Boris Johnson is now in intensive care.

Nebraska is still open.

The pretend Secretary of the Navy says his speech to the sailors was fine.

The crew doesn’t seem to have agreed with the pretend secretary.

CNN tells us:

The Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly blasted the now ousted commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt as “stupid” in an address to the ship’s crew Monday morning, in remarks obtained by CNN.

Modly told the crew that their former commander, Capt. Brett Crozier, was either “too naive or too stupid” to be in command or that he intentionally leaked to the media a memo in which he warned about coronavirus spreading aboard the aircraft carrier and urged action to save his sailors.

Who is Thomas Modly? A businessman who has served as Acting United States Secretary of the Navy since November 24, 2019. A whopping four months in the job and the highly relevant qualification of being a businessdude.

“It was a betrayal. And I can tell you one other thing: because he did that he put it in the public’s forum and it is now a big controversy in Washington, DC,” Modly said, according to a transcript of remarks Modly made to the crew, copies of which have been provided to CNN by multiple Navy officials.

I suspect those multiple Navy officials are the real kind as opposed to the businessdude until ten minutes ago kind, and I suspect they are pissed.

In remarks that were piped over the vessel’s PA system, Modly suggested Crozier leaked the memo on purpose or was “too naive or too stupid” to be in command if he didn’t think that sending it to over 20 people would not result in it getting out to the public.

“If he didn’t think, in my opinion, that this information wasn’t going to get out to the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this,” Modly said. “The alternative is that he did this on purpose.”

Modly went on to say it was a “betrayal of trust, with me, with his chain of command.”

That’s an interesting thing to say to that audience in that situation. He’s talking to the people whose lives were at risk because of a massive virus outbreak on the ship, and he’s whining about a betrayal of his trust. Crozier put his crew’s lives first, and Modly is telling that crew how naughty that was. I bet the applause was light and scattered.

A defense official familiar with Modly’s remarks offered his opinion of Modly’s address, saying the acting secretary “should be fired. I don’t know how he survives this day.”

Let’s hope so.

Several senior military officials, including the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, recommended against Modly’s decision to fire Crozier before an investigation into the matter was complete and in the midst of an evacuation, two US officials tell CNN.

The assholes have taken over the ship.

Watch Trump physically prevent Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine.

Trump is still insisting on noisily promoting a drug that’s untested for use against the virus.

Ooh ooh ooh I know the answer to that one. Sometimes the powerful drugs kill things you DO want living within your body and you wind up dead.

Trump knows better than the people who do this full-time after getting the appropriate education.

Interesting how Trump keeps singling out Yamiche Alcindor to disparage and snarl at her. I wonder why that could be.

He won’t of course. He much prefers to insult her from the White House podium.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Worst ever.

Recently I heard a rant by Ben Shapiro. I generally avoid Shapiro, because I don’t like disingenuous little shits who think being captain of the debate club equals having an education, but still, I heard it.

Shapiro was going on about how workers who went on strike were just as bad as price gougers right now, and it struck me.

For years the US has had the most expensive medicine in the world. It has gotten so bad that prior to the lockdown, Americans were going to Mexico to buy diabetes medication.

So when it was not a pandemic, and people will die from lack of medication, Shapiro was absolutely fine with corporations doing the same thing he condemns workers for doing now.

And America has always been kind of stupid when it comes to healthcare. It has always treated healthcare as if it is a privilege, not a social necessity.

One of the things I watched as my country went into lockdown was Pandemic on Netflix, and part of what it went into was efforts to vaccinate migrants.

In December the New York Times reported that several doctors had been arrested during a protest – after they had been refused permission to vaccinate migrants.

In other words, Americans hate the idea of “illegals” benefiting from their tax dollars so much, they’re willing to compromise their own herd immunity over it. Hell, another character highlighted by the documentary was an awful anti-vaxer, who seemed to be a complete narcissistic idiot so focused on her bullshit idea of personal autonomy that she couldn’t fathom the idea of individuals having responsibilities to their communities.

For most of the series, it followed another woman working a 72 hour shift in a rural hospital where she was the only doctor on call. It struck me, they also showed doctors fighting Ebola in the Congo – and there was more than one doctor on duty over there.

American healthcare has been badly neglected for years, so I’m not sure that we can say that an outbreak like Covid-19 wasn’t inevitable. While prior presidents have put together response teams, those rural hospitals kept closing.

Having a response team sounds good and all, but they can’t magic up more hospitals on the spot. The basic infrastructure has been allowed to collapse.

Donald Trump is not only a bad president in and of himself, but an end point to bad decisions going back decades. Decisions driven by the constant need to try and cut taxes, as inflation meant that the stuff government needed to be doing became more expensive.

Everything where the impact wouldn’t be felt immediately, has been neglected and that is something I think somebody is going to have to address. In a lot of ways Donald Trump is everything wrong with American politics on steroids, including the tendency to ignore consequences in favour of short term electoral gains.

Trump is the mudslide at the end of years of erosion, when he leaves office, whether it is after this election or the next one, he is going to be leaving behind a mess. Whether Trump goes down as the worst president in US history is going to depend heavily on whether the next president is willing to go to the expense cleaning that mess up is going to entail.

The longer Trump remains, the worse it is going to be, and the more extreme the action required to fix it is going to be. Can the Democratic Party provide the radical course correction required? And can such a course correction win at the ballot box?

If only it were Trump.

Boris Johnson has been admitted to hospital with coronavirus after suffering persistent symptoms for 10 days.

Downing Street insisted it was just a precautionary measure but Johnson’s admission on a Sunday evening comes after days of rumours that his condition has been worsening.

…

The Guardian was told last week that Johnson was more seriously ill than either he or his officials were prepared to admit, and that he was being seen by doctors who were concerned about his breathing.

But Downing Street flatly denied that the prime minister’s health had seriously deteriorated, and insisted there were no plans at that point for him to be admitted to hospital.

And Downing Street would never lie to the Guardian I’m sure.

But still, I wish it were Trump.

Sad and infuriating:

A California megachurch has found itself at the center of a coronavirus outbreak after public health officials connected it to 71 cases , even as church leaders say they have been unfairly blamed for failing to take action to stop the spread among church members.

County health officials have put Bethany Slavic Missionary church, a Pentecostal house of worship in a suburb of Sacramento, at the heart of one of the largest outbreak clusters in the country. The church is reported to be the largest Slavic congregation in the US, with 3,500 members and a total attendance at some services of up to 10,000.

The county’s public health director said that a third of all coronavirus cases in Sacramento county have been linked to places of worship. As of Thursday, health officials tallied the number of county cases at 350, with 10 deaths.

The pursuit of the phantom god is lethal. Religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, megachurches and “Liberty University” in the 21st.

Seventy-one of the members who tested positive live in Sacramento county, and members who live in other counties may also be infected. One parishioner has died, officials said, and a pastor indicated in an online sermon the church’s senior pastor has been hospitalized and two others are critically ill.

All for a god that doesn’t exist. Tinkerbell doesn’t exist and the god that collects people in groups to infect them with a lethal virus doesn’t exist.

Health officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but the Sacramento county public health director, Peter Beilenson, told the Los Angeles Times it is “outrageous this is happening”, adding that public health guidelines trump the freedom of religious expression.

Beilenson said Thursday that in-person services at the Slavic megachurch have now ceased.

But he said church leaders rebuffed previous attempts to discuss the cases. “They’ve basically told us to leave them alone,” Beilenson told the Sacramento Bee. “This is extremely irresponsible and dangerous for the community.”

Public health officials can’t leave them alone, any more than the fire department could if they were building huge bonfires during fire season. They’re not leaving the people of Sacramento County alone by spreading infection, so the health department can’t leave them alone.

Faith Presbyterian church, also in Sacramento, has had two parishioners die from the virus and a total of five people test positive for the virus, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Forty minutes south, in Lodi, church leaders sent the city a “cease and desist” letter after police entered the church during a service on 25 March, telling authorities the church “intends to continue to meet this Sunday and all future Wednesdays and Sundays”.

No you cease and desist.

Another press briefing campaign rally, perhaps the weirdest yet.

At this stage of the rally, the early stage, he comes across as drunk, exhausted, sick, something – gabbling, slurring, and seeming to talk through a gallon or two of his own drool.

“…when thee brunt of it comes, which is coming quickly, you see it, you see it as sure as you can see it” [rising hand gesture to illustrate “brunt”]

Lots of drunk – slurring – weaving – struggling in this one:

No, people with expertise in researching and testing new medications are going to have to do that.

That one is particularly disgusting. He goes on and on about who stroked his ego enough and who didn’t, as if that were the whole point. It makes me wish I could bash his head in myself.

Yes, “inappropriate” to go public to save the lives of his crew.

It’s true about the bizarre hushed tones. He’s doing the creepy-daddy whisper at this point, and it makes one want to run for the hills.

The long haul:

“I think this idea … that if you close schools and shut restaurants for a couple of weeks, you solve the problem and get back to normal life — that’s not what’s going to happen,” says Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and author of The Rules of Contagion, a book on how outbreaks spread. “The main message that isn’t getting across to a lot of people is just how long we might be in this for.”

Predictions are that a vaccine will take 12 to 18 months, so that’s probably how long.

Long.

Very long.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, agrees that the social distancing measures might need to be in place for at least months. “I don’t think people are prepared for that and I am not certain we can bear it,” she writes in an email. “I have no idea what political leaders will decide to do. To me, even if this is needed, it seems unsustainable.” She adds that she might just be feeling pessimistic, but “it’s really hard for me to imagine this country staying home for months.”

It’s really hard for me to imagine how that can even work, given how many people have zero margin. Robert Reich says 80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, so…??????

It’s okay to be upset by all of this. And there are still a lot of unknowns about this virus, and how it will all play out. Perhaps the worst will spare us. But we still need to prepare for it and tap into our resiliency. Life may feel very hard and very stressful over the next several months. It’s a real burden, and you don’t have to like it. But know: This pandemic will end eventually. What we don’t yet know is when.

Yes but hard and stressful aren’t really the issue, nor is resiliency. Eviction and starvation are the issue. The Vox article, bizarrely, never addresses that.

To the surprise of no one:

JARED KUSHNER’S family real estate company, which owns and manages thousands of apartment units, continued its aggressive eviction practices and debt collection lawsuits as Americans wait for government relief. Well into the coronavirus crisis, which has led to skyrocketing unemployment, court records show properties owned by Kushner Companies are still filing new eviction lawsuits.

No shit. Did anyone think Jared Kushner is any kind of humane or decent person?

At least 15 tenants in New Jersey and Maryland have been on the receiving end of lawsuits from Kushner-owned properties even after both states declared states of emergency. Gov. Phil Murphy, D-N.J., and Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md., have both called for a moratorium on evictions and courts have been closed, postponing hearing dates for a range of debt collection-related activities.

Blah blah blah; Prince Jared wants his money, pal, so pay up or gtfo.

On March 25, Westminster Management, a unit of Kushner Companies, filed a lawsuit requesting sheriff services to enforce an eviction against a man residing at the company’s Harbor Point Estate apartment in Essex, Maryland. Days later, on March 30, Kushner’s company filed a collection lawsuit against another man in the same complex.

The previous week, on March 19, Oxford Arms, a Kushner-owned apartment complex in Edison, New Jersey, filed six lawsuits against tenants. Other lawsuits have been filed in recent weeks against tenants by legal entities tied to the Whispering Woods complex in Middle River, Maryland; the Cove Village complex in Essex, Maryland; and the Pier Village building in Long Branch, New Jersey — all of which are owned by Kushner.

They didn’t get where they are by not being ruthless.

Kushner, whose estimated net worth is around $800 million, has said in the past that he has stepped away from day-to-day management of the real estate firm, though he has not relinquished his ownership stake. Ethics disclosures show that he still receives millions of dollars a year in income from rent collected by his assorted real estate portfolio, including the chain of apartment buildings.

At the same time as he meddles in government activities, because his psychopath daddy-in-law lets him.

Kushner Companies owns a vast array of commercial and residential real estate units around the country. The firm, founded by Kushner’s father, has come under fire for predatory business practices. Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, in a lawsuit filed last year, accused the company of failing to address rodent infestations while forcing tenants to pay illegitimate fees.

The real estate firm’s debt collection practices, which involve hundreds of lawsuits pursuing tenants often for small amounts of debt, have been detailed in reporting in ProPublica and the Baltimore Sun. In the past, Kushner’s attorneys have gone so far as to pursue civil arrest warrants for at least 105 tenants over unpaid fees and rent.

Even if you justify all that by saying landlords need their income like anyone else, it’s still not a good fit with government work, especially not government work in the White House.

Last month, Netflix released “Slumlord Millionaire,” a mini-documentary about the abusive practices of Kushner’s real estate companies. The feature describes Kushner as a “tier one predator,” who has used harassment tactics to drive tenants out of rent-stabilized apartments in New York, while systematically imposing hefty fees on tenants in Maryland. The feature shows tenants dealing with debt collection letters, eviction notices, water damage, mold, fire code violations and shoddy maintenance.

Some prince.

Oh really?

Tests for a virus that didn’t exist until 3 years after Obama’s term expired.

This is an incredible display.

Another campaign rally:

Meaning, he wants it to have some good results.

Yeah the banks. Let’s talk up the banks. They’re the real heroes here.

Also: no we’re not. We’re going to be in a deep deep hole that will take years to climb out of, assuming conditions then allow us to climb.

This is not ending. It will not end for a long time. It for sure won’t end until there’s a vaccine, and that’s projected to take 12 to 18 months. You won’t see any really good things out of this pandemic. Some good things despite it, maybe, but don’t count on it. Trump’s musings are not worth a roll of toilet paper.

Well he is very handsome, wouldn’t want to cover that up.

There he is making the same mistake all over again – thinking that because there are no cases in state X now there never will be.

Still pushing that lie.

No, because then Kushner wouldn’t have contrasted “our” with “the states.”

DARVO again. He’s the one who ought to be in a permanent state of scalding shame.

Daniel Drezner on Trump as toddler:

Trump’s toddler traits have significantly hampered America’s response to the pandemic. They aren’t new, either. In the first three years of his term, I’ve collected 1,300 instances when a Trump staffer, subordinate or ally — in other words, someone with a rooting interest in the success of Trump’s presidency — nonetheless described him the way most of us might describe a petulant 2-year-old. Trump offers the greatest example of pervasive developmental delay in American political history.

Or delay combined with deterioration. He’s always been stupid and ignorant, but word is he hasn’t always been this stupid.

[T]he Trump White House’s inadequate handling of the outbreak highlights his every toddler-like instinct. The most obvious one is his predilection for temper tantrums. Some advisers describe an angry Trump as a whistling teapot that needs to either let off steam or explode. Politico has reported on the myriad triggers for his tantrums: “if he’s caught by surprise, if someone criticizes him, or if someone stops him from trying to do something or seeks to control him.”

Like a toddler’s, Trump’s temper has flared repeatedly as the pandemic has worsened and the stock market has tanked. Multiple reports confirm that Trump was irate with prescient statements in late February by Nancy Messonnier, a senior official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who warned that a coronavirus outbreak in the United States was inevitable at a time when Trump was insisting he’d prevented one by banning travel from China. A report in Vanity Fair quoted “a person close to the administration” saying that Trump was “melting down” over the pandemic. He pitched a fit after his Oval Office address in early March was widely panned. His temper has acted as an obvious deterrent for other officials to contradict Trump’s happy talk about the pandemic: In early March, Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered his overseas commanders not to take any action mitigating the coronavirus that might surprise the president. For Trump’s staff, crisis management revolves around managing the president’s temper, not managing the actual problem.

Let’s read that penultimate sentence again.

In early March, Defense Secretary Mark Esper ordered his overseas commanders not to take any action mitigating the coronavirus that might surprise the president.

So more people will die because the Secretary of Defense is afraid of Trump’s tantrums.

Trump, like most toddlers, also has poor impulse control. Some White House advisers reportedly refer to it as the “shiny-object phenomenon” — his tendency to react to breaking news rather than focusing on more important issues.

He does it in the middle of his own sentences, even (or perhaps especially) when he’s on camera. His own words remind him of something so he veers off, mid-sentence, to say something he’s said 40 thousand times already and is irrelevant to the subject at hand.

Trump’s short, toddler-like attention span has been a problem throughout his administration. One former high-ranking government official told me that a 45-minute meeting with the president was really 45 different one-minute meetings, in which Trump would ask disconnected, rapid-fire questions such as “What do you think of NATO?” and “How big is an aircraft carrier?”

I know one or two people like that. Fortunately, they are not presidents of the United States.

That inability to focus laid the groundwork for the bad pandemic response. During the transition, the Obama administration prepared a tabletop exercise to brief the incoming Trump team about how to handle an influenza pandemic. The president-elect did not participate, and a former senior official acknowledged that “to get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard.”

Oh well at least he’s only the president; not much need to focus on something.

Trump’s inability to sit still has been on display recently. His aides have questioned whether he has the capacity to focus on what will be a months-long emergency. White House staffers acknowledged that the one time he tried to read a prepared speech from the Oval Office was an unmitigated disaster. Multiple reports confirm that he has grown restless while confined on the White House grounds. He has crashed staff meetings because he does not know what else to do.

He could always hold a two hour press briefing/campaign rally.

Ok this one shocked me. One keeps thinking shock has become impossible but they pull the football away again.

The official government webpage for the Strategic National Stockpile was altered Friday to seemingly reflect a controversial description of the emergency repository that White House adviser Jared Kushner offered at a news conference Thursday evening.

According to a brief online summary on the Department of Health and Human Services website, the stockpile’s role “is to supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled, as well.”

But just hours earlier, the text characterized the stockpile as the “nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.”

So the feds are changing wording and policy to keep up with the ignorant and abusive claims of Jared fucking Kushner.

The previous language stated that when “state, local, tribal, and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need them most during an emergency.”

Also stripped from the new summary is sentence that affirmed the stockpile “contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.”

In other words it’s not (or it wasn’t) a matter of “these are ours and we don’t have to share them if you don’t ask nicely,” it was a matter of “these are all of ours, for use in emergencies.” They’ve changed it now to agree with the selfish petulant remarks of a sleazy landlord.

The revisions come after Kushner argued at the White House coronavirus task force press briefing Thursday that the stockpile’s reserves are the property of the federal government.

“The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile. It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use,” he said. “So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.”

That “we’ve” is interesting – Kushner framing himself as the federal government. He shouldn’t even have a job in his wife’s father’s administration, because Congress passed a law against that kind of nepotism after Kennedy made his brother Attorney General. Furthermore he has zero qualifications for any such job. Robert Kennedy was at least a lawyer.

Congress authorized the creation of the national stockpile in the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness Response Act, which passed in 2002, nine months after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

The legislation orders the Secretary of Health and Human Services to “maintain a stockpile or stockpiles of drugs, vaccines and other biological products, medical devices, and other supplies … to provide for the emergency health security of the United States.”

The secretary, the law says, must also “devise plans for the effective and timely supply-chain management of the stockpile, in consultation with appropriate Federal, State and local agencies, and the public and private health care infrastructure.”

This doesn’t translate to “fight with governors and accuse them of stealing supplies.”

Let’s go through The Letter.

Dear Senator Schumer:

Thank you for your Democrat public relations letter and incorrect sound bites, which are wrong in every way.

He manages to dictate the first three words as an adult would, but then the enraged toddler breaks through. The adjective is “Democratic.” The letter was a request to expedite the provision of supplies IN A PANDEMIC – one that threatens the lives of millions or billions of people. It was not a public relations letter, it was a doing government work letter in a dire emergency. Imagine Franklin Roosevelt sending rude childish letters to Republican Senators a few hours after Pearl Harbor. It wasn’t “sound bites,” it wasn’t “incorrect,” it wasn’t “wrong in every way.” That’s a stupid spiteful child talking, not an adult head of state in a dire emergency.

As you are aware, Vice President Pence is in charge of the Task Force. By almost all accounts, he has done a spectacular job.

By most of the accounts Trump is aware of, possibly, but what Trump is aware of is an infinitesimal fraction of what there is to be aware of. In the real world hardly anyone gives an account in which Pence has done a spectacular job. If Pence had done a spectacular job, medical workers wouldn’t be wearing garbage bags and hospitals wouldn’t be desperate for ventilators.

The Defense Production Act (DPA) has been consistently used by my team and me for the purchase of billions of dollars’ worth of equipment, medical supplies, ventilators, and other related items. It has been powerful leverage, so powerful that companies generally do whatever we are asking, without even a formal notice. They know something is coming, and that’s all they need to know.

He sounds like his ridiculous son-in-law prattling about “the best things.”

We have given New York many things, including hospitals, medical centers, medical supplies, record numbers of ventilators, and more.

He talks as if he were the king and the states were his peasants. He’s not “giving” anyone anything; he doesn’t own the “many things” so they’re not his to “give.” He’s not our boss. We’re not his humble petitioners. We don’t have to kiss his ass for providing (let alone for not providing) emergency medical supplies.

You should have had New York much better prepared than you did, and as Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said yesterday, New York was very late in its fight against the virus. As you are aware, the Federal Government is merely a back-up for state governments. Unfortunately, your state needed far more of a back-up than most others.

Says the petulant childish brat who spent weeks telling us COVID-19 was going to disappear quickly and doing nothing to prepare for it.

If you spent less time on your ridiculous impeachment hoax, which went haplessly on forever and ended up going nowhere (except increasing my poll numbers)

People are dying. He needs to shut up about his poll numbers.

and instead focused on helping the people of New York, then New York would not have been so completely unprepared for the “invisible enemy.” No wonder AOC and others are thinking about running against you in the primary. If they did, they would likely win.

Focus. The subject is a lethal pandemic and thousands of deaths.

Fortunately, we have been working with your state and city governments, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, to get the job done.

Is screaming insults for weeks on end “working with”?

You have been missing in action, except when it comes to the “press.” While you have stated that you don’t like Andrew Cuomo, you ought to start working alongside him for the good of all New Yorkers.

DARVO. Trump is the one who refuses to work with people he doesn’t like, and he certainly has not been working alongside anyone for the good of all New Yorkers.

I’ve known you for many years, but I never knew how bad a Senator you are for the state of New York, until I became President.

Most of us neither knew nor cared what a terrible human being Donald Trump is until he became president.

Could someone drop a piano on him now?