James.galbraith

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Are you watching the adult programming, or the kid shows?

President Trump during a briefing about the novel coronavirus pandemic at the White House on March 30. | Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Trump had a chance to avert the unfolding coronavirus disaster. He blew it.

President Donald Trump revealed a grim projection in the coronavirus pandemic on Tuesday: Even with the social distancing the US is doing now, 100,000 to 200,000 Americans will likely die as a result of the ongoing outbreak. “When you see 100,000 people, that’s a minimum number,” Trump said.

It’s a horrifying figure. That’s more people than ever died in a single year from HIV/AIDS, drug overdoses, gun violence, or car crashes in the US. It’s more than American casualties during the entire Vietnam War.

But it’s also a horrifying number, in part, because much of it was likely preventable. If the US — including the Trump administration — had better prepared for pandemics, the country likely could have avoided ever talking about 100,000 to 200,000 deaths.

The estimated death toll “was not inevitable,” Céline Gounder, an epidemiologist at New York University, told me. “If we’d jumped into contract tracing and testing, social distancing, and health system preparedness as soon as we heard reports from China, we’d be in a very different situation now.”

John Moore/Getty Images

Under Trump, the US had years to prepare. With warnings from President Barack Obama’s administration and activists like Bill Gates, it was always clear that America was vulnerable to a pandemic. (Vox did a whole episode about it for Netflix.) For many, the 2014-’16 Ebola outbreak exposed the threat; Jeremy Konyndyk, who worked in the Obama administration during the Ebola outbreak, told me he “came away from that experience just completely horrified at how unready we would be for something more dangerous than Ebola,” which, thankfully, was relatively hard to transmit.

In the years leading to the coronavirus outbreak, though, Trump did not take the concerns seriously. His administration shut down the White House office, set up after the Ebola outbreak, that oversaw disease outbreaks and pandemics. It repeatedly proposed cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other public health agencies (although Congress largely rejected those cuts). The administration cut a public health position that was meant to help detect disease outbreaks in China, where the coronavirus outbreak began.

By the time it became clear that the world was facing a serious threat in January and February, Trump and his administration were again slow to act. Despite declaring a public health emergency, the administration failed to establish the infrastructure for nationwide testing — holding up private testing labs with bureaucratic and regulatory hurdles while sending out its own faulty test kits. The administration did nothing of substance to really scale up the production of personal protective equipment (PPE) for health care workers, allowing a shortage to take root. Trump still hasn’t leveraged the full might of the Defense Production Act to get medical supplies to hospitals and clinics that need them to fight the outbreak.

The failure on testing alone is massive — one that remains today. As Johns Hopkins University epidemiologist Jennifer Nuzzo told the New York Times, “Had we had done more testing from the very beginning and caught cases earlier, we would be in a far different place.”

The result is an outbreak that looks very different in the US than in the few countries, like South Korea and Taiwan, that have better contained Covid-19, the disease caused by the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

This isn’t solely on Trump. Some of it comes down to chance — that the coronavirus is popping up now and is so deadly and contagious is obviously not under any president’s control. Konyndyk’s experience under Obama shows the previous administration wasn’t ready for a pandemic either. Experts and advocates argue that pandemic preparedness, along with public health more broadly, is notoriously underfunded not just in the US but around the world. Some local and state officials, such as in New York City and Florida, have also underreacted to the crisis, making it worse.

But Trump, perhaps more than any other president, had plenty of warning about what was to come. He squandered all the opportunities given to him to do better, leaving much of the aggressive action that has reduced the death toll — down from the millions the White House and experts say is possible without interventions — to local and state officials who simply don’t have the reach of the federal government.

So now 100,000 to 200,000 Americans are likely to die.

Trump failed to prepare, then downplayed the coronavirus outbreak

Every step of the way, the Trump administration failed to take the threat of a pandemic seriously.

The threat was long well-known, including to the federal government. Government simulations and exercises before the outbreak revealed that there were a lot of problems, from the lack of sufficient PPE to simple confusion between the cities, states, and many federal agencies about who’s in charge during a crisis.

Trump reacted to the risks by deprioritizing pandemic preparedness. In 2018, then–National Security Adviser John Bolton fired Tom Bossert, a homeland security adviser who, the Washington Post reported, “had called for a comprehensive biodefense strategy against pandemics and biological attacks.” Then Bolton let go the head of pandemic response, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer, and his global health security team. The team, the Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense, was the main group within the White House for pandemic preparedness — and it was never replaced.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

At the time, the Trump administration and Bolton said the cuts were needed to streamline the National Security Council. But what it did, experts have told me, is leave the US unready for a crisis of the magnitude it’s facing now.

“The basic systems need to be in place for global, state, and local responses,” Jen Kates, director of global health and HIV policy at the Kaiser Family Foundation, previously told me. “When you don’t shore those up, you’re not starting from scratch, but you’re catching up every single time.”

Even once it became clear that the coronavirus pandemic was a real threat, Trump downplayed the outbreak. He compared the novel coronavirus to the seasonal flu, when the coronavirus is in fact much deadlier and more contagious than the flu. He called concerns about the virus a “hoax.” He said on national television that, based on nothing more than a self-admitted “hunch,” the death rate of the disease was much lower than public health officials projected. Even after his administration invoked social distancing guidelines, Trump talked up the idea of doing away with them by Easter to allow for “packed churches.”

Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, described the administration’s early messaging as “deeply disturbing,” adding that it’s “left the country far less prepared than it needs to be for what is a very substantial challenge ahead.”

Trump’s tone has changed in recent weeks. He ultimately extended his task force’s social distancing guidelines through April. On Tuesday, he went after the claim — that, again, he repeatedly made before — that coronavirus is like flu: “It’s not the flu. It’s vicious,” he said.

But however Trump may feel now, his administration’s failure to take this threat seriously early on left the country in a much worse place.

A recent investigation by the New York Times exposed how the Trump administration failed to scale up testing. The CDC developed its own test for coronavirus — seemingly to make a more accurate test than what was available from other places — but the test turned out to be faulty, and the CDC took weeks to provide a fix. Meanwhile, the administration put up all sorts of regulatory hurdles that prevented private labs from rolling out their own tests.

The result: The US was only testing about 100 samples a day by mid-February, according to the Times.

The Times concluded, “Across the government, [experts] said, three agencies responsible for detecting and combating threats like the coronavirus failed to prepare quickly enough. Even as scientists looked at China and sounded alarms, none of the agencies’ directors conveyed the urgency required to spur a no-holds-barred defense.”

This failure alone doomed the US to a much bigger outbreak, forcing Americans to rely far more on social distancing and suffer many more deaths. That’s because testing is crucial, especially in the early stages, to curtailing an outbreak: First, it lets public health officials identify sick people, isolate them, and trace their recent contacts to make sure those people aren’t sick and get them into quarantine as well. Second, testing lets officials detect which places are hardest hit and, therefore, require the most attention and help.

Yet, even today, testing remains a problem. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said this week that Trump’s claim that testing is no longer a problem is “just not true” and states are still “flying blind” due to insufficient testing.

Testing is only one example among many. The country is also experiencing a shortage of PPE for health care workers and ventilators for treatment. Both problems were repeatedly raised in pandemic simulations, but the federal government failed to replenish its Strategic National Stockpile and failed to scale up domestic production and supply chains. Even now, Trump has refused to use the full powers of the Defense Production Act, which would allow the federal government to demand more domestic production of these goods (although it’d likely take at least weeks for this production to scale up).

The lack of medical supplies is one reason experts worry the US won’t have the health care capacity to deal with a flood of Covid-19 patients, leading to sickness, suffering, and death due to insufficient treatment.

Again, a lot of this goes back to poor preparation in the years before the Covid-19 pandemic — and, indeed, the years before Trump was in office — but Trump and his administration failed to prepare even once the threat of the coronavirus became clear.

There’s another way this could have gone

These outcomes weren’t inevitable. Other countries that were more aggressive earlier seemed to reduce their potential death tolls.

Just take a look at this chart comparing Covid-19 cases between different countries and places:

The US’s trajectory in this chart is exponential: The number of cases is clearly rising every single day. But while US cases seemed to explode about two weeks after the 100th case, a few places — like South Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong — managed to flatten their curves with early, aggressive action around the same time.

South Korea did this, as Max Fisher and Choe Sang-Hun reported at the New York Times, with a lot of testing. While the US was still doing at most 100 tests a day, South Korea was pumping them out in the thousands, if not tens of thousands, a day. This allowed officials in South Korea to detect where outbreaks were happening and contain them — particularly by getting people to isolate and quarantine, along with some restrictions on movement, travel, and socializing — before things got too out of control.

The US is obviously not South Korea. It’s much bigger, more sprawling, and more populous. But the South Korean experience shows that aggressive testing, as one example, could help contain coronavirus. The US, due largely to the Trump administration’s failures, just didn’t have the capabilities South Korea did here.

There’s plenty of other evidence that early, aggressive action can help contain epidemics. During the 1918 flu pandemic, some US cities took quick, decisive action while others didn’t. A 2007 study in PNAS exposed the different outcomes in St. Louis, which quickly imposed restrictions to force social distancing, and Philadelphia, which didn’t, in this telling chart:

PNAS

The study concluded that “cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic had peak death rates ≈50% lower than those that did not and had less-steep epidemic curves. Cities in which multiple interventions were implemented at an early phase of the epidemic also showed a trend toward lower cumulative excess mortality, but the difference was smaller (≈20%) and less statistically significant than that for peak death rates.”

If Trump had acted sooner, the US could have had a better chance at replicating the results from St. Louis in 1918 or South Korea in 2020. But that moment has passed — and Americans are now facing the deaths of potentially hundreds of thousands of their friends, family, and peers as a result.

The ironies abound. And they're deeply galling.

You’re about to make an expensive purchase when the store employee extends an offer that sounds too good to be true: a credit card with no-interest financing for 12 months. So, what’s the catch?

There can be no question that President Donald Trump simply doesn't care how many people die in this coronavirus pandemic. There's no other explanation for why he chose to counter the advice of health officials and keep the Affordable Care Act marketplace closed. Politico reports that insurers—who had endorsed a special enrollment period and been in talks with administration officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS)—expected Trump to announce open enrollments last Friday based on those conversations. He didn't. Politico reports that it is not "immediately clear why the Trump administration decided against the special enrollment period." But here's a hint: "CMS deferred comment to the White House."

That can't mean anything other than it was Trump's decision. Trump did say last week that he's still fully behind the Republican lawsuit before the Supreme Court that could completely upend Obamacare and with it much of the health care system. Nothing about this pandemic has made him change his number one goal: "win" his grudge match against President Barack Obama by erasing his most significant achievement. The White House didn't comment, other than to say the administration is "exploring other options." Spoiler alert: It's not.

Twelve states, including the District of Columbia, which run their own marketplaces for individual insurance under the law, have created special enrollment periods to get their uninsured people covered to help them through this epidemic. They're encouraging the uninsured and the underinsured who fell for Trumpcare junk plans to get new, fully ACA-compliant insurance. The Trump administration weakened the ACA by making those junk plans, often sold by insurance brokers alongside real health insurance, more widely available and lasting for a longer term.

There are options for newly unemployed workers under Medicaid and SCHIP, and for higher-wage unemployed continued coverage on their employer-based plan with COBRA. This is under the federal law known as the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act. That option is an expensive one, however, because individuals have to pay the full cost of their premiums, which means their portion AND the portion their employer paid.

The second bill passed by Congress at least secures free testing for coronavirus, but the Democratic House couldn't get the Republican Senate to agree to free treatment for people who are uninsured. They're going to have to do that now. Period.

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Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) arrives for the Republican policy luncheon in Washington, DC, on March 19, 2020. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Loeffler is one of many lawmakers under fire for suspicious stock-trading activity following a coronavirus intel briefing.

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA) benefited from stock trades worth millions of dollars shortly before the general public was alerted to the severity of the Covid-19 crisis, selling off shares in industries that have been adversely affected by the coronavirus pandemic and buying shares of companies that have benefited, according to an Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) report published late Tuesday.

Loeffler, who sits on the Senate Health Committee, first began selling stocks on January 24 — the same day that committee held a private all-members session on Covid-19 — and continued making trades in late February and early March.

According to her latest financial disclosure, which the senator provided to the AJC, her largest transaction involved the sale of $18.7 million in Intercontinental Exchange stock in three separate deals dated February 26 and March 11. Intercontinental Exchange operates global exchanges for several financial and commodity markets — and since Loeffler made her first sale, its stock has fallen by 16 percent.

“Senator Loeffler filed another Periodic Transaction Report (PTR) and the facts are still the same,” a spokesperson for the senator told Vox in a statement. “These transactions are consistent with historical portfolio activity and include a balanced mix of buys and sells. Her stock portfolio is managed independently by third-party advisors and she is notified, as indicated on the report, after transactions occur.”

When challenged over the trades following prior reporting by the Daily Beast, Loeffler said the transactions were handled by third-party advisers, given that she is an elected official and her husband, Jeffrey Sprecher, is chair of the New York Stock Exchange and chair and CEO of its holding company, Intercontinental Exchange.

Additionally, a spokesperson for the senator told the AJC that the sell-offs were pre-planned in order to pay taxes, cover transaction costs, and produce “liquidity.”

Raising questions, however, is the fact that beyond Intercontinental Exchange, the couple also sold stock from other companies ultimately affected by the coronavirus, including a combined $155,000 or so from retailers Ross Stores, TJX Cos. (the parent corporation for T.J. Maxx and Marshalls), and upscale athletic-apparel company Lululemon over the same period of time.

And as Loeffler and Sprecher made those sales, a number of stocks added to their portfolio have seen gains as the Covid-19 crisis deepens. For instance, the couple obtained $206,777 in shares of chemical giant Dupont, which produces critical protective gear to combat transmission of the virus, in four separate transactions in late February and early March. They also acquired shares in telecommuting company Citrix on January 24 — again, the same day the Senate Health Committee held a private meeting about the coronavirus.

Four days after the briefing (and her acquisition of Citrix stocks), Loeffler accused Democrats of misleading the American public about the Trump administration’s response to the outbreak for political gain.

On March 19, Loeffler responded to the allegations in a statement on Twitter. “As confirmed in the periodic transaction report to Senate Ethics, I was informed of these purchases and sales on February 16, 2020—three weeks after they were made,” she said.

The trades have garnered attention due to both their timing and Loeffler’s public assurances that the Trump administration had the coronavirus situation well in hand. But Loeffler isn’t the only lawmaker to have faced questions over recent stock trading.

Lawmakers are barred from insider trading, but it’s difficult to prove

Government officials and lawmakers are often privy to key information — which could potentially be used to profit in the stock market — that isn’t available to the public. In mid-January, former Rep. Chris Collins (R-NY) was convicted of using his position to engage in insider trading and was sentenced to 26 months in prison.

After learning that a drug made by an Australian biotech firm had failed in clinical trials, Collins warned his son in a phone call he made from the White House — after which his son, his son’s fiancée, her parents, and others sold their stock in the company ahead of the test results being made public, according to CNBC.

Many other lawmakers, including former Georgia representative and Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, have been accused of insider trading but never convicted. Insider trading is often difficult to prove, since evidence is often circumstantial, and prosecutors must show that traders knowingly used inside information.

Members of Congress are barred from engaging in insider trading under the STOCK Act, as explained by Vox’s Ella Nilsen:

The bipartisan act was signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2012, after it became clear some members of Congress were using the classified information they were getting in briefings to get personally wealthy. Burr was one of just three senators at the time to vote against it.

“Any insider trading investigation involving the Stock Act will likely focus on did the member of Congress obtain ‘material’ ‘non-public’ information during the course of his or her official duties, did the member place the trades or cause the trades to be placed, or, alternatively, were the trades done through a blind trust with zero involvement by the member,” [Robert Long, a former senior attorney at the US Securities and Exchange Commission] told Vox.

...

Initially, the Stock Act had two major provisions. In addition to banning insider trading, it also beefed up transparency rules designed to require financial disclosures be posted online in searchable databases.

But just as the Stock Act was signed into law with lots of pomp and circumstance in April 2012, it was quietly defanged — with the searchable financial disclosures stripped out — about a year later. Members of Congress quietly passed that bill by unanimous consent, and Obama signed it into law.

Along with Loeffler, several other lawmakers, including Sens. Richard Burr (R-NC), Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), have been accused of engaging in potentially suspicious trading activity related to the pandemic, though all have denied doing so. Burr himself asked for a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into his own trading activity.

The Department of Justice, in conjunction with the Securities and Exchange Commission, has begun an investigation into lawmakers who may have tried to profit off inside information about the pandemic. The DOJ has yet to specify which members of Congress are or have been under investigation.

It’s possible that the trades were innocuous, but people’s nerves are frayed from dealing with the coronavirus pandemic itself as well as the resulting economic crash. The investigations will take time, and again, insider trading is difficult to prove. But even if all the lawmakers facing questions are cleared of wrongdoing, the situation may give additional weight to reforms being pushed by some of their colleagues.

For instance, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced wide-ranging anti-corruption legislation in 2018 that would have banned lawmakers from owning individual stocks altogether. And the HR 1 legislation that passed the House last year but has stalled in the Senate would tighten rules around lawmaker conflicts of interest, though it doesn’t specifically mention insider trading.

Editor’s note: Updated with a statement from Loeffler’s spokesperson.

Vice President Mike Pence is either suffering amnesia or is just an out-and-out liar. Appearing on CNN Wednesday morning, he told Wolf Blitzer “I don't believe the president has ever belittled the threat of the coronavirus.” As they say in the news business, roll tape:

January 22: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” February 10: “Looks like by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” February 24: “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. […] Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” February 28: “It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” March 4: “Some people will have this at a very light level and won’t even go to a doctor or hospital, and they’ll get better. There are many people like that.” March 9: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” March 10: “We’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.” March 15: “This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.”

To his credit, Blitzer pushed back. “What I'm suggesting that he was saying at one point,” he interrupted Pence to emphasize, “it wasn't as bad as the regular flu and he was talking about automobile accidents. He seemed to be suggesting at one point there were 15 cases, it would get down to zero very quickly.” Pence’s response? “Well, look, the president is an optimistic person.”

Well, look, the vice president is a shameless, sniveling lackey:

Google says it’s trying to crack down on misinformation and price-gouging by banning most ads relating to coronavirus. But there’s a presidential campaign on, the guy in office is not shy about using government resources to promote himself, and Google’s policy is blocking Democrats from getting their message about coronavirus policy to the public. That’s going a little too far—and it stands to help Trump.

“I totally understand if they want to ban for-profit entities from talking about coronavirus," digital advertising consultant Josh Koster told Protocol. "They're trying to avoid people price-gouging face masks and selling fake cures, and generally exploiting the crisis for profit. But that's an entirely separate use-case from nonprofit organizations trying to spread accurate information about the situation and holding elected officials accountable for the life-and-death decisions they are currently making.”

Google’s official position is that “we are currently blocking ads related to coronavirus under our sensitive events policy, with exception of government PSAs on important health information” and, yay, "this policy applies to all advertisers equally, including all political advertisers.” But we’re talking about an administration headed by someone who wanted to put his own signature on stimulus checks even though standard procedure would be for a civil servant to sign them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention already sent out an informational mailing with Trump's name on it.

The government’s coronavirus content is not apolitical, in other words. Running that but not legitimate and truthful ads from politicians and organizations with policy commentary is effectively a pro-Trump policy. 

”For Google to basically say that the Trump administration is the only entity that is allowed to talk about the most important issue in politics really puts their thumb on the scale of the incumbent president and against anyone who is really looking to challenge him,” digital advertising consultant Eli Kaplan told Protocol.

Former vice president and presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, for instance, has things to say. He should be able to get his message out.

Sen. Chris Murphy responded to the report on Google's policy, tweeting, “If true, this is a massive mistake that needs to be fixed ASAP. If not, just more reason to break up these information monopolies.”

Nicole Byer is the queen of Nailed It! — and she’s back. | Courtesy of Netflix

The playful reality baking show celebrates the joy of sugar, friendship, and messing up.

Take heart, friends. The kindest, goofiest, lowest-stakes, highest-return show on TV has returned — right when need it most.

Nailed It! is back for a new season.

The Netflix reality competition series sounds, to the uninitiated, like a show that would have been invented by Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock. It’s based on that meme in which someone shows off both a gorgeous tricky craft or project — say, a fancy cake — and an amateur’s botched attempt to remake it. “Nailed it!” proclaims the text superimposed on the image.

As with most things on the internet, the meme takes different forms. Sometimes it’s an attempt to shame or make fun of people who screw up. But it’s also possible to reclaim it with a healthy dose of irony, a triumphant cry in which one both admits defeat and proclaims victory. I didn’t do it, but I sure as hell did try!

When the meme was converted into a show, it retained the intent of the latter more than the former. Nailed It! is styled like one of those cutthroat cooking or baking competition shows (think Chopped) in which three amateur bakers with dubious skills show up to recreate absurdly complicated cakes in hilariously compressed timeframes. Three judges comment on the results and award cash prizes to the “winner.” In this case, that usually means “the one whose baking we could manage to swallow.”

Courtesy of Netflix

You’d think, given the skill level involved and the setup, that Nailed It! would be snarky and mean. Instead, it’s emerged as one of the sweetest, most supportive, silliest ways to entertain yourself and your family, while also maybe learning one or two things about baking. The key: Nailed It! never, ever takes itself seriously.

The series is hosted (and judged) by comedian Nicole Byers, she of the infectious laugh, alongside world-renowned pastry chef and judge Jacques Torres, plus a rotating cast of comedians, actors, celebrity chefs, and sports personalities. (Jason Mantzoukas, Sylvia Weinstock, Jillian Bell, Maya Rudolph, Felicia Day, Antoni Porowski, and Lauren Lapkus have all appeared as judges on the show.)

And while you’d expect Torres to be the straight man in the group, over three regular seasons and two “holiday specials,” Byers and Torres have developed a hysterical rapport to rival any comic duo. The new season opens with the pair sipping cocktails while seated in fancy thrones. Their reverie is interrupted by Wes, the assistant director, who tells them to get back to work. “Four seasons of baaaaad cakes!” Torres intones in his thick French accent as he walks back to set; Byers slides slowly off her chair and rolls away like a log, whining, “But I don’t want to!”

The much-maligned Wes is Weston Bahr, the series’ actual, long-suffering assistant director, on whom Byers is always calling to bring out a drink or wheel out a prize (she pronounces his name “Hhhhhhwes!”). His presence on the show as not only a crew member but also a recurring character is kind of a window into Nailed It!’s sense of humor. Everybody knows this show is ridiculous, that it’s built a strange little universe for itself in which we’re shooting a baking competition show that’s for people who should never be on a baking competition show. The cakes they’re being asked to recreate would be a huge challenge for most professionals, let alone people who sometimes make some cupcakes at home; the point is that they’re supposed to fail, and fail spectacularly. And everyone is in on the joke — bakers, crew, judges, and Netflix itself. (Byers has addressed the show’s parent company as “Mister Netflix” before.)

Nailed It! is no The Great British Baking Show, most of which can also be watched on Netflix. The amateur bakers on that show are skilled. They know the difference between types of dough; they can tell you the difference between a pie and a tarte, a cannoli and a sfogliatelle, and even the worst of their creations is still lovely. On Nailed It!, panicking bakers forget to add butter to their dough, rarely leave the cake in the oven for the right amount of time, and suffer a truly startling array of mixer mishaps.

Courtesy of Netflix

But nobody in Nailed It! is shamed for their lack of skills, at least not by the judges. Everyone tries very hard to say something nice about the “creations” the contestants come up with. Byers breaks out into amused giggles every time a baker reveals their results and says “nailed it!” The celebrity judge tries to find something funny to say. And Torres gently tells them what probably went wrong, and then heroically attempts to offer a positive note when he has to take a bite.

Season 4’s first episode is themed around “literary cakes,” meaning Shakespeare and Moby-Dick. (Other themes include fashion, Marvel, and the ’90s.) As the judges, including comedian and actor Matt Walsh, watch the contestants scurry around creating havoc, Byers asks Torres, “Do you ever find it ironic that you are a highly decorated, well-respected pastry chef and you have to eat trash every day for money?”

He smiles. “You know what I like about it?” he says. “When they mess up, I can explain why they mess up and how not to mess up. This is an opportunity for me to teach.”

I can bake, but only bread. I’ve watched all of Nailed It!, and I think the only thing I’ve actually learned is that royal icing is different from buttercream. But what Torres teaches might be a little better. You (and I) don’t have to be perfect at things. We don’t have to create elaborate cakes or brilliant works of art in order to be valued and valuable. We’re all trying the best we can — and Nailed It! celebrates our gameness to get out of bed every day and keep trying, and maybe laugh along the way, too.

Nailed It! season 4 is streaming on Netflix.

One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend.

View co-host Whoopi Goldberg on Wednesday asked Bernie Sanders why he’s still in the race for president, suggesting he was performing a repeat of 2016, when he refused to concede the primary to Hillary Clinton and took a month to endorse her after he did.

Said Goldberg: “I’m told that you intend to stay in this race because you believe there is a path to victory. I want to know what that path is. Because this feels a little bit like it did when you didn’t come out when Hillary Clinton was clearly the person folks were going for, so can you explain why you’re still in the race, and what this path is that you see?”

Replied Sanders: “That’s not quite accurate, I worked as hard as I could to, for Hillary Clinton.”

Replied Goldberg: “But Bernie, just so we’re clear. You worked for Hillary, but it took you a very very long time to hop in, and your people also took a very long time for them to hop in, so when I say that, that’s what I’m talking about.”

“Well I don’t accept that characterization, but the point is,” continued Sanders.

“Okay, why are you still in the race?”

Replied Sanders: “People have a right, last I heard, people in a democracy have a right to vote. And they have a right to vote for the agenda that they think can work for America, especially in this very very difficult moment. We are assessing our campaign as a matter of fact, where we want to go forward, but people in a democracy do have a right to vote, and right now in this unprecedented moment in American history, I think we need to have a very serious discussion about how they go forward.”

In a separate interview with NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell, Sanders called on Wisconsin to delay its primary: “We don’t want people to have to risk their lives in order to cast a vote. That’s a dangerous situation. Let’s, if we can avoid that, avoid it.”

The post Whoopi Goldberg Grills Bernie Sanders: ‘Can You Explain Why You’re Still in the Race?’ — WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

How to spin your failure to control a pandemic as a success in five easy steps.

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Apple is working on some useful changes for iCloud Keychain, according to details found by 9to5Mac in a leaked version of iOS 14 that has been circulating for the last few weeks.


‌iCloud‌ Keychain, for those unfamiliar with the feature, stores login names and passwords for websites and apps, with the information synced across a person's iOS and Mac devices through ‌iCloud‌. It is a free and useful way to manage unique passwords for each different service used.

In ‌iOS 14‌, ‌iCloud‌ Keychain will include warnings whenever a password is reused, which should help encourage users to select different passwords for each login. With all the password leaks these days, choosing a different password for each site prevents malicious entities from being able to access multiple sites that use the same password when leaked info is obtained.

Apple also appears to be adding a way to save two-factor authentication passwords, which would presumably allow ‌iCloud‌ Keychain to generate two-factor authentication codes to prevent the need for a two-factor authentication app. 1Password and other password management apps already have these features, and if Apple added them, it would make ‌iCloud‌ Keychain an appealing alternative to paid solutions.

Apple is working on quite a few other features for ‌iOS 14‌, and details on what's in the works can be found in our iOS 14 roundup.
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Donald Trump continues to play the media and the media continues to be willing to be played. Every time he puts on his serious face and admits what he denied for so long about the seriousness of the novel coronavirus, he gets another round of headlines that help him erase months of disastrous denial of the scale of what we face.

Tuesday’s press briefing was more of the same. It was an event that veteran Trump fact-checker Daniel Dale described as having “featured a dishonest overall narrative—a Trump effort to cast himself as the leader who stood strong against the faction that downplayed the severity of the virus,” in addition to “a barrage of specific false claims” that drew the coverage he was looking for from reporter after reporter.

“Trump sounding different today. Scale of death appears to have changed his tone, at least,” The New York Times’ Eric Lipton tweeted. According to CNN’s John Harwood, it was “the most effective job of communicating President Trump has done during this crisis.” From ABC News’ Karen Travers: “The tone at this White House coronavirus task force briefing feels different than all prior COVID-19 briefings: grave, sober, grim, realistic.” And so on.

The New York Times also offered a full-length example of the form. Though the article acknowledges many of the times Trump downplayed the crisis, the sentence reporter Peter Baker chose to tweet was from the Trump-has-changed genre: “The grim-faced president who appeared in the White House briefing room for more than two hours on Tuesday evening beside charts showing death projections of hellacious proportions was coming to grips with a reality he had long refused to accept.”

Also, we learn, it was “the starkest such effort he has made to prepare the country for the expected wave of disease and death.” The starkest such effort, or a belated attempt to memory-hole his weeks of active denial? Baker acknowledges the weeks of denial, but is credulous—in true Times political coverage style—about the reason for it. Trump is worried about reelection. He’s moving the goalposts to redefine his failure as a success. And when talking about his made-for-the-media tone shift as a real thing, it’s not enough to point to evidence of the ways Trump led us to this disastrous point. Reporters have to be willing to go further. This White House is carefully constructing the latest big lie and coverage of it has to show it for what it is, or the media is failing us more badly than it did in 2016.

T-Mobile today announced that it has completed its merger with Sprint, with the merged company to operate under the T-Mobile brand. Effective immediately, T-Mobile's former COO Mike Sievert will assume the role of CEO, with John Legere stepping down.


T-Mobile said it plans to focus on creating a "transformational" nationwide 5G network. Within six years, the carrier promises to provide 5G to 99 percent of the U.S. population and average 5G speeds in excess of 100 Mbps to 90 percent of the U.S. population. T-Mobile also plans to provide 90 percent of rural Americans with average 5G speeds of 50 Mbps.

The "new" T-Mobile has committed to delivering the same or better rate plans for at least three years, including access to 5G. Rate plans are not changing today.

For now, the merged company says all customers will stay with the same Sprint and T-Mobile network, stores, and service they have been using. Over time, Sprint assets will simply begin to be rebranded as T-Mobile.
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Miracle? Not so much. During Tuesday’s coronavirus briefing, federal officials projected that the nation would experience at least 100,000 to 240,000 deaths due to the COVID-19 pandemic if people across the country successfully maintain social distancing recommendations. In other words, that might actually be a best-case scenario. Asked directly whether the country should be prepared for the likelihood of 100,000 deaths due to coronavirus, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said, "Yes, we should be prepared for it." Fauci also stressed that adhering to strict mitigation efforts might lower that number. 

But Donald Trump accepted that projection as a victory. What would have happened, Trump wondered, if we did nothing? "There was a group that said, ‘let's just ride it out,’" Trump said, with apparent amnesia. What Trump forgot to mention was, there wasn’t just a “group” saying that, there was a president saying that. His name was Donald Trump.

Remember when Trump pooh-poohed COVID-19 by comparing it to the flu? “Last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu,” Trump tweeted on March 9, saying that flu deaths average between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. "Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

During a White House briefing on Feb. 26, Trump said the novel coronavirus was “a little bit like the flu.”

On Tuesday, Trump did a complete 180, returning to his ride-it-out theme from earlier in the briefing. "A lot of people have said 'Ride it out. Don't do anything, just ride it out. And think of it as the flu,'” Trump said. “But it's not the flu. It's vicious."

Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are making their very best effort to gaslight America on their supposed early leadership on coronavirus. They're now projecting 100,000 to 240,000 American deaths ... and maybe more.

That's not a frickin’ "miracle," folks. It's an abomination. And it could get worse.

Life Tabernacle Church was packed for services on Tuesday night after its pastor, Mark Anthony (Tony) Spell, was charged with six misdemeanor counts of disobeying the powers of the governor for defying the state’s ban on public gatherings amid the coronavirus crisis.

This Louisiana pastor continues to defend opening the doors of his church, despite getting charged for violating the governor's coronavirus ban https://t.co/FdgY1vpv3s pic.twitter.com/NSOJtpKTgo

— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 1, 2020

“We have a mandate from the word of God. … We have a mandate from God to praise God in his sanctuary. This is the sanctuary,” said Spell.

WFAB reports: “On Tuesday, March 31, Chief Roger Corcoran with Central Police Department issued Mark Anthony Spell, (Aka: Tony Spell), pastor of Life Tabernacle Church in Central, a misdemeanor summons for six counts of violating the governor’s executive order (LA R.S. 29:724E) following his decision to host multiple large gatherings. …. Just hours after Pastor Spell was charged, hundreds flocked into Life Tabernacle for its 7:30 p.m. service Tuesday night. Before they could get in, their temperature was checked and a metal detector was used to make sure no one had any weapons on them. Dozens of cars with people inside them lined Hooper Road in front of the church to watch and see if anyone would stop the pastor from holding services. Three East Baton Rouge Parish Sheriff’s Office units drove into the parking lot of the church before the service began.”

I'd be OK with these folks who continue to pack churches simply Darwin-ing themselves out of existence, but the problem is they're still going to mingle among the rest of us (AP photo of protester at Life Tabernacle Church in Louisiana) pic.twitter.com/xZYbg8mlgz

— Jenn! (@jenngidman) April 1, 2020

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Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler’s financial disclosures from late February and early March are simply fascinating. We already knew that Loeffler sold off a lot of stock in early February, while buying stock in a company positioned to do well during coronavirus shutdowns because it provides online meetings. But the hugely wealthy senator’s money moves didn’t stop there.

Loeffler sold off $18.7 million in shares of Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange. Loeffler’s husband, Jeff Sprecher, is the CEO of the company and she used to be an executive there. Loeffler and Sprecher also sold shares of retail stores including Lululemon and T.J. Maxx, while making another really interesting investment. This time, they bought shares of a company that makes protective gear being used in hospitals fighting COVID-19.

Let's end this corruption. Can you give $1 to help Democrats win the seats that could flip the Senate?

Loeffler has said that her stocks are managed by an investment firm and she isn’t making the decisions. This disclosure does give Loeffler some losing moves to point to to bolster her case that this is just what financial disclosures look like when you’re offensively wealthy. She and Sprecher sold off some Facebook stock, when now everyone is home looking at social media all the time, and some shares of a remote signature company, which again is probably getting a boost from many people working remotely. (Understand that when I say “some shares,” I mean “almost certainly more than twice your annual income.”)

What makes Loeffler’s financial moves most noteworthy is if she was using information she got because she is a senator to her own financial benefit. In that sense, her transactions from late February and early March, when public attention to coronavirus was growing, are less damning than her transactions from January and earlier in February. Nonetheless, it’s interesting, shall we say.

The Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission are reportedly looking into financial transactions by some senators (a list headed by Sen. Richard Burr), but it’s not clear if Loeffler is among them.

NEW YORK — The coronavirus careening through New York City has brought one of the world’s premier medical capitals to its knees.

The city’s cash-strapped public hospitals were predictably overwhelmed by the breadth of the virus: Despite relocating certain patients and rearranging wards to open up space for the influx, the system was consumed by the crisis. So too was New York City’s network of private hospitals, most of which operate on much more comfortable margins and have boards that count New York’s civic elite as members.

In a city of extremes, the coronavirus has been an equalizer: Wealthy and poor alike are grappling with its grip on their medical resources.

“Everybody’s in the same boat — private hospitals, public hospitals, every hospital,” said Kenneth Raske, president of Greater New York Hospital Association. “They’re all responding to this crisis.”

The pandemic has exposed how ill-prepared hospitals are for a crisis of this magnitude, despite repeated pleas by medical professionals to bolster response plans. Some of that falls on the federal government, which under Democratic and Republican leadership alike has stripped funding for programs created in the wake of 9/11 to prepare health systems for a catastrophe.

“No one ever got enough money to actually get prepared for a major disaster like this,” said Irwin Redlener, a medical doctor and the director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, as well as an adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio on public health matters.

City and state officials have scrambled to build makeshift hospitals at large sites that aren’t in use: The Javits Center in Manhattan opened Monday as an emergency facility with capacity for 2,500 beds, just as the U.S. Naval Ship Comfort docked in New York’s harbor to care for up to 1,000 patients displaced from traditional hospitals that are contending with the coronavirus. On Tuesday de Blasio announced the tennis stadium that hosts the U.S. Open in Queens would become a 350-bed hospital for coronavirus patients.

“All the hospitals combined had about 20,000 staffed hospital beds. We now need to — in just the next weeks — triple that number,” de Blasio said Tuesday, as he announced the transformation of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. “We're just going to keep going every single day adding and adding and adding to get to the point where we have what we need.”

Hours later, his administration reported an estimated 8,549 of the city’s 41,771 coronavirus patients had been hospitalized and 1,096 had died.

Meanwhile Gov. Andrew Cuomo and de Blasio have been at turns pleading and fighting with the Trump administration for more hospital supplies, and the mayor has said he expects the city to run out of masks and ventilators by April 5.

“This virus has been ahead of us from day one. We’ve been playing catch up from day one,” Cuomo said during his own daily press briefing on Tuesday.

As city officials watched the illness devastate Italy, the system that oversees 11 public hospitals began ramping up surge plans that govern how to manage a deluge of patients. Each site has its own plan, tailored to its building layout, and by January the city began fleshing out those blueprints to grapple with the coming storm, Mitchell Katz, president of the NYC Health + Hospitals, said in an interview Monday.

The hospital staff began by canceling surgeries that weren’t deemed medical emergencies, discharging homeless people who had been staying on site for months to hotels around the city and beefing up staffing rounds, Katz said.

He now routinely asks hospital heads how they are making the most of their sites to account for the uptick in coronavirus patients: “What space are you going to use? Where are you going next? What is the next ward that you’re going to turn into an ICU?”

Some have combined wards: At Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx the obstetrics and pediatric patients were placed in the same wing, and those in the psychiatric emergency room were transferred to another section of the hospital to make room for those afflicted by the virus. Moving psychiatric patients is particularly delicate, since rooms cannot contain any items that would facilitate suicide, Katz said.

“Every one of my hospitals knew ahead of time what the order was. It’s true that the speed of this has made it very challenging to staff, but in each case we knew what [spaces] would open first,” Katz said. Lincoln, Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan and Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, which became the face of overcrowding last week, have all tripled their intensive care unit space, he said.

The ERs have morphed into battle zones, with intake staff having to forgo standard questions about tobacco history and family history as patients fall so ill so quickly they need intubation.

Redlener said pandemic planning is often put on the back burner of local and federal preparations with more immediate problems taking precedence, and New York is no exception.

Hospitals are now facing a shortage of ventilators. Some patients who need to go on life support don’t wake up, and the hospitals and city morgues are already filling — three weeks before the state’s expected virus apex. The state is working toward centralizing purchase orders for ventilators and coordinating with other states to avoid paying inflated prices due to bidding wars after pleas to the Trump administration fell on deaf ears.

“I can tell you from the frontline workers, we don’t have enough ventilators. We need them desperately,” Henry Garrido, executive director of DC 37, a large labor union,
said on the radio Tuesday afternoon. “Part of our job right now has to do with moving ventilators for different patients, unplugging one and plugging another one to keep people alive. That’s not how we should be handling this pandemic.”

The health systems burned through personal protective equipment, or PPE, at a dizzying rate and have since had to prolong the use of the gear, which medical professionals say has caused many health care workers to fall ill to the virus.

On March 1, when New York City recorded its first confirmed case of the virus, the city’s health department had on hand 101,000 N95 face masks, 19 million surgical masks, more than 40,000 gloves, more than 38,000 gowns and 3,500 ventilators, mayoral spokesperson Laura Feyer said.

Recognizing the virus’s reach, the city scrambled to order more — the health department and the hospital network procure goods separately from one another — but found itself competing for a limited supply with harder-hit areas around the world. A spokesperson for Health + Hospitals did not provide the amount of equipment it had on hand on March 1.

Feyer said the city is buying another 5 million masks from 3M, as it continues to dole out equipment to both its own hospital network and the often well-funded private sites that have found themselves similarly short on supplies.

As of Tuesday afternoon, the health department had provided hospitals 2,077,980 N95 masks, nearly 8.3 million surgical masks and more than 1.9 million gloves, Feyer said.

But it’s not enough — de Blasio this week asked the Trump administration for for 15,000 ventilators, three million N-95 masks, 50 million surgical masks and 25 million sets of gowns, gloves and other protective equipment.

Isaac Weisfuse, who left his job at the city’s health department in 2012, said a review of the equipment stockpiles during his tenure revealed a shortage of ventilators and masks in the event of a pandemic.

“Given that New York City is a global destination, if any novel strain becomes easily transmissible from human to human, we will not be able to keep influenza from entering the city [or] prevent transmission once it arrives, but [we] will attempt to slow transmission,” he wrote in an article 2006.

Reached by phone on Tuesday, he said an agency buying spree around 2006 beefed up the supply, but was insufficient for this type of outbreak.

“We used the 1918 Spanish influenza outbreak as our model of a really bad pandemic. We held that up as the model of the big one,” he said. “I’ll be the first to say we didn’t purchase enough ventilators to deal with that, but we tried to use our funds to fill in the gaps.”

Northwell Health uses about 20,000 N95 masks a month under normal circumstances. Now, the system is going through about 25,000 masks a week — a rate dictated by rationing, said spokesperson Terry Lynam.

The Montefiore health system broke from city guidance last week to allow staff showing a fever to get tested for the coronavirus. More than a dozen medical professionals employed at systems across New York City told POLITICO that positive tests keep people from working and create staffing shortages — a scenario the state is bracing for.

“It’s like hear no evil, see no evil,” said one hospital staffer based in New York City, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. “[The hospitals are] banking on not everyone contracting a severe case. I think that’s why they’re implementing these protocols with PPE because they’re treating everyone as if they are positive.”

She added: “Everyone is sick. Everyone is sick. I’ve never, ever, ever seen anything like this. It’s really bad.”

While hospitals have their own stockpiles of supplies, most rely on immediate ordering to save on the costs of warehousing massive amounts of equipment — limiting the stash of gloves, gowns and masks facilities can dip into in a time of crisis.

“Very few hospitals constantly have a comfortable reserve — they have huge budgets, but they also have very thin margins,” Redlener said. “So you can imagine the conversations that go on internally. If someone says, ‘We need to invest $10 million to make the hospital ready for a major disaster for stockpiling,’ then they’re going to get pushback and there’s going to be conflict there.”

NYC Health + Hospitals/Lincoln and Mount Sinai — hospitals that treat the city’s poorest and richest residents, respectively — have set up GoFundMe pages to raise money for more PPE as bidding wars raise the price of essential equipment.

The lack of protective equipment has left some workers to improvise, fashioning makeshift face shields and using trash bags for additional coverage, regardless of where they work, said Patricia Kane, executive director of the New York State Nurses Association.

NYU Langone took away bins of hand sanitizer, surgical masks and N95 masks that are usually accessible to staff at the beginning of March, telling employees they were rationing supplies to prepare for an influx of coronavirus patients, said one nurse who also requested anonymity out of fear for retaliation. The hospital is encouraging nurses to use N95 masks and protective face shields for a week unless they’re visibly soiled; workers put their PPE in paper bags at the end of each shift.

“It’s definitely not an ideal situation,” said the nurse. “Ideally, we would be changing out our masks and disposing them each time we exit a patient room, but now I’m putting it on multiple times during the day and also using it for up to a week.”

Some hospitals are relying on donations from nontraditional sources to make up for the lack of essential equipment. Madiha Choksi, a librarian at Columbia University, began 3D printing face shields out of her apartment after someone at New York Presbyterian contacted her about the dire need for supplies. She now has a full assembly line at the 92nd Street Y, churning out more than 700 face shields a day and distributing them to hospitals across the city.

Elmhurst Hospital in Queens has made headlines as the medical facility facing the brunt of the crisis, with an emergency room doctor raising concern about limited supplies of ventilators and N95 face masks.

While the borough has seen a surge in cases, medical professionals say hospitals throughout the city are starting to see the same kind of patient demand — including several other facilities in the city's network, like Bellevue and Kings County hospitals.

“That initial spike in Queens is now being matched by the entire city,” Joseph Masci, a research director at the city's public hospital system, said during a recent virtual town hall.

“Elmhurst was hit hard because it was the only hospital in central Queens. But they didn’t do anything wrong. In fact they tripled their ICU in order to meet the demand,” Katz said. “I think what will happen going forward is that next week, maybe even sooner, a lot of hospitals will look like Elmhurst looked last week."

A group of community members from the Lighthouse Fellowship Church in Bloomington, Indiana, stand outside a Bloomington Hospital to pray for hospital staff on March 29. | Jeremy Hogan / Echoes Wire/Barcroft Media via Getty Images

You can’t pray away the pandemic.

Last week, Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, who oversees the area of Texas that includes Houston, issued an order requiring “all individuals currently living within Harris County ... to stay at their place of residence except for Essential Activities” (in Texas, the title “county judge” refers to the chief executive of a county government).

Like many similar orders handed down by state and local officials throughout the United States, which are intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, Hidalgo’s order closes most businesses within the county and shuts down most places where people gather in large groups. Although it allows faith leaders to “minister and counsel in individual settings, so long as social distance protocols are followed,” it requires worship services to “be provided by video and teleconference.”

That restriction on in-person worship services has sparked a lawsuit, filed by three Texas pastors and Steven Hotze, a medical doctor and anti-LGBT Republican activist whose political action committee was labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. These four men ask the Texas Supreme Court to strike down Hidalgo’s order, claiming, among other things, that it violates the “religious liberty” of pastors who wish to gather their parishioners together during a pandemic.

The case is named In re Hotze.

Under existing precedents, the petitioner’s arguments in Hotze are not strong. They rely heavily on older US Supreme Court decisions that were effectively overruled by the Supreme Court’s later decision in Employment Division v. Smith (1990) (although it’s worth noting that Smith is very much out of favor with judicial conservatives and could, itself, be overruled by the Court’s current majority).

The Hotze petitions also essentially ask the Texas Supreme Court to place the temporary interests of a few pastors before the county’s interest in combating a deadly disease. The US Supreme Court has long held that the government may take targeted action to protect especially compelling interests — even when doing so implicates constitutional rights.

Yet, while there is little legal support for the Hotze petitioners’ arguments, the Texas Supreme Court is notoriously conservative — all nine of its members are Republicans — so there is, at least, some chance that the Hotze petition succeeds.

It is at least as likely, however, that the Texas justices will recognize that they need to place some limits on the religious liberty doctrine. Unlike other high-profile lawsuits about religious exemptions to generally applicable laws, Hotze does not pit a Republican interest group (such as business owners with conservative religious views) against a group associated with Democrats (such as LGBTQ people).

Hotze places the public health of an entire community against the interests of a handful of pastors (and, potentially, parishioners) with an idiosyncratic view of the pandemic.

The government may limit religious liberty if it has a sufficiently compelling reason to do so

The Hotze petition mingles legal arguments with Trumpian rhetoric and familiar Republican Party talking points. One subsection of the petition argues, falsely, that the coronavirus is less dangerous than the flu. An entire section of the petition suggests that Judge Hidalgo’s order is invalid because it “picks winners and losers.”

The petition also makes some fairly basic legal errors. It argues, for example, that the First Amendment’s clause protecting the “free exercise” of religion requires courts to strike down Hidalgo’s order unless that order is supported by a “compelling government interest.” But the Supreme Court rejected this reading of the First Amendment in Smith.

Under Smith, “the right of free exercise does not relieve an individual of the obligation to comply with a valid and neutral law of general applicability on the ground that the law proscribes (or prescribes) conduct that his religion prescribes (or proscribes).” That is, so long as Hidalgo’s order does not single out places of worship for inferior treatment that it does not impose on similar organizations, the order does not violate the First Amendment.

That said, there is a case pending before the US Supreme Court right now that asks the justices to overrule Smith. And the argument against Smith is likely to receive a very sympathetic audience from the Court’s Republican majority. The Texas Constitution also contains strong language protecting religious freedom, and the state’s highest court is free to interpret that language differently from the US Supreme Court read of the First Amendment in Smith.

So it is not that much of a stretch to say that Texas pastors enjoy strong constitutional protections against a government order regulating how they conduct worship services.

Yet, even the Hotze petitioners admit that these protections are not unlimited. Rather, they concede that the government may take actions that limit religious freedom if such actions are “narrowly tailored” to advance a “compelling interest.”

This test, which is also known as “strict scrutiny,” is the same test the US Supreme Court applies to laws that restrict speech or that discriminate on the basis of race. But, even in the context of censorship or race discrimination, strict scrutiny is not insurmountable. A study by UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, for example, found that federal courts applying the compelling interest test upheld 22 percent of free speech restrictions and 27 percent of laws that engaged in discrimination between 1990 and 2003.

The government interest at stake in Hotze, moreover, is protecting human life from a disease that threatens to kill millions. And Hidalgo’s order is narrow in that it does not ban worship services. It simply requires them to be temporarily held online until the pandemic passes.

The coronavirus pandemic could force the US Supreme Court to place some limits on “religious liberty”

Until fairly recently, the Supreme Court recognized that there must be some practical limits on a religious objector’s ability to seek exemptions from generally applicable laws. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Court in Smith, “to make an individual’s obligation to obey [the] law contingent upon the law’s coincidence with his religious beliefs, except where the State’s interest is ‘compelling’” is to permit that individual “to become a law unto himself.”

Accordingly, the Court typically had been reluctant to grant religious liberty exemptions to a law when granting such an exception could harm third parties. And it was especially reluctant to give religious liberty exemptions to businesses. As the Court explained in United States v. Lee (1982), “when followers of a particular sect enter into commercial activity as a matter of choice, the limits they accept on their own conduct as a matter of conscience and faith are not to be superimposed on the statutory schemes which are binding on others in that activity.”

Nevertheless, in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), the Supreme Court held, for the first time, that religious objectors may sometimes wield those objections to limit the rights of third parties — Hobby Lobby held that business owners who object to birth control may refuse to include contraceptive coverage in their employee’s health plans.

Thus far, however, the Court’s latest line of religious liberty cases has largely pitted conservative religious groups against laws favored by liberals, including laws protecting birth control access and laws prohibiting anti-LGBTQ discrimination. Hotze is different because the pandemic impacts Democrats and Republicans alike. Indeed, if the pastors behind Hotze get their way, the biggest losers are likely to be their parishioners, who will be at immediate risk of infection.

Hotze, in other words, potentially offers the courts an ideal vehicle to draw limits around the new “religious liberty” doctrines advanced by cases like Hobby Lobby. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling interest than preventing a deadly disease from spreading unchecked through the population. And Hotze shows that everyone, liberal and conservative alike, benefits from a society with universal laws.

Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) told Laura Ingraham’s FOX News show that cancelling schools in California for the rest of the year due to COVID-19 is “overkill” and suggested they be sent back in two weeks.

Ingraham said parents would be demonstrating if “normal life” didn’t start up again soon and were forced to wait for a vaccine: “That would not be going back to normal life, Congressman Nunes, for 12 months. Which if parents across the country are hearing that, and workers, they are going to be showing up in Washington, even if you all aren’t here. … They’re going to be coming to Washington to send you a message.”

Replied Nunes: “That’s not going to work. The schools were canceled here in California, which is way overkill. It’s possible kids could’ve went back to school in two weeks to four weeks, but they just canceled the rest of the schools. So, I’m optimistic here.”

Added Nunes: “I think that the drugs that are on the market now, look how quick we were able to get this approved, this new malaria drug. That you have been talking about every night. There’s a lot of optimism here that we have in some of these drugs that are coming online. The vaccines are going to take a while, but look; we have this bill that we just passed last week, $2.2 trillion worth, we have to focus on keeping people employed.”

The post Rep. Devin Nunes Calls Coronavirus School Cancellations ‘Overkill’ in Remarks That Will Not Age Well: WATCH appeared first on Towleroad Gay News.

Battlestar Galactica boasts a terrific and sprawling cast. | Courtesy of NBC Universal

The sci-fi series is one of the best TV shows ever made — and it’s finally streaming again.

Few TV shows have spoken to the unrelenting chaos of the still-young 21st century as well as Battlestar Galactica, which aired on Syfy from 2003 to 2009.

A remake of the critically panned 1978 series — itself a poorly disguised attempt to rip off Star Wars and make into a TV show — the new Battlestar Galactica took most of the good ideas from its predecessor (humanity on the run from murderous robots, a complicated mythology built around some combination of the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 signs of the zodiac, and a search for a long-missing Earth) and updated them for a newer, more terrifying world.

The 2000s Battlestar series is a post-9/11 show in the way that so many great genre shows of that era were (see also: Lost), but its underlying story about a humanity terrified of its own extinction by all manner of threats has resonated consistently since it debuted. Very early in the Trump era, for example, New Republic writer Matt Ford compared the news cycle to the tremendous early Battlestar episode in which the robotic Cylons attack the human fleet every 33 minutes with relentless efficiency.

Battlestar Galactica is bedeviled by complaints that its later seasons weren’t as good as the early ones, or that its series finale was bad, or any number of things, but I disagree with all of those complaints. The series’ weird blend of apocalypticism, science fiction, and spirituality has grown only more resonant in the years since it aired — and if there was ever a time to marathon the show, it’s right now.

How fortunate, then, that the show’s entire four-season run, as well as the pilot miniseries and two spinoff movies (neither of which are necessary to understand the full story, but both of which are enjoyable), is available again for the first time in ages on Syfy.com. (The episodes are free to stream, though they contain ads.)

Battlestar Galactica balanced complicated sci-fi storytelling with smaller standalone tales about life among the humans running for their lives

Courtesy of NBC Universal

Battlestar Galactica aired during one of my favorite periods for genre TV. (It and Lost launched within a year of each other.) The storytelling complexity of these shows ramped up considerably, with deeper and more intricate mythologies for fans to obsess over. But because they still had to make lots of episodes (20 per season, in Battlestar’s case), they had to blend the larger sweep of their overarching stories with smaller ones about the characters and their adventures.

Consequently, these shows were more all over the place, quality-wise, compared with a show like Game of Thrones (at its best). But when they ended, even if they disappointed fans, it meant that it was possible to fondly remember stories that had nothing to do with the overall arc, something Game of Thrones didn’t really have going for it when it ended in disappointing fashion just last year.

Consider the episode I mentioned above, the one where the Cylons attacked every 33 minutes. It is, in essence, a re-pilot — a season premiere meant to catch up new viewers by introducing a show’s premise the way a pilot typically would, but without boring viewers who’ve watched to that point. Because Battlestar had launched in late 2003 with a four-hour miniseries that told the story of how humanity came to be on the run from the Cylons, the season one premiere didn’t need to belabor that point in another episode.

Instead, the writers came up with the ingenious idea of a Cylon attack arriving every 33 minutes, creating a bunch of frazzled, sleep-deprived humans on the run from an enemy who could exploit their every weakness and frailty. It’s an episode that’s stuck with me (and a lot of people) ever since it aired in 2005.

Battlestar Galactica’s showrunner was Ronald D. Moore, a longtime Star Trek veteran who had soured on that universe’s antiseptic gleam. Moore wanted to talk about human frailty and the political strife of the world; with Battlestar, he helmed what is perhaps the best TV show ever made about the tenuous nature of our democracy.

The series’ main characters hailed from the military (Edward James Olmos’s Admiral William Adama) and the government (Mary McDonnell’s President Laura Roslin, elevated to the highest office when everybody else in the Cabinet died). Their relationship, at once fraught and friendly, provided much of the series’ gravitas. But Moore also saw in their relationship a way to talk about how difficult it is to preserve human rights in times of trial. The series told sci-fi stories that mirrored debates Americans had at the time regarding torture and other human rights abuses during the George W. Bush administration. But the larger question of how we protect and maintain what’s human about us in the face of so much horror and death is broadly applicable to humanity in general.

The Cylons were an enemy that posed an existential threat to humans, but rather than the obviously robotic robots of the original series, they had evolved into humanlike androids who could live among us and carry out acts of war. They seemed just like us, but maybe weren’t us. Unless they were? Battlestar explored the fuzzy line between humans and Cylons with greater boldness as it went on, in ways that sometimes frustrated fans but that I ate up. (It turns out I have a robust appetite for mystical hoo-ha in my science fiction stories.)

And beyond all of these sociopolitical themes, the show was gloriously silly sci-fi. The story of the hunt for Earth had enough juice to drive much of Battlestar’s run, and it combined some of the greatest space battles ever created for television with an eerie mysticism that fueled the show’s more serialized plotting. Some fans would tell you the end of this story was disappointing. I’m not one of them, but I mention it just so you’re prepared.

Yet even if you hate the show’s series finale, it’s well worth embarking on the journey. Battlestar Galactica is one of my favorite TV shows ever made, one of those series I could conceivably write thousands of words about without breaking a sweat. (I haven’t mentioned the groundbreaking direction, for instance. Or composer Bear McCreary’s glorious score, the best ever written for television. Or Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck. Or ...) Suffice it to say that if you’re looking for a quarantine marathon that leans into your anxiety, Syfy may have just given you the perfect gift.

All four seasons of Battlestar Galactica, as well as the miniseries and two spinoff movies, are now streaming on Syfy.com with ads.

This is an important thread and I highly recommend you read it: 

In short, Fox News could lose all of its advertising and it wouldn’t matter, because cable companies pay them “carriage fees” to be in the lineup. And they command the highest carriage fees in cable news, because they use their viewers to harangue cable companies into paying whatever it is Fox is demanding. The solution? We can push back against Fox’s PR campaign—or even easier, you can simply cancel your cable service. I’ll explain why that makes the most sense. 

Most media companies negotiate “carriage fees” with cable providers as the cost of doing business. Those negotiations have several elements; cost is a big one, obviously, but it also has to do with whether a channel is in the basic tier or higher premium tiers. Every studio and content provider wants to be included in the lower tier for maximum viewership (which translates to higher ad rates), but there is obviously a limit to how many channels can be provided. After all, those costs get passed on to the customer. 

This is where companies like Disney have huge leverage. There is no way a cable provider can exclude ESPN from its basic tier, so here comes owner Disney not just demanding higher rates to carry ESPN, but also forcing cable providers to include marginal channels like ABC Family. Viacom, Warner, NBC Universal, etc.—they all wield their stable of channels to demand higher rates and channel inclusion, always fighting to be included in the basic tier. And you know what that means? Yup. Skyrocketing prices: In 2020, cable packages are going up at least $100 a year, or far more, depending on the cable provider. 

Comcast and AT&T are around $50 per month for the basic package. Charter is around $45. Costs go up for higher tiers with desirable channels (like local sports networks, or premium channels like HBO). 

So, it’s in this world that Fox News is trying to squeeze more dollars. 

So you’re already paying Fox News about $20 every year. You are paying Tucker Carlson’s salary—Fox and Friends, etc. Those fees are worth $1.8 billion to Fox, every year. And now, they’re trying to squeeze even more out of you: 

So what can you do about it? You can try and lobby back against those efforts, telling your cable provider that you aren’t going to keep subsiding hate TV. These guys are on it. Seriously, if you have cable and are intent on keeping it, click on that link—unfoxmycablebox.com—and help lobby against those fees. But there’s something else you can do that’s even more effective: just quit cable altogether. 

QUITTING CABLE

Assuming you’re on the lowest tier, you are paying $45 to $50. But the average cable customer paid a staggering $217 per month for TV in 2018, and costs have only gone up since then! And it’s not just the base price. According to a Consumer Report, “the average cable bill in our study costs consumers $217.42 a month. Of this number, a little less than $157 on average was determined to be the base package price once all fees, taxes, and charges for premium services were subtracted from the total price. In other words, the average consumer pays more than a 33% mark-up over the base price of service because of add-on fees of all types.”

My God, people—why are you paying that?!

So how do you replace that content? You enter the great new world of streaming, where you don’t care about TV schedules; you watch what you want, when you want it. Here’s what I get and pay for, providing all my viewing needs:

Broadcast networks: $0

One of the big cable scams is getting you to pay for stuff you can get over the air via an antenna. Yes, many of you live in remote rural areas without over-the-air broadcast TV. You may need to pay for live broadcast TV. But for most people? It’s unnecessary. You can plug in your address here and see what TV stations you can get over the air. The service will even tell you which way to point your antenna for best coverage!

You don’t even need one of those big old school roof antennas. The link above will note what kind of antenna you can use, including those cool flat ones that can be easily used indoors. That’s what I have—a flat antenna that I have behind my flat screen. I get great channels. I’m in an urban area, so I don’t need anything high-powered or larger, but that’s the point. Too many of us are paying for channels we can already get for free. 

Now, say you’re one of those people who can’t get over-the-air broadcast signals. FuboTV has a $55 a month package, Hulu has a $55 a month package, and YouTube TV has a $50 a month package. They’re not cheap, but they’re far better than that $217 monthly average, and they all include a lineup of popular cable channels. 

But if you can get it for free, then do so! I’m still feeling warm and fuzzy after talking my elderly neighbor down the street into giving up his cable subscription. He and his wife only watched PBS. Saved him over $100/month for something he could’ve gotten for free all along. He was beyond thrilled—not only did he have free PBS, but he could get three PBS stations over the air (and up to five in favorable conditions, like at night). People have been conditioned to think that they have to pay for TV. As a bonus, the quality is usually better as stations broadcast in full high definition while much of cable is compressed. 

Netflix: $16

Netflix starts at $9 for a single screen in standard definition. I pay for the highest tier: $16 for high-definition (I’m an audio-visual snob), which allows for four simultaneous streams. That means both kids can watch on their iPads (which is a thing that never happens) while I watch on the main TV. I share the subscription with my partner and her parents. Find someone to share the costs, and Netflix becomes far cheaper than the top-line costs. And seriously, there’s so much content here, good luck running out of things to watch. One thing to note: Aside from Netflix’s own homegrown content, any TV series doesn’t post on Netflix until the current season is over. Still, that’s less and less of a thing because content providers are pulling their content from Netflix for their own streaming services. It’s not a particularly big loss, however. 

Disney+: About $6/month ($70/year)

If you’re into Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, National Geographic, and Marvel superhero movies, this is a must. I’m into all of those, so yeah, well worth the cost. Also, Disney’s entire noncartoon movie catalog is on there, which is quite extensive. (Includes Mary Poppins to the Muppets to Cool Runnings, and so on.) 

Hulu: $12/month 

Hulu starts at $6/month for the ad version, which throws in ads before and after a show. I can’t stand ads, so I pay double the price. There’s also a bundle deal with Hulu, Disney+, and ESPN for $13/month, but it doesn’t have the no-ads Hulu price. 

Hulu carries contemporary TV series from NBC, ABC, and Fox (the studio, not the news, which is now owned by Disney). It also carries programming from a bunch of cable networks like A&E and Bravo. These shows are streamed the day after they air on those channels. Hulu is also doing its own original programming, with The Handmaid’s Tale being its biggest hit. 

So if you get the biggest, most expensive packages from those providers, and have over-the-air broadcast coverage, you’re at $34 per month, and get almost everything you can get via cable. You can get all that for as cheaply as $21/month. And if you don’t have kids and don’t care about superheroes, Star Wars, or cartoons, we’re down to $15/month. 

HBO: $15/month

No cable package offers HBO for free, so it’s always an add-on. HBO is prestige TV, with shows like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Silicon Valley, and Westworld. I pay it for several shows I can’t live without, but it would be the first thing I’d cut if I needed to tighten my belt. 

Sports: A lot per year

I’m a Chicago sports fan living in California, so even if I could get the local sports networks it wouldn’t do me any good. I pay for all the league packages: NFL Sunday Ticket, NBA League Pass, and NHL Center Ice. My T-Mobile cell package gets me MLB for free every year, but if it didn’t I’d probably skip that. I also follow the European soccer leagues around to their streaming homes every year, as they change constantly. So yeah, a lot of sports around here. 

If you follow your home team, this gets tough because most of these packages black out local teams! Yeah, terribly stupid. With football, that’s fine. You can usually get that over the air on broadcast TV. Other sports are almost all on the local sports cable networks. (We’ll talk about strategies for that in a bit.) But even if you subscribe to cable, those local sports networks aren’t available on your basic tier. You’re like paying over $100 a month to get them. 

(Incidentally, NFL Sunday Ticket is currently tied to DirecTV satellite service. You aren’t supposed to be able to get it without paying for DirecTV, but there are exceptions for students and people who live in apartment complexes without the ability to add a satellite dish. All I did was add an apartment number to my home address to get the exemption.)

Amazon Prime: included with Prime shipping, $119

I don’t consider this as part of my paid offerings because 1) I pay for Prime for the shipping benefits, and 2) I wouldn’t pay for it if it wasn’t included. It has some good stuff, but nothing I can’t live without. And quite frankly, I’m oversaturated with content, so I haven’t even paid close attention to what’s available here. 

So that’s what I pay for. Here are other streaming services:

CBS All Access: $6/month

If you’re into CBS series like Big Bang Theory or … I can’t think of anything else; CSI maybe? This was never a compelling product to me. There is a new Star Trek series on there that people are raving about, but it’s not enough to get me to pay more. So I don’t, and I don’t miss it. I already have more TV with all the above than I can ever watch. 

Specific cable networks: Tricky …

So I’m a huge Rick and Morty fan. I can watch old seasons on Hulu, but the fresh material only comes out on Comedy Central. There’s CNN. There’s ESPN. C-SPAN (for this audience!). Local sports. These all require a cable subscription to access via streaming. So how to do it? 

My partner lives in a condo complex with cable included in the HOA fee, so I use her login and password and I have access to everything. What I’m saying is, find someone who doesn’t want to get rid of cable, or can’t (like my partner), and use their login. Problem solved. 

If that’s not an option, then Plan B is to use a streaming service with the requisite cable networks. These get expensive, but it should still be cheaper than a full cable subscription. Some options: 

Philo. 59 channels for $20/month. But lacks news channels except for BBC World News. 

SlingTV: $30/month. Includes cable news networks, including Fox. You’re still subsidizing those a-holes. Best reviewed streaming service for cable channels. These guys also have a good sports package. 

But really, getting someone’s login and password is your best bet to get cable news (and local sports and other cable channels) without you having to subsidize Fox News. And as cable cord-cutting picks up steam, at some point CNN and MSNBC will hopefully offer standalone streaming products. And the sports leagues, for sure, need to quit local-team blackouts (which might require federal legislation).

C-SPAN likely never would survive as a standalone streaming service as it’s funded entirely by cable fees. But really, C-SPAN should be like PBS: publicly funded. 

In case you’re wondering, cord-cutting isn’t some crazy fringe thing anymore. The number of people dropping traditional pay TV is rising like crazy, and the trend is only accelerating. 

Comcast: This company had 22.3 million video customers by year-end 2017. At the end of 2018, that number was down to 21.9 million. By the end of 2019, the company had lost an additional 733,000 video subscribers. Verizon: Subscriber numbers for this company have decreased every quarter since Q4 2016. Charter: This organization is now losing tens of thousands of video customers each year. Its CEO blames higher carriage fees imposed by programmers as a key trigger for customers who are moving on to cord-cutting services. DirecTV (satellite): This AT&T-owned company lost over 2.3 million satellite TV subscribers between 2017 and 2019. Some of those subscribers eventually went to its internet TV streaming service, AT&T TV Now (formerly DirecTV Now), although most of its traditional pay-TV subscribers likely went to competitor services like Sling TV and YouTube TV.

STREAMING BOXES

So where do you stream all this stuff? You use a streaming box. I’m an Apple household, so I use an AppleTV, but you can get much cheaper options. The Roku is fantastic. Amazon has a streaming box: the Amazon Fire TV. These plug into your TV and can either be hardwired directly to your internet via an ethernet connection or can connect via Wi-Fi. 

As a bonus, these tiny, svelte devices consume a fraction of the power of a thirsty cable box, saving you even more money in reduced energy costs. (Don’t get me started on my energy efficiency obsession! Or maybe do. It would make for a fun series.) 

Their user interface is different than traditional cable service. There’s no guide to see “what’s on” at any given time. You decide what to watch, when you watch it. And after walking some people through the process, it can be very hard for people to shift behavior that’s ingrained over decades of TV-watching. People steeped in the streaming lifestyle can say, “I’ve heard such great things about Tiger King! Gonna binge it this weekend.” To traditional TV viewers, that’s weird. 

My antenna TV has a traditional schedule guide. Googling around, it looks like that’s manufacturer-specific. But even then, people can do old-school-style channel surfing with antenna TV. 

CONCLUSION

Don’t subsidize Fox News with cable service. But really, don’t overpay for TV with cable service. There’s almost no reason to do so. Yes, some of you have specific cases for why it makes sense, and that’s fine. You can be the friends and family members that share your logins so that everyone else can cut the cord! 

But if possible, cutting the cord can save you hundreds of dollars a year, if not thousands, and it cuts off Fox News’ lifeblood. The day they have to rely on advertising to make ends meet is the day they’re forced to reassess their entire business model and programming approach. 

It was good to see #WeLoveYamiche trending on Twitter after President Donald Trump once again openly disrespected black female journalist Yamiche Alcindor, who is the White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour. Thousands of people took to Twitter to show support as fellow journalists, viewers, friends, fellow Alpha Kappa Alpha (AKA) sorority members, activists, and politicians all stood in solidarity with Alcindor, who has remained calm and focused throughout it all.

More people are noticing what has become a pattern for Trump. Alcindor is not the first, nor will she be the last black woman attacked by Trump as long as the Racist-Sexist-in-Chief controls the nation’s bully pulpit. 

No question about it—he is a bully.

Here’s a response from political analyst and campaign organizer Karine Jean-Pierre, who is Haitian-American; Alcindor’s parents are from Haiti. 

Standup comedian and television host W. Kamau Bell weighed in.

As did an AKA sorority sister and fellow journalist Sophia A. Nelson.

Viewers also chimed in.

The Root’s Michael Harriot opined on the “why” of Trump’s behavior.

Alcindor was interviewed on MSNBC’s Morning Joe over a week ago and asked about Trump’s behavior towards her.

We already know that Trump loves to use the “nasty” word. Let’s not forget this 2018 Newsweek story: ”Donald Trump Attacked Six Black Women in Three Days: 'Nasty,' 'Loser,' 'Racist Question' and 'Stupid Question.'”

President Donald Trump, who defended himself against claims of racism just this week, has attacked six prominent black women in the three days since the midterm elections that resulted in Democrats taking House control from the Republicans.

Trump challenged the women's intelligence and in a degrading tone called one "nasty" and a "loser." He also said he was being asked a "racist question" and a "stupid question."

The women ranged from journalists to an election official, a politician and a former first lady.

The journalists were White House correspondents April Ryan and CNN reporter Abby Phillip. Trump has tried to silence Ryan ever since he took office.

Black women across the nation watch television and read the news. We see this, and we’ll see Donald Trump at the polls.

Last week incompetent stain on humanity Donald Trump floated the mother of all trial balloons when he proposed, as did innumerable conservative pundits and hangers-on, that perhaps we should lift social distancing advisories early and let the virus take its course. The "cure" of economic turmoil might be "worse than the disease," he opined. The "disease," to make sure we are clear here, is Americans dying inside tents set up in hospital parking lots.

The New Yorker set up an interview with the conservative Hoover Institution lawyer guy, Richard Epstein, whose newfound expertise on worldwide pandemics was said to be influential, in Team Trump circles, in the belief that the danger of virus was being overplayed. It is quite the read. You will note once again the defining feature of newfound conservative expertise: It all revolves around the supposition that every actual subject matter expert in the world is wrong because I, Conservative Thinker Guy, ran my own numbers and made my own assumptions that none of you eggheads previously thought of. Debate mah!

If you haven't read the New Yorker interview yet, go do that if you want to get a feel for the very uppermost echelons of conservative … let’s say ... "scientific rigor." If you’ve had about all you can take of coronavirus misinformation, however, you might want to bow out. We’ve had a long, long damn month.

The summary version is this: Epstein, whose original piece suggested we might see "about 500 deaths" from the pandemic (he now says his math was wrong and is very sorry about that), does not know how pandemics work, and so he set out to reinvent or reexplain or (???) the same pandemic curve (see: #FlattenTheCurve) that every actual expert already knows about. Hang on, you've got to get a taste of this:

"[...] you cannot use any exponential system because essentially then everybody is going to be dead, because things just keep doubling, doubling, and doubling. So you have to develop a model which is going to explain why there’s a fairly rapid increase at the outset, and then why the thing starts to turn flat, ultimately down, and then disappears."

Yes. Yes, that is how pandemics (and brontosauruses) work. The numbers go up. Then they flatten. Then they go down, because everybody has either recovered or is dead. Nobody, anywhere, believes that an "exponential" rate of increase lasts forever because if nothing else—think zombie hoards—you begin to reach a point where the scattered survivors are all quite nicely social distanced because of, you know, everyone between them being zombies.

Every flu, every cold season, every new disease—they all follow that same basic pattern. But Epstein instead believes he has discovered something novel here, which is both difficult to explain and very, very wrong. He hinges most of his argument on a theory that "natural selection" will or already has produced a "strong" and a "weak" version of the virus, and the "strong" version will kill people until "adaptation" sets in and changes in "genetic viral behavior" will take place while people with the "weak" version live longer and so infect more people with the "weak" version and with social distancing "the evolutionary process should be more rapid than that for the ordinary flu."

Got it? No you don't, you're lying. This is not how evolution works, not on a March-until-June basis, anyway, and there is no data supporting this made-up theory that there are strong and weak versions of this virus. None. It is his speculation. It is his self-described "sense," unsupported, based on no knowledge of epidemiology, viruses, biology, evolution, or medicine in general. (But "I've done a lot of work in these particular areas," Epstein pipes up. "One of the things you get as a lawyer is a skill of cross-examination.")

After that things begin to fall apart in the interview as reporter Isaac Chotiner probes the various flaws with Epstein's assertions and Epstein retreats into allowing that sure, perhaps he's wrong, but "I'm always willing to debate somebody on the other side."

A debate. He has printed something based on only the most rudimentary understanding of his subject matter, called the experts wrong, and suggested that it is only fair that they Debate Him.

Where oh where have we heard that refrain before? Ah—right. Every self-proclaimed new conservative expert, in every field and genre, from the Ben Shapiros to the Dinesh D'Souziis. Because you cannot prove to my own satisfaction that I am wrong, you experts, I must be more clever than you. (Also, you are not allowed to provide any evidence that I am wrong because I don't have time to read or absorb new information. Also you are expected to provide endless amounts of your own free time devoted entirely to proving to me all the various conclusions of your field that I have not heard of and which therefore I shall declare to be probably made-up. Also you must invite me to your scientific conferences or you are Afraid Of My Genius.)

The staples of conservatism remain constant, through every year and crisis. The same insistence that knowing a smattering of key words and phrases is intellectually equivalent to a lifetime of study. The same belligerence at book-learners who would even bother with more than that smattering before writing up their conclusions under a just-asking-questions byline. The same ideological rigor—come up with the desired conclusion first, the reasons afterwards.

Nobody is bored with this yet? Nobody is maybe up for a little self-reflection on whether this pattern is, in fact, not working out? The Iraq War was not a cakewalk, and did not spread peace throughout the region. Tax cuts, over and over and over again, have failed to produce the results boastingly predicted every last sodding time. Years of bank deregulation did not work out well. The United States is not uniquely immune to the same pandemic that spread rapidly through the rest of the world. A movement that is contemptuous of science and intellectualism cannot produce either, it can only crudely mimic the gestures used.

Is there a museum devoted to past takes of the Hoover Institution that turned out to be catastrophic in practice? Shouldn't there be? Are there trading cards with each conservative thinker, listing their past major works and giving a batting average on how that all worked out?

Shouldn't there be?

The Trump administration has decided against reopening Obamacare enrollment to uninsured Americans during the coronavirus pandemic, defying calls from health insurers and Democrats to create a special sign-up window amid the health crisis.

President Donald Trump and administration officials recently said they were considering relaunching HealthCare.gov, the federal enrollment site, and insurers said they privately received assurances from health officials overseeing the law's marketplace. However, a White House official on Tuesday evening told POLITICO the administration will not reopen the site for a special enrollment period, and that the administration is "exploring other options."

The annual enrollment period for HealthCare.gov closed months ago, and a special enrollment period for the coronavirus could have extended the opportunity for millions of uninsured Americans to newly seek out coverage. Still, the law already allows a special enrollment for people who have lost their workplace health plans, so the health care law may still serve as a safety net after a record surge in unemployment stemming from the pandemic.

Numerous Democratic-leaning states that run their own insurance markets have already reopened enrollment in recent weeks as the coronavirus threat grew. The Trump administration oversees enrollment for about two-thirds of states.

Insurers said they had expected Trump to announce a special enrollment period last Friday based on conversations they had with officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which runs HealthCare.gov enrollment. It wasn’t immediately clear why the Trump administration decided against the special enrollment period. CMS deferred comment to the White House.

Trump confirmed last week he was seriously considering a special enrollment period, but he also doubled down on his support of a lawsuit by Republican states that could destroy the entire Affordable Care Act, along with coverage for the 20 million people insured through the law.

People losing their workplace coverage have some insurance options outside of the law's marketplaces. They can extend their employer plan for up to 18 months through COBRA, but that's an especially pricey option. Medicaid is also an option for low-income adults in about two-thirds of states that have adopted Obamacare's expansion of the program.

Short-term health insurance alternatives promoted by Trump, which allow enrollment year-round, is also an option for many who entered the crisis without coverage. Those plans offer skimpier coverage and typically exclude insurance protections for preexisting conditions, and some blue states like California and have banned them or severely restricted them. The quality of the plans vary significantly and, depending on the contract, insurers can change coverage terms on the fly and leave patients with exorbitant medical bills.

Major insurers selling Obamacare plans were initially reluctant to reopen the law's marketplaces, fearing they would be crushed by a wave of costs from Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. But the main insurance lobby, America's Health Insurance Plans, endorsed the special enrollment period roughly two weeks ago while also urging lawmakers to expand premium subsidies to make coverage more affordable for middle-income people.

Congress in last week’s $2 trillion stimulus passed on that request, as well as insurers’ petition for an open-ended government fund to help stem financial losses from an unexpected wave in coronavirus hospitalizations.

Democrats pushing for the special enrollment period are also grappling with the high costs facing many people with insurance despite new pledges from plans to waive cost-sharing. Obamacare plans and a growing number of those offered by employers impose hefty cost-sharing and high deductibles that could still burden infected Americans with thousands of dollar in medical bills.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) on a press call Monday contended that "we also need to have free treatment" after Congress eliminated out-of-pocket costs for coronavirus tests.

"We did the testing, which is now free, and everybody, regardless of their insurance, gets it," Pallone said. "But that has to be for the treatment as well."

President Donald Trump’s management of the coronavirus pandemic has cost him the on-air support of one of his most outspoken hometown defenders.

Mike Francesa, the longtime icon of New York sports talk radio, blasted the president on Monday with the type of tirade he typically reserves for the Knicks or Mets — accusing Trump of not funneling enough medical equipment to the current epicenter of the outbreak in the United States.

“We’re watching one thing happen in our city on the 11 o’clock news every night. We’re watching people die, and now we know people who died. And we’re not seeing one or two people die now in our neighborhood. We’re seeing them die by the tens and twenties by the day,” Francesa said, charging that police, firefighters, health care workers and other first responders “don’t have the supplies they need” to combat the public health crisis.

“So don’t give me the MyPillow guy doing a song-and-dance up here on a Monday afternoon when people are dying in Queens,” Francesa added. “Get the stuff made, get the stuff where it needs to go, and get the boots on the ground! Treat this like the crisis it is!”

Francesa’s fiery remarks came after the daily press briefing of the White House coronavirus task force on Monday, during which Trump introduced MyPillow founder and CEO Mike Lindell, the Minnesota multimillionaire inventor whose firm is manufacturing cotton face masks in short supply.

In that appearance before reporters, the president repeated his baseless claim from over the weekend that masks at New York hospitals could be “going out the back door,” apparently suggesting that nurses, doctors or other employees were stealing the personal protective equipment.

Trump then called on members of the media to investigate the supposed suspicious activity, a demand met with outrage from Francesa.

“You go investigate that! You have your military, your FEMA investigate that! That’s your job! You’re in charge of this!” he said. “If this is a war, they’re stealing your supplies, what do you do? You tell the media to go investigate it? What, and get back to you in six weeks or two months, as more people die on a daily basis? That’s what’s wrong here. There’s a disconnect.”

Francesa also took aim at the president’s comments on Sunday regarding the projected death toll from Covid-19 infections in the U.S., which the administration expects could result in 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities among Americans.

Trump had said that “if we can hold that down, as we’re saying to 100,000 [deaths], it’s a horrible number, maybe even less, but to 100,000, so we have between 100,000 and 200,000, we all together have done a very good job.”

“How can you have a scoreboard that says 2,000 people have died and tell us, ‘It’s OK if another 198,000 die, that’s a good job,’” Francesa said. “How is that a good job in our country? It’s a good job if nobody else dies! Not if another 198,000 people die! So now 200,000 people are disposable?”

Francesa, who first emerged as a supporter of Trump’s presidential campaign in spring 2016, has become increasingly disparaging of the administration’s handling of the pandemic in recent days on social media, while New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, has vacillated between praise and criticism of the president in an effort to ensure federal resources continue to flow to his state.