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Republican Venality

Late Night ‘Trump Crime Cartel’ Open Thread: Profiteering on the Pandemic

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And then there’s GOP fundraiser Mike Gula!

I figure it’s even odds Gula doesn’t actually have access to this mysterious supply, any more than that Nigerian ‘prince’ online has access to ONE MILLION DOLLARS (US$). But if desperate people wire him a bunch of money for stuff that doesn’t exist… who’s gonna complain they were rooked?

And if they do, well, it’s what a BSD salesguy does, overselling his prospects, sure he may have exaggerated his holdings slightly in the heat of the deal, but his intentions were only the best!

(He just better be giving the Oval Office Occupant a taste, something to wet his beak, is all I’m saying…)

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic) – Monday/Tuesday, March 30/31

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Retweeted by James Palmer, Deputy editor at Foreign Policy, ex-Beijing :

Elsewhere in the same city:

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GOP Venality Open Thread: Hey, It’s National Doctors Day!

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And he doubled down today! Per ABC News:

As health care workers on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis warn about shortages of masks and other protective equipment, President Donald Trump insinuated over the weekend people might be taking masks from hospitals “out the back door,” suggesting they might be being sold on the black market.

He was reacting to an account by a mask company executive who said the demand had skyrocketed at one New York City hospital, which they did not name, from 10,000 to 20,000 a week to 200,000 to 300,000 masks a week.

The New York Greater Hospital Association and New York Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo have since pushed back on Trump’s claims…

Trump implied, without evidence, that there was a nefarious reason for the shortage in masks, which states have criticized the federal government for not providing. Meanwhile, nurses and doctors across the country have resorted to re-using protective equipment, accepting donations, buying their own PPE (personal protective equipment) and other workarounds to keep themselves safe.

“How do you go from 10 to 20 to 300,000? 10 to 20,000 masks to 300,000? Even though this is different, something’s going on. And you ought to look into it as reporters,” Trump said. “Where are the masks going? Are they going out the back door? How do you go from 10,000 to 300,000 — and we have that in a lot of different places,” he said, though he didn’t mention any other examples of hospitals that have reported stolen masks.

“I hope I didn’t get any of your clients in trouble, but it could be that they are in trouble,” Trump said, referring to hospitals as “clients” and speaking to the CEO of the mask-production company, who accompanied Trump at the briefing.

While there have been a handful of small-scale reports of people stealing masks, gloves and hand sanitizer from hospital waiting areas or other health centers across the country as anxieties over supply shortages rose, many quickly criticized Trump for seeming to put the blame on hospital workers…

At his daily coronavirus briefing in New York on Monday, Cuomo deflect questions about Trump’s comments, saying, “I don’t know what he’s trying to say.”

“In terms of a suggestion that the PPE equipment is not going to a correct place, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know what he’s trying to say. If he wants to make an accusation then let him make an accusation. But I don’t know what he’s trying to say by inference,” Cuomo said…

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious diseases and a key member of the White House coronavirus task force, said Monday morning that he wasn’t familiar with the issue but suggested that there could be more demand because “many more” patients need them.

“You know, I have not looked at that carefully, so I can’t really can’t comment. I mean, it could be that there are many more patients there that need them and they’re actually not walking out the door, they’re actually being utilized. I don’t know. I mean, that discussion came yesterday. I really didn’t know what was going on. I’d have to check that out later and find out what they were talking about,” Fauci said on CNN…

[Side note: Dr. Fauci’s not long for this administration, and is all too aware of that fact.]

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COVID-19 Update (Domestic) – Sunday/Monday, March 29/30

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New York:

Maine –

Thread, from the Land of Lincoln:

Bleeding Kansas:

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update – Thursday/Friday, March 26/27 (Domestic Edition)

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Required disclaimer: China is almost certainly lying about its stats, which in no way improves ours.

How many Americans have coronavirus? New Reuters poll might offer a hint:

… In the nationwide poll, 2.3% of Americans surveyed said they’ve been diagnosed with the coronavirus, a percentage that could translate to several million people.

Of course, it’s impossible to know if the answers are a result of misinformed self-diagnoses, untested professional diagnoses or test-confirmed infections. But Carnegie Mellon University professor Baruch Fischhoff, who studies risk perception and analysis, said that the poll results shouldn’t be viewed as merely a collective neurotic reaction to the pandemic.

Given the shortage of coronavirus test kits, it may well be a broadly accurate estimate of the extent of the infection across the United States, he said. “It may be the best available data,” he said.

A further 2.4% of those polled said they have been in close contact with someone who has tested positive. And in an illustration of the degrees of separation with the deadly virus, a further 2.6% said they knew someone who has been in close contact with a person who has tested positive.

The poll, which surveyed 4,428 adults between March 18 and 24, shows a dramatic increase in those saying they have tested positive for the virus from a similar poll conducted just a few days earlier. In the Reuters/Ipsos poll of 1,115 Americans conducted March 16 and 17, about 1% said they were infected.

The latest poll also suggests that Latinos are far more likely to come in contact with people who may be infected than whites; the same appears true for younger people compared to older Americans. The disease appears to be concentrated in the Northeast, according to the poll, but the survey also suggests it’s widespread throughout the country…

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Republican Venality Open Thread: Deliberate, Criminal Negligence

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… “Is there sufficient personal protective equipment for healthcare workers who are providing medical care?” the playbook instructs its readers, as one early decision that officials should address when facing a potential pandemic. “If YES: What are the triggers to signal exhaustion of supplies? Are additional supplies available? If NO: Should the Strategic National Stockpile release PPE to states?”

The strategies are among hundreds of tactics and key policy decisions laid out in a 69-page National Security Council playbook on fighting pandemics, which POLITICO is detailing for the first time. Other recommendations include that the government move swiftly to fully detect potential outbreaks, secure supplemental funding and consider invoking the Defense Production Act — all steps in which the Trump administration lagged behind the timeline laid out in the playbook.

“Each section of this playbook includes specific questions that should be asked and decisions that should be made at multiple levels” within the national security apparatus, the playbook urges, repeatedly advising officials to question the numbers on viral spread, ensure appropriate diagnostic capacity and check on the U.S. stockpile of emergency resources.

The playbook also stresses the significant responsibility facing the White House to contain risks of potential pandemics, a stark contrast with the Trump administration’s delays in deploying an all-of-government response and President Donald Trump’s recent signals that he might roll back public health recommendations…

The NSC devised the guide — officially called the Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents, but known colloquially as “the pandemic playbook” — across 2016. The project was driven by career civil servants as well as political appointees, aware that global leaders had initially fumbled their response to the 2014-2015 spread of Ebola and wanting to be sure that the next response to an epidemic was better handled.

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Open Thread: GOP Monsters Assume Everyone Else Is A Monster, Too

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“Just a thought experiment, throwing some ideas around… “

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Who funds the Federalist, and how have they managed to stay out of jail?

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ETA: A Title Would Help

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Here’s a cheery little musical interlude to take our minds off (not really) the horrors around us.

Gallows humor is better than no humor at all, I guess.

In other notes, check out this map of rural hospital closings since 2002–most since 2010, after red states decided they didn’t need no stinking Medicaid expansion. Details here.

And with that, open thread.

Image: Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Man in an Armchair, 1652.

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Grousing & Unpleasant Thoughts Open Thread: Minor Tragedy

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a) He (claims he) feels just fine!

b) He apparently jumped the line to score a test that might’ve been useful to someone actually suffering, because FYIGM (Fvck You, I Get Mine).

Murphy the Trickster God is seldom a subtle plotter, but this is just lazy, Dude.

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Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

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Coronavirus is changing America hugely in the here and now–just look outside.

It’s also true that it will have a lasting impact on the country (and the world), and while prediction is hard, especially about the future, there is one obvious impact that will harm both millions of individual Americans and the long term economic health of the nation.

That would be what’s waiting for students graduating this June into a job market that for all intents and purposes won’t exist–likely for months/years to come.

TL:DR: it’s bad. Really bad. There are serious losses of income and long term wealth that produce knock-on effects on health and social factors in the lives of those who, by no fault or action of their own, happen to come into adulthood at just the wrong moment.

Kids These Days (Are F**ked)

At this moment, we’re diving into what looks like a deep economic disaster that will wreck the dreams of millions of kids just getting started, and we are doing so because the Republican leadership botched both short and long term plans for a predictable event. This is social misery that is about to happen as a direct result of political choices made by Donald Trump and 40 years of decisions by Republican elected officials. We will need to drive that point home, until being a Republican ranks in popular estimation a couple of rungs below refurbished condom retailer.

To our sorrow, there’s a fair amount of research on  the natural experiments we’ve already endured that shwo what starting one’s career in such a moment does to both short term and longer prospects.  In 2006, a paper looking at Canadian college graduates between 1982 and 1999 showed that recessions have a significant impact on new graduates:

Our main results suggest that the average worker graduating college in a recession faces earnings losses that are very persistent but not permanent. On average, a two standard deviation increase in the unemployment rate (roughly comparing the difference between those exiting college in a bust versus boom) leads to an initial wage gap of about 10 percent. This gap declines relatively slowly, and fades to zero after about the eighth year. Controlling for unemployment rate conditions after the first year of labor market entry, we also conclude that virtually all of the wage deficit can be attributed to the unemployment rate variation in the very first year after leaving school.

Graduating at the wrong time affects the shape of careers; timing matters, in that the newest graduates suffer more than those with a toe-hold in the job market; finally, that average 10% loss masks the differential effects by income level. As usual, the poor suffer more (from the non-technical summary):

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Repub Venality Open Thread: FRIST!

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Richard Burr is so crooked that, as used to be said of Nixon, he has to screw his pants on in the morning… but he’s loyal to the Permanent Republican Party, not to Donald Trump, which is why Trump wants his head on a pike right now. Pay close attention to the other Repubs implicated in this scandal, particularly the wife of the chairman of the NY Stock Exchange:

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Not Just America’s Monster; The World’s Monster

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Dear everyone,

We’re so sorry.

(signed)

Every even vaguely moral American.

The above became necessary after this report:

German government sources told Reuters on Sunday that the U.S. administration was looking into how it could gain access to a potential [coronavirus] vaccine being developed by a German firm, CureVac.

Earlier, the Welt am Sonntag German newspaper reported that U.S. President Donald Trump had offered funds to lure CureVac to the United States, and the German government was making counter-offers to tempt it to stay.

…

Welt am Sonntag also quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists’ work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, “but only for the United States.”

Read that last sentence again:

Welt am Sonntag also quoted an unidentified German government source as saying Trump was trying to secure the scientists’ work exclusively, and would do anything to get a vaccine for the United States, “but only for the United States.”

Not Just America's Monster; The World's Monster

Fuck me.

I got nothing.

I suppose I could hope that the anonymous German source is making stuff up, but recent history gives me no confidence that this is the case.

 

And if it’s not, then this is the pure distillate of modern Republicanism. It takes IGMFY to its logical endpoint. I Got Mine
Go Die (Or Pay Everything You’ve Got). It’s disaster capitalism honed to its sharpest point, to be stuck between the ribs of most of humanity.

I wish–I REALLY would hope–to be surprised.

I’m not at all.

This isn’t just Trump, of course. It’s the Republican Party playbook down to the last jot and tittle. The party, and not just this president, needs to be wrecked, its fields salted, its monuments pulled down until history has no memory that such wretched people ever walked the earth.

Open thread.

Image: The Silent Highwayman, a cartoon in Punch, 10 July 1858. (Description: Death rows on the Thames, claiming the lives of victims who have not paid to have the river cleaned up, during the Great Stink.)

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Open Thread: Snark in A Time of Just-the-Flu

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Thursday Morning Open Thread: Chaos Under Heaven

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Trump's Dow Lifeboat Fails - Jack Ohman

(Jack Ohman via GoComics.com)
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Foreign Policy editor in Beijing:

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COVID-19 Coronavirus Update (Domestic Politics) – Tuesday/Wednesday, March 10/11

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Think I’m gonna split this into three parts tonight — look for separate ‘International’ and ‘Informational’ following posts.

This story is getting retweeted a lot, read it for yourself:

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