaining parts of government who told them that the pandemic would be much more severe and deadly than the White House bumblecraps "wanted" to believe.

Not just Trump himself, but this entire administration may go down as the worst, most incompetent, most crooked, most self-absorbed, most damaging, and most deadly in all of American history. The history books devoted to this era, if any are left to exist, will be barred from classrooms because the authors will not be able to contain their swearing when conveying what these jackplarps were up to.

They don't need to merely be removed from the White House. They don't need to merely be criminally charged. They need to be deported to an uninhabited island three inches above sea level, and the White House they have conducted their business in needs to be burned down, scraped off the site, the ground salted and a new White House built somewhere else.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

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I await your response, Toby Ord.

Today's News:

President Donald Trump addresses reporters at the White House on May 5, 2020. | Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

In a New York Post interview, Trump said he thinks Americans are “starting to feel good now.”

President Donald Trump gave an interview to the New York Post Monday, in which he lavished praised upon himself, seemed to suggest the worst of the pandemic was behind the US, and projected a hope and optimism about the coronavirus that does not appear to be shared by the American public.

“The one thing that the pandemic has taught us is that I was right,” Trump said. “You know, I had people say, ‘No, no, it’s good. You keep — you do this and that.’ Now those people are really agreeing with me. And that includes medicine and other things, you know.”

It would have been great if Trump had been right — if he were, the novel coronavirus would be under control; the president was adamant in February that “like a miracle, it will disappear.” The number of confirmed coronavirus cases would be in the double digits; and the number of deaths would be in the single digits. Perhaps a drug like hydroxychloroquine would have cleared any lingering disease, and the world would have a vaccine. And millions of people currently without work would be earning money to provide for themselves and their families.

Instead, the US death toll is approaching 70,000 as of May 5, and the president himself has revised his estimate of the number of people who will ultimately lose their lives, telling Fox News on Sunday, “We’re going to lose anywhere from 75, 80, to 100,000 people.”

As Vox’s Aaron Rupar has explained, the daily number of new confirmed cases and Covid-19 related deaths has remained fairly steady for weeks, suggesting that the US’s style of social distancing can only reduce the spread of the disease so much. (Other countries, like Italy, more successfully contained their outbreaks with more aggressive shelter-in-place orders and measures such as contact tracing of the disease.) Deaths and infections in America will likely increase now that social distancing measures are being relaxed.

Despite all this, Trump told the Post, “I think [Americans are] starting to feel good now. The country’s opening again. We saved millions of lives, I think.”

Americans aren’t starting to feel good — and should be concerned as nonessential businesses begin to reopen

It isn’t clear what’s making the president feel that Americans are “starting to feel good,” but it certainly isn’t polls.

A Washington Post/University of Maryland April 28 to May 3 poll released Tuesday found that 63 percent of Americans are worried about contracting Covid-19 — and that 38 percent believe “the worst is yet to come” with respect to the pandemic (30 percent said we’re currently living through the worst period).

The same poll, which surveyed 1,005 US adults by telephone and has a 3.5 percentage point margin of error, found that most Americans are uncomfortable with nonessential businesses reopening — for instance, 78 percent and 67 percent said they’d be uncomfortable going to a restaurant and a clothing store, respectively, should they be open. And 44 percent said they currently feel “uncomfortable” going to the grocery store.

Other recent polls found similar levels of anxiety about the pandemic; an Axios-Ispos poll released Tuesday found most Americans expressing concern Covid-19 deaths are worse than has been reported, while an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll released last week found half of all Americans have lost work or wages due to the coronavirus.

In short, things are not going well. But Trump maintains the opposite is true, and has been increasingly speaking as if the coronavirus is an issue that the country has conquered and can now move past.

Sunday, he tweeted, “And then came a Plague, a great and powerful Plague, and the World was never to be the same again! But America rose from this death and destruction, always remembering its many lost souls, and the lost souls all over the World, and became greater than ever before!”

Notably, all of that tweet is in the past tense. In his interview with the Post, Trump also seemed to suggest the problem was in the past, saying, “We did the right thing and now we’re bringing the country back.”

But the right thing wasn't done, and anti-coronavirus work still needs doing. Test kits are still in short supply and high demand — so much so that Maryland has the ones it smuggled in from South Korea housed at a secret location under armed guard. A national contract tracing system has yet to be established — something that is a particularly pressing need now that states are beginning to reopen.

Rather than address these needs in any substantive way, Trump has been dismissive and has adopted the sort of sunny outlook he had in the early days of the pandemic. He has certainly said, as he did during a Fox News town hall Sunday, that the death toll will be high, but he called death numbers in the 100,000 range a “successful” outcome. And he is also giving the American people statements like something else he told the Post Monday: “I think there’s a great optimism. I don’t know if you see it, but I think there’s a great optimism now.”

Experts, meanwhile, are pessimistic. Internal CDC documents first reported on by the New York Times Monday show projections of a steep increase in daily deaths beginning May 14, and that 3,000 Americans will be dying per day by June 1. Daily new cases could reach 200,000 by that same date, the documents claim. Justin Lessler, the creator of the model and an associate professor at Johns Hopkins told the Washington Post the data was a preliminary analysis not yet ready for public release. But Lessler also said he believes 100,000 new cases per day by June 1 is possible, and that “There are reopening scenarios where it could get out of control very quickly.”

Despite the fact that many states are reopening businesses, the pandemic is not over and the future does not look bright — particularly if reopening goes as poorly as is projected. Nevertheless, Trump continues to make unhelpful assertions, like telling the New York Post, “We’ll open it up and I think your fourth quarter is going to be very good.”

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Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Trump speaks to reporters outside the White House on Tuesday. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The models are based on the relaxation of social distancing that Trump has been championing.

As President Trump pushes for businesses to reopen — even though the US coronavirus outbreak is not under control — his response to two new models indicating that cases and deaths will increase in the coming weeks is to mischaracterize them.

The models are grim, with one projecting 135,000 Americans will die by early August, and the other estimating the US will see 3,000 daily deaths by June 1. Grilled about them on Tuesday by reporters ahead of his departure for a trip to Arizona, Trump dismissed them, falsely claiming they are based on “no mitigation,” as in, if we did nothing.

“We’re doing a lot of mitigation,” Trump said. “And, frankly, when the people report back [to work], they’re gonna be social distancing, and they’re gonna be washing their hands, and they’re gonna be doing the things that you’re supposed to do ... but that report is a no-mitigation report, and we are mitigating.”

But the fact is, the US is doing less mitigation than it was a few weeks ago. States are beginning to reopen nonessential businesses, and customers are beginning to patronize them.

And the two new models — one based on government data put together by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and another by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington (IHME) — take this into account. Both feature projections based on the relaxation of mitigation that Trump has championed by urging state governments to take steps to reopen businesses, even as none of them has met the White House coronavirus task force’s gating criteria for doing so.

For instance, as the New York Times reports, the IHME’s new model, which estimates that the coronavirus will claim nearly 135,000 lives in the US by early August, states that its upward revision is based on “rising mobility in most US states as well as the easing of social distancing measures expected in 31 states by May 11, indicating that growing contacts among people will promote transmission of the coronavirus.” (The FEMA document shows that the daily US death toll will reach 3,000 by June 1, a near doubling of the roughly 1,500 lives being claimed per day by the coronavirus right now.)

Trump’s comments indicate that he thinks workers being diligent about washing their hands and trying to keep distance from other people will be sufficient to slow the spread of the virus, but experts say that’s not the case. Stay-at-home orders and the shutdown of most businesses haven’t so far been sufficient to bend the trajectory of new cases down, they’ve merely gotten the country to a relative plateau in new cases and deaths. This suggests the number of new cases and deaths will likely get worse as things reopen.

It is for these reasons that public health experts think it’s premature to relax stay-at-home orders. But later during his comments outside the White House on Tuesday, Trump indicated he thinks there’s no choice but to try to get the economy going again.

Asked by a reporter if he’s concerned that deaths are projected to increase because states are relaxing social distancing guidelines too early, Trump responded that he isn’t because “the fact that we’re letting people go and go to their jobs — they have to do it.”

“You know, if they held people any longer with the shutdowns, you’re going to lose people that way too, and you already have, I’m sure,” Trump said. “But between drug abuse, and, I mean, they say suicide — a lot of different things. Just so you know, there’s no great win one way or the other.”

While many would disagree with Trump’s insinuation that tens of thousands of lives are worth prematurely pretending the worst of the coronavirus is in the rearview mirror, Trump has self-interested motives for downplaying the new models: He faces a tough reelection fight, and the economic message he planned to make a centerpiece of his campaign has been suddenly flipped into a conversation about the possibility of 20 percent unemployment and massive quarterly declines in GDP.

So instead of engaging with the grim public health reality, the White House has instead reportedly relied on a rosier model prepared by controversial White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett that implausibly shows coronavirus deaths plunging to zero by mid-May.

It’s difficult to tell exactly what the White House is basing its Covid-19 policies on at the moment, in part because Trump is preventing House Democrats from asking government public health experts what’s going on. During another part of his Q&A with reporters on Tuesday, he said that he’s blocking the government’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, from testifying to the House of Representatives because “the House is a setup.” (Fauci will testify next week before the Republican-controlled Senate.)

“The House is a bunch of Trump haters,” Trump added. “They, frankly, want our situation to be unsuccessful, which means death.”

He went on to suggest that the US coronavirus response is the envy of the world.

“The whole world is excited, watching us, because we’re leading the world,” Trump said — ignoring that the nearly 70,000 coronavirus deaths the US has experienced to date are well over twice the number endured by the No. 2 country, Italy, which has had just over 29,000.

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Support Vox’s explanatory journalism

Every day at Vox, we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you, and our audience around the world, with information that has the power to save lives. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower you through understanding. Vox’s work is reaching more people than ever, but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn. Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation, but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles, videos, and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires. Please consider making a contribution to Vox today.

Donald Trump is denying House Democrats access to two more of his administration's top pandemic task force members. The White House is now prohibiting the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Alex Azar, and the director of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Seem Verma, from testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, according to the Daily Beast.

Last week, the White House also prohibited one of its top coronavirus medical experts from testifying before the House—Dr. Anthony Fauci. But for the moment, Fauci is still scheduled to testify before a GOP-led panel in the Senate.

Laughably, Trump officials have justified the gag orders by saying testifying before Congress was too time-consuming for key pandemic response officials, as if Trump hasn't spent the past month squandering the time of those very same people as he prattled on day after day, peddling misinformation. Fauci even called the briefings "really draining" several weeks ago.

But when Trump was asked Tuesday about the task force gag order, he made clear the move was explicitly political, calling House Democrats "Trump haters."

Just like with impeachment, the default position for the White House now is that everyone on the coronavirus task force must seek permission from White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to testify. In other words, every request by House Democrats is a complete nonstarter.

But the difference now is that Trump is blocking the public from getting information that's literally a matter of life and death. House Democrats have said the hearings are effort to gather information that can help them craft legislation in response to the ongoing public health crisis.

“The fact is that we need to allocate resources for this,” said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “In order to do that, any appropriations bill must begin in the House. And we have to have the information to act upon.”

Secretary Azar has not provided public testimony on the pandemic for nearly two months. Verma, who runs the government's two most expansive healthcare programs, hasn't given public testimony since the crisis began. 

FOX News host Laura Ingraham trashed social distancing rules on her show last night, bashing efforts to contain COVID-19.

Said Ingraham, via Media Matters: “Although intuitively I think it probably seemed like social distancing would be necessary, there was no real scientific basis for believing that, since it had never been studied. And as one infectious disease doc told me last week, trying to stop this virus with social distancing is like trying to drive a nail through Jell-O. Viruses spread, that’s what they do, they often weaken as they go and if it’s like SARS, we hope it is, it’ll eventually burn out as SARS did.”

Soon Fox will be telling people to lick doorknobs. https://t.co/D0YpmdQ4vw

— Michelangelo Signorile, subscribe to my newsletter (@MSignorile) May 5, 2020

The post Laura Ingraham Trashes Social Distancing Rules: ‘There Was No Scientific Basis for Believing That’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Jeremy Konyndyk, then the director of the US Agency for International Development, speaks at Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on January 13, 2015. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images

An expert explains how the Trump administration wasted another month in the fight against Covid-19.

President Donald Trump’s February response to the coronavirus pandemic was so botched that the New York Times described it as a “lost month.” Throughout that month, Trump spent much of his time denying that the novel coronavirus was a significant threat to Americans — suggesting the virus would miraculously subside — and his administration failed to scale up the testing and health care capacity needed to confront the challenge ahead.

Now, it looks like April was another lost month. In a viral tweet thread, Jeremy Konyndyk, an expert in disease outbreak preparedness at the Center for Global Development, argued that the federal government wasted April in its response to the coronavirus: Despite some gains in March on health care capacity and testing, the US failed to capitalize on social distancing throughout April to continue scaling up measures and get the coronavirus under control.

Consider testing. Experts widely agree that the US needs at least 500,000 Covid-19 tests a day, on the low end, or even tens of millions, on the high end, to safely end extreme social distancing measures. Throughout March, the US made some progress toward that: It went from a few dozen tests a day to a few hundred to more than 100,000.

In April, that progress seemed to stall out. In the last week of April, the US averaged around 220,000 tests a day — not much of an improvement from the roughly 150,000 a day that it reported during the first few weeks of the month, and far from what experts say is needed to control the outbreak (as South Korea and Germany have).

The result, Konyndyk and other experts warn, is the US still isn’t ready to safely reopen its economy. Confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths aren’t trending down — with the country reporting around 25,000 to 30,000 new cases each day throughout April and now into May.

“There’s no definitive downturn,” Konyndyk, who served in President Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “We’re on a plateau.”

No country is escaping — or at least is expected to escape — the coronavirus pandemic unscathed. Besides the US, developed nations like Italy, Spain, and France have also dealt with a frightening number of cases and deaths.

But in Konyndyk’s view, the US is unique among the rest of the developed world in that it has consistently bungled its response even after it became clear that the coronavirus is a real threat. From South Korea to Germany, other countries have taken the steps necessary — scaled-up testing, expanded contact tracing, and built-up health care capacity — as coronavirus began to appear within their borders. The US has taken some steps here and there, but it’s struggled to build an expansive national response.

The difference isn’t that all of these other countries have better public health systems than the US, Konyndyk argued. It’s that their political systems have done a better job, with strong national leadership and coordination. “This is a disease that does not just test your health system,” Konyndyk said. “It tests your political system. It tests the quality and competence of your governance.”

Konyndyk spoke in greater detail about the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic. Our conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.

German Lopez

Why do you say the federal government wasted April?

Jeremy Konyndyk

The federal government has not done a great deal to get the country ready to exit the lockdown. The lockdown is not meant to be a permanent state of affairs; it’s intended to be a giant pause button that buys you time to get ready for the next phase. That’s why I see a really striking parallel between February and April.

In February, the main thing that the federal government was doing was the travel bans. The public health literature on travel bans says they are at best a delaying tactic, but they are defensible if they’re used to buy extra time to prepare.

We didn’t. In February, infamously, the Trump administration was not using that month to prepare. They were not signaling the hospital system to get ready. They were not reinforcing our supplies of PPE [personal protective equipment]. They were not scaling up nationwide testing. All those things they began doing in the middle of March, they should have been starting the moment they put those travel bans in place in February.

In the month of March, the federal government started to do some things. They began to scale up testing, with a major increase in the number of tests throughout the month. They began to get FEMA [the Federal Emergency Management Agency] into the game. They began doing work on PPE, although that’s been highly fraught. By the end of March, almost the whole country had put stay-at-home orders in place, had put social distancing, physical distancing measures in place. We actually made headway in March.

But April, we didn’t. You see that in the case numbers: They’ve been basically flat the month of April. According to Johns Hopkins, on April 1 the [daily] case level was 25,100, and on April 30 it was 29,500. Throughout the month, they got as low as 22,000 one day; they got as high as 36,000 one day. Without the outliers, [the case level] was hanging between 25,000 and a little over 30,000 new cases every day.

There’s no definitive downturn. We’re on a plateau. Social distancing stopped the growth of transmission, but it didn’t drive it down.

The hope had been that once this came into place, it would begin driving transmissions down. That’s what we saw in China. That’s what we saw in Italy. That’s what we’ve seen in Spain.

German Lopez

What should the US have been doing in April that it didn’t do?

Jeremy Konyndyk

We should have been laying the groundwork for going from being stuck to actually suppressing cases, and laying the groundwork for an ability to lift the [stay-at-home] orders in a safe way.

There’s a ton of consensus in the public health community around what needs to happen. It’s practitioners, policymakers, scientists. You’ve got Trump’s former FDA commissioner and someone like myself, who served in the Obama administration and is pretty progressive in my political views. It’s not a political or partisan thing.

We need to test much more widely. We need to scale up contact tracing. We need to protect the most vulnerable populations. We need enhanced surveillance so we can actually see what this virus is doing. And we need to reinforce the hospital system.

The basic components of a sustainable suppression strategy are pretty universally agreed upon at this point. They mirror what’s been successful in other countries. They mirror what’s been successful in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

There’s no indication we’re making headway on that in a serious way.

German Lopez

You tweeted that if we have another month like April, we’ll have another month with a death toll that’s equivalent to all American casualties in the Vietnam War. And even if you look at less grave impacts, the lack of action means people will have to social distance for longer. It seems like everything negative we associate with this pandemic is going to stay the same or get worse the longer we keep having these lost months.

Jeremy Konyndyk

Absolutely. This is what’s so confounding about the federal position right now: What needs to happen is very clear.

But what we need is federal leadership; it requires the federal government to take ownership of some of these problems. Testing is not going to be resolved until the federal government takes ownership of expanding it; as long as they keep kicking it to the states, we will remain stuck. Contact tracing is going to be difficult to scale up at a national level without a consistent federal approach. The bottlenecks on PPE aren’t going to be fixed without federal leadership.

The federal government wants to shift all the political responsibility on the states. If something is going wrong, blame the governor. But they still want to take the credit for getting the win.

German Lopez

I was struck by this “blueprint” the Trump administration put out, which basically said states and the private sector will have to solve every problem and the federal government will play a supplementary role — a “supplier of last resort.”

But if Maryland sees a swab factory in Maine become the bottleneck for testing, what can Maryland do? That seems to be the problem here. That’s why you need federal leadership.

Jeremy Konyndyk

That’s exactly right. There’s a reason why when we go to war, we don’t go to war with each governor running their own brigades. We go to war with a unified military. If we’re going to say that this is like a war — and I think that’s a fair analogy for what we’re up against — we need the federal government for this just as much as we need it for any other war.

There are really important, substantive reasons for that. The federal government has much more buying power than the individual state has. The federal government has the leverage to solve problems across and between states.

Take contact tracing. You have to have a contact tracing network that can cross state lines, because people cross state lines, the disease crosses state lines. If this is all being run by individual state departments of health that are relatively siloed from each other, you don’t get that kind of connectivity.

But we have a federal CDC for a reason. We have FEMA for a reason. If they weren’t relevant, they wouldn’t exist.

There’s this great quote from Abraham Lincoln to Gen. George McClellan during the Civil War. McClellan was proving tepid about actually fighting the Confederates. Lincoln said, “If General McClellan does not want to use the army, I would like to borrow it.”

If President Trump doesn’t want to use the federal government, he should let someone else borrow it — because there is a lot of capability there that’s simply not being used.

German Lopez

I wanted to focus on this point a bit. To some degree, this pandemic would be bad no matter what. Many countries have underinvested in public health. Many countries have seen cases and deaths. Even those that haven’t, they face a threat from Covid-19.

But part of what you’re talking about here is that the US and this administration have done particularly badly compared to other countries.

Jeremy Konyndyk

Well, let’s start with the fact that clearly we are doing worse than just about everyone else.

The only places that got this right from the beginning are South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Vietnam. You could argue Singapore, although recent developments there have called that into question. These were countries that right from the beginning took it seriously. It’s no coincidence that these were all countries that experienced SARS, MERS, or other novel coronavirus outbreaks. They saw cases, but they didn’t have their health-care systems overwhelmed, because they acted very early. That’s the best tier of countries.

Then you have the next tier of countries, which bungled it initially but then got on top of it. I would put China in that category, but also Germany. Initially, they had a pretty significant acceleration of transmission, and they didn’t do enough to prepare. But once it became clear how bad it was, they swung into very serious action. They had a peak that’s higher than it should have been, but once it arrived, they at least did what was necessary — and they’ve been able to get their numbers way down now from the peak that they experienced.

Then you have countries like the US, which is the third category. Not only did we fail to prepare initially, but then we have mismanaged the response once we began responding. We were late, slow, and unprepared, and then we executed poorly once we began acting.

That’s what really sets the US apart.

The countries that have done well have done well not just because of their stronger public health systems but also because their political systems performed better.

That’s the critical variable here: This is a disease that does not just test your health system. It tests your political system. It tests the quality and competence of your governance.

German Lopez

Looking forward, how do we make sure May is not a repeat of February or April?

Jeremy Konyndyk

I can answer that in a technical way by laying out the strategic elements that we need to be executing on. But the gap we face right now is not a failure to know what to do. It’s a failure of the political will to do it. That’s the hardest thing to generate.

The way we avoid May being like April is we get serious about national-level contact tracing, we have the federal government get serious about PPE production and using the DPA [Defense Production Act] to go big on PPE production, and we have the federal government going big on strengthening the supply chain for testing supplies. All those things are absolutely things that need to happen, and would have a helpful impact.

But they all require the political will by the president to have the federal government own those problems. And that seems to the one red line.

I don’t know how we do that. Do we have Congress force his hand? Do we have governors band together and demand that he do it? The only way he’s going to do it is if he’s forced to.

German Lopez

To your point, the approaches you listed are things you and other experts were telling people in February and early March. It’s not stuff we just figured out in late April or May.

Jeremy Konyndyk

That’s right. That’s what’s so infuriating. We have a clearer idea now of what we need to do than a month ago or two months ago, but we knew the broad strokes.

As little as I expected from this administration, I expected that they would have this sorted out by now. And they don’t.

The fundamental issue here is we have an incompetently managed federal response — and that is unlikely to change.

Donald Trump didn’t just do a Fox News virtual town hall in the Lincoln Memorial, sitting at the feet of the giant statue of Abraham Lincoln while saying he was treated worse than the assassinated president. He had the monument closed and the rules changed to allow him to conduct a crass political event inside, near the statue, an area that, by law, isn’t supposed to be used for “demonstrations and special events”—that’s why every big event you’ve ever seen involving the Lincoln Memorial was outside, on the steps.

But Trump wanted to look presidential, there at the feet of Lincoln, so Interior Secretary David Bernhardt closed the memorial and changed the rules for him. The New York Times reports that the original plan put Trump on the steps, but then the White House said nah, he’s going inside. 

“Given the extraordinary crisis that the American people have endured, and the need for the President to exercise a core governmental function to address the Nation about an ongoing public-health crisis,” Bernhardt writes in his declaration closing the memorial for Trump’s Fox News hit, “I am exercising my authority to facilitate the opportunity for the President to conduct this address within the Lincoln Memorial, by directing a partial security-based closure of portions of the Lincoln Memorial.” 

“Understandably, the President has, very deliberatively, made the decision to address this national crisis at the Lincoln Memorial. I anticipate his doing so will illuminate and reflect the values of our Nation during an unprecedented public-health crisis,” this masterpiece of sucking up continues. “Such an action will allow the President and the Nation to use Lincoln's powerful presence and the solemnity of the Memorial to reflect on and draw from our Nation's better angels, and to remind all of us that we can knit our often-divided Nation together in a time of trial.”

Well, we know why Bernhardt is Trump’s interior secretary, and it’s not just that Trump wanted to put a former oil lobbyist in charge of public lands: He wanted to put a former oil lobbyist who was also an accomplished suck-up in charge of public lands. Seriously, the man first used what “the American people have endured” as a reason to give Trump what his ego demanded, then claimed that Trump had “very deliberatively” made the decision to give his ego the grandest possible backdrop, then claimed that a Fox News virtual town hall was going to be the occasion to “illuminate and reflect the values of our Nation” and “reflect on and draw from our Nation’s better angels.” Fox News. Sure.

And then Trump went on to continue to promote unproven COVID-19 treatments and attack his political rival and attack the media while comparing himself to Lincoln. Illuminating and reflecting the values of our nation a narcissistic bully.

The White House has decided to bar all Coronavirus Task Force members from testifying before Congress for the next month.

Real Clear Politics reported: “The White House last week blocked Dr. Anthony Fauci from testifying in the House this Wednesday. And now, according to an internal document obtained by RealClearPolitics and three senior administration officials, the administration will bar the coronavirus task force, which includes Fauci, from testifying in Congress for the next month.  ‘For the month of May, no task force members, or key deputies of task force members, may accept hearing invitations,’ reads a White House memo outlining the updated guidance. Exceptions are in order, but only at ‘the express approval of the chief of staff.'”  

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer she thinks she knows why: “The fact is that we need to allocate resources for this. In order to do that, any appropriations bill must begin in the House. And we have to have the information to act upon…We must insist on the truth. Now it’s interesting, they said they weren’t going to the House but Dr. Fauci can go to the (Republican-controlled) Senate. … We will be very, very strictly insisting on the truth. And they might be afraid of the truth

Speaker Pelosi on Trump Admin. decision to prohibit members of #COVIDー19 task force from testifying: "We will be insisting on the TRUTH, & they may be afraid of the TRUTH!"

With almost 70K Americans dead, we NEED the TRUTH. We know you will find it. Thank you, Madam Speaker. pic.twitter.com/neVYVoppOx

— Peter Morley (@morethanmySLE) May 5, 2020

The post Nancy Pelosi Blasts White House for Blocking Entire Coronavirus Task Force from Testifying Before Congress: ‘They Might Be Afraid of the Truth’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Microsoft has released a new version of its Outlook app for iPhone and iPad that includes a new feature allowing users to remove repetitive multi-reply email threads from their inbox.


In Microsoft speak, a Conversation is the complete chain of emails from the first message through all responses, and the messages of a Conversation have the same subject.

The new feature, called Ignore Conversation, is specifically aimed at getting rid of company-wide email threads that build up in the user's inbox as other people keep replying to them.

Microsoft's release notes for version 4.36.0 of the app describe Ignore Conversation as follows:

Sick of that company-wide email that everyone is still replying all to? So are we. Stay focused on what's important by getting it and all future replies out of your inbox and straight into deleted items with our new Ignore Conversation feature.

The feature has actually been available in Outlook on other platforms for some time, but this is the first time that users accessing their emails on iOS devices have been able to use it.

Microsoft Outlook for ‌iPhone‌ and ‌iPad‌ is a free download available from the App Store. [Direct Link]
This article, "Microsoft Outlook Update Brings 'Ignore Conversation' Feature to iPhone and iPad" first appeared on MacRumors.com

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A key model of the coronavirus pandemic favored by the White House nearly doubled its prediction Monday for how many people will die from the virus in the U.S. by August – primarily because states are reopening too soon.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington’s School of Medicine is now projecting 134,000 coronavirus-related fatalities, up from a previous prediction of 72,000. Factoring in the scientists’ margin of error, the new prediction ranges from 95,000 to 243,000.

Dr. Christopher Murray, the director of IHME, told reporters on a call Monday the primary reason for the increase is many states’ “premature relaxation of social distancing.”

For the first time, Murray explained, the model is factoring in data from four different cell phone providers showing a major uptick in Americans’ going out in public.

This rise of mobility in the last week or 10 days is likely leading to an increase in transmission, he said.

Monday’s update is the fourth since the model debuted in late March. It’s been relied on by the White House in recent months because it presents a more optimistic forecast on health system capacity, cases and deaths than other experts have predicted.

Even with its latest forecast, the University of Washington model is still far more optimistic than a model developed by Johns Hopkins for CDC predicting as many as 3,000 deaths per day by June. Murray said that model, which the New York Times published Monday, is likely inaccurate.

“Our numbers are nowhere near that level,” he said, noting that IHME is forecasting 890 deaths per day by June 1. “This relates very much to whether the models think there is going to be a large, New York-style epidemic in some states. We don’t see that because we’re building into the modeling the rising temperatures and rising testing and contact tracing. That will put the brakes on transmission enough that we won’t see 3,000 deaths a day by June 1.”

In a statement on Monday evening, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health called the leaked models “preliminary analyses,“ saying that they had been provided to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to help in scenario planning, were not a final version and were not meant to be used or presented as forecasts.

Still, the statement added, “the information illustrates that there are some scenarios, including the premature relaxation of social distancing, that are likely to cause significant increases in the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths in the United States.“

The White House on Monday acknowledged the existence of the internal administration document but asserted that the grim modeling had not gone through interagency vetting and “is not reflective” of any projections from or analyzed by the White House coronavirus task force.

In a statement to reporters, White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere said that the internal report obtained by The New York Times was “not a White House document” and hadn’t been presented to the coronavirus task force.

The CDC document projects north of 175,000 new cases of Covid-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus, each day. That’s up from about 25,000 new cases per day last week and more than four times the peak of about 37,000 new cases per day.

The alarming modeling comes as some states are already beginning to put parts of the White House’s phased reopening plan into motion despite concerns that the administration’s guidelines for doing so have not yet been met. It also underscores fears that moving too fast to relax strict social-distancing restrictions could fuel a dangerous second wave of infections.

The CDC document found some reason for optimism, noting that nationwide, the trajectory of new illnesses in "multiple counties, including hard hit areas in Louisiana and in the New York City region" has continued to decrease, and that incidence rates have recently plateaued around Chicago.

Still, it found that there "remains a large number of counties whose burden [of illness] continues to grow or are in an elevated incidence plateau, including in the Great Lakes region, parts of the Southeast, Northeast, and around southern California." The document includes a color-coded map of the country with darker spots peppered throughout, and it states that the goal "is to have all communities be represented in the lighter colors, demonstrating little to no disease burden and no increase in trajectory."

Deere on Monday defended the White House plan, which President Donald Trump released last month with the goal of returning to some semblance of normalcy and reviving an economy that has been shuttered over the past two months due to the virus.

The guidelines “are a scientific driven approach that the top health and infectious disease experts in the federal government agreed with,” Deere said. “The health of the American people remains President Trump's top priority and that will continue as we monitor the efforts by states to ease restrictions.”

Murray also noted that the updated University of Washington model also now takes into account the ramping up of testing in most states, as well as warming temperatures heading into late spring and early summer. But he cautioned that the impact of temperature on coronavirus transmission is not yet fully understood, and likely will not be for several more months.

For now, IHME is assuming that every degree Celsius the temperature goes up will lead to a 2 percent decline in transmission.

“Are we sure about that? No,” he said.

As predicted, the proprietary locking system Apple rolled out with its 2018 MacBook Pros is hurting independent repair stores, refurbishers, and electronics recyclers. A combination of secure software locks, diagnostic requirements, and Apple's new T2 security chip are making it hard to breathe new life into old MacBook Pros that have been recycled but could be easily repaired and used for years were it not for these locks. From a report: It's a problem that highlights Apple's combative attitude towards the secondhand market and the need for national right to repair legislation. "The irony is that I'd like to do the responsible thing and wipe user data from these machines, but Apple won't let me," John Bumstead, a MacBook refurbisher and owner of the RDKL INC repair store, said in a tweet with an attached picture of two "bricked" MacBook Pros. "Literally the only option is to destroy these beautiful $3,000 MacBooks and recover the $12/ea they are worth as scrap." As Motherboard has reported previously, without official Apple diagnostic software, newer MacBooks cannot be repaired or reset. "By default you can't get to recovery mode and wipe the machine without a user password, and you can't boot to an external drive and wipe that way because it's prohibited by default," Bumstead told Motherboard in an email. "Because T2 machines have no removable hard drive, and the drive is simply chips on the board, this default setting means that a recycler (or anyone) can't wipe or reinstall a T2 machine that has default settings unless they have the user password."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walt Disney Studios

Disney celebrated Star Wars day with an early streaming release for the film and the series finale of the much-loved cartoon The Clone Wars.

May 4 is perhaps best known as “the day before Cinco de Mayo” — unless you’re a Star Wars fan. In that case, you might be accustomed to thinking of the date as May the Fourth ... as in, “May the Force be with you.”

Certainly that’s how Disney wants us to think of this otherwise average date. Ever since it acquired Lucasfilm in 2012, Disney has celebrated Star Wars Day on May 4, with the first officially organized celebration taking place on May 4, 2013. What Star Wars diehards have come to expect from the annual event are tons of sales on franchise merch and live spectacles at Disney’s theme parks, as well as independent events at bars, bowling alleys, and movie theaters that invite fans to share in the joy of their favorite movie series.

As the coronavirus pandemic hampers the 2020 edition of the “holiday,” Disney is focusing on the opportunity to market its Disney+ streaming service by expanding the service’s catalog of Star Wars content. Anyone anticipating this fall’s release of season two of The Mandalorian may appreciate a new behind-the-scenes look at the Star Wars drama, debuting Monday. The first episode of Disney Gallery: The Mandalorian, an eight-installment making-of series, is now streaming. Hopefully the show will provide new Baby Yoda content to coo at.

But that’s small potatoes compared to May 4’s biggest release: the Disney+ arrival of December’s Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker, the capper to the franchise’s far-reaching Skywalker Saga. The movie is now available on the streaming platform as a special May the Fourth gift; it was reportedly expected to arrive on Disney+ in July, but Disney bumped up its streaming release date by two months amid the pandemic, as it has done with other tentpole films’ Disney+ debuts.

Your mileage may vary on how good a gift this is, considering The Rise of Skywalker was roundly disparaged by critics. Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson awarded the film just 1.5 stars (out of 5) in her review, writing:

Is this what audiences demand from franchise movies? Films that cater to what’s comfortable and capitulates to the most unimaginative fans? That feel as if they’re just ticking boxes on a checklist? You could say I’m taking this too seriously, but I think a series as important to movies — and to millions of people — as Star Wars deserves to be taken seriously.

And Vox’s Emily VanDerWerff similarly wrote that the movie “feels like a checklist that director and co-writer J.J. Abrams is systematically working through.” She noted that The Rise of Skywalker suffers both from fan-courting moments that neglect established plot lines and character motivations and the unshakable feeling that it was “reverse-engineered” to be a mainstream hit.

The Rise of Skywalker ended up with a 52 percent “rotten” score from Rotten Tomatoes, a big drop from its more well-liked predecessors. That makes it the most derided Star Wars film of the decade, but that’s no skin off Disney’s nose, since the movie still made beaucoup bucks: The Rise of Skywalker grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, and finished 2019 as the sixth-biggest film of the year. (Also, for what it’s worth, the fan service did delight at least some. I liked it!)

On the plus side for Star Wars fans who consider the ninth movie to be a colossal waste of time, there’s another Star Wars finale dropping on Disney+ for Star Wars Day. The long-running animated TV series Star Wars: The Clone Wars, whose story is set between Episode II and Episode III, will air its series finale on May 4.

Reviews leading into the conclusion have been strong. “The Clone Wars’ final episodes have been escalating levels of excellence in all aspects: score, animation, writing, blocking, voice acting, directing and visuals,” wrote Kevin Johnson of the A.V. Club after the series’ penultimate episode.

The Clone Wars began with a theatrical film in summer 2008, followed by a companion TV series later that same year. The show aired on Cartoon Network until Disney’s acquisition of Lucasfilm resulted in its sudden cancellation in early 2013, during its fifth season. Disney was newly in control of the expansive Star Wars canon, and one of its first public efforts was to pare that canon way down. The Clone Wars, it seemed, became a casualty of the Star Wars expanded universe reset.

When The Clone Wars was canceled, a sixth and then-final season had already finished production. Disney dropped the season on Netflix in 2014 — but as it was not conceived as The Clone Wars’ last, it left the series without a proper conclusion. After fan outcry, Disney announced in 2018 that it would bring The Clone Wars back for one final season on its then-unnamed streaming service. This long history makes the show’s May 4 finale probably this year’s most significant, or at least unique, Star Wars Day event. (All six previous seasons are available on Disney+ as well, for newcomers to check out.)

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Scientists created a monoclonal antibody that can defeat the new coronavirus in the lab, an early but promising step in efforts to find treatments and curb the pandemic's spread. From a report: The experimental antibody has neutralized the virus in cell cultures. While that's early in the drug development process -- before animal research and human trials -- the antibody may help prevent or treat Covid-19 and related diseases in the future, either alone or in a drug combination, according to a study [PDF] published Monday in the journal Nature Communications. More research is needed to see whether the findings are confirmed in a clinical setting and how precisely the antibody defeats the virus, Berend-Jan Bosch of Utrecht University in the Netherlands and colleagues wrote in the paper. The antibody known as 47D11 targets the spike protein that gives the new coronavirus a crown-like shape and lets it enter human cells. In the Utrecht experiments, it didn't just defeat the virus responsible for Covid-19 but also a cousin equipped with similar spike proteins, which causes Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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With #BlueLivesMatter trending Sunday, Twitter users pointed out just how much protesters fighting coronavirus stay-at-home orders sound like activists advocating for the basic human rights of Black people, minus the part about Black people of course. “MY RIGHTS DON'T END WHERE YOUR FEAR BEGINS,” one sign read at an anti-quarantine protest in California.  “STOP TYRANNY,” another demanded.

Those are almost exactly the same asks the Black Lives Matter movement has been making. Only, they aren’t advocating to open coffee shops or spas in the face of a deadly pandemic. They are fighting to save the lives of Black men, women, and children who too often become victims of police brutality. It’s that very movement that some police officers and supporters protested with the countermovement dubbed Blue Lives Matter in 2014. Apparently, take away the part about Black lives mattering, and protecting constitutional rights—even when it means opposing police—becomes important enough to send white demonstrators to the streets in masses.

”How curious... looks like some of the Blue Lives Matter crowd weren’t as pro-blue as they were anti-black. Funny how that works,” Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice tweeted. A Twitter user who goes by Emily @randomfandom88 said: “Blue lives matter until Karen and Chad want to get a haircut and eat at a Mexican restaurant.” The tweet, in response to protest video, was liked more than 100 times.

Jaime Ponce, a supporter of entrepreneur and political commentator Andrew Yang, shared the same video in a tweet. "#whiteprivilege is telling #POC’s to respect the police but when it’s your turn to do that you do this instead,” Ponce wrote in the tweet. “The only time #BlueLivesMatter to them is when they’re beating or killing us."

Russell Drew, another Twitter user, tweeted a meme of a fully engaged hypocrisy meter. "To right wing activists, the term #bluelivesmatter just means that police officers should be able to mistreat black and brown people,” he said in the tweet. “It was never about actually respecting police officers. These clowns always expose their true selves."

Other Twitter users pointed out the “white privilege” at play when anti-quarantine protesters showed up to rallies carrying guns but still weren’t deemed a threat. Demonstrators dressed in military fatigues, carried guns, and gathered outside the governor's mansion in Nevada Saturday, according to The Nevada Independent. They carried signs reading “Open our Churches,” “Open All Business Now,” and “Set NV Free!!!” “If you are an elected representative or a governor and you don’t like the Constitution, you want to govern or rule (like a) dictatorship, go to another country,” one protester reportedly yelled through a bullhorn.

At the California protest, demonstrators shouted in officers’ faces and waved American flags at them. "If you believe #BlueLivesMatter, I assume you’re livid about armed militias yelling at cops protecting state houses, right? Asking for some friends," social media user Oren Jacobson tweeted.