Tuesday’s Forum
Here we go round again
Steven L. Taylor
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Tuesday, April 7, 2020
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76 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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I just read the following from Felix Salmon over at Axios:
@Kit, firm, decisive and evidence-based leadership from the top may have more of us standing on that common ground. Felix’s point is an excellent one.
trump said, “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
It’s a freight train.
Between going to sleep last night and waking up this morning, there have been 2 supreme court decisions that affect my day.
New rule: No court decisions before coffee!!
Hmmmm…. Just the other day he was saying,
I give that FlipFlop a 6.4 at best.
Am I the only one to think these burials should be permanent so that as people stroll thru the park they can commune with the dead and be reminded of the costs of electing a narcissistic sociopath to the White House?
US designates Russian white supremacists as foreign terrorist group
Gee, I wonder when they will designate our own white supremacists to be terrorists? s//
Coronavirus couture: the rise of the $60 designer face mask
It was only a matter of time.
@OzarkHillbilly:
The people of New York City don’t need to be reminded. They didn’t vote for him.
When this pandemic is over(*), we should pick a date to mark a First responders, Doctors and Nurses Day, and make it a national holiday.
(*) all outbreaks eventually burn out, and none kill the entire susceptible population. It may just take a very long time
The cruise line industry is sniffing around for some sort of bailout again.
Over the weekend Yahoo news posted a several day old report from Bloomberg on the straits of the cruise industry and how it is being denied assistance since the companies are incorporated outside the US. When I began reading the post, there were ~25 comments, by the time I finished there were hundreds. I read several dozen and not one was in support of the companies. Virtually all were of the if you don’t pay taxes, you don’t get bailed out variety.
Tom Friedman is off his meds again and engaging in magical thinking.
Speaking of magical thinking, MLB is suffering from it as well.
If this comes to fruition, Vegas needs to open a line on how many games will be played before the whole thing collapses in a viral out break.
Donald Trump offers US medical help to ‘incredible guy’ Boris Johnson while telling US states “SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!” – video
Well then, I guess the 9/11 Memorial is rather superfluous as well.
@Sleeping Dog:
Vegas is closed.
From what some friends tell me, even slot machines outside casinos, such as in grocery stores, are also inoperative.
Seven-year-old Greek piano prodigy pens an ‘isolation waltz’ .
@OzarkHillbilly: “Gee, I wonder when they will designate our own white supremacists to be terrorists”
When they stop supporting Republicans.
@Kathy: “When this pandemic is over(*), we should pick a date to mark a First responders, Doctors and Nurses Day, and make it a national holiday.”
Who wants to predict which is the first Republican politician to suggest this replace MLK day?
Trump Says ‘Nobody’ Knew Pandemic Was Coming. His Adviser Warned Of It In January.
Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, reportedly penned two memos — in January and then February — warning of potential catastrophe because of COVID-19.
…according to reports in The New York Times and Axios on Monday, at least one top official in Trump’s own administration sounded the alarm ― in late January and then again in February ― about the potentially catastrophic impacts of the virus that causes COVID-19 on the United States.
In a Jan. 29 memo about the coronavirus addressed to the National Security Council, Peter Navarro, President Trump’s trade adviser, warned that the “risk of a worst-case pandemic scenario should not be overlooked,” the Times reported. The disease could kill up to half a million Americans, Navarro warned in the document, and cost the U.S. trillions of dollars if no action was taken to contain the virus.
“The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil,” the memo read.
( source )
Trade Adviser Warned White House in January of Risks of a Pandemic
A memo from Peter Navarro is the most direct warning known to have circulated at a key moment among top administration officials.
A top White House adviser starkly warned Trump administration officials in late January that the coronavirus crisis could cost the United States trillions of dollars and put millions of Americans at risk of illness or death.
( source )
@Kathy:
Online gambling then!
Trump is edging Modly nearer and nearer to the bus. He is pointing out that it wasn’t his decision and that maybe Crozier shouldn’t have lost his job over one bad decision.
@MarkedMan: As predictable as the sun.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Evidently I was unclear.
The people of New York don’t need to be
since they didn’t vote for the narcissistic sociopath in the first place.
Obviously, a memorial to those who have lost their lives is a different thing.
This Is Trump’s Fault
The president is failing, and Americans are paying for his failures.
“I don’t take responsibility at all,” said President Donald Trump in the Rose Garden on March 13. Those words will probably end up as the epitaph of his presidency, the single sentence that sums it all up.
Trump now fancies himself a “wartime president.” How is his war going? By the end of March, the coronavirus had killed more Americans than the 9/11 attacks. By the first weekend in April, the virus had killed more Americans than any single battle of the Civil War. By Easter, it may have killed more Americans than the Korean War. On the present trajectory, it will kill, by late April, more Americans than Vietnam. Having earlier promised that casualties could be held near zero, Trump now claims he will have done a “very good job” if the toll is held below 200,000 dead.
The United States is on trajectory to suffer more sickness, more dying, and more economic harm from this virus than any other comparably developed country.
That the pandemic occurred is not Trump’s fault. The utter unpreparedness of the United States for a pandemic is Trump’s fault. The loss of stockpiled respirators to breakage because the federal government let maintenance contracts lapse in 2018 is Trump’s fault. The failure to store sufficient protective medical gear in the national arsenal is Trump’s fault. That states are bidding against other states for equipment, paying many multiples of the precrisis price for ventilators, is Trump’s fault. Air travelers summoned home and forced to stand for hours in dense airport crowds alongside infected people? That was Trump’s fault too. Ten weeks of insisting that the coronavirus is a harmless flu that would miraculously go away on its own? Trump’s fault again. The refusal of red-state governors to act promptly, the failure to close Florida and Gulf Coast beaches until late March? That fault is more widely shared, but again, responsibility rests with Trump: He could have stopped it, and he did not.
( source )
@MarkedMan:
When Trump pats you on the back, look for the knife in his hand.
@Kari Q: No, a Memorial to the dead is both at the same time. And the New Yorkers of today are not the New Yorkers of tomorrow. Memories are short, and it’s not like 100% of New Yorkers voted for Hillary either. As I recall Staten Island went for trump by a considerable margin (the google says 57% of the vote)
Read this:
http://www.thebulwark.com/why-is-trump-obsessed-with-hydrochloroquine/
The Daily Beast says Trump has a major financial stake in the company that manufactures Plaquenil.
@CSK:
That should be http://www.thebulwark.com/why-is-trump-obsessed-with-hydroxychloroquine/
Ouch. I’d say that this looks like a 10% death rate except that the U.K. is being very picky about who they actually test so there’s probably a much wider number of people with COVID-19 that aren’t showing up in the statistics.
It’s not all doom and gloom, at least for one company in Denmark:
( link )
Things might be progressing rationally, for a change. Today the Mexico City government published a suspension on all construction work, and for the first time in days no invitations for procurement procedures were published.
In this sense, the state of Chihuahua achieved a high level of irony. They published an invitation for foodstuffs for the “COVID-19 emergency.” The process will last until April 15th. Seriously, in an emergency, they can just pick a supplier, negotiate a price, and award a contract.
@OzarkHillbilly: Staten Island Is to the rest of NYC what a white flight suburb is to Nashville.
Stephanie Grisham has quit as Trump’s press secretary to take up laboring as Melania’s chief of staff.
For a couple of weeks now I’ve been pointing out that the administration’s mishandling of supplies and unwillingness to Publicly state what has gone where was a strong indication of corruption at work. Talking Points Memo has been digging hard into the story and deserves a lot of credit, but this NYT article lays it out with a lot of detail. Shipments of supplies negotiated by hospitals and states have been seized by the Feds, with at least half given to private companies to resell on the open market. This has literally forced states and hospitals to get into a bidding war to buy back their own stuff.
@CSK: And they are putting that ding-a-ling Kayleigh McEnany in the position. I cannot *stand* her.
@MarkedMan: If the next administration doesn’t make investigating past corruption a top priority, then they will have effectively sanctified it. I’m not hopeful.
@Kathy:
Didn’t Garek on Star Trek Deep Space Nine say true friends stab you in the front?
This was from the New England Journal of Medicine, and it is their first ever social commentary: the apology they want too hear from Donald Trump. It really lays out what he did and didn’t to that made this worse than it had to be, and shows clearly that he has blood on his hands.
https://blogs.jwatch.org/hiv-id-observations/index.php/dear-nation-a-series-of-apologies-on-covid-19/2020/04/06/
@OzarkHillbilly: They will be using an island off the Bronx, if I heard correctly.
I think that’s a shame, as Central Park is so central, and there would be no better permanent memorial to those who lost so much, and those who have just had their lives disrupted.
We’re there memorials for the 1918 pandemic? Or just out of the way graveyards?
@Kathy:
Shouldn’t you do that before he pats you on the back 😉
@CSK:
Other than scolding some folks via a handful of press releases that they were being too mean to President Trump and needed to kiss his behind like most of the GOP is doing did she ever hold an actual, well…press conference?
I saw an article that she was terminated without ever having held a Press Conference, if true than yeah, she might be a good human being but she was lousy at her job and deserved to be fired.
If I hire a Press Secretary, I would like this individual to well, ummm….actually interact with the press.
BJ’s Wholesale Club promotions hasn’t apparently gotten the memo that we’re all supposed to be remaining indoors right now. For at least the third time in two weeks or less I have gotten an email suggesting I should buy such things as a Gazebo, Outdoor shed, and lawn furniture.
Just in case anyone missed my message from yesterday, it was held up in the moderation queque still over 4 hours after I posted it, I’ll repeat it today
Baseball Hall of Famer Al Kaline has died at the age of 85
and
Actress Honor Blackman, star of The Avengers and Goldfinger and saying this famous movie line, has died at the age of 94
@Kathy:
We should. We should also do something, perhaps something more substantial, like financial, for all the nursing home custodians, medical registration clerks, USPS employees, grocery checkout people, FEDEX drivers, Amazon warehouse workers, drive-thru clerks, and an army of others who got drafted by circumstance into being in the front lines of this and keeping things going as best they can.
@inhumans99:
As far as I know, Grisham never held a press conference. I can’t imagine that her duties as Melania’s COS will be terribly taxing.
@Jen:
My God, she’s like one of those bobble-headed dolls.
Isn’t that the job she came from, CSK?
Alternate History…What if:
@Joe:
Grisham was an aide to Melania of some sort. Today Melania said that she was “excited to welcome Stephanie back in this new role,” which suggests she wasn’t Melania’s COS previously.
Trump removes inspector general who was to oversee $2 trillion stimulus spending
Because of course he did.
And again, nearly half our fellow countrymen will continue to cheer this corrupt filth.
@CSK:
She didn’t. We paid her nearly $180K to do nothing besides occasional lying on Fox News.
@Mikey: Which is what her boss wanted her to do.
@Bill: what’s wrong with that? If it’s in your own backyard, and the only people using it are the ones that live in your house, how is that a violation of lockdown orders?
Or do you mean going out to shop for it? Well, stores like BJs are considered essential businesses right now, so if you have to stop by for food or TP or cleaning supplies or whatever, might as well buy something that makes your sheltering in place more comfortable. (I’m an apartment dweller, so I have no dog in this fight)
One reason for some of the traffic is that people have to grocery store hop because the stores are still out of many items. I can’t find any alcohol, which we use for mosquito, fire ants, and occasional spider bites. Dawn and hand sanitizer can help, but alcohol works fastest. I might try the pvc cleaner that the hardware store carries. The fire ant bites gets worse daily – itching then blisters which tend to get infected. Pesky critters.
Also, bread, milk, peanut butter, hamburger, and fish sticks evidently are very popular.
Sardines? No thanks.
If they had what I needed would only need to go out once every two weeks.
Ammon Bundy is at it again.
You have to hope that he’s successful. At getting the virus.
And once again, Trump hires and then fires only the best people:
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/07/politics/modly-resign-crozier-esper-trump/index.html
@mattbernius:
Credit due…you were correct, and I wasn’t.
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
This will probably be the only time that happens.
among the most intriguing, and practical, inventions in SF(*), there’s Larry Niven’s Stasis Field (aka Zero Time).
It probably is not original with him. the idea is a field of some sort inside of which time does not pass.
The applications are many. You can put anyone on stasis and they’ll keep as long as you want. Same for objects. Same for hot objects. You can cook a meal, put it in stasis, and have ti piping hot centuries later (I said it was practical).
Niven has used it in his fiction to store things for long periods, to be found by people far, far in the future. Also to keep people from getting bored in long interstellar trips. And to keep food hot. and very nicely as a safety device. If your ship is about to crash, the stasis field goes on and the people inside are protected.
We could definitely use something like this now. Instead of suspending business except for essential activities, and spending trillions in subsidies and stimulus, we could just put everyone in stasis and give some millions to researchers and a few essential workers to keep things from decaying. Then we’d emerge months or years later with a vaccine and/or a cure, and a heck of a cleanup job(**), waiting.
Hm. That might work as a story…
(*) The top will always be The Simpsons: “Things are a lot easier now that scientists finally invented magic.”
(**) A great deal of infrastructure would decay anyway, and everything would accumulate layers of dust in such a scenario.
@CSK:
Major stake? From what I’m seeing, $15k at the most. Where do you see “major”?
@Liberal Capitalist:
Wait, you’re really expecting Trump to know something because he read a memo? Who are you kidding?
The Washington Post has a story today about COVID-19 testing and how the states have to basically come up with their own way and it’s all different. This sentence from that story has made me angrier than I’ve been in a very long time:
“In recent days…” ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! “In recent days?!” THIS IS SOMETHING THESE INCOMPETENT FUCKSTICKS SHOULD HAVE BEEN WORKING ON FOR THREE MOTHERFUCKING MONTHS!
*sigh* Stay healthy, everyone.
So sadly predictable. Only the best people:
From today’s press conference, file under the ethos of the president and his supporters:
President Trump: “I think mail-in voting is horrible, it’s corrupt.”
Reporter: “You voted by mail in Florida’s election last month, didn’t you?”
Trump: “Sure. I can vote by mail”
Reporter: “How do you reconcile with that?”
Trump: “Because I’m allowed to.”
source: https://t.co/Es8ZNyB3O1
In other news, yet more evidence that if there is a deity, she has a rather cruel sense of humour:
@Kathy:
Niven was the main promulgator of the stasis field trope in SF.
But IMHO the best uses were made by Vernor Vinge: The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime
Highly recommended.
(Along with everything else by Vinge)
@Kathy:
That was a critical feature of the series “Red Dwarf”. It allowed Dave Lister to survive for 3 million years after the rest of the crew were effectively vaporized after a radiation leak.
Imagine being 3 million years out of sorts.
I will admit, I would have never known how good a spicy chicken vindaloo is if it wasn’t for that show.
@mattbernius: Ouch. But only a moron or a crazy person would tie themselves to Trump at this point. Even the corrupt Republican filth feeding off the corpses will (hopefully) get stood up against the wall once we get an actual government again.
@JohnSF: I always thought she walked and talked a bit…. masculine.
/sarcasm
@Kathy:
IIRC, in one story* Niven mentioned that one stasis box had contained a hand grenade with its pin freshly pulled…
*”The Soft Weapon”?
@Liberal Capitalist:
I did, on the other hand, already know that gazpacho is served cold…
Sadly, John Prine has lost the fight with COVID-19. He passed away this evening.
@Bill: Remain indoors? Where is this? Our local and state officials encourage walking, jogging, walking the dog, riding the bikes, and pushing the strollers. Just stay six feet apart (except families). That’s fresh air and vitamin D. Temperatures have been on the warm side, and clear skies.
..Where do you see “major major”?
@Mikey: Every day for the past i-dont-know-how-long-it-seems-like-forever-but-it-can-only-be-a-few-days after petting the nearest cat, but before making tea, I would check to see if John Prine was still alive and whether his condition had gotten better or worse.
Not sure what I’ll do tomorrow.
He was a fine musician, a great writer, a funny man, and by all accounts a good man. I love his most recent album, The Tree of Forgiveness, and actually only really started seriously listening to him with that, slowly working my way backwards. A few of his earlier songs had stuck with me before that, but only a few.
I’m sorry he had to go through this. And I’m sorry he’s gone.
@JohnSF:
I’ve put them on my Scribd queue.
@DrDaveT:
That story was adapted to an animated Trek episode, called, if memory serves, The Slaver Weapon.
In another story, I think called “There Is a Tide,” he makes the important point of distinguishing stasis boxes from neutronium spheres. 😉