James.galbraith

A woman checks in to cast her ballot during a Democratic presidential primary election at the Kenosha Bible Church gym in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on April 7, 2020.  | KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI/AFP via Getty Images

The state has been under a shelter-in-place order since March 25.

Polls opened at 7 am in Wisconsin despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, despite the Democratic governor’s attempts to delay the election because of said epidemic, and despite calls from public-health experts to stay home.

The result by mid-morning was what critics feared: Voters were queued up in long lines, waiting for hours to vote in crowded and understaffed polling stations.

Experts fear the prolonged public gatherings could undermine efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus.

Take this line of scores of voters waiting at one city’s singular polling location, which a journalist with the local ABC affiliate tweeted:

The state has been under a shelter-in-place order since March 25, but Republican officials in the state fought to ensure the election would proceed as originally scheduled, and the state’s and nation’s highest courts ruled in their favor on key logistical outlets.

The highest-profile race at stake Tuesday is the Democratic presidential primary, which Joe Biden is expected to win, according to recent polls. But given the state of the Democratic primary, the state Supreme Court seat also on the line could be far more consequential. (There are also several other key state and local elections on the ballot.)

As of Monday afternoon, there have been 2,440 confirmed cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in the state, along with 77 deaths, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services.

Here’s what we know about the chaos seen in Wisconsin and what it could mean for the November general election throughout the country.

What we know

• Voters are waiting in what are expected to be hours-long lines to vote at several polling locations in Milwaukee, according to videos tweeted by CNN correspondent Omar Jimenez and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times.

• Long lines formed across the state, including in Green Bay, where there are only two polling locations open compared to the usual 31, according to the Green Bay Press Gazette.

• Fearing contracting Covid-19, most poll workers in the state have refused to work the polls Tuesday, meaning the state has had to drastically cut back on polling locations.
• In Milwaukee, which is heavily Democratic and where 40 percent of residents are black, the state only has enough staff to open five polling locations, when there are typically 180 in the city, according to Molly Beck of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
• Democratic Gov. Tony Evers announced he was calling in the National Guard on April 1 to staff polling locations, given the shortage of poll workers.
• The Wisconsin Assembly speaker, Republican Robin Vos, was seen in personal protective equipment working the polls, in Burlington. Vos led one of the lawsuits against Evers to prevent the election from being delayed.

• The pandemic has created new challenges to meeting existing voting requirements. For example, voters must have a witness sign an absentee ballot. That has become a problem for at least one voter who had contracted Covid-19 and had no one present to witness their ballot, according to a tweet by a member of the Fair Elections Project.

• Voters are having to overcome several barriers to voting on top of those related to the pandemic, including multiple reports of registration issues, confusion over polling locations, and never receiving an absentee ballot.

Why this is happening

Simply put, there aren’t enough election workers to run a free and fair election in Wisconsin on Tuesday.

Poll workers in the state have refused to staff the polls for fear of catching the virus. As a result, while the city of Milwaukee usually has 180 polling locations for a given election, there’s now only enough staff for five. More than 100 municipalities reported that they didn’t have enough poll workers to open a single polling place. In response, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers called in the National Guard in order to work the polls.

While other states simply delayed their elections, Wisconsin was initially reluctant to do so because of the general elections for the state and local offices. When Evers did begin attempting to delay the election, the state’s Republican-controlled legislature declined to take any action to move Election Day. As recounted by Vox’s Ian Millhiser:

The Supreme Court’s decision in Republican is the capstone of a weeks-long effort by the Republican Party to make it difficult for voters to actually cast a ballot in Wisconsin. Last week, Gov. Evers called the state legislature into session and asked it to delay the election. But the Republican-controlled legislature ended that session just seconds after it was convened. After Evers acted on his own authority to delay the election, the state’s Supreme Court voted along partisan lines to rescind Evers’s order. Republicans also rejected Evers’s proposal to automatically mail ballots to every voter in the state.

That set off a series of legal challenges that all broke along party lines and culminated in a Monday US Supreme Court decision with the court’s five conservatives deciding that absentee ballots must be postmarked by Election Day. (That overturns a previous court’s ruling that allowed ballots to be postmarked later, as long as they arrived by April 13.)

The actions in Wisconsin could have repercussions in this fall’s general election, Millhiser explained:

The background is that Republicans hope to hold onto a seat on the state Supreme Court, which is up for grabs in Tuesday’s election. As law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen recently noted, “only 38% of voters who had requested an absentee ballot in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County had returned one, compared with over 56% of absentee voters in nearby Republican-leaning Waukesha County.” So there’s at least some evidence that, if additional voters are unable to return their ballots, Republicans will be overrepresented in the ballots that are counted.

It’s also worth noting that, if Wisconsin had free and fair elections to choose its state lawmakers, Evers would most likely have been able to work with a Democratic legislature to ensure that Tuesday’s election would be conducted fairly. In 2018, 54 percent of voters chose a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly. But Republicans have so completely gerrymandered the state that they prevailed in 63 of the state’s 99 Assembly races.

There is far more at stake in Wisconsin, moreover, than one state Supreme Court seat. Wisconsin could be the pivotal swing state that decides the 2020 presidential election. The question of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden occupies the White House next year could easily be determined by which man receives Wisconsin’s electoral votes.

And the Court’s decision in Republican suggests that the Supreme Court will give the GOP broad leeway in how US elections should be conducted.

Wisconsinites, for their part, have tried to make do and vote safely. As of last Wednesday, 1,053,556 absentee ballots had been requested from the state. However, it’s unclear how many of those absentee ballots will end up counting, after the Supreme Court decision.

The legal maneuvering and the pandemic’s inherent risk have created a perfect storm to produce long — and potentially life-threatening — lines for voting.

Donald Trump is having the predictable temper tantrum over the Health and Human Services inspector general's report finding that hospitals face huge challenges—many of them caused by the Trump administration—in fighting the coronavirus pandemic. The report confirmed much of what we’ve learned from news reports about hospitals receiving unusable masks and other personal protective equipment, facing a “severe shortage of test kits,” and struggling with a lack of clear guidance from the federal government.

“Why didn’t the I.G., who spent 8 years with the Obama Administration (Did she Report on the failed H1N1 Swine Flu debacle where 17,000 people died?), want to talk to the Admirals, Generals, V.P. & others in charge, before doing her report. Another Fake Dossier!” Trump rage-tweeted.

As a factual matter, the H1N1 outbreak in 2009 killed more like 12,500 people in the U.S., total. That’s a number of deaths COVID-19 is likely to surpass today, before it has peaked in this country. And the Obama administration responded to it much more quickly and effectively than the Trump administration responded to coronavirus.

But it’s the attack on the government watchdog who produced the troubling report that’s more worrisome than the routine lies about the Obama administration. Christi Grimm, the principal deputy inspector general whose name is on the report, “began her career with OIG in 1999 as a Program Evaluator and later served as a Senior Program Analyst in OIG’s Office of Evaluation and Inspections.” So it’s not that she is in the Trump administration as an Obama holdover. She’s a career official who has served under both Democrats and Republicans. Grimm “has received the Secretary’s Award for Excellence in Management and the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency Award for Excellence in Management.”

Of course, excellence in management is pretty much anathema to Donald Trump, even when that excellence is not a source of criticism of Trump’s own terrible management.

And it’s telling that Trump wishes Grimm had talked not to the hospitals fighting the crisis patient by patient but to the people who answer to him and could be relied on to praise him regardless of the facts.

As predictable as Trump’s attack on Grimm is, we can’t just roll our eyes and say “of course he did.” Trump is actively working to create a government that answers only to him and will not provide factual information about his administration’s failures, where they exist. Intimidating the public servants who are tasked with telling those truths is part of that broader effort, and it’s dangerous.

Donald Trump has fired Glenn Fine, the Pentagon inspector general appointed to oversee the $2 trillion coronavirus stimulus package.

Politico reports: “That decision, which began circulating on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning, effectively removed Fine from his role overseeing the coronavirus relief effort, since the new law permits only current inspectors general to fill the position. … Fine’s removal is Trump’s latest incursion into the community of independent federal watchdogs — punctuated most dramatically by his late Friday ouster of the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.”

The Hill reports: “The move follows several steps Trump has taken to combat oversight of the bailout fund. After signing the relief package into law last month, the president issued a signing statement saying he would not allow the special inspector general for the relief program to report to Congress without his supervision. And last week, he nominated one of his own White House lawyers, Brian Miller, for the special inspector general position.”

The post Trump Fires Inspector General Overseeing $2 Trillion Coronavirus Stimulus Package appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

On Monday, Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly addressed the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The ship of more than 4,000 sailors has been a focal point of novel coronavirus pandemic talk in recent days because its former commander, Captain Brett Crozier, went viral after a four-page memo he wrote asking for COVID-19 support from Navy higher-ups was picked up by the San Francisco Chronicle. Since then, at least 230 USS TR crew members have tested positive for the virus. Crozier, who reportedly tested positive for the virus himself, has been fired. And, as occurred in Modly’s leaked address on Monday, Crozier was attacked and criticized over how he sent out his plea for help. 

As of Monday night, Modly apologized—sort of. And now people are calling for him to resign or be fired.

Of all Modly’s remarks—which you can listen to here—his comments that Crozier was “naive” or “stupid” were particularly offensive. “If he didn’t think,” Modly stated on Monday, “in my opinion, that this information wasn’t going to get out into the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naive or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this… The alternative is that he did this on purpose.”

The backlash was swift, but Modly initially stood by his remarks, saying in part: “The spoken words were from the heart, and meant for them. I stand by every word I said, even, regrettably any profanity that may have been used for emphasis. Anyone who has served on a Navy ship would understand. I ask, but don’t expect, that people read them in their entirety."

As an actual apology, a few hours later, he offered this: "I apologize for any confusion this choice of words may have caused. I also want to apologize directly to Captain Crozier, his family, and the entire crew of the Theodore Roosevelt for any pain my remarks may have caused."

The rest of the statement has a lot of backpedaling. 

Modly stressed: "Let me be clear, I do not think Captain Brett Crozier is naïve nor stupid. I think, and always believed him to be the opposite. We pick our carrier commanding officers with great care. Captain Crozier is smart and passionate.” 

Then, this: “I believe, precisely because he is not naive and stupid, that he sent his alarming email with the intention of getting it into the public domain in an effort to draw public attention to the situation on his ship.”

In his initial remarks to the crew, Modly focused on media attention and the related “betrayal of trust.” At that time, he said in part: “Because he did that, he put it in the public’s forum and it’s now become a big controversy in Washington, D.C., and across the country, about a martyr CO who wasn’t getting the help he needed and therefore had to go through the chain of command, a chain of command which includes the media.”

Modly has told reporters that he fired Crozier because he believed the captain “raised alarm bells unnecessarily” and that he didn’t have confidence in the commander’s abilities any longer. As of Monday night, Trump said he will be “getting involved and see exactly what is going on there because I don’t want to destroy someone for having a bad day.”

What might have brought on the apology? As reported by CNN, two U.S. officials told the network that Defense Secretary Mark Esper’s office told Modly that he had to apologize, which may have prompted the sudden change of heart.

Either way, many people are calling for Modly to be removed or resign, including House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith. “Acting Secretary Modly’s decision to address the sailors on the Roosevelt and personally attack Captain Crozier shows a tone-deaf approach more focused on personal ego than one of the calm, steady leadership we so desperately need in this crisis,” the Democrat from Washington state said in a statement. “I no longer have confidence in Acting Secretary Modly’s leadership of the Navy and believe he should be removed from his position,” he added.

Some also suggest that instead of giving Modly the chance to resign, he should simply be fired.

And Crozier’s former crew? The viral video in which they cheered and clapped for him as he disembarked from the ship last week speaks for itself.

When Donald Trump said that the United States had “15 soon to be down close to zero” cases of COVID-19, the actual confirmed count was over 60. Early in the pandemic, on Feb. 12, China suddenly reported over 15,000 new cases as it acknowledged that its testing had fallen behind the actual number of cases. Just five days ago, numbers for France took a sudden lurch as thousands of cases and deaths that had occurred in nursing homes were at last added to official totals that had been until then limited to those who were tested, or died, in hospitals.

From the beginning, there has been an urge to undercount what’s happening with COVID-19. In some cases, that may be trying to paint the official response in a better light. In others, it may be confusion over how to handle an event that’s overwhelming state or local officials. And in the end it may be a simple inability to acknowledge the genuine scale of the disaster. 

In any case, there are reasons to believe the actual number of COVID-19 deaths in New York is much higher than the official number.

As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, Italy appears to be drastically, and intentionally, underreporting deaths due to COVID-19. As with France, deaths in nursing homes are largely being ignored, as are deaths that happen at home, and even deaths that happen in the hospital may be left off the tab because no one is taking the time to test someone if they died before being confirmed as a novel coronavirus patient. The Journal indicated that the undercount in Italy was in the thousands of deaths. And it warned that “Italy’s hidden death toll shows what could lie in store for the worst-hit areas of the U.S.”

That one week in the past prophecy is now being confirmed by Gothamist, which reported a staggering 10-fold increase in the number of New Yorkers dying in their own homes since New York City became America’s viral hot spot. Where on an ordinary day 20 to 25 residents might be expected to die in their own homes, that number is now in excess of 200. 

Many of those dying at home are dying for the same reason that another 600 New Yorkers died on Monday: COVID-19. They were either unable to reach a hospital, or overtaken by the disease so rapidly that, like in many reported cases, they progressed from flu-like symptoms to acute respiratory distress within hours. But there is another reason that bodies are being removed from New York homes and apartments at an unprecedented clip. 

Last week, paramedics in New York were told to stop bringing in heart attack patients who could not be revived at the scene. The results are so striking that on Monday The New York Times asked “Where have all the heart attacks gone?” The decrease in the number of heart patients was so striking that some hospitals were not at capacity despite the influx of COVID-19 patients. Those people with heart attacks, strokes, and other critical events aren’t going to hospitals. They’re not going anywhere.

The same thing has happened in Spain, Italy, France, China … everywhere that nations have become heavily engaged in combating the rapidly spreading COVID-19 infection. It’s not only those infected with the novel coronavirus who suffer. It’s thousands—tens of thousands—of others. And it’s not only that these people wouldn’t have died at home. It’s that they would not have died. Heart attack counts in hospitals have crashed. Heart attack deaths have spiked.

Just as much as those who died intubated in an ICU, those who died from a potentially treatable heart attack, stroke, or accident are also victims of this pandemic. However, they are unlikely to ever appear in the numbers when the ravages of COVID-19 are finally tallied. Even so, thousands of those who have died at home, and are still dying at home, appear to be direct victims of COVID-19. Those numbers should definitely be added—though the 45% positive rate of testing in New York at the moment makes it painfully clear that the test capacity isn’t even there to handle those who are making it to hospitals.

Donald Trump, Mike Pence, and Peter Navarro at the White House on April 2. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Trump was warned the coronavirus could kill 2 million Americans. Three days later, he said it was going away.

On Tuesday, Axios published internal White House memos that make the statements from President Donald Trump downplaying the coronavirus before it became a full-blown crisis look even more willfully ignorant.

A February 23 memo labeled as a “MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT” sent through the National Security Agency, then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the Covid-19 task force warns in its very first sentence that “[t]here 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.”

Three days later, however, 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.

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.” Needless to say, the memo that was addressed to him four days earlier made no allowance for the miraculous.

The February 23 memo doesn’t identify its author, but Axios reports that it was written by White House trade adviser Peter Navarro. The document presciently advises the federal government to immediately invest $618 million in ventilators and personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers.

“This is the first line of defense for our health care workers and secondary workers in facilities such as elder care and skilled nursing,” the memo says. “Key items include N-95 facemasks, goggles, gloves, Tyvek suits, ventilator circuits and Positive Air Press Respirators (PAPRs).”

Fast-forward 10 weeks and there are now hundreds of thousands of confirmed coronavirus cases in the US and more than 10,000 dead. Shortages of PPE and ventilators have become major problems and a source of tension between Trump and state governors who have called on him to do more to obtain supplies.

But instead of heeding the February 23 warning that major investments in PPE and ventilators were needed, Trump dithered — and not just until there was a sudden uptick in confirmed cases in early March. The Associated Press’s Michael Biesecker reported on Sunday that a review of federal purchasing contracts “shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.”

“By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile,” Biesecker added. When asked about the federal government’s slow response, Trump’s line has been that the states should have done more on their own.

Trump was warned the coronavirus could spiral out of control in January, then told people “we think we have it very well under control”

The February 23 memo was not the first White House document to warn that the coronavirus could be really bad. Axios also published a January 29 memo also authored by Navarro that advised “an immediate travel ban to China” and sounded the alarm about data indicating Covid-19 spreads more easily from person to person than the H1N1 flu or SARS. The memo estimated as many as 18 million Americans could be infected by the coronavirus, with 543,000 deaths.

“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on US soil,” the January 29 memo, which was addressed to the National Security Council, says. “The lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

During a rally the next day in Des Moines, however, Trump downplayed the coronavirus threat, saying, “We think we have it very well under control.”

“We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five [cases] — and those people are all recuperating successfully. 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,” he added.

Trump did move to restrict travel from China on February 2. But by then, the virus was already spreading inside the borders of the United States. And in the days that followed, Trump continued to make public statements that gave Americans a false sense of security.

“You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat,” he claimed on February 10.

Trump is now trying to rewrite history

During a news conference on March 17, Trump tried to pretend that he took the coronavirus seriously from the jump.

“I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” he said.

Then, during a Fox & Friends interview on March 30, Trump said of the coronavirus pandemic that “nobody could have predicted something like this.” But the memos indicate Trump’s own advisers had not only anticipated it but tried to warn him about it.

The Navarro memos reveal the sheer brazenness of Trump’s attempt to rewrite history. Instead of taking action, Trump engaged in wishful thinking until the spread of the virus was so out of control that many major population centers in the country were forced into a state of virtual lockdown. Hospitals, meanwhile, continue to struggle with resource shortages that the federal government did nothing to alleviate during the crucial period between January and early March.

Now, instead of misleading suggestions that the coronavirus will go away on its own, Trump has moved the goalposts dramatically. No longer are 15 cases a “good job” — instead, it’s a far more ghastly number.

“If we can hold [the number of US deaths] down, as we’re saying, to 100,000, it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100 [thousand] and 200,000, we altogether have done a very good job,” he said on March 30.

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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.

Jared Kushner and Donald Trump at a coronavirus task force daily briefing. | Win McNamee/Getty Images

The Trump administration is plagued by the Dunning-Kruger effect — the overconfidence of the ignorant. And it’s making the rest of America sick.

It was the White House coronavirus clash of the heavyweights: Dr. Anthony Fauci, perhaps the most respected public health official currently working in the US government, against Peter Navarro, an eccentric Trump economic adviser who shares the president’s anti-China obsession (and once quoted a fake version of himself named Ron Vara — an anagram for Navarro — in a book he wrote).

Per Axios, Navarro got into it during a coronavirus task force meeting on Saturday. Navarro claimed that hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug that Trump had been touting as a potential counter-coronavirus drug, had been shown to have “clear therapeutic efficacy” in foreign trials. When Fauci, who has become one of the most trusted medical experts on the subject, corrected him by pointing out that the evidence for the drug’s success against coronavirus was “anecdotal,” Navarro reportedly flew into a rage — raising his voice and (falsely) accusing Fauci of opposing the travel ban Trump imposed on China.

On Monday, CNN’s John Berman asked Navarro about the confrontation: “What are your qualifications to weigh in on medicine more than Dr. Anthony Fauci?” Navarro’s response: “My qualifications, in terms of looking at the science, is that I’m a social scientist.”

It’s only fitting that there’s a concept from social science — psychology, specifically — that helps us understand Navarro’s bluster. In a now-famous 1999 paper, Cornell University’s David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that people who did poorly on tests of abilities like logic and grammar “grossly overestimated” their own talents in those fields relative to peers. Competent people, by contrast, were less likely to overestimate their own talents. It seemed that the incompetent people knew so little that they were unable to adequately assess how little they knew — and thus were overconfident.

This phenomenon, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, may explain Navarro’s outburst. There are important differences in this case: Navarro has basic knowledge and expertise — he has a PhD in economics from Harvard, and actually warned Trump early on about the risks from coronavirus. He is not, however, an expert on medicine, and an economics doctorate doesn’t qualify him to give medical assessments over Fauci. But not being an expert also means that you’re unable to fully appreciate how little you know — and perhaps might even make you feel comfortable shouting down a preeminent expert in the field on an issue of vital national importance.

It’s not just Navarro, though. The entire Trump administration is an exercise in what happens when people without relevant expertise get to run the world’s most powerful government. Nothing makes that clear than its response to the coronavirus.

Our Dunning-Kruger pandemic

No figure, other than the president himself, better embodies the ethos of the Trump administration’s coronavirus effort than Jared Kushner.

A presidential son-in-law with no relevant experience in medicine or epidemiology, Kushner has nonetheless come to occupy a key role in coordinating the White House’s response to the virus. He has been previously failed in his roles attempting to solve the opioid crisis and the Israel-Palestine conflict (about which he once bragged about having read 25 books).

Early on in the crisis, per the New York Times, Kushner told Trump that the media was overhyping the virus to hurt his presidency. He later went on to convince Trump to hype an essentially nonexistent Google testing website, crowdsourced ideas for policy responses from said brother’s father-in-law, and launched a drive-through testing initiative that (as of early April) produced a grand total of five testing sites across the country.

Despite Kushner’s efforts, the testing situation in America remains dire. A dearth of adequate and rapid tests makes it harder for doctors and nurses to allocate scarce resources to the patients who need it. In the long run, the failure to test makes it harder for America to relax social distancing measures and move toward a South Korea-style surveillance model.

Failure after failure, both during the pandemic and his broader time in government, Kushner reportedly remains convinced of his own abilities — that he knows better than anyone else, including federal experts and state officials.

“Kushner shares the president’s view that governors are driving their residents into a panic by airing worst-case projections of medical needs,” the Times reports. “In conversations with advisers to the president, many of whom were stunned by the remark, Mr. Kushner has stressed what he considers his own abilities, saying that he has figured out how to make the government effective.”

By any reasonable lights, Kushner shouldn’t be anywhere near the White House’s coronavirus response — let alone coordinating it. Navarro, widely considered a crank in his own field of economics despite his Harvard degree, shouldn’t be in the White House — let alone working on the coronavirus response team. Yet Kushner is in on purely nepotistic grounds — and he reportedly brought Navarro in after discovering the latter’s book on Amazon.

This is the nature of the American government today.

The Republican Party and its allies in the right-wing media have spent the past several decades attacking the very idea of neutral policy expertise, treating academia as enemy-held territory rather than a source of important knowledge about the world. As a result, it became fertile ground for an arrogant anti-elite populist — a man who seems to believe he knows more than everyone about everything — to take it over and remake in his image.

Experts aren’t infallible, of course. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past two decades, it’s that our elite class is eminently capable of catastrophic failure.

Yet blanket skepticism of elites in Trump’s style is no more justified than blind faith in their pronouncements. In fact, it’s arguably quite a bit more dangerous, particularly when it comes to something like a pandemic response, a difficult task that requires understanding and synthesizing conclusions from a variety of technical and deeply specialized intellectual disciplines.

Instead, though, we have a president and a ruling party that instinctively distrusts the people most qualified to do that. It is under these conditions that Jared Kushner and Peter Navarro could end up playing key roles in confronting the biggest public health crisis in a century.

Trump, Kushner, and Navarro may be the ones suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. But Americans will be the ones suffering the consequences.

Two former FDA commissioners, both with bipartisan credibility, are working with lawmakers on a framework to gradually restart the economy — as long as the country builds an ample testing and disease surveillance system to rapidly diagnose coronavirus, isolate infected people and effectively quarantine their close contacts.

Mark McClellan and Scott Gottlieb foresee a need for a vast expansion of the United States’ public health system that would require hiring and training thousands of new workers to bolster coronavirus surveillance. Their paper, exclusively obtained by POLITCO, also cautions that antibody testing is not a panacea to determine if individuals can return to the workplace; scientists need to learn more about the virus — and how much immunity people have once they’ve been infected.

“There is no time to lose,” they wrote. “Building these capabilities now will accelerate our ability to assure the public’s safety — the foundation for a sustainable and secure approach to reopening our communities.”

Gottlieb, President Donald Trump's first FDA chief, said he has been talking to a bipartisan group of legislators about crafting legislation to put such a surveillance system in place. He developed the plan with McClellan, who served as both FDA commissioner and headed the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, under President George W. Bush. Several other prominent public health experts also contributed.

The authors didn’t lay out a timetable, but called for quick action from the Hill. Congress would have to make several changes, for instance in CMS payment policy, and it would have to appropriate money for the ambitious virus control effort.

Some authors of the report had earlier estimated that at least 750,000 tests would be needed per week, but now they say that’s only a guide for the current epidemic. For the reopening phase, the number would have to be higher so that everyone with Covid-19 symptoms, the close contacts of confirmed cases and health care workers, could be tested. Public health officials would isolate people with the virus and track contacts.

In addition, they call for a broad program to test a representative sampling of the population, enabling tracking of the disease’s prevalence and spread.

In an interview, Gottlieb suggested one high-end surveillance approach would be to test everyone who visits a doctor — about 3.8 million people a week. So far the U.S. has conducted nearly 2 million tests, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

The report also envisions a public-private partnership to tie rapid electronic reporting of test results by providers, labs and others to Medicare, Medicaid and private payer reimbursement. And there should be no payments for tests “do not meet minimum standards for sensitivity, specificity, and reliability in practice.” They called for a new grant program to encourage ongoing development of better tests.

The report explicitly cautions that cell phone location data — which some countries are using — is “unlikely to have adequate discriminating ability or adoption to achieve public health utility, while introducing serious privacy, security, and logistical concerns.”

Other authors include Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, former National Coordinator for Health Information Technology Farzad Mostashari and Lauren Silvis, Gottlieb’s FDA chief of staff.

Donald Trump has a financial interest in a company that manufactures the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine in Europe. Trump has repeatedly pushed the unproven drug as a treatment for coronavirus during White House press briefings.

Trump says some remarkably irresponsible stuff about hydroxychloroquin: "What do you have to lose? Take it. I really think they should take it … try it, if you'd like." pic.twitter.com/ULjKRfqEG5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 4, 2020

The NYT reports: “If hydroxychloroquine becomes an accepted treatment, several pharmaceutical companies stand to profit, including shareholders and senior executives with connections to the president. Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine.”

Earlier this week, reports emerged that “one of the largest manufacturers of the drug, Novartis, previously paid Trump’s now-incarcerated former personal attorney Michael Cohen more than $1 million for healthcare policy insight following Trump’s election in 2016. … Fast forward a few years and Cohen is currently in federal prison serving a three-year sentence for campaign finance violations, tax fraud, and bank fraud. Novartis, on the other hand, just agreed to donate up to 130 million doses of the unproven drug to help fight COVID-19.“

The post Trump Has Financial Interest in Manufacturer of Unproven Coronavirus Drug He Has Been Pushing at Press Briefings appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

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Last week, Pastor Tony Spell, head of the Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was arrested and charged with six misdemeanor counts of defying a governor’s executive order after holding church services in spite of state orders from Gov. John Bel Edwards to limit crowds. Each count was for one religious service Spell held after Edwards banned groups of more than 50 people, as reported by The Daily Beast. As reported by Reuters, Spell was back at it on Sunday and held services again, this time reportedly drawing more than1,200 people in spite of the stay-at-home order and ongoing pandemic.

Police charged the pastor when he was arrested on Tuesday, March 31. This shouldn’t have come as a huge shock, given that, as Daily Kos previously covered, he defied the ban by holding services for hundreds of people who were brought in using dozens of buses. According to CBS News, Spell claims his church is cleaned on a daily basis, and that attendees did practice social distancing by standing six feet apart. They did not, however, wear masks.

“They would rather come to church and worship like free people than live like prisoners in their homes,” Spell said on Sunday. He also reportedly told attendees they had “nothing to fear but fear itself.”

“We derive our inalienable rights from God, not any government,” Spell told CBS in an email interview on Monday.

“They’re just afraid there’s not going to be enough money in the collection plate,” Bobbye McInnis, who lives by the church, told Reuters. 

Unsurprisingly, Spell—who once told a local outlet he believes the virus is “politically motivated”—plans to sue. On what grounds? As Spell’s spokesperson, attorney Joe Long, explained to Reuters, Spell believes the governor’s order violates the constitutional rights to freedom of religion, as well as the freedom to peaceably assemble. 

The pastor of a Florida megachurch, Rodney Howard-Browne, was arrested last week as well. Howard-Browne, mindblowingly, not only held a packed service but live-streamed the evidence on the church’s Facebook page. His charges include violating public health rules and unlawful assembly.

It’s understandable that for people of faith, connecting with religious communities and leaders can be especially helpful during a public health crisis. What to do? Go virtual. And use positions of power and community to encourage people to take the pandemic seriously.

Senators are responding to President Donald Trump’s firing of the intelligence community’s top watchdog with a muddled message, with some calling for hearings and others saying lawmakers have far more important issues to tackle.

The scattershot response suggests Congress is unlikely to urgently address Trump’s decision to sack Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community’s inspector general — and it underscores how difficult it will be for the Senate and House to conduct oversight of the surprising firing, especially in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the matter is an urgent priority to some, including Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who said the Senate should hold a hearing.

King, who sits on the powerful Senate Intelligence Committee, said officials such as Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell and Atkinson himself — whom Trump fired late Friday night — should be put under oath.

“It should be an open hearing to have members of the administration come forward and provide an explanation,” King, who caucuses with the Democrats, said in a phone interview, calling Trump’s decision to fire Atkinson “terrible on a lot of levels.”

Trump has defended the firing, telling reporters on Saturday during a White House coronavirus task force briefing that the longtime public official was a “total disgrace” for the way he handled a whistleblower complaint that led to the president’s impeachment.

But King cautioned that even a public hearing might not yield many answers because “this was a decision made principally by the president, probably without consulting much of anyone else.”

“We don’t need to know why he did it — he said it. The president yesterday said it!” King quipped.

A spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the panel’s plans. The Senate is scheduled to return to regular session on April 20, but several senators have cast doubt on that timeline given the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has yet to comment on Atkinson’s removal.

Meanwhile, Atkinson released a lengthy statement Sunday night about his firing, asserting that Trump removed him simply for doing his job.

“It is hard not to think that the president’s loss of confidence in me derives from my having faithfully discharged my legal obligations as an independent and impartial Inspector General,” Atkinson wrote.

Democrats have condemned the firing as an abuse of power and a brazen act of politically motivated retribution by a president emboldened after the Senate acquitted him in his impeachment trial. Republicans have been tepid in their criticism of the action, but some, including Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, said the firing “demands an explanation,” while others largely deferred to the president’s unorthodox leadership style.

“Obviously those people serve at the pleasure of the president and as is usually the case, it’s not something that we have any control over,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the GOP whip. “The president made it pretty clear why he did. But he has the prerogative. We don’t always have to agree with his actions. As we’ve learned in the past he’s going to do what he’s to do.”

Thune said it was too early to assess whether the firing was unwarranted: “I want to talk to the people who are close to it and get some context on it. I don’t understand it at this point. But that’s a question for another day when I can figure out what went into it.”

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who presided over a pro forma session of the Senate on Monday morning, also said more information was needed.

“I think we should get more detail. I agree with that,” she said. “It’s such an odd time it’s hard to say how we’re going to get that info — I mean, you know what kind of priority that information is going to have — but I think that’ll all come out.”

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), a top Trump ally, said he was more consumed with reforming the foreign surveillance courts than Atkinson’s firing. But he also made clear it didn’t trouble him, either: “I don’t necessarily have any issues with it.”

“My view is that this is the president’s decision, it’s a decision that’s his to make. It doesn’t give me enormous heartburn,” Hawley said in an interview on Monday. “It’s not the main issue.”

President Donald Trump greets Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as Supreme Justice Brett Kavanaugh looks on ahead of the State of the Union address on February 4. | Mario Tama/Getty Images

American democracy is in deep trouble.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority, in a case that is literally titled Republican National Committee v. Democratic National Committee, handed down a decision that will effectively disenfranchise tens of thousands of Wisconsin voters. It did so at the urging of the GOP.

The case arises out of Wisconsin’s decision to hold its spring election during the coronavirus pandemic, even as nearly a dozen other states have chosen to postpone similar elections in order to protect the safety of voters. Democrats hoped to defend a lower court order that allowed absentee ballots to be counted so long as they arrived at the designated polling place by April 13, an extension granted by a judge to account for the brewing coronavirus-sparked chaos on Election Day, April 7. Republicans successfully asked the Court to require these ballots to be postmarked by April 7.

All five of the Court’s Republicans voted for the Republican Party’s position. All four of the Court’s Democrats voted for the Democratic Party’s position.

The decision carries grave repercussions for the state of Wisconsin — and democracy more broadly. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg notes in her dissent, “the presidential primaries, a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court, three seats on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, over 100 other judgeships, over 500 school board seats, and several thousand other positions” are at stake in the Wisconsin election, which will be held tomorrow. Of all these seats, the state Supreme Court race, between incumbent conservative Justice Daniel Kelly and challenger Judge Jill Karofsky, is the most hotly contested.

The April 7 election is shaping up to be a trainwreck. Most poll workers have refused to work the election, out of fear of catching the coronavirus, which forced Gov. Tony Evers (D) to call up the National Guard in order to keep polls open. But even this measure appears woefully inadequate. In Milwaukee, election officials announced that the state only has enough election workers to open five poll locations — when the city would normally have 180 polling places.

Meanwhile, the state has received a crush of absentee ballot requests — about 1.2 million, when it typically receives less than 250,000 in a spring election. That’s left state officials scrambling to send ballots to voters in time for Tuesday’s election. And on top of all of these complications, a state law required all ballots to be received by election officials by 8 pm on April 7, or else those ballots would not be counted.

Tens of thousands of voters are not expected to even receive their ballots until after Election Day, effectively disenfranchising them through no fault of their own.

In response to this brewing catastrophe, Judge William Conley, an Obama appointee to a federal court in Wisconsin, ordered the deadline for receiving ballots to be extended to 4 pm on April 13. In response to this order, the Republican Party asked the Supreme Court to modify Conley’s decision to require all ballots to be postmarked by April 7 or they will not be counted.

The Supreme Court’s Republican majority granted the GOP this very specific request.

Again, many voters are not expected to receive their ballots until after this April 7 deadline. As Justice Ginsburg notes, “as of Sunday morning, 12,000 ballots reportedly had not yet been mailed out,” so the number of voters disenfranchised by the Court’s order in Republican is likely to be vast. The Court’s decision in Republican, moreover, is the culmination of a weeks-long effort by Republicans to thwart various efforts by Democrats to accommodate voters who might be disenfranchised by coronavirus.

The majority relied upon one of the most destructive voting rights decisions of the modern era

The majority opinion, which is unsigned, relies heavily on the Court’s previous decision in Purcell v. Gonzalez (2006). Purcell is by no means a famous decision. It received far fewer headlines that the Court’s decisions striking down much of the Voting Rights Act or permitting partisan gerrymandering. But it’s proved to be one of the greatest thorns in the side of voting rights advocates. And the Court’s decision in Republican cements Purcell’s status as one of the greatest obstacles facing a voting right litigator.

Briefly, Purcell held that courts should be reluctant to hand down orders impacting a state’s election procedures as Election Day draws nigh. “Court orders affecting elections,” the Court warned in Purcell, “can themselves result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls. As an election draws closer, that risk will increase.”

There is some wisdom to this vague guideline. Voters may, indeed, be quite confused if a wave of court orders are handed down close to an election. For example, if the Supreme Court of the United States were to declare, well after sunset on the eve of an election, that voters must mail their ballots by April 7 or be disenfranchised, such an order is likely to confuse some voters and lead to them being unable to vote.

In any event, there are good reasons why Purcell’s warning about courts deciding voting rights cases too close to an election should not be read as an inexorable command. For one thing, the consequences of a new voting law may not become apparent until that law is actually operating close to an Election Day. Voting rights advocates may not learn that voters are struggling to obtain absentee ballots, for example, until an election is close and many voters are complaining that they haven’t received ballots. If courts cannot intervene under these circumstances, many impediments to the right to vote will go unaddressed.

Similarly, as the Democratic Party unsuccessfully argued in its brief in the Republican case, court orders are not the only thing that can “result in voter confusion and consequent incentive to remain away from the polls.” In Republican, voter confusion and an incentive to remain away from the polls arose from “the COVID-19 pandemic and the ‘voter confusion and electoral chaos’ it is causing.”

Until recently, the Democratic brief explained, “Wisconsin voters reasonably expected they would be able either to vote safely in person on election day or through a reliable, well-functioning absentee ballot system.” Those voters learned very close to the election that this reasonable expectation was wrong. And Judge Conley’s order was an attempt to alleviate the disruption caused by the pandemic.

Nevertheless, Republican treats Purcell’s warning about last-minute election orders as something very close to mandatory. “By changing the election rules so close to the election date,” the Court’s Republican majority claims, “the District Court contravened this Court’s precedents and erred by ordering such relief.”

“This Court,” the majority opinion added, “has repeatedly emphasized that lower federal courts should ordinarily not alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

This conversion of Purcell from guideline to something close to a mandatory decree is likely to have sweeping consequences for future elections. It means that, if voting rights advocates discover in the final days before an election that a new state law is disenfranchising African American voters — or a pandemic keeps away most voters — federal courts most likely may not intervene. It means that many problems that are unlikely to be discovered until Election Day itself will go unaddressed.

Republicans have fought tooth and nail to make it hard to vote in Tuesday’s election

The Supreme Court’s decision in Republican is the capstone of a weeks-long effort by the Republican Party to make it difficult for voters to actually cast a ballot in Wisconsin. Last week, Gov. Evers called the state legislature into session and asked it to delay the election. But the Republican-controlled legislature ended that session just seconds after it was convened. After Evers acted on his own authority to delay the election, the state’s Supreme Court voted along partisan lines to rescind Evers’s order. Republicans also rejected Evers’s proposal to automatically mail ballots to every voter in the state.

The background is that Republicans hope to hold onto a seat on the state Supreme Court, which is up for grabs in Tuesday’s election. As law professor and election law expert Rick Hasen recently noted, “only 38% of voters who had requested an absentee ballot in heavily Democratic Milwaukee County had returned one, compared with over 56% of absentee voters in nearby Republican-leaning Waukesha County.” So there’s at least some evidence that, if additional voters are unable to return their ballots, Republicans will be overrepresented in the ballots that are counted.

It’s also worth noting that, if Wisconsin had free and fair elections to choose its state lawmakers, Evers would most likely have been able to work with a Democratic legislature to ensure that Tuesday’s election would be conducted fairly. In 2018, 54 percent of voters chose a Democratic candidate for the state Assembly. But Republicans have so completely gerrymandered the state that they prevailed in 63 of the state’s 99 Assembly races.

There is far more at stake in Wisconsin, moreover, than one state Supreme Court seat. Wisconsin could be the pivotal swing state that decides the 2020 presidential election. The question of whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden occupies the White House next year could easily be determined by which man receives Wisconsin’s electoral votes.

And the Court’s decision in Republican suggests that the Supreme Court will give the GOP broad leeway in how US elections should be conducted.

Say what you will about Georgia’s Republican leadership team: They are corrupt and incompetent and terrible. That’s mostly what I wanted to say. First you had Republican Gov. (and anti-democracy cheerleader) Brian Kemp dragging his ass on doing anything proactive to help his constituents during the beginnings and middle of the COVID-19 outbreaks in the country. Now, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Republican Sen. David Perdue of Georgia seems to have made sure he was able to wet his beak before the proverbial shit hit the fan.

According to the AJC, Perdue was a busy little bee on the stock market last month, with 82 transactions dated to March 3, 2020. This came a couple of weeks after the Senate Intelligence Committee was given a closed-door briefing on the potential of a COVID-19 pandemic. Sen. Perdue seems to have been following the lead of North Carolina Republican Sen. Richard Burr and fellow Georgian and Republican junior U.S. Sen. Kelly Loeffler, both of who dumped millions in stocks in the days and weeks proceeding the security briefing.

Like Burr and Loeffler, Perdue has already said that while this may look like a duck, walk like a duck, and sound like a duck, it’s really a swan. It’s a swan wrapped in a flag with a red MAGA hat on top. In general, Sen. Perdue is the kind of arrogant, pig-headed elitist we have come to expect from the Republican Party, and also an untrustworthy narrator of his own story. For example, how prescient of Perdue to decide to buy no less than $65,000 in DuPont de Nemours stock on Jan. 24—the very day of the security briefing. DuPont is a chemical company that supplies the kind of personal protective equipment (PPE) medical professionals are clamoring for across the country. Over the next couple of weeks, Perdue made sure to invest a total of about $185,000 in DuPont stock. 

Coincidentally, Sen. Perdue also sold off shares of casino company stocks while buying about $50,000 worth of shares of at-home streaming service Netflix. The AJC points out that Perdue did also sell a lot of Kroger’s grocery store shares, which have gone up with demand. Maybe Perdue just has just dumb luck ? Or maybe Perdue is just dumb, and was lucky to be in on the ground floor of a new scam in this ever- corrupt administration?

Trump during an exchange with ABC’s Jon Karl on Monday. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

“What you just said is a disgrace.”

President Donald Trump was asked repeatedly during Monday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing about a new Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) inspector general report detailing the federal government’s failure to provide hospitals with the testing and equipment resources they need. His contemptuous responses spoke volumes about his disdain for oversight, as well as for any reporter who has the gall to ask him questions he doesn’t like.

The HHS IG report was released on Monday, two days after Trump fired intelligence community Inspector General Michael Atkinson for not doing his political bidding with a whistleblower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine. Trump’s initial response on Monday to a question about the HHS IG report referenced his reflexive distaste for the oversight position.

“It’s just wrong. Did I hear the word ‘inspector general?’” Trump said. “Could politics be entered into that?”

When he was asked about the report for a second time, Trump suggested it couldn’t be trusted because he wasn’t sure whether the HHS official who put it together — Principal Deputy Inspector General Christi Grimm — was appointed by him. Grimm, however, has experience in the federal government under both Republican and Democratic presidents dating back to the Clinton administration. Moreover, the IG report is based on direct conversations with hospital administrators.

Later, when Fox News reporter Kristin Fisher attempted to ask Trump specifically about the report’s finding that hospitals are working with a “severe shortage” of testing materials, Trump unloaded on her.

“You should say ‘congratulations, great job,’ instead of being so horrid in the way you ask a question,” he said.

Fisher wasn’t alone in being on the receiving end of Trump’s abuse. Trump also bashed ABC’s Jon Karl because Karl didn’t tell Trump that Grimm had served under President Obama when he asked a question about the IG report — as though Grimm’s experience under a previous administration destroyed her credibility.

“You’re a third-rate reporter. What you just said is a disgrace,” Trump said to Karl. “You will never make it.”

The HHS IG report, which is based on a random sample of administrators from 323 hospitals across the country conducted March 23-27 — a period of time before the worst of the coronavirus pandemic hit the US — details a lack of testing supplies and medical gear that’s making things difficult for hospitals, and alludes to the disorganized nature of the federal response.

One administrator told HHS the supplies they received from the federal government “won’t even last a day.’” Another detailed how their staff had resorted to jury-rigging ventilators from anesthesia machine.

A third administrator, referring to shortages of surgical masks that the federal government hasn’t been able to address, said, “we are throwing all of our PPE best practices out the window.” And a fourth lamented “instances of receiving conflicting guidance from different Federal, State, and local authorities.”

Instead of engaging with that reality, however, Trump on Monday characteristically deflected from it with ad hominem attacks. You can’t solve problems if you don’t even recognize they exist.

The IG report comes days after the Associated Press broke news that the federal government waited until mid-March to try and replenish the national stockpile of medical gear. By that time, “hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile,” the AP reported.

When asked about his administration’s tardy response, Trump’s standard line is that states should be doing more on their own and should be grateful for any federal help they’re fortunate enough to receive.

“The people that you’re looking at — FEMA, the military — what they’ve done is a miracle,” Trump said during the White House briefing on Sunday, referring to the AP report.

In a move he’d repeat again on Monday, Trump then went on the attack against the reporter who dared to ask him a question that reflected poorly upon him.

“What they’ve done for states is incredible, and you should be thanking them for what they’ve done and not always asking wise-guy questions,” 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.

It's only going to get more difficult, and the time between now and November is growing short.

Donald Trump’s epic string of lies about coronavirus is impressive enough on its own, but it looks even worse when you compare it with former Vice President Joe Biden’s public statements on the same topic. Greg Sargent did just that, with a devastating timeline.

Bear in mind that Biden doesn’t command the airwaves every time he decides to clear his throat. He doesn’t get daily press briefings to stroke his own ego. He has to make what he says count—like writing a USA Today op-ed on January 27 warning that the outbreak “will get worse before it gets better” and that “I am concerned that the Trump administration’s shortsighted policies have left us unprepared for a dangerous epidemic that will come sooner or later.”

That op-ed came three days after Trump said “It will all work out well” and three days before Trump said “We think we have it very well under control.” The day after Trump said “We think we have it very well under control,” on January 31, Biden told reporters “We have, right now, a crisis with the coronavirus” and “This is no time for Donald Trump's record of hysteria and xenophobia—hysterical xenophobia—and fearmongering to lead the way instead of science.” The day after that, Biden emphasized the same point, tweeting “We are in the midst of a crisis with the coronavirus. We need to lead the way with science—not Donald Trump’s record of hysteria, xenophobia, and fear-mongering. He is the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health emergency.”

Trump, the next day: “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China.” Eight days later, on February 10, he made his unsubstantiated claim that coronavirus would go away when the weather got warm. Biden responded the next day by slamming that claim on Morning Joe.

In late February, Trump made some of his most notorious claims about coronavirus, from that it was “going very substantially down, not up” to “It’s going to disappear. One day—it’s like a miracle—it will disappear” to that it was a Democratic “hoax.”

On February 28, Biden went on CNN to say “You need to let the experts speak,” running through several of the ways Trump had weakened U.S. pandemic response. “This is not a way to run a nation, this is not a way to reassure the world.”

From March 9 to 13, Trump again made a series of statements dangerously downplaying the dangers of COVID-19, including the notorious “It will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” 

On March 12, Biden gave a major speech on coronavirus and presidential truthtelling, unveiling his own plan, which included expanded testing, emergency paid sick leave, and more. “No president can promise to prevent future outbreaks,” he said. “But I can promise you this: When I’m president, we will be better prepared; we will respond better and recover better. We will lead with science. We will listen to the experts.” In sharp contrast to Trump, he pledged “I’ll always tell you the truth.”

That was the day before Trump said “I don’t take responsibility at all.”

Two days later, Biden wrote, “It is the job of the President to take responsibility—and his response is unacceptable,” while renewing his call for expanded—and free—testing. 

It can be difficult for Biden to break through to the news in the current environment, while Trump has seized the microphone and is the main mouthpiece for his administration’s response. But while Trump has said a lot more (in public, at least) about coronavirus, it’s clear who is advocating for truth-telling, for the more effective response, and for the more serious attention to this as a danger to human life rather than personal political prospects.

On Monday, Wisconsin's conservative-majority Supreme Court ruled 4-2 along ideological lines to block Democratic Gov. Tony Evers' executive order that had canceled in-person voting in Tuesday’s presidential primary and competitive state Supreme Court election, reversing Evers' decision to postpone the election until June 9 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The court's decision means voting will proceed on Tuesday even as hundreds of polling places around the state won't be open and the state has ordered people to shelter in place to and avoid public gatherings to stop the spread of the virus.

Earlier in the day, Evers had issued an order to postpone in-person voting and call the Republican legislature into another special session so that they could expand alternative voting methods such as voting by mail. However, Republicans have consistently opposed any effort to make it easier to safely vote, and they quickly filed a lawsuit before the sympathetic state court to stop him.

Republicans' intransigence had already led to a flurry of litigation and widespread confusion as in-person voting has increasingly become unsafe due to the virus. Indeed, in Wisconsin's biggest city of Milwaukee, which is a Democratic stronghold and home to a majority of its black population, officials slashed the number of in-person polling places from 180 to just five, or one location for every 10,000 voters expected to vote in-person on Tuesday. Roughly 500,000 voters statewide still had yet to return their requested absentee ballots as of Sunday, meaning the ongoing battle over a federal court order extending the deadline to return absentee ballots from April 7 to April 13 could leave hundreds of thousands of voters disenfranchised.

Wisconsin Republicans have so steadfastly refused to protect voters from public health risks by making alternative voting methods easier because—like Donald Trump—they believe that allowing everyone to safely vote would endanger conservative Justice Dan Kelly's chance of winning a key race for the state Supreme Court, where conservative hardliners hold a 5-2 majority (though Kelly recused himself from hearing the case over the election delay). If progressive Judge Jill Karofsky were to win, progressives would have a shot at gaining their own majority when a conservative incumbent faces the voters in 2023.

GOP legislators, who won fewer votes than Democrats in 2018 but maintained sizable majorities thanks largely to their gerrymanders, are aiming to preserve their majority on the court because a future progressive majority could strike down their gerrymanders and voter suppression laws, showcasing the vicious cycle that this week's voter suppression efforts are a part of.

In a time when the coronavirus pandemic is necessitating a massive expansion of mail voting across the country, many Republicans in positions of power are watching what is happening in Wisconsin. If the GOP succeeds in winning this election via mass voter disenfranchisement because hundreds of thousands were unable to safely vote, refusing to expand voting access and hoping that Democratic-leaning voters bear the disproportionate brunt of the pandemic will become the Republican playbook for the November elections if it hasn't already.

After many schools adopted Zoom to conduct online lessons during the coronavirus lockdown, concerns about security and privacy have led to a ban on the video conferencing software across the U.S. BetaNews reports: The chancellor of New York City's Department of Education Richard A Carranza sent an email to school principals telling them to "cease using Zoom as soon as possible." And he is not alone; schools in other parts of the country have taken similar action, and educators are now being trained to use Microsoft Teams as this has been suggested as a suitable alternative, partly because it is compliant with FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act). Documents seen by Chalkbeat show that principals in NYC have been told: "Based on the DOE's review of those documented concerns, the DOE will no longer permit the use of Zoom at this time." The Washington Post quotes Danielle Filson, spokesperson for the NYC Education Department, as saying: "Providing a safe and secure remote learning experience for our students is essential, and upon further review of security concerns, schools should move away from using Zoom as soon as possible. There are many new components to remote learning, and we are making real-time decisions in the best interest of our staff and student. We will support staff and students in transitioning to different platforms such as Microsoft Teams that have the same capabilities with appropriate security measures in place." Clark County Public Schools in Nevada, as well as schools in Utah, Washington State and beyond are looking into Zoom alternatives.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I take no joy whatsoever in writing this particularly grim post, but Donald Trump's relentless string of lies about the coronavirus going away, being just like the flu, being a media hoax, and being a problem that governors and governors alone should handle are all about to hit a wall as the death toll mounts across the country. 

Americans of all stripes will have the opportunity to see with their own eyes the deadly results of a president who was too incoherent, too incompetent, and too inhumane to worry about leading an unprepared nation into an ambush blindfolded. And no region will be spared, not even those that rabidly support Trump.

In fact, many of the rural and southern regions of the country that make up some of Trump's strongholds stand to get pummeled, as Daily Kos community member Dartagnan noted over the weekend. In those regions, Trump and a host of GOP governors will bear specific responsibility for sowing confusion over the seriousness of the epidemic and the dire need for social distancing to slow its spread. “There is no city anywhere in the world that can withstand the outbreak that would occur if there isn’t rigorous social distancing,” Tom Frieden, a former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director, told Politico.

Emerging hot spots, according to modeling done by Columbia University epidemiologists, include St. John the Baptist Parish in Louisiana, rural Tennessee just north of Nashville, and parts of southwest Georgia near Albany. Most of these rural areas are already desperately low on the resources and medical personnel necessary to handle an influx of COVID-19 cases. 

St. John the Baptist, for instance, doesn't even have a hospital located within the parish. Politico writes, "As of Friday, St. John the Baptist had nearly 300 confirmed cases and 22 deaths. The state health department says the region is already at 56 percent of its hospital bed capacity and 68 percent of its ICU bed capacity, with the virus’ peak not expected for at least another week and cases doubling every 2.5 days."

But rural areas in Arkansas and South Carolina are uniquely at risk precisely because their governors still haven't issued a statewide stay-at-home order. In addition, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Georgia only did so recently and, in some cases, with some pretty glaring carve-outs for activities like going to beaches and attending religious services.  

“The best indicator of who is at risk is how tamped down are you in terms of social distancing,” said Nirav Shah, a senior scholar at Stanford University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center.

Over the weekend, Trump spent a lot of time pointing fingers at everyone but himself for the carnage that is coming—the media, Democratic governors, regions that are making “inflated requests” for equipment (i.e. New York, though Trump never named the state).

"It is critical that certain media outlets stop spreading false rumors and creating fear and panic with the public," Trump said, failing to single out any specific stories that were supposedly over the top.

His finger pointing will ramp up as the death count rises. But never forget that Trump and Senate Republicans pissed away the entire month of February and about half of March without doing virtually anything (other than dumping some stocks) to prepare the nation for what lay ahead. 

[Putting people who dislike and distrust the government in charge of the government is a risky business, and we are paying the price for it now. ]

We are now three months in.  The CDC is recommending "wearing cloth face coverings in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission."

They're not talking about the "N-95" or surgical masks; those are in "short supply," and "must continue to be reserved for healthcare workers and medical first responsers." Just the ordinary, non-surgical, cloth (or heavy paper) masks covering mouth and nose, the ones that cost maybe $0.25 each at wholesale.

As it happens, these are also in short supply.  So the CDC has described how we all can make our masks at home.

That's helpful—I've made some for myself, following their instructions—but really: We're three months in. Where the hell are the masks?  Why aren't they being handed out on street-corners to anyone who wants one? Fifty or 100 million dollars—chump change—would have gotten us all the masks we need.

We don't have them because the federal government placed its order for 50 million masks—on March 12th.

It's not just masks, or ventilators, or the other PPE that are in critically short supply. There is, as far as I have been able to determine, not a single bottle of ordinary hand santizer, or alcohol-based disinfectant wipes, available for sale within the Washington DC metropolitan area, where I live.  Not one. The (many) online retailers I have checked are promising delivery by the middle of May.

I know, I know—many people are hoarding, and others are price-gouging. Well, who could have imagined that?!  Hoarding and price-gouging during a national emergency! I'll tell you who could have imagined that:  people whose job it is to imagine that (and things like it), and who are competent at their job, and are given appropriate direction and resources to do their job.

If you are not outraged by the incompetence displayed here you have either lost your sense of outrage completely, or you don't have a friend or loved one who is a healthcare provider or first responder.

The failure is so deep that we don't even really know how deep it is. Our testing capability, as is well known, is woefully inadequate for the task, so we really haven't the faintest idea how many people are carrying the virus. Who's got ventilators?  How many? Where are they stored? Who is in charge of the decisions about where they get deployed? Is the federal government seizing ventilators and ordering them to be sent somewhere, or not? If so, who's in charge of that?  Spend an hour or two trying to figure that out, and you'll get a glimpse of the dismal state of information-gathering and information dissemination that is plaguing this effort.

In the face of this appalling breach of their duty to defend us from attack, one response has been: we don't, actually, have the duty to defend you from attack. "We're not a shipping clerk," the president famously declared; "the Federal government is not supposed to be out there buying vast amounts of items and then shipping." And in what is surely both the ugliest, and the most ignorant, comment from a public official in recent memory, Jared Kushner observed that "the notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile; it's not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use."

This is not just nonsense; it is pernicious and harmful nonsense that is likely, in fact, to cause people—real people—to die. Louisiana was supposed to have its own stockpile of PPE to prepare for an epidemic?  Thanks for telling us now.  "We" all thought, up to now, that "you" were with "us." Thanks for setting us straight on that.

Now, you may say: "Well, it's not like it's easy to get 50 million masks—let alone a million ventilators—manufactured and distributed to the people who need them."  That is precisely my point.  It's not easy. It takes people who know what they're doing—people with the technical expertise to figure out what's needed, and how much of it is needed, and where it is needed, and by when, and where and how can it be procured, and the administrative and managerial expertise to understand the production and procurement systems and the rules under which they operate, and enough to know how and when to bend the rules when necessary, and how to manage large groups of people doing different tasks—to get it done.

Remember that good old American can-do spirit—the one that says "we can do anything we put our minds to"? Or perhaps you are too young to remember—it's been a while. There was always some bullshit in it—but it wasn't just bullshit; we did get things done. But now, it appears that only the bullshit is left, with none of the substance to back it up.

Some people attribute our (former) ability to actually get big things done to unbridled capitalism, and there is surely a large measure of truth in that. But sometimes our government also knew how to get big things done, things that the capitalists, on their own, can't accomplish.

Like many of you, I have more time on my hands than I would like, and I've been doing some reading about the US's response, in terms of industrial production, to the attack on Pearl Harbor.**  The response was staggering, the numbers mind-blowing; by the end of the first year after the attack, airplane production had roughly tripled, ship production quadrupled, and munitions production had gone up by a factor of five. Less than five months after the Pearl Harbor attack, the U.S. Army Air Force launched B-25 bombers from the deck of the USS Hornet—a feat which had previously been deemed impossible—and bombed Tokyo. Eleven months after the attack, Eisenhower led an entire invasion force—tanks, howitzers, jeeps, food, ordnance, medicine, water, road-building equipment, etc. and 65,000 GIs—into North Africa. Within two years after Pearl Harbor, American factories were turning out a Jeep every 70 seconds, and a tank and an airplane every hour or so, 24 hours a day. Etc.

**There's a prodigious literature on this question. I found this article ("The War of Production 1920-1942"), by naval historian Thomas Hone of the Defense Systems Management College at Fort Belvoir, particularly helpful, along with Thomas Morgan's "The Industrial Mobilization of World War II" (available on JSTOR here).

This didn't happen because the States somehow figured out how to band together to undertake the common defense; most people in 1941 understood that we had already done that, back in 1789. Nor did it happen because FDR banged his fist on the table and said "We're going to become the Arsenal of Democracy!"  He did bang his fist on the table and say that, over and over again—but he also actually took the steps necessary to get it done.

It was a prodigiously complicated task:

It was not clear, for example, just how to make the agencies of war production both effective and representative. To be effective, war production agencies at the federal level had to (1) have data on what U.S. industry and agriculture could do, (2) be able to anticipate the right kinds and numbers of items needed by the fighting forces, (3) have control over civilian manpower, (4) have a means to control scarce resources, (5) maintain a stable currency by monitoring and controlling prices, wages and savings, and (6.) work closely with the agencies implementing foreign and fiscal policy. To do these things, the leaders of war production-would need public support, the support of the President, the cooperation of the armed services, and the knowledge necessary to make workable policies. Yet it was not really clear to Roosevelt and his advisors how to create a hierarchy of politically legitimate institutions which had the capabilities required to perform the tasks necessary to effective mobilization. [Hone—see note ** above]

Nothing like it had ever been done before, and there were lots of starts and stops and trials and errors; the War Resources Board was changed to the Advisory Commission to the Council of National Defense and then to the office of Production Management before it became the War Production Board in 1942. By the end of January, 1942—two months after the attack—Roosevelt had created, in addition to the WPB, the Office of Price Administration, the National War Labor Board, and the War Manpower Commission, each with its own set of (sometimes overlapping) duties and powers. Roosevelt then had to keep moving personnel around until he found the right people for the right jobs.

No other country on earth did it, and no other country on earth could have done it, and we were, justifiably, proud of that. So we did it again—building the world's greatest highway network—and again—sending astronauts to the moon (in 9 years!). Etc.

So if someone can actually make America great again, I'm all in on that.  In the meantime, I can only read about Taiwan's response, or Singapore's response, to the virus (0.2 deaths and 1.1 deaths per 1 million residents, respectively) and sigh, and wonder about how we (29 deaths per 1 million residents—and rising) have descended to the second rate.

I understand—it's not an apples-to-apples comparison.  But it is hard for me to imagine a sadder illustration of American decline than the move from "a jeep every 70 seconds" to "no available twenty-five-cent masks."

NOTE TO COMMENTERS: If you have any thoughts about the point I'm trying to make—that the US government has failed, miserably and shamefully, in its duty to protect us from an attack it knew, months ago, was coming, and that its failure will cost American lives—I'd love to hear them, whether you agree or (especially) if you disagree. But I would ask you to refrain from discussing extraneous, off-topic points (about the general political situation, the upcoming election, the performance of this Administration in regard to other matters, etc.).

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Even in the midst of this crisis, maintaining his public image is Trump's highest priority.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Several major apps and websites, such as Paypal and Venmo have a flaw that lets hackers easily take over users' accounts once they have taken control of the victim's phone number. Earlier this year, researchers at Princeton University found 17 major companies, among them Amazon, Paypal, Venmo, Blizzard, Adobe, eBay, Snapchat, and Yahoo, allowed users to reset their passwords via text message sent to a phone number associated with their accounts. This means that if a hacker takes control of a victim's cellphone number via a common and tragically easy to perform hack known as SIM swapping, they can then hack into the victim's online accounts with these apps and websites. Last week, two months after their initial outreach to the companies to report this flaw in their authentication mechanisms, the Princeton researchers checked again to see if the companies had fixed the problem. Some, including Adobe, Blizzard, Ebay, Microsoft, and Snapchat, have plugged the hole. Others have yet to do it. Paypal and Venmo, given that they are apps that allow users to exchange money and are linked to bank accounts or credit cards, may be the most glaring examples. Motherboard verified this week that it's possible to reset passwords on Paypal and Venmo via text message. Fear not, there is a solution. "The easiest way to make it impossible for SIM swappers to take over your accounts after they hijack your number is to unlink your phone number with those accounts, and use a VoIP number -- such as Google Voice, Skype, or another -- instead," reports Motherboard. "Google Voice numbers, given that they're not actually linked to a real SIM card, are much harder to hijack."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Monday, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin issued an executive order cancelling in-person voting and postponing Election Day from April 7 to June 9 in Wisconsin's presidential primary and competitive state Supreme Court general election, citing the dangers of the coronavirus pandemic making it impossible to safely hold the election in a manner consistent with voters' rights. Republicans had already asked the U.S. Supreme Court to prevent the extension of absentee mail voting, and they swiftly vowed to fight Evers' latest order at the state Supreme Court, leaving the election in chaos thanks to judicial uncertainty.

Despite a stay-at-home order and Evers' calls to expand mail voting as the safest way to protect voters and poll workers, Republican legislators have adamantly refused to take any actions that would have made it easier to vote and have actively fought litigation to do so, which led to a federal court refusing to postpone the election. Republicans adjourned a special session without taking action over the weekend just as soon as Evers had ordered one to be convened, leaving Evers no other option than to assert executive authority to delay the election.

Republicans' intransigence had already led to a flurry of litigation and widespread confusion as in-person voting has increasingly become unsafe due to the virus. Indeed, in Wisconsin's biggest city of Milwaukee, which is a Democratic stronghold and home to a majority of its black population, officials slashed the number of in-person polling places from 180 to just five, or one location for every 10,000 voters expected to vote in-person on Tuesday. Roughly 500,000 voters statewide still had yet to return their requested absentee ballots as of Sunday, meaning the ongoing battle over a federal court order extending the deadline to return absentee ballots from April 7 to April 13 could leave hundreds of thousands of voters disenfranchised.

Wisconsin Republicans have so steadfastly refused to protect voters from public health risks by making alternative voting methods easier because—like Donald Trump—they believe that allowing everyone to safely vote would endanger conservative Justice Dan Kelly's chance of winning a key race for the state Supreme Court, where conservative hardliners hold a 5-2 majority. If progressive Judge Jill Karofsky were to win, progressives would have a shot at gaining their own majority when a conservative incumbent faces the voters in 2023.

GOP legislators, who won fewer votes than Democrats in 2018 but maintained sizable majorities thanks largely to their gerrymanders, are aiming to preserve their majority on the court because a future progressive majority could strike down their gerrymanders and voter suppression laws, showcasing the vicious cycle that this week's voter suppression efforts are a part of.

In a time when the coronavirus pandemic is necessitating a massive expansion of mail voting across the country, many Republicans in positions of power are watching what is happening in Wisconsin. If the GOP succeeds in getting the conservative-dominated courts to block Evers' latest attempt to delay the election until it can be held in a safer manner and that leads to a conservative election victory via mass voter disenfranchisement, refusing to expand voting access and hoping that Democratic-leaning voters bear the disproportionate brunt of the pandemic will become the Republican playbook for the November elections if it hasn't already.

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New York City is planning to use public parks to temporarily bury coronavirus victims because of the lack of space in morgues, funeral homes, and cemeteries, according to NYC Council Member Mark Levine. But a spokesman for Mayor Bill De Blasio denied the rumor.

Tweeted Levine: “NYC’s healthcare system is being pushed to the limit. And sadly, now so is the city’s system for managing our dead. And it, too, needs more resources. This has big implications for grieving families. And for all of us. NYC’s “city morgue” is the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), which luckily is the best in the world. But they are now dealing w/ the equivalent of an ongoing 9/11. And so are hospital morgues, funeral homes & cemeteries. Every part of this system is now backed up.”

“A typical hospital morgue might hold 15 bodies,” added Levine. “Those are now all full. So OCME has sent out 80 refrigerated trailers to hospitals around the city. Each trailer can hold 100 bodies. These are now mostly full too. Some hospitals have had to add a 2nd or even a 3rd trailer. Grieving families report calling as many as half a dozen funeral homes and finding none that can handle their deceased loved ones. Cemeteries are not able to handle the number of burial requests and are turning most down.”

“It’s not just deaths in hospitals which are up,” Levine continued. “On an average day before this crisis there were 20-25 deaths at home in NYC. Now in the midst of this pandemic the number is 200-215. *Every day*. Early on in this crisis we were able to swab people who died at home, and thus got a coronavirus reading. But those days are long gone. We simply don’t have the testing capacity for the large numbers dying at home. Now only those few who had a test confirmation *before* dying are marked as victims of coronavirus on their death certificate. This almost certainly means we are undercounting the total number of victims of this pandemic. And still the number of bodies continues to increase. The freezers at OCME facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn will soon be full. And then what?”

Levine laid out the plans: “Soon we’ll start ‘temporary interment’. This likely will be done by using a NYC park for burials (yes you read that right). Trenches will be dug for 10 caskets in a line. It will be done in a dignified, orderly–and temporary–manner. But it will be tough for NYers to take. The goal is to avoid scenes like those in Italy, where the military was forced to collect bodies from churches and even off the streets. OCME is going to need much more staff to achieve that goal. Thankfully the Dept. of Defense and the NY National Guard have already sent teams, and volunteer medical examiners have come from around the country. But we are going to need much more help if we’re going to avoid disaster. As New York City continues to appeal to the nation for help, we need to ask not just for doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists. We also need mortuary affairs staff. This is tough to talk about and maybe tough to ask for. But we have no choice. The stakes are too high.”

Concluded Levine: “As New York City continues to appeal to the nation for help, we need to ask not just for doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists. We also need mortuary affairs staff. This is tough to talk about and maybe tough to ask for. But we have no choice. The stakes are too high.”

NYC’s “city morgue” is the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME), which luckily is the best in the world.

But they are now dealing w/ the equivalent of an ongoing 9/11. And so are hospital morgues, funeral homes & cemeteries.

Every part of this system is now backed up. 2/

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

Grieving families report calling as many as half a dozen funeral homes and finding none that can handle their deceased loved ones.

Cemeteries are not able to handle the number of burial requests and are turning most down. 4/

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

Early on in this crisis we were able to swab people who died at home, and thus got a coronavirus reading. But those days are long gone. We simply don't have the testing capacity for the large numbers dying at home. 6/

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

And still the number of bodies continues to increase. The freezers at OCME facilities in Manhattan and Brooklyn will soon be full. And then what? 8/

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

The goal is to avoid scenes like those in Italy, where the military was forced to collect bodies from churches and even off the streets.

OCME is going to need much more staff to achieve that goal. 10/

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

As New York City continues to appeal to the nation for help, we need to ask not just for doctors and nurses and respiratory therapists. We also need mortuary affairs staff. This is tough to talk about and maybe tough to ask for. But we have no choice. The stakes are too high. 12/

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

To recap: Nothing matters more in this crisis than saving the living. But we need to face the gruesome reality that we need more resources to manage our dead as well. Or the pain of this crisis will be compounded almost beyond comprehension. 13/13

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

De Blasio’s press secretary Freddi Goldstein denied the rumor in a response to Levine’s tweet: “We are NOT currently planning to use local parks as burial grounds. We are exploring using Hart Island for temporary burials, if the need grows.”

“Gov. Cuomo said Monday that he would not support burying coronavirus victims in parks, but hadn’t heard that it was being considered,” Syracuse.com reported.

Levine later clarified his tweet thread.

This tweet has gotten a lot of attention. So I want to clarify: the is a contingency NYC is preparing for BUT if the death rate drops enough it will not be necessary. https://t.co/6wLO8qWtML

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 6, 2020

The post NYC Planning Temporary Mass Graves in Public Parks to Bury Coronavirus Victims: Councilmember appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

The local leaders of the tourist-dependent beach towns in Georgia are now depending on people to stay away to keep them safe. Gov. Brian Kemp is fighting their efforts, and it's got many coastal Georgia communities enraged. Over the weekend, Kemp reopened all of the state's beaches, emulating the kind of lethal cluelessness and disregard for human life we see in the White House press room on a daily basis.

"As the Pentagon ordered 100,000 body bags to store the corpses of Americans killed by the Coronavirus, Governor Brian Kemp dictated that Georgia beaches must reopen, and declared any decision makers who refused to follow these orders would face prison and/or fines," Tybee Island Mayor Shirley Sessions wrote Saturday. "The health of our residents, staff and visitors are being put at risk and we will pursue legal avenues to overturn his reckless mandate." Sessions shut down Tybee Island beaches on March 20, worried about the town's aged community and because the town has no hospital and only one, two-lane route to the mainland. That concern was echoed across the state, which is supposedly under a stay-at-home order. Opening the beaches while that order is in place is "stupid and crazy at the same time," says Allen Booker, a Democratic county commissioner in Glynn County.

Republican office holders are pissed, too. Republican state Rep. Jeff Jones, said that "opening Georgia beaches and lifting rules on short term rentals is counterintuitive to mitigating virus spread and supporting local government control. […] The governor should have left it alone. It was done." He said that the decision left him "scratching my head. […] Maybe the governor should have sought the opinion of local reps."

Glynn County Commissioner Peter Murphy, a Republican, said that the governor "undid all the good we did in March" with the decision to open beaches. "I've talked to some short-term rental operators, and they said they're being flooded with calls from New York and other hot spots, and we have no way to force them to quarantine," another Glynn County commissioner, chairman Michael Browning said. "They're going to be out and about in the community." It doesn't help that Kemp's decision seems to be more influenced by cronyism and political favors than anything else. Murphy pointed out that Kemp's reopening order for privately owned Sea Island, days after it was closed, was "interesting" because the owner of the island is billionaire Republican donor Philip Anschutz and because one of Kemp's biggest political allies, Sen. David Perdue, also has a home there.

A Tybee Island resident, Keith Gay, told local media "In my opinion, they just loaded a gun and pointed it at the beach. […] I hope I'm wrong but, when they put the stay-in-place rule, the weekend following that, we had 9,000 cars on the island. Every restaurant, every bar and beach were completely slammed. This is after there had been a national warning and a state warning about social distancing."