Thursday, April 2, 2020
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
It's all downhill from here
Yes, Trump said that.
Well, that was stupid. Have they MET Trump?Under pressure, members of the coronavirus task force discussed privately how parts of the country might be opened in April, but cautioned Trump not to get locked into a specific timetable given the deteriorating conditions in New York hospitals and ominous upticks in cases in New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere. “They discussed it internally, but they never intended Trump to announce it,” a Republican working with the task force told me.
Vanity Fair
I was wrong, apparently. He DOES have a friend in a coma. He has a friend.Trump’s impulsive decision—and its messy aftermath—consumed the West Wing during the critical week that governors were pleading with the White House to deliver medical supplies before hospital systems began to collapse. “It was totally crazy,” the Republican told me. Dr. Fauci, Senator Lindsey Graham, and others raced to convince Trump that an Easter opening would be a cataclysmic error that could cost millions of lives. “This is a very, very stressful situation for everybody, including me,” Fauci told me in a phone interview on Monday. By last weekend Fauci’s arguments broke through: Trump agreed to extend the social distancing guidelines until the end of April.
[...]
Trump learned that his close friend, 78-year-old New York real estate mogul Stan Chera, had contracted COVID-19 and fallen into a coma at NewYork-Presbyterian. “Boy, did that hit home. Stan is like one of his best friends,” said prominent New York Trump donor Bill White.
And he's certainly doing a bang-up job!Trump also grew concerned as the virus spread to Trump country. “The polling sucked. The campaign panicked about the numbers in red states. They don’t expect to win states that are getting blown to pieces with coronavirus,” a former West Wing official told me. From the beginning of the crisis, Trump had struggled to see it as anything other than a political problem, subject to his usual arsenal of tweets and attacks and bombast. But he ultimately realized that as bad as the stock market was, getting coronavirus wrong would end his presidency. “The campaign doesn’t matter anymore,” he recently told a friend, “what I do now will determine if I get reelected.”
And HE'S doing a bang-up job.For an ordinary West Wing dealing with a crisis of this magnitude, the chief of staff would be a central player, mediating, delegating, making the trains on time. But Trump has only very intermittently been able to tolerate another person with power in his White House. Mick Mulvaney had essentially been a lame duck for months, and since he was pushed out in early March, there’s been no chief of staff at all—Mark Meadows, whom Trump appointed weeks ago, only resigned his congressional seat on Monday to fill the post.
[...]
Jared Kushner, who’s often been in competition with Trump’s chiefs of staff, continues to be the central West Wing player, leading a shadow coronavirus task force that is more powerful than the official group led by Vice President Mike Pence. In conversations Kushner has blamed HHS Secretary Alex Azar for the criticism Trump has received, according to a person in frequent touch with the West Wing. “This was a total mess,” Kushner told people when he got involved last month. “I know how to make this government run now,” he said, according to a source.
Take a minute. I'll wait till you're finished laughing.The White House downplayed tensions between Kushner and the task force. “The vice president and Jared work so well together because they both view their roles through the lens of what’s best for the American people and how do we best serve the president,” deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley said.
You see, this is why I don't trust Fauci, the guy everybody thinks is saving us. He also either lied or was uninformed about Italy's response to the pandemic.Last week he called Wall Street executives and asked for advice on how to help New York, people briefed on the conversation said. Kushner encouraged Trump to push back against New York governor Andrew Cuomo after Cuomo gave an emotional press conference during which he said New York was short 30,000 ventilators. In a White House meeting around this time, Kushner told people that Cuomo was being an alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a person present. During an interview on Hannity on March 26, Trump said: “I don’t believe you need 40,000 or 30,000 ventilators.”
Kushner declined to comment. But the White House press shop sent a statement from Fauci: “The interactions between Jared Kushner and Vice President Pence have added real value to the discussions at the coronavirus task force. They complement each other very well by providing information and opinions derived from shared and sometimes different perspectives. The bottom line and goal of both of them is to always get the facts straight and to act on and make decisions based on the best available evidence.”
How's that working out? Apparently, Hicks is his Chief of Staff.Meanwhile, Trump is also consulting his longtime confidante Hope Hicks, whom Trump hired back in February (Hicks had been serving as chief communications officer for Fox Corp., the parent company of Fox News). Officially, Hicks reports to Kushner, but according to sources, Hicks is constantly with Trump. “Hope is in charge of Trump’s calendar, which means Jared is in charge of Trump’s schedule,” a Republican who deals with the White House said. Sources said Hicks prepares Trump for his daily task force briefings and advises him to act presidential.
Meanwhile, that idiot Hogan Gidley -whatever he's supposed to be - is busy denying everything. About the situation between Kushner and Grisham:For weeks, according to sources, Kushner has been looking to sideline [communications director Stephanie] Grisham but has been unable to displace her because Grisham remains close to Melania Trump, whom Grisham did communications for when she worked in the East Wing. “Jared doesn’t tell Grisham what he’s working on. At this point Stephanie has just given up,” a person close to Grisham said. “
About Hicks trying to get Trump to "be presidential":“That is blatantly false and a sick attempt by someone to stoke division where there is none" Gidley said. "Steph and Jared have been friends since the campaign and have always worked very well together.”
“No one has to give President Trump advice about being presidential—he is just a natural-born leader—and in this time of crisis, the country clearly sees the president is focused on the safety and security of the American people and always has their backs.”
[...]
Trump’s press conferences for the last few weeks had mostly been rally substitutes—boastful, contentious, featuring Trump as pitchman, selling the great job the administration was doing and the beautiful future after the novel coronavirus had magically flowed through, while compulsively blame-shifting to China, the media, governors, anyone but his own administration. But on Tuesday the event turned somber, with Trump trying to put the best possible face on a terrifying set of metrics—100,000 to 200,000 dead Americans, even if, as Dr. Deborah Birx said, safety measures continued—that he’d been trying to push away and wish away for weeks. Whatever his tone, it will be a very hard future to sell.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
He's figured out how to always be right
And it might go down more before it goes up.
What a buffoon.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
Burn it all down
You could be forgiven for thinking he WANTS people to die.
Despite the decision, the ACA — better known as ObamaCare — provides for a special enrollment period for those who have recently lost their employer-based health plans, meaning some people who have lost their insurance due to the pandemic may still be able to sign up through the portal.
[...]
Those who have lost their jobs also have the option to extend their employer-based plans through the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act — also known as COBRA — but that option frequently proves cost-prohibitive for people who have just lost their main sources of income. About two-thirds of states have also expanded Medicaid under the ACA.
[...]
While the White House oversees enrollment for about two-thirds of states, several Democratic state governments have already reopened enrollment in state-run marketplaces, Politico reported. Trump said last week that he was considering reopening enrollment, but he affirmed that he still supports an ongoing administration lawsuit that would undo the entire law.
The Hill
The Trump administration ignored a pandemic warning from White House economists who published a study estimating possible effects of a pandemic last September, according to a New York Times report.
The White House study reportedly cautioned that a pandemic, like the coronavirus outbreak the world is now facing, could cause the deaths of a half million Americans and cost the economy as much as $3.8 trillion. The study contradicts what administration officials have repeatedly said about the coronavirus coming out of nowhere and causing unforeseen devastation to the U.S. economy, the Times noted.
The 2019 study was ordered by the National Security Council, two people familiar with the matter told the newspaper, which added that it warned officials not to conflate the risks of the annual flu with a potential pandemic.
[...]
One of the authors of the study, who has since left the White House, estimated a majority of economic activity would need to be halted for two to eight months to slow down a potential virus, according to the Times.
The study, which did not predict the coronavirus specifically, modeled a pandemic involving a virus similar to the 1918 Spanish flu or the swine flu of 2009 hitting the country. The model flu in the study, however, was less contagious and less deadly than public health officials say the coronavirus could be.
The Hill
Trump FAIL
For every state in the country.“It was disturbing today to find out that the national strategic stockpile is now empty. We did get 50 ventilators, for which I am very thankful,” Lamont told reporters, according to Reuters. “For now we are on our own. For now we are doing the best to scour the globe for [personal protective equipment] as best we can.”
[...]
Lamont said that state officials were currently looking for medical supplies on the open market worldwide.
“This breaks my heart,” he said. "I feel like a general sending troops into battle without the protective gear they deserve."
He said that April would be a "horrible month" for the state, noting that confirmed cases were continuing to rapidly climb.
The Hill
AND called it a job well done!Connecticut reportedly increased its hospital capacity by 50 percent to prepare for a surge in hospitalizations over the next three weeks. Lamont also said he was releasing nonviolent prison inmates to help stem the spread of the disease in state prisons.
The Trump administration on Tuesday unveiled projections saying that between 100,000 and 240,000 people in the U.S. could die from the coronavirus outbreak even if social-distancing requirements remain in place.
Burn it all down
And that, we all know, is bullshit. Also, if companies are concerned enough to do that, what does it matter if the law is there? There's only one reason to remove it: because it's in their way.A plan by the Trump administration to change the rules under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act could devastate the population of threatened and endangered species and accelerate their decline across North America, a former US wildlife official has warned.
Dan Ashe, a former US Fish and Wildlife Service Director, told the The Associated Press news agency news agency that for years the law's threat of prosecution served as "a brake on industry" and had probably saved billions of birds.
[...]
"It will be catastrophic."
[...]
Industry sources and pollutants kill an estimated 450 million to 1.1 billion birds annually, out of an overall 7.2 billion birds in North America, according to recent studies by the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Under the 50-year practice in the migratory bird law, criminal penalties are being used to put pressure on companies into taking measures to prevent unintentional bird deaths.
The Trump administration dismissed Ashe's dire prediction, contending companies will continue to avoid bird deaths voluntarily.
alJazeera
What happened to "these ugly windmills are killing thousands of beautiful birds!"?The Trump administration's proposal follows longstanding pressure from oil companies, utilities and other industries.
[...]
The 1918 migratory bird law was passed after many US bird populations were destroyed by hunting and poaching, much of it for feathers for women's hats.
Over the past half-century, the law was also applied against companies that failed to prevent foreseeable bird deaths.
However, the Trump administration says deaths of birds that fly into oil pits, mining sites, telecommunications towers, wind turbines and other hazards should be treated as accidents not subject to prosecution. And an Interior Department proposal would cement that into federal regulation.
Jesus Tapdancing Christ! (h/t Kevin Kruse). Perhaps the birds should be fined!State officials and wildlife advocates who are suing the administration in federal court say birds are already being harmed under actions allowed by a 2017 Trump administration legal memo that signalled the rule change.
Most notable was the destruction last northern autumn of nesting grounds for 25,000 shorebirds in Virginia to make way for a road and tunnel project. State officials had ended conservation measures for the birds after federal officials advised such measures were voluntary under the new interpretation of the law.
The move to relax the bird law, combined with Trump's relaxations of the Endangered Species Act and the National Environmental Policy Act puts birds and their habitat at greater risk.
[...]
The American Petroleum Institute suggested in a regulatory filing: "The birds themselves are the actors, colliding or otherwise interacting with industrial structures."
This administration will be the death of the planet.
UPDATE:
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