Donald Trump began pressing the case for hydroxychloroquine during his very first appearance at what’s since become the daily campaign rally replacement. Since then, Trump has declared that he had a “hunch” about the effectiveness of the treatment over and over. And over. Meanwhile, he’s been quick to shove actual experts, like Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, away from the microphone to keep them from responding to questions about the anti-malaria medication. Fox News has backed up Trump’s claims by repeatedly trumpeting the supposed benefits of hydroxychloroquine—a drug in which Trump has a personal financial interest. In addition to his shilling for profit during multiple hours networks are inexplicably allotting him on a daily basis, Trump has frequently tweeted praise for the drug, calling it “one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.”
On Tuesday, a study in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that COVID-19 patients given Trump’s wonder drug were actually more likely to die than patients given standard care. Even so, Fox and other dead-enders continued to claim that those researchers simply weren’t doing it right. After all, Trump wasn’t just pushing hydroxychloroquine, he was pushing hydroxychloroquine together with a heavy dose of the antibiotic azithromycin. Now the NIH has come out with a recommendation on Trump’s full magic cocktail. And the answer is—Trump’s cure is genuinely worse than the disease.
Hydroxychloroquine is frequently used in treatment against rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. It is also effective, in very low doses, against the single-celled plasmodium that causes malaria. Azithromycin is an antibiotic, effective against a number of bacteria. Both are valuable drugs. Both have serious side effects when taken in high doses. Pairing the two together is especially problematic as heart problems are on the list of side effects for both drugs.
And that’s exactly what NPR reports: researchers using Trump’s hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin cocktail found a strong association with increased heart problems. This same result has been seen with the combination, and with hydroxychloroquine alone, by researchers in multiple countries, as well as at the largest random trial in the United States. These trials have been suspended early, because the drugs Trump was pushing have turned out to increase the danger to a degree that further trials are not recommended.
On April 5, Trump may have hit maximum hucksterism for this drug which puts money in his own pocket. "What do you have to lose?” Trump said to the nation. “And a lot of people are saying that when … and are taking it … if you're a doctor, a nurse, a first responder, a medical person going into hospitals, they say taking it before the fact is good. But what do you have to lose? They say, 'Take it.' I'm not looking at it one way or the other, but we want to get out of this. If it does work, it would be a shame if we didn't do it early. But we have some very good signs. So that's hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin."
That’s Trump pushing this combination not just on people who were already ill and desperate, but on people who were not even infected. In fact, this is just one of several instances in which Trump suggested that hydroxychloroquine wouldn’t just cure, but prevent, COVID-19.
The answer to “what have you got to lose” is now extraordinarily clear. The National Institutes of Health panel hasn’t just taken a neutral on the hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin combination. It’s not saying that there’s a lack of evidence, or that more tests are needed, or that we just don’t know. It is explicitly stating that this drug combination should not be given.
With this publication on April 20, Trump has to have known that this evidence was working through the pipeline. Fauci and others have to have warned him that the evidence of hydroxychloroquine having any positive effect was lacking, and the evidence that the drug Trump was recommending was itself causing deaths was absolute. But Trump was still speaking and tweeting support for hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin on April 18.
Don’t be surprised if he continues to do so. Because science, and deaths of Americans, are nothing to Trump. His hunch is … you really need to buy what he’s selling.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp's (of course he's a Republican) decision to "loosen" his state's shutdown for coronavirus is getting significant resistance. That's in part because he consulted no one beyond the tiny, ranting Donald Trump that lives in his brain instead of the state’s mayors or the members of the coronavirus task force he created.
Mayors, like Atlanta's Keisha Lance Bottoms, are opposed. Bottoms is considering legal action to protect her city, which is "not out of the woods yet," she told CNN. "I have searched my head and my heart on this and I am at a loss as to what the governor is basing this decision on," she said. "You have to live to fight another day. And you have to be able to be amongst the living to be able to recover." It's kind of hard to argue with staying alive, unless you're a Republican. Athens Mayor Kelly Girtz, a Democrat like Bottoms, told CNN that people have said to him that they are "not going to frequent businesses right now because we don't feel safe. We're not going to return to work." He also said: "I've had a number of hair salon owners approach me over the last day and say we're not opening our doors back up because we care about our employees and we care about our clients."
Plenty of business owners are saying that, like Harry Spevak, the chairman of the corporation that owns SoulCycle gyms. They will not open this week and are "working with infectious disease experts to determine when and how to reopen." That's advisable, given Kemp is an idiot. Even South Carolina's own Trump whisperer, Sen. Lindsey Graham, sounded like a reasonable human being when he tweeted: "I worry that our friends and neighbors in Georgia are going too fast too soon. […] We respect Georgia's right to determine its own fate, but we are all in this together," Graham said. "What happens in Georgia will impact us in South Carolina."
Pastors are also resisting Kemp's call to have churches open on Sunday. Reginald T. Jackson, the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) bishop for the Atlanta region, has directed the AME churches in the area to stay closed. "There is no need to increase the possibility of more sickness and death by gathering prematurely," Jackson said in a statement obtained by CNN. "We absolutely must increase testing, and flatten the curve before we begin to gather again."
Kemp, in his infinite Republican version of wisdom, decided that within the next few days and weeks he's going to open everything, starting with the meccas of social distancing, i.e., gyms, barber shops, hair and nail salons, massage therapists, tattoo parlors, and bowling alleys. Where obviously everyone can do what you do at those kinds of places 6 feet apart. (That's just got to be trolling. Even Kemp can't be stupid enough to believe that is a possible thing.) "Gyms, nail salons, bowling alleys, hair salons, tattoo parlors," former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said Tuesday on CNBC. "It feels like they collected a list of the businesses you know that were most risky and decided to open those first."
Which is enough to make you think that maybe Kemp is looking at the news that the pandemic is disproportionally killing Black people and deciding that maybe this is an easier path to Republicans staying in power than having to come up with new ways of suppressing their vote.
To the surprise of absolutely no one who's paying attention.
Sean Hannity in the White House briefing room. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images
Sophisticated new research links Hannity’s coronavirus misinformation to “a greater number of Covid-19 cases and deaths.”
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, media critics have warned that the decision from leading Fox News hosts to downplay the outbreak could cost lives. A new study provides statistical evidence that, in the case of Sean Hannity, that’s exactly what happened.
The paper — from economists Leonardo Bursztyn, Aakaash Rao, Christopher Roth, and David Yanagizawa-Drott — focused on Fox news programming in February and early March.
At the time, Hannity’s show was downplaying or ignoring the virus, while fellow Fox host Tucker Carlson was warning viewers about the disease’s risks.
Using both a poll of Fox News viewers over age 55 and publicly available data on television-watching patterns, they calculate that Fox viewers who watched Hannity rather than Carlson were less likely to adhere to social distancing rules, and that areas where more people watched Hannity relative to Carlson had higher local rates of infection and death.
“Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight leads to a greater number of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” they write. “A one-standard deviation increase in relative viewership of Hannity relative to Carlson is associated with approximately 30 percent more COVID-19 cases on March 14, and 21 percent more COVID-19 deaths on March 28.”
This is a working paper; it hasn’t been peer reviewed or accepted for publication at a journal. However, it’s consistent with a wide body of research finding that media consumption in general, and Fox News viewership in particular, can have a pretty powerful effect on individual behavior.
Some of this research has found, for example, that TV consumption can affect decisions as intimate as whether or not to have children. It makes sense that an older American’s favorite TV host telling them they don’t need to worry about the coronavirus would cause them to ignore stay-at-home orders and care less about thoroughly washing their hands.
What’s more, the research design on this particular study seems quite rigorous, according to those scholars who have taken early looks.
“It’s a good paper; they took pains to control for many alternative explanations,” writes Zeynep Tufecki, a professor at the University of North Carolina who studies technology and research methods.
“This really looks like a causal effect of misinformation [leading] to deaths.”
How the study worked
The paper is technically quite complex, but it (more or less) breaks down into three parts.
First, the authors provide evidence that there was a difference in how Hannity and Carlson covered the coronavirus outbreak in February and early March. Second, they present data from their poll showing that Hannity viewers were less likely to follow social distancing rules than Carlson viewers. Third, they used data on television viewership and the coronavirus to show that higher rates of Hannity viewership relative to Carlson viewership were correlated with higher rates of local infection and death.
It’s pretty clear, from the first section, that Carlson took this way more seriously than Hannity. On February 25, Carlson warned that the virus could kill as many as a million Americans. On February 27, Hannity said it was less dangerous than car crashes or the common flu.
These are not cherry-picked examples. The authors, using both a data analysis of transcripts and a review of these transcripts by five paid staff, find systematic differences in how much the shows covered the coronavirus and how seriously they told their audiences to take it.
“Both anchors first discussed the coronavirus in late January when the first US case was reported, but Carlson continued to discuss the subject extensively throughout February while Hannity did not again mention it on his show until the end of the month,” they write. “While Hannity discussed the coronavirus as frequently as Carlson during early March, he downplayed its seriousness and accused Democrats of using it as a partisan tool to undermine the administration.”
Next, the researchers investigated if this difference in tone actually affected the way viewers of the two programs thought about coronavirus. To do so, they conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,045 Republicans aged 55 and up who reported watching Fox News at least once a week. They chose to study this demographic specifically because older Republicans were more likely to watch Fox and because older people in general are more vulnerable to the coronavirus.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Fox host Tucker Carlson.
In the survey, they ask viewers which shows they watched and how much they watched them. They also asked when, if it all, they started changing their behavior in response to the outbreak — things like canceling their vacation plans, doing social distancing, and washing their hands with increased frequency.
They then ran a regression analysis to see if behavior changes correlated with any viewership patterns. It turned out that, when compared to viewers of other Fox News shows, both Hannity and Carlson fans were distinct and statistically significant outliers.
“Viewers of Hannity changed their behavior five days later than viewers of other shows,” they write. “Viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight changed their behavior three days earlier than viewers of other shows.”
The final part of the paper uses two different regression models to show that, in fact, there is good reason to believe that Hannity viewership did increase coronavirus deaths relative to Carlson viewership.
In the first model, they compare data on the two shows’ ratings in different areas to county-level data on coronavirus infections and deaths. Specifically, they compare Hannity viewership to coronavirus rates two weeks later — the time it would take for the virus to start presenting in virtually all infected, symptomatic individuals.
After controlling for a number of confounding variables, ranging from overall television viewership rates to demographic factors like race, they find a clear relationship: Areas with greater Hannity viewership had more cases and more deaths. This relationship weakened after Hannity changes his show’s tune in mid-March, suggesting that it is in fact the programming driving the changes.
“A one standard deviation greater viewership difference is associated with approximately 2 percent more cases on March 7, 5 percent more cases on March 14, and 11 percent more cases on March 21,” they write. “Deaths follow a similar trajectory on a two-week lag.”
To be clear, this doesn’t show that Hannity viewers are necessarily the ones getting sick and dying. It could be that they’re asymptomatic carriers, simply spreading the disease to others without suffering themselves. All this regression shows is that higher Hannity viewership in a particular area is correlated with higher coronavirus infection rates and deaths in that area.
It’s possible that there’s some hidden variable they couldn’t control for driving this effect, rather than the programming itself. Maybe there’s something about people who choose to watch Hannity rather than Carlson that makes them less likely to take social distancing seriously.
That’s where the second regression model comes in. It exploits a pattern the authors identified in television viewership: It tends to be highest 2.5 hours after the sun sets, regardless of what’s on the air. This makes sense: People like to be outside or doing other stuff during daylight hours, settle in at home to watch TV for a bit after the sun sets, and then tend to go to bed within a couple of hours.
Around the country, Carlson’s show is broadcast in the hour before Hannity’s. This sets up a random experiment: In counties where the sun sets earlier, Carlson viewership will be higher (and vice-versa when the sun sets later). This isn’t because people prefer Carlson to Hannity for any particular reason, but simply because they want to watch something on Fox and Carlson’s show happens to be on.
Studying this random pattern allows them to remove the possibility that it’s something about the kind of people who watch the shows, rather than the programing itself, that’s driving the results.
In a second regression incorporating the sunset data, focusing on media markets where Fox is popular while once again controlling for confounders, the relationship holds: Places where Hannity viewership is randomly higher than Carlson viewership tend to have higher rates of infection and deaths.
“Greater exposure to Hannity relative to Tucker Carlson Tonight increased the number of total cases and deaths in the initial stages of the coronavirus pandemic,” the authors conclude. “Our findings indicate that provision of misinformation in the early stages of a pandemic can have important consequences for health outcomes.”
Why the finding that Sean Hannity killed people is disturbingly plausible
It’s important to be cautious about drawing sweeping conclusions from this paper, for two broad reasons.
First, the authors caution that their findings are limited to the comparison between Hannity and Carlson. All they claim to show is that watching the former made people more likely to get sick and die than watching the latter, not any kind of more generalizable statement. They haven’t proved that watching Hannity rather than (say) MSNBC or a scripted drama would make a random person more likely to get sick, nor that watching Carlson instead of those sources would make them more likely to stay healthy.
Because the study only looked at Fox viewers, it’s difficult to draw conclusions about the network’s effect more broadly. In theory, mainstream media’s more serious tone in February should mean that switching between it and Carlson would have little effect on a news consumer’s behavior and health — but choosing to watch Hannity rather than a mainstream source would have a large one. That’s really just a guess, though; there’s no direct evidence for this in the paper itself.
Second, drawing sweeping conclusions from one paper is always a bad idea. The social sciences in particular are notoriously difficult, dealing with complex phenomenon using imperfect data. The fact that this study hasn’t been formally peer reviewed means that, despite its impressive design and positive reviews from scholars who have read it so far, you should be especially cautious.
These caveats aside, there are several reasons to think that the conclusion in this paper is at least close to the truth.
Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Fox hosts’ faces, as seen in New York posters.
First, we know that the response to the coronavirus has been deeply affected by partisan attitudes. Polls and regression analyses consistently find that Republicans are considerably less likely than Democrats to embrace social distancing measures, seemingly as a result of the overall partisan debate over the issues.
Given Fox News’ overwhelming popularity among Republicans, it’s at least plausible that some of this effect comes from Hannity and other coronavirus skeptics on the network (Carlson’s early programming was an outlier).
Second, we know that Fox News in general has powerful effects on American political behavior.
A 2007 study on Fox News’ initial rollout found that areas where the channel was available showed much better results for Republicans in both the 2000 presidential and Senate elections. The effect was significant enough to have swung the entire presidential election given the razor-thin margin separating Bush and Gore.
A 2017 study used data on the 2000, 2004, and 2008 presidential elections to show that the expansion of Fox News’ availability and viewership had significantly increased the advantage the network offered Republicans. Fox shifted the the 2000 results in their direction by about 0.46 percentage points nationally in 2000, 3.59 in 2004, and 6.34 in 2008.
If Fox News can affect the way Americans vote, it’s at least plausible to say that it might affect the way they approach a novel and confusing pandemic.
Third, television in general appears to affect the way people make decisions about their health. One particularly interesting study looked at the popularity of Brazilian soap operas (novelas) on fertility. These shows tended to feature women with one child or none at all; the study’s authors found that, as these shows became more popular, the fertility rate of Brazilian women tended to fall. This does not appear to be an accident.
“Decreases in fertility were stronger in years immediately following novelas that portrayed messages of upward social mobility,” the authors write. “The effect ... in any given year was stronger for women whose age was closer to that of the main female characters portrayed that year.”
It seems that people really do see media as a guide to some of their most intimate life choices. Given how much a certain segment of older, white, conservative Americans trust Fox, it seems very plausible that they took cues from their favorite anchors on how to handle the coronavirus outbreak.
For some Americans, that choice may well have been a fatal one.
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Gee, it's like publicly sacrificing an entire demographic may have adverse effects on their feelings towards you.
Donald Trump tweeted to seniors on Wednesday morning, telling them “their lives will be better than ever” after polls showed he’s losing their support.
Tweeted Trump: “States are safely coming back. Our Country is starting to OPEN FOR BUSINESS again. Special care is, and always will be, given to our beloved seniors (except me!). Their lives will be better than ever…WE LOVE YOU ALL!”
States are safely coming back. Our Country is starting to OPEN FOR BUSINESS again. Special care is, and always will be, given to our beloved seniors (except me!). Their lives will be better than ever…WE LOVE YOU ALL!
Morning Consult reports: “As President Donald Trump increasingly signals interest in prioritizing economic interests, America’s senior citizens are growing critical of his approach.In mid-March, this group approved of Trump’s handling of the outbreak at a higher rate than any other age group, with a net approval of +19. A month later, that level of support has dropped 20 points and is now lower than that of any age group other than 18-29-year-olds. “
NY Mag adds: “Similarly, Quinnipiac shows seniors approving of Trump’s handling of the coronavirus by a 48/45 margin in early March but disapproving by a 52/45 margin in early April. Quinnipiac also shows Biden’s lead among seniors swelling from 49/46 in March to 54/41 in April, even though the Democrat’s overall lead drops from 11 to eight points.”
The GOP doesn't get to complain about bipartisanship. It's the House and they clearly established that only a bare majority matters. They spent years shitting on the minority, now they can shut up.
Democrats are pushing ahead with historic changes to House rules despite vocal GOP opposition, setting the stage for a potential showdown on the floor when lawmakers return Thursday.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her deputies are drafting a temporary overhaul of the chamber’s rules that would permit lawmakers to cast votes by proxy for their colleagues, allowing them to go on record without leaving home during the coronavirus outbreak.
The change, according to top Democrats, would allow the House to return to some semblance of normalcy, after scrapping roll call votes for five weeks to limit the risk involved with calling all 430 members back to Washington. The plan is expected to come to the floor Thursday, the same day lawmakers approve the latest $484 billion coronavirus relief bill.
“This virus has forced us to do things in different ways — to be radically different in many respects for the safety and security of all in our country,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who formally endorsed a system of remote voting on Tuesday, told reporters afterward.
But the lack of GOP support is threatening an ugly partisan clash when the House meets Thursday to pass yet another round of legislation confronting the nation’s dual health and economic crises.
"I think you'll see pretty close to universal Republican opposition," said Rep. Tom Cole, the top Republican on the House Rules panel, who has called on lawmakers to return to Washington.
"It was probably more dangerous to get here during the Civil War," the Oklahoma Republican added. "Congress looks pretty wimpy here, in my view."
Tensions between the two parties were already running high, with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy accusing Pelosi of holding up small-business aid during negotiations over the latest round of relief — a move he said has soured any good will that had existed during the national crisis. “I think there was a moment in time when [proxy voting] could have been [voice voted], but I think the Democrats have really messed that up,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said in a recent interview.
House Democrats would likely have the votes to implement the changes on their own this week. But they would have to contend with making a dramatic procedural shift for the 200-year-old institution without buy-in from the minority.
“Democrats got the majority, so if they want to do it, they can do it. It’s not like you need Senator [Mitch] McConnell to sign off on how the House conducts business,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) told reporters in the Capitol, adding that he thinks it's a "terrible idea."
Many Democrats, and some Republicans, say a system of proxy-voting would allow Congress to function far more robustly than it has during this crisis. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a supporter of remote voting, sought to add language to a Senate bill on Tuesday that would allow remote voting "if necessary." McConnell rejected it on the floor.
The House proposal is a more low-tech version of electronic voting that some members have supported. It would allow lawmakers who are unable to come into the Capitol to still go on record for the massive relief bills — the biggest of their congressional careers — by being paired with a member in the Capitol who casts their vote.
"Whatever we would do on proxy voting, at this time, would be strictly related to the coronavirus," Pelosi said of the proxy voting push. "It’s not just about us. It’s about the staff, it’s about the press, it’s about the security, it’s about those who run the buildings."
But without the backing of GOP leaders, that change in House rules could also lead to chaos. Some are already anticipating a scenario in which nearly half of the House openly defies the new rules and hammers Democrats for refusing tosummon their full caucus back to Washington.
Democrats plan to approve the change through the House Rules Committee on Wednesday night, though it’s unlikely to garner much, if any, bipartisan support. Jordan said he traveled back to D.C. early so he could voice his opposition to the idea during the meeting.
And McCarthy said in a letter to Pelosi on Tuesday that he was aware of “reports” of the plans for proxy voting and wanted more details about how it would work — including how it would “avoid abuses of power.”
Democrats, though, say McCarthy has already been part of initial discussions on the idea and has remained open to it; Hoyer and McCarthy have been in contact about the issue.
In a recent interview with POLITICO, McCarthy said Republicans are “willing to look at ways to improve” the House’s system of voting during the pandemic, though he said he didn’t think it should be voice voted on the floor without the input of all members.
“You don’t change 200 years of history and say, ‘I’m going to go do something.’ You have to study it. It has to be bipartisan,” McCarthy said.
The push to create a proxy voting system in the House comes as a growing number of lawmakers on both sides have fiercely criticized Congress for being seen as missing from their posts — even as lawmakers work furiously from their districts to assist struggling businesses, health facilities and local governments. Some Democrats also fear they're not doing enough publicly to be a counterpoint to President Donald Trump, who holds daily press news on the coronavirus that often run over two hours.
McCarthy, too, used his letter to increase the pressure on Pelosi and other top Democrats to reopen the House before they’re scheduled to return on May 4, complaining that lawmakers were still awaiting guidance on when the chamber’s usual duties, like hearings and debate, would resume.
Around a half-dozen frustrated House Republicans even attempted to stage a miniprotest Tuesday by returning to Washington early in defiance of Democratic leadership’s decision to extend the recess. Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.) tried to seek recognition on the House floor during the pro forma session, during which he planned to ask about how and when the House will return to normal. But his effort was rejected before the procedural move could begin.
Several of those GOP members who came back to D.C., including Rep. Andy Harris (R-Md.), said they oppose any kind of proxy voting. They worry it would limit lawmakers' involvement in the legislative process and warn that it is not a sufficient replacement for being physically present in the Capitol.
“We should be here in person to vote,” Harris, who wore a plastic face shield in the Capitol, told reporters. “That's the way it’s been done for 200 years, that's the way we should do it now.”
Some Republicans, like Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Elise Stefanik of New York, have been vocal in calling for remote voting — at least on a temporary basis. But even some GOP lawmakers who support the idea say Democrats are attempting to make the historic changes unilaterally instead of working with Republicans.
And others say the proxy voting plan falls short of allowing lawmakers to use technology to vote remotely.
“Speaker Pelosi’s ‘proxy’ voting is a total punt on this critical issue to ensure Congress is able to remotely legislate,” Stefanik tweeted. “She needs to enter the 21st century & use basic tech tools to ensure every Member can vote yea/nay and also help shape legislation while in home districts.”
Some Republicans have also cautioned that remote voting of any kind would raise constitutional questions. Multiple constitutional experts consulted by the House, however, assured Democrats that such a change is likely within their power.
"I think the Constitution is clear that each house gets to make the rules for its proceedings," said Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional expert from the University of California Berkeley School of Law who recently spoke with House Democrats.
"This authority is expansive and would include the ability to adopt a rule to permit proxy voting. Nothing in the Constitution specifies otherwise." Chemerinsky said.
Democrats, meanwhile, have acknowledged the difficulty in reshaping institutional procedure but have stressed it would solely be on a temporary basis during the coronavirus crisis.
“It won't be a permanent fix. It will be just for a few weeks to get us through the pandemic. Once that is over, then we can return to regular order,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.) told reporters in the Capitol on Tuesday.
“If the Republican conference instructs members to not vote for it that would be very disappointing. But it will take 216 votes ... and we'll have 216 Democrats here ready to vote for it,” Butterfield said.
Raise your hand if you want to temporarily suspend or lower your rent or mortgage during the coronavirus crisis? You are not alone. We’d all love to suspend or lower those payments while the nation gets back on track. None more so than the 22 million Americans who have filed for unemployment in the last month.
The Trump Organization is asking the federal government for relief on their rental payments for the Washington D.C. hotel, according to The New York Times. The hotel was built in an old post office that is still owned by the federal government and leased to the Trump Organization. Even though it was a favorite of Republican grifters, MAGA fans, Republican politicians looking to suck up to Trump and lobbyists looking to corrupt, the Trump Organization had been trying to sell it in recent months. After the stock market collapsed in March, the sale was put on hold.
Now the Trump Organization is asking for the federal government to lower their $286,000 per month rental payments. The lease is maintained by the General Services Administration (GSA), the massive federal agency in charge of procurement for the federal government, which has the ultimate say in rent relief. GSA Administrator Emily Murphy, a Trump appointee, has not commented on the matter. Eric Trump told The New York Times they were looking for the same treatment as anyone else.
At the end of the day, the billionaire president’s sons are out there trying to get a break for Donald Trump and themselves, but they have yet to advocate for a rent break for anyone else.
I really do adore BA :) Andy and Chris are delightful lol
The Bon Appétitteam, back when they could all stand in close proximity to one another. | Laura Murray/Bon Appétit
Without the Test Kitchen, the magazine’s stars are taking us into their homes.
The quarantines and social distancing mandates that have brought many American cities to a near standstill have also completely halted production in the film and television industries. A few intrepid TV shows are experimenting with episodes filmed in quarantine, but for the most part, the entertainment industry is taking a wait-and-see approach.
And yet YouTube is full of channels that are still putting out the same great videos as ever. That’s relatively easy to do when a channel is predominantly run by one or two people who can collaborate online. But then there’s the case of Bon Appétit.
One of the most popular channels on all of food YouTube, the offshoot of the 54-year-old food magazine has seen its most successful months ever during the coronavirus pandemic, according to Matt Duckor, Condé Nast’s head of programming, lifestyle, and style. The channel saw 76.7 million views in March, the most successful month in the channel’s history, up 5 percent over February.
And though the channel works six to eight weeks ahead and is still releasing new videos filmed in its massive Test Kitchen (the setting for most of its videos to date), the Bon Appétit team has scrambled to make videos that reflect the challenges most American chefs, amateur or professional, are facing right now — videos shot in the homes of the channel’s stars. So many of us are cooking from home, clearing out our pantries, and trying to figure out how to navigate occasional shortages in ingredients.
Bringing viewers into the homes of Bon Appétit’s editor-chefs could have been a massive flop, considering the endeavor has required all 13 of the “regulars” to shoot their own video. But creative use of the internet has allowed the channel to keep posting new videos filmed in chefs’ personal kitchens since widespread shelter-at-home orders began in mid-March. And many of the channel’s most famous video series will move from the Test Kitchen into their stars’ homes, with Claire Saffitz’s hugely popular Gourmet Makes — in which the pastry chef recreates everything from Twinkies to Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups — joining the at-home slate in May.
How was Bon Appétit able to do that? I asked Duckor about the challenges of shifting to remote production, as well as what it’s meant to the channel’s fans to see inside the homes of Bon Appétit’s increasingly popular YouTube personalities.
Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Matthew Peyton/Getty Images for BroadwayHD
Matt Duckor (right) speaks at an event in 2019.
Emily VanDerWerff
You’re a small operation to begin with, but the production lift on making these at-home videos seems significant.
Matt Duckor
We received an email on Wednesday, March 11, advising employees to work from home. We had just started talking about a contingency plan about what we would need to do if the office closed that Monday, two days prior. I’m confident none of us felt like that was going to happen that quickly. We thought, we’ll be able to send a cameraperson to somebody’s house. They can get there. We’ll keep the crews really small.
Within five days, it was very clear that we weren’t going to be sending any crews anywhere. So we had these kits that we put together. Everyone has the latest iPhone in the Test Kitchen, basically, so we knew that the camera was good and consistent. We got them a couple different tripods, and we got them some audio gear, which is the biggest thing that separates cell-phone video from more professional video. We ordered some basic wireless [lavalier microphones] for everybody in the Test Kitchen.
Then it became a question of, creatively, what can we do to meet our audience where they’re at with our content? The Test Kitchen has become such an iconic location. It’s been, obviously, where the majority of our content has been shot but also where our folks interact with each other. So what happens when we take them out of that? We thought there would be some intrigue in seeing everybody’s home kitchens. I didn’t really estimate how important all that would be to people. The response we’ve seen has been pretty incredible.
The first thing that we wanted to have was a video that could come out as quickly as possible that had everybody from the Test Kitchen universe in it, using the Test Kitchen Talks [format] that we use on the channel, where we pick a topic and we supercut different people doing the same task or talking about the same thing. We knew that we could do that pretty quickly with all 13 people we have regularly on the channel.
We sent tips to all of them [about filming themselves at home] and then, that following Thursday and Friday, we had our first two shoots. As production lists go, we had to figure out, well, how do we make this, how do we produce this? So we’ve been using Zoom to have our production teams join [each shoot]. Those first shoots went really, really well. We were able to shoot videos with all 13 talents.
By that time, everyone had been out of the office for almost two weeks, and more than anything, everyone was just really excited to see each other. We had a first call to walk everybody through things, and it was a big Zoom call with all the people from the Test Kitchen on there, and everyone was just excited to see each other.
And it’s the same thing that people around the country have been experiencing, and we wanted to have content that reflected that. The first video, our status-update video, touched the Covid crisis in quarantine more on-the-nose than anything else we’ve done. Of course, it’s evident in everything we’re doing, because everything’s at home and produced in a different way. Hopefully it feels more relatable for people who are also at home, but doesn’t [also] feel like a reminder of the fact that we’re all under quarantine in some sort of somber way.
Emily VanDerWerff
When you started the Bon Appétit YouTube channel, you were turning magazine editors and chefs who weren’t previously on camera into onscreen talent. Now you’re helping those people understand the tech so they can do some of their own production. Obviously, most of us know how to shoot a video on our iPhone, but how did you walk everyone through some of the other technical aspects?
Matt Duckor
All the credit goes to our production team. The first thing was sort of elevating the equipment [from what everyone already had] and the second part, after we [sent the equipment] to them, was showing them how to use it. So our [directors of photography] hosted a hilarious Zoom with all 13 [people] on there, walking them through how to set up a microphone and the basics of framing a shot, stuff like that.
There’s a bit of a learning curve there. Yes, everyone shoots video on their iPhones casually for Instagram or with their families. But we started getting questions [from fans] almost immediately about how were we adapting the Bon Appétit videos for this time. [Viewers were] worrying on social media that there wouldn’t be anymore Bon Appétit videos, and how were they going to get through the pandemic without it. So there was some pressure on us to create something that felt like it lived up to, for a lot of our audience, something that’s really important in their daily lives.
Brad adapted right away to being in his kitchen by himself, just yelling at an iPhone
That anxiety was also felt by the talent a little bit. “Oh my god, we’re shooting in our home. We don’t have this huge crew around us. They’re on Zoom. What’s it going to be like?” From the very beginning, from the first shoot we did that first week, everything was really, really smooth. We tried to make it as simple as possible. We were there with them every step of the way. We weren’t trying to set up complicated shots. We’d frame it up with them on a Zoom call, and then it’s them being their amazing, relatable selves in the comfort of their own home.
It rolls pretty easily. Some of them, you can tell, are really comfortable at home. Brad [Leone] adapted right away to being in his kitchen by himself, just yelling at an iPhone. It’s a testament to how real those guys are on camera. We surround them with a crew and formats that really elevate them, and the Test Kitchen is a really fun setting. But at the end of the day, they’re really compelling even in front of an iPhone in their home kitchen. What’s making the content really work is that [the personality] is still intact. Nothing’s changed there.
Emily VanDerWerff
Have you faced any big technical hurdles beyond just mailing out the equipment? Were there home kitchens that were trickier to shoot in?
Matt Duckor
Uploading the footage to our server was one thing the first day. We were expecting that upload times may be significant, but, depending on how much we shoot, it takes 16 to 24 hours to upload an entire shoot to our server. Obviously, all of our editors are working remotely as well. So some of them had full desktop setups at home, but others were working off a laptop that wasn’t ideal. So post-production in the beginning, we had to get a handle on that workflow.
Everyone has a different type of kitchen, but we worked with them before the first shoot to scout their homes over Zoom, to really figure out the best place. When it came time to really do that first shoot, we had a good sense of what we were working with. Going forward, those kitchens aren’t changing, and we’re really using those same setups for all content that we’ve been filming since then.
We put out content since we started filming remotely that was shot in the Test Kitchen before all of this happened. We will continue to do so to some degree. But right now, the pendulum is sort of shifting. Last week and before, remote concepts were being sprinkled throughout [the Test Kitchen] stuff. Now we want to be putting out content that feels really reflective of where our talent is right now: at home, just like everybody else.
We work six to eight weeks out in terms of filming, but we wanted to prioritize content that felt really of the moment and will relate to people and everything they’re going through. It was a heavy lift in the beginning, but now we’re getting into a pretty good rhythm.
Emily VanDerWerff
The Test Kitchen videos have a real air of a workplace comedy, like The Office or Parks and Recreation. I get the feeling of a whole bunch of people working together, moving between the background and foreground as their “storylines” become more important. And now it’s almost like you’re doing episodes where you follow those “characters” home. Has it been weird letting the audience into that larger world?
Matt Duckor
We’ve talked about filming in the homes of [Test Kitchen talent] before, but never really done it. But just as the Test Kitchen is another character in a lot of our videos, people’s home kitchens have become that. There’s been a lot of dissecting [by fans on social media] how people’s home kitchens are reflective of their individual personalities. Of course Brad has a chaotic kitchen with 50 pans on the wall. And Sohla [El-Waylly] has the biggest spice collection of in anybody in the Kitchen.
Our first remote episode of It’s Alive is just a great example of how you can take a show that [is] incredibly iconic and translate it to a new setting in Brad’s home. Matt Hunziker, the director and editor, who is really the creative genius behind that show, did a great job. We have the first interaction between people in that episode. Sohla works with Brad to make a grated ginger-garlic paste that Brad uses for some cooking. So that’s using Zoom and self-taping on Sohla’s end to bring those two together.
The home kitchens and the talent’s families have emerged as other characters, not to take the place of anyone in the Test Kitchen or the Test Kitchen itself but to add another dimension to these videos. There’s real texture to it. And it’s their homes and it’s their private lives and their personal lives. And they’re all willing, I think, to share that. We’re all happy to be able to continue to work and create content from home that is having a deep impact on people.
In the comment section, and on Instagram and all of our different platforms, we get a lot of really amazing feedback and testimonials [from fans] on how what we’re doing is giving people comfort in a really weird time. We’re happy to be able to continue that, even if it’s in a slightly different setting and Brad’s kids are running into the room every 10 minutes.
Emily VanDerWerff
Do you miss not having that Test Kitchen set to go to?
Matt Duckor
It’s an iconic place that binds all of our videos together. I think some of the home kitchens are becoming that, but for years, the Test Kitchen has been the home of our most successful videos, and it’s so ingrained in the mind of our audience.
I wouldn’t say we lose anything, but it’s hard to replace what the Test Kitchen provides, which is a setting that is memorable but that also is a place that facilitates the interaction and collaboration that, I think, makes some of the best Bon Appétit videos really tick. It’s hard to replicate that over Zoom.
But it’s hard to do anything that we’re doing remotely now, in all of our lives. It’s hard for other industries to work remotely, but people are finding ways to do that. Aside from videos, the entire Test Kitchen team also have to create and test recipes for the magazine, the website, and social media. They’re continuing to have to find a way to do that from home. They’re collaborating together to work on those things. At the core of it, it’s the reality of who these people are, and their skills and their relationships and friendships with each other. It’s no different in video.
Emily VanDerWerff
How have your video strategies shifted with some of the other Condé Nast YouTube channels? Like the Wired series, where celebrities answer the most-Googled questions about themselves, seems like it would be harder to produce from home.
Matt Duckor
There was some initial concern among everybody, but especially celebrities, about, “Well, what do we do during this time that doesn’t seem tone-deaf and still work and create things during really sensitive times?” And I think we’ve seen in the past couple weeks, a lot more celebrities and public figures wanting to collaborate with us on things.
It’s like, “Is it okay to film from our homes, which are often bigger and nicer than a majority of Americans’? Does that feel insensitive?” I can think of that Gal Gadot “Imagine” video, and a few other things where there was, like, a little bit of backlash in the beginning, and I think celebrities were like, “Ooh, we’ll hang tight for a second and see how everything develops. We’ll work on fundraising and other charitable things.”
And now I think there’s a little more willingness to experiment. But then, at other brands, we really tried to take a page out of Bon Appétit’s playbook, which is to build homegrown talent or rely on experts that we work with. Wired, you mentioned, has a lot of programming that’s built around experts who are friends with the brands. And those people are still able to work from their homes as well.
The celebrity component [of many Condé Nast video operations] is massive, and we’re finding ways to work with celebrities and other public figures right now. That’s moving in the right direction. But we have a lot of other programming that is more controllable and that isn’t based around celebrities’ junket opportunities or someone being on the cover of a magazine.
Emily VanDerWerff
You mentioned the question of how to produce content that isn’t tone-deaf. How are you tackling that problem? Obviously there’s a lot of suffering going on right now, but people don’t tune in to Bon Appétit to think about that. How do you walk that line?
Matt Duckor
The first step was acknowledging the reality of where our Test Kitchen is at. They’re at home. I think we had enough [Test Kitchen] content already filmed that we could’ve never made an at-home video and the channel wouldn’t have gone dark. But that didn’t feel like the right thing to do. People identify with our Test Kitchen, and they see it as an extension of their lives. They’re in the kitchen with their friends. We’re not going to suddenly do a whole series of videos on coronavirus and an explainer on how to wipe down your food when you get it from the grocery store. That doesn’t feel in line with the ethos of our channel and what our brand is about.
But to miss the opportunity to do something that’s reflective of the lives of our chefs, and millions of people around the country and the world, felt wrong. And everyone wanted to continue working. All of us love what we do every single day, and we love the connection we have with our community especially.
We want to be putting out content that feels really reflective of where our talent is right now: at home, just like everybody else
We’ve been cautious on the production side. In the first batch of five videos we did, one of them required actual active cooking. That was an acknowledgement that it’s slightly difficult to get groceries right now. In those five videos, we didn’t want to do anything that would make huge portions that couldn’t be eaten by one or two people who are in the same apartment. We don’t want to have anything that shows food waste. The cooking video that we did make was how to cook with items from your pantry. Most people are looking at their pantries like, “Oh, what the hell do I do tonight?” The Test Kitchen pantries may look a little bit different than most people’s, but at the end of the day, that’s still reflective of how a lot of people are thinking of cooking right now.
The response has been amazing. March was the most viewed and watched month of all time on Bon Appétit, and April is pacing to pass that. Anecdotally, the most gratifying thing is to be able to make a change like this and people don’t say, “Oh, it’s not [the] Test Kitchen. I don’t know, it’s kind of weird. They’re in their houses.” I was optimistic that the response would be positive, but you don’t know until you put it out there. To have this wave of appreciation come back was so gratifying for me and for everyone on the team.
I don’t know how long this is going to go on for, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it makes its way into future programming that we do [post-quarantine]. It has felt like a different layer of the onion for all of these people in our videos. We have a better understanding of who they are, so I wouldn’t be surprised if in the future, it informs the way that we make other things. But certainly we’ll all be excited to be back in the Test Kitchen whenever the appropriate parties determine that it’s the safe move.
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Not a hoax. Not biased. The GOP-led Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan report Tuesday agreeing with the U.S. Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that Russia had interfered in the 2016 elections to boost Donald Trump's election bid.
In a very heavily redacted 158-page report, the committee consistently found the Intelligence Community's original January 2017 assessment of Russian interference to be "sound" and concluded it was reached both without political bias and using "proper analytic standards." Overall, "the Committee found no reason to dispute the Intelligence Community’s conclusions," Republican Intelligence chair Richard Burr said in a statement. The ranking Democrat on the committee, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, also noted that there was “no reason to doubt that the Russians’ success in 2016 is leading them to try again in 2020.”
Throughout the report, the committee offered nothing but praise for the intelligence community's work on the assessment. "In all the interviews of those who drafted and prepared the ICA, the Committee heard consistently that analysts were under politically motivated pressure to reach specific conclusions," the report stated. "The Committee finds the conclusions of the ICA are sound, and is reassured by the fact that collection and analysis subsequent to the ICA's publication continue to reinforce its assessments."
In a break from the conclusions reached by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee, the bipartisan Senate report also said “specific intelligence reporting" supported the ICA conclusion that Russian president Vladimir Putin and his government "demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump." The intelligence also supported the assessment that Putin personally "approved and directed" certain aspects of the Kremlin's interference operation. But by and large, almost the entire section on "Putin's role" is redacted.
This was the fourth installment of the Senate Intelligence Committee's Russia report. The fifth installment will deal specifically with the controversial Steele dossier, which was not actually relied upon for any of the conclusions made in the original January 2017 assessment. The dossier was, however, mentioned in an annex, an inclusion pushed by FBI leadership at the time in part because President Obama had instructed the intelligence community to include all information it had on 2016 Russian interference in the assessment.
From adults creating chlorine gas in their kitchens to toddlers guzzling hand sanitizer, Americans seem to be inadvertently poisoning themselves as they try to defend against the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2.
Since the beginning of March—as the COVID-19 pandemic began raging in the US—calls to poison control centers nationwide “increased sharply,” according a new study led by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Although researchers cannot directly link pandemic preparedness to the poison control calls, “the timing of these reported exposures corresponded to increased media coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports of consumer shortages of cleaning and disinfection products, and the beginning of some local and state stay-at-home orders,” the researchers write.
Again, just an extension of the Trump reelection campaign
Donald Trump never issued the nationwide lockdown that the United States needed to minimize the damage of the novel coronavirus. In fact, Trump and the federal government moved incredibly slowly, despite months of advance warning that COVID-19 was coming and represented a serious threat to the economy, national security, and lives. That failure to act can now be measured in over 800,000 confirmed cases and 43,500 deaths. To date.
But for Attorney General William Barr, there is no situation that can’t be made worse by a misapplication of the department formerly known as justice. Since taking over as Trump’s go-to unraveler of law, Barr has not only managed to waste an incredible amount of time destroying U.S intelligence, eroding relationships with allies, and trying to back up Trump’s numerous conspiracy theories, he has also been eking out time to threaten Black communities, killing investigations into Trump, and destroying oversight authority. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that, in the midst of a crisis where nearly 2,000 Americans are dying on a daily basis, Barr is determined to get out his robe and scythe to hurry the process along by threatening governors over social distancing guidelines.
On Monday, more than a third of the world’s new cases of COVID-19 were in the United States. So were almost half of all the deaths. By any measure, the U.S. response—the Donald Trump response—to the novel coronavirus pandemic has been the single-greatest preventable disaster in American history. And it’s far from over. With Trump encouraging would-be terrorists to threaten governors and law enforcement, and Republican governors intent to open everything from barbershops to beaches, the question isn’t whether or not the United States will suffer a second wave. It’s just whether or not that wave will be a tsunami.
But it’s not possible to have an existential threat to the nation without Barr wanting a piece of the action. So on Tuesday, Barr joined right-wing radio loon Hugh Hewitt to explain how issuing a shelter-in-place order to slow the spread of a deadly contagion is really a drag. “These are very, very burdensome impingements on liberty,” said Barr. He seemed to admit that the actions being taken by governors were, in fact, aligned with guidelines that belatedly appeared from the federal government. However, said Barr, “we adopted them ... for the limited purpose of slowing down the spread, that is bending the curve. We didn’t adopt them as the comprehensive way of dealing with this disease.”
So, it was perfectly okay to issue a stay-at-home order in order to slow the spread of COVID-19. But it’s not a comprehensive way of dealing with the disease. On that point, everyone should be in agreement with Barr—because it’s only through extensive, nationwide testing and case tracing that the number of active cases can be reduced to the point where it’s safe to relax social distancing guidelines.
However, that doesn’t appear to be Barr’s take. Instead, Barr insisted that the curve had now been bent and it was time for governors to get rid of stay-at-home orders, which Barr compared to placing everyone “under house arrest.” Because in Barr’s mind, people under house arrest are apparently allowed to journey forth for take out, grocery shopping, and exercise.
What kind of legal theory says it’s okay to implement “house arrest” so long as it’s to “bend the curve” but not okay to have those same rules in an effort to prevent a resurgence of cases? A nonsense legal theory pulled straight from the nethers of Barr’s knickers. But that seems to be exactly where he is going. Barr has indicated that he will review all the state rules—by which he means all the blue state rules—and find the ones that he thinks “go too far.” When these targets are located, says Barr, he will try to “jawbone the governors into rolling them back.”
But if governors don’t want to listen to the sweet, sweet reason of open up because Barr said so, the next step is that Barr is absolutely declaring he will take the states to court and “side with the plaintiffs.” By which he means he will take the DOJ and put it at the service of people waving Confederate flags and AR-15s in state capitals. In fact, it’s amazing Barr isn’t arguing that the right to infect people with COVID-19 is protected by the Second Amendment. Yet.
Could have been worse, but still not great. A poll worker is not a good sign
As the novel coronavirus continues to spread, events nationwide are being canceled, but not without protest. States across the country have postponed elections in efforts to curb the spread of the pandemic. Despite health concerns and an executive order by the governor to postpone elections, Wisconsin Republicans refused to postpone races for state and local office in addition to the presidential primary. Insisting the election go on, Republicans in the state fought the order with the support of the U.S. Supreme Court resulting in a forced election on April 7. Of course, their actions didn’t end without dire consequences; health officials have linked at least seven cases of COVID-19 to state election activities, Milwaukee Health Commissioner Jeanette Kowalik said Monday.
According to Kowalik six of the cases involve Milwaukee voters and one is a Milwaukee poll worker, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. Officials are investigating further into the cases to inquire additional information including whether the virus was concentrated in any of the city’s five polling places and if any of the cases resulted in death. As Daily Kos previously noted, election officials were operating only five in-person voting centers for a city of 600,000 people.
Thousands of voters endured long lines at each polling station, making contact tracing more difficult and the chance the virus spread high. While many did stay home fearful of their health, several of those who attended polling stations did so without protective gear, according to the Associated Press.
Officials are using contact tracing to determine where the virus spread from and what impact it may have. In order to conduct contact tracing effectively, Kowalik said broad notifications would be sent out to people present during certain time frames. "As you recall, there were people that were in line for a very long time to get their vote in, so if you figure out around a range of time when someone was there or in the polling sites or in the line, connect to someone who was an actual case, that's when we would do notifications," she said. According to Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, approximately 3,500 voters participated in each of the city’s voting locations in addition to polling workers, The Journal Sentinel reported.
While many feared the forced election would bring a spike in the state’s cases, Wisconsin Department of Health Services Secretary Andrea Palm said Monday that there is no confirmed evidence yet that the election resulted in a surge in COVID-19 cases. However, she noted that if further cases do exist, symptoms may not have yet appeared. Tuesday marks 14 days since the election on April 7; global health experts have shared that symptoms of the virus most often appear within five to 14 days, if at all. As of this report, more than 4,000 people have tested positive for coronavirus in Wisconsin and 230 people have died as a result, the AP reported.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about one in every six people who get COVID-19 becomes severely ill. While only seven cases have been confirmed to the April 7 election, having the election during this pandemic was completely unnecessary and irresponsible. When alternatives like mail-in ballots exist and other states have postponed their elections amid the pandemic, Wisconsin officials had no reason to insist on continuing with their election and putting the lives of residents at risk.
Not only did the election put those who voted at risk, but those who stayed home and followed social distancing measures were unable to participate in their right to vote due to a lack of absentee ballots. State officials should prioritize the health of their residents, not make Americans choose between exercising their right to vote or the ability to stay healthy.
He was too busy sucking off Trump to pay attention to any facts on the ground. GA is going to be in trouble.
If you’ve spent your coronavirus shut-in time waiting to get in a good sweaty workout followed by a massage, a hair cut, a tattoo, and a friendly game of bowling, get yourself to Georgia on Friday. Gov. Brian Kemp is allowing gyms, barber shops, massage parlors, tattoo parlors, and bowling alleys to reopen as long as they follow social distancing guidelines. (How do you keep distance while giving or getting a hair cut, massage, or tattoo?) On Monday, April 27, restaurants and theaters can reopen.
Georgia currently ranks 42nd in testing per capita, which means state officials don’t really know how widespread the disease is. What we do know is that the state had its highest death toll from the virus on Monday, along with 452 new confirmed cases. At this point, 23% of tests conducted in Georgia have been positive. These are not the numbers that say: “This thing is over, let’s reopen the businesses and get celebratory massages.”
“By taking this measured action, we will get Georgians back to work safely without undermining the progress that we have all made in the battle against COVID-19,” Kemp said of his decision, though he acknowledged that “we’re probably going to have to see our cases continue to go up.”
When Kemp belatedly issued a shelter-in-place order at the beginning of April, he claimed it was because he had just learned of supposedly new data that the virus “is now transmitting before people see signs.” This was not new information at that point, which tells you something about Kemp’s credibility.
Kemp isn’t the only Republican governor moving toward reopening businesses. “The vast majority of businesses in 89 counties” in Tennessee are slated to reopen on May 1, as are Ohio businesses. South Carolina beaches and retail stores are already reopening. Texas, too, is relaxing its restrictions despite a dire lack of testing in the state’s large rural areas.
Update: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms says Kemp didn't talk to her or other key mayors before making this decision.
Forget looking for a job and start looking for a storage tank. If you’re able to take a couple of thousand barrels of West Texas crude off the hands of producers in May, you can make an instant $75,000 just for giving them somewhere to pump their sludge. Seriously. And you also get to keep the oil, which might possibly be worth something again someday. Maybe.
On Monday, the price of oil utterly collapsed. Despite many claims by Donald Trump that his negotiations with fellow authoritarians Mohammed bin Salman and Vladimir Putin had the world’s crude production back on track, those claims proved to be as accurate as everything else ever said by Trump. With every storage field, tank, tub, and milk glass in North America already filled with crude, and production continuing to be significantly greater than demand, oil prices didn’t just tumble to the ground, they kept right on going. After first falling to $2 a barrel, then to under $1 a barrel, futures markets proved that the floor wasn’t a floor at all. There are vast caverns down there. So now Trump is promising to bail out an industry that has been for decades the biggest wealth engine in the history of history. And yes, that’s as impossible as it sounds.
Not all oil is in negative territory. If you really want to open the tap on a barrel of Texas “sweet” crude at the moment, the going price is around $1.30—and no, you don’t really get a barrel, would-be barrel barons. It’s the futures market for May that’s really writing up the offers to create a nega-tycoon out of anyone who discovers somewhere to simply put the damn stuff. The ability be paid for taking oil off the hands of producers is a real thing.
Why don’t they just dial back production? Because that also costs money. Idling a well or closing down a pipeline are high-ticket items. So are opening them back up again. For a variety of reasons, it can be more costly to go through this cycle than it was to put in the well to begin with. At the moment, producers are making the bet that they can take an oil-bath on May futures for a few days and hope that this thing gets turned around again.
Besides, oil and gas have long been a game filled with sharp-elbows and a fair amount of playing chicken. It’s an industry where there is always someone who feels that they have deeper pockets, or lower costs, that will allow them to drive their competitors to their knees. Why turn off your own wells if a few days of sub-$2 prices drives a rival out of business and idles their whole field? Then you—person whose wells are still flowing—can capture a larger chunk of a rising market when supply and demand suddenly swing back into alignment! Insert maniacal laugh here.
Not surprisingly, oil and gas corporations believe in oil and gas. Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell may have been shoved down the charts of stock value by upstarts like Apple and Amazon, but in terms of sheer profit over time, there’s no doubt these energy industry giants have been the most lucrative businesses ever. Bar none. Not only do they enjoy huge benefits in which the government funds many of their risky endeavors while collecting little or no tax revenue, but they also enjoy tremendous political support. For oil companies, the country exists ever on the edge between using a lot of oil, and using even more and the government exists only as a candy store. It’s little wonder the industry consistently lays its bets on the idea that the huge demand for oil is only getting huger.
Since coming into office, Trump has affixed his executive order scrawl to papers that gave oil companies benefits for running thousands of miles of leaky pipelines around the country, opened up huge swathes of federal land (and sea) for more drilling/fracking, and gave these monster corps even vaster tax breaks. National monuments have been disassembled to their benefit; the EPA turned into a PR agency goading them on to drill, baby, drill. Trump has also worked hard at raising the demand side of the equation, removing pollution guidelines and eliminating Obama-era efforts to improve auto mileage.
In 2019, Exxon may have racked up an official profit of just $5.7 billion, a significant decline for a company that racked up a $21 billion profit the year before, but one thing which didn’t change between those years would be Exxon’s tax outlay. That would be $0.
Shake Shack may have given back the $10 million loan directed its way by the Small Business Administration. You can absolutely bet that Exxon is not about to turn down any number of billions sent its way by Trump. And there’s no doubt it will be billions. No industry has so consistently enjoyed Trump’s favor as oil and gas. It’s unlikely he’ll fail them now. After all, there are always ventilators that can be sold in a pinch.
Out there in the wider world market, Brent crude from the North Sea is still demanding $25 a barrel with both producers and refiners being better capable of controlling the available supply. But as Donald Trump has proudly pointed out again and again, the U.S. has been repeatedly setting records for oil production. A decade of frack frack here, frack frack there, frack frack fracking everywhere has left the nation awash in so much oil, and so many wildcatting producers, that the industry has already been having trouble keeping the supply from driving prices below costs.
At the moment, the equation in the U.S. remains the same—too much production, too little demand, almost no remaining storage. Very, very soon oil companies will have to take the hit and start shutting down wells, or simply pour the oil out on the ground. But don’t discount the idea that Trump may allow them to do just that.
On Monday, the IRS quietly released this urgent "special alert," informing some of the lowest-income Social Security beneficiaries, those who have too little income to file income tax returns, that they will have less than 48 hours to register their eligible children for the additional $500 coronavirus supplemental cash payment. The lowest-income beneficiaries, people receiving Social Security retirement, survivor or disability benefits (SSDI), Railroad Retirement benefits, Supplemental Security Income (SSI) and Veterans Affairs payments, have just one day to prevent having a portion of those payments—the $500 payments for dependent children—delayed until 2021!
These emergency payments were supposed to go out quickly to every American, including the more than 60 million Social Security beneficiaries whose age or disabilities put them most at risk of COVID-19 infection. Making it even worse, the Trump administration is requiring that they provide this information online—never mind that many of them do not have computers or internet service and are supposed to be sheltering in place. They're supposed to go enter the information on this special, non-filers website, the information that the government already has.
Whether it's incompetence on the part of the Trump administration or its typical malignancy, or a combination of both, it's all too typical Trump. Those who will suffer the delayed payments are the lowest income and most vulnerable among us. They include children whose parents have died or become permanently disabled, as well as grandchildren who are under the care of their grandparents because their parents were not able to care for them.
The Social Security Administration was authorized to share data with Secretary Mnuchin's Treasury Department to help get those payments the CARES Act authorized out to everyone. You remember what happened next—they created a roadblock forcing these people to have to jump through potentially insurmountable hoops to get their checks. After immense public pressure (thank you for taking action) they relented for retirees and some disabled people. But here we go again, with an immediate deadline—noon Eastern, Wednesday, April 22—in order go get those payments this year. Otherwise, they would have to file a tax return next year to get the payment, not seeing this urgent emergency money for another year.
Earlier this month, Ina Garten shared a video in which she makes a jumbo Cosmopolitan, and actor Stanley Tucci may now be attempting to take the Barefoot Contessa’s spirits crown, with a video in which he demonstrates how to make a Negroni. The clip has gone viral on Twitter with more than 730,000 views and Tucci is trending on social media with viewers describing it as “soothing,” “foreplay,” and thirsting to be “manhandled” by him the way he authoritatively commands the ingredients.
Why is Stanley Tucci just such a massive sex symbol within both the straight and gay universe? In this essay I plan to – pic.twitter.com/UjnKHivbrD
— Ben Wyatt But Quarantined and Gay (@Maxyman250) April 21, 2020
Nothing — and I mean nothing — has soothed me in the last six weeks quite like the way Stanley Tucci making a “Negroni” on Instagram has. pic.twitter.com/LzlbE3iJWL
Enlarge / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai on December 14, 2017 in Washington, DC, the day of the FCC's vote to repeal net neutrality rules. (credit: Getty Images | Alex Wong )
The Federal Communications Commission is in another dispute with the fire department that fought for net neutrality rules after being throttled by Verizon during a wildfire response.
The Santa Clara County Central Fire Protection District, along with the cities of Los Angeles and New York, last week asked the FCC to extend a deadline for filing comments on the last remaining piece of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's net neutrality repeal. Pai had to seek another round of public comments on the net neutrality repeal and related deregulation of the broadband industry because federal judges who upheld the overall repeal ruled that Pai "failed to examine the implications of its decisions for public safety."
The fire department and cities said they couldn't meet the FCC's comments deadline because of the coronavirus pandemic. But the FCC refused to grant more time for filing comments in an order issued yesterday, resulting in condemnation from the Santa Clara County Fire Department, Democrats, and consumer advocates.
Fucking xenophobic nutjob. When in doubt, it must be someone else's fault.
President Donald Trump’s announcement that he would soon suspend immigration into the U.S. surprised his own officials and likely overstated the extent of the still-developing executive order.
Already, much of the immigration flow into the country has been paused during the coronavirus pandemic, as the government has temporarily stopped processing all nonworker visas. And, according to three industry representatives familiar with the decision, the upcoming ban will exempt seasonal foreign farmworker visas, one of the largest sources of immigration at the moment.
The Department of Homeland Security is still drafting the plan, though, meaning its contours could change, according to three people familiar with the situation. Officials have also discussed even broader exemptions for all temporary guest workers, not just for those working in agriculture.
Whatever order Trump issues will have significant political ramifications. Cutting off all immigration would bolster Trump’s standing with his hard-line conservative base, but anger the business community, which wants Trump to ease restrictions on temporary worker visas. Conversely, if Trump chooses to exempt any temporary workers from his immigration ban, he’ll bolster his standing with the business community but risk creating a backlash among his more conservative base.
Trump kicked off speculation about his intentions Monday with a late-night tweet proclaiming: “In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”
The tweet did not indicate what specific action Trump would take: He could simply suspend entries for a period of time, or cancel a specific program for the year. The White House did not offer clarity when it issued its first official statement on the issue Tuesday morning.
“President Trump is committed to protecting the health and economic well-being of American citizens as we face unprecedented times,” said White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. “As President Trump has said, ‘Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African-American and Latino workers.’ At a time when Americans are looking to get back to work, action is necessary.”
When asked what prompted the decision, a top DHS official responded: “22 million unemployed Americans and counting due to Covid-19.”
Since the pandemic began, international travel has come to a virtual standstill as countries across the globe have imposed travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has restricted foreign visitors from China, Europe, Canada and Mexico, and has paused processing for immigrants trying to come into the U.S. on nonworker visas because of office closures. Trump has boasted that such moves demonstrated his administration’s serious and early response to the growing outbreak. Public health experts say the moves likely bought the U.S. some time but that the administration did not use that time to properly prepare for a domestic surge in cases.
Trump has faced calls from conservative groups to go further than the slate of travel restrictions. They have been urging the Trump administration to halt all foreign workers from entering the U.S., citing the millions of Americans who have been put out of work amid economic shutdowns intended to help slow the coronavirus outbreak.
But for weeks, his administration has allowed the foreign workers to enter.
Specifically, the U.S. eased requirements for immigrants to get certain jobs, such as farmworkers, landscapers and crab pickers, aware that certain industries, including those that fill grocery store shelves, could be hurt during the pandemic if they couldn’t hire foreign employees. It has also begun easing the process for companies looking to hire foreign workers, altering some paperwork requirements, including allowing electronic signatures and waiving the physical inspection of documents.
In early April, under pressure from immigration activists, the administration did backtrack on a plan to pause the approval of 35,000 more seasonal worker visas, pending further review.
Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who is running for a Senate seat in Alabama, pushed for a complete moratorium on immigration to the U.S. on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News last week. Carlson has been in close contact with Trump during the course of this virus and was one of the primary outside allies pushing him to do the China travel ban back in early January.
Immediately after the president’s tweet on Monday night, hard-line immigration groups cheered the decision.
“The president's comments reflect a sensitivity to a primary purpose of all immigration laws of every country, and that is to protect a nation's vulnerable workers,” said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, which supports restrictions. “With tens of millions of Americans who want to work full time not able to, most immigration makes no sense today, and to allow it to continue at its current level at this time would show a callous disregard for those enduring deep economic suffering.”
The excitement could change if the White House confirms exemptions for foreign worker visas in its upcoming order.
“One question remains,” said RJ Hauman, government relations director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors immigration restrictions. “Are there any caveats like guest workers being excluded from the order? We’ll see.”
Trump has repeatedly touted the importance of agricultural visas in recent weeks.
“We want them to come in,” he said in early April. “We're not closing the border so that we can’t get any of those people to come in. They've been there for years and years, and I've given the commitment to the farmers: They're going to continue to come. Or we’re not going to have any farmers.”
The remarks have been well-received in the business community. Industry leaders, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have argued that foreign workers are critical to companies that might be unable to find enough unemployed Americans willing to take certain jobs.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump vowed to reduce immigration if elected. But since entering office, the number of immigrants with temporary visas has steadily increased, reaching 925,000 in 2018, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
While there is no cap for the total number of temporary workers, there are annual limits on several individual visa categories. More than 1 million immigrants are allowed into the United States each year on a permanent basis, but only a fraction — 140,000 — come through employment categories.
Trump did not hint at making any drastic immigration moves during his lengthy daily coronavirus news briefing earlier Monday evening. Immigration has largely taken a back seat during the pandemic as the president hopes to salvage a strong economy that had become one of his major campaign talking points in the lead-up to the November election.
Trump’s surprise tweet about further immigration restrictions comes as he has signaled optimism that the country will soon reemerge from weeks of lockdowns designed to contain the virus. The president has repeatedly tried to downplay the severity of the outbreak since its arrival in the country, and his push to reopen the economy has put him at odds with some of the nation‘s governors and, at times, his top health experts.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), chairman of the House Hispanic Caucus and vice chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, condemned Trump’s immigration remarks as a diversion from the criticism the president has received for his response to the virus.
“This action is not only an attempt to divert attention away from Trump’s failure to stop the spread of the coronavirus and save lives, but an authoritarian-like move to take advantage of a crisis and advance his anti-immigrant agenda,” Castro tweeted Monday night. “We must come together to reject his division.”
House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) echoed Castro, tweeting: “President Trump now seeks to distract us from his fumbled COVID-19 response by trying to put the blame on immigrants. The truth is many immigrants are on our front lines, protecting us as doctors, nurses, health aids, farmworkers, and restaurant workers.”
The only positive—if it can be called that—in this entire tragic pandemic is that it has laid bare the inadequacies of our infrastructure, our economic structure, and the conservative political philosophy of running the government like a Ponzi scheme. When Trump’s pick to chair the FCC, Ajit Pai, helped roll back net neutrality consumer protections, he did so by arguing that the FCC had no right to enforce any regulations on big telecommunications companies. The argument was that the internet is not the same level of essential utility that phones or the telegraph is. It was bullshit, and Pai’s subsequent contradictory moves and statements have proven that.
A couple of weeks ago, Pai, now heading a toothless regulatory body, scrambled to make it look like his Republican-led agency’s gutting of consumer protections was not going to pose an enormous problem. Pai and the Republicans on the FCC had given away their powers to force telecommunications to do right by the American people. To that end, Pai was able to get most of the internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast to sign a thing called the “Keep Americans Connected” pledge that said they would be super awesome during the COVID-19 pandemic. Well, since they don’t actually have to, it turns out that telecoms aren’t keeping that pledge.
The pledge that Pai hurriedly got telecoms to sign said things like they would not “terminate service to any residential or small business customers because of their inability to pay their bills due to the disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic.” It also said telecoms promised to “waive any late fees that any residential or small business customers incur because of their economic circumstances related to the coronavirus pandemic.” According to NBC News, telecoms decided they didn’t care so much for those promises.
NBC gives case after case of newly unemployed workers and recently furloughed workers who have found their services cut off, and mixed messages coming from their providers. Cleveland.com tells the story of a woman who had her phone cut off in the middle of a telemedicine visit with her brother’s doctor, even after she spoke with a representative who assured her they would allow her to pay off her bill with a soon-to-be-received disability check.
The important thing to realize here is that there is no recourse for this. The FCC, in repealing net neutrality protections, has in essence given up the right to do much of anything except shake their fingers.
Huawei was recently caught passing off photos taken with a DSLR as ones shot with one of its phones. PhoneDog reports: Earlier this month, Huawei kicked off a contest for its Next Image community, and a video on Weibo included several high-quality photos and at the end said they were "taken with Huawei smartphones." As South China Morning Post notes, though, Weibo user Jamie-hua found that some of those photos were actually taken with a $3,500 Nikon D850 DSLR camera. The photos were found on 500px, an online photography site, and were taken by photographer Su Tie.
Huawei has since apologized and said that the photos were incorrectly marked due to "an oversight by the editor." The company has also updated its original promo video for the contest to remove the claim that the images were taken with Huawei phones. This isn't the first time something like this has happened to Huawei. In 2018, an ad appeared to show that a selfie was taken with the Huawei Nova 3, but it was actually snapped with a DSLR.
Yep I'm expecting WA's lockdown to expand beyond May 4
GENEVA — The head of the World Health Organization has warned that “the worst is yet ahead of us” in the coronavirus outbreak, raising new alarm bells about the pandemic just as many countries are beginning to ease restrictive measures.
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus didn’t specify exactly why he believes that the outbreak that has infected nearly 2.5 million people and killed over 166,000, according to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University, could get worse. Some people, though, have pointed to the likely future spread of the illness through Africa, where health systems are far less developed.
Tedros alluded to the so-called Spanish flu in 1918 as a reference for the coronavirus outbreak.
“It has a very dangerous combination and this is happening ... like the 1918 flu that killed up to 100 million people,” he told reporters in Geneva.
“But now we have technology, we can prevent that disaster, we can prevent that kind of crisis.”
“Trust us. The worst is yet ahead of us,” he said. “Let’s prevent this tragedy. It’s a virus that many people still don’t understand.”
Yeah, I'm torn between ipad or macbook air at this point
Apple hasn't specified the weight of its new Magic Keyboard, but a MacRumors reader who received their unit early has weighed the larger model for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro and found it to be 710 grams. That makes the Magic Keyboard heavier than the iPad Pro, which weighs 641 grams.
Image by OzMoon
It's not surprising that the keyboard has to have some heft to counterbalance a connected iPad Pro and provide a sturdy base for working on. But that makes their combined weight 1,351 grams, which is heavier than a 13-inch MacBook Air (1,290 grams) and closer to the weight of a 13-inch MacBook Pro (1,370 grams).
So if you were expecting a 12.9-inch iPad Pro and Magic Keyboard to be a lighter option than using a laptop when you're on the road, then it's worth being aware that that's not necessarily going to be the case. On the other hand, 9to5Mac claims the Magic Keyboard for the 11-inch iPad Pro weighs 601 grams, which would mean that their combined weight would be 1,072 grams. That's lighter than any MacBook that Apple currently sells.
In our upcoming review of the new Magic Keyboard, we'll look at weight considerations, portability, and more. Apple's Magic Keyboard includes a floating cantilevered design for viewing angles, a backlit keyboard with scissor-switch keys, and an integrated trackpad. You can order one for the 11-inch iPad Pro for $299, and for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro for $349 on Apple.com.
A federal court has ordered the "Genesis II Church of Health and Healing" to stop distributing a bleach product that Genesis claims is a cure for COVID-19 and many other health problems.
The US government sued Genesis on Thursday, alleging that it violated the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act with labeling for its so-called Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), also known as Master Mineral Solution. Genesis' website "contains claims that MMS is intended to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent coronavirus, which includes COVID-19, and links to testimonials claiming that MMS cures a litany of other diseases including, among others, Alzheimer's, autism, brain cancer, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis," the lawsuit said. Despite its name, the "church" is a "secular entity based in the State of Florida," the government lawsuit said.
"In the midst of a viral pandemic and national emergency like nothing seen for more than a century, the above-captioned defendants are exploiting the crisis by marketing a powerful industrial bleach to consumers as a remedy for coronavirus," the government also said in its lawsuit.
Former President Barack Obama meets with Donald Trump in the White House in November 2016, days after Trump won the presidential election. | Win McNamee/Getty Images
Trump is attacking Obama for not developing tests for a virus that didn’t exist when he was president. Seriously.
Barack Obama left office in January 2017. The coronavirus didn’t arrive in the United States until three years later. Yet over the weekend, President Donald Trump repeatedly tried to pin blame on his predecessor for the testing failures and shortage of medical supplies that have marred his administration’s response to the pandemic.
“I started with an obsolete, broken system from a previous administration,” Trump claimed during his daily press briefing on Saturday, later adding: “Unfortunately, some partisan voices are attempting to politicize the issue of testing, which they shouldn’t be doing, because I inherited broken junk. Just as they did with ventilators where we had virtually none, and the hospitals were empty.”
"We started off with a broken system. We inherited a broken, terrible system. And I always say it -- our cupboards were bare. We had very little in our stockpile": Trump tries to blame Obama, who left office in 2017, for a virus that reached the US in 2020 pic.twitter.com/YwMSPkjmw8
Trump sounded the same theme on Sunday. Asked by ultra-sycophantic One America News Network if he sees the government’s testing failures as “a function of lax oversight from the Obama/Biden administration,” Trump indicated he does.
“We inherited a lot of garbage,” Trump said. “We took, ah, they had tests that were no good, they had, all the stuff was no good. It came from somewhere, so whoever came up with it.”
“Our stockpiles were empty,” he added. “We had horrible stockpiles, we had horrible ventilators, we had very few of them too ... CDC had obsolete tests, old tests, broken tests, and a mess.”
This is totally nonsensical. The CDC couldn’t have bad tests left over from the Obama administration, because the coronavirus test didn’t exist until this year. And the stockpile was far from empty — its problem was that it was poorly maintained, an issue that rests on the Trump administration’s shoulders.
Of course, it’s not surprising that Trump is trying to blame Obama. His political rise was fueled by pushing racist conspiracy theories about America’s first black president, and a central theme of Trump’s political life is trying to erase Obama’s legacy across a spectrum of issues. But even by Trump’s standards, the brazenness involved in this particular effort to rewrite history is jarring.
So while it’s a sad commentary on our times that such an examination is even necessary, what follows is a look at why Obama is not, in fact, to blame for the coronavirus killing more people in America than in any other country.
Trump was president for three full years before the coronavirus hit
First of all, Trump was president for three full years before the first official coronavirus case was reported in the US on January 20, 2020. However, Trump failed to start replenishing the national stockpiles of ventilators, masks, and other medical supplies. (In fact, Trump actually fired the government’s pandemic response team in spring 2018.)
Beyond that, it’s simply not the case that Obama left the national stockpiles empty. FactCheck.org recently detailed how news reports in 2016 described the warehouses that store the Strategic National Stockpile as “packed with stuff,” filled with “row after row of containers filled with mystery medications and equipment — including that one item everyone’s been talking about lately, ventilators.”
Last month, Dr. Anthony Fauci said there were nearly 13,000 ventilators in the national stockpile. Some of them were broken down. That total may not have been enough to meet the demands created by the coronavirus, but even when it became clear that additional supply was required, Trump was slow to act.
The Associated Press, citing a review of federal purchasing contracts, recently reported that federal agencies “largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.”
“By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile,” the AP added. So not only did Trump do nothing to replenish the national stockpile during his first three years in office, but he also waited nearly two months after the first US coronavirus case to begin addressing its shortfalls.
Blaming Obama for the CDC’s testing failures is totally absurd
Perhaps the federal government’s biggest coronavirus-related failure was the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) testing mishaps. Instead of using kits developed by the World Health Organization (WHO), the CDC insisted on developing its own. But its initial tests didn’t work reliably, resulting in a delay that allowed the virus to spread across the country in a mostly undetected manner in February and early March.
As previously mentioned, Trump on Sunday tried to blame Obama for this. Watch:
"We inherited a lot of garbage ... horrible ventilators" -- Trump responds to a second question from ultra-sycophantic OAN, this one about coronavirus testing failures, by trying to shift blame to Obama (Obama left office in 2017 and the virus didn't reach the US until 2020) pic.twitter.com/II60SLGOrn
But Trump’s talking point that the CDC “had obsolete tests, old tests, broken tests” because of Obama makes absolutely no sense.
A test for the novel coronavirus obviously couldn’t be developed before the virus was discovered, which first happened in China in late 2019 — nearly three years after Obama left office. Responsibility for the CDC’s decision not to use the WHO coronavirus test and its subsequent failure to develop its own in January and February rest entirely with the organization and its leadership, including CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, whom Trump appointed to the role in March 2018.
Obama literally provided Trump with a blueprint
In addition, the Trump administration failed to follow a detailed pandemic response playbook put together by Obama’s National Security Council in 2016. A recent report from Politico detailed how following that document’s guidance could’ve resulted in the Trump administration responding in a quicker and more decisive manner:
The playbook also repeatedly urges officials to question official numbers about the viral spread. “What is our level of confidence on the case detection rate?” reads one question. “Is diagnostic capacity keeping up?”But across January and much of February, Trump administration officials publicly insisted that their diagnostic efforts were sufficient to detect coronavirus. Officials now privately concede that the administration’s well-documented testing problems have contributed to the outbreak’s silent spread across the United States, and health experts say that diagnostic capacity is only now in late March catching up to the need.
In a subsequent section, the playbook details steps to take if there’s evidence that the virus is spreading among humans, which the World Health Organization concluded by Jan. 22, or the U.S. government declared a public health emergency, which HHS Secretary Alex Azar did on Jan. 31.
Under that timeline, the federal government by late January should have been taking a lead role in “coordination of workforce protection activities including… [personal protective equipment] determination, procurement and deployment.” Those efforts are only now getting underway, health workers and doctors say.
Unnamed Trump officials quoted in the piece provide a variety of excuses for why the 2016 playbook was discarded — “it’s quite dated and has been superseded by strategic and operational biodefense policies published since,” one said — but let’s be real. The thought of using a playbook developed in the Obama years is antithetical to everything Trump is. Even if following it would’ve been in the best interests of the country, he wouldn’t do it.
Perhaps the truest thing Trump has said during his presidency was this remark on March 13: “I don’t take responsibility at all.” Part of that approach to governance involves finding others to blame when things go wrong. In the case of the coronavirus, Trump’s list of scapegoats has included the media, Democratic governors, the WHO, China, and now Obama.
Even if blaming Obama doesn’t make any sense (and it doesn’t), Trump clearly thinks it’s a politically useful talking point that takes some of the heat off him (and perhaps shifts some to Joe Biden). For this president, what matters is saying what’s necessary to win the news cycle — logical coherence or even a chronological sense of time be damned.
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Yes indeed. And makes the oil industry's purchase of the GOP look like an excellent investment
Low gas prices in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, on March 30. | Derek Davis/Portland Press Herald/Getty Images
Oil and gas companies were already facing structural problems before Covid-19 and are in long-term decline.
Update, June 29: Chesapeake Energy Corp., a massive US oil and gas company that led the fracking boom, has filed for Chapter 11 protection in a bankruptcy court in Texas following the collapse of energy demand in the Covid-19 crisis. The following post, first published April 20, explains why companies like it faced challenges predating the pandemic. (It’s not clear whether Chesapeake received stimulus funds before filing for bankruptcy.)
As countries across the world have gone into lockdown in response to Covid-19, economies are in free fall. Almost every sector is taking a hit, hemorrhaging jobs and value. And almost every sector will be shaped, for years to come, by the speed, amount, and nature of public assistance it receives. There is a finite amount of time, resources, and political will available to get economies going again; not every sector will get what it wants or needs.
In short, the decisions legislators make in response to the coronavirus crisis will have an enormous influence on what kind of economies emerge on the other side.
In this post, I take a look at why it is equally shortsighted for President Trump and congressional Republicans to remain so devoted to the fossil fuel industry.
The dominant narrative is still that fossil fuels are a pillar of the US economy, with giant companies like Exxon Mobilproducing revenue and jobs that the US can’t afford to do without. Even among those eager to address climate change by movingpast fossil fuels to clean energy— a class that includes a majority of Americans — there is a lingering mythology that US fossil fuels are, to use the familiar phrase, too big to fail.
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
President Donald Trump, flanked by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, left, and Chevron CEO Mike Wirth, meets with energy sector CEOs at the White House on April 3.
But the position of fossil fuels in the US economy is less secure than it might appear. In fact, the fossil fuel industry is facing substantial structural challenges that will be exacerbated by, but will not end with, the Covid-19 crisis. For years, the industry has been shedding value, taking on debt, losing favor among financial institutions and investors, and turning more and more to lobbying governments to survive.
It is, in short, a turkey. CNBC financial analyst Jim Cramerput it best, back in late January, before Covid-19 had even become a crisis in the US: “I’m done with fossil fuels. They’re done. They’re just done.”
“We’re in the death knell phase,” he said. “The world has turned on [fossil fuels].”
Cramer’s take is not yet conventional wisdom, but he’s right. Evidence in support appears in an April report from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) called “Pandemic Crisis, Systemic Decline.” Let’s walk through it.
Fossil fuels are furiously lobbying for, and receiving, largesse from the US government
The UK-based think tank InfluenceMap recently did an analysis that tracks corporate lobbying in the face of the Covid-19 crisis. It found that, across the globe, the oil and gas sector has been the most active in lobbying for interventions, seeking, as CIEL summarizes, “direct and indirect support, including bailouts, buyouts, regulatory rollbacks, exemption from measures designed to protect the health of workers and the public, non-enforcement of environmental laws, and criminalization of protest, among others.” In Canada, Australia, and the UK, the industry is arguing that it must be subsidized and deregulated in order to survive.
In the US alone, the industry is seeking access to a range of stimulus funds, relief from a variety of pollution regulations, and use of the strategic petroleum reserve to bolster prices. Journalist Amy Westervelt is tracking at least a dozen other lobbying efforts. Recently the Federal Reserve changed its rules to allow bigger businesses access to “Main Street loans” (widely seen as a sop to oil and gas companies) and, as Emily Holden reports for the Guardian, records show that fossil fuel companies have already gotten $50 million in loans meant for small businesses.
The petrochemical and plastics industry, which is in large part an extension of the oil and gas industry, is exploiting the crisis as well. It has lobbied the federal government to declare an official preference for single-use plastic bags and suggested that more fresh produce should be wrapped in plastic.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP/Getty Images
The petrochemical industry has lobbied the federal government to declare an official preference for single-use plastic bags.
Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
President Trump delivers a speech on energy sector jobs at the Shell Chemicals Petrochemical Complex in Monaca, Pennsylvania, on August 13, 2019.
During a supply glut driven by historically low prices, the Interior Department is rushing to lease federal land for oil and gas development, despite an anemic response, rock-bottom prices, and calls from conservative and taxpayer groups to suspend leasing in the face of the coronavirus.
Across the board, the administration is doing everything it can to help fossil fuels. But it’s a mug’s game. The industry is faltering for reasons that well predate Covid-19.
Fossil fuels were already facing structural problems before the coronavirus
US coal is in terminal decline, for reasons I’ve written about many times before. No amount of stimulus money or weaker pollution regulations can save it.
But on the surface, things look different for oil and gas. Thanks to fracking, production has been booming for the past decade, vaulting the US ahead of Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the the world’s leading oil and gas producer.
And the same goes for petrochemicals and especially plastics, which have been forecast to be the main drivers of rising petroleum demand in coming years. The industry has issued rosy projections of plastics’ growth and invested $200 billion in new petrochemical and plastics infrastructure.
But dig below the surface and things don’t look so good.
First, fracking was a financial wreck long before Covid-19 hit. US fracking operations have been losing money for a decade, to the tune of around $280 billion. Overproduction has produced a supply glut, low prices, and an accumulating surplus in storage.
CIEL reports:
Since 2015, over 200 drillers have gone bankrupt, with 32 declaring bankruptcy in 2019. At the beginning of 2020, the industry continued to struggle as natural gas prices remained low due to sluggish demand growth. By the end of the first quarter, another seven drillers had declared bankruptcy, six additional drillers had their credit outlook downgraded, and several major banks had written down the expected value of many drillers’ reserves. A recent analysis from Rystad Energy indicated that, at prevailing oil and gas prices, almost all new fracking wells drilled would lose money.
Even as its prospects grow dimmer, the enormous debt the industry has taken on over the years is coming back to bite it. Some $40 billion will come due this year alone, and around $200 billion in the next four years.
Second, both oil and gas prices were persistently low leading into 2019. Due to oversupply and mild winters in the US and Europe, there is a glut of both natural gas and oil, such that the entire world’s spare oil storage is in danger of being filled. Many big oil deals in “frontier countries” with as-yet-unexploited reserves, like Guyana, Argentina, and Mozambique, are falling through as low prices drag on.
Third, renewable energy and electric vehicles are threatening oil and gas’s dominance in both transportation, which represents 70 percent of global demand, and electricity. Natural gas’s status as a “bridge fuel” in the power sector is in increasing doubt; since 2014, orders for new gas turbines (to generate power) have fallen by half. As for transportation, a recent report from the international banking group BNP Paribas concluded that “the economics of oil for gasoline and diesel vehicles versus wind- and solar-powered EVs are now in relentless and irreversible decline.”
Sven Hoppe/picture alliance/Getty Images
An electric car at a charging station in Bavaria, Germany, on March 26, 2020.
Fourth, oil and gas majors are revealing their own weakness by writing down assets — effectively conceding that certain reserves cannot be profitably exploited. In 2019, Chevron wrote down $11 billion worth; Spanish oil company Repsol recently wrote down $5 billion worth. Exxon Mobil, after adding Canadian tar sands assets to its books in 2017, reversed course and wrote down 3.2 billion barrels last year.
Fifth, financial institutions — “institutional and retail investors, banks, insurers, and credit rating agencies” — are catching wind of fossil fuels’ weakness and beginning to back away. Many, like Wells Fargo, BlackRock, the European Investment Bank, and the World Bank Group, are restricting investments in carbon-intensive projects. As of March 2020, asset investors worth $12 trillion had declared that they would divest from fossil fuels.
As financial institutions divest, the ones still invested in carbon-intensive projects face increasing vulnerability to lawsuits charging them with ignoring material risks. “As the risks of investing in the oil and gas sector become ever more apparent,” CIEL writes, “more and more investors subject to fiduciary duties will likely choose to steer clear of these companies.”
Like these other dismal trends, the financial turn from fossil fuels was underway well before Covid-19. Over the past decade, companies in the sector have spent more on stock buybacks and dividends than they have brought in through revenue, leading to a greater and greater debt burden. Declining confidence in the sector has made it the worst-performing sector on the S&P Index.
S&P Dow Jones IndicesThe Dow Jones Index (black line) vs. the Dow Jones Oil & Gas Index (blue line), as of April 17, 2020.
Finally, plastics, the great hope of the oil and gas sector, do not appear to be growing fast enough to justify the industry’s optimistic projections. Much of the US plastics industry is geared for export, but countries across the world (127 and counting) are adopting restrictions on single-use plastics. The most recent such restrictions were adopted by China, the world’s largest plastic producer and consumer. Plastics, like oil and gas, are suffering from the dual malady of overexpansion and underconsumption.
As an example that encompasses all these structural problems, CIEL cites Exxon Mobil. The company’s plan for growth involves growth in its petrochemical operations, which is now in doubt; fracking in the Permian Basin, which is now in doubt; and expanding oil production in Guyana, which is now (owing to political instability) in doubt.
All these doubts are converging as Moody’s recently revised the company’s outlook to negative. It fell out of the S&P’s top 10 for the first time, its stock hit its lowest price in a decade, the rapid rise of renewables and electric vehicles rendered billions (and perhaps soon trillions) of dollars of its assets worthless, and it is keeping shareholders happy with debt-financed dividends. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found that over the past decade, Exxon Mobil has spent $64.5 billion more on payouts to stockholders than it earned in free cash flow. That can’t go on much longer.
Again: All of these structural trends predate Covid-19. But the global lockdown in response to the virus has accelerated all of them.
Oil and gas are caught in a historic downturn
Into this already dismal situation for fossil fuels came the virus and the subsequent lockdown. The vertiginous plunge in consumer demand has hit every sector of the economy, but oil and gas, already facing oversupply and persistent low prices, were particularly vulnerable.
“Oil, gas, and petrochemical stocks have been affected more rapidly and much more deeply than almost any other sector,” CIEL writes. “The oil and gas sector lost more than 45% of its total value from the beginning of January to early April 2020.”
The already declining stocks of Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, and Occidental Petroleum were sent tumbling even faster. In July 2014, Exxon stock hit a high of $107; as of early April 2020, it was at $42, its lowest level in decades. (On June 29, it was at $44.)
Transportation represents 70 percent of petroleum consumption, but no one is moving. Rystad Energy estimates that as of March 2020, global traffic is down 40 percent. As lockdowns remain, that number will likely drop further.
Air travel has been the fastest-growing source of demand for transport fuels, but no one is flying. “In the final week of March 2020,” CIEL writes, “commercial air traffic was almost 63% lower than in 2019.”
Christina Animashaun/Vox
Public health officials warn that there could be periodic outbreaks for months or even years. Meanwhile, there are rapid advances being made everywhere in the infrastructure, technology, and practices of working remotely from home. It’s entirely possible that auto and air travel won’t reach their pre-virus levels in the US for years, if ever.
Travel by ship is also taking a hit. Cruise ships, beset by a series of viral horror stories, have suspended operations and many analysts doubt they will ever fully recover.
Meanwhile, oversupply, exacerbated by the drop in demand, is taxing the nation’s storage capacity — the International Energy Agency says global capacity is about 85 percent full. “Nearly all observers have concluded that at projected levels of demand destruction,” CIEL writes, “the total global capacity for storing unneeded oil and gas will soon be exceeded.” At that point, many producers will be forced to simply shut down operations and write-downs will accelerate.
On top of all this has come a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, competing for the shrinking supply left over by the US supply glut. Global oil prices were at $69 per barrel in January 2020. The price of a barrel of Canadian tar sands oil appears headed into negative prices, as are Texas oil and natural gas in some parts of the US, for May futures (June prices are higher). The so-called OPEC+ group of oil-producing nations (OPEC + Russia) recently agreed to a 10 million barrel a day cut in production, but analysts agree that it is unlikely to be sufficient to stabilize prices.
(In the hours after this article was first published on April 20, oil futures for May fell to negative prices. Mind-boggling.)
Igor Onuchin/TASS/Getty Images
Freight trains filled with oil in Krasnodar, Russia, on April 14. As supply exceeds demand and oil prices fall, oil producers find themselves confronted with storage challenges.
When storage capacity runs out, producers are forced to pay people to take oil off their hands. (Raise your hand if you had “negative oil prices” on your 21st-century bingo card.) Even if storage doesn’t completely run out, it will be close to full, serving to suppress prices, for years. Petrochemicals and plastics don’t have it much better, with major investors delaying or dropping out of projects left and right.
“In the medium term,” CIEL writes, “the prospect of a full recovery for many of these revenue streams is, at best, uncertain, and, in many cases, unlikely.” Fossil fuels and petrochemicals could struggle for years.
And even if they eventually manage to achieve something like their pre-virus trajectory, that trajectory was sloping downward. As CIEL summarizes: “the pandemic exposes and exacerbates fundamental weaknesses throughout the sector that both predate the current crisis and will outlast it.”
Wasting stimulus money on fossil fuels makes no sense, so Trump will probably do it
Slowly but surely, the world is beginning to take global warming seriously, shifting attention and investment to materials and sources of energy that do not produce greenhouse gas emissions. As more and more jurisdictions, institutions, and investors turn away from fossil fuels, explicitly citing climate change, those left holding carbon-intensive assets will become targets of increasingly intense legal and civic activism holding them responsible for the damages.
CIEL concludes with recommendations to investors, frontier countries, and local communities: Take heed of fossil fuels’ long-term weakness when making decisions about the future. CIEL also argues that public officials “should not waste limited response and recovery resources on bailouts, debt relief, or similar supports for oil, gas, and petrochemical companies.”
Given the well-established inclinations of Trump and congressional Republicans, that recommendation is likely to fall on deaf ears, at least in the US. If Democrats do not muster the courage to stop them — and it does not seem they will — the GOP is likely to continue showering the fossil fuel industry with favors while dismissing aid to the clean energy industry as frivolous.
Erin Schaff/Pool/Getty Images
President Trump signs the $2 trillion stimulus bill on March 27, 2020. Not a crew likely to turn their backs on fossil fuels.
At best, they can slow down the transition to clean energy a bit. They cannot stop it. Adding stimulus money to fossil fuels’ already subsidy-rich diet will allow a little more pollution and a little more damage to public health for a little longer, but it’s only a delay. Meanwhile, other countries will be establishing a commanding position in some of the biggest growth industries of the 21st century.
It would be a shame to emerge from this crisis still clinging to the past rather than facing, and preparing for, the future.
Editor’s note, May 1: This piece has been updated to note new Federal Reserve rules to allow bigger businesses access to “Main Street loans.”
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