The S&P 500 fell more than 7% Monday, triggering circuit breakers that prevent a further plunge. From a report: The index hit "limit down" shortly after the open, halting trading below that level for 15 minutes. The market was set to resume trading at 9:49 am ET. In addition to the S&P, the most all-encompassing large-cap stock index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 7.3% while the Nasdaq, which is concentrated in technology names, slid 6.9%. According to the New York Stock Exchange, a market trading halt may occur at "three circuit breaker thresholds" on the S&P 500 due to large declines and volatility. Under "circuit breaker" rules, stocks will resume trading 15 minutes after the halt. The halt on Monday morning was the first since the rules were implemented after the financial crisis. If there's a subsequent drop of 14% from the last trading close, there will be another 15-minute trading halt. If there's a 20% drop at any point, that would halt trading for the rest of the day.
At this point any future predictions seem tenuous at best
Apple's ban on its engineers from traveling to Asia in the wake of the coronavirus has affected the development of its next-generation iPhone which could result in a delayed fall launch, claims a new report today from DigiTimes.
According to the supply chain-focused Taiwanese publication, Apple has extended the deadline by one month to the end of April for the removal of a set of travel restrictions preventing its engineers from making business trips to Asia, and the restrictions have delayed the engineering verification tests (EVTs) for the 5G iPhones at manufacturing facilities in China.
Related supply chain makers had originally expected the rescheduled EVT procedures to be carried out by the end of March enabling the kick-off of volume production of the new iPhone devices in June, said the sources, adding that a further delay of EVT tests to the end of April could postpone the volume production by another 1-2 months.
Judging from the revised EVT schedule, Apple's product launch for the next-generation iPhone devices could to be postponed to October, said the sources.
The claim follows a Bloomberg article published over the weekend that quotes a report from Bank of America analysts suggesting Apple's 5G iPhone release could be delayed by a month this fall.
Apple's travel restrictions were first reported late last month. The restrictions apply to several countries hit by the coronavirus outbreak, including China, which is an issue because Apple engineers often visit China at this time of year to prepare for the manufacturing of new iPhones.
Production of new devices usually kicks off in the summer, but during the first months of the year, Apple employees visit China to perfect assembly processes with manufacturing partners like Foxconn.
These delays could eat into the time Apple needs to finalize orders for chips and other iPhone components that need to be made well in advance of when full production begins. However, supply chain experts told Reuters in late February that Apple still has time to keep the iPhone schedule on track, despite the travel restrictions.
"We have instituted specific travel restrictions in a few countries including China, South Korea, and Italy," Apple said in a memo sent out to employees last week. Apple is recommending that employees manage meetings through phone calls and video chats instead.
Apple plans to release four new iPhone models in the fall, according to respected Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. The all-OLED lineup is said to consist of 5.4-inch, two 6.1-inch, and 6.7-inch models, all of which will support 5G.
DigiTimes predicts that overall shipments of 5G-enabled smartphones will be much lower in the first-half of 2020 than originally expected, due to the influence of the outbreak.
The Grand Princess cruise ship, which is housing about 3,500 people, some of them infected with the coronavirus, is due to dock in Oakland sometime Monday, and White House officials have made it abundantly clear they have no plan for what to do with those passengers. ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson Sunday in an interview: “What plan is in place to deal with the 3,500 people on board?” Much to viewers’ discomfort, the former neurosurgeon seemed stumped by what should have been a predictable question.
"The cruise ship personnel and, as you know, vice president met with the CEOs of the major cruise ship companies yesterday, and they are coming up with a plan within 72 hours of that meeting," Carson said. Stephanopoulos interrupted him to point out what seemed like a mathematical error. “The ship’s docking tomorrow,” he said.
STEPHANOPOULOS: The Grand Princess is docking tomorrow. What's the plan for the 3,500 people on board? BEN CARSON: They're coming up with one S: It docks tomorrow C: The plan will be in place S: Shouldn't you be able to say what it is? C: It hasn't been fully formulated pic.twitter.com/J717Q7q0DG
“The plan will be in place by that time, but I don’t want to preview the plan right now,” Carson responded. Stephanopoulos hit him with another perfectly logical follow-up question: “Shouldn’t you be able to do that?”
He’s the Housing and Urban Development secretary so technically, no, but considering he’s the one doing the interview, you would hope he is somewhat knowledgable about the topic at hand. Apparently not. “I think it all needs to come from a solitary source,” Carson said. “We shouldn’t have 16 people saying what the plan is particularly when it hasn’t been fully formulated.” Translation: There is no plan.
Margaret Brennan, moderator of CBS News' “Face the Nation” asked U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams a similar question, to clarify what's happening to the thousands of people onboard the Grand Princess when it docks, and he tried to change the subject as if she had asked him about the weather. “Well, we'll quickly get into the cruise ships,” Dr. Adams said. “But what I want the American people to know is that the novel coronavirus is a family- comes from a family of viruses, including the cold, including SARS and MERS, which we've successfully navigated in the past, and that most people who get the coronavirus are going to have a mild disease. Very few will actually need to be hospitalized.”
Brennan again pressed: “So- so for those people who are actually infected in this hot spot on this cruise ship, are they be- being released into the public?” Adams again fumbled. “Well, what we're- what we're prioritizing when we look at the cruise ship situation is number one, making sure people who are sick on the cruise ship get the medical care that they need, that they're appropriately evacuated,” he said. “And we've sent CDC teams on to the ship. We've sent personal protective equipment on to the ship. We're making sure number two, that we can get people off the ship as quickly and as safely as possible.”
So basically, officials are consulting the experts but those consultations haven’t netted an actual plan for the thousands of people onboard the Grand Princess. The American people are supposed to, however, take comfort in Adams’ words that officials are “working with Department of Defense, Coast Guard and the local authorities to make sure we have a safe place to take these people.” Well, I’m not comforted, to say the least.
Surgeon General Jerome Adams is asked about criticism regarding the Trump administration's coronavirus response pic.twitter.com/bvVtkEj7C7
On Friday, as coronavirus infections rapidly multiplied aboard a cruise ship marooned off the coast of California, health department officials and Vice President Mike Pence came up with a plan to evacuate thousands of passengers, avoiding the fate of a similar cruise ship, the Diamond Princess, which became a petri dish of coronavirus infections. Quickly removing passengers was the safest outcome, health officials and Pence reasoned.
But President Donald Trump had a different idea: Leave the infected passengers on board — which would help keep the number of U.S. coronavirus cases as low as possible.
“Do I want to bring all those people off? People would like me to do it,” Trump admitted at a press conference at the CDC later on Friday. “I would rather have them stay on, personally.”
“I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault,” Trump added, saying that he ultimately empowered Pence to decide whether to evacuate the passengers.
For six weeks behind the scenes, and now increasingly in public, Trump has undermined his administration’s own efforts to fight the coronavirus outbreak — resisting attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios, overturning a public-health plan upon request from political allies and repeating only the warnings that he chose to hear. Members of Congress have grilled top officials like Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield over the government’s biggest mistake: failing to secure enough testing to head off a coronavirus outbreak in the United States. But many current and former Trump administration officials say the true management failure was Trump’s.
“It always ladders to the top,” said one person helping advise the administration’s response, who noted that Trump’s aides discouraged Azar from briefing the president about the coronavirus threat back in January. “Trump’s created an atmosphere where the judgment of his staff is that he shouldn’t need to know these things.”
Interviews with 13 current and former officials, as well as individuals close to the White House, painted a picture of a president who rewards those underlings who tell him what he wants to hear while shunning those who deliver bad news. For instance, aides heaped praise on Trump for his efforts to lock down travel from China — appealing to the president’s comfort zone of border security — but failed to convey the importance of doing simultaneous community testing, which could have uncovered a potential U.S. outbreak. Government officials andindependent scientists now fear that the coronavirus has been silently spreading in the United States for weeks, as unexplained cases have popped up in more than 25 states.
“It’s a clearly difficult situation when the top wants to hear certain answers,” said one former official who’s briefed the White House. “That can make it difficult for folks to express their true assessment — even the most experienced and independent minds.”
While Trump last week allowed hospitals and labs to start developing their own coronavirus tests, wrongly blaming Obama administration regulations for a delay, the same move could have been made weeks ago had the president and his advisers felt it was necessary, said two officials.
The White House press office declined to comment on the record, referring questions to HHS.
The health department said that Trump had been responsive to the department's concerns and understood the seriousness of the coronavirus threat from the first day he was briefed.
"The President took early and decisive actions like instituting travel restrictions and utilizing the quarantine authority" to protect Americans from the outbreak, an HHS spokesperson said.
HHS also stressed that Azar and Trump had a good working relationship.
"The Secretary always offers the President his honest assessment, and always insists when briefing the President on public health issues that the relevant experts participate," the spokesperson said.
Trump-inspired disorganization plagues early response
As the outbreak has grown, Trump has become attached to the daily count of coronavirus cases and how the United States compares to other nations, reiterating that he wants the U.S. numbers kept as low as possible. Health officials have found explicit ways to oblige him by highlighting the most optimistic outcomes in briefings, and their agencies have tamped down on promised transparency. The CDC has stopped detailing how many people in the country have been tested for the virus, and its online dashboard is running well behind the number of U.S. cases tracked by Johns Hopkins and even lags the European Union’s own estimate of U.S. cases.
After senior CDC official Nancy Messonnier correctly warned on Feb. 25 that a U.S. coronavirus outbreak was inevitable, a statement that spooked the stock market and broke from the president’s own message that the situation was under control, Trump himself grew angry and administration officials discussed muzzling Messonnier for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, said two individuals close to the administration. However, Azardefended her role, and Messonnier ultimately was allowed to continue making public appearances, although her tone grew less dire in subsequent briefings.
Trump’s defenders can point to many coronavirus crises that, so far, have been failures of bureaucracy and disorganization. The president didn’t lock out a government scientist from CDC. He didn’t know that officials decided to fly back coronavirus-infected Americans aboard planes with hundreds of others who had tested negative, with Trump bursting in anger when he learned the news.
But Trump has added to that disorganization through his own decisions. Rather than empower a sole leader to fight the outbreak, as President Barack Obama did with Ebola in 2014, he set up a system where at least three different people — Azar, Vice President Mike Pence and coronavirus task force coordinator Debbie Birx — can claim responsibility. Three people who have dealt with the task force said it’s not clear what Birx’s role is, and that coronavirus-related questions sent to her have been rerouted to the vice president’s office.
In response, Pence’s office said it has positioned Birx as the vice president’s “right arm,” advising him on the response, while Azar continues to oversee the health department's numerous coronavirus operations.
Trump on Friday night also shook up White House operations, replacing acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney with Rep. Mark Meadows, a longtime ally. The long-expected ouster of Mulvaney was welcomed in corners like the health department, given that Mulvaney had been one of Azar’s top critics. But the abrupt staff shuffle in the middle of the coronavirus outbreak injects further uncertainty into the government’s response, said a current official and two former officials. It’s not yet clear what Mulvaney’s departure will mean for his key lieutenants involved in fighting the outbreak, like Domestic Policy Council chief Joe Grogan, for instance.
“Every office has office politics — even the Oval Office,” said one individual. “You’d hope we could wait to work it out until after a public health emergency.”
Health officials compete for Trump’s approval
The pressure to earn Trump’s approval can be a distraction at best and an obsession at worst: Azar, having just survived a bruising clash with a deputy and sensing that his job was on the line, spent part of January making appearances on conservative TV outlets and taking other steps to shore up his anti-abortion bona fides and win approval from the president, even as the global coronavirus outbreak grew stronger.
“We have in President Trump the greatest protector of religious liberty who has ever sat in the Oval Office,” Azar said on Fox News on Jan. 16, hours after working to rally global health leaders to fight the United Nations’ stance on abortion rights. Trump also had lashed out at Azar over bad health-care polling that day.
Around the same time, Azar had concluded that the new coronavirus posed a public health risk and tried to share an urgent message with the president: The potential outbreak could leave tens of thousands of Americans sickened and many dead.
But Trump’s aides mocked and belittled Azar as alarmist, as he warned the president of a major threat to public health and his own economic agenda, said three people briefed on the conversations. Some officials argued that the virus would be no worse than the flu.
Azar, meanwhile, had his own worries: A clash with Medicare chief Seema Verma had weakened his standing in the White House, which in December had considered replacements for both Azar and Verma.
“Because he feels pretty insecure, about the feuds within his department and the desire to please the president, I don’t know if he was in the position to deliver the message that the president didn’t want to hear,” said one former official who's worked with Azar.
The jockeying for Trump’s favor was part of the cause of Azar’s destructive feud with Verma, as the two tried to box each other out of events touting Trump initiatives. Now, officials including Azar, Verma and other senior leaders are forced to spend time shoring up their positions with the president and his deputies at a moment when they should be focused on a shared goal: stopping a potential pandemic.
“The boss has made it clear, he likes to see his people fight, and he wants the news to be good,” said one adviser to a senior health official involved in the coronavirus response. “This is the world he’s made.”
President swayed by flattery, personal appeals
Trump’s unpredictable demands and attention to public statements — and his own susceptibility to flattery — have created an administration where top officials feel constantly at siege, worried that the next presidential tweet will decide their professional future, and panicked that they need to regularly impress him.
The most obvious practitioner of this strategy is Azar, who became Trump’s second health secretary after the first, Tom Price, failed to bond with Trump and was ousted over a charter-jet scandal. Azar decided early in his tenure to have “zero daylight” with the president, said three individuals close to him, and the health secretary routinely fawns over the president in his TV appearances on Fox News. “No other president has had the guts, the courage to take on these special interests,” Azar told Fox News host Tucker Carlson in December after Trump pushed new price transparency on the health care industry.
Azar’s team also has insisted upon using background photos for his Twitter account that always show him with the president — sometimes silently standing behind Trump while he speaks. Azar is alone among Cabinet members in this practice; secretaries like HUD’s Ben Carson, Transportation’s Elaine Chao and Treasury’s Steven Mnuchin opted for bland Twitter backgrounds that show their headquarters.
"The Secretary respects the President and values their strong relationship," said an HHS spokesperson, when asked about Azar’s approach to working with Trump and use of Twitter photos.
Other health officials have modeled similar behavior as Azar. Asked by Trump if he wanted to make a “little statement” on Friday, CDC Director Redfield responded by praising the president’s “decisive leadership” and visit to CDC headquarters amid the outbreak. “I think that’s the most important thing I want to say,” Redfield said.
At least one health official has offered a more subtle reminder of her loyalties. Verma wore an Ivanka Trump-brand pendant to some meetings and events with the president, before it was stolen in 2018.
Health officials also have to guard their words and predictions, worried that the president will fixate on the wrong data point or blurt out damaging information in public. Trump on Friday told reporters that he’d initially scrapped a trip to the CDC because of a possible coronavirus case at the agency. The announcement came as a surprise to CDC staff, including those preparing for Trump’s visit, because they hadn’t been briefed on the potential coronavirus case, POLITICO first reported.
Meanwhile, Trump’s political allies have tried to circumvent the policy process, causing further headaches for the overwhelmed health department. Alabama Republicans prevailed upon Trump to scrap an HHS contingency plan to potentially quarantine some coronavirus-infected Americans at a facility in their state last month.
“I just got off the phone with the President,” Sen. Richard Shelby tweeted on Feb. 23. “He told me that his administration will not be sending any victims of the Coronavirus from the Diamond Princess cruise ship to Anniston, Alabama.”
But Democrats in a California city facing a similar situation failed to get a similar guarantee, leading them to file a lawsuit that accused the administration of political favoritism.
“California must not have the pull to get taken off the list,” attorney Jennifer Keller, representing Costa Mesa, Calif., reportedly said during a court hearing last month. “Alabama does.” A federal judge later halted plans to transfer coronavirus-stricken patients to a facility in the city.
Meanwhile, the president has allowed feuds to fester and spill into public view. Azar, for instance, has battled with White House officials and Verma for months over policies, personnel and even seats aboard the presidential airplane. Those fights have been reignited amid the coronavirus crisis, when Azar clashed with longtime rivals like Grogan over funding the response and whether enough coronavirus tests were being performed.
They’ve also cast a long shadow over strategy, like Azar’s decision not to push for Verma to be added to the coronavirus task force that he oversaw for nearly a month. Verma instead was added to the task force on March 2, several days after Pence took over leading the effort. While Azar said he asked for Verma to join the task force, and an HHS spokesperson pointed to the secretary’s public statement, two people with knowledge of task force operations said that the White House officials had raised questions about her omission.
Officials call the original decision to exclude Verma from the task force short-sighted at best, given the virus’ potential threat to the elderly patients covered by the Medicare program and residents living in nursing homes that are regulated by Verma’s agency.
With Trump unwilling — or unable — to put a stop to the health department's fights, they’ve occupied and gripped Washington during relative peacetime. When at war against a potential pandemic, there’s no room for these distractions, officials say.
“If this sort of dysfunction exists as part of the everyday operations — then, yes, during a true crisis the problems are magnified and exacerbated,” said a former Trump HHS official. “And with extremely detrimental consequences.”
"America is approaching one of its most contentious hours," writes the Phildadelphia Inquirer, "and officially, it's one that doesn't exist."
According to the National Conference of State Legislators, lawmakers in 32 states are considering bills that would change the current system of splitting the year into about eight months of daylight time and the rest, standard. "It's been a hot issue," said Jim Reed, an NCSL official. And it's getting hotter, he added. Every year more state lawmakers are considering changing the system.
The preponderance are pushing for year-round daylight time, although Congress has forbidden states from doing so. Pennsylvania has four different proposed time-change bills, and three of those essentially endorse year-round daylight time. Yet, if the issue were put to a national primary, all-standard, all-the-time would win decisively, according to a poll conducted last year. More than 70% of those surveyed said, Please, stop with the changes, period...
DST critics have pointed to studies pointing to possible connections to an increase in heart disease when the clocks go up, and the impacts of disrupted body rhythms resulting from disrupted sleep patterns. Proponents say later sunsets mean more Vitamin D and more opportunities to luxuriate in the later twilights.
Most notably, the GOP would all but shred Beshear's ability to issue executive orders by giving legislative committees—which would feature Republican majorities—the power to reject them. The same bill would also delay new orders from taking effect by at least 35 days; currently, they go into effect immediately. In addition, any "administrative body" established by an executive order would be disbanded 90 days after the end of a governor's term.
Meanwhile, another bill would require Beshear to obtain approval from the state Senate before appointing commissioners to the Kentucky Horse Racing Commission, which regulates one of the state's best-known industries, or the Kentucky Horse Park, a popular theme park owned by the state. That's similar to the GOP's first attempt to shrink Beshear's powers by effectively eliminating his control over the state's Department of Transportation. With Republicans in firm control of the legislature and only a simple majority needed to override any Beshear vetoes, the GOP can and almost certainly will keep finding new ways to undermine the results of last year's election.
Top federal health officials on Saturday said they don't know how many people in the U.S. have been tested for coronavirus — or how many will need to be in the coming weeks.
The health officials, in an untelevised briefing at the White House, also defended President Donald Trump's claim on Friday that anyone seeking a test can get one, even as state officials voice frustration with the availability of tests.
Federal government labs have tested specimens for 1,583 people, but the Trump administration does not havefigures for the numbers of people tested at state and local labs, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn told reporters. They said said that 5,861 specimens have been tested across the country, but it's not clear how many people that translates to because each test requires multiple specimens and people get multiple tests.
The administration has previously struggled to communicate how many tests have been conducted. Azar last Sunday said more than 3,600 people had been tested, but two days later Anne Schuchat, a top CDC official, testified in the Senate that more than 3,000 specimens had been taken from 500 people — a fraction of what Azar claimed.
By Friday night, 1.1 million tests had been shipped out, Hahn said. That was just shy of the 1.5 million that Vice President Mike Pence had said would be available to hospitals this week. Hahn said diagnostic manufacturers believe they can churn out 4 million tests by the end of next week.
But frustration is growing among state health officials who say they do not have the tests needed as cases rack up in California, New York and Washington state. Meanwhile some people have taken to Twitter and Reddit to say they were turned away from testing because they did not have a clear link to someone already infected.
Trump officials said Trump's claim that "anyone who wants a test can get a test" was accurate, but that people still need the approval of their doctors and state public health officials. But on Thursday, Vice President Mike Pence told reporters that that “we don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward.”
Asked in the White House briefing about the discrepancy between Trump and Pence’s language, Azar said, “It's just different ways of phrasing it.”
"He's using a shorthand," Azar said. "We're getting capacity out there."
Azar declined to estimate how many people would need tests going forward, saying only that if “very aggressive containment” and community efforts worked out, the country could end up with surplus testing capacity.
Azar added that Washington, California and New York “have everything they've asked for in terms of diagnostics” from the federal government.
Meanwhile Pence, speaking in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, after a meeting with cruise executives on Saturday, told reporters that, “Doctors can prescribe tests to anyone in America regardless of their symptoms.”
And let's all remember, if a Democrat did this, the media would literally set itself on fire shouting this from the rooftops. But Trump? Nah it's all normal
President Trump speaks during a visit to the CDC March 6. | AFP via Getty Images
Trump spent a visit to the CDC misrepresenting the state of coronavirus testing, praising himself, and attacking his critics.
President Donald Trump visited the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Friday amid his administration's push to control the spread of Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus first observed in China. But in a press conference during that visit, Trump did little to help Americans understand the government’s response to the virus, instead spreading misinformation while using the public health crisis for self-aggrandizement.
The president spent much of the press conference working to convince the public his administration has the coronavirus under control, something that does not appear to be the case.
For instance, while it is unclear how many people have been infected by the virus due to a delay in testing, it has become increasingly clear in recent days that there are Americans infected with the virus across the country. The number of confirmed Covid-19 cases in the United States has more than doubled in the past week, and as CNN’s Ryan Struyk reported, at least seven states — Minnesota, Oklahoma, Connecticut, Kentucky, Nebraska, Hawaii, and Utah — reported their first Covid-19 cases following Trump’s CDC visit.
Yet during the press conference, Trump dismissed any criticism against the government’s handling of the virus, stressing in particular the availability of Covid-19 tests.
“As of right now and yesterday, anybody that needs a test [can have one], that’s the important thing, and the tests are all perfect, like the letter was perfect, the transcription was perfect,” Trump said, seemingly referring to the White House transcript of his call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in which he requests an investigation into his political rivals.
"The [coronavirus] tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect. This was not a perfect as that, but pretty good." -- is Trump referring to the transcript of his phone call with the Ukrainian president here? pic.twitter.com/FU5XxPTu7Z
That call was, of course, not perfect, and helped lead to the president’s impeachment — and the tests have not been perfect either.
There have been three main problems with the US government’s coronavirus tests: the first batch, distributed in February, is believed to have had a faulty reagent leading to inconclusive results; once that issue was corrected, there was not enough CDC capacity to test the kits that had been sent out (leading the center to open up testing to state-level facilities), and there aren’t currently enough tests to go around.
Several states have been pushing the CDC for more Covid-19 test kits, and have criticized the government for its slow response in making more tests available. New York, where there are more than 70 confirmed cases, cannot meet the demand for testing because it doesn’t have enough tests, according to Raul Perea-Henze, the New York City deputy mayor for health and human services.
“With multiple positive cases, NYC needs maximum testing capacity to enable successful implementation of the public health strategies that best protect New Yorkers,” Perea-Henze wrote in a letter Friday, requesting more testing kits. “The slow federal action on this matter has impeded our ability to beat back this epidemic.”
California simultaneously does not have enough kits to test all those at risk of having been infected, and does not have the lab capacity to process all of the tests it has already run. Lab technicians have been working 18-hour shifts in order to try to work through a testing backlog, but have been unable to do so. In Los Angeles County, commercial laboratories will begin processing tests on Monday, which is expected to help alleviate this issue.
But not all states have the resources California and New York do — while they were able to send tests to state-run labs after the CDC began allowing them to do so, some states, including Maine, Ohio, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Wyoming, do not currently have the capacity for in-state testing.
The government has tried to respond to mounting criticism about the shortage of testing kits. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence promised to increase supply, saying 1.5 million tests would be made available. So far, however, the actual number of tests being administered fails to live up to that promise — as of Friday, US Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said the CDC had distributed enough tests for 75,000 people, and partnered with a private firm to distribute material for 700,000 additional tests.
Trump’s CDC presser confirms everything people were worried about if Covid-19 hit the US
Even before the recent uptick in US-based Covid-19 cases, critics of the Trump administration’s coronavirus response argued the administration was disorganized and ill-equipped to combat Covid-19. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias has written, the president was slow to put someone in charge of the coronavirus response efforts — and when he finally did, he selected Vice President Mike Pence, someone who failed in his responses to public health crises while serving as governor of Indiana, according to experts. And there were also concerns Trump’s efforts to cut CDC funding — and the size of the administration’s initial coronavirus budget — might have limited the government’s ability to fight the virus effectively.
But experts have argued the biggest issue with the administration’s coronavirus response so far is, as former director of the USAID’s Office of US Foreign Disaster Assistance Jeremy Konyndyk told Vox’s Alex Ward, Trump has “made it primarily about himself.”
And this concern was on display at the CDC press conference when Trump took time to talk at length about his own intelligence, in part by referencing a “great, super genius” uncle who taught at MIT.
“I like this stuff. I really get it,” Trump said. “People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors say, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”
Here's Trump rambling at length about how smart he is and how well he understands public health pic.twitter.com/1Co6MaRkzl
Trump’s public response, however, is a reminder of how he has recently put his public health knowledge into question. During a White House meeting on Monday with pharmaceutical executives and public health officials, Trump displayed his ignorance by pushing for a vaccine to be developed in a few months (something he has promised the public will happen) — even though that’s just not how it works.
And he went on to express confusion as to why pharmaceutical companies can’t release the drugs they are currently working on immediately, as Vox’s Aaron Rupar reported:
Trump pressed the pharmaceutical leaders on why they can’t just release the coronavirus drugs their companies are working on tomorrow — in the process revealing that he doesn’t understand the concept of clinical trials.
“So you have a medicine that’s already involved with the coronaviruses, and now you have to see if it’s specifically for this. You can know that tomorrow, can’t you?” he said.
“Now the critical thing is to do clinical trials,” explained Daniel O’Day, CEO of Gilead Sciences, which has two phase-three clinical trials going for remdesivir, a potential treatment for the coronavirus. “We have two clinical trials going on in China that were started several weeks ago ... we expect to get that information in April.”
Hours after learning about how vaccines work and the timeline for a potential coronavirus vaccine, Trump told supporters at a rally: “We had a great meeting today with a lot of the great companies, and they’re going to have vaccines I think relatively soon. And they’re going to have something that makes you better, and that’s going to actually take place we think even sooner.”
It isn’t clear why Trump said this, particularly after seemingly having been disabused of his misconceptions in his White House meeting, but such a statement does not support his claim at the CDC that “I understand that whole [scientific] world.”
Nor did the president’s CDC visit allay concerns about a lack of coordination between officials. If anything, it added confusion to an already tumultuous — and potentially dangerous — situation.
For example, the Trump administration has been offering a variety of answers to the question of whether the country is experiencing a shortage of test kits (it is). On Thursday, Pence said, “We don’t have enough tests today to meet what we anticipate will be the demand going forward,” according to The Hill.
Trump, however, had a completely different message as he boasted of the US’s testing capabilities in Atlanta on Friday, saying, “Anybody who needs a test gets a test. ... They have the tests and the tests are beautiful.”
This left Pence with the difficult task Friday of attempting to bring his factually correct messaging in line with the president’s incorrect statements.
“I think for any American that’s symptomatic, speaking to your doctor, if you have reason to believe that you have been exposed to the coronavirus, I have every confidence that your physician would contact state health officials and have access to the state lab,” Pence said at a White House briefing. And this, unlike Trump’s statement, is closer to the truth — the CDC revised its testing guidelines on Wednesday, allowing primary physicians to conduct testing in concert with local authorities. Whether local labs have the ability to process those tests, or if those tests are even available, however, remains a matter of concern.
Although we’ve grown used to the Trump administration’s frequent inconsistency in messaging, it becomes dangerous in times like this, when transparent communication is key in helping contain a disease and keep trust in the government strong. And Trump’s tendency to self-aggrandize is not helpful in a moment that calls for collaboration and creating an apolitical environment.
Trump continues to politicize the Covid-19 outbreak
In fact, perhaps the most concerning aspect of the CDC conference was how it gave us a glimpse into Trump’s view of the coronavirus as a political rather than health-based issue.
During his remarks, Trump said he would rather have the passengers of the Grand Princess, a cruise ship docked in San Francisco with 21 confirmed cases onboard, stay on the ship than move to land — all because doing so would raise the number of total Covid-19 cases in the US.
“I would rather because I like the numbers being where they are,” Trump said. “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault. And it wasn’t the fault of the people on the ship either, okay? It wasn’t their fault either and they’re mostly Americans. So, I can live either way with it. I’d rather have them stay on, personally.”
"I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship" -- Trump explains that he doesn't want to let people off the Grand Princess cruise ship because he doesn't want the number of coronavirus cases in the country to go up pic.twitter.com/ELhZDjiZW9
Trump’s comment suggests a grim reality: that keeping the number of Covid-19 cases low is more important to him than the actual people who have the disease — all because he wants to avoid the political fallout of a growing case count.
And that wasn’t the only political moment during the conference — he also took time out to praise Fox News for its ratings, attack CNN as “fake news,” and smear Washington’s Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee — who was praised by Pence for his work in fighting the spread of Covid-19 — as a “snake” who wants to “take advantage” of the administration’s kindness.
Trump smears Jay Inslee, governor of the state at the heart of the coronavirus outbreak: "I told Mike [Pence] not to be complimentary of the governor, because that governor is a snake." pic.twitter.com/zfraPiqmGI
These sort of attacks undercut the seriousness of the situation — and they also draw attention toward Trump and away from the coronavirus itself. And they come at a time when the virus needs more attention than ever.
Glad to see courts realizing that no part of this administration can be trusted to operate in good faith. Actual oversight is required.
A federal judge in Washington has ordered the National Security Agency to turn over to her a memo that details an unusual conversation in which President Donald Trump pleaded with former NSA chief Adm. Mike Rogers to take action to rebut news reports about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said in a ruling Friday that she needs to read the memorandum — written by Rogers’ deputy, Rick Ledgett — in order to decide whether it can be entirely blocked from release in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
The Trump administration opposed the so-called in camera review by the judge and said it was unnecessary, but Kollar-Kotelly disagreed.
“In light of the ... arguments and legal principles, making a responsible de novo determination of NSA’s exemption claims requires in camera review,” Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, wrote.
The Justice Department has argued that the entire memo is classified and exempt from disclosure under a form of executive privilege, because the document describes a confidential conversation between the president and a top adviser.
The watchdog group pressing for the memo’s release, the Protect Democracy project, contends that the privilege was waived after special counsel Robert Mueller included a summary of the conversation in his report that was published last year.
Kollar-Kotelly said it is simply too hard for her to resolve those issues without seeing the memo herself.
“The Court must consider whether the relevant information in the Ledgett Memorandum has been officially acknowledged, which requires close comparison of the relevant information disclosed in the Mueller Report and the relevant information contained in the Ledgett Memorandum,” she wrote in her eight-page decision.
Kollar-Kotellly’s order was particularly notable because it came just one day after another judge on the same court ordered an in camera review of the Mueller report itself. That judge, Reggie Walton, said in a scathing opinion the review was needed because Attorney General Bill Barr had a pattern of misleading statements about the contents of the report.
Historically, in camera review by judges in Freedom of Information Act cases is unusual, although the preeminent transparency statute explicitly authorizes such assessments. The back-to-back rulings this week suggest that some judges are increasingly unwilling to take at face value representations from the Trump administration about the contents of documents being withheld in FOIA cases.
Kollar-Kotelly ordered NSA to give her access to the Ledgett memo by March 13. She invited the agency to advise her if any special procedures were necessary because of to the sensitive nature of the document.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and the NSA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
Ben Berwick, counsel at Protect Democracy, said he’s “grateful the Court has now chosen to look at this memo for itself and determine whether the government is inappropriately asserting privileges in order to hide presidential wrongdoing.”
Because people that hate government shouldn't be running it
Nearly a week after the first U.S. coronavirus death was announced, the Trump administration scrambled Friday to meet its target for increasing the number of people able to be tested. But it still could take weeks for the actual tests to take place.
HHS Secretary Alex Azar told reporters that the government had shipped out materials for 700,000 coronavirus tests — well short of the 1.5 million that Vice President Mike Pence had said would be available to hospitals this week, in remarks on Wednesday. Late Friday, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir told POLITICO that more tests passed quality checks, bringing the total ready to 1.5 million.
Reaching the 1.5 million test target hinged on 2,500 coronavirus test kits produced by a CDC contractor, Integrated DNA Technologies.
"The last lots are here being validated by Dr. [Steve] Monroe's team as we speak," Azar said Friday during a visit to the CDC's Atlanta headquarters. He said that "up to 4 million tests" would be available by the end of next week.
The Trump administration is struggling to provide a clear picture of how many people are being tested for the coronavirus. Conflicting, and sometimes misleading, statements by top officials have fueled confusion over how many samples labs are processing, and how quickly that number could grow.
"We've already tested over 3,600 people for the virus," Azar said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation." “We now have the capability out in the field to test 75,000 people.”
Two days later, CDC Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat told the Senate health committee that her agency had tested more than 3,000 specimens taken from roughly 500 people — a fraction of what Azar claimed. That same day, an FDA spokesperson told POLITICO that state and local public health labs had enough supplies on hand to test 15,000 people, but said that capacity would grow to 75,000 people by the end of the week.
Sen. Patty Murray, the Senate health committee’s ranking member, slammed the mixed messaging, saying it hinders businesses', schools' and families’ ability to make informed decisions. The Washington Democrat’s home state has been hit hard by the coronavirus, with at least 75 confirmed cases and 12 deaths so far.
“It is deeply concerning and utterly unacceptable that top-ranking Administration officials charged with responding to this crisis are confusing people and contradicting health experts rather than giving them the facts,” Murray told POLITICO.
When asked about the discrepancy between Azar comment's on "Face the Nation" and Schuchat’s testimony, an HHS spokesperson told POLITICO that Azar correctly said 3,600 tests, instead of 3,600 people, at a House Ways and Means hearing last week.
At least 23 states have now confirmed cases of the coronavirus, including clusters of community-acquired infections in Washington state and New York.
The administration has faced increasing criticism over the slow roll out of testing, driven by problems with a diagnostic test the CDC developed for use in public health labs across the country.
Seventy-two public health labs in 45 states and Washington DC had verified CDC’s diagnostic test for the coronavirus as of Friday, according to the Association of Public Health Laboratories. But the group cautioned that each lab can only test 100 samples per day, and at least two samples from each patient must be tested to arrive at a diagnosis.
“We’re rapidly expanding our testing capacity, so these numbers will change,” an HHS spokesperson told POLITICO. “Moving forward, we expect exponentially more tests to be distributed as additional manufacturers ramp up production.”
Commercial lab companies, such as Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp, are beginning to run their own in-house coronavirus tests with permission from the FDA, but an industry source told POLITICO that private labs will be limited to a few thousand tests per day at first.
“For really high volume you need to get the platforms from the manufacturers,” the source said. “If you’re going to have something that really ramps up the throughput, you’re going to need the Abbotts, the Thermo Fishers. It will take some time.”
Barr was able to override the decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals because immigration courts fall under the DOJ. Administrations have done so to varying degrees: The Obama administration did it four times in eight years, The Washington Post reports, while the Bush administration did it 16 times. But, the Post writes, “Immigration lawyers and judges say the Trump administration is using the power with greater frequency ... to the point of abuse,” and specifically “as a check on immigration judges whose decisions don’t align with the administration’s immigration agenda, experts say.”
The administration’s agenda, of course, has been to rid immigration courts of any fairness and due process for immigrants and asylum-seekers, to the point where immigration judges and asylum officers have quit, some after years of service. “As more policies were issued,” Judge Ilyce Shugall wrote in the Los Angeles Times after resigning last year, “it became clear that this administration’s attack on immigrants and the independence and functioning of the immigration courts would only get worse.”
Doug Stephens, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer who resigned rather than help implement the inhumane Remain in Mexico policy, said last year that it was “clearly designed to make individuals fail and send everyone back without really giving them a fair shot.” He recalled one interview in which “it seemed clear that someone had a claim to being able to stay in the United States by showing that they would be harmed in Mexico based on their nationality or their status as a member in a particular social group.” But he said that when he checked with a superior “to see if we could use that to let them stay in the United States, and I was told, flat-out, ‘no.’”
Meanwhile, the new immigration judges being brought into the fold aren’t there to fairly oversee what are in many cases life-or-death situations for asylum-seekers and others, but instead to impose the impeached president’s radical anti-immigrant views, Senate Democrats criticized earlier this year. “Under the Trump administration, once hired, immigration judges receive limited training, and the training they do receive reportedly emphasizes that immigration courts are part of the Trump administration’s enforcement efforts, rather than an independent body,” they said.
There have been urgent calls for independent immigration courts, but that won’t be happening as long as this president—and attorney general—can help it. “Other critics said Barr’s move should concern everyone—not just those in immigration,” The Washington Post wrote, because changes being made in immigration courts “could produce ripple effects in the wider justice system.” Dana Leigh Marks, president emeritus of the National Association of Immigration Judges, said, “What’s happening now is that all the norms are breaking. All the wheels are coming off the car.”
We mark to market our 1Q GDP forecast up to 1.5% from 1.0%, while taking down 2Q GDP by 0.6pp to 1.0% and 3Q GDP 0.2pp to 1.4%, reflecting wider disruption from the COVID-19 spread. [Mar 6 estimate] emphasis added
From Goldman Sachs:
Based on the downward revision to January wholesale inventories and the declines in US and global trade volumes, we lowered our Q1 GDP growth forecast by two-tenths to +0.7% (qoq ar). [Mar 6 estimate]
The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the first quarter of 2020 is 3.1 percent on March 6, up from 2.7 percent on March 2. [Mar 6 estimate]
CR Note: These early estimates suggest real GDP growth will be between 0.7% and 3.1% annualized in Q1.
A “black-pilled” neo-Nazi with a history of invading events organized by Jews and Muslims became the latest far-right activist to invade a Democratic campaign event—this time, a Bernie Sanders event in Phoenix, Arizona, where he unfurled a red Nazi banner with a swastika, shouted, “Dirty Jew!” at Sanders, and then verbally assaulted a black man with a similar epithet as he departed the stadium.
The stunt briefly disrupted the rally—Sanders remarked, “Whoever it was, I think they’re a little outnumbered tonight”—before the man was ejected, spewing racist epithets.
He was later identified by antifascist activists at Panic! In the Discord as Robert Sterkeson, a Mesa man who runs a website called BombIslam.com. Sterkeson claimed credit on Facebook, and vowed to post a video of the stunt on his YouTube and BitChute video channels, which are full of neo-Nazi rants aimed at Jews and Muslims.
As he left Veterans Memorial Stadium in Phoenix, he got into a verbal exchange with a black man at whom he directed a stream of racist epithets. Earlier, a Donald Trump fan had been ejected for attempting to bring in a large Trump banner.
Sterkeson has a long history of such stunts. In 2018, on the same day that an anti-Semite murdered 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue, Sterkeson walked into a Jewish National Fund conference in Phoenix and unfurled a Nazi banner. He also has participated in anti-Muslim rallies outside Phoenix-area mosques, including one featuring notorious Islamophobe Jon Ritzheimer, a participant in the 2016 armed standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon.
Sterkeson has described himself in social media posts as being “blackpilled,” a term to describe people who have gone from being merely “redpilled”—radicalized into believing far-right conspiracy theories—to becoming deeply nihilistic “accelerationists” whose main purpose is to help modern society destroy itself. In an earlier video posted on YouTube, he also warned that he intended to bring his “stunt activism” to events featuring Democratic candidates.
This is only the latest such incident. Men from the street-brawling hate group Proud Boys have begun appearing at Democratic campaign rallies to harass people—notably at events for Bernie Sanders in particular, at which the extremists have harassed Sanders and his supporters as “socialists” and “communists.” At one event in Denver, the Proud Boys entered the rally making the white nationalist “OK” hand signal. At a Sanders event in Tacoma, Washington, Proud Boys managed to sneak into a secure media area and wave Trump flags while wearing red MAGA hats.
Proud Boys have also been making their presence felt at Trump campaign rallies, including a recent event in Colorado. “We are aligned with Trump in that we believe in America First,” said one Proud Boy. “There’s an America First agenda. And ‘America’ means everybody that’s here in America. We’re sick of people dividing each other across lines of race and ethnicity.”
An anonymous reader shares a report: For those who don't want to dive fully into torrents, Plex is a great alternative for streaming television shows and movies for free. Officially, Plex is a "neutral" media player, and it first became popular with people looking to stream content between devices at home, like from their desktop in the study to their laptop in their bedroom. But, with Plex Media Server, users can also share media with other users to stream, creating a virtual free-for-all, and a serious problem from a copyright perspective. CreativeFuture, a pro-copyright coalition boasting more than 560 members, has taken notice and is calling out the platform, along with rival service Kodi.
"Thanks to a rapidly growing media application called Plex, torrent-based piracy is back in vogue, and better than ever (for criminals who have no problem with profiting from content that doesn't belong to them, that is)," the coalition writes in a blog post. Those who pay $4.99 per month for Plex Pass are able to share their libraries with up to 100 users. As Creative Future points out, this isn't always done for the sake of altruism, or so family's can share their legally procured copies of Frozen. Some Plex users actually charge for access to their content -- a more nefarious (though, granted, enterprising) evolution from the totally free world of torrenting. For extra sass, the shared content can be pirated to begin with.
President Donald Trump speaks during a Fox News town hall on March 5, 2020, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Following his Fox News town hall, Stephanie Grisham and Kellyanne Conway denied that Trump said what he said.
During his Fox News town hall on Thursday night, President Donald Trump said he planned to propose cuts to government benefit programs like Medicare and Social Security in his second term. The White House spent the hours that followed trying to walk those comments back.
Trump’s remarks came in the context of a discussion about the national debt, which has ballooned to historic levels under his presidency despite his 2016 campaign promise to eliminate it entirely. After Trump claimed that cutting the debt would be a focus of his second term, host Martha MacCallum pointed out that “if you don’t cut something in entitlements, you’ll never really deal with the debt.”
But before “you’ll never really deal with the debt” even escaped MacCallum’s lips, Trump interjected to agree with the first part of her statement — that cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare will be necessary to get the debt under control.
“Oh, we’ll be cutting,” he said. “We’re also going to have growth like you’ve never seen before.”
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s comments generated a negative stir. While pushing for cuts to entitlement programs have been GOP orthodoxy for many years, the idea is deeply unpopular with the American public. Shortly after the town hall ended, White House officials (including Trump) got busy doing some damage control.
Press secretary Stephanie Grisham responded on Twitter to a story from the Daily Beast about how Democrats like Joe Biden were already messaging on Trump’s entitlement comments by calling the premise of the article “fake news.”
“Fake news — POTUS was taking about cutting deficits, NOT entitlements,” Grisham tweeted.
Fake news — POTUS was taking about cutting deficits, NOT entitlements. https://t.co/BNkdFoAh5O
“I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past 3 years. Sleepy Joe Biden will destroy both in very short order, and he won’t even know he’s doing it!” he tweeted.
I will protect your Social Security and Medicare, just as I have for the past 3 years. Sleepy Joe Biden will destroy both in very short order, and he won’t even know he’s doing it!
Around that same time, White House counselor Kellyanne Conway was on Fox News denying that Trump said what he said — even after hosts played her the video clip of his comments.
Here's Kellyanne Conway on Fox News insisting that Trump didn't actually say what he said last night about cutting entitlements (she does this even after Fox News plays the clip back!) pic.twitter.com/vwAFeFCwzR
Despite what White House officials would have you believe, the video of Trump’s “we’ll be cutting” comment makes clear he was talking about government benefit programs.
Trump started talking about his intention to make cuts before MacCallum even had a chance to say the word “debt.” And his use of the term “cutting” in the context of the national debt doesn’t make sense. Debt is something you reduce, not cut, and what Trump was trying to say is that budget cuts are one way he plans to address the national debt.
Regardless of how the White House spins in, the bottom line is that Trump wants to cut entitlements
The question about whether Trump intends to cut entitlements isn’t really up for debate — he’s already proposed cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security disability programs.
His most recent budget, which was released just last month, includes “steep reductions in social-safety-net programs,” the Wall Street Journal reported:
The White House proposes to cut spending by $4.4 trillion over a decade. Of that, it targets $2 trillion in savings from mandatory spending programs, including $130 billion from changes to Medicare prescription-drug pricing, $292 billion from safety-net cuts—such as work requirements for Medicaid and food stamps—and $70 billion from tightening eligibility access to disability benefits.
These cuts might be popular among Tea Partiers, but they’re not popular with the general public. So for years now, Trump has played both sides by proposing cuts that don’t end up getting enacted because of Democratic opposition in Congress while continuing to insist that he’s not really proposing cuts.
For instance, during an interview that was conducted in Davos, Switzerland, in January, Trump told CNBC that entitlement cuts would be on the table “at some point.”
CNBC: Will entitlements ever be on your plate [for cutting]?
TRUMP: "At some point they will be"
CNBC: But you said you wouldn't do that in the past
The backdrop of all this is that back in 2015 and ‘16, Trump differentiated himself from the rest of the Republican presidential hopefuls by campaigning on a vow to not cut government benefit programs.
“I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump told the Daily Signal, a conservative publication affiliated with the Heritage Foundation, in 2015.
Regardless of whether he’s lying, ignorant about his own budget proposals, or maybe even confused about what an “entitlement” is, the reality is that Trump wants to cut the social safety net — even if White House officials are unwilling to be honest about it.
I've been slow in posting about these, because I've been occupied with several briefs I've had to finish and file (I hope to blog about them soon), and because I'm still try to run down a few issues related to these libel lawsuits. But Jacob Gershman (Wall St. J.) has a very good story about them; here is the part that conveys my thoughts:
[R]ecent past presidents looked at libel lawsuits as a political loser or beneath their dignity, says Prof. Eugene Volokh …. He said Mr. Trump [departing from this tradition] may have spotted a chance to expose media bias and burnish his image as a politician who fights back.
But his lawsuits aren't without risk, said Mr. Volokh. Mr. Trump and past presidents have avoided testifying as defendants in civil lawsuits by arguing that the proceedings would interfere with their public duties. It would be harder for Mr. Trump to dodge deposition when his campaign is the one doing the suing, said Mr. Volokh….
Should the lawsuits survive motions to dismiss, the Times and the Post would likely get an opportunity to examine and cross-examine Mr. Trump under oath about the articles in question and their assertions about his dealings with Russia …. "It's hard to see how you could resist testifying about that," said Mr. Volokh.
Note that the lawsuits are nominally brought on behalf of the Trump campaign rather than Trump himself, but I doubt that this would keep Trump from being deposed as to the factual allegations on which he may have personal knowledge.
Please let this be the last time we fuck around with the time jump
Baseball is a fun springtime activity. | Adam Glanzman/MLB Photos via Getty Images
We push our clocks forward at 2 am Sunday. Here’s why.
On Sunday, March 8, at 2 am, daylight saving time begins. We’ll set our clocks forward one hour, and the change will push sunsets later into the evening hours and sunrises later into the morning hours. The cost is that “springing forward” will temporarily disrupt the sleep of millions of Americans. Yet as simple as it seems, there is still a lot of confusion.
The first thing to know: Yes, it begins in the spring, just as the increase in daylight hours starts to become noticeable. And it will end onNovember 1, right before the darkest time of the year. Let’s sort it all out.
1) Why do we need to “save” daylight hours in the summer?
Daylight saving time in the US started as an energy conservation trick during World War I and became a national standard in the 1960s.
The idea is that in the summer months, we shift the number of daylight hours we get into the evening. So if the sun sets at 8 pm instead of 7 pm, we’d presumably spend less time with the lights on in our homes at night, saving electricity.
It also means that you’re less likely to sleep through daylight hours in the morning (since those are shifted an hour later too). Hence “saving” daylight hours for the most productive time of the day.
Overall: We agree, the name is kind of confusing.
2) Isn’t it “daylight savings time” not “daylight saving time”?
No, it’s definitely called “daylight saving time.” Not plural. Be sure to point out this common mistake to friends and acquaintances. You’ll be really popular.
Despite the fact that daylight saving time was introduced to save fuel, there isn’t strong evidence that the current system actually reduces energy use — or that making it year-round would do so, either. Studies that evaluate the energy impact of DST are mixed. It seems to reduce lighting use (and thus electricity consumption) slightly but may increase heating and AC use, as well as gas consumption. It’s probably fair to say that energy-wise, it’s a wash.
4) Why doesn’t Arizona or Hawaii change its clocks?
Arizona has a simple way to deal with daylight saving time: Most of the state ignores it.
Fifty years ago, the state legislature opted to keep the clocks in most of the state in standard time all year. One reason: Arizona summers are very hot, and an earlier sunset gives residents more time to enjoy tolerable temperatures before bed, as AZcentral explains. (What’s confusing: The Navajo Nation in Arizona does use DST.)
Hawaii also doesn’t observe DST. The island state is the farthest south of all states and rejected it because it doesn’t see a hugely noticeable daylight hour difference between winter and summer months.
5) Didn’t a bunch of states pass laws making daylight saving time permanent? What happened with those?
If you’re a bit confused about which states follow daylight saving time and which do not, I don’t blame you. That’s because lately, a few states have looked into joining Arizona and Hawaii, but with a twist: They want daylight saving time to be in place all year long.
In the November 2018 election, Californians voted in favor of a ballot measure that paves the way for this. The measure, which passed with 60 percent of the vote, simply grants the California Legislature the power to vote to change the clocks permanently. Any changes would need to start with a two-thirds majority vote in the state legislature — which hasn’t happened yet.
And even then, the time change wouldn’t be a given. The federal government would have to approve it; that has uncertain prospects too.
In 2018, the Florida government approved the delightfully named Sunshine Protection Act, which seeks to permanently leave Florida in daylight saving time. (Essentially, it would mean that Florida will be one hour ahead of the rest of the East Coast during the winter months.) Massachusetts has looked into a similar measure, too.
The bill is still waiting on approval from Congress before it can go into effect. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has put forth a few bills to push the approval forward, but they haven’t moved at all. Arkansas, too, passed a bill to make daylight saving time permanent, but it included the condition that the changes wouldn’t go into effect until its bordering states changed their clocks permanently too. Other states that have approved legislation to enact year-long daylight saving time include Washington, Tennessee, Oregon, Nevada, and Alabama. Some Maryland legislators are interested, too. But none of the changes can go into effect without approval from the federal government.
So for now, all these states will be changing their clocks on Sunday along with the rest of us. Sorry!
(It appears other countries are also interested in getting rid of DST, or keeping it in place forever: Some members of the European Parliament — the governing body of the European Union — want to abolish clock changes there too.)
6) What would happen if daylight saving time were abolished? Or if it were extended forever?
It’s worth thinking about what would happen if Congress abolished daylight saving time (or kept it going all year long).
How might our patterns change? Blogger and cartographer Andy Woodruff decided to visualize thiswith a great series of maps.
The goal of these maps is to show how abolishing daylight saving time, extending it all year, or going with the status quo changes the number of days we have “reasonable” sunrise and sunset times.
Reasonable, as defined by Woodruff, is the sun rising at 7 am or earlier or setting after 5 pm (so one could, conceivably, spend some time in the sun before or after work).
This is what the map looks like under the status quo of twice-yearly clock shifts. A lot of people have unreasonable sunrise times (the dark spots) for much of the year:
Here’s how things would change if daylight saving were abolished (that is, if we just stuck to the time set in the winter all year). It’s better, particularly on the sunrise end:
And here’s what would happen if daylight saving were always in effect. The sunrise situation would actually be worse for most people. But many more people would enjoy after-work light — and there’s a strong argument to make that this after-work light is actually worth more. (More on that below.)
(Note: The length of light we experience each day wouldn’t actually change; that’s determined by the tilt of Earth’s axis. But we would experience it in times more accommodating for our modern world. Be sure to check out the interactive version of these maps on Woodruff’s website.)
In 2015, Stromberg made the compelling case that the daylight saving time shift into the evening should be extended year-round. Having more light later could benefit us in a surprising number of ways:
People engage in more leisure activities after work than beforehand, so we’d likely do more physical activity over sedentary leisure activities. Relatedly, studies show that kids get more exercise when the sun is out later in the evening.
Stromberg also cites some evidence that robberies decrease when there’s more sun in the evening hours.
There could be economic gains, since people “take short trips, and buy things after work — but not before — so a longer DST slightly increases sales,” he writes.
7) Is daylight saving time dangerous?
A bit. When we shift clocks forward one hour in the spring, many of us will lose that hour of sleep. In the days after daylight saving time starts, our biological clocks are a little bit off. It’s like the whole country has been given one hour of jet lag.
One hour of lost sleep sounds like a small change, but we humans are fragile, sensitive animals. Small disruptions in our sleep have been shown to alter basic indicators of our health and dull our mental edge.
And when our biological clocks are off, everything about us is out of sync. Our bodies run this tight schedule to try to keep up with our actions. Since we usually eat a meal after waking up, we produce the most insulin in the morning. We’re primed to metabolize breakfast before even taking a bite. It’s more efficient that way.
(There’s some good research that finds taking over-the-counter melatonin helps reset our body clocks to a new time. Read more about that here.)
Being an hour off schedule means our bodies are not prepared for our actions at any time of the day.
One example: driving.
In 1999, researchers at Johns Hopkins and Stanford universities wanted to find out what happens on the road when millions of drivers have their sleep disrupted.
Analyzing 21 years of fatal car crash data from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, they found a very small, but significant, increase in road deaths on the Monday after the clock shift in the spring: The number of deadly accidents jumped to an average of 83.5 on the “spring forward” Monday compared with an average of 78.2 on a typical Monday.
And it seems it’s not just car accidents. Evidence has also mounted of an increase in incidences of workplace injuries and heart attacks in the days after we spring forward.
8) How can we abolish daylight saving time, or extend it year-round?
It's quite a decision, and coming from a GWB appointee
A federal judge excoriated Attorney General Bill Barr on Thursday for distorting the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Ina stinging 23-page opinion, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie Walton said Barr’s efforts to spin the report before its public release last year raised serious doubts about whether the Justice Department faithfully applied the law when deleting certain information from the publicly disclosed version.
“The Court cannot reconcile certain public representations made by Attorney General Barr with the findings in the Mueller Report,” wrote Walton, an appointee of President George W. Bush.
“The inconsistencies between Attorney General Barr’s statements, made at a time when the public did not have access to the redacted version of the Mueller Report to assess the veracity of his statements, and portions of the redacted version of the Mueller Report that conflict with those statements cause the Court to seriously question whether Attorney General Barr made a calculated attempt to influence public discourse about the Mueller Report in favor of President Trump despite certain findings in the redacted version of the Mueller Report to the contrary,” the judge added.
Spokespeople for Barr did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge’s decision.
Democrats have complained for nearly a year that Barr’s description of the report was skewed and that it altered the public narrative about Mueller’s conclusions. Shortly after Barr issued a letter describing Mueller’s findings, the special counsel wrote to Barr to complain about the framing and to ask that the report’s executive summary be released immediately.
However, Barr declined to allow what he called a piecemeal release of the report, which did not occur until almost a month after it was submitted.
Now, Democrats have a Republican-appointed judge endorsing Mueller’s view that Barr’s characterization led to confusion.
“The Court has grave concerns about the objectivity of the process that preceded the public release of the redacted version of the Mueller Report,” the judge wrote. “A review of the redacted version of the Mueller Report by the Court results in the Court’s concurrence with Special Counsel Mueller’s assessment that Attorney General Barr distorted the findings in the Mueller Report.”
Walton issued his decision in connection with two Freedom of Information Act lawsuits seeking the report and related records. One was brought by BuzzFeed and its reporter Jason Leopold. The other was filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center.
Justice Department lawyers asked that the judge bless the deletions from the report based on a declaration submitted by a department official. But Walton declined to do so and demanded that the department provide him an unredacted copy of the report by March 30, so he could see exactly what was deleted.
“These circumstances generally, and Attorney General Barr’s lack of candor specifically, call into question Attorney General Barr’s credibility and in turn, the Department’s representation that ‘all of the information redacted from the version of the [Mueller] Report released by [ ] Attorney General [Barr]’ is protected from disclosure by its claimed FOIA exemptions,” Walton wrote.
Walton’s claim that Barr displayed a “lack of candor” is likely to reverberate loudly within the Justice Department. That phrase has unusual weight in federal law enforcement, where such an accusation can and does result in dismissal. “Lack of candor” is specifically what former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe was accused of before being fired by Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, in 2018.
The tongue-lashing Walton unleashed on Thursday was hardly the first time the judge has leveled criticism at Barr or the Justice Department. Even before the report was released last April, the judge saidBarr’s description of it was sowing distrust in government among many Americans.
“The attorney general has created an environment that has caused a significant part of the public … to be concerned about whether or not there is full transparency,” the judge said at the time.
Walton also repeatedlyteed off on the department for being slow to decide whether to drop its effort to pursue criminal charges against McCabe over statements he made to investigators.
Prosecutors finallynotified McCabe’s lawyers last month that no charges were being brought. The formal word came on the same day as a deadline that Walton had set for the release of previously secret court records about the issue.
Transcripts made public that day showed that at an earlier, closed-door hearing the judge used extraordinarly sharp language as he slammed the Justice Department’s handling of the investigation of McCabe, who has been a frequent target of attacks from Trump.
“The public is listening to what’s going on, and I don’t think people like the fact that you got somebody at the top basically trying to dictate whether somebody should be prosecuted,” Walton said. “I just think it’s a banana republic when we go down that road.”
The president of Bellevue College resigned on Monday, along with one of the school’s vice presidents, in the aftermath of an incident involving artistic censorship of a particular kind: the vice president had whited out a passage about a local businessman’s anti-Japanese activity in her posted description for a mural she created on the campus about the city’s early Japanese-American community.
Students and Nikkei community leaders held an observance ceremony Tuesday on campus after the college’s trustees voted Monday to “separate” from President Jerry Weber and Gayle Colston Barge, the school’s vice president of institutional advancement. It was Barge who apparently directed an underling to white-out a portion of artist Erin Shigaki’s description accompanying her mural, “Never Again Is Now,” outside its student activities center.
Erin Shigaki’s mural at Bellevue College, ‘Never Again Is Now.’
The sentence Barge ordered removed touched off a furor in Bellevue because it touched on the problematic history of the city’s founders, particularly a man named Miller Freeman (1875-1955), who was largely responsible for shaping the city into the modern, bustling suburb of Seattle it is today. It read:
“After decades of anti-Japanese agitation, led by Eastside businessman Miller Freeman and others, the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans included the 60 families (300 individuals) who farmed Bellevue.”
After the white-out attempt, Barge apparently had an underling place a “corrected” version of the description with the sentence simply removed atop the white-out version.
Barge, an African American woman, later apologized, calling the decision to remove the sentence “a stupid, impulsive act.” She reportedly told staff at the time she did it “to protect any member of the Freeman family.”
Artist Erin Shigaki reads the roll of Japanese American internment camps.
In fact, Freeman not only was one of the most powerful men in Washington state, he was also one of its most outspoken and unrepentant white supremacists. He particularly had a lifelong hatred of Japanese, and near the end of his life had played an instrumental role not only in ensuring their wartime incarceration in concentration camps, but had even harassed neighboring Japanese in Bellevue about their “loyalty” during the weeks preceding the internment.
At Tuesday’s ceremony, Shigaki led a commemoration for the original reason for her mural, erected in early February near the anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066 by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, which cleared the way for the U.S. military to order the removal and detention of 110,000 Japanese Americans along the entire Pacific Coast in concentration camps.
Ceremony participants line up with plaques featuring the names of Japanese American internment camps.
The ceremony included a roll-call reading of the names of the “relocation centers”—the War Relocation Authority’s euphemism for the concentration camps it hastily erected in the spring and summer of 1942 in a variety of remote locations, mostly around the interior West: Manzanar—by Shigaki: “Manzanar. Tule Lake. Poston. Gila River. Granada. Heart Mountain. Minidoka. Topaz. Rohwer. Jerome.”
As she spoke each name, a person holding an engraved plaque with the camp name on it stepped forward and joined a line assembled in front of the mural, which shows two children about to be sent off to the camps.
On Wednesday, Weber—who had sent out a letter of apology to students and staff on Feb. 24—announced he was resigning. He will be replaced on an interim basis by Provost Kristen Jones. Jones spoke briefly with Daily Kos on Tuesday, saying she hoped the school could “heal” from the incident.
Jordana Maciel, head of the Asian Pacific Islander Student Association—which helped organize Tuesday’s ceremony, and had spearheaded student petitions to protest the mural defacement, told Daily Kos that “this was never our intention.” She said the controversy had nonetheless sparked a “healthy discussion” on campus.
The board of trustees made it clear that the school’s initial steps to deal with the issue were inadequate. “We need to do something to make this better, so an apology, as heartfelt as it has been, is not really enough,” Chairman Rich Fukutaki told the Seattle Times. “With that in mind, the board has determined a change in leadership is necessary.”
The world would be a better place with 4 fewer republicans in the senate
It's not looking good this fall for four Republican senators, namely Susan Collins of Maine, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Martha McSally of Arizona, and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Despite the advantages of incumbency, all four are trailing their prospective Democratic challengers by four points or more, according to the latest round of PPP polling.
Here's the breakdown:
Collins 43, Sara Gideon 47
Gardner 38, John Hickenlooper 51
McSally 42, Mark Kelly 47
Tillis 41, Cal Cunningham 46
PPP calls the Maine polling "most interesting" due to a stunning turnaround from last spring when Collins was leading Gideon by 18 points, 51-33. Perhaps Collins is concerned. She should be. The dual Kavanaugh/Trump acquittal votes aren't turning out so hot with Democrats. "Last April Collins had a 32% approval rating with Hillary Clinton voters," PPP writes, "now she has just a 9% approval rating with Clinton voters." Collins' overall approval rating now is also 24 points underwater, 33%-57%. Sorry, not sorry.
Kelly's lead over McSally, however, hasn't changed much from last spring when he had a 4-point advantage of 46-42. McSally never won that seat to begin with: She was appointed to fill it after Sen. John McCain passed. Perhaps Arizona voters are suffering from buyer’s remorse on a purchase they didn’t even make.
PPP writes that the North Carolina data comes from a survey the outfit did for a private client last week, so no further information beyond the top lines were available. The Colorado data comes from a poll PPP conducted last year in the race between Gardner and Hickenlooper.
Enlarge / An 8th-generation Intel Core Processor. (credit: Intel)
Virtually all Intel chips released in the past five years contain an unfixable flaw that may allow sophisticated attackers to defeat a host of security measures built into the silicon. While Intel has issued patches to lessen the damage of exploits and make them harder, security firm Positive Technologies said the mitigations may not be enough to fully protect systems.
The flaw resides in the Converged Security and Management Engine, a subsystem inside Intel CPUs and chipsets that’s roughly analogous to AMD’s Platform Security Processor. Often abbreviated as CSME, this feature implements the firmware-based Trusted Platform Module used for silicon-based encryption, authentication of UEFI BIOS firmware, Microsoft System Guard and BitLocker, and other security features. The bug stems from the failure of the input-output memory management unit—which provides protection preventing the malicious modification of static random-access memory—to implement early enough in the firmware boot process. That failure creates a window of opportunity for other chip components, such as the Integrated Sensor Hub, to execute malicious code that runs very early in the boot process with the highest of system privileges.
Jeopardizing Intel’s root of trust
Because the flaw resides in the CSME mask ROM, a piece of silicon that boots the very first piece of CSME firmware, the vulnerability can’t be patched with a firmware update.
Attorney General William Barr has named Will Levi as his new chief of staff, according to two Justice Department officials familiar with the matter.
Levi has spent the past two years as one of Barr’s seven counselors, helping the attorney general navigate several hot-button issues at the center of President Donald Trump’s campaign against the “deep state.” He assisted Barr on efforts to revise the government’s domestic spying powers and has worked on national security and criminal and civil matters at DOJ.
Levi’s appointment comes at a critical moment for the Justice Department, which is facing questions about its independence from the White House under Barr. Most recently, Barr announced he was lowering a prison sentence recommendation for one of Trump’s former aides, Roger Stone, just after Trump complained about the recommendation. The move raised questions about whether Barr was following the president’s orders, a charge the attorney general denied.
As chief of staff, Levi will work closely with Barr and other senior DOJ officials to manage the department’s day-to-day affairs. He will also regularly interact with the White House counsel’s office. Levi, who started his new role on Monday, replaces Brian Rabbitt, who is taking a senior role in the DOJ's criminal division. The move had been in the works for some time, as Rabbitt had wanted to move back into issues he had worked on previously in the government and private sector.
Levi got close to Barr working as one of several counselors the attorney general employs. Typically, each counselor focuses on discrete components of DOJ, but Levi in recent months worked on several major issues as they became priorities for the attorney general, according to one of the officials familiar with Levi's work.
Levi is a third-generation DOJ official. His father, David Levi, who was a U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of California under President Ronald Reagan, briefly worked with Barr during Barr's first stint as a senior DOJ official. And Levi’s grandfather, Edward Levi, served as attorney general under President Gerald Ford, pushing through major reforms at the department after the Watergate scandal eroded the country’s faith in government.
Edward Levi briefly resurfaced recently in the public discourse when Donald Ayer, former deputy attorney general for President George H.W. Bush, called on Barr to resign after his move in the Stone case, comparing him unfavorably to Levi.
Before joining the Justice Department, Will Levi spent time as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in the private sector and as a Senate staffer.
“He was immensely helpful, and I was deeply impressed by his brilliant work, his diligence and his deep dedication to public service and the rule of law,” Alito told POLITICO in a statement.
More recently, Levi also worked for four months at the Domestic Policy Council in the White House as a special assistant to the president, where he worked on regulatory reform issues.
Levi is one of several Barr aides who have moved from White House jobs to senior positions at the Justice Department.
Prior to his time in the White House, Levi worked as chief counsel for Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), a libertarian-leaning member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he focused on criminal justice reform and nominations. He also was staff director for the Senate antitrust subcommittee, which Lee chairs.
Yep and hopefully he'll fold soon and actually work to avoid his supporters being entirely toxic and focus on the real issue: beating Trump.
Interesting thought, speaking of Elizabeth Warren and her inability to gain traction with the Bernie Sanders left:
And it didn't win over the Bernistas anyway, because they're only partly about progressive policy; they want someone who channels their sense of grievance. Warren wasn't their type precisely because of the thoughtfulness that attracted her supporters 3/
I’ve wracked my brain wondering why so many on the progressive left, in this day and age of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, would align with an old white guy when there were clear alternatives (unlike in 2016), and this makes as much sense as anything. One commenter on my last piece, on why Bernie Sanders fizzled upon contact with actual voters, wrote that, “for Bernie to do some of the work kos is asking, he would have to change his message in a way a dependably left politician will never do.”
Interesting—what made Sanders a “dependably left politician,” but Warren not? Clearly, it wasn’t actual policy or ideology. Krugman’s “grievance” is as good as an explanation as any.
Remember, the Sanders campaign decided early on that his path to the nomination consisted of keeping his core 30% base intact, and nothing more: As The Atlantic noted, “And then, Sanders aides believe, he’ll easily win enough delegates to put him into contention at the convention. They say they don’t need him to get more than 30 percent to make that happen.”
That was important, as we’ve discussed, because it set the tone for the entirety of their campaign—from othering the supporters of other candidates as “neoliberal corporatist shills” (and worse) to sticking with a message that had failed Sanders already in 2016, when only two candidates had been in the race.
And it’s shocking how close to 30% his results have been:
Sanders share of the vote
Iowa
26.5%
New Hampshire
25.6%
Nevada
40.5%
South Carolina
19.8%
Alabama
16.5%
Arkansas
22.4%
California
33.8%
Colorado
36.1%
Maine
32.9%
Massachusetts
26.7%
Minnesota
29.9%
North Carolina
24.1%
Oklahoma
25.4%
Tennessee
25%
Texas
30%
Utah
34.6%
Vermont
50.8%
Virginia
23.1%
Take a guess what his overall percentage is so far.
28.9%
It’s amazing seeing a strategy play out so well! They set out to win 30%, and they nailed it. (Well, close enough.)
Why didn’t someone say, “Bernie, 30% is, uh, less than 50%”? No one seriously considered that because, again, it would have required compromising that message of a “dependable left politician.”
Or, as Sanders’ campaign manager said when I questioned the lack of message adjustments?
We have the same fundamental economic injustices in our system as 4 yrs ago. Bernie has consistent solutions as 4 yrs ago. He says what he truly believes, and he'd act on it as President. https://t.co/4sOFXVv9r3
Of course Faiz was right! The economic injustices remain! But Sanders’ approach wasn’t winning new converts. There isn't just a single way to talk about injustice, and many do so more eloquently, with a more inclusive approach that makes clear to all base Democrats that they’re being seen and heard. Sanders never cared to even try to broaden that message without sacrificing his core ideals.
In fact, Sanders took that rigidity to such absurd lengths that he refused even to talk to people he might disagree with!
Sanders explanation for why he didn't ask Clyburn to endorse him: "Jim is a very nice guy. I like him and respect him. His politics are not my politics. There�s no way in god�s Earth he was going to be endorsing me."
So the only people worth talking to are those who would endorse his brand of politics? Is that why he skipped Selma this year, because black voters—who have a greater claim to grievance politics than anyone else—wouldn’t vote for him?
Such an approach to politics is a downright Trumpian/Bushian “us versus them” mentality, and it permeated every level of his campaign, from Sanders to his core campaign team and all the way down to his surrogates and supporters. Grievance politics requires an enemy, and rather than train their fire on their true enemy, they indiscriminately shot at anyone who wasn’t part of their core 30%—to the point that Elizabeth Warren herself became the enemy. There’s a reason Warren refused to shake Sanders’ hand after that one debate.
The irony? Sanders’ brand of exclusionary grievance politics is the best friend any establishment ever had. Why worry about Sanders when Sanders isn’t interested in building a governing majority? Why listen to the LEFT itself if the left will jump in bed with the guy uninterested in building a governing majority?
30%.
That’s his ceiling. He only significantly broke it in Nevada, where caucuses disenfranchise the bulk of voters, and in his home state of Vermont, where he barely managed a majority. And if he could only muster the barest of majorities in VERMONT, of all places, how was he supposed to do so elsewhere?
Thirty percent was never a winning number, and the fact that the Sanders campaign built an entire campaign around hitting that—and only that—was political malpractice that doomed the left this presidential cycle.
President Trump speaks during a visit to the CDC March 6. | AFP via Getty Images
President Donald Trump speaks during a Fox News town hall on March 5, 2020, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Baseball is a fun springtime activity. | Adam Glanzman/MLB Photos via Getty Images
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