I’ve just realized something about this whole situation – something very obvious and that we already knew, but I hadn’t quite noticed the issue before. I was doing yet another self-rebuke, of the kind I’m sure we’re all doing (Trump and the generic trumps excepted): the kind that goes “oh shut up, everyone’s in the same boat, stop whining, just shut up and get on with it”…and I realized there’s nothing to get on with. All we can “get on with” is being passive and hunkered down and distant. All we can psych ourselves up to do is stay inside and wait.
It’s seriously weird to give yourself or anyone else a shake and an order to stop complaining and get to…erm…nothing.
Not very inspiring, is it.
I just want to underline this, even though I said it yesterday when he did the press rally. ABC News reports:
Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents.
The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.
Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,’ one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. ‘It was then briefed multiple times to’ the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House.
November. Huh.
The Guardian, quoting this story, comments:
This news follows reports that Trump’s top trade adviser, Peter Navarro, wrote memos starting in late January warning of a potential coronavirus pandemic with catastrophic consequences for Americans’ health and finances.
The president claimed yesterday that he had never seen Navarro’s memos, but their existence undermines his defense of the federal government’s early response to the pandemic, which has been widely criticized.
Here’s what I want to underline: Trump seems to think that claiming he never saw the memos lets him off the hook. It does the opposite. It’s his job to see them, and to take them in and understand their meaning and act accordingly. That’s what he’s there for. That’s the job he decided to go after, and it is his obligation to do it. He swore an oath to do it. He’s not there to compose angry stupid tweets and shout at reporters and tell evil lies. He’s there to read the memos and do what needs to be done. His claim that he never saw them is simply an admission that he’s not even slightly doing the job he swore an oath to do.
More glorious Trump in his glory.
Why is he doing that? Because “they missed the call. They coulda called it months earlier, they woulda known, and uh…they should of known, they probably did know, so we’ll be looking into that very carefully.”
Yes, it’s the WHO that knew about the pandemic and did nothing. Not Donald Trump, no no, the WHO.
“He made a mistake, he had a bad day.” Yes, it’s a mistake to try to get your crew off a ship infected with a deadly virus.
I’m sure he didn’t, but why is that?
Trump doesn’t find it awkward though. Trump doesn’t find anything awkward. Trump doesn’t know what “awkward” is.
MediaMatters on Kayleigh McEnany:
In Donald Trump’s White House, dishonesty and antagonism toward the press are requirements for the press secretary. And considering those requirements, no one is better suited for the job than former CNN commentator and Trump 2020 campaign spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany.
This all by itself is an out of the Nazi playbook type of thing. It’s reminiscent of the Museum of Decadent Art: appoint people “press secretary” who are dedicated liars who despise real journalism. It’s bad in itself and it’s also a poke in the eye to everyone who isn’t a monstrous liar and misanthrope.
McEnany has a long history of defending anything Trump says, no matter how brazen the lie may be. She couples that deceit with attacks on any source of information that is not Trump-approved.
And this isn’t just normal Partisan Bickering, or even intensified Partisan Bickering – it’s nihilistic destructiveness.
Recently, CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski pointed out on Twitter that McEnany said during the February 25 edition of Trish Regan’s now-cancelled Fox Business show, “We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn’t it refreshing when contrasting it with the awful presidency of President Obama.”
Yes, our current situation is so refreshing.
In response to Democrats calling for Trump to do more to protect the country from coronavirus, McEnany wrote a Fox News op-ed on March 1 saying, “President Trump has proven himself the professional – the adult in the room as Democrats act like small children, incapable of stepping up to the task at hand and certainly incapable of leading the nation.”
And much more in the same vein.
Another sudden dunking in the pool of shit.
Her profile says she’s the national press secretary for Trump’s campaign, and it cites Phil 4:6, so I looked up Phil 4:6.
Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.
In other words, don’t bother Trump, just ask god for help.
Kyle Cheney and Connor O’Brien on Trump’s attack on the people overseeing the pandemic response:
President Donald Trump has upended the panel of federal watchdogs overseeing implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus law, tapping a replacement for the Pentagon official who was supposed to lead the effort.
…
Fine’s removal is Trump’s latest incursion into the community of independent federal watchdogs — punctuated most dramatically by his late Friday ouster of the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.
You know, if they’re really independent watchdogs, it should be impossible for the president to get rid of them.
Trump has also begun sharply attacking Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, following a report from her office that described widespread testing delays and supply issues at the nation’s hospitals.
“Another Fake Dossier!” Trump tweeted, mentioning Grimm’s tenure as inspector general during the Obama administration. He didn’t mention, though, that Grimm has been serving as a federal watchdog since 1999, spanning administrations of both parties.
So fucking scary. His rancid hide comes before everything, including the survival of 327 million people.
Trump’s targeting of Atkinson drew an unusual rebuke from Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Justice Department who also oversees a council of inspectors general. Horowitz said Atkinson handled the whistleblower matter appropriately and defended the broader IG community.
“The Inspector General Community will continue to conduct aggressive, independent oversight of the agencies that we oversee,” he said in a statement after Atkinson’s ouster. Atkinson, too, issued a lengthy statement Saturday accusing Trump of removing him for following whistleblower laws.
But nobody can stop him, apparently.
He’s going to kill every last one of us.
Trump keeps saying nobody knew. People did know. People around him knew, and they told him.
On Tuesday, Axios published internal White House memos that make the statements from President Donald Trump downplaying the coronavirus before it became a full-blown crisis look even more willfully ignorant.
[In] A February 23 memo labeled as a “MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT” sent through the National Security Agency, then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the Covid-19 task force warns in its very first sentence that “[t]here is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”
Three days later, however, Trump held a news conference in which he suggested the coronavirus would soon go away on its own in the United States.
“When you have 15 [coronavirus cases], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” Trump said.
This is the problem with putting a conceited ignorant corrupt incompetent in the White House.
The memo said stock up on ventilators and PPE now, as a matter of urgency. Trump of course never read it, because he never reads anything.
The Associated Press’s Michael Biesecker reported on Sunday that a review of federal purchasing contracts “shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.”
“By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile,” Biesecker added. When asked about the federal government’s slow response, Trump’s line has been that the states should have done more on their own.
…
Then, during a Fox & Friends interview on March 30, Trump said of the coronavirus pandemic that “nobody could have predicted something like this.” But the memos indicate Trump’s own advisers had not only anticipated it but tried to warn him about it.
Nobody could have except everybody.
Arwa Mahdawi on the Kushner threat:
On Thursday, Kushner, who has taken on vast responsibilities in the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19, made his first public appearance at the White House daily coronavirus briefing. His moment in the spotlight seemed to serve as a wakeup call for the US. All of a sudden, it was glaringly obvious how dangerous Kushner’s hubris is…
…Kushner was supposedly at the press briefing to explain the work he has been doing. However, despite him repeating the word ‘“data” 13 times, it quickly became clear that he has no idea what he is doing. He doesn’t even seem to know what the purpose of a federal stockpile of medical equipment is. “It’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he explained haughtily to reporters. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”
…
During his 39 years on Earth, Kushner has continuously failed upwards. Despite being an unremarkable student, he got a place at Harvard; according to spokespeople for Kushner Companies, this was unrelated to his dad giving $2.5m to the university. After buying a skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market, Kushner was miraculously bailed out by a company with links to the government of Qatar – just months before a potentially ruinous $1.4bn mortgage was due. Wherever Kushner is, questionable deals, questionable ethics and a crowd of yes men seem to follow. The world is constantly remade to reflect the reality that he wants to see. Indeed, shortly after the backlash to Kushner’s comments about the federal stockpile, the government’s website appeared to change to more closely reflect Kushner’s assertions.
And the stakes have risen.
Horribly sad and also terrifying.
Major supermarket chains are beginning to report their first coronavirus-related employee deaths, leading to store closures and increasing anxiety among grocery workers as the pandemic intensifies across the country.
You can see how it’s both. Horribly sad for the workers and terrifying for all of us (the workers included) because how will we get food.
A Trader Joe’s worker in Scarsdale, New York, a greeter at a Giant store in Largo, Maryland, and two Walmart employees from the same Chicago-area store have died of covid-19 in recent days, the companies confirmed Monday. In March, a Seattle neighborhood grocer died from the effects of COVID-19.
Though more than 40 states have ordered nonessential businesses to close and told residents to stay home to stem the spread of the virus, supermarkets are among the retailers that remain open. Thousands of grocery employees have continued to report to work as U.S. infections and death rates continue to climb, with many reporting long shifts and extra workloads to keep up with spiking demand. Many workers say they don’t have enough protective gear to deal with hundreds of customers a day. Dozens of grocery workers have tested positive for the coronavirus in recent weeks.
They should be getting hazard pay.
Another rally.
Yes. That’s right. It’s like movies. War isn’t actually a real thing, with real bullets and explosions and death and mutilation, it’s a thing you watch, with suited up guys running up hills. Then you have cookies and milk and go to bed.
Bit of a discrepancy there.
It always does.
I wish we had a fair president. We really don’t.
Shouldn’t be allowed to win. Interesting concept. I wonder what he has in mind.
Welllll, more than 100 billion a year is kind of like nothing. Not that different.
Johnson and his people have been lying a blue streak.
There was a rumor on Thursday that he was on the point of going into hospital, but they denied it.
Johnson’s aides were emphatic. His condition had not deteriorated, he still had only “mild symptoms”, he hoped to be at work from Friday when his coronavirus isolation period was up – and he had not been admitted to St Thomas’ hospital for treatment. When on Monday evening it emerged that contrary to reassurances about him getting on with his red box, he was being admitted to intensive care, the denials were coming under increasing scrutiny.
FDR and polio. Kennedy’s extremely bad health and addiction to uppers. Reagan’s dementia. Woodrow Wilson’s stroke. They keep doing this.
Thursday lunchtime, having denied the first round of rumours about St Thomas’, Downing Street floated the idea that Johnson might not be back at work on Friday as planned if his temperature remained high.
A cough was not mentioned, but his official spokesman told a daily briefing with journalists that he would only go back to work the next day if his temperature came down.
That evening at 8pm, despite his isolation, the prime minister appeared at the door of No 10 to applaud the work of NHS workers. Despite the appearance, the health rumours did not go away: St Thomas’ was on standby because Johnson’s condition had worsened, the first source insisted – only for Downing Street, when pressed, to deny that he was about to be admitted that night.
On Friday lunchtime, the situation began to unravel. An unkempt, gravelly-voiced and clearly unwell Johnson released a video in which he said, somewhat implausibly, “I’m feeling better,” before conceding he could not fully return to work. “Alas, I still have one of the symptoms, a minor symptom, I still have a temperature,” he insisted.
That’s ok, it’s none of our business if heads of government are dropping like flies, we just work here.
Shortly before 8.30pm on Monday, further news came: the prime minister had been admitted to intensive care at St Thomas’ 90 minutes earlier.
Several sources say Johnson has required oxygen to help with his breathing following his admission to hospital – an assertion that was not denied by Downing Street – although his official spokesman said that Russian reports that he was on a ventilator were “disinformation”.
He’s not on a ventilator yet.
Some Conservative MPs are worried that Downing Street’s evasiveness on the seriousness of the prime minister’s condition will undermine trust in what they say going forward.
Ya think?
NHS workers could do worse than examine the experience of another London hospital during the Spanish influenza pandemic just over 100 years ago. Today, that hospital is named St Charles and offers walk-in care at the northern end of Ladbroke Grove, Kensington. But in 1918 it was known as St Marylebone Infirmary and had 744 beds for the “sick poor”, many of whom had tuberculosis and other chronic lung conditions.
In October 1918, as a second wave of Spanish influenza spread across Britain, its wards were inundated with pneumonia cases…
“All training, and indeed every sort of trimming, went by the board,” Hood recalled in his notebook 30 years later. “The staff fought like Trojans to feed the patients, scramble as best they could through the most elementary nursing and keep the delirious in bed!”
The timing was bad because around half of all trained nurses were in military service.
“Each day the difficulties became more pronounced as the patients increased and the nurses decreased, going down like ninepins themselves,” Hood wrote. “Sad to relate some of these gallant girls lost their lives in this never-to-be-forgotten scourge and as I write I can see some of them now literally fighting to save their friends then going down and dying themselves.”
Hood made the nurses wear lint masks and advised them “not to interpose their faces too near the blast of those coughing”. But when it came to tending to a fellow nurse, many refused to wear the masks for fear of distressing their colleague.
In the case of one nurse, Hood noted: “Nothing I could do or say had the slightest effect in influencing her to diminish the risks to herself. She was consumed with a burning desire to save her … inevitably, the nurse developed a lung infection, dying soon after the woman she had been nursing.”
By December, Hood was exhausted and went on sick leave. When he returned in February, the epidemic was still raging and two more nurses had died, bringing the fatalities to nine.
“One poor nurse, I remember, with a terribly acute influenzal pneumonia, became so distressed she could not stay in bed and insisted on being propped up against the wall by her bed until she was finally drowned in her profuse, thin blood-stained sputum.”
Not something to look forward to.
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.
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.
