That other captain is also reminiscent of our current pumpkin head.

The old classics are the best.

Who knew Trump was a fan of mutiny?

So is he identifying with Captain Bligh or Fletcher Christian?

But lots of people are remarking that he’s more like Captain Queeg.

Bligh was actually not the demon the later stories portrayed him as. The mutiny was more about Christian’s reluctance to leave Tahiti than any special brutality of Bligh’s, and several of the mutineers were more forced into it than enthusiastic allies.

Won’t someone please think of the people who need to go to Whole Foods EVERY DAY??

WOW, just imagine, she and her husband are not free to ignore the rules during a pandemic, WHERE IS OUR PRECIOUS LIBERTY?

Especially when the total deaths are 69 and will never go any higher because that’s how this works.

Of course she is asking WHY, she cares about our precious freedom to infect each other, MAKEAMERICAGREATAGAIN

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on This racially disproportionate rate of death.

One of the most disgusting responses to the virus I saw was – The View accusing Bernie Sanders of politicizing the crisis by pushing medicare for all.

Joe Biden sounding very much like he’d veto medicare for all if it ever actually passed the lower houses.

Biden had previously said medicare for all wouldn’t help – just look at how Italy’s healthcare service was over-run.

Well, if you go to Vox and look at their story from two days ago that included charts of infection rates, what you can see from their linear graph is that Italy has handled the virus significantly better than the US, despite both countries having failed to lock down early enough.

The US is handling this crisis uniquely badly, and a big chunk of that is that the US’ healthcare policy is highly fragmented. Because the US is entirely reliant on private healthcare, some insurers are waiving costs for treatment, others are not.

And it required bringing in new legislation to make the tests free, which meant delays on getting sufficient testing done.

So you’ve got a crisis which requires federal action to deal with. Leaving it up to the states means you get stupid shit like giving religious exemption to lockdowns despite the fact that religious gatherings are pretty good at spreading the disease.

It also means that you have big gaps in who has adequate and inadequate medical infrastructure.

And yes, the virus is in rural America.

There is a real risk of creating reservoirs of the virus that reinfect places that took sensible measures, because the handling of it is so fragmented.

So essentially it is fine to politicize the pandemic in order to prevent any action that might conceivably help solve the crisis and mitigate future pandemics, that’s exactly what Joe Biden did with regards to Italy.

But to suggest letting people get free-at-the-point-of-service healthcare under a unified federal system is bad form. There is a disgusting and frankly odious hypocrisy in that.

Now you’ll note I’m hitting the Democratic Party in this. This is because right now the Democrats need to start showing some spine.

If they cannot argue for a more unified approach on public healthcare now, then when can they?

The argument from high costs is identical to the argument against dealing with climate change, and suffers the same problems. The fact is that you’re already paying for the status quo, and you’ve got no guarantees of treatment under the status quo.

Much like climate change, the cost of doing nothing may well be more than the cost of action.

What medicare for all does is essentially migrate how you pay for healthcare to doing it through your taxes. If healthcare costs are destined to balloon over the next decade, they’ll still do that if you’re doing it through the private sector. Doctors will still need to be paid, medicines will still need to be made, if you get sick, you will still need treatment.

Where the savings predicted in medicare for all come in are through economies of scale, you need less administration for one healthcare system versus a whole load of insurance companies, and through savings on drugs due to the fact that a single payer has more negotiation power.

You also have better preventative care, and earlier detection of health problems, reducing the costs of dealing with those problems as a whole.

The US pays more for medication than any other country in the world, and that medication is developed into a commercial product by drug companies, but are actually often discovered by publicly funded universities.

So the argument that the private sector is the driver for new drug discoveries is in fact dodgy.

This is the case that should be being made by what is supposed to be the leftist party in America, yet they are too timid to make it even as the current sitting president is confiscating medical supplies from hospitals.

When Zimbabwe suffered through its economic collapse, one of the things Zanu-PF did was ensure that their supporters got food aid, while the opposition did not.

The fact that you cannot trust the current president not to do the same thing in this crisis means now is not the time to be nice.

There comes a time in which a party has to be able to fight. To stand up and suggest solutions and not back down for fear of getting criticized.

A politician’s job is to politicize things, to suggest political solutions to problems, to debate what action the body politic should be taking, and for far too long and on far too many issues, this has become taboo because that taboo supports the kind of people who buy patents for diabetic medications and hike the prices.

If you’re hiring somebody for a job, you don’t want somebody who is too cowardly to do the job. The Democratic Party needs to do better here, or risk losing to a man who belongs in jail, not the Oval Office.

God’s eye is not on the sparrow.

Pastor Gerald O. Glenn, founder and bishop of the New Deliverance Evangelistic Church in Chesterfield, Virginia, died on Saturday evening after contracting the novel coronavirus, his church announced on Facebook.

Why it matters: Glenn snubbed social distancing guidelines and warnings about the danger of religious gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, even after Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam issued a stay-at-home order on March 30.

Glenn’s wife has tested positive for the virus.

Ashley Parker has a useful summary of that nightmare press briefing yesterday.

President Trump stepped to the lectern Monday on a day when the coronavirus death toll in the United States ticked up past 23,000. He addressed the nation at a time when unemployment claims have shot past 15 million and lines at food banks stretch toward the horizon.

In other words several weeks into the worst catastrophe most of us have ever experienced. Even the war wasn’t a catastrophe for us on this side of the Atlantic the way this one is – in fact for a lot of people it brought jobs that paid a decent wage after more than a decade of high unemployment and basement-level wages. But this thing is disease and unemployment and immiseration. It’s made life for the non-rich, which is most of us, hellish.

So what is Trump focused on? Himself, of course.

Yet in the middle of this deadly pandemic that shows no obvious signs of abating, the president made clear that the paramount concern for Trump is Trump — his self-image, his media coverage, his supplicants and his opponents, both real and imagined.

Not parents of young children who live paycheck to paycheck and have to figure out how to keep their children safe with no schools open. Not people gasping for air in crowded hospitals. Not medical workers sweating and exhausted under masks and visors and gowns working desperately to save the people gasping for air. Not family and friends of people gasping for air, or no longer gasping because they’re dead. Not bus drivers and grocery store workers and people who work for the postal service and UPS and Amazon. Not people who used to work in restaurants and bars who can’t pay their rent. Just him.

“Everything we did was right,” Trump said, during a sometimes hostile 2½ -hour news conference in which he offered a live version of an enemies list, brooking no criticism and repeatedly snapping at reporters who dared to challenge his version of events.

…

At one point — after praising himself for implementing travel restrictions on China at the end of January and griping about being “brutalized” by the press — Trump paused to boast with a half-smirk, “But I guess I’m doing okay because, to the best of my knowledge, I’m the president of the United States, despite the things that are said.”

No, see, that’s just it. The fact that he’s president does not mean he’s doing okay. It means we’re a broken catastrophe of a country.

First Trump made Fauci get up and say he’d misspoken on CNN when he acknowledged that Trump sat on his ass all through February when he should have been taking steps. (Not an exact paraphrase of what Fauci said.)

Next, Trump played a propaganda-style video that he said had been pulled together by White House aides earlier in the day. In a short hagiography more in line with a political event than a presidential news conference, clips critical of the media were interspersed with footage of loyalists praising the president.

One could write a book on what is so disgusting about that.

Shortly after Trump played the video, CBS’s Paula Reid pressed him on how his administration had not used the month of February to ready itself for the coming virus, after sharply limiting travel from China.

“You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals, you didn’t use it to ramp up testing,” Reid said, before Trump cut her off, calling her “disgraceful.”

Which of the two is really the disgraceful one here?

At another moment, seemingly eager to assert his dominance over the nation’s governors, Trump declared incorrectly, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.”

No there’s no reason to assume it’s just that he’s eager to assert his dominance over the nation’s governors. It’s all too obvious that he’s determined to assert his dominance over all of us – all of us in the US and all of us out of it, too, because we’re The Big Cop.

Later, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins followed up: “You said when someone is president of the United States, their authority is total. That is not true. Who told you that?”

I like “who told you that?” It’s so contemptuous. It’s not something you say to an adult, it’s something you say to a child. It conjures up a vision of Pence or Barr or any of Trump’s abject goons Telling Him That while kissing his ass from a kneeling position.

The whole thing was a horror. It was worse than Psycho.

OMG Trump is trending.

Unbelievable.

That is terrifying on so many levels.

Oh, is that a fact. States can’t do anything without the approval of the president of the United States – according to Donald Dimwit.

He’s apparently doing the craziest press briefing rally yet, including playing a campaign video.

It’s fine. It’s fine. I’m sure it will be fine.

Fox News White House correspondent John Roberts reported on Monday that President Donald Trump will soon announce a council to re-open the U.S. economy amid the coronavirus pandemic, a plan that was quickly ripped apart on Twitter.

Is Fox News Trump’s press secretary now? Because if not why is Fox News announcing such things instead of a press secretary or other member of Trump’s administration?

The current members of the council to “re-open America” include Mark Meadows, Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Steven Mnuchin, Larry Kudlow, Robert Lighthizer, and Wilbur Ross, none of whom are experts in medicine, science, or public health.

Also, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner aren’t experts in anything. They’re just crooks, who work for their crook relatives.

Ross, on Jan. 30, said that the pandemic would bring jobs back to the U.S. And on March 6, Kudlow said the virus was “contained.” Those two men, along with the commander-in-chief’s daughter and son-in-law, will comprise a majority of the group charged with what Trump himself has termed the “most important decision” of his presidency — the call to determine when America will reopen.

But here’s the good news: they won’t actually decide anything, they’ll just do whatever Trump screams at them to do.

They’re doing what now?

What do they need a “council” for? Trump just said it’s his to decide, all by himself, with his magic absolute powers.

But if they do need a council…oh never mind, it’s too obvious to bother saying.

There’s always a tweet.

NPR reminds us that Trump declared a national emergency a month ago on March 13.

In a Rose Garden address, flanked by leaders from giant retailers and medical testing companies, he promised a mobilization of public and private resources to attack the coronavirus.

“We’ve been working very hard on this. We’ve made tremendous progress,” Trump said. “When you compare what we’ve done to other areas of the world, it’s pretty incredible.”

But very little of what he promised actually happened.

NPR’s Investigations Team dug into each of the claims made from the podium that day. And rather than a sweeping national campaign of screening, drive-through sample collection and lab testing, it found a smattering of small pilot projects and aborted efforts.

In some cases, no action was taken at all. Target did not formally partner with the federal government, for example.

The remarks in the Rose Garden highlighted the Trump administration’s strategic approach: a preference for public-private partnerships. But as the White House defined what those private companies were going to do, in many cases it promised more than they could pull off.

It’s like socialism turned inside out. Say the capitalists will do the heavy lifting, then look fixedly in the opposite direction while the capitalists do no lifting at all.

Drive-through testing? Nope. Walmart opened two, Walgreens opened two, CVS opened four. Not quite enough to do the job.

The president also welcomed Bruce Greenstein, an executive vice president of the LHC Group, to the microphone.

Greenstein’s organization primarily provides in-home health care, and he pledged that it would be helping with testing “for Americans that can’t get to a test site or live in rural areas far away from a retail establishment.”

NPR called more than 20 LHC sites in 12 states, and none of them is doing in-home testing one month following the Rose Garden address. Employees at the LHC sites said they lacked both testing kits and the training to administer kits.

So Trump gave them a nice free ad, and they’ve paid us back with…bupkis.

There’s much more.

Trump is bullshitting about his Absolute Power to do whatever he feels like doing, again.

It’s not the news media, it’s just reality. He can say “Let it be understood…” all he wants, but that doesn’t make the thing he wants us to understand true. Let it be understood that Donald Trump of Queens is a bumbling blowhard.

It isn’t. He’s not the Universal Boss. He thinks he is, he wants to be, but he isn’t.

Yeahbut who ya gonna believe, the Constitution or Donald Trump?

Now there’s an argument for you. Trans woman Gemma Stone has always leaned Labour but there’s just one problem: all this here transphobia.

A number of transphobes retain their membership despite using the hashtag #ExpelMe to ask to be expelled for transphobia. Many of them support hate groups which almost exclusively push for trans exclusionary policies. While Keir Starmer himself refused to sign a pledge condemning these groups stating he doesn’t want the issue to become a “political football”, two of his fellow contenders in the Labour leadership race did.

The fourth contender who didn’t sign, Emily Thornberry, spoke out in support of trans rights after the event, but said we should be careful about calling things hate groups. Whereas I do agree with the sentiment, I don’t think there’s any difficulty in applying “hate group” to organisations who invariably espouse what many trans people like me perceive as hatred.

There it is: the top class argument. Yes, we should be careful about calling things hate groups, but first we have to stipulate that “hate group” means any organization that espouses what we perceive as hatred. That’s careful enough, surely, and not at all circular.

It doesn’t take much to look at some websites or social media and see they are single-issue lobby groups and nothing else. We are being told to tolerate intolerance just because they themselves say they aren’t bigoted when they clearly are.

A compelling point. All we have to do is look, and we see what I see. They say they aren’t bigoted but THEY CLEARLY ARE I tell you. What more do you want?

Meanwhile, the hate groups themselves are becoming more and more emboldened. This, of course, results in more and more harassment and abuse of trans people online. Every day that politicians dither on the issue, trans people, like me, are forced to face bigotry down on our own.

I wonder if Gemma Stone is aware of abuse of women online and off.

Starmer is right that the issue shouldn’t become a political football but has seemingly failed to understand that the political dithering is itself what’s making it a political football. We need strong and robust support for the human rights of trans people, we need to put the bigots back in their box and tell them they won’t be tolerated.

But what human rights? What are the human rights of trans people that need strong and robust support? Do trans people not already have the human rights that other humans have? There is no “human right” to force other people to accept your counter-factual claims about yourself. That’s not a human right and never can be, because it would make a hash of everyone else’s human rights.

They need to be told they don’t have reasonable concerns because right now the lack of clearly and pointedly telling them “no” is leaving them the open window to assume a “yes” is still on the table somewhere. They need to know it isn’t. Otherwise they’ll just keep coming and trans people will continue to be degraded, abused and harassed. Labour is no place for transphobia. Say it.

Telling them “no” in reply to what? What specifically is Gemma Stone talking about? Why can’t he say?

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.”