Trump’s War With Truth – Page 15

Saturday’s (No) Soother – March 14, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Mt. Pavlov and Pavlov’s sister, the Aleutians, AK – Pavlov is the most active volcano in the US. Hat tip: Ottho H.

We’re crossing a threshold between what we knew about public health, toward an unseen future. There’s no certainty about what that future will look like. As important as it is to remove Trump, his incompetence has made his removal our second national priority. He’s made beating the Coronavirus our number one priority.

This has a domino effect: We don’t just have a national health emergency, but soon, a recession. So many things cancelled. So much commerce deferred, and for how long? Think about how many working people are/will be out of work due to postponements and cancellations, due to small companies closing. Due to illness of family and deaths of loved ones.

Widespread illness is showing the cracks in our health care delivery system: In early January, America was among the best-prepared nations for an epidemic. Our large number of ICU beds, plus our stockpiles of drugs and medical equipment, made us the envy of many nations.

And we took an early lead: On January 6, the CDC issued a Level 1 travel watch for China. On January 7, the CDC established a 2019-nCoV Incident Management group. On January 8, the CDC began alerting clinicians to watch for patients with respiratory symptoms and a history of travel to Wuhan. On January 17, the CDC issued an updated interim Health Alert Notice (HAN) Advisory to inform state and local health departments and health care providers about this outbreak. We began screening passengers on flights from Wuhan to five major US airports.

On January 31, Trump announced blocking of entry of Chinese nationals and mandatory quarantines on US citizens who returned from affected parts of China.

Since then, we’ve had inaction and mistakes by the FDA and CDC, including screwing up the provision of desperately needed tests. Even now the CDC and FDA say there’s an inadequate supply of reagents used in the tests, a bottleneck that should have been dealt with in January.

Organizations require strong leadership. That allows established process and procedures to rule in an emergency. That’s why we need good elected leaders in charge of the experts. Today, it’s the other way around. This is inexcusable.

Here’s a thought about one of the detestable people who helped bring us to this new threshold between where we were, and where we’re going: Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). In 2009, she singlehandedly removed $870 million in pandemic funding from the economic stimulus package:

From Grunwald’s tweet:

“Collins also deleted the pandemic flu preparations as a nonstarter”

Stop saying that Sen. Collins is a reasonable Republican. She’s proven time and again she’s not. It’s possible that there may not be any reasonable Republicans left. Please donate to Collins’s opponent, Democrat Sara Gideon.

Finally, haven’t we had enough of the lying and purposeful misinformation spewed by Trump? Eric Boehlert has a great idea: The media and the rest of us should stop listening to Trump:

“The President of the United States is actively endangering the American public, and at what point does the press decide that dutifully broadcasting Trump’s misinformation is not in the nation’s best interest. At what point does the press unplug Trump for the good of the country?”

His forum should be restricted to only FOX news. There is no reason to have presidential debates, since no fact-checking organization, much less any citizen, can keep up with Trump’s lies and misstatements. Sure, the GOP will complain that Biden (or Sanders) are chickens, that they’re too old to match wits with Trump. But the truth is, Trump should be denied a forum when and wherever possible.

He hasn’t earned being normalized by the rest of us. And don’t say we should respect the office – he doesn’t.

We need only one point to prove this: Trump did not push to do aggressive Coronavirus testing because more testing might have led to more Coronavirus cases being discovered. Trump made it clear the lower the numbers on Coronavirus, the better for him and his re-election this fall.

That disqualifies him.

Here’s a little tune to help you through the weekend. It’s “Enjoy Yourself (it’s later than you think)” by Jools Holland, The Specials, Hozier, Rhiannon Giddens and others performed in 2015:

And it IS later than you think! Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Trump Shows No Leadership on the Virus

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Mesa de Anguila, Big Bend NP, TX – 2020 photo by pierceingramphotos.

Trump spoke from the Oval Office about the pandemic on Wednesday night. It left most of us puzzled regarding whether our government is capable of more than a banana republic response to our public health crisis.

Trump offered no top-level guidance or policy, and no explanation for why testing remains largely unavailable. He issued vague promises of loans for businesses and tax deferments to individuals soon to have no jobs or incomes to tax.

Health care support for victims? Nada.

He labeled the Coronavirus a “foreign virus”. Several GOP Congresscritters are calling it the “China Virus”. What are Republicans trying to accomplish with this reframing?

His 30-day travel ban from Europe is a stop-gap way to wall off America from certain infected foreigners. Remember that in February, he did the same thing with China. He announced his European ban while saying it would not apply to the UK, where the virus has an established foothold. It also doesn’t apply to South Korea, which has the largest number of infections outside China. Again, what’s his point?

We hoped for a significant statement about controlling the spread of the virus in the US, but there was nothing. And since that was ostensibly the point of his little talk, it indicates that he either doesn’t know how to control the spread of the virus inside the US, or, doesn’t think that kind of program would help to keep him in office after November.

From Charlie Pierce:

“You knew it was all going to go terribly wrong in the first few sentences when the president* referred to the source of the pandemic as “a foreign virus”—This is the most aggressive and comprehensive effort to confront a foreign virus in modern history….the claim was as false as it was stupid. As the Washington Post helpfully points out, the administration*’s response to this outbreak has been to deny it, ignore it, downplay it, and now to use it as an excuse to ram through some tax cuts, a form of antibiotics that Joseph Lister never thought of.”

More tax cuts? Perhaps the one takeaway from the past two weeks, and from Trump’s Oval Office speech, is this:

“All the King’s tax cuts for all the King’s men
Won’t keep the Coronavirus from coming in”

People were expecting Trump to declare a national emergency but he didn’t, because he’s in a quandary. He doesn’t want to declare it despite the fact that we’re already in one. It would make a lie of his talking points that there’s nothing to worry about.

But remember last year, when he stirred up emotions about “an invasion of our country with drugs, with human traffickers, with all types of criminals and gangs“? He was happy to declare a National Emergency to get some of his wall built.

Emergency to stop immigrants? Sure. Emergency to save American lives? I’m thinking….

Here’s a long quote from David Frum:

“This crisis is not of Trump’s making. What he is responsible for is his failure to respond promptly, and then his perverse and counterproductive choice of how to respond when action could be avoided no longer….No American president, and precious few American politicians, have ever pointed so many fingers or hurled so much abuse as Donald Trump. What he means, of course, is: Don’t hold me to account for the things I did.

But he did do them, and he owns responsibility for those things….

More people will get sick because of his presidency than if somebody else were in charge. More people will suffer the financial hardship of sickness because of his presidency than if somebody else were in charge. The medical crisis will arrive faster and last longer than if somebody else were in charge. So, too, the economic crisis. More people will lose their jobs than if somebody else were in charge…More savers will lose more savings than if somebody else were in charge. The damage to America’s global leadership will be greater than if somebody else were in charge.”

Let’s close with Tom Sullivan:

“The only saving grace in this graceless, classless, heartless presidency is that this virus may end it…”

However, only if Biden wins in November.

Trump and the Republicans who enabled him in order to get their tax cuts and judges, must go.

Monday Wake Up Call – March 9, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Zion NP sunset from Watchman Overlook, UT – 2019 photo by kaushik612

Random thoughts on Monday:

Many of us have a tough time waking up on the first Monday after Daylight Savings Time kicks in. It’s more a case of “spring forward, fall flat”. Isn’t it ridiculous that a period that’s around for only 4.5 months out of 12 months is called “Standard Time“?

Who thinks that a 70-year-old (Trump) going on TV and telling a bunch of other 70-year-olds (Fox News viewers) that the Coronavirus is no big deal because it only kills old people, is a winning message?

Wrongo would like to think Trump can’t bullshit his way through an epidemic (“The tests are perfect!”). But GW Bush managed to bullshit his way through years of war in Iraq, including refusing to let us see lots of American body bags flown back to Dover AFB on TV.

The latest body bags now contain virus victims, and we’re seeing them up close and personal. Maybe that will matter to Americans who still think Trump is doing a helluva job.

You should read this article from The Atlantic on our botched test kits. South Korea has tested 200,000+ people, but The Atlantic could only confirm 1,895 tests in the US.

The region of Lombardy in Italy has enacted a forced quarantine for around 16 million residents. A doctor in Lombardy Italy reports that 9% of cases require hospital admittance. Recall that yesterday, Wrongo said that even a 5% admittance rate would overwhelm America’s ICU bed capacity.

Your virus coping strategy may be different than this one, since you follow the news:

The AP is telling us that the White House overruled the CDC, who wanted to recommend that elderly and physically fragile Americans be advised not to fly on commercial airlines because of the Coronavirus. The administration has since suggested certain people should consider not traveling, but they have stopped short of the stronger guidance sought by the CDC.

We learned that an attendee at last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which Trump also attended, has tested positive for Coronavirus. Trump and Pence spoke at the gathering, which took place two weeks ago. Secretary of State Pompeo, Health and Human Services Secretary Azar, and newly-appointed White House chief of staff Mark Meadows also attended.

This is hilarious. Will they believe their own stories, or what?

Trump’s plan is simple. Offload the crisis to Pence. Run a bus over him if it goes wrong. Take credit if it goes right. There are no steps after that.

Finally, to banish the grogginess of your first “spring ahead” work day, take a moment and watch this video panorama of the Mars landscape. It was taken between Nov. 24 and Dec. 1, 2019. It’s composed of more than 1,000 images carefully assembled over the ensuing months, and contains nearly 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape that look surprisingly sharp and clear:

Think how far we’ve come in our ~200,000 years of Homo sapiens existence: Our ancestors were fascinated by the bright orbs above, and here we are, seeing the geographic features of another planet in mind-boggling detail from our home/office on a magical screen thingy.

We take this all for granted, but we’ve come a very long way in Wrongo’s lifetime. Mars looks so familiar, yet at the same time, so alien. It’s hard to fathom that we’re looking at another planet.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Trump’s Coronavirus Disinformation Campaign

The Daily Escape:

Mount St. Helen’s WA – July 2019 photo by NathanielMerz

The Coronavirus global tally as of Saturday March 7^t^h is 105,612 cases with 3,562 deaths. Yesterday was the first day where we saw over 3,000 new cases in a single day since there was routine reporting of those levels in China a week or so ago.

That means the focus of new infections has shifted from China to the west. Wrongo saw a meme comparing flu deaths to Coronavirus deaths, saying that “54,000 people die from the flu each year and no one bats an eye, but people are freaking out over 3,500 coronavirus deaths”.

This is disinformation of the worst kind.

We’ve written about the differences between the flu and the Coronavirus: Coronavirus is at least 20 times as deadly as the flu, and is currently trending at 35 times as deadly. It is more contagious. This means that for 54k people to die from flu, 54 million people have to get the flu. But, for 54k people to die from Coronavirus, only between 1.8 million and 2.7 million people have to get sick.

This kind of disinformation is also spewing from the president. He has repeatedly downplayed concerns about Coronavirus. Just this week he:

Said he wanted to keep sick people on a cruise ship to fudge the numbers
Called the governor of Washington state, who has the most cases, “a snake”
Was preoccupied with his ratings on Fox
Said anyone can get tested, when they can’t

Meanwhile, the number of US cases have gone from 5 to 260 since he claimed it was all a hoax.

America can’t seem to get sufficient numbers of tests in the hands of health professionals. Connecticut, for example, has one examination kit that allows only 600 tests to be conducted. Do Trump & Pence realize that when you test fewer people, you do keep your number of confirmed cases low, but your death rate percentage is going to be higher?

The disinformation is reflected in polling. Reuters reports:

“Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent threat to the United States, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this week. And more Democrats than Republicans say they are taking steps to be prepared, including washing their hands more often or limiting their travel plans. Poll respondents who described themselves as Republicans and did not see the coronavirus as a threat said it still felt remote because cases had not been detected close to home and their friends and neighbors did not seem to be worried, either.”

Overall, about four of every 10 Democrats said they thought the new Coronavirus poses an imminent threat, compared to about two of every 10 Republicans. This is looking like a battle between the scientists working on the Coronavirus, and the political complacency of the right, who say that the virus is no big deal.

But this is a binary situation: One side or the other will turn out to be correct. The complacents assume that the number of cases will remain small (in the hundreds), so the number of deaths will also remain small. From Charles Hugh Smith:

“Given the scientific evidence that Covid-19 is highly contagious, let’s do a Pareto Distribution (80/20 rule) projection and estimate that 20% of the US population gets Covid-19. That’s 66 million people….higher than the 54 million who catch a flu virus in a “bad flu” season.”

Smith’s analysis paints a daunting picture: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Using the lower CFR (case-fatality rate) rate, 2% of 66 million is 1.3 million, so if Covid-19 infects only 20% of the US populace, current data suggests 1.3 million people will die.”

That should be a reason for panic.

Some final points: If even just 5% of all cases required hospitalization/intensive care, that would equal about 3.3 million people. Thus, America will quickly run out of hospital intensive care bed capacity. Smith says that there are just 94,000 intensive care beds in the US. Once the number of patients needing hospitalization exceeds the number of ICU beds, the death rate can grow dramatically.

And today, using disinformation, the Trump administration is trying to deflect and minimize what the scientists are saying. Trump’s handling of the Coronavirus in America is dangerous, and needs to be stopped.

A final word from Brian Schatz, Senator from Hawaii, on Trump:

“Today is a three dimensional demonstration of the consequences of electing someone like this. He’s not lying about his wealth. He’s not lying about his polling. He’s not lying about his opponent or his ratings. He’s lying about a pandemic and the government response.”

If in another 2-3 months, the hospitals are overflowing and surrounded by armed guards to keep the uninsured out of the building, we’ll be riding in a shit storm of Trump’s incompetence.

Is America Prepared For the Coronavirus?

The Daily Escape:

Coronavirus or not, it’s always business as usual – credit: Dave Note

The photo demonstrates why the coronavirus won’t be contained. 21^st century humans will do what they want, when they want, and how they want. They’ll trust that their government will sort out the consequences.

We need to take a hard look at resilience, which is defined as the ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune. We talk about it for individuals, markets, governments, and society. In truth, it applies to every system on earth.

We had our first wake-up call about American resilience with 9/11, followed in 2005 by Hurricane Katrina. We watched the news, and saw that America was unable to snap back quickly, that we were powerless in the face of incomprehensible disaster.

There are still scars in New Orleans 15 years later.

We have ignored that the Covid-19 virus is at least as infectious, and possibly more than, the normal flu virus we see every year. But the mortality rate of Covid-19 is about 2%, or about 20 times as deadly as the normal flu, which has a mortality rate of around .1%.

Thus far in 2020, 19 million cases have been reported to the CDC, with 10,000 deaths and 180,000 hospitalized. Multiply 10,000 by 20, and that’s 200,000 deaths in the US, and following the flu model, perhaps 3,600,000 incremental hospitalizations.

We need to think about our resiliency. According to the American Hospital Association, there are 924,107 staffed beds in hospitals, down about 53,000 beds since 2000. Of the 2020 total, 792,417 are in community hospitals. The national occupancy rate for all of those beds is about 65%, based on the latest figures from 2017, so perhaps we have sufficient beds, assuming all hospital beds are equally capable.

Logistics will drive our resilience response. There is much to learn from the Chinese response. Wuhan didn’t have enough beds when the Covid-19 virus struck, and built two new hospitals in an attempt to have a place for all victims who needed to be in a hospital setting. They quickly had shortages of sterile gowns, masks and gloves. Then they had a shortage of health care professionals, and moved some professionals to Wuhan to deal with the explosion of cases.

They quarantined cities, something that we can’t do effectively without declaring martial law.

But, it gets more difficult. Covid-19 is a severe respiratory illness. Victims need the kinds of breathing therapies equipment that are usually in limited supply in each hospital. The NHS in England only has 15 available beds to treat the most severe respiratory failure in the entire country. They say they will struggle to cope if there are more than 28 patients who need them.

Testing is an issue, because without tests, we can’t be sure that the patient has the virus, and test kits are in very short supply. Iran reported on the BBC that it had just 14 test kits in the country at the time of the outbreak.

Live Science reports that in early February, the CDC sent testing kits to labs across the US, but a glitch in the kits made them unusable. Now, just five state health departments: California, Illinois, Nebraska, Nevada and Tennessee, as well as the CDC, have the ability to test for the virus. As of Feb. 26, just 445 people have been tested in the US, not including the travelers who returned on evacuation flights. In contrast, the WaPo reported that as of Feb. 25^th, South Korea had tested more than 35,000 people for the virus.

How will America scale up?

We need tests that work, equipment to treat respiratory failure, hospital beds, sterile gowns and gloves, along with trained healthcare professionals. Where will they come from? These are the questions the media and politicians should be asking Mike Pence, the new Covid-19 Czar.

Don’t count on answers. The administration has already told the federal government that all communication to reporters and others, is to go through Pence. That’s even more dangerous, because there is no one who will tell Trump or Pence anything they don’t want to hear. And Pence is muzzling the scientists who really know what’s going on.

The economic consequences are even greater than the blood-letting in the stock market this week would lead you to believe. The health consequences are enormous.

What about the political consequences? We’re in the middle of a presidential election, so we’re bound to hear the right and left version of this story. Wrongo doesn’t want Democrats to try and exploit the government’s less-than-adequate efforts to contain the virus.

They should be rational. They should invite scientists to testify to break through the administration’s spin. They should pass a supplemental spending bill aimed at containing the crisis based on the scientists’ advice.

This is a time for good policy that will turn out to be good politics.

Facebook Could Destroy Democracy

The Daily Escape:

Pond, Greenville County SC – February 2020 photo by Ninjiteex. It’s rare to see snow in SC

On Facebook, Wrongo mostly reads the posts of friends who are involved in showing dogs at AKC events. People who show dogs skew older and female, and thus, so do Wrongo’s Facebook friends. Many share a constant amount of pro-Trump (dis)information.

So, Wrongo tried a week-long experiment, letting some of those posters know that their posts were factually incorrect. Let’s focus on one, a picture of a very young Bernie Sanders being hauled away by police:

The photo’s caption says:

“In 1963 Bernie Sanders was arrested for throwing eggs at black civil rights protestors. This is the side of Bernie that CNN and the fake news media don’t want you to know”

The picture is real, the caption is false. Sanders was actually protesting police brutality and segregation, and was arrested for “resisting arrest”. Facebook has now taken down the post, but it was up for over a week.

When Wrongo told friends that their posts were false, everyone deflected, and minimized their intent. One, a fervent Trumper, said, “I just wanted to post a picture of him when he was young”. Never mind that this photo is available all over the internet with the simplest of searches, all with the correct reference.

Despite a week’s worth of trying, no one was willing to delete a false post. Many of these people post disinformation six or more times a day, so it was an exercise in futility to try and make these “friends” admit the truth about their posts, much less show any awareness about their biases.

This is a small example of what McKay Coppins wrote in his Atlantic article, “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President.” As an experiment, Coppins signed up at many pro-Trump social media sites, and soon was deluged with alternative facts: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“What I was seeing was a strategy that has been deployed by illiberal political leaders around the world. Rather than shutting down dissenting voices, these leaders have learned to harness the democratizing power of social media for their own purposes—jamming the signals, sowing confusion. They no longer need to silence the dissident shouting in the streets; they can use a megaphone to drown him out. Scholars have a name for this: censorship through noise.”

All of this is helped by Facebook’s excellent micro-targeting tools. They allow an advertiser to slice the electorate into narrow and distinct niches and then reach them with precisely tailored digital messages. More from Coppins:

“An ad that calls for defunding Planned Parenthood might get a mixed response from a large national audience, but serve it directly via Facebook to 800 Roman Catholic women in Dubuque, Iowa, and its reception will be much more positive.”

The results can be overwhelming. The Trump campaign runs hundreds of iterations of ads. In the 10 weeks after the House of Representatives began its impeachment inquiry, the Trump campaign ran roughly 14,000 different ads containing the word impeachment.

No one has the bandwidth to sift through all of them, and then call them out.

It gets worse. Coppins says that the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign have compiled an average of 3,000 data points on every voter in America. They have spent years experimenting with ways to tweak their messages based not just on gender and geography, but on whether the recipient owns a dog or, a gun.

Raw Story quotes former Rep. David Jolly (R-FL) saying that Donald Trump intentionally wants America to be anxious: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“I had a colleague that was in a meeting in the Roosevelt Room and….he heard Trump say, ‘Have you ever seen the nation so divided?’ My colleagues and others said, ‘No, we haven’t.’ Trump said, ‘I love it that way.’’

He thinks this how he’ll be re-elected!

Last Sunday, Walter Schaub, former director of the US Office of Government Ethics had a remarkable tweet thread on this, saying: (emphasis and brackets by Wrongo)

“…we’re in a dangerous new phase of Trump’s war on democracy. What do we do now?

….the greatest threat we face is despondency. The enemies of democracy…want you drowning in hopelessness. A hopeless populace is a helpless one. To that end, a hostile foreign power set up an infrastructure to weaponize social media against you.

Compounding the assault on your senses, he [Trump] also wields a corrupted government, which follows his lead in disseminating lies to sow confusion…

In the face of this psychological warfare, our most urgent mission—our civic duty—is to reject despondency. Everyone has a bad day, so we may need to take turns leading the charge. But our job as citizens is to resist the temptation to spread defeatism on social media.”

You said it, Walter!

We gotta keep hope alive.

Trump’s Sweet Little Lies

The Daily Escape:

Owens River, Owens Valley, CA – 2020 photo by AndrewHelmer. Owens is the deepest valley in the US.

A few thoughts about the SOTU. First, should we have minimum standards of conduct and language in our society? If so, should the president reflect them? Or, have we finally reached peak SOTU=STFU?

Trump wouldn’t shake Pelosi’s hand. Pelosi tore up her courtesy copy of the SOTU speech after Trump finished speaking. Both were empty gestures of contempt. Pelosi later explained to reporters that she tore up the speech because it was “manifesto of mistruths”. Twitter was ablaze, using hashtags like#NancytheRipper. The right predictably reacted. Here’s Jonathan Turley’s tweet:

“Pelosi’s act dishonored the institution and destroyed even the pretense of civility and decorum in the House. If this is the Speaker’s “drop the mike” moment, it is a disgrace that should never be celebrated or repeated. In a single act, she obliterated decades of tradition.”

Some (Nikki Haley) said that Pelosi was dishonoring the last surviving Tuskegee Airman and a service member’s reunion with his family. Some are calling for a one-way return to civility. Why is it that calls for more grace and more respect for tradition only operate in the Democrats’ direction?

Some always point out that we can give the OFFICE respect without giving the person respect. That’s an important distinction, one Wrongo supports, and one not made during the Obama era by Republicans.

Heather Cox Richardson sums up the evening:

“Trump….went on to play the game show host turned autocratic ruler. In the course of the speech, he developed the theme that he, the president, could raise hurting individuals up to glory. He promoted an older African American veteran to General. He awarded a scholarship to a child who had previously been unable to get one. He had Melania award the Medal of Freedom to talk show host Rush Limbaugh….He reunited a military family. Contrived though all these scenarios were, they made him the catalyst for improving the lives of individuals in ways to which we all can relate. It was reality TV: false, scripted, and effective.”

It was Trump’s Oprah moment: You get a scholarship! You get a medal of freedom! Juan Guaidó, you get Venezuela! If he had asked the audience to look under their seats for envelopes, Trump’s night would have been indistinguishable from an Oprah show.

But the worst was honoring Limbaugh: A horse’s ass recognized by a jackass. It may replace what to Wrongo’s thinking was the worst Presidential Medal of Freedom, Trump’s award to napkin economist Arthur Laffer. He of the 40-year proven failure of economic theory, the Laffer curve. But now and forever, America will have honored Rush, who the right-wing media will hereafter describe as the stoic hero facing a terrible death.

The media’s other narrative will be: Nancy, the Nasty Bitch.

The WaPo again did yeoman’s work fact-checking Trump’s lies in the SOTU speech:

“Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in using them,”

He repeats them incessantly to wear down the media, and to exhaust the rest of us. He hopes that we’ll accept his version of reality.

If you knew nothing about the last three years of Trump’s presidency, the picture he painted sounded pretty good. If you have paid any attention at all, you know that the country was being snowed under with an avalanche of lies and half-truths.

His was a long, tedious exercise in election-year pandering and demagoguery. The president’s record of accomplishments is thin, so he had to pad it with hyperbole and outlandish claims.

Let’s close with a musical interlude. Here’s Fleetwood Mac’s video of their hit “Sweet Little Lies”, an appropriate tune for Trump’s manifesto of mistruths:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Saturday Soother – January 25, 2020

The Daily Escape:

The Subway, Zion NP, UT – 2019 photo by DarthButane. This is a nine-mile round trip hike.

When it comes to the impeachment trial, nothing that’s said really matters, if you are hoping for a fair review of guilty, vs. not guilty.

Let’s spend a moment reviewing Adam Schiff’s closing remarks on Thursday night. He was off the charts brilliant:

“The American people deserve a president they can count on to put their interests first, to put their interest first. Colonel Vindman said, here, right matters. Here, right matters.

Well, let me tell you something. If right doesn’t matter, if right doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter how good the constitution is. It doesn’t matter how brilliant the framers were. It doesn’t matter how good or bad our advocacy in this trial is. It doesn’t matter how well-written the oath of impartiality is. If right doesn’t matter, we’re lost. If truth doesn’t matter, we’re lost. The framers couldn’t protect us from ourselves, if right and truth don’t matter. And you know that what he did was not right. “

Schiff concluded with: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“But here, right is supposed to matter. It’s what’s made us the greatest nation on earth. No constitution can protect us if right doesn’t matter anymore. And you know you can’t trust this president to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to.

This is why, if you find him guilty, you must find that he should be removed. Because right matters. Because right matters. And the truth matters. Otherwise we are lost.”

He didn’t read this, he spoke from the heart. He wasn’t histrionic, or angry. However, he did deliver a sharp condemnation of Trump. He all but said “If Trump walks, and is re-elected, this country is finished.”

That fell flat with some Republicans:

Republicans have really thin skins when it comes to attacks on the guy who tweets insults for a living.

Schiff didn’t pretend that witnesses are a real possibility. He didn’t pretend Democrats are going to get documents. He didn’t pretend that GOP Senators will do the right thing.

He made it clear to the real jury, America’s voters, what’s at stake, and exactly who is shirking their duties. He’s shown us that Republicans no longer even pretend to give a flying f__k about democracy, honesty, or the Constitution.

Was it a tough week for you? Jim Lehrer died. The long-time anchor of the PBS NewsHour was possibly the last of his kind. Wrongo often watched Lehrer’s careful, considered journalism on PBS, along with his moderation of presidential debates. He was never one of those in the news media who thrive on gotcha questions and confrontations.

Time to let it all go for a few minutes. Iit’s time for our Saturday Soother. Here, the fields of Wrong still have snow on the ground, although it is now crisscrossed by the tracks of all sorts of animals. We’re in for a rainy weekend, so let’s start by brewing up a mug of coffee that is recommended by Wrongo’s daughter, Merrill. It’s Colombia Santa Rita coffee ($16/12 oz.) with its notes of caramel, toasted almond, and powdered cocoa, from Rainier Coffee.

Now settle back near a fire, and listen to a piece of cello music from Henry Eccles, a violinist from Great Britain who was born in 1670. We will listen to the Largo section of his “Sonata for Violoncello in G minor”, played by Maxim Kozlov, who calls himself “Cellopedia”:

Wrongo and Ms. Right heard this played on New Year’s Day by Sam Magill, cellist with the NY Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. He hasn’t recorded it professionally, but you will love this sad, emotional performance by Kozlov.

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

Verdict First. Trial Later

The Daily Escape:

Joshua Tree NP CA, in snow – December 2019 photo by chase_embrace

Have you been watching the impeachment extravaganza? It’s a mind-numbing exercise that’s difficult to take in large doses. That was probably Mitch McConnell’s plan. There are a few revelations though. One is the work of Adam Schiff, (D-CA) who is the lead House manager for the impeachment trial.

Josh Marshall at TPM says that Schiff’s job is to put the Senate on trial, and put Republican senators in a box that they can’t climb out of in November:

“Adam Schiff… [is] making a really convincing, damning set of arguments about all the accusations the President’s lawyers are denying while they simultaneously refuse to release records which would quickly confirm and refute those accusations.

These are cases in which we know there are contemporaneous notes or other records. The answers are there. But they refuse to release them. It is a damning indictment not only of the President but even more his Senate accomplices.”

The Senate Republicans swore an oath to be jurors, but they want to keep all of the proof secret. So, Schiff and the other House managers are making it clear that it is the Senate Republicans that are really on trial. The weakness for Republicans is that this is the first Senate trial held in defiance of the principle of shared facts and evidence.

Republican Senators are not paying close attention to Schiff and the others. All Senators are supposed to be in attendance and listening, but a few, mainly on the Republican side, are openly flaunting the rule. Dana Milbank’s column in the WaPo:

“Just minutes into the session, as lead House impeachment manager Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) presented his opening argument for removing the president, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) displayed on his desk a hand-lettered message with big block letters pleading: “S.O.S.” In case that was too subtle, he followed this later with another handwritten message pretending he was an abducted child: “THESE R NOT MY PARENTS!”

See, it’s all just a joke, presided over by the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Hell, Trump said out loud at Davos that he’s withholding evidence: (brackets by Wrongo)

“I got to watch enough [of the Senate trial] — I thought our team did a very good job. But honestly, we have all the material. They don’t have the material.”

The second article of impeachment is obstruction of Congress by withholding witnesses and documents. Trump confessed to it on live TV to reporters, and Senate Republicans don’t care.

Wrongo’s been waiting for Republicans to pay a significant price for their lying, hypocrisy, constant defiance of the rule of law, and disrespect for our institutions, norms, and Constitution, ever since the days of St. Ronnie.

From Martin Longman: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“In a way, it’s something the Democrats are getting used to. From the hanging chads in Florida in 2000 to the Electoral College loss in 2016, the Republicans make a living winning despite losing. They’ve become dependent on cheating and rigging the rules of the game, and they’re experts at it at this point.”

The impeachment trial Kabuki play is no different. The GOP is gleefully waiting out the ceremonial “trial” in order to deliver their pre-ordained verdict.

Is it just Wrongo, or does it seem like America is screwed beyond redemption? If, by some cosmic quirk, Democrats one day hold the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, anything they attempt to do that does not align with Republican orthodoxy will end up being decided by one of McConnell’s right-wing courts.

You can expect that they will find a way to tie up, or simply negate anything the savior Congress tries to do. Will some great leader show up? Does the current crop of Democratic candidates have anyone able to make the case for wholesale change?

Do any of them have coattails sufficient to win the Senate?

Wrongo proposes that we think about Adam Schiff as the Democratic Presidential nominee. Sure, you think it’s too late, but is it really?

Here’s what the WaPo’s conservative writer Jennifer Rubin said about Schiff’s opening statement: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“And that is what the trial is about. It’s about making clear to the entire country that Trump did exactly what he is accused of, but that his own party, suffering from political cowardice and intellectual corruption, do not have the nerve to stop him. If that is the goal — prove Trump’s guilt and Republicans’ complicity — Schiff hit a grand slam. And we have days more of evidence to hear.”

He’s someone who can make a tightly reasoned argument. He’s well-spoken, and knows Constitutional history. He’s a liberal from a liberal state, and at 60, he’s not a geezer.

President Adam? Sure, why not!

Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 19, 2020

What to make of the new trade deal with China? The deal seems to restore the US-China trade relationship to where it was before Trump launched his “easy to win” trade war. Nothing that China has agreed to departs markedly from what it agreed to during the Obama administration. In 2015, Obama and Xi Jinping announced an end to cyber-intellectual property theft and embarked on a next round of negotiations over market access.

Trump’s Phase I agreement barely restores China’s agricultural purchases to where they were before 2017, even though Trump presented it as a victory. If one of your main customers boycotts you and then agrees to start buying again, but is buying fewer goods, it’s disingenuous to announce that they had promised to buy more.

After two years of mounting tariffs hostilities, the Phase I agreement has cost the US more than $30 billion in subsidies to American farmers. It has cost American consumers tens of $ billions in tariffs. It has forced some US companies to diversify their supply chains out of China at an additional cost of $ billions.

Trump and his trade sidekick Peter Navarro, fundamentally misread the relative strengths of both the US and China. They thought that Chinese exports to the US are the key driver of the Chinese economy. If that were true, tariffs would be a potent weapon.

But a recent McKinsey study shows that China has aggressively shifted from an export-driven economy to a domestic consumer-driven one. Much of any gain in Chinese exports primarily accrues to the multinational companies like Apple that source in China, and not to the domestic Chinese economy.

At best, Trump fought China to a draw. At worst, China now understands that less economic engagement with America is in its self-interest. The trade war and its new, paper-thin truce leaves America with less leverage going forward. On to cartoons.

Was Round One a win?