Media Matters reported recently:

Fox News host Sean Hannity has stood out among the network’s many misinformers about the coronavirus pandemic. From encouraging viewers to try unproven treatments to downplaying the lethality of coronavirus compared to other diseases to defending President Donald Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic, Hannity has downplayed coronavirus dozens of times on his Fox and radio programs over the past month.

Why? The virus doesn’t distinguish between left and right, so what’s the motivation for a Fox News hack to tell lies about it? I suppose it must be the fact that Trump has made such a dog’s breakfast of dealing with it. Great: so to defend a lying murderous hack, another hack with a huge audience puts people’s lives at risk on his tv show. Is this a sick country or what.

Fox’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has been abysmal — and dangerous. Fox Business fired prime-time host Trish Regan less than a month after she ranted that Trump’s opponents were using the disease as “yet another attempt to impeach the president.” Tucker Carlson has become the face of the network’s racist attempt to rebrand coronavirus as the “Chinese” or “Wuhan” virus in some twisted effort to deflect attention from Trump’s mishandling of the pandemic. Fox’s news anchors and medical commentators have also contributed to the network’s spread of misinformation. And Hannity, who has at least twice interviewed the president about the coronavirus and even appeared in a Fox News public service announcement on the issue, has downplayed the severity of the coronavirus pandemic in numerous ways.

And all for what? To flatter an ignorant rich wannabe-dictator. That’s some life goal right there.

On March 9, Hannity suggested that young, healthy Americans have no reason to fear coronavirus and claimed people were faking concern about it to “bludgeon Trump with this new hoax,” echoing a comment Trump had made at a rally in late February. Two days later on his radio program, Hannity promoted a conspiracy theory about the “deep state” allegedly using coronavirus to manipulate the public. But these are just two of the most egregious things Hannity has said about coronavirus; taken as a whole, his commentary falls into six discernible themes: peddling unproven treatments, comparing COVID-19 to other illnesses or focusing on other ways people can die, defending Trump’s response to the pandemic, blaming the media and journalists, downplaying supply shortages, and attacking local and congressional responses.

All for Trump. The virus isn’t a Democrat, the virus doesn’t vote for universal health insurance or a higher minimum wage, the virus doesn’t pass gun control laws or try to do something about climate change – yet Hannity coddles it and defends it and gives it boxes of chocolate, all for Trump. There isn’t even a political reason any more, it’s just some giant Be More Shitty campaign.

Media Matters provides a long long list of examples.

Get sick and die for Trump, it’s the patriotic thing to do!

Another way the US is not a developed country:

Across the city of New Orleans and throughout the state of Louisiana, in America’s deep south, similar scenes of mourning have played out among hundreds of African American families. Louisiana is among the states hardest-hit by Covid-19, with 755 deaths marking one of the highest per-capita death rates in the country. Seventy per cent of those who have died here are black, despite African Americans making up only 32% of the state population.

This racially disproportionate rate of death has begun to emerge among other states in the deep south, America’s poorest region, where a nexus of intergenerational poverty, a greater prevalence of underlying health conditions, and less access to healthcare are certain to have more pronounced consequences for the black community as the virus proliferates.

Black people in the South and in the rest of the country have been systematically and deliberately kept in that intergenerational poverty since their ancestors were dragged here in chains. Poor people are treated like shit in this country. That’s not “developed.”

“The south has the perfect storm of characteristics to just be a tragic region in terms of the Covid outbreak,” said Thomas LaVeist, dean of public health and tropical medicine at Tulane University.

… The “perfect storm” LaVeist refers to, brews over a region that has almost unanimously – bar Louisiana – declined to expand Medicaid benefits offered by Barack Obama’s signature healthcare legislation, the Affordable Care Act, which would enable millions of low-income southerners access to health insurance.

We treat poor people like shit here.

The drunk child in a bear suit thinks he, and he alone, gets to shout “OPEN IT UP!!” and we all have to obey.

On Saturday night, Trump said a decision to open up the economy was one he alone would make, and would be “the biggest” of his presidency. He has targeted 1 May as the date when the country may begin a return to normalcy, and in a tweet on Sunday morning cited a drop in hospitalisations as “a very good sign”.

He’s wrong on his facts though. The decision is not his alone to make, and in fact it’s not his to make at all. He’s permanently confused about this, with his talk of having “the absolute right” to do things he has no such absolute right to do. It’s a tad embarrassing that he’s never bothered to learn a damn thing about this job he’s pretending to do.

Dr Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious diseases expert, stressed any such move should come only when it was safe and as a gradual process. He also warned of the danger of a resurgence of Covid-19 cases later in the year if things reopened too soon.

“If you just say, ‘OK, it’s whatever, 1 May, click, turn the switch on,’ obviously, if you do it in an all-or-none way, there’s an extraordinary risk of there being a rebound,” he told CNN’s State of the Union. “That could be a real problem. And everybody knows that.”

Well not quite everybody knows that. Trump doesn’t know that.

“When one starts to relax some of those restrictions, we know that there will be people who will be getting infected. That is just reality. The critical issue is to be able to, in real time, identify, isolate and contact trace.

“Obviously, New York, [which] is going through a terrible ordeal, is going to be very different from Arkansas, and very different maybe from some places on the west coast, like Washington state, which have been successfully able to prevent that big spike. I think it’s going to have to be something that is not one size fits all.”

We’ve been able to prevent that big spike? Good on us.

Trump’s Sunday tweet appeared to indicate he was still keen to reopen the country sooner than later, having told Fox News on Saturday night he would seek advice from “very smart people”. Last week, Trump announced he would establish a bipartisan “Opening Our Country Council”.

Nonsense. He seeks advice from very agree-with-trump people. He wouldn’t know a very smart person from a potato on a sunny afternoon.

“A lot of very smart people, a lot of professionals, doctors and business leaders are a lot of things that go into a decision like that,” he said. “And it’s going to be based on a lot of facts and a lot of instinct also. Whether we like it or not, there is a certain instinct to it.”

See? That’s not a smart-people thing to say. That’s a dumb-people assertion. That’s his escape clause. “We’re going to ask some rich guys what they think and then we’re going to do whatever I want us to do, and that will be instinct.”

Least surprising news ever:

Donald Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, which he once dismissed as a hoax, has been fiercely criticised at home as woefully inadequate to the point of irresponsibility.

Yet also thanks largely to Trump, a parallel disaster is unfolding across the world: the ruination of America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner.

Of course, but that long predates the pandemic. It dates from his candidacy. The fact that an ignorant malevolent clown like him could get one of the major party nominations spelled doom for America’s reputation as a safe, trustworthy, competent international leader and partner. (Mind you, decades of warmongering and bullying and human rights abuses didn’t help either.)

Since taking office in 2017, Trump has insulted America’s friends, undermined multilateral alliances and chosen confrontation over cooperation. Sanctions, embargoes and boycotts aimed at China, Iran and Europe have been globally divisive.

Plus…you know…all the rest of it. The children in cages, the children dying on the floors of those cages, the Nazi rallies, the lies, the corruption, the cruelty, the vulgarity, the complete tinyness of it all – it adds up.

Trump’s ineptitude and dishonesty in handling the pandemic, which has left foreign observers as well as Americans gasping in disbelief, is proving a bridge too far.

…

The furious reaction in Germany after 200,000 protective masks destined for Berlin mysteriously went missing in Thailand and were allegedly redirected to the US is a case in point. There is no solid proof Trump approved the heist. But it’s the sort of thing he would do – or so people believe.

It’s the sort of thing he would do, and it’s not the sort of thing an underling would do in the absence of his orders or approval.

Trump’s surreal televised Covid-19 briefings are further undermining respect for US leadership. Trump regularly propagates false or misleading information, bets on hunches, argues with reporters and contradicts scientific and medical experts.

All that but also he just displays his hopeless incompetence, recklessness, self-adoration, bad manners – the whole cocktail of chaotic grotesque not how this is supposed to go clownishness. It’s impossible to overstate how shockingly wrong it all looks. It’s as if an angry drunk toddler on meth in a bear suit were at that podium. Yes, oddly enough, that does make us look bad.

To a watching world, the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.

Indeed, but this too has been true all along, or most of it has. We’re very much an anomaly among “developed” nations; some argue that we shouldn’t even be classified as a developed nation. Mass poverty and grotesque wealth for a few do not combine to make a developed nation.

The Times has a big piece on Trump’s failure to act on the virus promptly.

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

A week after the first coronavirus case had been identified in the United States, and six long weeks before President Trump finally took aggressive action to confront the danger the nation was facing — a pandemic that is now forecast to take tens of thousands of American lives — Dr. Mecher was urging the upper ranks of the nation’s public health bureaucracy to wake up and prepare for the possibility of far more drastic action.

Six weeks. The end of January, all of February, early March.

Unfolding as it did in the wake of his impeachment by the House and in the midst of his Senate trial, Mr. Trump’s response was colored by his suspicion of and disdain for what he viewed as the “Deep State” — the very people in his government whose expertise and long experience might have guided him more quickly toward steps that would slow the virus, and likely save lives.

“Deep State” is code for people who actually know something, as opposed to random gangsters like Trump who know nothing except how to abuse and exploit people. It would be nice if people who know something about pandemics had some influence when there’s a pandemic forming.

Despite Mr. Trump’s denial weeks later, he was told at the time about a Jan. 29 memo produced by his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, laying out in striking detail the potential risks of a coronavirus pandemic: as many as half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in economic losses.

The health and human services secretary, Alex M. Azar II, directly warned Mr. Trump of the possibility of a pandemic during a call on Jan. 30, the second warning he delivered to the president about the virus in two weeks. The president, who was on Air Force One while traveling for appearances in the Midwest, responded that Mr. Azar was being alarmist.

But how would he know that? How would he know Azar was being alarmist as opposed to telling an alarming truth? He wouldn’t. He just didn’t want to hear it, but he couldn’t say “I just don’t want to hear it,” so he said the meaningless thing about being “alarmist.” It’s like being on a plane that’s nosediving toward the ground and calling it “alarmist” to get agitated.

When Mr. Trump finally agreed in mid-March to recommend social distancing across the country, effectively bringing much of the economy to a halt, he seemed shellshocked and deflated to some of his closest associates. One described him as “subdued” and “baffled” by how the crisis had played out. An economy that he had wagered his re-election on was suddenly in shambles.

He only regained his swagger, the associate said, from conducting his daily White House briefings, at which he often seeks to rewrite the history of the past several months. He declared at one point that he “felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic,” and insisted at another that he had to be a “cheerleader for the country,” as if that explained why he failed to prepare the public for what was coming.

Of course. That’s his happy place – on camera, the center of attention, flapping his mouth and hands while spouting bullshit and lies. That’s where he feels like a big deal, and he doesn’t care about anything else.

There was a plan toward the end of February to persuade Trump that strong measures were needed, but it went awry thanks to Trump’s stupidity.

Mr. Trump was walking up the steps of Air Force One to head home from India on Feb. 25 when Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, publicly issued the blunt warning they had all agreed was necessary.

But Dr. Messonnier had jumped the gun. They had not told the president yet, much less gotten his consent.

See first they had to flatter him and kiss his buttocks and give him seven scoops of ice cream.

On the 18-hour plane ride home, Mr. Trump fumed as he watched the stock market crash after Dr. Messonnier’s comments. Furious, he called Mr. Azar when he landed at around 6 a.m. on Feb. 26, raging that Dr. Messonnier had scared people unnecessarily. Already on thin ice with the president over a variety of issues and having overseen the failure to quickly produce an effective and widely available test, Mr. Azar would soon find his authority reduced.

Notice there’s no mention of Trump asking if it was true, just that he raged at the consequences of mentioning it. So if there are nukes on the way and somebody says so and it’s time to head for the shelters, the right thing to do is rage and scream rather than heading for the shelters.

The meeting that evening with Mr. Trump to advocate social distancing was canceled, replaced by a news conference in which the president announced that the White House response would be put under the command of Vice President Mike Pence.

And that was the end of any possibility of doing the right thing.

The push to convince Mr. Trump of the need for more assertive action stalled. With Mr. Pence and his staff in charge, the focus was clear: no more alarmist messages. Statements and media appearances by health officials like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Redfield would be coordinated through Mr. Pence’s office. It would be more than three weeks before Mr. Trump would announce serious social distancing efforts, a lost period during which the spread of the virus accelerated rapidly.

Three weeks. Some number of people are dead because of those three weeks.

Over nearly three weeks from Feb. 26 to March 16, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the United States grew from 15 to 4,226. Since then, nearly half a million Americans have tested positive for the virus and authorities say hundreds of thousands more are likely infected.

Because Donnie had a tantrum on the plane. Thus our lives are determined.

Originally a comment by Claire on For observation.

This is horrifying. Ethically, morally and legally monstrous.

Concern is mounting after a doctor at a Texas nursing home started giving the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to dozens of elderly patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and tracking the outcomes in what he’s calling an “observational study.”

This is not how observational studies work. Any clinical trial, including observational studies, must have a clearly written protocol approved by the relevant IRB. Patient recruitment is done using an IRB-approved consent form. Fully informed consent is legally required. If a patient is unable to consent, they must have a legal proxy to consent for them. Patients or their proxies must be assured that they do not have to consent and that their standard of care will not be adversely affected by that refusal.

Not to do this is a crime, even with competent adults. With what the USG calls a “vulnerable population”, the standards are even stricter in terms of how you consent and treat patients.

I run several clinical studies and I can bore you for hours about trying to construct protocols that satisfy the IRB that the research is ethical, appropriate and safe. This report makes me so angry. He thought he could blow off the reporters by claiming he is running a research study. He is not. In some jurisdictions, this could be considered assault.

In some cases, he did not discuss prescribing the tablets with anyone at all before doing so. He said it is common for physicians to prescribe new medications to patients without explicit consent from the patient or family members. “It’s not required,” he said.

This is a flat out lie. Doctors have the latitude to administer drugs or treatments unconsented only in the case of an emergency when the time needed to obtain consent would endanger the patient. Otherwise, patients have the right to refuse treatment, even when that refusal may result in death or disability. The only thing doctors can do in that situation is advise and ensure the patient fully understands the potential outcomes of all the choices before them.

This is why cancer patients can decide not to continue radio- or chemotherapy. It’s how relatives of a person in a coma from which they are unlikely to recover can decide to withdraw the life support.

Whether or not he is prosecuted (or pardoned), the relatives can sue the ass off the company running the nursing home.

We’re number one!

The US has suffered more confirmed coronavirus deaths than any other country and on Saturday was poised to soon reach 19,000 Covid-19 fatalities, new data indicated.

This is all the more impressive when you remember we don’t have more people that any other country – we’re far behind China and India.

By Saturday afternoon, Johns Hopkins University’s tally of US Covid-19 fatalities was at 18,860. Italy followed with 18,849. The US was also the first country to report 2,000 deaths in a single day, with 2,108 people dying in the previous 24 hours….

Also on Saturday, the New York Times published a devastating report chronicling Donald Trump’s repeated failures over several months to take the coronavirus crisis seriously, and how the president’s suspicion of the so-called Deep State “colored” his response even as the death toll began to soar.

In short, we’re a failed state.

“The shortcomings of Mr Trump’s performance have played out with remarkable transparency as part of his daily effort to dominate television screens and the national conversation,” the Times reported, referring to the president’s rambling and falsehood-ridden press briefings from the White House, which even Republican allies believe are hurting his popularity.

And hurting everything else even more.

One good thing about the virus though: it could give Trump the chance to kill the postal service and thus make voting by mail impossible, which would improve his chances of stealing another election.

Though the novel coronavirus has Americans more reliant on package delivery than ever—including for prescription medications—it has put the future of the U.S. Postal Service in danger. Not distant, far-in-the-future danger, but could-stop-operating-in-June danger. And the Trump administration, which wants to bail out foreign-flagged cruise lines, is saying the postal service is on its own.

“I spoke with the Postmaster General again today,” Rep. Gerry Connolly tweeted Thursday afternoon. “She could not have been more clear: The Postal Service will collapse without urgent intervention, and it will happen soon. We’ve pleaded with the White House to help. @realDonaldTrump personally directed his staff not to do so.”

…

Why is the novel coronavirus crisis such an immediate, life-or-death crisis for USPS, a part of the federal government that is actually written into the Constitution? Mail volume is already down by nearly a third and could be down by half by the end of June. But the origin of the crisis comes from Congress—specifically from a congressional mandate for the USPS to prepay its retiree health obligations decades into the future and from congressional blocks on the postal service doing things like online bill-paying, money transfer services, postal banking, copy and fax services, phone cards, notary public services, and hunting and fishing licenses. There are so many things that post offices, which are located in nearly every community in the nation, could do that would help Americans out by providing affordable services they need, and at the same time the USPS would be strengthened. But Congress won’t allow it. 

And now in the current crisis, Congress would have passed a bill including at least part of what the USPS needs to survive—but Donald Trump wasn’t having it, in part because he’s angry that the postal service doesn’t charge enough to deliver packages for Amazon, which was founded by Jeff Bezos, who owns The Washington Post, which has published stories Trump didn’t like.

You know what else Trump doesn’t like? Voting by mail.

Oh good, human drug testing without consent at a nursing home, that’s not reminiscent of the Nazis at all.

Concern is mounting after a doctor at a Texas nursing home started giving the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to dozens of elderly patients diagnosed with COVID-19 and tracking the outcomes in what he’s calling an “observational study.”

Coolio, can we give untested drugs to him in an observational study?

The Food and Drug Administration has not approved the drug for the treatment of COVID-19. The U.S. National Institutes of Health is currently tracking clinical trials of the drug. Additionally, the University of Minnesota is undertaking a trial and Columbia University is as well. Results are not expected for weeks or months.

But that’s too long, so let’s just let doctors do “observational studies” on the occupants of their very own nursing homes.

The controversial decision to administer hydroxychloroquine at The Resort at Texas City over the last few days was made by Robin Armstrong, a physician and medical director of the nursing home.

“It’s actually going well. People are getting better,” Armstrong told NPR, adding that after just a handful of days, some of the 39 patients on the medication are showing signs of improvement.

And he knows that’s because of the hydroxychloroquine via special doctors-only Insight.

But scientists argue that relying on observational, uncontrolled evidence can be misleading and that the only way to truly prove a drug is working is through carefully controlled clinical trials. And, contrary to Armstrong’s assertion that hydroxychloroquine “has virtually no side effects,” it is known to have serious negative health impacts. That is why so many in the medical community worry about prescribing it without such proof.

…

Armstrong admits it is difficult to quantify how much of his elderly patients’ improvement is due to the malaria drug or how they would have fared without it. Nor can he explain why other patients are not responding to the tablet doses, though he notes many are only halfway through the five-day cycle.

“To be clear, no one is worse than when they started,” he said emphatically. “From my perspective it’s irresponsible to sit back and do nothing. The alternative would have been much much worse.”

So if it’s better to do something than to do nothing, what about giving them Plumber’s Helper? Or motor oil? Or Roundup?

In total, 87 people at The Resort tested positive — 56 of 135 residents as well as 31 staffers. One patient has since died.

…

Armstrong said he was alarmed by the test results last week and immediately began making calls to track down a source for the medicine, which is in short supply.

That’s when his political connections proved useful.

Armstrong, who is a prominent GOP activist, called Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. He says Patrick reached out to Texas state Sen. Bryan Hughes, also a Republican, who knew someone on the board of the New Jersey-based company Amneal Pharmaceuticals. The company, which makes and distributes the drug, has donated more than a million tablets nationwide, including to the states of Texas and Louisiana.

In the trade I believe that’s called not donations but free samples.

“The people who are on it were getting sicker but were not so sick that they had to go the hospital,” Armstrong explained.

He acknowledged that some families were not aware their relatives were put on the drug, saying that “for the most part,” he consulted with each nursing home resident prior to giving them on the tablets.

While the “overwhelming majority of them are awake and alert and can actually have a conversation,” Armstrong said some suffer from middle stages of dementia. In some cases, he did not discuss prescribing the tablets with anyone at all before doing so. He said it is common for physicians to prescribe new medications to patients without explicit consent from the patient or family members. “It’s not required,” he said.

And people in the middle stages of dementia make such awesome experiment subjects.

Armstrong denies he was swayed by politics or Trump’s championing of the malaria drug in his decision to implement it at the nursing home before it has been proven safe and effective against COVID-19.

Really? But then what did make him decide to “implement” it? It can’t have been glowing endorsements in medical journals, because there aren’t any. It can’t have been straight news that reports it working, because there isn’t any. So what was it then?

The most recent comprehensive inspection of the facility by Texas Health and Human Services occurred on July 25, 2019, according to a spokesperson.

At the time, the nursing home was cited for 14 violations of state standards. Among them, the report shows:

The facility did not properly care for residents needing special services, including: injections, colostomy, ureterostomy, ileostomy, tracheostomy care, tracheal suctioning, respiratory care, foot care and prostheses.

The facility did not store, cook and give out food in a safe and clean way.

The facility was not designed, built, equipped or well-kept to protect the health and safety of residents, workers and the public.

Other than that…

Via Beth Rep:

Yasssssssssss that’s definitely an excellent way to make yourself feel more feminine. So is

and

and

At the press briefing rally today.

Oh, no, surely he was being friendly.

So…he doesn’t even remember that antibiotics can’t touch viruses? They must have told him, they must have told him a hundred times, because that’s who he is, but I guess a hundred times he didn’t listen.

The Guardian on Barr’s corrupt campaign to protect Trump and punish anyone who tries to hold him to account:

William Barr has said without evidence that he believes the Russia investigation that shadowed Donald Trump for the first two years of his administration was started without any basis and amounted to an effort to “sabotage the presidency”, he said in an interview with Fox News Channel that aired on Thursday.

The attorney general offered no support for his assertion that the FBI lacked a basis for opening the investigation and made no mention of the fact that the bureau began its investigation after a Trump campaign adviser purported to have early knowledge that Russia had dirt on his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

Plus this is the Attorney General making wild accusations about the FBI, for the sake of an ignorant incompetent corrupt bully who stole the presidency. Normally AGs and the FBI work together, being as how the FBI is a branch of the Justice Department and the AG is its head.

We know the reasons, in a sense; Barr is a very far-right ideologue and he will clearly do anything to hammer the far-right manacles closed on all of us. But still. I still can’t really grasp how functioning adults can tolerate Donald Trump for a single second, let alone work to consolidate his power.

“I think the president has every right to be frustrated, because I think what happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history,” Barr said in the interview with Fox News Channel’s Laura Ingraham.

Really? Up there with the acquittal of the guys who murdered Emmett Till? The framing of the Central Park 5 and the years they spent in prison? Slavery? The expropriation of all Native Americans? Mass incarceration?

The justice department’s inspector general found in a December report that the FBI was justified in opening the investigation to protect against a potential national security threat. It did not find any evidence that the decision to start the investigation was motivated by political bias.

Well Barr isn’t going to let a little thing like that stop him.

Barr has faced previous calls to step down after he was accused of politicizing the position of attorney general, “doing the president’s personal bidding” and damaging the reputation of the department for “integrity and the rule of law”.

So he’s doing that but even more, by way of thumbing his nose at us.

The House is looking into it.

Two House committees have called on the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to turn over documents related to reports that the agency is seizing orders of coronavirus medical supplies from states, as well as the involvement of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in overseeing those efforts.

I wish that said “ordered” instead of “called on.” This shit should not be negotiable.

The committees also requested a response to media reports that that agency was “redirecting” medical supplies ordered by states and hospitals. Officials in at least a half-dozen states have reported that FEMA hijacked supplies sent to states without informing them.

“After encouraging the states to take care of themselves, the Trump administration now appears to be positioning FEMA to engage in the redirection of private supply chains — but the agency’s opaque and evolving processes are clearly not meeting the needs that communities have right now for [personal protective equipment] and medical supplies,” the letter said.

The committees requested documents “to understand” wtf Jared Kushner is doing in all this.

Thompson and Maloney said their committees “do not understand the role” that Kushner is playing in FEMA’s efforts.

That makes 325 million of us.

“It appears that Mr. Kushner is unclear about basic facts regarding the purpose of the Strategic National Stockpile,” the letter said, noting that Kushner “erroneously” described it as “our stockpile” that is “not supposed to be the state stockpiles that they then use.”

Also, he’s a money-grubbing useless little shit, who should be nowhere near even a job keeping the toilets at a National Park clean, let alone managing supplies to deal with a flaming pandemic.

The chairs were also “troubled” by reports that Kushner’s actions could be “circumventing protocols that ensure all states’ requests are handled appropriately.”

“We are particularly troubled that Mr. Kushner’s work may even involve ‘directing FEMA and HHS officials to prioritize specific requests from people who are able to get Kushner on the phone,'” they wrote.

In other words, friends, as in that loathsome little story he told at the press briefing last week about a friend of Donnie’s who phoned and so Donnie phoned him and so he, the Petulant Prince, took care of it, because that’s how important he is.

Kushner has assembled a so-called “shadow” task force filled with start-up entrepreneurs who have “issued orders to health agencies” and sparked “resentment” among federal officials, according to The New York Times.

One senior official described Kushner’s team as a “frat party” that “descended from a UFO and invaded the federal government,” while others criticized the group’s use of private email and free teleconferencing services to discuss sensitive policy issues.

Why the hell would we even need a “shadow task force”? How about letting the full sunlight task force do their god damn job?

Trump has found a reason to love the pandemic.

The US has expelled more than 6,300 undocumented migrants on its Mexico border using emergency powers to curb coronavirus spread, officials say.

…

The measure, initially in place for 30 days, was necessary to limit the spread of the disease in crowded places such as border patrol stations or ports of entry, said CDC Director Dr Robert R Redfield. The US has the world’s highest number of confirmed infections – more than 460,000 – and nearly 16,500 deaths.

A social-distancing move, in other words.

In recent years, most of the people trying to enter the US have come from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, usually claiming to be fleeing poverty and violence.

Combined, those countries have fewer than 700 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 32 deaths, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking the disease globally. Mexico has some 3,400 confirmed cases with 194 deaths.

They have far fewer cases than we do…so this could be seen as sending them back for their own safety. That won’t be how Trump sees it though.

Those being sent back under the CDC order include children arriving at the border alone who would previously be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services to be protected from violence and exploitation. “The disease doesn’t know age,” Mr Morgan said.

However, he rejected criticism that the health measure was being used as an extension of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies. “This is not about immigration. This is about public health,” he told reporters. “This is about putting forth aggressive mitigation and containment measures.”

Could be, but with Trump on the throne, it’s best to be suspicious. Pro Publica and Democrats are being suspicious.

But an internal CBP document published by ProPublica website shows that access to protections such as asylum has been effectively blocked, with exceptions granted only for those able to show a “reasonably believable” fear of being tortured.

On Tuesday, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote a letter to acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf, who oversees border agencies, saying the government’s use of the emergency public health measure was not legal.

“Contrary to existing law, individuals, families and children are now unable to sufficiently make claims for asylum, seek other forms of humanitarian protection, and, in some instances, are being expelled to countries in which they fear p[er]secution,” it said.

The virus is not the only threat to life, even now.

Words fail me.

Pure evil.

[T]he White House seizes goods from public officials and hospitals across the country while doling them out as favors to political allies and favorites, often to great fanfare to boost the popularity of those allies. The Denver Post today editorialized about one of the most egregious examples. Last week, as we reported, a shipment of 500 ventilators to the state of Colorado was intercepted and rerouted by the federal government. Gov. Jared Polis (D) sent a letter pleading for the return of the equipment. Then yesterday President Trump went on Twitter to announce that he was awarding 100 ventilators to Colorado at the behest of Republican Senator Cory Gardner, one of the most endangered Republicans on the ballot this year. As the Post put it, “President Donald Trump is treating life-saving medical equipment as emoluments he can dole out as favors to loyalists. It’s the worst imaginable form of corruption — playing political games with lives.”

He steals life-saving ventilators from a state and then gives them to a political ally and brags about it on Twitter.

The words don’t exist.

I wish I could poison his ice cream and then watch him thrash around in agony.

New examples of confiscations or rerouted orders crop up almost every day. Here’s one about a shipment of test kit materials bound for the PeaceHealth hospital system in the Pacific Northwest seized and shipped, purportedly, to the East Coast. The supplies would allow hospitals like Bellingham, Washington’s St Joseph’s Hospital to do tests on premises and more quickly ascertain who is COVID-positive and who’s not. “Our analyzers remain idle, while we continue to send specimens to outside laboratory testing sites, prioritizing labs based on the shortest turnaround times,” a spokesman for the hospital system told The Bellingham Herald.

For all the confusion, what is clear is that the federal government is demanding that states, localities and hospital systems find their own supplies while systematically interdicting those they do purchase and rerouting them in other directions while providing no explanation of what standards are being used to distribute them. At the same time, Republican officeholders keep turning up announcing windfalls of medical supplies courtesy of the President. In many cases, like Gardner, they’re Republicans within blue or purple states.

Words entirely fail me.

From a New Yorker interview with Fran Lebowitz:

Has this crisis shown us anything about Donald Trump that we didn’t know before?

No. Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him. But the single most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is how unbelievably stupid he is. It’s not the most dangerous thing in someone who has no responsibilities, but in a President it’s the most dangerous thing.

His absolute belief in himself, that is something that is not going to ever change. And he doesn’t care. When people say he’s not showing enough empathy—he doesn’t know what it means. Whenever he uses the word “love,” which he does occasionally, I think of the word “algebra,” because I don’t know what algebra is. I took Algebra 1 four times, because I failed it four times, and I still don’t know what algebra even means. I know the symbols. And that is what love means to Donald Trump.

I think he knows what the word “love” means in one of its senses – he loves fast food, he loves grabbing women by the pussy, he loves insulting people, he loves applause, he loves attention, he loves center stage, he loves a parade. But in a sense that goes beyond personally relishing a treat – no, I think she’s right, he doesn’t get that.

As for empathy – no question, he has no clue what that might be.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba at Miscellany Room 4:

Screechy Monkey wrote:

Actually, following some links from that Pharyngula comments section, the asterisk is supposed to indicate that trans* covers both transsexual and transgender people.

And transfemine, transmasculine, transfemme, transcetera. Like the LGBT… alphabet soup itself, the T keeps splintering into ever more narcissistic subsets. Geek humor: it’s almost like a “recursive” acronym/initialism. Example: GNU, which stands for “GNU is not UNIX.” Ha. Funny, right? No, I’ve never understood the purported humor, either.

Sastra wrote:

I was also unaware of how trans ideology had morphed into the idea that science had done away with the two sexes by introducing a science-based gender identity — and that failure to agree was a form of murder.

That’s exactly how I found my way back here. I checked out of the online atheist/skeptic blogosphere around 2011 when drama was infecting everything. (“Sexual harassment!” “Rapey!” “Racist!” “Sexist!”) I’d mostly ignored the gender-theory stuff. Even when Bill Nye stepped in it with his show, I figured the blow-back was just from right wing religious nutjobs. It was only last year, about this time, actually, that I happened to watch a doc about the Evergreen College affair and read The Coddling of the American Mind.

That spurred research into the efficacy of trigger warnings and safe spaces, which, of course, exposed me to a whole bunch of vocabulary I’d been ignoring. There followed a bunch of youtube searching on pronouns, gender, gender identity, sexual differentiation, and gender identity disorder/dysphoria. Then a slew of hours on JSTOR searching for the same things and related psychological phenomena, etiologies, comorbidities, and treatments. And even more hours digging through philosophy journals for anything vaguely non-gobbledygook explicating the epistemological basis for treating “I feel like an X, therefore I am an X” as an authoritative statement.

The void that stared back at me was an answer all on its own.

So now I’m apparently one of those “anti-SJW bigots” or something, simply because I refuse to convert to Wokism or even recite the Wokecene Creed. On the bright side, it is, at least, a fascinating time to be alive if you’re interested in religion as a phenomenon. We get to see in real time how new religions form, take hold, spread, and gain temporal power. Wheee?

Artymorty wrote:

That’s the problem when a supposedly progressive website prioritizes being “friendly” over the hard work of critical thinking (it’s right there in the blog title): when you turn your brain off and just feel the good vibes, maaaan, it’s very easy to be misled by bad actors. That’s why all those hippie-granola California/Portlandia types keep getting sucked into cults and persuaded by superficial arguments like anti-vax which feel “nice” on the surface but are deeply unscientific and irrational upon critical inspection. There’s nothing rational about prioritizing “friendly” at all costs. It’s actually kinda cowardly, and kinda narcissistic.

If’n you look at ’em, a lot of the responses to Sastra could have been taken verbatim from skeptic-religious discussions. That nominal atheists could deploy them unironically is depressing, since it reveals the sort of lazy cognition that brought them to their atheism in the first place. Rigorous analysis of evidence and argument was not the genesis of their unbelief; following people who gave them goodfeels was.