Reaction to Jared Kushner’s new role as replacement for Anthony Fauci is not universally ecstatic.
The president has been very hands on the microphone, the podium, other people, but he has not been busy responding to the pandemic.
Very hands on, but only starting 13 days ago. And not very hands on.
And did he come across as an empty suit? Yes he did.
Oh wait, it turns out Kushner is totally qualified to save us from the pandemic.
Data, models, decisions, informed, people, focused, things, deliver, teams, barriers, lines of effort.
It’s a fucking pep talk. From Howdy Doody.
The Navy announced it has relieved the captain who sounded the alarm about an outbreak of COVID-19 aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Capt. Brett Crozier, who commands the Roosevelt, an aircraft carrier with a crew of nearly 5,000, was relieved of his command on Thursday, but he will keep his rank and remain in the Navy.
Crozier raised the alarm earlier this week that sailors on the ship need to be quarantined to stop the spread of the virus. His plea for assistance quickly made headlines.
And we can’t have people stopping the spread of the virus, so get him out of that command.
The move was announced in a briefing by Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly Thursday evening. The official reason for Crozier’s relief of duty is a loss of trust and confidence, according to the officials who spoke to NBC News
I have zero trust and confidence in the people who did this.
Nancy LeTourneau explains why many journalists were suckered into thinking Trump had changed simply because he managed to pretend to be serious for a few minutes on Tuesday.
It is infuriating to watch political reporters get sucked into the nonsense delivered by this president over and over again. But David Roberts recently described why that happens.
Ask someone who’s been in an abusive relationship with a malignant narcissist. One reason they’re able to maintain appearances/jobs/etc. is that they are relatively rare & unusual & the normal people around them simply can’t absorb that they are what they are…They try again and again, thinking there must be normal human intentions & emotions in there somewhere. It’s just remarkable how far someone w/out shame or conscience can get by exploiting this cognitive/emotional blindspot.
I do it myself. I can’t help continuing to think – despite knowing better – that if someone sat him down and explained to him (there would have to be a gag in his mouth) what an evil monstrosity he is, he would get it. That’s ludicrous, but it seems to be deeply wedged into my thinking process.
When Roberts writes about how we keep trying to see normal human intentions and emotions in someone who has never exhibited them before, it is because projection isn’t merely a matter of assuming that others are capable of our worst instincts. In general, we tend to project all of our responses onto others in an attempt to understand their actions. Since most of us aren’t malignant narcissists, it is difficult for us to grasp the levels of depravity exhibited by those who are.
It is. I can’t seem to do it despite knowing it. I know it and I don’t know it. If I really knew it, knew it all the way down, I would just ignore him. I can’t just ignore him, so clearly I don’t know it in that way. I want him to realize what a shit he is, and I guess wanting that makes it impossible for me to internalize the awareness that he never will because he’s not made that way.
Juxtaposition.
Six hours ago:
Soon after tweeting that, he retweeted this:
On the one hand he calls the Democratic Senate minorily leader “Cryin’ Chuck” and accuses him of complaining, and on the other hand he shares someone claiming that he doesn’t care if you’re a Democrat or a Republican.
I beg to differ.
Well then we’re all doomed.
Dozens of Trump administration officials have trooped to the White House podium over the last two months to brief the public on their effort to combat coronavirus, but one person who hasn’t — Jared Kushner — has emerged as perhaps the most pivotal figure in the national fight against the fast-growing pandemic.
Jared Kushner is not a person you want as the pivotal figure in a pandemic.
I put that with careful, jaw-clenching restraint.
What started two-and-a-half weeks ago as an effort to utilize the private sector to fix early testing failures has become an all-encompassing portfolio for Kushner, who, alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government: Expanding test access, ramping up industry production of needed medical supplies, and figuring out how to get those supplies to key locations.
How are we defining “experts” here? Are they experts in what’s needed in a pandemic, or in extracting profit from whatever situation they find themselves in? We need the former more than we need the latter.
Kushner’s group, which some have characterized as an “all-of-private-sector” operation in contrast to Vice President Mike Pence’s “all-of-government” task force, has had its successes – including airlifting emergency medical supplies to the United States, crowdsourcing mask and glove donations, and rapidly devising a last-ditch plan for hospitals to maximize ventilators.
But the behind-the-scenes working group has also duplicated existing federal teams and operations, and its focus on rapid, short-term decisions has created concern among some health-agency officials, according to interviews with 11 people involved in Kushner’s effort, including senior government officials, outside advisers and volunteers on the projects, as well as other health department and White House officials.
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“You can’t have enough good smart people working on a problem of this scale,” said Andy Slavitt, who helped lead the Obama administration’s 2013-2014 HealthCare.gov repair effort and is now advising on Kushner’s coronavirus response. “But they have to be organized with a clear chain of command.”
And they have to be good smart people. What reason is there to think Kushner is either good or smart?
[T]he effort’s makeshift nature has unnerved even some recruited to aid Kushner’s team, who described it as a process unlike any other traditional disaster response. Kushner’s team has stepped in to coordinate decision-making at agencies including the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the scope of his authority now exceeds that of Health Secretary Alex Azar, the one-time leader of Trump’s coronavirus response.
He’s the criminal and corrupt president’s son-in-law. Before that he was a slum landlord. None of this bodes well.
About those naughty medical workers with their “insatiable appetites” for the tools to save our lives – Politico has a jolting story:
Last week, a Trump administration official working to secure much-needed protective gear for doctors and nurses in the United States had a startling encounter with counterparts in Thailand.
The official asked the Thais for help—only to be informed by the puzzled voices on the other side of the line that a U.S. shipment of the same supplies, the second of two so far, was already on its way to Bangkok.
Oops. The shipment was put on hold (which I guess means told to bob around in the ocean) while the geniuses in the Trump administration figured out how to cover their asses aka “what went wrong.”
The heightened scrutiny comes as American health care workers complain of severe shortages of masks, goggles and gloves amid a nationwide spike in coronavirus cases, and as Democrats rip the administration for shipping aid to other countries while vastly underestimating America’s own needs.
Foreign aid is a good thing, both inherently and instrumentally, but at the same time it’s more than a little pointless to send supplies Over There while ordering in supplies from Over There. Cut the duplication of effort, I would suggest. Also…talk to each other. Find out who is sending what where, and co-ordinate.
There is bipartisan agreement on the need to resupply American hospitals and take care of domestic shortages first. But the issue is tricky: Other countries’ ability to fight the virus directly affects the U.S.—an infected man from Wuhan, the sprawling capital of Hubei province in China, is believed to be the first to bring the novel coronavirus to American shores in January—and millions of Americans work, serve, and study overseas in countries that have been hard hit.
Point taken, but at least co-ordinate, and also tell Trump to shut the fuck up with the blaming medical workers for needing equipment.
H/t What a Maroon
Jennifer Rubin at the Post compares Trump to governors like Newsome and Cuomo:
If you watch New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or most every other governor (except the bumbling Ron DeSantis of Florida) at his or her daily news conference, you will see someone in command of the facts (e.g., number of infected patients, number of beds, number of ventilators, number of discharged patients) and with a clear sense of mission.
On Wednesday, Newsom rattled off lines like this: “Again, the prioritization of our day in date discussion interaction is the issue of hospitalizations and ICU beds. Roughly hospitalizations to ICUs are running about 41, almost 42%. You extrapolate that out based on the graph that was just provided in the model, we’ll exceed that phase one surge capacity of 50,000 somewhere in the middle part of May, and if you get up to about 66,000, that’s based upon our current modeling, we’re looking about 27,000 ICU beds that we’ll need to procure in this state.” Just imagine — no, you can’t do it — President Trump displaying that mastery of information.
A Trump who could do that wouldn’t be Trump.
The contrast between the governors’ level of sophistication and Trump’s abject ignorance manages to still shock and appall us. On Wednesday, Trump explained how his thinking on covid-19 had changed. “The severity,” Trump said. “I think also in looking at the way that the contagion is so contagious, nobody’s ever seen anything like this where large groups of people all of a sudden have it just by being in the presence of somebody who has it. The flu has never been like that. . . . Also the violence of it if it hits the right person.” The contagion is so contagious. That’s the president of the United States.
Always with the idiot mind-blind “nobody’s ever seen anything like this” when all he means is that he hasn’t seen it before and hasn’t been paying attention for the past three months.
You would think the president and vice president’s abject ignorance would be a source of embarrassment. Nope. They are locked in the right-wing media disinformation bubble. They find out details under duress. Only when things go very badly and their experts are forced to confess bad news do they grudgingly move into the real world. The change in “tone” that too many gullible reporters coo about is the point at which Trump’s lies, disinformation and self-delusion can no longer be sustained. No wonder he looks deflated.
Let’s hope he deflates all the way and we never hear his voice again.
They should have been prepared, says the evil maggot who was not prepared.
But isn’t he the guy who sent medical supplies to China without replacing them? Wasn’t he a tad unprepared?
Yes, he was.
It is also true that on Feb. 7, 2020, while critics contended that the Trump administration was doing relatively little to prepare for the coming pandemic in the U.S., the State Department announced it had facilitated “the transportation of nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies to the Chinese people, including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials” in order to help “contain and combat the novel coronavirus”.
Humanitarian relief is a good thing, but so is keeping supplies ready at home during a raging pandemic.
Evil maggot outdoes himself.
I wish someone would douse him in gasoline and throw a match.
Ahh theodicy, just what we need to distract us from pandemics and Trump telling the world he’s Number Wun on Fasebook.
Dude’s a theologian according to his profile. Ok so a theologian to theodicy is like infectious disease specialists to the coronavirus, yeah?
No, because there is no coronavirus equivalent in theodicy. There is no thing to know; there is no body of knowledge to master; there is no evidence to bring to bear. The theo of theodicy is a human invention, so expertise about it is like expertise about a literary character. You can know a lot about what people have said about the literary character, and a lot of opinions about what the author meant by the character, but you can’t have the equivalent of knowledge about how a virus operates. It’s not the same kind of thing.
So, sure, there could be things theologians have said that would make a kind of sense of a god who sent pandemics to kill millions of people. A kind of sense, because you have to accept a lot of very dubious premises first, but still something. But is it a kind of expertise that mere civilians shouldn’t try to challenge?
No. No, because “God” is also the god of the pews who tells people what to do, and we all need to be free to challenge that god and what the priests say about it.
Anyway…I for one am not “telling God how to deal with evil”; I’m telling godbotherers that their god is evil. The god is supposed to be in a position to tell us what to do, so there shouldn’t be professional-credential obstacles to saying why that god 1. doesn’t exist and 2. is a shit.
Malaysia has the largest number of COVID-19 cases in Southeast Asia with more than 2,900 and counting.
Oh dear, what to do – I know, tell women to stop being such bitches.
Malaysia’s Ministry for Women, Family and Community Development issued a series of online posters on Facebook and Instagram with the hashtag #WomenPreventCOVID19. It advised the nation’s women to help with the country’s partial lockdown by not nagging their husbands.
That’s right. If he drops his clothes on the floor when he takes them off it’s her job to pick them up, not “nag” him to put them in the laundry bag or even – gasp – do the household laundry.
The ministry also advised women to refrain from being “sarcastic” if they asked for help with household chores. And it urged women working from home to dress up and wear makeup.
And to wear catch me-fuck me shoes, and a thong, and nothing else.
“(It) is extremely condescending both to women and men,” Nisha Sabanayagam, a manager at the advocacy group All Women’s Action Society, told Reuters. “These posters promote the concept of gender inequality and perpetuate the concept of patriarchy.”
Also the concept that men should never do anything useful at home no matter how much time they spend there or how hard women are working.
H/t What a Maroon
The Grand Canyon remains open to visitors despite pleas to close it.
Calls mounted Tuesday for the federal government to close Grand Canyon National Park after the popular tourist destination saw its first case of the coronavirus in a hospitality worker.
…
Members of Congress and city, county and tribal officials have urged the federal government to approve a request from the park to close amid concerns that social distancing can’t be maintained.
“We understand that closing an iconic destination like the Grand Canyon is not an easy decision, but we implore you to do everything in your power to prioritize public health and not interfere with locally informed decisions to close parks where appropriate,” members of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources wrote to the Interior Department.
So what’s the Interior Department doing? Counting the take? Watching Fox News? Stockpiling toilet paper?
The Navajo Nation also renewed a request for the park to close. Anyone headed to the park’s East Rim must drive through the tribe’s reservation, which has seen five deaths and nearly 150 coronavirus cases.
It’s smallpox blankets all over again.
The Park Service has been deciding whether to shut down individual sites on a park-by-park basis, in consultation with state and local health officials. Neither the Interior Department nor the Park Service immediately responded to requests Tuesday on the status of the Grand Canyon’s request.
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Several of the country’s most popular national parks have closed, including Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Great Smoky Mountains, Glacier, Arches and Canyonlands. Some of those calls were made at the request of governors and health officials in those states.
In Arizona, Gov. Doug Ducey has listed parks, golf courses and other outdoor recreation areas as essential. A spokesman did not immediately return a message Tuesday asking whether the governor would support closing the Grand Canyon.
At first I was taken aback by the golf courses exception, but then I remembered that social distancing is pretty easy with golf, so maybe that’s not entirely absurd. Getting outside is good, and maybe golf courses can play a role there.
But the Grand Canyon is a place where people cluster at the viewpoints. Shut’er down.
Updating to add: yes the Grand Canyon is big, no that doesn’t mean you can allot an equal share of its total space to each visitor. As I said, people cluster at the viewpoints.
As always, women take the hit.
The “stay home, stay safe” mantra against the coronavirus is having dreadful — and even deadly — consequences for women in Turkey, where, activists warn, measures to contain the outbreak are exacerbating the rampant problem of femicide and domestic violence in the country.
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At least 18 women have been killed across Turkey, 12 of them at home, since March 11, when Ankara confirmed its first COVID-19 case, according to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, a civic group dedicated to fighting violence against women. The killers included spouses, partners, ex-husbands and ex-partners as well as male relatives of the victims, the platform’s tally shows.
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About 470 women were killed in Turkey last year, at least half of them by husbands, partners, exes and male relatives, the platform says.
If something goes wrong, attack the nearest woman.
People in charge during a crisis like the current one need resiliency; they need to be able to change course and adapt, to be willing to try new things, to get creative.
Trump does not need to reach back in history for an example of a leadership style that doesn’t require a dubious pose of perfection to convey strength. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, who regularly shares the podium with Trump at coronavirus briefings, has described often in interviews the vitriol targeted at him during the early days of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. Protesters were storming the National Institutes of Health campus and burning Fauci in effigy, because of frustrations with the pace of research on a cure.The activist Larry Kramer, whom Fauci now counts as a friend, was calling him a murderer. Fauci decided the protesters were right on some key points and urged they be integrated closely into the government’s response.
“The best thing I’ve done from a sociological and community standpoint was to embrace the activists,” Fauci said in an interview with Science Speaks in 2011. “Instead of rejecting them, I listened to them.”
Close your eyes and imagine Trump saying that.
Can’t be done, can it.
What changed that blob of vanilla pudding known as Trump’s “mind”?
Pictures, and graphs, and the fact that people he actually knows have the virus.
“We’re thinking that around Easter that’s going to be your spike. That’s going to be the highest point we think, and then it’s going to start coming down from there,” Trump said Monday on “Fox & Friends.” “The worst that can happen is you do it too early and all of a sudden it comes back. That makes it more difficult.”
Yes, but people were telling him that all along, and he ignored them.
The bleak forecasts were carried into the Oval Office by Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Deborah Birx, who displayed to Trump projections that, on the low end, could yield 100,000 American deaths from COVID-19. One model showed that deaths could have soared past 2 million had there been no mitigation measures.
“We showed him the data. He looked at the data. He got it right away. It was a pretty clear picture,” Fauci told CNN on Monday.
No, he didn’t get it right away. This past weekend is not “right away.” Right away would have been weeks ago, not three days ago.
Trump mused to reporters Saturday about a quarantine of New York, as well as parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, blindsiding their governors and raising questions about federal authority.
Even if the measure was unenforceable, Trump thought it could be a signal to supporters elsewhere that he was walling off a virus hot zone comprised of three Democratic states. But Fauci and other advisers persuaded him that it would accomplish little except ignite worry.
Aw too bad. It would have been so awesome to see “Democratic states” consigned to doom while “Republican states” flourished like the green bay tree.
States that voted Trump get what they need. States that didn’t vote Trump can just choke on their own blood.
Because Europe “took a much different route than we did, a much different route,” in responding to the coronavirus pandemic, “they’re having tremendous problems,” Trump said. As he did during yesterday’s briefing, the president is attempting to paint the US’ delayed and chaotic response to the pandemic as superior to Europe.
Yesterday, Trump implied that the US would soon have such a surplus of scarce and necessary medical equipment that he’d be able to send the excess to Italy, France and Spain.
Adding another chapter to the Great Book of Lies.
Trump said there are lots of ventilators. There aren’t.
“We are going to go through a very tough two weeks,” Trump said, striking a more somber tone than he has at previous briefings. “This is going to be a very, very painful two weeks.”
There will be“light at the end of the tunnel,” he added. We are going to see things get better “all of a sudden” like a “burst of light.”
No we’re not. It’s not going to be sudden or like a burst of light at all.
Early mitigation slowing the spread of disease in California and Washington state
is“gives us great hope,” said Dr. Deborah Birx.
I’m doing my best.
The White House has predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths in the US from coronavirus pandemic, even with mitigation measures. This isn’t the first time that the task force scientists have presented these grim projections.
Cheery.
“All of our major cities modeled like New Yor is what gets us into trouble,” Birx said. “California and Washington state reacted very early to this.”
“For whatever reason, New York got off to a very late start,” Trump added. “And you see what happens when you get off to a late start.”
We do. We got off to a late start because of Trump and his taking a flamethrower to what he calls “the deep state.” Many thousands will die prematurely because Trump is a lying hack.
Though Trump is seeking to blame states for a delayed response to the coronavirus crisis, the president consistently downplayed the concerns of public health officials who raised early alarms.
In late January, at the Davos conference, Trump said, “It’s going to be just fine.”
In February, after the WHO announced more than 25,000 cases worldwide, Trump said that it “looks like, by April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.”
And earlier this month, Trump tweeted this:
But please do tell us more about those other places that got a late start.
Then he got back into his pick fights with everyone mode.
“This is really easy to be negative about. But I want to give people hope, too,” Trump said, abandoning the quiet, somber tone he used earlier in the briefing.
“I’m not about bad news,” Trump said. “I want to give people hope. I want to give people the feeling that we all have a chance.”
As he has during previous briefings, the president then became combative, attacking reporters and dismissing what he called “stupid questions”.
The briefing has been going on for more than two hours now.
