James.galbraith

This week’s panels have been formatted to provide Sparky with proper social distancing! 

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Novak Djokovic, currently the #1 ranked tennis player in the world, has come out as an anti-vaxxer during an online chat with Serbian athletes.

Said Djokovic (translation via Reuters): “Personally I am opposed to vaccination and I wouldn’t want to be forced by someone to take a vaccine in order to be able to travel. But if it becomes compulsory, what will happen? I will have to make a decision. I have my own thoughts about the matter and whether those thoughts will change at some point, I don’t know. Hypothetically, if the season was to resume in July, August or September, though unlikely, I understand that a vaccine will become a requirement straight after we are out of strict quarantine and there is no vaccine yet.”

A COVID-19 vaccine is likely 12-18 months away, according to health officials, though an experimental one for high risk groups such as health workers could be ready sooner.

The Guardian reports: “‘It really depends on what you mean by ‘having a vaccine’,’ says Marian Wentworth, president and CEO of Management Sciences for Health, a Massachusetts-based global not-for-profit organisation that seeks to build resilient health systems, and a long-time observer of vaccine development. ‘If you mean one that can be used in a mass vaccination campaign, allowing us all to get on with our lives, then 12 to 18 months is probably right.’ But in terms of an experimental vaccine that is deemed safe and effective enough to be rolled out in a more limited way – to high-risk groups such as health workers, say – that could be ready within weeks or months, under emergency rules developed by drug regulatory agencies and the World Health Organization in the context of the recent Ebola epidemics in Africa.”

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Making it the first major retailer to go under amid the coronavirus crisis, Neiman Marcus is set to file for bankruptcy this week, according to sources who spoke to Reuters..

Reuters reports: “The debt-laden Dallas-based company has been left with few options after the pandemic forced it to temporarily shut all 43 of its Neiman Marcus locations, roughly two dozen Last Call stores and its two Bergdorf Goodman stores in New York. Neiman Marcus is in the final stages of negotiating a loan with its creditors totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, which would sustain some of its operations during bankruptcy proceedings, according to the sources. It has also furloughed many of its roughly 14,000 employees.”

JC Penney is also mulling a bankruptcy filing, Business Insider reported this week: “Macy’s also furloughed all of its employees and is reportedly teaming up with a financial consultancy to consider options, while CEO Jeff Gennette is foregoing his salary. Like JCPenney, Macy’s has also faced a difficult past few years.”

The post Neiman Marcus to File for Bankruptcy Amid Coronavirus Losses: REPORT appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

If you’re hearing the siren call of aesthetic change or just feeling annoyed by the relentless flopping of bangs in your eyes, you may be itching for a trim. But because most salons are temporarily closed, it has become almost impossible to get a professional haircut. If you’re considering taking matters into your own hands, read this first. We asked four professional stylists to tell us about their best tips and tools for anyone who may be tempted to cut their hair at home.

President Donald Trump speaks at his April 18 coronavirus press conference. | Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images

A Washington Post report finds the Trump administration was given inside information from WHO during the early days of the pandemic.

More than a dozen United States experts were working at the World Health Organization and feeding the Trump administration information last December as the coronavirus spread through China, according to reporting by the Washington Post.

That reporting stands in contrast with President Donald Trump’s accusations that the WHO spent late 2019 “severely mismanaging” the global response to the virus — and that it was “covering up” information to paper over China’s inability to contain Covid-19. And it comes days after the president announced he would be freezing US funding for the WHO in the midst of a global health crisis in retaliation for these alleged failings.

In fact, according to the Post, Trump administration officials helped guide WHO policy — and worked to ensure the US was informed of new coronavirus developments as soon as the international body learned about them.

A top official from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was part of the committee that advised the WHO on whether to declare a global public health emergency in late January. Two US scientists were part of the WHO’s information gathering mission to China in mid-February. A CDC official has compiled daily reports of outbreaks in consultation with WHO counterparts and passed along information to higher-ups in the organization through daily briefing calls. And upcoming WHO plans and announcements were reportedly shared days in advance with top US officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar.

The WHO has been criticized for its handling of the pandemic — including whether the organization waited too long to declare a global emergency and if it has been too liberal in its praise for China’s response — but the Post’s reporting indicates that lack of early communication of the threat to the US was likely not one of its missteps.

Trump claims otherwise, telling reporters last Tuesday, “The reality is that the WHO failed to adequately obtain ... and share information in a timely and transparent fashion.”

He has repeated this allegation — along with a claim the WHO didn’t want him to institute a travel ban — a number of times in recent days, seemingly in an attempt to blame the international organization for the US’s current coronavirus crisis.

Trump has used the WHO to shift blame from his own administration

Trump has been criticized for weeks over his response to the coronavirus in the US, which his critics — and most Americans — have argued was dangerously slow. While weathering this criticism, the president has increasingly looked to the WHO as a party to blame for any of the US coronavirus shortcomings.

Trump’s frustrations with the organization seemed to begin in late January, when top officials in the WHO said governments don’t need to “unnecessarily interfere with international travel and trade” to stop the spread of the disease, after Trump announced he would be partially banning travel from China. The organization didn’t directly criticize the US, which wasn’t the only country imposing travel restrictions at the time.

“Travel restrictions can cause more harm than good by hindering info-sharing, medical supply chains and harming economies,” said the World Health Organization director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, at the time.

In early April, faced with growing scrutiny over his early response, Trump became increasingly explicit in his critiques of the organization, tweeting that the WHO “really blew it.”

“For some reason, funded largely by the United States, yet very China centric,” he wrote. “We will be giving that a good look.”

As Vox’s Lois Parshley reported, the criticism didn’t end there:

Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus task force coordinator, and Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration under Trump, criticized its handling of China’s data and transparency. Gottlieb told Face the Nation, “Going forward, the WHO needs to commit to an after-action report that specifically examines what China did or didn’t tell the world and how that stymied the global response to this.”

Senate Republicans, meanwhile, on April 13 announced a plan to investigate the origins of the virus and the global response, including the WHO’s decisions. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chair Ron Johnson told Politico, “We need to know what role WHO might have had in trying to cover this thing up.”

Trump’s threat to stop sending the millions of dollars the country sends annually to the WHO would be a devastating blow to the organization, which is helping to coordinate the global response to Covid-19. The US is the organization’s single largest funder, providing 22 percent of all member state assessed contributions and often hundreds of millions more in voluntary contributions.

It’s not clear whether he can stop the $116 million that’s been appropriated to the agency by Congress, but it seems he may be allowed to reroute the funding to other organizations or withhold it until next year.

The WHO may continue to be a scapegoat for the Trump administration, but experts have urged him not to take it out on an agency they largely agree has avoided major missteps.

“How can you threaten to withdraw funding from the world’s leading global health agency in the midst of a pandemic, with tens of thousands of people dying?” Lawrence Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University and a past critic of WHO’s director-general, told Parshley. “It’s utterly irresponsible.”

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While Republican lawmakers continue even now to prop up Donald Trump despite Trump's obvious and dangerous incompetence, during the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, we appear to have already arrived at the point where state governors are being forced not just to recreate what the federal government was expected to do in previous national crises but to do so behind Trump's incompetent and corrupt back. In secret. To avoid having him damage the efforts.

Last week, The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker was planning to ship "millions of masks and gloves from China" back to his state via charter jets, but was keeping the details of those flights secret "out of fear the Trump administration might seize the cargo for the federal stockpile." Now, reports Forbes, the White House is responding in the usual Trump White House way: sending a sniveling underling out to complain about it.

White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere broke with usual Trump spokesman tradition to actually put his own name to his quote, sniffing to RealClearPolitics that Pritzker "through ignorance or incompetence or a propensity to politicize" was simply wrong when Pritzker told CNN his state had gotten "very little help" and that he'd "given up on any promises that had been made" by Trump.

Despite this rare moment of evidence that the "White House press office" is a thing that still exists, however, those insults appear to be the sum total of Team Trump's argument against Pritzker. On the core point—that the states are now on their own, and that Trump won't be helping after publicly promising a series of things that all collapsed quickly afterwards—even Trump himself is in agreement. The governors are on their own, Trump says, with regard to testing. They're on their own when it comes to getting supplies, with Jared Kushner's "federal stockpile" acting only as indecipherably-managed backup. They're on their own when it comes to making reopening decisions, because Trump wants it on someone else's head if those decisions turn out to be wrong.

The worst thing, though, is that Pritzker is not wrong in his fears that Team Trump would actively try to confiscate medical supplies his state was ordering. Federal officials stepped in to buy 500 much-needed ventilators out from under Colorado state officials, only to showily announce that they would be providing just 100 of those ventilators to the state by request of a Trump-allied Republican senator. Supplies have been "confiscated" in foreign airports and U.S. ports by unidentified federal interlopers.

Rather than provide supplies to the states directly, it appears the Trump administration is instead releasing the acquired emergency supplies to the for-profit private sector, forcing the states to compete with each other in bidding wars to get them.

So Pritzer's plan to keep state purchases of emergency supplies secret from the federal government, then, seems not just appropriate but necessary. There is no assurance that those flights would not be intercepted, if the federal government knew of them. There is no assurance Illinois would get the supplies back, if so intercepted—at least, not without paying considerably more cash to whatever private company they were redirected towards.

It may be that each of the states begin doing this. It is not just that Trump and his team has been grossly incompetent in the face of crisis; their incompetence allowed the pandemic to spread explosively and has made the crisis worse every step of the way. White House lies have hindered planning efforts, as states are told to expect "4 million tests" or other actions that evaporate into thin air soon afterwards. White House corruption has seemingly prioritized Republican leaders and Republican states for what supplies they were able to muster. Trump's own personal dishonesty and narcissism has led him to attack governors who have taken strong measures to combat the pandemic's spread, weakening public trust in those measures and spreading gibbering conspiracy nonsense from his mouth and Twitter feed.

If Republicans will not remove Trump even as his incompetence turns into the cause of death for tens of thousands of Americans—so far—then state governors will have to save Americans behind Trump's back. If the White House press office wants to snivel about that, they are welcome to do so. Heaven knows nobody else in the building is doing anything useful.

No pandemic is going to stop the Trump administration from pouring billions of dollars into building a needless border wall, apparently. And once you’re blowing through money at the rate of $20 million per mile, why not up it to $30 million per mile and send that money to a construction company owned by big Republican donors?

One construction firm, BFBC, just got $569 million in contract modifications from the Army for building an extremely specific 17.17 miles of wall in two California locations. It’s not BFBC’s first such contract, either. The company has now gotten over $1 billion for 37 miles of wall, working out to an average of $27 million per mile.

The new $569 million no-bid contract came about because, the Army says, BFBC was “mobilized and working… in close proximity” to where the new 17.17 miles of wall will be.

Timothy Barnard, the owner of BFBC’s parent firm, Barnard Construction, joined his wife in giving a maximum $5,600 contribution to Donald Trump’s reelection campaign in 2019, the Daily Beast reports. Over the past four years, they’ve given more than $50,000 to the Montana Republican State Central Committee. Barnard and other top executives have also given substantial amounts to specific Montana Republican candidates, and Barnard has given money out of state to Sens. Martha McSally, John Cornyn, Cory Gardner, and Thom Tillis.

There’s a pandemic going on, but the wall must keep going up. There aren’t enough masks and gowns and ventilators and millions of people are newly unemployed and struggling to stay afloat, but $33 million per mile of pointless wall is just something the Trump administration is going to keep doing, no matter what.

Stephen Moore, a member of President Donald Trump’s council to reopen the country, said he is helping to plan a “drive-in” to protest Wisconsin’s stay-at-home orders.

“They’re going to shut down the Capitol — shh, don’t tell anybody,” Moore, a Trump ally who also serves as an outside economic adviser to the president, said in a video posted to a libertarian think tank’s YouTube page earlier this week. "We need to be the Rosa Parks here and protest against these government injustices,” he added.

The economics commentator told CBS News on Friday that he believed the White House had waited too long to reopen the country and the country’s economy couldn’t wait for more widespread coronavirus testing to become available.

Moore’s plan comes as scores of protesters have taken to streets across some of the U.S.’s state capitals, railing against governors' shutdown policies that they argue harm the economy and Americans’ constitutional rights.

Trump announced on Thursday a three-phased approach to reopen parts of the country before breaking with the new guidelines on Friday in a series of tweets that called on some Democratic governors to "LIBERATE" their locked-down states.

Protesters in Wisconsin announced a “Freedom Rally” to be held on April 24 after Gov. Tony Evers on Thursday extended the state’s stay-at-home order until May 26.

Moore said in the video he had spoken to an unnamed donor in the state who promised to “pay the bail and legal fees” for anyone who gets arrested during the rally.

“We’re going to see a lot more of [the protests],” Moore predicted. “So, this is a great time, gentleman and ladies, for civil disobedience."

"I actually think we should have started this a week or two ago,” Moore said in Friday's interview with CBS’s Major Garrett. "I don't think we can wait two or three or four more weeks for testing … The rate of infection to the economy is very similar to the rate of infection of this disease."

Business leaders on Wednesday called on Trump during his council’s first conference call to increase the scale and scope of coronavirus testing before people felt safe to leave their homes.

Moore, who has argued the Federal Reserve should “be responsive” to the president, was picked by Trump for a seat on the central bank’s board in March 2019. The former Trump campaign adviser withdrew from consideration in May 2019 after his selection spurred public and private criticism, including from many GOP lawmakers who expressed wariness over disparaging comments he made about women and fellow Republicans.

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Beaches in some parts of Florida reopened Friday evening and were reportedly flooded with people within 30 minutes. Accordingly, “Florida morons” trended on Twitter.

Jacksonville Beach reopened 26 minutes ago. This is a live picture. pic.twitter.com/tC6voQ3BAn

— Travis Akers (@travisakers) April 17, 2020

CNBC reports: “Mayor Lenny Curry said Duval County beaches were reopening Friday afternoon with restricted hours, and they can only be used for walking, biking, hiking, fishing, running, swimming, taking care of pets and surfing. The beaches will be open from 6 to 11 a.m. and 5 to 8 p.m., Curry said in a video posted to social media. Gatherings of 50 or more people are prohibited and people must still practice social distancing.”

And here’s Florida Governor Ron DeSantis putting on his mask… pic.twitter.com/YKLHu7nuBo

— Rex Chapman (@RexChapman) April 18, 2020

CNN adds: “The scene at Jacksonville Beach wasn’t one of caution in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. Crowds cheered and flooded the beach when police took the barriers down. People were seen swimming, biking, surfing, running and fishing.Social distancing seemed to be the last thing on anyone’s mind Friday. Some residents told CNN not being able to go to the beach was “torture.” People were out with their towels, coolers and sunbathing. There were very few masks.”

According to the Palm Beach Post, there are currently 24, 753 cases of COVID-19 in Florida: “There have been 726 deaths and 3,649 are currently hospitalized. Orange County (Orlando) has 1,158 cases and 23 deaths. Hillsborough County (Tampa) has 924 cases and 19 deaths. Duval County (Jacksonville) has 817 cases and 15 deaths.”

#Florida beach is crowded within 30 MINUTES of reopening at 5pm, despite state recording 1,413 new #COVID19 cases – its highest one-day increase since the pandemic crisis began #floridabeaches #FloridaMorons #SaturdayMorning #SaturdayThoughts #StayAtHomehttps://t.co/j85ET7wcMe pic.twitter.com/Y9OTppl9Co

— Evan Kirstel #StayHome #RemoteWork (@evankirstel) April 18, 2020

The post ‘Florida Morons’ Trends as People Crowd Reopened Beaches Amid COVID-19 Crisis appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T falsely reported to the Federal Communications Commission that it offers broadband in nearly 3,600 census blocks spread across parts of 20 states. AT&T disclosed the error to the FCC in a filing a week ago. The filing provides "a list of census blocks AT&T previously reported as having broadband deployment at speeds of at least 25Mbps downstream/3 Mbps upstream that AT&T has removed from its Form 477 reports." The 78-page list includes nearly 3,600 blocks. With Form 477 reports, ISPs are required to tell the FCC which census blocks they offer service in. The FCC uses the data to track broadband-deployment progress and, crucially, to decide which census blocks get government funding for deploying Internet service. AT&T falsely reporting broadband-data coverage could prevent other ISPs from getting that funding and leave Americans without broadband access. When contacted by Ars, AT&T said the mistake was caused by a software problem. "The updates to the census blocks address an issue with a third party's geocoding software. There has been no change to our service area and this doesn't affect the service we provide our customers," AT&T told Ars.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While "evangelical" leader Jerry Falwell Jr.'s Liberty University is getting itself sued by its own students for not refunding room and board money they paid based on Falwell's assurances that the campus would be staying open despite the pandemic, fellow evangelical Rev. Franklin Graham is pushing back against the bad press generated when it came to light that his own organization, Samaritan's Purse, was requiring workers to sign a pledge declaring themselves Christians and opposed to same-sex marriage at their Central Park field hospital for COVID-19 patients.

Both leaders are adopting the usual conservative approach. They are the ones being oppressed. Their critics are the ones oppressing them. The New York Times brings us Graham's version. In a Facebook post, Graham praised the work his group was doing in constructing an emergency field hospital in Central Park, which has now admitted over 100 patients, he lambasted those objecting to the pledge requirement.

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"In a country that cherishes freedom of speech and religion we don’t object to opposition or criticism of our beliefs as a Christian organization. What we do object to is being harassed into diverting precious resources of time and energy and personnel away from serving COVID-19 patients in New York City in order to respond to demands for documents and other information from eight Democratic members of Congress, the Human Rights Commission and the Reclaim Pride Coalition—all while the death toll in New York continues to climb. If any of these groups had funded and erected their own emergency field hospitals to serve COVID-19 patients in Central Park, we would join what we believe would be most New Yorkers—and Americans—in applauding and praying for them, not harassing them."

If it sounds Trumpian, it is. Democrats asking us about bigotry and possible wrongdoing are "diverting" our attention from being able to effectively save people's lives, suggests Graham. Your focus on our behaviors really needs to stop, unless you want blood on your hands.

Although Graham identifies "demands for documents" as the "harassment" compelling him to air his grievances, the Times notes that his post followed in the hours after Mount Sinai Health Systems, which is partnering with his organization to operate the Central Park field hospital, told lawmakers that it would be requiring workers to sign a second pledge reconfirming they would not discriminate against patients. Graham no doubt saw that move as personal insult.

Meanwhile, Liberty University head Jerry Falwell Jr. has focused his ire more directly on the press, because without the press none of you bastards would even know what he was up to. The media, a separate Times story tells us, is "authoritarian" like "Nazi Germany," Falwell ranted to a far-right radio interviewer. He's been threatening lawsuits against outlets that file stories he doesn't like. He's had campus police issue arrest warrants (for "misdemeanor trespassing") to a reporter and a photographer who entered the Liberty University campus for the purposes of, you know, reporting.

And like all True Christians and all Americans who value "Liberty" enough to put it in big, bold letters on the side of buildings, he left a late-night voicemail message for another Times reporter warning that reporter "you're in some serious trouble" for unspecified report-doing.

Falwell's remora-like attachment to Donald Trump appears to have both men now mimicking the behavior of the other. Trump is giving more lip service to Jesus of late than he has at any point in his weird and flamboyantly sinful life; Falwell is calling up reporters he doesn't like to berate them and is threatening nuisance lawsuits against outlets who report his doings.

A core premise of the evangelical far right is, after all, that they are oppressed. They are more oppressed than anyone else; by putting limits on their deep spiritual desire to oppress whoever they want to, it is everyone else who are the monsters. It's an unflattering look even for the average evangelical chair-sitter, but when the people who run their own international charities or universities or who keep their own private jets just in case Jesus comes back and needs an urgent lift somewhere, it just looks narcissistic and maladjusted. To put it politely.

Trump outside the White House on Wednesday. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Minimization and misinformation: Trump accuses the WHO of the same things he did.

President Donald Trump’s latest spin is that while he always took the coronavirus seriously, his early efforts to respond to it were hampered by World Health Organization misinformation and a lack of warnings from American government officials. He’s rewriting history.

On Friday morning, Trump, echoing something he saw on Fox News, accused the WHO of making “several claims about the CoronaVirus that ere either inaccurate or misleading” in January and February.

In fact, Trump was warned many times about the virus early on — both by officials from his government and from the WHO. But rather than heed those warnings, he spent January and February downplaying the threat. He told Americans they had nothing to worry about because his government had it under control. He only treated the pandemic with the seriousness it requires when it became undeniable that the country was headed into the crisis we’re now dealing with.

With a tough reelection fight looming and the economy in tatters, those facts are inconvenient for Trump. He’s now trying to prematurely move on from the coronavirus and put his slow response down the memory hole.

Trump has done the same thing he’s accusing the WHO of doing

America isn’t over the coronavirus hump yet. A record 4,591 people died from the virus in a 24-hour period ending Thursday evening. But Trump is cherry-picking statistics and ignoring the country’s lack of testing capacity to justify quickly reopening relatively unscathed parts of the country. And as he does that, he’s trying to change the topic from his administration’s performance to the WHO.

To be clear, it’s fair to criticize the WHO for a tweet it posted on January 14 citing “[p]reliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities” that found “no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission.” That turned out to be devastatingly wrong. But Trump should also look in the mirror.

On January 24, for instance, he publicly praised China’s handling of the coronavirus, saying the US “greatly appreciates their efforts and transparency.” Most experts now believe the Chinese government was hiding the full extent of the outbreak.

And if Trump’s criticism is that the WHO spread dangerous misinformation, then he’s on thin ice there as well. The president has regularly pushed unproven and potentially lethal drugs as miracle cures. On Thursday, he posted tweets encouraging anti-stay-at-home-order protests in Minnesota and Michigan that could become vectors for spreading the virus.

While Trump is now trying to cast the WHO as a villain, the reality is that the US coronavirus response would’ve been much more effective had he actually followed some of the organization’s key recommendations about testing and social distancing. Instead, Trump sat idly by while the virus spread across the country in a mostly undetected manner in February and only embraced social distancing in mid-March, when public healths experts begin to sound the alarm about the possibility that American hospitals could be overwhelmed by Covid-19 patients like ones in China and Italy were.

This isn’t to say the WHO is blameless. The organization can also be fairly criticized for waiting until January 30 to declare coronavirus a public health emergency. But that declaration had no discernible impact on Trump, who on that very same day proclaimed that “we think we have [the coronavirus] very well under control.”

“We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully,” Trump added. “But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us … that I can assure you.”

As we know now, the virus was anything but under control in the country at that time. But Trump didn’t just ignore the WHO — he also ignored warnings coming from his own government.

Trump was warned — but didn’t listen

During his press briefing on Thursday, Trump tried to portray himself as a victim. He described himself as “angry” because “people knew [the coronavirus outbreak] was happening and people didn’t want to talk about it.”

Those comments came days after Trump tried to push back on an in-depth New York Times report about his slow coronavirus response by tweeting that Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar “told me nothing” about the coronavirus until after Trump restricted travel from China — a commendable move but one that came after the virus was already spreading in the US.

Trump’s claim about Azar is at odds with what multiple unnamed senior administration officials told the Washington Post. From a report published on March 20:

Inside the White House, Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously, according to multiple officials with knowledge of meetings among those advisers and with the president.

Azar couldn’t get through to Trump to speak with him about the virus until Jan. 18, according to two senior administration officials. When he reached Trump by phone, the president interjected to ask about vaping and when flavored vaping products would be back on the market, the senior administration officials said.

Although Trump now wants people to believe he wasn’t adequately warned, that same Post report says intelligence agencies “were issuing ominous, classified warnings in January and February,” with one unnamed US official telling the paper that “Trump may not have been expecting this, but a lot of other people in the government were — they just couldn’t get him to do anything about it. ... The system was blinking red.”

It’s not just that one report, either. Trump also ignored White House memos prepared in January and February by his top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, including one addressed directly to him on February 23 warning in its very first sentence that “There is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”

Not only did Trump not heed that warning, but he did the opposite by telling Americans there was nothing to worry about. For instance, on February 26 — just three days after Navarro tried to sound the alarm — Trump held a news conference in which he suggested the coronavirus would soon go away on its own in the United States.

“When you have 15 [coronavirus cases], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” Trump said. (Less than two months later, the US now has nearly 700,000 cases and more than 31,000 deaths.)

On February 27, as the US confirmed case count stood at 15, Trump went even further, claiming of the coronavirus that “one day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear.”

He has now moved the goalposts from saying the virus will go away to insisting that if as many as 100,000 American deaths would be evidence he did a good job. He’s criticizing the WHO not because he has good-faith concerns about the organization, but because it’s a useful distraction that is being amplified by loyal media outlets like Fox News.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

One of Trump’s famous rallying cries was “build the wall.” It was that and something like, “Aren’t you afraid of brown people too?” When Trump came into office, he had the House and he had the Senate and he was gifted the Supreme Court. He used all of that unpopular support to … give tax breaks to the rich. He and his fellow GOP also shifted around some money to build symbolic walls that do nothing except waste money and time and resources.

The Washington Post reports that one such section of Trump’s new impenetrable wall was either breached or attempts at breaching it were made about 18 times between Sept. 27 and Oct. 27 of last year. Each time, the cost to fix the breach was $620, according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection records.

The Post was able to obtain the records through a Freedom of Information Act request. These 18 breaches and attempted breaches on a single section of wall over one month does not necessarily mean that it is the general rate that this kind of activity is happening along our Trumponian circus sideshow border wall. Border officials told the Post that the tallies they obtained were the result of smuggling operations, meaning that there is a good chance that any and all other breaches or attempted breaches might not have been recorded.

Considering that wind has been known to knock down some of Trump’s border wall, it would not be surprising to find out that most of what has been built in Trump’s name is as easily penetrated as Trump’s small mind is. But don’t you worry: according to officials, this section of wall is not fully operational yet—like the Death Star in Star Wars—but when it is it’ll be “the most advanced border wall system USBP has ever deployed.”

Deadly stupidity was on full display Friday in Minnesota, where MAGA-types held a rally outside the home of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. 

No social distancing. Very few masks. Plenty of reckless, perhaps even deadly behavior. All of it was on display today in Minnesota, and all of it was encouraged by Donald Trump and misinformation network Fox News. (You can read more about that at the link below.)

Watch as the 2016 “Fuck your feelings” MAGA crowd holds a 2020 “Fuck your life” party at the governor’s house.

The crowd has grown throughout the afternoon. It’s a death cult. 

I can’t help but notice a lot of these folks fit the criteria for those most at-risk. And look, I get it: This is frustrating for all of us. But until COVID-19 is contained, we simply cannot get back to life-as-usual. The disease will simply spike and spread again and we’ll be right back to exploding death rates. The number of deaths has jumped several hundred just since I shared the number this morning. According to Johns Hopkins, as of 3:47 PM ET on Friday, April 17, 2020, the number is 34,575 American lives lost. 

These aren’t just internet cranks turning up for these rallies—some of the folks on hand are elected officials (Republicans, of course). Take Jeremy Munson from the Minnesota House of Representatives. He’s having the time of his life mingling with his MAGA pals during a pandemic. 

And look, these super-duper, grassroots-y, not-at-all-coordinated with right-wing organizations MAGA-types already have t-shirts printed.

And in case you were wondering, Munson makes it clear he’s following orders. 

From taking away health care to slashing food assistance to holding rallies during the most deadly pandemic of modern times, the Republican Party has fully embraced its pro-death platform. 

This isn’t just a couple of cranks turning up. This is an effort being driven by the same cast of characters who created the artificial tea party nonsense. Click here to read more about today’s right-wing ecosystem and the eerily similar vibe to the 2009 tea party astroturf protests.

Business is booming for Medal.tv as house-bound users flock to the gaming startup, making it one of the rare coronavirus success stories. Half its employees are still taking salary cuts in the wake of the outbreak. From a report: In return, the 33-person company is offering those employees restricted stock units which will vest over one year. The company intends for employees to be able to sell those shares when Medal eventually closes its next round of financing. Timing on that: to be determined. "If everything goes well, not only does the company save money and slow down its cash burn, but the employees that exchange their salary for stock will have a bigger payout during our Series B round," said co-founder Pim de Witte. Medal is among a growing number of startups offering stock-for-salary trades to preserve cash as the tech industry reels and economic uncertainty mounts. Medal, which lets players clip and share snippets of games on social media, has doubled its user growth rate since shelter in place orders started. The company said while high earners were "strongly encouraged" to take the deal, the pay cut and stock option swap was voluntary. It's a move that only works for "employees who believe in the financial outlook of your company," De Witte said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

French President Emmanuel Macron (C) wears a face mask during the visit of the military field hospital outside the Emile Muller Hospital in Mulhouse, eastern France, on March 25, 2020 | Mathieu Cugnot/Pool/AFP via Getty Images

Germany followed the playbook for saving lives. France didn’t.

France and Germany, Europe’s two most powerful countries, have been hit hard by the coronavirus, with each approaching 150,000 confirmed cases. But as of April 17, France is near 18,000 dead from the infection, while Germany’s death toll has passed 4,000.

Which raises the question: How did two similarly sized countries, located right next to each other and with comparable levels of wealth and resources, end up with such starkly different outcomes?

The answer has a lot to do with how their respective governments responded to the crisis.

France had the continent’s first confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, but the French government failed for weeks to take decisive action to impose strict social distancing measures or promote large-scale testing. Germany, on the other hand, immediately began aggressively testing and tracking people with symptoms.

Now, France is under lockdown and has just extended it until May 11 at least. Meanwhile, Germany plans to reopen part of its economy next week.

The experiences of these two countries show that just having substantial national wealth and high-quality health care systems isn’t enough to keep citizens safe from the deadly coronavirus. Saving lives is also about how quickly, thoroughly, and effectively the government responds to the brewing crisis. Any delay, it seems, is very costly.

“Countries that were slow to respond have, so far, paid the price,” Thomas Bollyky, a global health expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, told me last month.

If there’s a lesson for world governments, then, it’s to be more like Germany — not France.

How Germany kept its coronavirus death rate so low

It’s not surprising that Germany has the world’s fifth-largest coronavirus outbreak. It’s in the middle of Europe and nearly borders Italy, which early on in the crisis became the continent’s epicenter. If the disease was going to spread, Germany was always going to be a likely victim.

What wasn’t predetermined, though, was its low death rate. That result came from a combination of luck and the government’s quick action.

Let’s start with the luck part.

Marieke Degen, the deputy spokesperson of Germany’s Robert Koch Institute, told me that the country’s earliest coronavirus carriers were skiers returning home from Austria and Italy. Health authorities say that older adults, especially those over 60 years old, are at risk of severe complications. Most skiers, however, don’t fit that age demographic. While some still got sick, then, the chance they would die from the disease was low.

That trend continues: The average age of an infected person in Germany is 49 years old, compared to about 62.5 years old in France.

It also helped that the vast majority of early cases were clustered in the western region of Heinsberg. That just happens to be near top German hospitals in Bonn, Düsseldorf, Cologne, and other cities, which means those patients were able to access the best care.

But young carriers in the area, even if they were asymptomatic, could spread the disease around the country to more vulnerable people. Why didn’t that happen on a wide scale?

Two words: testing and tracking.

“The reason why we in Germany have so few deaths at the moment compared to the number of infected can be largely explained by the fact that we are doing an extremely large number of lab diagnoses,” Christian Drosten, the chief virologist at the Charité hospital in Berlin, told the New York Times this month.

Germany has Europe’s best pharmaceutical industry, allowing it to respond quickly to disease outbreaks. In the case of Covid-19, German laboratories started accumulating testing kits as signs of a global spread became more real in early 2020. These labs were well stocked ahead of Germany’s first confirmed coronavirus case in February.

The Robert Koch Institute’s Degen told me that early testing helped the country’s public health officials get a better understanding of where the outbreaks were and how far the disease had spread before things got out of control. “This is probably why we started to see cases very early, and many cases, and also mild ones,” she said.

This also helps explain why the number of confirmed cases is so high but the number of deaths so small: hundreds of thousands are getting tested each week, and the vast majority of them won’t have a life-threatening case. Every subsequent test, then, makes the infection-to-death ratio smaller and smaller.

But that’s not all: Germany has also gone the extra mile to track those with the disease.

In the city of Heidelberg, for example, the New York Times reports that vehicles known locally as “corona taxis” transport physicians to the homes of those who have been sick for five to six days.

“They take a blood test, looking for signs that a patient is about to go into a steep decline. They might suggest hospitalization, even to a patient who has only mild symptoms; the chances of surviving that decline are vastly improved by being in a hospital when it begins,” the New York Times’s Katrin Bennhold wrote.

This not only helps authorities keep tabs on a known patient, but also enables them to intervene at a critical point in the disease’s progression, thereby reducing the chances of death.

“Testing and tracking is the strategy that was successful in South Korea and we have tried to learn from that,” Hendrik Streeck, who leads the University of Bonn’s virology institute, told the New York Times.

It appears Germany plans to keep up intense tracking for the foreseeable future. “Once...we are down to, let’s say, a couple of hundred cases per day or even better, less than a hundred cases, we will try to follow up on every case and get in touch with everyone who has been in touch with those new cases, quarantine and test them,” Karl Lauterbach, an epidemiologist at the University of Cologne, told CNBC on April 3.

Of course, many experts I spoke to warned that the situation could still worsen in Germany.

Degen told me that “the [death] rate has been steadily rising” — it’s roughly at 3 percent now — “and we expect it to further do so.” She added that it’s “very important to stress that Germany is still at the beginning of the epidemic” and that more and more elderly people in the country are getting sick.

That means Germany isn’t out of the woods yet. But it’s in a better position than most because it had good fortune and the good sense to start testing early and often.

France, on the other hand, had none of that.

How France bungled its coronavirus response

France, like Germany, is a wealthy country with a great healthcare system. It doesn’t have the pharmaceutical prowess of its neighbor, experts tell me, but still has good hospitals with thousands of ICU beds and well-trained physicians.

If you were to list the countries best prepared, at least in theory, to weather the coronavirus outbreak, France would surely be near the top.

And yet that’s not what happened.

That’s in large part because French President Emmanuel Macron and his team completely missed their chance to quash the disease early on.

Macron even admitted as much. “Were we prepared for this crisis? On the face of it, not enough. But we coped,” he said in a televised national address in which he announced an extension of the nation’s lockdown to May 11.

To understand just how badly Macron’s government bungled the country’s coronavirus response, it helps to go back to the beginning.

On January 24, France’s then-Health Minister Agnès Buzyn announced that two people in the country tested positive for the coronavirus, becoming the first known cases in all of Europe. They had just been to China, Buzyn said, adding, “We will probably have other cases.”

But if Macron’s government felt a sense of urgency, it didn’t show it.

February came and went with little action. Health officials advised citizens to wash their hands, keep a safe distance from others, cover their mouths when sneezing, and stay away from retirement homes. And even as Macron held video conference calls on the virus and inspected hospitals and clinics to see how his country was coping, few concrete actions were taken to impose strict social distancing measures or promote large-scale testing.

In fact, in early March, the government still allowed gatherings of up to 1,000 people to proceed. Macron, for his part, attended a theater performance on March 6, partly to show that life could continue unperturbed. He also visited a retirement home that same day, even as the number of coronavirus infections in the country was at least doubling.

To make matters worse, France couldn’t get a clear picture of the growing problem due to a lack of tests. As Politico reported last week, the country doesn’t manufacture its own testing kits, but rather “relies on China for their main components.” With China paralyzed by its coronavirus outbreak at the time, France was unable to quickly get more tests. That severely limited the country’s ability to do widespread testing early on, which public health experts say is critical to slowing an outbreak.

Macron, in effect, seemed to be sleepwalking toward disaster. Two events finally woke him from his slumber, experts say.

The first was Italy’s coronavirus situation. In late February, Italy had just three confirmed cases; by mid-March, that number had skyrocketed to around 15,000. That got Macron’s attention and caused him and his leadership team to worry that perhaps the disease was worse than China had let on.

The second was the discovery of some 2,500 coronavirus cases in the country that could all be traced back to a single week-long religious gathering that had taken place in mid-February.

As Reuters reports, during the week of February 17, hundreds of worshippers from around the world attended an annual celebration at the Christian Open Door evangelical megachurch in Mulhouse, a city in eastern France near the country’s border with Germany. One of the congregants carried the disease.

The first case linked to the church was identified on February 29. Over the following weeks, experts traced some 2,500 infections back to the event. “Worshippers at the church [had] unwittingly taken the disease caused by the virus home to the West African state of Burkina Faso, to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, to Guyana in Latin America, to Switzerland, to a French nuclear power plant, and into the workshops of one of Europe’s biggest automakers,” Reuters reports.

By the time researchers understood the extent of the outbreak, they knew bigger problems lay ahead. “We realized that we had a time bomb in front of us,” Michel Vernay, an epidemiologist with France’s national public health agency, told Reuters in March.

Put it all together, and it becomes clear that in addition to its early luck with younger carriers, Germany’s ability to test early, track often, and treat patients thoroughly has kept its death toll down despite a large number of confirmed infections. France, meanwhile, dawdled on implementing significant measures, especially testing, for weeks.

The contrast shows how vital swift, aggressive measures are for combating the disease. The hope is that other nations learn that lesson as the virus continues to sweep across the globe.

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Donald Trump's national approval rating on how he's handled the coronavirus has been underwater in nearly every reputable poll in the last several days. But as everyone knows, individual states—particularly swing states—are what really counts when it comes to a president’s reelection, and Trump's disastrous coronavirus response could be complicating his path in several key states.

In particular, Trump's campaign is worried about Florida and Wisconsin, according to the Associated Press, but Michigan and Arizona are also emerging as trouble spots. 

In Florida, for instance, Trump mini-me Gov. Ron DeSantis has actually seen his approval ratings sink by at least a handful of points amid the pandemic, while most other governors have seen a double-digit spike in their approval ratings. The Sunshine State is a nonnegotiable for Trump and while DeSantis was very popular precoronavirus, Trump could now be saddled with a governor who allowed raucous beach parties in his state as the virus took hold around the country.

But even if Trump prevails in Florida, two states he also needs—Wisconsin and Michigan—are looking worse for him all the time. Republican lawmakers and the GOP-leaning state Supreme Court just forced voters in Wisconsin to choose between their right to vote and the very real prospect of exposing themselves and their loved ones to life-threatening illness. It backfired spectacularly. On the line was a critical state Supreme Court seat. The liberal-leaning candidate, Judge Jill Karofsky, prevailed by winning a whopping 28 counties, more than double the 12 counties that Hillary Clinton captured in 2016. Karofsky defeated her Trump-endorsed opponent by a decisive double-digit margin.

“It makes me wonder if there’s something brewing in the weaker elements of the Trump base,” Paul Maslin, a Wisconsin-based Democratic pollster, told the AP. “Is the pandemic fight the final straw that’s going to cause some of this small slice of votes he needs to win these states to back away?”

Michigan, which Trump won by less than 11,000 in 2016, also isn't looking particularly great for him. Trump very publicly derided the state's Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, telling Vice President Mike Pence, "Don't call the woman in Michigan," among other slights. If anything, Trump's pettiness has rebounded to Whitmer's benefit, with her approvals jumping by more than 20 points amid the the crisis despite being the target of protesting by some right-wing pro-Trump groups. Democratic enthusiasm in the state also appears to be soaring with participation in the Democratic primary last month up 32% over 2016. Trump reportedly has zero field offices in the state.  

Arizona, traditionally a Republican stronghold, has also turned into a wild card for Trump. The state is looking increasingly purple, with Democrat Kyrsten Sinema's narrow win in the 2018 race for U.S. Senate and Democrat Mark Kelly in an increasingly strong position to capture the other Senate seat this fall in his race against GOP Sen. Martha McSally. At the same time, Trump's approvals in the state are slumping and he's also polling poorly against Joe Biden in the state. Civiqs polling currently has Trump 11 points underwater and trending downward. Biden has outpolled Trump in every head-to-head since the beginning of March.

Donald Trump started down a very dangerous path on Friday morning. As the U.S. reels from nearly 34,000 COVID-19 deaths and more than 672,000 confirmed cases, Donald Trump is fanning the flames of insurrection—an incredibly reckless act, even for Donald Trump. 

In a series of tweets on Friday, Trump targeted the popular Democratic governors in Virginia, Michigan, and Minnesota. Rather than trying to unify the nation, Donald Trump continues to sow discord, division, and hatred. 

Can you imagine this is an actual message from the president of the United States during a pandemic that has killed 34,000 Americans with no end in sight? As my colleague Steve Singiser was quick to point out on Twitter, all three governors from those states have markedly higher approval ratings in those states compared to Donald Trump. For the most part, citizens trust these governors to protect them. The governors are making public health decisions that are centered on actual science—not just gut instinct from someone who couldn’t pass a 7th grade science exam, which is Trump’s preferred pandemic response. 

In truth, Donald Trump has courted the gun-toting former Tea Party people you see above from the start of his campaign back in 2015. He even dispatched a campaign representative to meet with the Bundy clan when they were in the midst of an armed takeover of a government wildlife refuge. That representative, Jerry DeLemus, ended up in prison for his role in another armed standoff with the Bundys in Nevada.

There is something else that’s troublesome about these “grassroots” protests. They may have started three days ago in North Carolina, but suddenly there were similar coordinated protests in Michigan and Ohio, with other planned protests in numerous other cities over the coming days. These protests have a very familiar feel about them, eerily reminiscent of the Tea Party protests that ended up being coordinated by a conservative network funded by the Koch brothers. In fact, they were small groups of people being propped up by big-time funding from the Koch brothers, the DeVos family, and other billionaire donors.

According to Fox 17, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer hinted as much on Monday when addressing the public. Whitmer said: “I also would just say, I think it is this group is funded in large part by the DeVos family and I think it’s really inappropriate for a sitting member of the United States president’s cabinet to be waging political tax on any governor, but obviously on me here at home. I think that they should disavow it and encourage people to stay home and be safe.”

While DeVos representatives have denied they are funding the rallies, Greg McNeilly, chairman of the Michigan Freedom Fund and one of the Michigan rally organizers, has worked for the DeVos family for decades. He was previously the campaign manager for Dick DeVos, husband of Betsy, when he ran for governor. When Betsy DeVos served as the chair of the Michigan Republican Party, McNeilly served as the executive director. 

Another similarity with the Tea Party astroturfing efforts is the way their television partner is promoting it lock and step. Take a look at what’s happening on Fox News right now: Just like the Tea Party protests of 2009, it doesn’t matter if only 30 people show up—if Fox News and other right-wing outlets are there to continually promote the cause, it might as well be 3,000,000 showing up. Like COVID-19 itself, these fringe-right tropes spread like wildfire with the aid of Fox News and social media. 

The thing that differentiates the 2009 Tea Party astroturfing and the similar 2020 protests cropping up now is we have a completely incompetent, morally deficient, narcissistic ignoramus in the White House who would rather fan the flames of division than work toward unity and cohesion, even in matters of life and death like a global pandemic. 

There is absolutely every reason for Democrats to refuse to hand Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump another $250 billion in "small business" emergency loans in the new Paycheck Protection Program included in the CARES stimulus package. The fund was exhausted Thursday, and Democrats have been holding out McConnell’s attempts to dump more money into it. They’ve got really good reasons, including this big one—typical Trumpian politics. Look at where the money went:

Three-quarters of Nebraska’s eligible payroll got the funding; 71% of North Dakota’s did. That powerhouse of the nation’s business, North Dakota. While California’s and New York’s got less than a quarter of their share. D.C. only got 19%. Yeah, that definitely smells like a rat.

It also helps confirm suspicions raised earlier this week. Rep. Speier of California tweeted on Tuesday about the initial reports from the Small Business Administration: “Can someone explain to me how Texas has been approved for $1 billion more in SBA loans—& more than 30,000  loans!- than California despite our economy being $1 trillion larger & California being much harder hit by COVID-19?”

Democrats want to make sure that there isn’t a repeat of this, that the next $250 billion goes where the need is the greatest, not where Trump wants to reward his base and, incidentally, help some vulnerable Republican senators.

The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Stephen Wolf, Carolyn Fiddler, and Matt Booker, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.

Leading Off

● Texas: A state judge said on Wednesday afternoon that he'll issue an order allowing all Texans to vote absentee due to the coronavirus pandemic, less than an hour after the attorney general's office threatened criminal prosecution for groups recommending voters concerned about contracting the virus request absentee ballots.

Campaign Action

Last month, because Texas is one of a number of states that requires voters to present an excuse in order to vote absentee, Democrats filed suit in state court asking that this requirement be relaxed. Specifically, plaintiffs said that a provision of law permitting mail voting if a voter has "a sickness or physical condition that prevents the voter from appearing at the polling place on election day without a likelihood of needing personal assistance or of injuring the voter's health" should apply to anyone practicing social distancing.

Judge Tim Sulak agreed, though it is not yet clear whether his injunction will affect only the state's July 14 runoffs or extend through the November general election; conceivably, it could remain in effect for the duration of the pandemic. Whatever the case, Texas Republicans have shown a great deal of hostility toward expanding mail voting and are almost certain to appeal.

That hostility was on vivid display shortly before Sulak announced his plans, when Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton issued guidance to the legislature concluding that "fear of contracting COVID-19" does not constitute a valid reason for voters to ask for an absentee ballot. Paxton, who is currently facing an indictment for allegedly committing felony securities fraud, concluded his letter by warning that if voting rights advocates were to provide the opposite advice to voters, that "could subject those third parties to criminal sanctions."

Should Sulak's anticipated ruling stand, however, Paxton's threats will be moot. But even if it's overturned, Democrats could nevertheless obtain the relief they seek thanks to a similar lawsuit they filed in federal court.

Election Changes

Please bookmark our statewide 2020 primary calendar and our calendar of key downballot races, both of which we're updating continually as changes are finalized.

● Alaska: Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy has signed a multi-faceted bill addressing the coronavirus emergency that includes a provision allowing Republican Lt. Gov. Kevin Meyer to order that Alaska's Aug. 18 primary and any special elections this year be conducted by mail. (In Alaska, the lieutenant governor is the state's top elections official.) Meyer has not yet said whether he'll issue such an order regarding the primary.

● Arizona: Republican Gov. Doug Ducey says he's opposed to conducting Arizona's Aug. 4 primary by mail, a move that both Democratic Secretary of State Katie Hobbs and the state's local election officials support. Ducey said he did not want the state "to disenfranchise anyone from voting on Election Day," but every state that conducts all-mail elections still allows voters to cast ballots on Election Day.

● Louisiana: Louisiana's Republican-run legislature has rejected a proposal by Republican Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin to modestly expand the availability of mail voting for the state's July 11 presidential and municipal primaries. Ardoin's plan would have allowed certain groups of voters, such as those over 60, those at high risk for contracting COVID-19, or those who are self-quarantining to vote by mail. It also would have increased the number of days for early voting from seven to 13. Lawmakers have asked Ardoin to come up with an alternate plan by April 24.

● Wisconsin: Democrat Marina Dimitrijevic, who last week was elected to Milwaukee's city council, is promoting a new proposal to send absentee ballot applications to all 300,000 voters in the city for Wisconsin's Aug. 11 primary and the November general election. Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and at least nine other members of the council, including the body's president, support the measure. Election officials in three large South Florida counties are also considering similar plans.

Senate

● Colorado: The deadline to turn in signatures to make Colorado's June 30 primary was March 17, and the state has a list of contenders who submitted enough petitions here. However, candidates can also reach the primary ballot by competing at their party conventions, also known as assemblies, and many of them chose to go with this route instead in large part because of the high cost of gathering signatures.

Democrats in CO-03 and Republicans in CO-06 recently held their virtual assemblies, and we'll be running down the results in our House section. The state Democratic Party will also hold their statewide convention on Saturday where they'll endorse a candidate to take on GOP Sen. Cory Gardner, which we'll talk about in our CO-Sen item below.

First, some notes about the convention rules. Contenders need to win the support of at least 30% of the delegates to advance to June, and whoever takes the most support will be listed first on the primary ballot. Candidates have the option to both turn in signatures and take part in the convention, but doing so still doesn't offer a guarantee: If a candidate takes less than 10% of the vote at the convention, then their campaign is over no matter how many signatures they turn in.

● CO-Sen: Colorado Democrats will hold their virtual state party convention on Saturday, but unlike in past years, there shouldn't be much suspense about how this gathering will go.

Former Gov. John Hickenlooper, who has the support of national Democrats in the contest to take on GOP Sen. Cory Gardner, announced in late March that he'd skip the convention after the state verified that he'd submitted enough petitions. That move left former state House Speaker Andrew Romanoff, who overwhelmingly beat Hickenlooper at the pre-convention party caucuses earlier in March, as the only well-funded candidate competing at the assembly, so it would be a massive surprise if he doesn't win this weekend.

A few other Democrats are also competing at the convention including nonprofit director Lorena Garcia; Stephany Rose Spaulding, who was the 2018 nominee in the safely red 5th Congressional District; and businesswoman Michelle Ferrigno Warren. It's possible that some of them will do well enough at the party gathering to make it to the primary, but they've each raised very little money and would struggle to gain traction in June.

Another long-shot candidate, scientist Trish Zornio, announced Wednesday that she was suspending her campaign. Hickenlooper appears to be the only Democrat who made the ballot by turning in enough signatures.

● IA-Sen, MI-Sen: Politico reports that the conservative Americas PAC, which is funded by megadonor Richard Uihlein, has booked TV time for mid-May in two Midwestern Senate contests. The group will reportedly spend $1.3 million to aid Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and $894,000 to help Republican John James in Michigan.

Meanwhile in Iowa, retired Navy Vice Adm. Mike Franken is up with his first TV spot ahead of the June Democratic primary to face Ernst, and The Courier reports that it's part of a six-figure buy. Franken declares that, while Donald Trump and Ernst are dividing America, "I've brought people together to take on terrorists, Ebola, and hurricanes from Hugo to Katrina."

● NC-Sen, NC-Gov: The Democratic firm Public Policy Polling is out with a new look at its home state of North Carolina, and it has overall good news for Team Blue.

Democrat Cal Cunningham holds a 47-40 lead over GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, which is up from Cunningham's 46-41 edge in late February. PPP also shows Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper defeating Republican Dan Forest by a wide 50-36 margin, which is a big change from the 45-41 lead Cooper posted the last time the pollster surveyed this race in June. This sample shows Joe Biden leading Donald Trump by a narrow 48-47 margin.

This is the second poll we've seen from North Carolina since the early March primaries. Earlier this week, the conservative Civitas Institute released numbers from the GOP firm Harper Polling that showed Tillis ahead 38-34 while Trump was winning by a wide 49-42 margin. Harper, though, found Cooper up 50-33, which is very similar to PPP's numbers.

● TN-Sen: Former Ambassador to Japan Bill Hagerty is the latest Republican to run a commercial echoing Donald Trump's racist attacks on China. The narrator declares, "Communist China covered up the Wuhan virus, putting America at risk. Conservative Bill Hagerty says we must hold China accountable."

Gubernatorial

● MO-Gov: Democratic state Auditor Nichole Galloway outraised GOP Gov. Mike Parson $640,000 to $332,000 during the first quarter of 2020, and Parson ended March with only a modest $1.4 million to $1 million cash-on-hand lead.

However, Parson's allied PAC holds a large financial edge over its Democratic counterpart. Uniting Missouri PAC took in $830,000 while Keep Government Accountable hauled in $230,000, and the GOP group held a large $3.8 million to $939,000 cash-on-hand advantage. In April, after the reporting deadline, Uniting Missouri PAC received $500,000 from the Republican Governors Association.

House

● CA-25: The conservative Congressional Leadership Fund has announced that it will spend $600,000 on mail and digital ads for the May 12 special election.

● CO-03: All three Democrats running to take on GOP Rep. Scott Tipton chose to compete at Tuesday's virtual party convention rather than collect signatures, and two of them advanced to the June primary.

Businessman James Iacino won the top spot on the ballot by winning the support of 49% of the delegates, while 2018 nominee Diane Mitsch Bush was just behind with 48%. The third candidate, climate activist Root Routledge was far back with just 3%. Whoever wins the nomination this summer will be in for a difficult race in this seat in the western part of the state. The district moved from 52-46 Romney to 52-40 Trump, and Tipton beat Mitsch Bush 52-44 last cycle.

Tipton himself does face an intra-party primary challenge from Lauren Boebert, who runs a restaurant called Shooters Grill in Rifle where staffers openly carry firearms, but she doesn't look like much of a threat. Tipton ended March with a huge $626,000 to $26,000 cash-on-hand lead, and because he successfully turned in enough signatures to reach the ballot, he can survive all but the worst performance at Friday's party assembly. Tipton also received Donald Trump's endorsement in December.

The money gap isn't as stark on the Democratic side. Mitsch Bush ended March with a $478,000 to $361,000 cash-on-hand lead over Iacino, who has done some self-funding.

● CO-06: Former state party CEO Steve House won last week's GOP party assembly by easily defeating an unheralded opponent, and because no one gathered signatures, this result means that House will be Team Red's nominee against freshman Democratic Rep. Jason Crow.

However, House is in for a very uphill battle in a suburban Denver seat that has been rapidly moving to the left. This district went from 52-47 Obama to 50-41 Clinton, and Crow unseated GOP incumbent Mike Coffman last cycle by a wide 54-43 margin. House doesn't seem interested in winning over the voters who have turned against the GOP in recent years, though, since he recently held a virtual event with a doctor who has a long track record of circulating conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic.  

Meanwhile, Crow ended March with a $1.7 million to $409,000 cash-on-hand lead over House.

● FL-19: Wealthy businessman Casey Askar is out with his first TV spot ahead of the August GOP primary for this open seat. As a clip plays of Saddam Hussein, Askar narrates, "On my seventh birthday, we fled our homes for America. Christians like us were being persecuted." The candidate goes on to say, "I worked hard. Joined the Marines. Built a business. I lived the American dream." Askar pledges he'll be a Donald Trump ally and concludes, "I'll defend America with everything I have because I owe everything I have to America."

● GA-06: The NRCC has released a month-old survey from North Star Opinion Research that gives former GOP Rep. Karen Handel a 49-47 edge in her rematch campaign against freshman Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath. This is the first poll we've seen from this year's race for this competitive suburban Atlanta seat.

McBath narrowly unseated Handel in a 2018 upset, and this time, the Democrat is the one who has the clear cash advantage. McBath outraised Handel $1.07 million to $283,000 during the first quarter of the year, and the incumbent ended March with a $2.61 million to $966,000 cash-on-hand lead.

● IL-14: National Republicans badly want to beat freshman Democratic Rep. Lauren Underwood, but they're stuck with a nominee they actively tried to defeat in last month's Illinois primary. Politico reported on Thursday that the Congressional Leadership Fund, which is the largest spender on House races among outside groups on the Republican side, financed a group called Illinois Conservatives PAC that ran ads against state Sen. Jim Oberweis in the 14th Congressional District.

The CLF spent $911,000 to fund commercials that declared, "Higher taxes, personally attacking President Donald Trump, and comparing pro-lifers to terrorists, that's the real Jim Oberweis." This expensive effort fell just short: Oberweis defeated fellow state Sen. Sue Rezin 26-23, a margin of just under 1,500 votes.

While the CLF has gotten involved in GOP primaries to protect incumbents, it's very unusual to see it intervene in an intra-party battle. However, if there's one Republican that national Republicans rightly should want far away from a general election ballot, it's Jim Oberweis. The wealthy dairy magnate has unsuccessfully run for the House or statewide office a grand total of six times beginning with his 2002 primary defeat to take on Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin, but his most high-profile defeat came in 2008 for a previous version of this seat.

Oberweis lost the special election to succeed former House Speaker Dennis Hastert in a historically red distinct by a 52.5-47.5 margin against Democrat Bill Foster, and it took no time at all for Republicans to place the blame on him. Oberweis and Foster had won their primaries for the regular November contest months before the special was decided, but Republicans reportedly tried to convince their nominee to drop out.

Then-state Rep. Aaron Schock, who was the GOP nominee for a congressional seat to the south, loudly threw Oberweis under the ice cream truck following his defeat, declaring, "Anybody in Illinois who knows Jim Oberweis knows that was not a referendum on the Republican Party; it was a referendum on Jim Oberweis." Schock, whose own congressional career would self-destruct the next decade, also volunteered that when it came to Oberweis, "The people that knew him best, liked him least." Oberweis didn't listen, and he lost to Foster again 58-42.

The CLF's staff should know Oberweis quite well at this point, and like him they don't. But while it's too late to deny Oberweis the GOP nod (or convince him to run for Congress in Florida), they don't need to spend to prop him up. Indeed, the CLF announced last week that it had reserved $43 million for fall TV ads in House races across the nation, but its first wave of bookings did not include this exurban Chicago district. Still, this 49-45 Trump seat may just be too tempting a target for Team Red even with an unwelcome nominee, and it's very possible that CLF or its allies will end up airing ads against Underwood.

And for all of Oberweis' considerable flaws, he may have the personal resources to fend for himself. Oberweis has invested millions into his past failed campaigns, and he self-funded a total of $1.1 million for this race through the end of March. However, he's raised a grand total of $558,000 from people who aren't named Jim Oberweis during his more than 13 months of campaigning, so he may need to throw down a lot more of his money if he's to compete with Underwood: At the end of March, the incumbent held a $2.26 million to $222,000 cash-on-hand lead.

● Oklahoma: Candidate filing closed last week for Oklahoma's June 30 primary, and the state has a list of contenders available here. A runoff will take place Aug. 25 in contests where no one takes a majority of the vote.

● OK-02: GOP Rep. Markwayne Mullin picked up a primary challenge from the right in October from state Sen. Joseph Silk, but so far, the incumbent looks safe in this safely red seat in the eastern part of the state. Mullin, who has Donald Trump’s endorsement, ended March with a $637,000 war chest, while Silk only set up his fundraising committee on Monday. One other Republican filed, so it’s possible this could go to a runoff if this primary turns out to be more competitive than it currently looks.

● OK-05: Democrat Kendra Horn unseated GOP Rep. Steve Russell in one of the most shocking upsets of 2018, and she’ll be a top Republican target as she defends an Oklahoma City seat that favored Donald Trump 53-40. Nine Republicans filed to take on Horn, and so far, there’s no obvious frontrunner. Only four of the Republicans, though, appear to have the resources needed to run a credible campaign.

Businesswoman Terry Neese, who has self-funded just over half of her campaign so far, had $651,000 to spend at the end of March, while state Sen. Stephanie Bice had $406,000 available. Former state School Superintendent Janet Barresi, who has financed almost her entire race so far, had $367,000 on-hand, while businessman David Hill had $180,000 in the bank.

Horn didn’t attract much attention from donors during most of her 2018 campaign, but the incumbent ended March with a hefty $2.23 million on-hand.

● WI-07: In his first general election TV spot ahead of the May 12 special, Republican Tom Tiffany tells the audience that "while I'd prefer to shake your hand and ask for your vote, that'll have to wait." After laying out his background Tiffany says, "In Congress I'll stand with President Trump to get people back to work and America up on her feet."

During an appearance on Fox News on Thursday night, celebrity psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw made his case for reopening the U.S. economy even if it causes more Americans to die from COVID-19.

Dr Phil says national lockdowns will cause more death than the coronavirus, adding that we don't quarantine the country for cigarette-related deaths pic.twitter.com/EOLJSDArQd

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) April 17, 2020

The Washington Post reports: After Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, explained the White House’s new guidelines for states to slowly reopen their economies in a three-phase process, Fox News host Laura Ingraham sought another opinion later in the show. She turned to Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, television psychologist to the masses. He acknowledged that the novel coronavirus is killing Americans — more than 33,000 as of early Friday — but also wondered why the economy would shut down over the pandemic but continues to function as people die from lung cancer, car crashes and pool drownings. “We don’t shut the country down for that,” said Dr. Phil, after he cited inaccurate statistics on accidental deaths. “Yet we are doing it for this and the fallout is going to last for years because people’s lives are being destroyed.”

Dr. Phil thinks "We probably shouldn't have ever started" the coronavirus quarantine pic.twitter.com/coUBVwTEoS

— Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) April 17, 2020

More from Mediaite: McGraw’s focus during his appearance was the long-term health health risks of extreme isolation, a subject that he claimed is “never” discussed during the public epidemiological assessments about the coronavirus threat. … But when McGraw pivoted to citing statistics supporting his argument, he both botched the data and made specious connections between well-established public health risks and a highly transmissible virus that has become the country’s number-one killer in the span of three months. “Two hundred and fifty people a year die from poverty,” McGraw incorrectly claimed, an absurdly low number that stands more than 1,000 times lower than a 2011 study that put the number closer to 300,000. “The poverty line is getting such that more and more people are going to fall below that because the economy is crashing around us. … The fact of the matter is we have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents,” McGraw claimed, though the most recent CDC data for motor vehicle deaths puts the figure at 38,659, a yearly death toll that the coronavirus will easily surpass after having been in the U.S. population only since January. He then cited the absurdly high number of 360,000 for annual “swimming pool deaths” in the country. In fact, McGraw’s figure is roughly 100 times higher than the nation’s actual  unintentional deaths from drowning figure, not all of which involve swimming pools.

Watch the full segment below.

The post Dr. Phil Says Economy Should Reopen Because We Don’t Shut Down for Smoking-Related Deaths: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Demonstrators gathered in downtown Trenton, N.J., Friday morning to protest Gov. Phil Murphy's "stay-at-home" order to combat the spread of the coronavirus.

While it's unclear how many people were attending the protest, video captured by the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce's Twitter account shows a long line of cars honking their horns along West State Street, across from the the Statehouse and Murphy's office. The tweet and video, which also showed people waving American flags, have since been deleted.

The words "no more fear" were audible through a megaphone as a helicopter hovered overhead and law enforcement officers blocked access to the Statehouse parking complex.

Demonstrators have also rallied in front of statehouses in Michigan, Ohio and other states to protest stay-at-home orders. Earlier on Friday, President Donald Trump issued an online call to "LIBERATE" those states where protesters have demonstrated orders issued by Democratic governors.
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On March 21, in order to prevent the disease's spread in New Jersey, Murphy ordered most retail businesses in the state to close and residents to stay at home until further notice. All schools in the state will remain closed until at least May 15.

While there's strong evidence showing that social distancing has helped slow the virus’ spread through New Jersey, the effects of the disease have still been severe. More than 3,500 residents have died of coronavirus-related complications, the second-highest total of any state. There have been more than 75,000 positive cases of Covid-19 in New Jersey since the first case was recorded on March 4.

New Jersey has yet to see a peak in Covid-19 hospitalizations. As recently as last weekend, the state's hospitals were at risk of running out of ventilators, which would have forced physicians to decide which patients would receive potentially life-saving care.

Even so, conservative media hosts and some Republican leaders have started to bristle against the continued shutdown in recent days, arguing that the damage being done to the economy outweighs the strain being placed on the health care system.

“I can no longer support Governor Murphy’s draconian shut down measures,” state Sen. Michael Doherty (R-Warren) told InsiderNJ earlier this week. “He needs to stop his one size fits all approach. He is destroying small businesses and sending millions of NJ residents into poverty.

Sir David King, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser from 2000-2007, told LBC Radio on Wednesday that a quicker response to the growing 2019 novel coronavirus pandemic would have saved lives. While telling the station that he was saddened by situation England found itself in, he was also very clear when he explained that if leadership had acted sooner, untold numbers of people would still be alive.

Stating that “it seems that we were unprepared and we didn’t take action,” King went on to detail how the recent efforts by politicians like Prime Minister Johnson to cut back on management programs has led them into this very predictable predicament. “For me, this is very upsetting because we had set this preparation process in place, as I say, back in 2006.”

Since the beginning of this crisis, King has been critical of the prime minister’s response and policies. At the beginning of April, King publicly slammed Johnson and the Conservative Party, saying cuts to the country’s National Health System (NHS) would only exacerbate the terrible situation that bad leadership has already gotten the Brits into. He also told Sky News at the time: “We know that what we should have done, early on, is take all sorts of precautionary measures to see that the virus did not get to the level it is now in this country, once we had seen what was happening in China.”

King’s criticisms mirror the very same ones leveled against Republican leadership. In Trump and his Republican Party’s case, huge tax giveaways to the rich have helped to justify attempts (and successes) at dismantling our already overstressed social programs and safety infrastructures. Like Trump’s administration, Johnson has lied and dragged his feet when it comes to the important containment tool of testing, having promised “100,000 tests a day by the end of April” and not even coming close.

As King explained, an early response—a proactive response—was available to any country of almost any means. “You go to Greece and the management of the epidemic, starting very, very early on, has been really astoundingly good. Go to Africa, go to Rwanda, you’ll find the same thing.”

Sony is joining the fight against Corona, enticing gamers to stay home and play games instead of going out in the world risking spread of the disease. Wow, that just sounds bad. But welcome to 2020 folks. 

People all over the world are doing the right thing by staying home to help contain the spread of COVID–19. We are deeply grateful to everyone practicing physical distancing and take our responsibility as a home entertainment platform seriously, so we are asking our community to continue supporting the safe choice and the need to Play At Home.

As a thank you to all who are doing their part to lessen the impact of this pandemic, Sony Interactive Entertainment is pleased to announce the Play At Home initiative. 

Play At Home has two components: first, providing free games to help keep the PlayStation community entertained at home; and finally, establishing a fund to help smaller independent game studios who may be experiencing financial difficulties continue building great experiences for all gamers. 

On top of the free games Sony is donating $10 million to independent development.

Sony is offering The Uncharted Collection which features all three games: Uncharted, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception from last generation remastered. It may be my favorite series of last generation next to Mass Effect. The latter two games to offer some co-op play in the form of seprate multiplayer modes.

Sony is also giving away Journey, a game devoted to a silent co-op experience with random strangers from around the world. I can't think of a better way to connect while we are all apart.

Both games are free from April 15th through May 5th. Sony is throttling downloads so it may take a while given demand and size - Uncharted collection is almost 50GB alone.  But be patient...I mean...what else are you going to do?

Read More

By Amanda Mannen  Published: April 15th, 2020 

Trump walks away from the podium at the end of his press briefing on Thursday. | Alex Wong/Getty Images

It’s all about testing, testing, testing — or the lack thereof.

President Donald Trump more or less declared victory over the coronavirus during the daily White House briefing on Thursday — ignoring signs that the battle with a disease he likes to call “the invisible enemy” is actually far from over.

Trump began by saying that “thanks to our all-out military operation and the extraordinary devotion of our people, we believe we will experience far fewer deaths than even the optimistic projection.” (In fact, as recently as late February Trump was saying the virus would go away on its own without any Americans dying.) He went on to outline the “Opening Up America Again” criteria that will guide states with sufficient testing capacity and declining numbers of new cases through the process of getting their schools and economies back up and running in a step-by-step manner, with the approval of governors.

“Now that we have passed the peak in new cases, we are starting our life again,” Trump said. “We are starting rejuvenation of our economy again.”

But Trump’s claim that American is on the downside of new cases is dubious. Because the country still doesn’t have enough testing capacity to accommodate everyone who has symptoms or has come into contact with those who do, it’s possible the plateau in new cases that’s happened over the past week just reflects the reality that many cases are going undetected.

A new piece from Robinson Meyer and Alexis C. Madrigal for The Atlantic explains:

The growth in the number of new tests completed per day has also plateaued. Since April 1, the country has tested roughly 145,000 people every day with no steady upward trajectory. The growth in the number of new cases per day, and the growth in the number of new tests per day, are very tightly correlated.

This tight correlation suggests that if the United States were testing more people, we would probably still be seeing an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases. And combined with the high test-positivity rate, it suggests that the reservoir of unknown, uncounted cases of COVID-19 across the country is still very large.

Furthermore, Meyer and Madrigal report that the “test-positivity rate” for coronavirus cases in America is about 20 percent — much higher than countries like South Korea and Germany who have had more success bringing their coronavirus outbreaks under control. Since test-positivity rates generally fall along with the prevalence of a disease in a society, the US’s relatively high rate is another sign that it’s too early to declare victory over the coronavirus.

Trump might not want to acknowledge these issues, but his own administration has. As my colleague German Lopez explained on Wednesday, the testing and surveillance system outlined in an early version of the administration’s plan assumes the country will dramatically ramp up its testing capacity to make sure any outbreaks that occur before a vaccine is available are contained.

What the country needs to properly do testing, according to experts, is at least 500,000 tests a day. Some experts call for much more than that — millions or even tens of millions a day — but 500,000 a day is generally considered the minimum to test everyone with symptoms and their close contacts.

Right now, the US is, on a good day, doing about 150,000 tests a day, or fewer than a third of that minimum. The US’s poor pandemic preparedness, as well as Trump’s slow reaction to the coronavirus outbreak, has meant America is still massively undertesting.

To be clear, there are some states — such as Wyoming or Alaska — that still have under 500 cases. For those places, it’s not crazy to think that some semblance of normal life could resume soon. But they aren’t out of the woods either — the lack of widespread testing means that if there’s an outbreak, it could spiral out of control before it’s even detected.

Ultimately, public health experts are in broad agreement that the US needs to significantly beef up its coronavirus testing infrastructure before it makes sense to talk broadly about reopening schools, restaurants, and offices in major population centers. But the US hasn’t made significant progress in that regard. And until it does, Trump’s declarations of victory amount to little more than rhetorical exercises.

The American public seems to broadly understand this. New polling from the Pew Research Central shows that 66 percent of people are concerned their state governments will relax social distancing restrictions too soon, compared to just 32 percent who are worried they won’t move quickly enough.

Characteristically, to advance his case that it’s appropriate to talk about reopening the American economy even while roughly 2,000 people in the country per day are dying from the coronavirus, Trump on Thursday tried to turn that reality on its head.

“America wants to be open. And Americans want to be open,” he said.

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The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

On Wednesday, far-right Michiganders staged a "gridlock" protest against Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer's April 9 stay-at-home order written to help curb the state's now-substantial COVID-19 outbreak. The protest delayed several ambulances, featured numerous Trump and confederate flags (but I repeat myself), "lock her up" chants, and was organized in part by a group funded by the wealthy family of Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.

In a signal that perhaps blocking ambulances during a pandemic will not of itself be successful at lifting stay-at-home orders, however, a handful of objectors have also filed lawsuits complaining that those orders violate their constitutional rights. The language is appropriately scenery-chewing.

As reported by Reuters, plaintiffs in one of the two suits filed so far this week complain that they "reasonably fear" these "draconian encroachments on their freedom" will "become the 'new norm.’" Whether this fear is "reasonable" will be in the hands of the judicial system, but the notion that taking emergency measures to combat a worldwide pandemic will result in a "new norm" of everyone in Michigan being confined to their homes forever seems Jade Helm-esque. The plaintiffs appear, in other words, to be off their rockers.

Another complaint: that closing gun shops violates the Second Amendment. It's important to wedge that one in there just to make sure the courts know you are not just paranoid about leaders maybe deciding that they'll just keep Americans in their houses forever is so much easier than running an economy, you are also worried that your current closetful of guns and ammunitions will not be enough to give them a proper what-for when they try. Good move.

Despite the now-viral "gridlock" photos and, now, the legal complaint of four Michigan residents, stay-at-home orders remain widely popular with the public because the public, in general, remains skeptical about sacrificing themselves and their own families in order to boost someone else's business revenue.

Indeed, photographs of bodies piled on top of one another inside a Detroit hospital and in the hospital's temporary parking lot morgues seem to provide incontrovertible evidence that the shelter-in-place orders are needed, that hospitals are overwhelmed, and that lifting the orders now would absolutely result in many more people dying inside—or more likely, outside—state hospitals.

We shall see how many of Thursday's flag-wavers themselves come down with the virus. Despite being told by organizers to stay in their vehicles, many did not; when you organize a rally for people who do not understand how contagious diseases work, you're going to get quite a few people who do not understand how contagious diseases work. Hopefully their fellow Michigan residents will have the common sense to not block the ambulances sent for them, if their own turn comes. If it happens, though, at least it will be because of Freedom.