Mary McCord on Trump’s call for insurrection:

Just a day after issuing guidance for re-opening America that clearly deferred decision-making to state officials — as it must under our Constitutional order — the president undercut his own guidance by calling for criminal acts against the governors for not opening fast enough.

Trump tweeted, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” followed immediately by “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” and then “LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!” This follows Wednesday’s demonstration in Michigan, in which armed protestors surrounded the state capitol building in Lansing chanting “Lock her up!” in reference to Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, and “We will not comply,” in reference to her extension of the state’s coronavirus-related stay-at-home order. Much smaller and less-armed groups had on Thursday protested on the state capitol grounds in Richmond, Va., and outside the governor’s mansion in St. Paul, Minn.

“Liberate” — particularly when it’s declared by the chief executive of our republic — isn’t some sort of cheeky throwaway. Its definition is “to set at liberty,” specifically “to free (something, such as a country) from domination by a foreign power.” We historically associate it with the armed defeat of hostile forces during war, such as the liberation of Western Europe from Nazi Germany’s control during World War II. Just over a year ago, Trump himself announced that “the United States has liberated all ISIS-controlled territory in Syria and Iraq.”

So what does “liberate” mean in this context? It means overthrow the people in power…the ones who were elected. It means nullify the elections with guns.

In that context, it’s not at all unreasonable to consider Trump’s tweets about “liberation” as at least tacit encouragement to citizens to take up arms against duly elected state officials of the party opposite his own, in response to sometimes unpopular but legally issued stay-at-home orders.

Legally issued stay home orders during a pandemic. It’s encouragement to overthrow the government in order to spread the pandemic among the population. Spreading the pandemic isn’t the goal, but it is the inevitable result. I don’t think the beefy guys with assault rifles know more about contagion than the CDC does.

Oh NPR. Do better.

“Critics say” Trump is inciting violence and civil war, and they’re right to say so.

No, these are people expressing their views, I see where they are, I see the way they’re working [flapping hands back and forth to illustrate the way they’re working], they [shrug] seem to be very responsible people to me, but it’s uh, y’know they’ve been treated a little bit rough, yes go ahead.

This isn’t a 3-year-old sleepy after a nap, this is a guy who decided he should be president of the US.

Ok so Trump is sticking to it. Let’s have a civil war, so that Trump can add that to his scrapbook.

The governor of Washington state isn’t too impressed either.

We’ll never have that luxury until the dangerous egomaniac is gone.

The Guardian live on Trump’s incitement of fascist revolt:

Minnesota governor Tim Walz said he has been unable to reach the president or the vice president to decipher the meaning of Trump’s “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” tweet.

What can they say? “He meant fascist men with guns should forcibly take over the government of Minnesota and throw it open to the pandemic.” I don’t suppose they want to say that to the governor, just about him.

The Democratic governor told the Wall Street Journal that his calls to the White House in the past couple of hours have gone unreturned.

Trump’s tweet echoed messaging from right-wing protesters who have expressed outrage about stay-at-home orders meant to limit the spread of coronavirus.

Meanwhile Fox “News” person says:

Trump wants gyms to re-open. That’s bonkers.

The inclusion struck public health experts as bizarre. ‘Gyms are like a petri dish,’ said Laurence Gostin, the director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University. ‘People are close to one another, they’re sweating, they’re coughing and sneezing, they’re touching multiple surfaces, they’re sharing equipment, they’re indoors. Literally all of the heightened risk factors for COVID transmission are all entwined together in a gym.’

I would guess a plane is the very worst place to be, but a gym looks like a close second.

The decision on gyms came a day after Trump’s phone call with sixteen business leaders including Stephen Ross, the founder and chairman of the Related Companies. That firm’s portfolio includes Equinox Holdings, which owns its own eponymous chain of luxury gyms as well as fitness brands SoulCycle, Blink Fitness, and Pure Yoga.

Ah, no wonder then. Of course he talks to the business leaders and takes their point of view, as opposed to talking to and taking the point of view of workers, consumers, bystanders, the population as a whole.

Let them eat bike shorts.

Time for the 25th.

Aaron Rupar on the eruption:

President Donald Trump can’t help but sow division, even at a time when Americans are largely united in supporting stay-at-home orders and social distancing to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

It’s not that he can’t help it, it’s that he loves doing it. He can’t help being the person he is, I guess, but the person he is loves doing malevolent cruel destructive things to people who are more vulnerable than he is, and to people who are not Donald Trump.

Just after 11:21 am Eastern time on Friday, President Donald Trump posted a trio of tweets endorsing the so-called liberation of a trio of states with Democratic governors from measures they’ve taken to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Liberate the virus! Liberate the pandemic!

These posts — which are among the most dangerous of Trump’s tenure — appear to have been inspired by a segment he saw on Fox News minutes earlier.

…

At 11:19 — two minutes before Trump’s Minnesota tweet — Fox News ran a segment about small groups of right-wing protesters in Minnesota and Virginia who have been agitating for governors there to relax stay-at-home orders so they can resume normal shopping and traveling activities.

Fox has extensively covered right-wing demonstrations in Michigan on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday this week, which echo the same theme.

Because public health measures are a left-wing plot, I guess.

Trump is erupting again.

Liberate them from…measures to slow the spread of the virus? Liberate them to get sick and die or survive with reduced lung capacity or damaged kidneys or both? Funny kind of liberation.

Jesus, the spectacle of Donald fucking Trump telling anyone else on earth to stop talking. He never shuts up and he never lets other people talk if he wants to talk over them. He interrupts reporters at those press briefing campaign rallies, shouting “Excuse me” and pointing his nasty stubby finger at them, then he talks and talks and talks and says nothing but bullshit. And he’s telling Governor Cuomo to stop talking.

Ah yes, the states do. It’s all the fault of the states.

But wasn’t that the states’ fault? You just said…

The thousands of cases in New York are not ridiculous.

Got a shortage of N95 masks? Then the thing to do is give a huge packet of money to a bankrupt company with no employees that has never made masks. Problem solved!

In this chaotic effort to obtain supplies, the Trump administration awarded a $55 million contract to Panthera Worldwide LLC, a company with no expertise in the world of medical equipment, for N95 masks, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

Panthera’s parent company filed for bankruptcy protection last fall, and one of its owners last year said it had had no employees since May 2018, The Post reported, citing sworn testimony. It’s no longer listed as an LLC in Virginia, where its main office is, after fees went unpaid, the newspaper said.

So, perfect company for the job. What a good thing the Trump admin was able to find it.

James V. Punelli, one of Panthera’s executives, told The Post that the company was working with military contacts to obtain the masks.

“We’ve done [Department of Defense] medical training over the years and through those contacts with that community were brought sources of supply in order to assist in the COVID-19 response,” Punelli said in a text message to The Post. “We made the connection with FEMA and offered these supplies to them.”

They have contacts. But surely the government also has contacts? Is it really worth 55 million bucks to have Panthera ask its contacts to send along some masks? Can’t the government do that itself without handing 55 million to an irrelevant intermediary? One that’s bankrupt and has no employees and is being sued?

The Post reported that the Federal Emergency Management Agency was paying Panthera about $5.50 per mask, decidedly more than what the government pays companies with an established background in producing medical supplies such as 3M, which charges about $0.63 per mask.

Because…?

Chuck Hagel, a former defense secretary, told The Post something was “amiss” about this order. “This is not how the government procures training or any type of supplies,” he said. “You just wouldn’t do business with somebody like that.”

But her emails.

The ACLU doesn’t already have enough to do, it seems.

Trans girls are girls, they tell us, superimposed on images of…two women. Not trans, not girls, just women. They’re actors: Blake Lively and Leighton Meester. Why is the ACLU telling us “trans girls are girls” with photos of two women?

Maybe the idea is that when we hear or read the phrase “trans girls” (or women? or have we officially reverted to calling women “girls” now, as if it were 1955 again?) we are supposed to visualize… Blake Lively and Leighton Meester. We’re supposed to visualize women, and not just women but young pretty smiling women.

That’s the whole point of women, I guess – being young and pretty and smiling. Women who aren’t any of that are just bitches, or cunts if they’re really ugly and frowny.

And then the slogan – “Trans people belong in sports — and everywhere else.” But what does that mean? Nobody belongs everywhere – other people’s living spaces without consent, to name one category. Very few people belong inside the cockpit of a 747, or an epidemic research lab, or the kitchen of your favorite restaurant.

And more specifically, of course, they want us to understand that slogan to mean it’s fine for men who identify as trans to compete against women and thus deprive them of medals, prizes, scholarships, wins, fairness, equal access, rights, and…in fact…a sense of belonging.

It’s a pack of lies and it’s deeply hostile to women. The ACLU has jumped off a cliff.

The other G7 countries don’t want Trump at their lunch table right now.

Donald Trump found himself isolated among western leaders at a virtual G7 summit, as they expressed strong support for the World Health Organization after the US’s suspension of its funding.

Health officials around the world have condemned the US president’s decision to stop his country’s funding for the UN agency, amid a crisis that has left more than 2 million people infected and almost 140,000 dead.

Yes but the infections and deaths don’t matter, all that matters is Trump.

Immediately after the hour-long conference call, a spokesman for Angela Merkel said that the German chancellor had argued that “the pandemic can only be overcome with a strong and co-ordinated international response”. The spokesman said Merkel “expressed support for the WHO as well as a number of other partners”.

The Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, said: “There is a need for international coordination and the WHO is an important part of that collaboration and coordination. We recognise that there have been questions asked, but at the same time it is really important we stay coordinated as we move through this.”

The Gates Foundation also announced an extra $150m (£120m) donation, in a move the WHO welcomed.

The Gates Foundation was already donating as much as the US, so now it’s donating significantly more than the US did until Trump yanked it back.

In a statement after the summit, the EU council president, Charles Michel, called on world leaders to contribute to an international online pledging conference on 4 May to “enhance general preparedness and ensure adequate funding to develop and deploy a vaccine against coronavirus”.

…

The EU statement also sent a shot across Trump’s bows by stressing “multilateralism should be at the core of the action”. The EU also stressed that its pledging conference should be devoted to building African resilience, a theme that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, stressed at the G7 conference.

Never mind shooting across his bows, just fucking sink him.

This is startling.

The pandemic has been good to Jeff Bezos.

The Amazon CEO and entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos, has grown his vast fortune by a further $24bn so far during the coronavirus pandemic, a roughly 20% increase over the last four months to $138b.

Amazon is getting a lot of business of course because real world shopping is either closed down or restricted.

But the increased demand comes amid growing controversy over the retailer’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak.

Workers have reported severe strains on warehouse teams. Many are on the frontlines packing and shipping items at warehouses where Covid-19 can easily spread.

Meanwhile Amazon is running tv ads showing the workers grinning broadly as they skip and dance around the warehouse doing their fun easy healthful jobs. I know this because I’ve seen one.

Amazon reported its first warehouse worker death on Tuesday. The man, an operations manager who worked at the company’s Hawthorne, California, warehouse, died on 31 March.

So for two weeks Amazon did not report that death.

Several workers have organized strikes and walkouts in protest at lack of worker protections. Chris Smalls, a former manager assistant, was fired by the retailer after leading workers at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island, New York, on a walkout.

Employees demanded Amazon temporarily shut down the facility for cleaning after multiple employees tested positive for Covid-19. Memos leaked by Vice News revealed company executives suggested coordinating an attempt to smear Smalls as “not smart or articulate” in response to the backlash over his firing.

Capitalism at its finest.

Several Amazon workers have since alleged retaliation for organizing. In an op-Ed for the Guardian, Smalls urged Bezos to spend more time on protecting his workers instead of stifling dissent.

And running perky tv ads saying we’re all in this together and look how joyous the workers are.

There are protests and then there are protests.

Thousands of demonstrators descended on the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on Wednesday to protest Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s restrictive stay-at-home order, clogging the streets with their cars while scores ignored organizers’ pleas to stay inside their vehicles.

Not staying inside their anything is the whole point. Mommy can’t tell ME what to do.

The protest — dubbed “Operation Gridlock” — was organized by the Michigan Conservative Coalition and the Michigan Freedom Fund, a DeVos family-linked conservative group. Protesters were encouraged to show up and cause traffic jams, honk and bring signs to display from their cars. Organizers wrote on Facebook: “Do not park and walk — stay in your vehicles!”

Many ignored the demand. Demonstrators, on foot, were seen waving American, “Don’t Tread on Me” and Trump campaign flags. At least two Confederate flags were spotted.

Protesters could be heard chanting “Open up Michigan!” At one point, there was a “lock her up” chant in reference to Whitmer.

It’s all the same thing, isn’t it – liberalism, virology, public health, women in top jobs, women taking our guns away – it’s all connected.

But then Michigan has one of the highest rates of infection, so maybe there’s a reason Whitmer signed a particularly restrictive order?

More than 27,000 cases have been confirmed in the state with at least 1,700 deaths. In Wayne County, home to Detroit, 820 people have died, per a Johns Hopkins University tracker. Wayne County has more deaths than any county in the U.S. outside of New York state.

Hmm Detroit, what’s Detroit known for? Besides cars? Those car factories made it a top destination for the Great Migration, so it has a large African American population. As we’ve seen, the virus is disproportionately infecting brown people. This “protest” has more than a whiff of the Charlottesville “protest” – more than a whiff of white supremacy.

See what I mean?

Social distancing at the BBC:

Well this is a hell of a thing. It’s local news, but it’s one of those big hit to a major city items of local news. A bridge that connects West Seattle to Seattle has turned out to be cracking, and it’s closed at best until 2022 and at worst forever. A major chunk of the city that has been sprouting high rises like crazy over the past decade or so is suddenly cut off from the rest of the city. It’s a bit like Hurricane Sandy…a reminder that big cities are far from invulnerable.

The key points: The high-rise West Seattle Bridge, closed for safety concerns 23 days ago, may not be fixable – SDOT “does not yet know” if it is feasible “technically or financially.” If they can fix it, it might last another 10 years, but that still means replacement would be needed a lot sooner than the original 75-year projection. Even if it’s fixable, it won’t be back in use any sooner than 2022.

Some bridges are just one of many. New York has several between Manhattan and Brooklyn/Queens, London has many across the Thames, Paris has many across the Seine. This isn’t that. It’s the only way to get from there to here. It doesn’t just cross a river, it also climbs a steep hill, so there’s only the one.

It’s kind of beautiful, at least from a distance. We can see it from here on top of this hill. I find it slightly nerve-racking to drive, but the views are spectacular.

It’s just, like the pandemic, another one of those “oh this life we’ve been living isn’t actually normal or eternal, it depends on all kinds of systems and situations that can break or end” reminders.

Trump’s threat to adjourn Congress isn’t going down hugely well.

More coup-threatening:

Fact check: Trump says he will execute constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress so he can make recess appointments to fill vacancies.

“If the House will not agree to that adjournment, I will exercise my constitutional authority to adjourn both chambers of Congress,” Trump said.

No president has ever used that authority.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in NLRB v. Noel Canning that the president cannot use his or her authority under the Recess Appointment Clause of the Constitution to appoint public officials unless the Senate is in recess and not able to transact Senate business. The Senate is in recess until May 4.

Trump was asked for details, and responded with his usual clarity and elegance.

Very simple. If they don’t act on getting these people approved that we need – we need them anyway, but we especially need them now because of the pandemic – we are going to do something that will be … something I’d prefer not doing, but which I should do and I will do if have to.

He’s joking about the prefer not doing, of course. He loves breaking all the rules and pushing everyone around.