PRAWN
Philadelphia Regional Anti-War Network
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"Trump
threatened to pull US Security Umbrella from Saudi if it didn't raise
Oil Prices to Help US Frackers" So the question for Jared Kushner is, if the last few months have
been a success, ...the U.S. death toll reached 60,000, the total number of U.S. infections topped 1 million, economic growth retreated to levels unseen since the peak of the Great Recession, and 30 million Americans filed for unemployment. what would failure look like? There is no scarcity of food. There's plenty of food. What US
producers and consumers lack is leadership. We need to have the Department of Agriculture buy food from farmers and to move it to those who need it. "China
Says We're a Joke. And, Alas, We Are." Deep dive on Tara Reade allegations against Joe Biden. Very serious questions about Reade's veracity and motivations. Major problem is the motivations of the very few people and groups that are supporting her. April "GOP
senator issues stark warning that both Georgia Senate seats are in
play" A space rock 1.5 miles wide came within 21 light-seconds of Earth (3.9 million miles away). Perspective: The Moon is about 1.3 light-seconds away or 237,674 miles. Stacey Abrams defends Biden against his accuser. And yes, we must recognize that Abrams would really like to be Biden's Vice-Presidential running mate. Ehh, we'll see what happens. "Car
Crashes Plummet As The US Sees What It's Like To Shut Down" This is why we consider Chuck Todd to be a complete, blithering idiot! You'll notice in his talk he mentions three disasters: "...whether it's on WMD's, the great recession, or this (COVID-19)." Notice anything about these disasters? That's right! Democrats had nothing to do with any of them! At worst, one can say that Democrats played an extremely minor role by not warning us or by voting for the AUMF. The problem is far more specific than just "politicians." Can COVID-19 be contained? Yes, Vietnam has done so quite successfully. The blogger looks at Jared Kushner's boast: "“We have achieved all the different milestones..." and wonder what the hell he's talking about! "Trump
Walks Back Huge Goal For Tests After His Own Testing Chief Said It
Was Impossible" So Jared Kushner says his father-in-law has been conducting a successful effort? (I trust Italy's figures more than I trust China's) BTW, No states have met the guidelines for safe re-opening! "Trump's
press secretary won't stop lying about pandemic — so New York Times
toasts her with puff piece" I had some people strongly advocating the widespread use of chloroquine /hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19. The piece here says Bayer has donated a large number of tablets so that testing can begin. The people said various foreign countries had achieved good results. Reminds me of when I joined the Navy. "Yes, your doctor may think you're in great shape. We don't care. We want our doctors to make sure you really are in good shape!" Yep. Just can't imagine why calls to poison control centers are
climbing. Such
a mystery! A real puzzle. Hint: President suggested about a month that
drinking disinfectant might an effective cure for the coronavirus.
NY Times wrote piece that provoked Fox News host Sean Hannity to threaten to sue them. NY Times refused to apologize. We've collectively made a wrenching change from physical travel
(air travel is down 95%) to electricity used for things like
tele-meetings (up 775%). Is this the beginnig of the end for oil? Again, forcing imigrant and non-union labor to produce meat for consumers is not what the Defense Production Act is for! What exactly does Hope Hicks do in the White House these days??? The blogger suggests Hicks is "Trump's emotional support human." Great snark in this post! The Vietnam War U.S. Military Fatal Casualty Statistics counts
58,220 U.S. military fatal casualties of the Vietnam War. That's from
1956 to 2006. "Pence
Visited Mayo Clinic Without Mask, Violating Policy" Update: Pence claims he wanted to look people in the eye. Erm the masks in question cover the mouth and nose, not the eyes! Also:
Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) added yesterday, 'When you don't wear
a mask, especially inside the Mayo Clinic, you are not being brave.
You are showing that you think the rules don't apply to you. And you
are setting a dangerous example by ignoring experts.
"Karen
Pence Claims Mike Was 'Unaware' Of Mayo Clinic's Mask Policy"
"Trump
to Order U.S. Meat Plants to Stay Open Amid Pandemic" "Who
Makes Life-Or-Death Supply Decisions For Your State? Jared Kushner?" This is very good news! The main lesson here is that the Supreme Court is not going to do the dirty work for the Republican Party. If they want to kill off the ACA/Obamacare, there's going to have to do that themselves. More expendable Fox News hosts get tossed overboard. "Diamond" and "Silk" are now unemployed for speading conspiracy theories. AG Barr wants to make sure there's no "overreach" by state authorities, but as these lockdowns SAVE LIVES, it's far from clear what exactly constitutes overreach. If the US wants to re-open safely, we are well short of the testing that would be necessary to do that. One of the problems is that people can be aymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus. With testing, we can find out who can come back to work and who should stay at home. .
"Mike
Pence Suggests America Is Too Dumb To See What A Great Job Trump Has
Done On Testing" So what has Jared Kushner been doing these past two months? Very few people actually know, but he seems to be getting a lot of his buddies employed, duplicating a lot of work the government was already doing, to zero good effect. His grifting operation is going full speed ahead of course, so we can be sure he and his buddies are raking in lots of money. President appears to have a very rich fantasy life as far as the pandemic is concerned and his own performance as president. Why the small business bail-out was, and remains, so urgent. Now is not the time to build up the national stockpile, now is the time to use it!!! If that medical equipment is being saved for a rainy day, guess what? It's raining!!! Trump called it the "Noble" Prize when he obviously meant "Nobel." After all of the mockery and disdain about that, the President tries desperately to bluff his way out. He asks
in the last sentence of his tweet if sarcasm ever works. In the President's rant on the "Noble" Prize, he claims he was innocent on "Russia, Russia, Russia." Not quite. It was shown that the President kept enormous amounts of material evidence out of the hands of investigators. He was cleared but not exonerated. "Astroturf
Group FreedomWorks Applies For $300,000 In COVID-19 Small Business
Loans" FEMA is doing vastly more harm than good by interfering with supplies. The cost is measured in the lives of veterans. Again, ensuring adequate supplies for our front line health care workers is by far THE most important priority the President has! Brutal piece from the NY Times. Kinda reminds me of another
national leader who spent a lot of time in a bunker. A quote from the
piece: But the president’s primary focus, advisers said, is
assessing how his performance on the virus is measured in the news
media, and the extent to which history will blame him.… But obviously, he's very highly selective as to the channels he watches. Trump clearly takes care never to expose himself to too much negativity. And hey, if that means he gets useless and delusional advice, hey well...
Dr. Anthony Fauci was asked who he'd like to have play him. His choice was Brad Pitt. Pitt tthought that was a great idea and played Dr. Fauci on Saturday Night Live! Alicia Keys sings for the heroes of the pandemic. Grocery store clerks and others had no intention of being heroes, so she sings for them anyway. Historical perspective on plagues and how some towns handled their outbreaks better than the US is doing today. If the "wonder drug" hydroxychloroquine wasn't dead
before, it certainly is now. FDA rejects it. Unfortuately, this was an entirely predictable result: Well, it’s started. Instead of being asked about how we improve our #COVID19 response in the coming months, doctors are being asked to comment on why people shouldn’t drink things like bleach or isopropyl alcohol. This has to stop. This is the problem. This has to stop. "Celebrate
Hubble’s 30th Birthday by Gazing Into This Shimmering Stellar
Expanse" CNN is not buying the President's BS about his "joking."
I agree with the blogger. Good for them! Good piece on the bill that spends roughly another $500 billion on
the coronavirus. Total spending is about $3 trillion now. Tweet from the NY Times: At a White House briefing,
President Trump theorized-dangerously, in the view of some
experts-about the power of sunlight, ultraviolet light and household
disinfectants to kill the coronavirus
What we have here is "The exception that proves the rule." The NY Times struggled for 12 hours to get out the truth that following the President's advice is a really bad idea. This is a one-sided issue that isn't open for debate. That's why the Times is floundering and uncertain. They're far more comfortable dealing in shades of grey, where both sides have a point. So of course, the Press Secretary says the press corps is taking the President out of context ...by running the entire press event in full, and then showing clips depicting the whole sequence of Trump’s proposal to treat the inside of the human body like a kitchen counter top. Why does the Presient say such crazy things as to suggest using Lysol in the body? Well essentially, the reason the President gives briefings where he doesn't seem to know what he's talking about is that he doesn't attend the task force meetings. He spends that time watching TV. He gets the sheets that summarize what the task force has discussed minutes before going on the air. As the whole hydrochloroquine idea seems to be pretty clearly
dead, our carnival-barker-in-chief had to come up with something new!
Why are networks covering his press conferences?!?!?!
President Trump is asking whether
there can be some sort of disinfectant injection, "almost a cleaning,"
in people's bodies to fight the coronavirus. "It would be interesting
to check that," he said.
He added, "The whole concept of the light. That's pretty powerful." This was posted in response: PLEASE do not inject anything
into your body or ingest anything at all to kill the coronavirus. There
is NO SUBSTANCE that will disinfect your body of the coronavirus from
the inside. Don’t inject or drink bleach, soap, don’t do isopropyl
alcohol, lysol, or ANYTHING WHATSOEVER.
President talks about how the US has done more coronavirus tests than everyone else in the world combined, ending with "You people aren't satisfied." Erm, the US has performed about a million tests, the rest of the world combined has performed over 19 million.
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas made such a bat$%#@ crazy comment, he got his own entry on Snopes, saying essentially "OMG! Did he really say that?!?!?!" TX Lt Gov Dan Patrick: "There are
more important things than living ... I dont want to die, nobody wants
to die but man we've got to take some risks"
His idea is to sacrifice in order to open the economy back up.
"Gov.
Andrew Cuomo Bulldozes Mitch McConnell For 'Dumb,' 'Vicious' State
Bankruptcy Idea" President makes prediction about the recurrence of the coronavirus after it's been defeated and the economy re-opened. First, the whole idea of reflecting on whether or not the deadly virus is going to "come back" is ridiculous when it's still here. Thousands of Americans are still dying from the virus every day.
Emphases in original.
Again, this is the problem with "crony capitalism," a capitalism that's based on personal relationships rather than objective criteria. Crony capitalism simply can't handle a 50-state pandemic. HHS Secretary Alex Azar appointed a buddy instead of someone who could do the job. Meat plants are vulnerable to the pandemic as meat workers typically work very close to each other. This gives pseudo-meat vendors an opening. Laura Ingraham of Fox News pushes back on reports that Fox has been pressing for a drug that's actually more deadly than it is helpful. My own takeaway is that Fox News and their chief fan, the President, need to not talk up a potential cure until it's been thoroughly tested. Joe Biden's got a problem. The youth vote is not locked in. Young Democrats may hold their noses and vote for him, but it would be far better if they were enthusiastic about voting for him. Good, lengthy piece on how the President's son-in-law approaches his job of being kind of a "shadow minister." Kushner is very good at handling problems via "crony capitalism," a system based more on personal relationships than it is on objective criteria. The thing is, the pandemic is a 50-state problem. It's wildly unrealistic for 50 governors and hundreds of mayors to all develop close, personal relationships with someone they never even heard of until a just a few years ago. One of the real problems with the coronavirus is that it's a "sneaky" disease. It's contagious long before people are aware that they have it. "More than 4 in 10 coronavirus cases are spread by those not obviously sick, a study suggests." Our planet is around 4.543 billion years old. Plate tectonics has now been dated to have started around 3.2 billion years ago. Facts vs wishful thinking. Mayor of Las Vegas refuses to believe COVID-19 is more contagious than a list of other diseases. The Governor of Nevada responds quite reasonably to the Las Vegas Mayor's nutty idea of offering up her city's citizens as a "control group."
"Obama
administration asked for funding to tackle future pandemics but
Republicans refused" Found this piece from exactly a month ago concerning how the Trump Administration had come up with this “great” new method of supplying our front line health care workers. A month later, here we are! The US supply of necessary equipment is in poor shape. The New England Journal of Medicine says the DPA can be very useful, but the supply chain has to be really mobilized. Nurses protesting the complete mess that is the US supply system for front line health care workers. Truly insane to see this weeks after the US declared the pandemic
to be a national emergency: "EXCLUSIVE:
The Long Strange Trip Of One Shipment Of Millions Of KN95 Masks"
"New
study shows drug Trump promoted as 'game changer' in COVID-19 is a
bust" Mainstream media, being lazy and irresponsible as usual. The anti-social distancing people are Tea Party II. As with Tea Party I, the media confuses them with a real and meaningful social movement. "White
House's case against World Health Organization crumbles" A survivor of COVID-19, a news host, describes what it was like. President is very upset that governors are buying tests from South Korea and elsewhere. I sorta suspect it isn't the governors who are misinformed about the availability of tests. Eight days ago, the President was bragging about a "great deal" he had made with Saudi Arabia and Russia on oil prices. Oops! Crude oil is now less than a dollar a barrel! Because people are driving so much less, there's a huge over-supply of gasoline. Nah, that doesn't mean we'll get free gas! Long past time to switch over to renewables! Oil is now -$37.63 a barrel. Since it costs at least $30 a
barrel to produce oil in the US, and some fracked fields cost more like
$40 or $50 a barrel, we could see a raft of bankruptcies among smaller
producers that lack deep pockets or have already taken on a lot of
debt. Saw a short clip of the President's reacting to the reporters
question. I give Trump points for a fast reaction. The piece here makes
it very clear, however, that he was not celebrating anybody
other than himself. See, the problem for the President is that when you've established a cult, you can't retreat into the background. You have to keep the cult members excited with constant harangues. The good news is that everybody who's not in the cult is turned off by the language of the cult. "Illinois
Gov. Pritzker is buying medical supplies in secret so Team Trump
won't seize them" So after Chris Wallace asks VP Pence about the President's seditious-sounding calls to "liberate" various states, the Vice-President first describes a completely fictional character, a President Trump who is sincere, hard-working and dedicated. Challenged still further by Wallace, the VP simply filibusters the rest of the time away. Governors push back against President's call to "liberate" various states. "The
Rich wanted to Strangle a Tiny Gov't in a Bathtub to avoid Taxes; Now
it Turns out We need a Competent State" Florida's Governor acts to silence Florida's Surgeon General, thereby endangering the lives of Floridians. Definitely Tea Party II. An astroturf group, funded by right-wing "sugar daddies," representing the interests of wealthy people, is pressing state governments to re-open . The good news is that the prospects for a vaccine are very good.
Bad news is that the US needs to be testing at three times our
current rate in order to reopen and "America accounts for
24% of worldwide deaths.
"We make up 4% of the world's population." Seems to me the FBI and DHS should have better things to do than to track shipments of medical equipment coming into the US. Yeah, I suppose it could be trans-shipped to other countries, but if our President had gotten off his butt back in January, that wouldn't be a problem. Global Citizen had a sort of shut-in Live Aid concert. Good stuff! Ugh! The stupid! It burns! From a press conference: Asked about
Stephen Moore’s quote about protesters defying social distancing
measures and likening them to “modern-day Rosa Parks,” Trump says
“there is a lot of injustice.”
North Korean propagandists have nothing on the new Press Secretary. McEnany: "Under President [Donald Trump's] leadership we have quickly developed the most expansive and accurate testing system in the world." WaPo: There is no "system" at all, "...but rather a patchwork of programs administered by states with limited federal guidance." Pandemic cases might have peaked in New York Tri-state region. That does not mean they've peaked nationwide! Interesting tweets on how different countries prioritize different things. Excellent point! This is why I've never been worried about having a right-wing vs left-wing civil war. Thing about Trump’s call for
insurrection: the kinds of people who showed up in Lansing—a lot of old
people who wouldn’t get out of their cars—are far from a Freikorps or
Bolshevik vanguard.
"Pence
briefed Democratic senators on COVID-19. It did not go well." Sorry, but the President has a long enough track record. Any city that hosts a Trump rally without getting full payment up front is run by suckers and losers who deserve to get ripped off. There are currently 14 cities that are awaiting payment for police coverage. Zero sympathy for them. "Why
it matters that Kellyanne Conway flubbed a basic COVID-19 detail" How the small business loan program is working. In short, overwhelmed. Why exactly is COVID-19 such a nasty and vicious disease? Good explainer in a little over eight minutes. So the Trump Administration is getting N95 masks from a start-up
company that had zero employees and zero manufacturing experience at
a cost per mask of $5.50 as opposed to the industry's usual cost of
$0.63 per mask. There's no reason to think the produced masks will be
of inferior quality, but this looks an awful lot like "crony
capitalism," where contracts are made based on relationships
with back-slapping, poker-playing good buddies instead of "Who
can produce these items quickly and efficiently?" Is that overly
suspicious? Perhaps, but as an NBC report says, the supply chain,
where Jared Kushner just happens to have a lot of influence, ...has favored some of the nation's largest corporations and ignored smaller producers of goods and services with long track records of meeting emergency needs.... "GOP
Politician: If We Don’t Blame China For Virus, Voters ‘Will Blame
Trump’" Wall Street executives were given only 12 hours to fit the President's conference call into their schedules. As they're getting earnings reports now, many of them couldn't make it. Trump was apparently very disappointed because the executives insisted on widespread testing when he was clearly expecting nothing more than praise for his work so far. Widespread testing is something his administration has been promising for many months. By mapping garbage pick-ups in New York City, we learn a great deal about how different groups have responded to the pandemic. If we're looking for a "field marshal" or a "czar"
to take charge of the American pandemic response, I'd recommend this
woman for the job. Devi Sridhar writes the tweet at the to of this post. *Sigh!* Typical Trump Administration cluster#$@%. Website to get stimulus check to people who don't aleady have direct deposit crashes and burns on first day. Archive - sidebar items
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