We’ve already lost more Americans to the Coronavirus in the month of March than we lost during the 9-year long Iraq war.
Here are the latest national numbers (which will be out of date by the time you read them). From The COVID Tracking Project: (as of 4/3)
Number of daily cases: 271,988, up 32,889 or +13.75% vs. April 2
Rate of case increase: 13.75% vs. 15% for the past week
Number of deaths: Total 6,962, up 1,178 vs. April 2
Rate of deaths increase 4/3 vs 4/2: 20.4% % vs. 23.1% on 4/2
Daily number of tests 4/3 vs. 4/2: 1,407,344, up 139,596 over 4/2
Rate of increase in tests: +11% vs. previous day
There is some evidence above that “flattening the curve” is working. Wrongo recommends visiting The COVID Tracking Project which has the most comprehensive data, both nationally, and by state. It is updated several times a day and can be exported to your device, if you are interested.
On to cartoons, starting with a chart Wrongo originally posted on Wednesday, now updated by Sharpie, showing why wearing a mask may be a very good idea:
Georgia governor Kemp said he didn’t know the virus could be spread without symptoms. Why do so many Republicans excuse their behavior by saying “I didn’t know“? Aren’t they the party of personal responsibility?
Kushner and Pence: little men trying to operate WAY beyond their abilities:
Remember when George W. Bush was the most incompetent president imaginable?
Remember when George W Bush was the most incompetent president imaginable?
Perhaps, “Thou shall not run a church as a money making enterprise” might help:
Why is gathering in a church not as dangerous as sitting in a restaurant? Is it because God will protect you in a church but not at Applebees? Or is group praying simply worth the risk? Or that Republican governors are afraid of pissing off their evangelical base?
Lake Colchuck, Alpine Lakes Wilderness, near Leavenworth, WA – photo by atgcgtt
Until 1956, e pluribus Unum (out of many, one) was the country’s unofficial national motto. It was officially replaced by “In God we trust“ by Congress in 1956. And in America today, there are many, many pastors who are telling their members that for Coronavirus, trusting God is enough. There’s no need for social distancing or flattening the curve. From Crooks and Liars: (Brackets by Wrongo)
“Apparently the Coronavirus was wiped off the face of the earth Sunday by televangelist Kenneth Copeland, [who]…around 12 eastern [said]…..In the name of Jesus… I execute judgment on you, COVID-19!..It! Is! Finished! It! Is! Over!”
But it isn’t over, we still have plenty of coughs right along with our prayers.
Many Americans just don’t like to be told what to do, even when it’s readily apparent why they should do it. Most are beginning to accept the arguments about transmission rates and mortality rates being higher than with the flu.
They are accepting curve flattening. But it’s doubtful they would have accepted it simply based on the words of scientists. Without the exercise of state and local power closing schools and stores, and banning social gatherings, along with their painful economic consequences they would be out and about like the kids in Florida during spring break.
Social media is filled with pandemic denialism and fantastic rumors about the true origin, or the severity of the virus. Most of us aren’t public health experts, so going along with the program boils down to “the government seems to be taking it seriously, so maybe I should too.”
And the government is finally taking it seriously, despite Trump’s refusal to take the COVID-19 outbreak seriously during the entire first quarter of 2020. Now suddenly, he is, and much of the media are giving him credit for a change in tone, for looking presidential, and for finally acting seriously.
Praising Trump for changing his tone is like praising your puppy for shitting closer to the door.
Trump frittered away January, February and most of March as a coronavirus denialist. It is a hoax, he said. We only have 15 cases. It will just go away. It is like the ordinary flu. It shouldn’t interfere with business, or with the stock market.
But it did interfere with our lives, and now it looks like an unstoppable force. Here’s a chart from the Financial Times:
This graph tracks most countries by number of cases and the days since the country’s 100th case. The steeper the curve, the faster the cases are growing, and the bigger the national problem. There are reference curves for cases doubling every day, every other day, every three days, an once a week.
The graph shows that America’s on a track to face a massive public health problem, perhaps the worst among nations. One made worse by the wide mistrust of the state’s authority by significant segments of America. Many politicians and citizens seemingly reject stay at home orders, or other measures to control the rapid spread of the virus.
Two stories of interest. First, a delicious irony is how dependent America is on foreign-born doctors and other health workers, given Trump’s aversion to immigration. Juan Cole reports that nearly one third of American physicians are foreign-born. And about a quarter of nurse aides are first-generation immigrants. More from Cole:
“About 17% of US physicians are Asian-Americans. These are the same Asian-Americans against whom Trump fomented beatings and harassment by calling Covid-19 “Chinese.” About 6% of our physicians are Hispanic. Fully one percent of them are Muslim, which is proportional to the Muslim-American population.”
Second, returning to the “In God We Trust” motto, a makeshift tent hospital was built in Central Park in Manhattan. The group Samaritan’s Purse is working with Mount Sinai Health System to open a 68-bed respiratory care unit. Sounds great, we need all the help we can get, right?
Wrong. Gothamist reports that Samaritan’s Purse has asked all volunteers working at the field hospital to sign a pledge that includes one that defines marriage as “exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female” and another that says “human life is sacred from conception to its natural end.” So, don’t work here if you are for same sex marriage, or abortion.
Maybe it helps to know the group is headed by Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, and a guy with a history of incendiary comments. Samaritan’s Purse is specifically seeking Christian medical staff for the tent hospital.
In the middle of this plague, the last thing anyone needs is a bunch of superstitious hatemongers judging those who either want to help, or who need help.
Last light, Tombstone Territory Park, Yukon, AK – fall 2019 photo by tmsvdw
A few days ago, Wrongo heard someone say that we should be careful what we wished for from Trump. He was talking about Trump’s lack of leadership regarding the pandemic. His thought was that the last thing people should want was Trump in full command, and attempting a vigorous response. We’re already failing, and that wouldn’t make it better.
OTOH, it’s been terrible to learn how ill-prepared we are, and how passive-aggressive the administration has been about doing more. It’s past time to accept the excuse that these people are well-intended but awful managers. Take this bit of news from the WaPo:
“On Feb. 5, with fewer than a dozen confirmed novel coronavirus cases in the United States but tens of thousands around the globe, a shouting match broke out in the White House Situation Room between Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar and an Office of Management and Budget official….Azar had asked OMB that morning for $2 billion to buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment…”
Several weeks later, the request was cut to $500 million. Now, there’s $16 billion in the stimulus bill for the strategic stockpile, but that’s at least six weeks too late. The government has been overwhelmed by urgent requests for masks, respirators, gloves and gowns since the first US case of Covid-19 was confirmed. But on February 7th, Secretary of State Pompeo announced that we were sending:
“…nearly 17.8 tons of donated medical supplies to the Chinese people, including masks, gowns, gauze, respirators, and other vital materials.”
Yes, this was after there were already 12 confirmed cases in the US, and after the HHS request for $2 billion to buy the same things was denied.
Then there’s Trump’s strategy, “better be nice to me if you want any medical gear”. More from the WaPo:
“Anecdotally, there are wide differences….Democratic-leaning Massachusetts, which has had a serious outbreak in Boston, has received 17% of the protective gear it requested….Maine requested a half-million N95 specialized protective masks and received 25,558 — about 5% of what it sought. The shipment delivered to Colorado — 49,000 N95 masks, 115,000 surgical masks and other supplies — would be “enough for only one full day of statewide operations…”
But, when Trump’s guy is in charge, as in Florida, it’s a different story: (emphasis by Wrongo)
“Florida has been an exception in its dealings with the stockpile: The state submitted a request on March 11 for 430,000 surgical masks, 180,000 N95 respirators, 82,000 face shields and 238,000 gloves, among other supplies — and received a shipment with everything three days later…It received an identical shipment on March 23, according to the division, and is awaiting a third.”
So, three times what they asked for, while California, with Trump nemesis Democratic Governor Newsom in charge, actually got worse than nothing. KRON-TV in San Diego reports that Los Angeles received 170 broken ventilators from the national stockpile. Surely, a simple clerical error.
California also asked for 20 million N95 respirators, and has received 358,381.
Trump is actually doing what he’s been saying: “I am sending aid to states that like me, and withholding aid from states that don’t like me.” That’s Trump’s re-election strategy: Support the states he needs to win for an Electoral College victory.
Reward your friends, punish your enemies. Is that the kind of leadership America needs?
You know leadership when you see it. Sadly, even the UK’s Prime Minister Bozo Boris Johnson shows more leadership than America’s Bozo. After Johnson’s terrible start fighting the Coronavirus, one that rivaled Trump’s, things have turned around. There is consistent messaging: The government has adopted the slogan “Save lives”, “Protect the NHS” [the national health system], and “Stay home”. Simple and clear, something the entire country can rally around.
In the US? No message is simple, or clear. Most messages are conflicting or simply unworkable, like Trump’s suggestion of issuing an executive order quarantining the states of NY, NJ and CT, an unconstitutional and unenforceable idea. How about THAT for leadership.
Trump’s plan for re-election is: “If you aren’t dead, I saved you. Show some appreciation. I take no responsibility for those whose governors failed to save you“. Favoring those states he may need in 2020 is outrageous and criminal.
Two audio-visual aids today for your Monday Wake Up. First, a staggering animated chart showing the growth in Coronavirus cases world-wide during March, with a particular focus on the US:
#CoronaUpdate Total no. of Coronavirus cases: (1st March – 27th March)
“To prevent the Black Death spreading in the 14th century, all ships thought to be infected were isolated for 40 days to prevent the spread of the disease. In fact, the word quarantine comes from the Italian quaranta giorni, meaning ’40 days’”.via Ilargi
Some math. $2 trillion from Congress, and $4 trillion from the Federal Reserve so far is how much per family? 83.5 million families divided into $6 trillion = $71,856 per family of new national debt. Hard to know exactly, but households are likely to see only about $3,400 of that $71,856, assuming it is a two-person, two-kid family that makes under $150,000/year. Your mileage may vary.
This shows that our government has once again misdistributed the stimulus. Isn’t it always the case that in a crisis, our Crisis Capitalism government never misses a chance to give money to the corporations and the rich? Why is it so difficult to distribute the funds more equitably? Because they want to distribute as little as possible to the people.
Don’t you think that Trump should wait until every state has all the tests, medical gear and ventilators they need before he starts prognosticating on what date we can all return to normal lives?
As part of his deflecting of responsibility, Trump blames Obama for not stockpiling medical masks during his presidency. But Trump has been president for the past three years, he owns the stockpile. Clearly, he made no effort to add new medical masks in his time in office. He owns the shortage.
NY Governor Cuomo has shown miles more leadership ability than Trump in dealing with the crisis. He’s been blunt, factual, and realistic. In contrast, Trump has downplayed and lied about the pandemic. On to cartoons.
Anything you need in order to revive the bull:
Trump’s driving the Death Train:
The pandemic shows that our safety net is full of holes:
Convict Lake, Eastern Sierras, CA – photo by wild_NDN. It got its name after a group of escaped convicts ambushed the posse at the lake in 1871.
There will be a few winners in the race to source products for the Coronavirus fight. One winner is Puritan Medical Products Co. of Guilford, ME. If you’ve been tested for Covid-19, it’s quite likely that the swab used to collect a sample from inside your nose was made by Puritan.
Puritan is one of two companies that produce the world’s supply of the swabs used for coronavirus testing. (The other, Copan Diagnostics Inc., is in Italy). From Bloomberg:
“If swabs are necessary for testing, and if testing is crucial to slowing the virus’s spread, then it wouldn’t be an overstatement to say that the world’s future depends, at least in part, on Puritan.”
Unless the method for conducting the COVID-19 tests changes, Puritan’s ability to make more swabs will remain the long pole in the tent for figuring out which Americans have the virus. Puritan sells 65 different kinds of swabs. It has more than $45 million yearly in sales revenue.
On March 12, Puritan started getting calls from the US government. Bloomberg quotes Timothy Templet, executive vice president:
“We are ramping up to produce and wrap a million swabs a week that we need to put into the supply chain across the US…”
Please think about that. The Trump administration first contacted the swabs guy on March 12th, two and a half months after we should have known we needed as many as we could get, assuming America was interested in testing for the Coronavirus.
Early tests used two swabs—one for the nose, and another for the back of the throat, but the swab shortage forced changes to CDC guidelines, and now, only one is required. Puritan has two swabs patented for this purpose, and they’re making and shipping both, but scaling up production isn’t simple. Workers are in short supply, with more aging out of the workforce than entering in rural Maine. More from Templet:
“The whole labor shortage has created difficulties to have enough machines and build equipment…I could use 60 people tomorrow.”
Second, let’s talk the shortage of hospital safety gear, including disposable face masks, eye protection, gloves and gowns. Farhad Manjoo had an Op-Ed in Thursday’s NYT, “How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask”, that details another sourcing problem:
“The answer to why we’re running out of protective gear involves a very American set of capitalist pathologies — the rise and inevitable lure of low-cost overseas manufacturing, and a strategic failure, at the national level and in the health care industry, to consider seriously the cascading vulnerabilities that flowed from the incentives to reduce costs.”
Twenty years ago, most hospital protective gear was made domestically. But like the apparel and consumer products business, face mask manufacturing has since shifted largely overseas. Today, China produces 80 % of masks worldwide. More from Manjoo:
“In January, the brittle supply chain began to crack under pressure. To deal with its own outbreak, China began to restrict exports of protective equipment. Then other countries did as well — Taiwan, Germany, France and India took steps to stop exports of medical equipment. That left American hospitals to seek more and more masks from fewer and fewer producers.”
In 2006, Congress funded adding hospital protective gear to a national strategic stockpile. At one point, it contained 52 million surgical face masks and 104 million N95 respirator masks. But in 2009, about 100 million masks in the stockpile were deployed to fight the H1N1 flu pandemic, and the government never bothered to replace them. Today, we have about 40 million masks in the stockpile — around 1% of the projected need for the Coronavirus fight.
Fighting the coronavirus is forecasted to require 3.5 billion face masks, according to DHHS. Mask producers say it will take at least few months to significantly expand production. Here’s a chart of the shortfall:
But, until that happens, the forecast is that we’re going to be short 170 million masks per month. Most of that must be sourced from China at a time when there is huge global demand, and Trump is fighting with the Chinese.
The real issue is that our system is built to optimize efficiency, not resiliency. But we’ve just learned the hard way that without resiliency, we could lose many more Americans.
This is where our priorities are misplaced. We have plenty of redundancy built into our military hardware, and our bloated defense budget assures it will stay that way. But pandemics are also a significant (and growing) threat to our national security.
How about rebuilding the “strategic reserve” of protective gear with some defense dollars? To add 300 million masks at $0.75 each would cost $225 million.
Just when you think that the two Parties and the White House have found agreement on a massive stimulus bill, a few rogue Republicans decide that there’s too much welfare in it for them. From NBC News:
Sens. Tim Scott, (R-SC), Lindsey Graham, (R-SC), and Ben Sasse, (R-NE), said that the bill “could provide a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work” because some people could theoretically make more by being unemployed. Senator Rick Scott (r-FL) jumped onto the obstructionist bandwagon as well.
More from the Senators’ statement:
“If the federal government accidentally incentivizes layoffs, we risk life-threatening shortages in sectors where doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trying to care for the sick, and where growers and grocers, truckers and cooks are trying to get food to families’ tables.”
The fight is over an additional $600 per week payment to each recipient on top of their unemployment insurance payment. The proposed benefit also extends to workers who typically would not qualify, such as gig economy workers, furloughed employees, and freelancers.
Imagine! These Senators are so out of touch, they think you can receive unemployment payments if you quit your job.
This is hypocrisy in action: These Republicans obstructionists pretend to be suddenly concerned about either deficit spending, or about government fraud and abuse after they blew a trillion dollar hole in the our last budget to give unneeded money to their wealthy benefactors.
The bill was supposed to be voted on late yesterday, but the Senators who are objecting could hold up the bill by forcing votes on amendments. Sen. Chris Murphy, (D-CT), tweeted:
“Let’s not over-complicate this…several Republican Senators are holding up the bipartisan Coronavirus emergency bill because they think the bill is too good for laid off Americans. “
“Right on cue, of course…Bernie Sanders threatened to block the bill unless the stooges dropped their opposition. Which, of course, is exactly what every Republican everywhere would like. The stooges are running a bluff. They don’t want to be the people who block this. They just want to talk about blocking it. If Sanders does them the incredible favor of blocking it himself, thereby pulling Mitch McConnell out of the ditch into which the Democratic minority has rolled him, they’ll all get re-elected.”
So the question is what is Majority Leader McConnell prepared to give up to pass the bill? And are Chuck and Nancy prepared to give up anything in order to move the bill on to the House?
It seems likely that McConnell wants to meet their demands with no real Democratic pushback. Is that likely to happen?
So, a few Republican supporters of our capitalist super heroes want to reduce the crumbs provided to ordinary workers. They have a small point about people not “earning” more from the government than they did on the job. The problem is that each state has its own unique unemployment insurance system, and it would be a nightmare to adjust each payment for each worker just to make Lindsay Graham feel good.
That’s the trouble with grifters. They simply can’t understand that there are people who aren’t always grifting.
On Tuesday, Trump was in the Rose Garden for a “virtual town hall” on Fox News. The Boston Globe reported that he wants the country “open and raring to go” by Easter, which is less than three weeks away. “I think it’s possible, why not?” he said with a shrug.
Watching Trump do a press conference is like watching the kid who didn’t read the book give his book report.
The top health professionals have called ending social distancing by Easter far too quick. But, Trump compared the potential for Coronavirus fatalities to our annual flu casualties and, to automobile accidents. That led Charlie Pierce to say:
“I can speak with some authority on this. On December 9, I got hit by a car. It has been three months now. Nobody I came into contact with in the aftermath has been hit by a car.”
It’s important to remember that Trump is saying this while we still have no idea how many Americans have, or have had, the virus. It seems safe to say the number is vastly higher than the number of people who have tested positive (nearly 50,000). Here’s a terrifying tweet:
(James Gallagher is the BBC’s Health and science correspondent)
Trump’s “let’s get America back to work” plea comes at a time when we have no idea about the extent of the virus’s impact, or how large the tsunami of cases will be. Trump is sounding a bit like General Buck Turgidson in 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove“:
“I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.”
There are operational issues involved in conducting a safe economic restart while the virus remains rampant in the country: It would require testing all who enter the workplace, every time they come to work. Where do those test kits come from when we can’t get enough for America’s hospitals? Who will read the tests and get the data back to the individual and the business? Can social distancing really be practiced at work? In offices?
Obviously there are conflicting opinions about how long to use severe Coronavirus mitigation and suppression measures when the economic consequences of that mitigation could be disastrous. The medical experts can tell us what the consequences of various courses of action are most likely to be in terms of illness and fatalities.
But the willingness to endure the likely costs of a particular course of action is a political, and possibly an ethical question. Last week, Wrongo asked:
“Is restoring our economy, and putting Americans back to work worth a million lives lost? Is it worth 300,000?”
This compares three prior crashes and the time it took to recover. Only the 1987 crash was a sharp “V” recovery, and that recovery took nearly two years. Both of the others took four years.
This most likely means Trump can’t run as a peace and prosperity president. He’ll simply be running as another Republican who ran up the debt with the crucial difference that Americans died on the home front on his watch, after trying to go back to work prematurely.
A few words about the attempted bailout. As Wrongo writes this, it’s likely that there may be a “deal” sometime late on Tuesday . The stock market has already closed up more than 2,000 points, or 11% on the hope of a deal.
The bailout deal should absolutely be as big as possible, but Mitch, Trump and the GOP have it wrong. We should be pointing our water hoses where the immediate fire is: Low – moderate income households and small businesses that have a week or two of cash reserves, and little access to credit markets.
While this is an emergency, it’s no excuse for another GOP round of opportunistic, potentially wasteful spending with little oversight. We have more important things to do than setting up a $500 billion Republican slush fund in an election year.
Trump will no doubt make an announcement that “America is again open for business”. But, that’s not really within his power. The economy is not usually like a faucet you can turn off and on.
It also means that Trump’s replacement will have a major job starting in 2021 trying to restore the stock market and the employment level to where they were pre-Coronavirus.
It is the highest duty of the US President to keep the country safe, and protect its people. Trump’s downplaying of what his science and security advisers have told him is doing exactly the opposite.
Great Wave off Kanagawa – Japanese woodblock print by Hokusai c. 1829. The wave could represent a tsunami of COVID-19 cases, or could it represent the rising of malign intent by Trump towards our democracy?
Are we in the midst of a national emergency or not? Is a tsunami of COVID-19 cases about to inundate America, or not? Let Wrongo answer: It’s a national emergency. When there’s a national emergency, does the federal government let the states take care of the problem? It does not.
Here’s America’s worst excuse for a leader on twitter Sunday afternoon:
“For years, skeptics expressed concern about how he would handle a genuine crisis threatening the nation, and now they know.”
Any other president, even the weakest, would have acted differently. Despite the fact that his policies are generally pretty standard right-wing Republican, Trump has managed to make a national disaster worse than it had to be.
Now all Americans should know how it feels to be Puerto Rican.
Bloomberg reports that Trump’s directive for governors to buy their own medical supplies to fight the coronavirus ran into a big problem when the federal government outbid them for the products! Earlier that day, Trump said that his administration is not a “shipping clerk” for medical gear that the states require to fight the virus.
“…on Saturday {Trump] sought to assure an anxious American public that help was on the way…and that private companies had agreed to provide desperately needed medical supplies to fight the fast-spreading coronavirus.
But Mr. Trump [said] he would not compel companies to make face masks and other gear to protect front-line health workers from the virus….. Mr. Trump said the clothing company Hanes was among those that had been enlisted to start churning out masks, although the company said they would not be the N-95 masks that are most effective in protecting medical workers.”
Trump could simply order companies like Hanes to make them, but instead, Hanes is making masks that don’t actually protect medical personnel. Capitalism @ work! At a time of national emergency, Trump is letting the market do it, and simply declaring victory.
The best part is that it permits the Treasury secretary to withhold the names of corporate recipients for up to six months. How is it possible to use taxpayer money for corporate bailouts and demand that taxpayers can’t know who’s received the funds?
Finally, here’s an example where Trump is unhappily, showing leadership. He wants to suspend habeas corpus, the Constitutional right to appear before a judge after arrest, and seek release:
“The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the US.”
The DOJ is looking for broad authority, including the ability to ask chief judges to detain people and to pause court proceedings during emergencies. It would apply to:
“any statutes or rules of procedure otherwise affecting pre-arrest, post-arrest, pre-trial, trial, and post-trial procedures in criminal and juvenile proceedings and all civil process and proceedings,”
This means you could be arrested and not brought before a judge until they decide that the emergency or the civil disobedience is over. Shouldn’t we be even more careful about granting new powers to the government if we’re in a national emergency?
We can hope that the House will block this nonsense.
We should remember that the US government was founded for the very purpose of solving some rather serious problems that the individual states couldn’t handle. That role of federal leadership has worked for 230+ years, but that doesn’t work for Trump.
You should be asking why.
It seems certain that at some point, Trump will say that the states were unable to solve the virus emergency, so he’s stepping in. He’ll try to use COVID-19 to assume extraordinary emergency powers between now and the election. That’s beyond frightening.
More will die because Trump won’t lead in the fight to contain the Coronavirus. And in the background, he’s busy laying the groundwork for emergency powers.
Wake up Democrats!
It’s time to ask, what are the DC Democrats doing to block all of this?
We have a ton of cartoons today, so just a brief comment. Neoliberal economics bears a major responsibility for the pathetic pandemic response by our corporations and government. It encourages efficiency over all other aspects of a complex product/service delivery system. We now see that it is fragile, without the resilience necessary to meet surges of demand/need.
Our CEOs and politicians now think only in terms of equilibrium, when equilibrium is the last thing we need in the middle of a runaway exponential disease process like COVID-19.
We’re seeing how difficult it is to source things like gloves, masks and sterile gowns. The delays procuring those items will pale against the delay in sourcing ventilators and ultimately, a vaccine in sufficient doses to truly stem the tide.
One thing to think about is how nations with authoritarian or collectivist societies have responded to the Coronavirus better than those in the west, where we celebrate the individual, occasionally to the detriment of society. Our way works fine when things are good, but not so well when things turn bad.
What would you expect, given an educational system that doesn’t teach people what “exponential” means?
Finally, imagine Trump if he were FDR right after the attack on Pearl Harbor: Standing in front of Congress declaring: “This Japan thing will go away!” On to cartoons.
Whose responsibility is this?
There’s only one real cure for Trump syndrome:
He’ll never have clean hands:
Sadly, it’s not just his hands that don’t measure up:
Sen. Burr and the others can’t explain their actions. They’re guilty:
Let all the people keep the checks, but nothing for corporations:
David Hockney (a new painting) — here’s a quote from Hockney: “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring 2020”.
Blog reader Fred VK emails:
“How do you know if you could be in a third world country? When you go see the Doctor, she greets you wearing a face mask that says ‘made by Mr. Coffee’”.
It is difficult for people to talk about anything else. COVID-19 is on the march, and America isn’t prepared for what’s coming. Worse, we’re unsure if this is a one-two month problem, or something that will last a year or longer. Most countries think that the virus will grow exponentially, and will kill many of their citizens. This leads nearly all governments to order many businesses to close. No one is traveling, except to their local stores. In Connecticut, no one is able to get a haircut for the duration.
But since Wall Street is still open, anyone who owns stocks has taken a huge haircut this week. Friday’s drop leaves Trump looking at a Dow average that’s 3% below what it was when he took office. He’s presided over the worst week in the stock market since 2008.
This market crash is due to investors trying to understand the extent of the damage to the US economy that’s being done by how we’re fighting COVID-19.
In order to save our society over the longer run, we’re actively putting ourselves into a very deep recession. That may mean that people will be out of work for a short, or a long time. If it’s a long fight, that may lead to a very dark economic time for all Americans.
A fundamental question is:
“What unpleasant decisions would our federal and state governments be willing to take to get us out of a deep recession, if the virus is still around a few months from now, and still killing a lot of people?”
Is restoring our economy, and putting Americans back to work worth a million lives lost? Is it worth 300,000?
Remember that before 9/11, no one thought we would surrender our freedoms for 3,000 deaths, but we did. No one thought we’d fight a nearly 20 year war that killed 6,789 and wounded 52,353 Americans, but we did.
What kind of sacrifices will we be willing to make if the Coronavirus is still killing Americans on Election Day 2020? Which Party will be saying we should put people back to work?
It’s likely to be both Parties.
Dark, right? There are encouraging signs. Small acts of kindness in supermarkets, artists performing for free on the internet, people trying very hard to avoid making the elderly sick. These are all wonderful things, and we need much, much more of them.
Some say that it takes a common enemy like the Coronavirus to unite us. If we become united in the fight, and stay united once we’re victorious, that would be also be a wonderful thing.
So, let’s take a beat, and think hopeful thoughts about the arrival of spring. Here in northwest Connecticut, the peepers began singing a week ago, and the daffodils are blooming. The first dandelions are peeping through the grass, but we’re expecting snow on Monday. So winter isn’t over just yet.
Let’s try to soothe ourselves by listening to two pieces of spring music. First, “Spring Morning” by Frederick Delius, written around 1888. This is always a Wrongo favorite in spring:
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
Second, listen to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons: “Spring” (La Primavera) in a complete version, performed live in February 2020 by Alana Youssefian and the Voices of Music. This isn’t a “Vivaldi as usual” performance. Wrongo had never heard of Youssefian, but listening to her and the Voices of Music’s original instruments is a treat.
Subtitles in the video are words by Antonio Vivaldi!
Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.
