Nut Cases

Posted on April 21, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

Covid-19 highlights the conservative reliance on fake experts.

 

By Paul Krugman/ New York Times / April 20, 2020

Cave

Over the past few days there have been noisy, threatening demonstrations at various statehouses demanding an end to Covid-19 lockdowns.

The demonstrations haven’t been very big, with at most a few thousand people, and involve a strong element of astroturfing — that is, while they supposedly represent a surge of grass-roots anger, some of them have been organized by institutions with links to Republican politicians, including the family of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education.

And polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans — including half of Republicans — are more worried that restrictions will be lifted too soon than that they will be kept in place too long.

But the demonstrators have received huge favorable coverage from right-wing media; Donald Trump called them “very responsible people”; and they were praised by White House economic adviser Stephen Moore, who compared them to Rosa Parks.

That last bit caught my eye, and not just because some of the demonstrators were waving Confederate flags. The grotesqueness of the comparison aside, why are we still hearing from Stephen Moore?

After all, Moore — whom Trump tried but failed to install as a member of the Federal Reserve Board — isn’t just a bad economist with a history of misogynistic outbursts. More to the point, he’s a quack, with a long history of misrepresenting or inventing facts to support his ideological agenda.

Among his greatest hits was a number-filled screed about the relationship between tax cuts and jobs — framed, as it happens, as an attack on yours truly — in which not a single number was remotely close to the truth.

On second thought, however, Moore fits right in. One thing the coronavirus has thrown into sharp relief is the centrality of quackery — confident pronouncements on technical subjects by people who have no idea what they’re talking about — to the whole enterprise of modern conservatism.

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THE AMERICA WE NEED

Posted on April 20, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

By the Editorial Board/ New York Times/ April 9, 2020

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From some of its darkest hours, the United States has emerged stronger and more resilient.

Between May and July 1862, even as Confederate victories in Virginia raised doubts about the future of the Union, Congress and President Abraham Lincoln kept their eyes on the horizon, enacting three landmark laws that shaped the nation’s next chapter: The Homestead Act allowed Western settlers to claim 160 acres of public land apiece; the Morrill Act provided land grants for states to fund universities; and the Pacific Railway Act underwrote the transcontinental railroad.

Nearly 75 years later, in the depths of the Great Depression, with jobs in short supply and many Americans reduced to waiting in bread lines, President Franklin Roosevelt proved similarly farsighted. He concluded the best way to revive and sustain prosperity was not merely to pump money into the economy but to rewrite the rules of the marketplace. “Liberty,” Roosevelt said at the Democratic Party’s convention in 1936, “requires opportunity to make a living — a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.” His administration, working with Congress, enshrined the right of workers to bargain collectively, imposed strict rules and regulators on the financial industry, and created Social Security to provide pensions for the elderly and disabled.

 

This article is part of a Times Opinion series exploring how the nation can emerge from this crisis stronger, fairer and more free. Read the editor’s introductory letter.

 

The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare once again the incomplete nature of the American project — the great distance between the realities of life and death in the United States and the values enunciated in its founding documents.

Over the past half century, the fabric of American democracy has been stretched thin. The nation has countenanced debilitating decay in its public institutions and a concentration of economic power not seen since the 1920s. While many Americans live without financial security or opportunity, a relative handful of families holds much of the nation’s wealth. Over the past decade, the wealth of the top 1 percent of households has surpassed the combined wealth of the bottom 80 percent.

The present crisis has revealed the United States as a nation in which professional basketball players could be rapidly tested for the coronavirus but health care workers were turned away; in which the affluent could retreat to the safety of second homes, relying on workers who can’t take paid sick leave to deliver food; in which children in lower-income households struggle to connect to the digital classrooms where their school lessons are now supposed to be delivered.

 

It is a nation in which local officials issuing stay-at-home orders must reckon with the cruel irony that hundreds of thousands of Americans do not have homes. Lacking private places, they must sleep in public spaces. Las Vegas painted rectangles on an asphalt parking lot to remind homeless residents to sleep six feet apart — an act that might as well have been a grim piece of performance art titled “The Least We Can Do

The federal government is providing temporary aid to less fortunate Americans, and few have objected to those emergency measures. But already some politicians are asserting that the extraordinary nature of the crisis does not warrant permanent changes in the social contract.

This misapprehends both the nature of crises in general and the particulars of the present emergency. The magnitude of a crisis is determined not just by the impact of the precipitating events but also by the fragility of the system it attacks. Our society was especially vulnerable to this pandemic because so many Americans lack the essential liberty to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.

This nation was ailing long before the coronavirus reached its shores.

A great divide separates affluent Americans, who fully enjoy the benefits of life in the wealthiest nation on earth, from the growing portion of the population whose lives lack stability or any real prospect of betterment.

The hedge-fund billionaire Kenneth Griffin paid $238 million last year for a New York apartment overlooking Central Park. He plans to stay there when he happens to be in town. Meanwhile, 10.9 million American families barely can afford an apartment. They spend more than half of their incomes on rent, and so they scrimp on food and health care. And on any given night, half a million Americans are homeless.

 

For those at the bottom, moreover, the chances of rising are in decline. By the time they reached 30, more than 90 percent of Americans born in 1940 were earning more than their parents had earned at the same age. But among those born in 1980, only half were earning more than their parents by the age of 30.

The erosion of the American dream is not a result of laziness or a talent drought. Rather, opportunity has slipped away. The economic ladder is harder to climb; real incomes have stagnated for decades even as the costs of housing, education and health care have increased. Many lower-income Americans are born into polluted, impoverished neighborhoods, with no decent jobs to be found.

“By 40, my parents owned a house, had a kid — me — and were both doing well in their careers,” said Melanie Martin-Leff, who works in marketing in Philadelphia. “I’m freelancing, renting, partnerless and childless.”

The inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health. A middle-aged American in the top fifth of the income distribution can expect to live about 13 years longer than a person of the same age in the bottom fifth — an advantage that has more than doubled since 1980.

These changes have become harder to reverse because the distribution of political power also is increasingly unequal. Our system of democracy is under strain as those with wealth increasingly shape the course of policymaking, acting from self-interest and perhaps also failing to imagine life on the other side of the divide or to design policy in the common interest.

The wealthy are particularly successful in blocking changes they don’t like. The political scientists Martin Gilens of the University of California, Los Angeles, and Benjamin Page of Northwestern have calculated that between 1981 and 2002, policies supported by at least 80 percent of affluent voters passed into law about 45 percent of the time, while policies opposed by at least 80 percent of those voters passed into law just 18 percent of the time. Importantly, the views of poor and middle-class voters had little influence.

 

The fragility of our society and government is the product of deliberate decisions. The modern welfare state was constructed in three great waves:

 

These policies embodied a broad and muscular conception of liberty: that government should provide all Americans with the freedom that comes from a stable and prosperous life.

“We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence,” Roosevelt told the nation in 1944.

The goal, of course, was never realized in full, but since the late 1960s, the federal government has largely abandoned the attempt. The defining trend in American public policy has been to diminish government’s role as a guarantor of personal liberty.

Advocates of a minimalist conception of government claim they too are defenders of liberty. But theirs is a narrow and negative definition of freedom: the freedom from civic duty, from mutual obligation, from taxation. This impoverished view of freedom has in practice protected wealth and privilege. It has perpetuated the nation’s defining racial inequalities and kept the poor trapped in poverty, and their children, and their children’s children.

One of the most important aspects of this retreat was the government’s role in constructing a new residential landscape of economically and racially segregated communities. The government built highways that carried white families to new suburban neighborhoods where minorities often were not allowed to live; it provided mortgage loans that minorities were not allowed to obtain; and even after explicit discrimination was declared illegal, single-family zoning laws continued to exclude low-income families, particularly minorities.

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Civil War

Posted on April 19, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

Trump Leads Pro-Plague States of America to a COVID Civil War

He is telling us plainly that he will stoke civil unrest and further harm public health to find a political pathway out of a galactic-scale fuck-up of his own making.

By Rick Wilson/ Daily Beast/ April 18, 2020

Fox

Donald Trump fired the first shots in the COVID Civil War this week, a modern-day Jefferson Davis of the Pro-Plague States of America sending his opening salvo from Fort Twitter at Democratic governors who dared to question if it wasn’t just a wee bit early to end the stay-at-home orders in states still far to the left of the peak.

He started the week with claims of “total authority” and then cried about a supposed mutiny by mouthy state leaders. By Friday, he was up to calls to “liberate” states.

Who does he want people to rise up against, exactly: People who don’t want to die? People who don’t want protesters spreading a deadly disease that’s already killed 34,000 Americans? Governors who swore an oath to serve their states and protect their citizens? Science? Medicine?

Whatever the enemy, the Trump horde is lurching toward it with protests “breaking out” in state capitals across the land filled with MAGAmericans clad in their Red Badge of Credulity hats and carrying the banners of Esoteric Trumpism. Events in Florida, Kentucky, Michigan, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia, and California have popped up in the last 36 hours, with more on the way.

In Ohio, one striking photograph showed the screaming faces of Trump supporters pressed against the glass doors of the state capitol, their incandescent rage caught in a single moment of fury. Surrounding capitols, blaring horns, they’re ready to protest side by side, fighting social distancing to the death.

First of all, you should understand that none of this—zero, zip, nada —is organic. None of this is real. Every bit of it is being pushed on Trump’s behalf via the twin modalities of our doom: Fox and Facebook.

   

Just as the Tea Party had a brief, organic origin story but was soon managed, harnessed, controlled and weaponized, so too is today’s Trump movement. The crowds showing up for these “liberation rallies” are lowing cattle, led down a chute to be fed or slaughtered, depending on the day. Their ignorance of their own state as philosophical zombies whose lives Trump is literally willing to sacrifice for a tiny bump in the stock market is breathtaking. Dying for a second-order economic effect will show the libs, right?

I’ve gotten in trouble before for calling them a bunch of credulous boomer rubes, but have a look at the demographic of any person at these stupid protests in pro- plague America; lily-white, assertively boomer, and as shrill as Tomi Lahren after an espresso colonic.

The first Civil War was against the vilest institution imaginable: a war to end a regime that treated humans as property, and waged at a horrific, bloody cost. Trump’s cosplayed civil war is against science, medicine, healthy public policy, and the desire to not have millions of Americans die in a preventable and shockingly resilient plague.

He wants his rebellion because it feeds into his brand of transgression and he believes it will benefit him politically; Donald Trump’s never tried to liberate a damn thing in his life except for banks from their money, porn stars from their panties, and rubes from their votes.

Let’s be clear about the things he’s going to do and the risks he is willing to take with the American people. Trump is telling us bluntly and plainly that he will stoke civil unrest to find a political pathway out of a galactic-scale fuck-up of his own

 

making. He’s willing to let a disease that’s already killed 33,000 Americans due to his inaction and dishonesty spread further, faster, and more widely.

Driving these protests is one more proof that Trump is a president without a shred of commitment to the oath of office, the country he claims to serve, or any American citizen not named Ivanka. He wants what he wants, and damn the toll in lives and treasure. He’s not worried that these protests could get out of hand—he’s counting on it.

Trump knows his power over his base like the most exaggerated horror-movie mind control, and that no other president has ever enjoyed anything close. He knows his base—amplified by his pet media outlets—will take the ball and run with it no matter how crazy the idea. They’ll revel in the media criticism of their excesses and damn the consequences.

In Michigan, we saw protesters waving Confederate flags. In California, there were signs about how “COVID-19 is a lie.”

Trump’s stirring up his base will have consequences. Many of the people at his “liberation” rallies may well get or spread COVID-19, just when the country’s continued diligence and caution about flattening the curve through social distancing is most vital. These engineered protests are taking resources that first responders desperately need to respond to the crisis, not Trump’s crisis actors.

The one person who won’t pay a price? Donald Trump.

Immune to political pressure, unable to process moral responsibility, and unwilling to put anything above his raw, raging ego and his boundless desire to hold power, he’ll keep badgering his base to start the COVID Civil War, one tweet at a time.

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Unpredictable?

Posted on April 16, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

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How Trump Screwed Up

Posted on April 13, 2020 by Arlen Grossman
By Thom Hartmann/ Thom Hartmann Blog/ April 13, 2020

America Has a Big Decision to Make – How Do We End Shelter In Place?

Thom plus logo  Dr. David Nabarro of the World Health Organization says that
until a vaccine is developed, the coronavirus will likely “stalk the human race” for quite a while. Shelter in place and all the other efforts to stop the spread of the coronavirus are designed to do, basically, only one thing: protect hospitals. When enough people get really sick really fast, our healthcare system is overwhelmed, so the goal of shelter in place is to slow the spread of the disease, not to stop it. But, as Dr. Anthony Fauci pointed out yesterday on CNN, Trump missed our opportunity several months ago to contain the virus like South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Norway, Denmark and Germany have done. Now the United States is purely in what is called mitigation. We’re trying to reduce its destructive hit on our healthcare system.

Because Trump failed in preventing the virus from spreading across the United States back in January, February, and March the only option we have now is to try to lessen the damage to our healthcare system by slowing the spread. But the spread of this disease is now inevitable all across the United States, so the debate is shifting to how to slowly infect pretty much everybody in the United States without creating hotspots or outbreaks that crash our hospitals. The only thing that could change this is the development of a highly effective vaccine, but that is months and maybe years away. Since younger people are less severely affected, expect that soon Trump and some states will be talking about letting young people out of quarantine. This, too, will increase the number of people who die and increase the spread to older people, although at a rate that our hospitals can handle.

Other countries that have done well with this did so through massive, widespread testing and contact tracing on an ongoing basis. The Trump administration, however, has taken both those things off the table for the United States. and because the virus does not respect state borders, this can only be done at the federal level: no governor has the ability to do this. Because Trump utterly failed in keeping the virus away from the United States and refuses to fund and implement a nationwide testing and contract tracing program, simply slowing down hundreds of thousands of coming deaths may well be all we have left.

souvenirs
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Go To Your Window…Now!

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

Posted in America, media, politics | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

American Democracy May Be Dying

Posted on April 11, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

Authoritarian rule may be just around the corner.

By Paul Krugman/ New York Times/ April 9, 2020

 

If you aren’t terrified both by Covid-19 and by its economic consequences, you haven’t been paying attention.

Even though social distancing may be slowing the disease’s spread, tens of thousands more Americans will surely die in the months ahead (and official accounts surely understate the true death toll). And the economic lockdown necessary to achieve social distancing — as I’ve been saying, the economy is in the equivalent of a medically induced coma — has led to almost 17 million new claims for unemployment insurance over the past three weeks, again almost surely an understatement of true job losses.

Yet the scariest news of the past week didn’t involve either epidemiology or economics; it was the travesty of an election in Wisconsin, where the Supreme Court required that in-person voting proceed despite the health risks and the fact that many who requested absentee ballots never got them.

Why was this so scary? Because it shows that America as we know it may not survive much longer. The pandemic will eventually end; the economy will eventually recover. But democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we’re much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize.

To see how a modern democracy can die, look at events in Europe, especially Hungary, over the past decade.

What happened in Hungary, beginning in 2011, was that Fidesz, the nation’s white nationalist ruling party, took advantage of its position to rig the electoral system, effectively making its rule permanent. Then it further consolidated its control, using political power to reward friendly businesses while punishing critics, and moved to suppress independent news media.

Until recently, it seemed as if Viktor Orban, Hungary’s de facto dictator, might stop with soft authoritarianism, presiding over a regime that preserved some of the outward forms of democracy, neutralizing and punishing opposition without actually making criticism illegal. But now his government has used the coronavirus as an excuse to abandon even the pretense of constitutional government, giving Orban the power to rule by decree.

If you say that something similar can’t happen here, you’re hopelessly naïve. In fact, it’s already happening here, especially at the state level. Wisconsin, in particular, is well on its way toward becoming Hungary on Lake Michigan, as Republicans seek a permanent lock on power.

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Coronavirus: What’s Next?

Posted on April 10, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What’s Coming

Epidemiologist Larry Brilliant, who warned of pandemic in 2006, says we can beat the novel coronavirus—but first, we need lots more testing.

By Larry Brilliant/ Wired/ March 19, 2020

LARRY BRILLIANT SAYS he doesn’t have a crystal ball. But 14 years ago, Brilliant, the epidemiologist who helped eradicate smallpox, spoke to a TED audience and described what the next pandemic would look like. At the time, it sounded almost too horrible to take seriously. “A billion people would get sick,” he said. “As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression, and the cost to our economy of $1 to $3 trillion would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their jobs and their health care benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable.”

Now the unthinkable is here, and Brilliant, the Chairman of the board of Ending Pandemics, is sharing expertise with those on the front lines. We are a long way from 100 million deaths due to the novel coronavirus, but it has turned our world upside down. Brilliant is trying not to say “I told you so” too often. But he did tell us so, not only in talks and writings, but as the senior technical advisor for the pandemic horror film Contagion, now a top streaming selection for the homebound. Besides working with the World Health Organization in the effort to end smallpox, Brilliant, who is now 75, has fought flu, polio, and blindness; once led Google’s nonprofit wing, Google.org; co-founded the conferencing system the Well; and has traveled with the Grateful Dead.

We talked by phone on Tuesday. At the time, President Donald Trump’s response to the crisis had started to change from “no worries at all” to finally taking more significant steps to stem the pandemic. Brilliant lives in one of the six Bay Area counties where residents were ordered to shelter in place. When we began the conversation, he’d just gotten off the phone with someone he described as high government official, who asked Brilliant “How the fuck did we get here?” I wanted to hear how we’ll get out of here. The conversation has been edited and condensed.

Steven Levy: I was in the room in 2006 when you gave that TED talk. Your wish was “Help Me Stop Pandemics.” You didn’t get your wish, did you?

Larry Brilliant: No, I didn’t get that wish at all, although the systems that I asked for have certainly been created and are being used. It’s very funny because we did a movie, Contagion—

We’re all watching that movie now.

People say Contagion is prescient. We just saw the science. The whole epidemiological community has been warning everybody for the past 10 or 15 years that it wasn’t a question of whether we were going to have a pandemic like this. It was simply when. It’s really hard to get people to listen. I mean, Trump pushed out the admiral on the National Security Council, who was the only person at that level who’s responsible for pandemic defense. With him went his entire downline of employees and staff and relationships. And then Trump removed the [early warning] funding for countries around the world.

Read all of our coronavirus coverage here

I’ve heard you talk about the significance that this is a “novel” virus.

It doesn’t mean a fictitious virus. It’s not like a novel or a novella.

Too bad.

It means it’s new. That there is no human being in the world that has immunity as a result of having had it before. That means it’s capable of infecting 7.8 billion of our brothers and sisters.

Since it’s novel, we’re still learning about it. Do you believe that if someone gets it and recovers, that person thereafter has immunity?

So I don’t see anything in this virus, even though it’s novel, [that contradicts that]. There are cases where people think that they’ve gotten it again, [but] that’s more likely to be a test failure than it is an actual reinfection. But there’s going to be tens of millions of us or hundreds of millions of us or more who will get this virus before it’s all over, and with large numbers like that, almost anything where you ask “Does this happen?” can happen. That doesn’t mean that it is of public health or epidemiological importance.

Is this the worst outbreak you’ve ever seen?

It’s the most dangerous pandemic in our lifetime.

We are being asked to do things, certainly, that never happened in my lifetime—stay in the house, stay 6 feet away from other people, don’t go to group gatherings. Are we getting the right advice?

Well, as you reach me, I’m pretending that I’m in a meditation retreat, but I’m actually being semi-quarantined in Marin County. Yes, this is very good advice. But did we get good advice from the president of the United States for the first 12 weeks? No. All we got were lies. Saying it’s fake, by saying this is a Democratic hoax. There are still people today who believe that, to their detriment. Speaking as a public health person, this is the most irresponsible act of an elected official that I’ve ever witnessed in my lifetime. But what you’re hearing now [to self-isolate, close schools, cancel events] is right. Is it going to protect us completely? Is it going to make the world safe forever? No. It’s a great thing because we want to spread out the disease over time.

Flatten the curve.

By slowing it down or flattening it, we’re not going to decrease the total number of cases, we’re going to postpone many cases, until we get a vaccine—which we will, because there’s nothing in the virology that makes me frightened that we won’t get a vaccine in 12 to 18 months. Eventually, we will get to the epidemiologist gold ring.

What’s that?

That means, A, a large enough quantity of us have caught the disease and become immune. And B, we have a vaccine. The combination of A plus B is enough to create herd immunity, which is around 70 or 80 percent.

I hold out hope that we get an antiviral for Covid-19 that is curative, but in addition is prophylactic. It’s certainly unproven and it’s certainly controversial, and certainly a lot of people are not going to agree with me. But I offer as evidence two papers in 2005, one in Nature and one in Science. They both did mathematical modeling with influenza, to see whether saturation with just Tamiflu of an area around a case of influenza could stop the outbreak. And in both cases, it worked. I also offer as evidence the fact that at one point we thought HIV/AIDS was incurable and a death sentence. Then, some wonderful scientists discovered antiviral drugs, and we’ve learned that some of those drugs can be given prior to exposure and prevent the disease. Because of the intense interest in getting [Covid-19] conquered, we will put the scientific clout and money and resources behind finding antivirals that have prophylactic or preventive characteristics that can be used in addition to [vaccines].

superman

 

When will we be able to leave the house and go back to work?

I have a very good retrospect-oscope, but what’s needed right now as a prospecto-scope. If this were a tennis match, I would say advantage virus right now. But there’s really good news from South Korea—they had less than 100 cases today. China had more cases imported than it had from continuous transmission from Wuhan today. The Chinese model will be very hard for us to follow. We’re not going to be locking people up in their apartments, boarding them up. But the South Korea model is one that we could follow. Unfortunately, it requires doing the proportionate number of tests that they did—they did well over a quarter of a million tests. In fact, by the time South Korea had done 200,000 tests, we had probably done less than 1,000.

Now that we’ve missed the opportunity for early testing, is it too late for testing to make a difference?

Absolutely not. Tests would make a measurable difference. We should be doing a stochastic process random probability sample of the country to find out where the hell the virus really is. Because we don’t know. Maybe Mississippi is reporting no cases because it’s not looking. How would they know? Zimbabwe reports zero cases because they don’t have testing capability, not because they don’t have the virus. We need something that looks like a home pregnancy test, that you can do at home.

If you were the president for one day, what would you say in the daily briefing?

I would begin the press conference by saying “Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Ron Klain—he was the Ebola czar [under President Barack Obama], and now I’ve called him back and made him Covid czar. Everything will be centralized under one person who has the respect of both the public health community and the political community.” We’re a divided country right now. Right now, Tony Fauci [head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] is the closest that we come to that.

Are you scared?

I’m in the age group that has a one in seven mortality rate if I get it. If you’re not worried, you’re not paying attention. But I’m not scared. I firmly believe that the steps that we’re taking will extend the time that it takes for the virus to make the rounds. I think that, in turn, will increase the likelihood that we will have a vaccine or we will have a prophylactic antiviral in time to cut off, reduce, or truncate the spread. Everybody needs to remember: This is not a zombie apocalypse. It’s not a mass extinction event.

Should we be wearing masks?

The N95 mask itself is extremely wonderful. The pores in the mask are three microns wide. The virus is one micron wide. [Editor’s note: The mask pores are 0.3 microns wide; the virus is 0.12 microns.] So you get people who say, well, it’s not going to work. But you try having three big, huge football players who are rushing for lunch through a door at lunchtime—they’re not going to get through. In the latest data I saw, the mask provided 5x protection. That’s really good. But we have to keep the hospitals going and we have to keep the health professionals able to come to work and be safe. So masks should go where they’re needed the most: in taking care of patients.

The world is not going to begin to look normal until three things have happened. One, we figure out whether the distribution of this virus looks like an iceberg, which is one-seventh above the water, or a pyramid, where we see everything. If we’re only seeing right now one-seventh of the actual disease because we’re not testing enough, and we’re just blind to it, then we’re in a world of hurt. Two, we have a treatment that works, a vaccine or antiviral. And three, maybe most important, we begin to see large numbers of people—in particular nurses, home health care providers, doctors, policemen, firemen, and teachers who have had the disease—are immune, and we have tested them to know that they are not infectious any longer. And we have a system that identifies them, either a concert wristband or a card with their photograph and some kind of a stamp on it. Then we can be comfortable sending our children back to school, because we know the teacher is not infectious.

And instead of saying “No, you can’t visit anybody in nursing home,” we have a group of people who are certified that they work with elderly and vulnerable people, and nurses who can go back into the hospitals and dentists who can open your mouth and look in your mouth and not be giving you the virus. When those three things happen, that’s when normalcy will return.

Is there in any way a brighter side to this?

Well, I’m a scientist, but I’m also a person of faith. And I can’t ever look at something without asking the question of isn’t there a higher power that in some way will help us to be the best version of ourselves that we could be? I thought we would see the equivalent of empty streets in the civic arena, but the amount of civic engagement is greater than I’ve ever seen. But I’m seeing young kids, millennials, who are volunteering to go take groceries to people who are homebound, elderly. I’m seeing an incredible influx of nurses, heroic nurses, who are coming and working many more hours than they worked before, doctors who fearlessly go into the hospital to work. I’ve never seen the kind of volunteerism I’m seeing.

I don’t want to pretend that this is an exercise worth going through in order to get to that state. This is a really unprecedented and difficult time that will test us. When we do get through it, maybe like the Second World War, it will cause us to reexamine what has caused the fractional division we have in this country. The virus is an equal opportunity infector. And it’s probably the way we would be better if we saw ourselves that way, which is much more alike than different.

Update 3-24-20 10:45 PM: This story was updated to correct the size of the virus and the width of the pores in an N95 respirator mask.

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Trump/Kushner, Inc.

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

Heaven help us, we’re at the mercy of the Slim Suit crowd.

By Maureen Dowd/ New York Times/ April 4, 2020

 

A few years ago, when some photos by Times photographers adorning our office walls were swapped out for others, I found one headed for the dumpster.

It captured the scene when Andy Card came over to whisper to George W. Bush, as he read “The Pet Goat” to schoolchildren in Sarasota, that a second plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

It was such a pivotal moment in this country’s history, it seemed too important to toss. So I hung it in my office.

But then three days later, I had to get rid of it. The look in Bush’s eyes was so disturbing, I couldn’t bear to see it anymore.

He looked frightened, like a horrible bill had come due and he was utterly unprepared to pay it. He looked like what he was: a man who had been winging it for the first half of his life, playing and swaggering around while he relied on his daddy and daddy’s friends to prop him up.

W. was shaken to the core, and that left him vulnerable to being influenced by the older advisers around him with their own crazy agendas. America is still paying for the dreadful decisions that came after that moment. The same blend of arrogance and incompetence informed the Bush administration’s handling of Katrina — the earlier lash of nature that exposed the lethal fault line between the haves and have-nots. W. retreated to clinical states’ rights arguments as a beloved city drowned.

Now we have another pampered scion in the Oval, propped up by his daddy for half his life, accustomed to winging it and swaggering around. And he, too, is utterly unprepared to lead us through the storm. Like W., he is resorting to clinical states’ rights arguments, leaving the states to chaotically compete with one another and the federal government for precious medical equipment.

Donald Trump is trying to build a campaign message around his image as a wartime president. But as a commander in chief, Cadet Bone Spurs is bringing up the rear.

“I would leave it up to the governors,” Trump said Friday, when asked about his government’s sclerotic response. Trouble is, when you leave it to the governors, you have scenes like we did in Florida with the open beaches — not to mention a swath in the middle of the country that, as of Friday night, still had not ordered residents to stay home.

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Presidential Gaslighting

Posted on April 4, 2020 by Arlen Grossman

George Conway: McConnell is “gaslighting” America by blaming Trump’s virus “failures” on impeachment

“Trump managed to visit his Mar-a-Lago estate for rounds of golf on at least four occasions,” Conway points out

By Matthews Rozsa/ Salon/ April 1, 2020

George Conway, the husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., of “gaslighting” America through his roundly-criticized claim that President Donald Trump failed to adequately address the coronavirus pandemic because of impeachment.

“Look at the calendar. The impeachment trial ended on Feb. 5,” Conway wrote in The Washington Post. “In reality, it was over before it even started, thanks in large part to McConnell. The only drama was about whether there’d be any witnesses — and that ended on Jan. 31, when the Senate voted not to hear testimony. That left plenty of time to deal with the virus.”

“Impeachment didn’t consume the government,” Conway continued, “and Trump managed to visit his Mar-a-Lago estate for rounds of golf on at least four occasions in January and February, after the coronavirus pandemic had already reached the U.S.”

Conway added that Trump held five campaign rallies around the country during this same period.

Trump publicly commented on COVID-19 on four separate occasions between Jan. 22 and Feb. 2, Conway said, and intelligence agencies warned both the president and Congress about the nature of the threat.

“The problem wasn’t impeachment — it was the president,” Conway wrote. “There was never any chance that the government was going to take sufficient action on the virus when the president himself wasn’t taking the virus seriously. It was Trump, after all, who claimed — at the very end of February, weeks after the impeachment trial had ended — that criticisms such as [Democratic Connecticut Sen. Chris] Murphy’s were a ‘hoax’ and that ‘within a couple days,’ the number of coronavirus cases ‘is going to be down to close to zero.'”

McConnell falsely claimed to right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday that Trump failed to respond to the pandemic because of impeachment.

“It diverted the attention of the government,” McConnell said, “because everything every day was all about impeachment.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., made the same claim earlier on Hewitt’s program that “unfortunately, Washington, especially the Congress was consumed with another matter — you may recall the partisan impeachment of the president.”

Trump was impeached in December for allegedly abusing his presidential power and obstructing Congress after he withheld $391 million in military aid from Ukraine while asking that country to investigate his political rivals. The Senate acquitted him in a mostly party-line vote: All Republicans voted to acquit and all Democrats voted to convict on obstruction of Congress, while Republican Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah broke from his party and joined Democrats in voting to convict on abuse of power.

In addition to downplaying the crisis in January, February and March, Trump disbanded a National Security Council pandemic panel that experts had praised; advocated for major budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control; and failed to provide Americans with accurate scientific information about the pandemic.

“He should have been warning us it was coming,” Dr. William Haseltine, a biologist renowned for his work in confronting the HIV/AIDS epidemic, for fighting anthrax and for advancing our knowledge of the human genome, told Salon. “He should have been preparing by stockpiling all the necessary equipment. But even today we’re not doing what we should do. Let me put it that way. What we should be doing is contact tracing [identifying people who may have come in contact with infected patients] and having mandatory quarantines for everybody who’s been exposed. And quarantining not at home, but in hotel rooms, single occupancy hotel rooms.”

MATTHEW ROZSA
Matthew Rozsa is a breaking news writer for Salon. He holds an MA in History from Rutgers University-Newark and is ABD in his PhD program in History at Lehigh University. His work has appeared in Mic, Quartz and MSNBC.
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