Late Friday night – oh hey Nancy by the way I’ve gotten rid of another one of those pesky General Inspector losers who kept getting in my way.

President Donald Trump has removed State Department Inspector General Steve Linick and replaced him with an ally of Vice President Mike Pence — the latest in a series of moves against independent government watchdogs in recent months.

Ah yes, one of those “independent” government watchdogs who are allies of the badmaddogs.

Trump informed Congress of his intent to oust Linick, a Justice Department veteran appointed to the role in 2013 by then President Barack Obama, in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday night.

As one does. Not during the day, not during the day during the week, but at night on Friday, to maximize the number of hours that will elapse before officials can officially respond.

“The president’s late-night, weekend firing of the State Department inspector general has accelerated his dangerous pattern of retaliation against the patriotic public servants charged with conducting oversight on behalf of the American people,” Pelosi said in a statement. “Inspector General Linick was punished for honorably performing his duty to protect the Constitution and our national security, as required by the law and by his oath.”

Fuck all that, the point is to protect Trump. Pass the ice cream.

Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, called Linick’s dismissal an “outrageous act of a president trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of State, from accountability.”

Engel claimed: “I have learned that the Office of the Inspector General had opened an investigation into Secretary Pompeo. Mr. Linick’s firing amid such a probe strongly suggests that this is an unlawful act of retaliation.”

Oh no. No no. It’s not retaliation, it’s prevention.

Trump has removed a number of federal watchdogs in the last few months, including Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, who issued a report critical of the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; and the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

Housekeeping.

Trump is getting more and more tantrummy about the CDC.

As the coronavirus pandemic stretches past its ninth week, tensions are rising between the White House and the nation’s leading public health agency. In interviews with CNN, senior administration officials in Washington, as well as top officials at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta describe a growing sense of mistrust and animosity between the White House and CDC over how quickly the US should reopen and how the government tracks data on the virus.

Similarly, if Trump Tower had a fire raging on the tenth floor, Trump would be expressing mistrust and animosity toward the NYC fire department.

Except no he wouldn’t, of course, at least not until the fire was completely out, because Trump Tower is something Trump cares about. Us? Not so much.

Last week, Redfield was forced to apologize to administration officials after a draft of the CDC’s guidelines to reopening America were leaked to the media. The 68-page document outlined a detailed approach for how states, businesses and individuals could safely ease back into normalcy and were far more strict and detailed than the White House’s own road map toward a return to normal, a CNN review found.

On Thursday the CDC published just 6 pages of graphics labeled “decision trees” as updated guidance. After spending “innumerable hours” on the guidance draft of recommendations, which they say was asked for specifically by Dr. Birx, two senior CDC officials tell CNN that the White House decision to shelve it for now in favor of a 6-page outline has only added to mounting frustration toward Birx within the CDC.

It’s almost as if there’s a downside to letting politics trump medical expertise.

Birx is a Trump whisperer, and she remains in his good graces while Fauci is now way out of them.

In interviews with CNN over the past several weeks, CDC officials have expressed a disappointment that Birx has not done more to correct some of the misinformation that Trump has touted during many of the coronavirus press briefings. “As a scientist when you stand-up in front of all that, it doesn’t help your credibility,” said the same official in describing the prevailing view of officials within the CDC about Birx.

But it helps your credibility with Trump.

Brilliantly done.

Also today:

I’m reminded of Trump’s “we have nicer apartments than they do.”

Notice also the repeated shrugging as he tries to minimize the death toll. (Not to mention Fauci’s well-timed brow-swipe.)

Remember this guy?

He’d do a much better job.

Reuters reports:

Lying in rows of cots in a small hotel on the outskirts of Kiev, 51 babies born to surrogate mothers are stranded in Ukraine as the coronavirus lockdown is preventing parents from the United States, Europe and elsewhere from collecting them.

In other words the disgusting practice of renting human incubators (who just happen to be women, and not trans women at that) has resulted in 51 babies with no parents in the midst of a pandemic.

Interesting that exploiters of women choose Ukraine as their human incubator supplier. That couldn’t be because Ukraine is so desperate and vulnerable could it?

Ukraine imposed a ban on foreigners entering in March, and most parents have only seen their newborns through pictures and video calls with the clinic.

“Parents” my ass.

The Hotel Venice belongs to the clinic BioTexCom, which released video footage of the babies to raise public awareness and spur the government into acting more quickly.

Reaction from the authorities was swift.

Lyudmyla Denisova, the human rights ombudsman for the Ukrainian parliament, said the video showed the country had a “massive and systemic” surrogacy industry where babies were advertised as a “high quality product”.

Fuckin’ A.

The Hotel Venice is surrounded by a high fence with barbed wire. The building is usually where parents stay while picking up their babies. At BioTexCom, a surrogate mother receives about $15,000-$17,000.

For nine months of hard work and discomfort culminating in childbirth.

“The children are all provided with food, a sufficient number of employees look after them, but there is no substitute for parental care,” said Denis Herman, BioTexCom’s lawyer.

A bit late for that.

Them that’s got shall get…

When Congress set aside $30 billion for education institutions facing ruin because of the coronavirus pandemic shutdowns, it’s pretty clear this is not what they had in mind. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is reportedly throwing millions of federal dollars that were intended mainly for public schools and colleges at private and religious schools, according to a report from The New York Times. About $350 million of funding has reportedly been allocated to small colleges, many of which are private or religious, regardless of need. For example, the Wright Graduate University for the Realization of Human Potential in Wisconsin, which has a completely normal website that denies claims that it’s a cult, has reportedly received about $495,000. DeVos has reportedly also used $180 million of the relief to encourage states to create “microgrants” that parents can use to pay for educational services, including private-school tuition.

I’m sure that’s a much better use for the money than giving it to public schools in Detroit, Chicago, St Louis, Atlanta, DC, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore…

I saw this a couple of days ago but couldn’t find the video clip so waited to post it. It’s sickening.

Nice of them not to shoot him though.

Updating to add a fuller clip

and to note that these fuckers did this days after the murder of Ahmaud Arbery in a situation EXACTLY like this.

Everywhere, around the world:

As the death toll rises, Trump’s claims to global leadership have became more far-fetched. He told Republicans last week that he had had a round of phone calls with Angela Merkel, Shinzo Abe and other unnamed world leaders and insisted “so many of them, almost all of them, I would say all of them” believe the US is leading the way.

None of the leaders he mentioned has said anything to suggest that was true. At each milestone of the crisis, European leaders have been taken aback by Trump’s lack of consultation with them – when he suspended travel to the US from Europe on 12 March without warning Brussels, for example. A week later, politicians in Berlin accused Trump of an “unfriendly act” for offering “large sums of money” to get a German company developing a vaccine to move its research wing to the US.

But he said he would say all of them. That has to mean it’s true.

A poll in France last week found Merkel to be far and away the most trusted world leader. Just 2% had confidence Trump was leading the world in the right direction. Only Boris Johnson and Xi Jinping inspired less faith.

A survey this week by the British Foreign Policy Group found 28% of Britons trusted the US to act responsibly on the world stage, a drop of 13 percentage points since January, with the biggest drop in confidence coming among Conservative voters.

Surprisingly high.

But hey, at least he’s providing a useful distraction from the point of view of the bosses in China:

There is a palpable sense of relief among Chinese state commentators that the US president’s antics have diverted some of the anger that would otherwise have been aimed at Beijing.

“Only by making Americans hate China can they make sure that the public might overlook the fact that Trump’s team is stained with the blood of Americans,” said an English-language Global Times editorial late last month.

…

China’s failure to cooperate fully with the WHO and its heavy-handed diplomacy has won Beijing few friends, despite its dispatch of medical assistance around the world. But the German news weekly Der Spiegel argued that Trump had single-handedly managed to spare Beijing the worst of the global consequences for its failings.

You’re welcome.

If the numbers are bad, here’s what you do: lie about the numbers.

Top Trump officials, huddled in the White House, itself the subject of a coronavirus outbreak, have according to reports begun questioning the number of deaths – and the president is among the skeptics.

He has a lot of practice being a “skeptic” about numbers. When he’s selling a thing, the value goes way up. When he’s reporting that thing to the tax people, the value goes way down. It’s magic.

One common claim is that hospitals receive more money from Medicare if they are treating a patient with the coronavirus compared with other illnesses, and so are inflating their numbers. Scott Jensen, a Minnesota state senator and family physician, began hawking this theory in early April, leading to an appearance on [Laura] Ingraham’s show.

“Right now Medicare has determined that if you have a Covid-19 admission to the hospital, you’ll get paid $13,000,” Jensen said.

“If that Covid-19 patient goes on a ventilator, you get $39,000, three times as much. Nobody can tell me after 35 years in the world of medicine that sometimes those kinds of things [don’t] impact on what we do.”

…

Factcheckers have found no evidence to support Jensen’s claims – in fact, some hospital revenues are expected to be down, due to the cancellation of elective procedures – but the idea of labeling illnesses as coronavirus for cash became a talking point on rightwing Facebook groups and beyond.

Worryingly, the disinformation push seems to be working. An Axios-Ipsos poll found that the death toll has become a political issue, 40% of Republicans believing fewer Americans are dying from coronavirus than the official toll says.

A separate study, published at the end of April, revealed the stark consequences of prominent figures underplaying the impact of Covid-19. A group of researchers tracked the spread of coronavirus among viewers of Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, after Hannity spent weeks downplaying the threat.

So Sean Hannity’s lies are killing people. I bet he still sleeps well at night.

More from le jardin des roses:

“We’ll fight through it,” he says repeatedly, in his dopy clogged voice. Send me in, coach! We coulda beena contenda. Fight fight fight!

“Wheya hadda problem come in, iddl go away, it may flare up, it may not flare up, wll hafta see wut happens but if it does flare up wir gunna pudout the fire, and we’ll pudit out quickly and efficiently, we’ve learned a lot Steve you have a question.”

Trump is in the Rose Garden right now, taking his idiocy out for an airing.

He can mean “we wouldn’t have the stats” – which would suit him just fine. He’d love it if we had no clue how bad the pandemic is.

Of course he may also think that not having the stats is the same thing as not having the cases.

No stats no cases! It would make a nice sign for the MAGAs to carry.

That’s showbiz, folks!

The Lancet has an editorial on Trump and the CDC:

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

Right-wing politics is how.

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration resisted providing the sufficient budget that the CDC needed to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis. The George W Bush administration put restrictions on global and domestic HIV prevention and reproductive health programming.

The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge. In a press conference on Feb 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned US citizens to prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life. Messonnier subsequently no longer appeared at White House briefings on COVID-19. More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC’s leadership and its work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Call me crazy but I think public health shouldn’t be a political issue. Rich people can get sick too, plus they suffer torments when they can’t shop for gold-plated running shoes and platinum caviar.

The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort.

But a person like that would be a threat to Trump, at least in Trump’s eyes, so no dice.

Hold the phone – women can get periods!

Who knew?

Yes, we know, because “trans guys” are women, and “non-binary people” are people and some people are women.

Maybe this whole thing is just a movement of people who long to be teachers but don’t want the grind of teaching second grade, so they make shit up in order to “teach” us it.

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Trump decided to try to demonstrate that he’s smarter than Anthony Fauci.

[I]t’s becoming clearer and clearer that reopening the country is Trump’s only plan for reviving the economy. The new stimulus package is, as Trump accurately declared, dead on arrival. The Federal Reserve is low on options. The White House has now essentially bet everything that states loosening restrictions will spur growth in time for November’s election. Fauci’s words of caution are an obstacle at a moment when the economic outlook is grim.

Has anyone bothered to tell Trump that rolling out the red carpet for a pandemic and waiting for the applause as tens of thousands more people die is not a winner either? Just saying “Fauci’s wrong Fauci’s wrong Fauci’s wrong” isn’t going to kneecap the virus. And you know what else? Causing another surge of the virus isn’t going to bring the economy back; rather the reverse.

Plus there’s that whole thing of risking thousands or tens of thousands of lives for the sake of his personal greed for attention. It’s not a great look.

Trump is frustrated that Fauci is eclipsing him in surveys on public trust, most recently the CNN/SSRS poll this week. Officials say Trump has long held out some resentment that Fauci is respected and liked by people he has struggled to convert.

Diddums. It’s so unfair that we trust Fauci more on issues to do with contagious diseases and how to manage them than we do Trump. Trump knows how to con people into buying crap condos! All Fauci knows is a lot of stuff about diseases and contagion and treatments. It should be no contest!

Trump’s irritation at being publicly undermined has been evident in conversations with his friends and aides, when he’s complained that Fauci doesn’t seem to be on his side.

Waaaah, my side, me me me me me me me, waaaaah, he should be kissing my ass, waaaaah, everything is about me.

The busy busy president who is working so hard found time to do a long interview with Fox News this morning, in which he told an exciting story about Obama something something something.

With such bad news on the human and economic fronts, perhaps it’s not surprising that Trump seemed to be most excited about pushing his new “Obamagate” conspiracy theory about his predecessor, Barack Obama. While Trump himself hasn’t been able to explain what exactly “Obamagate” is, the general idea is that Obama was part of a conspiracy to use an FBI counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia to undermine his presidency before it even began.

…

“If I were a Democrat instead of a Republican, I think everybody would’ve been in jail a long time ago, and I’m talking with 50-year sentences,” Trump claimed. “People should be going to jail for this stuff … this was all Obama. This was all Biden.”

What stuff though? What stuff? He never says. This what? What this? He never says.

He also said Russia longed for Clinton and didn’t want Trump.

This claim is at odds with the consensus conclusion of the US intelligence community, a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation, and even the words of Vladimir Putin himself — all of them affirming that Russia wanted Trump to win. But if viewers were hoping that Bartiromo would push back by pointing out the obvious, they were disappointed.

Because Fox is allied with…Russia?

It doesn’t make any sense except as pure unsullied My Team versus Their Team.

No more talk? That’ll be the day.

Rick Bright is testifying before the House today.

The tone of Dr Bright’s testimony during this hearing is one of urgency.

Just now he warned that “The window is closing to address this pandemic because we still do not have a standardized coordinated plan to take our nation through this response.”

…

Bright, during this hearing, said that his increasingly urgent warnings about the coronavirus spread caused a “commotion” and he was pushed out of meetings as a result.

The Guardian has more up close reporting on the Michigan dramatics:

Despite a thunderstorm with heavy rains, dozens of protesters are on the Michigan State Capitol steps and lawn calling for an end to Michigan’s stay-at-home order, and demanding governor Gretchen Whitmer’s resignation.

The protest is organized by Michigan United For Liberty, a militia group that’s suing Whitmer over her orders.

The demonstrators include a small number of militiamen carrying assault rifles, and the protest is part of a high-tension week in Lansing.

It’s very banality of evil though, isn’t it. Geezers in chunky white trainers and rain jackets – they don’t look very scary. But it’s a mistake to think that appearances matter in that way. Not all murderous fascists look like Timothy McVeigh.

After armed militia members glared and shouted at the legislature on April 30 during a heated debate over extending Whitmer’s stay-at-home order through the end of May, Democrats called for a ban on guns in the State Capitol building.

They charge that the protests are no longer about the stay-at-home orders, but a forum for intimidating Democrats in the legislature.

The two seem to be basically intertwined. The connection doesn’t seem necessary or inherent, but it’s there.

The Michigan fascisti are at it again.

Despite heavy rain, armed protesters gathered Thursday at the State Capitol in Michigan in what the organizing group, Michigan United for Liberty, a militia group, has branded “judgment day.”

It’s their third gun-toting tantrum over the lockdown and the fact that the governor is a woman and a Democrat.

Ahead of Thursday’s protest, comments were made in private Facebook groups threatening Gov. Whitmer and lawmakers with violence, according to reporting by the Detroit Metro Times.

But hey by all means let them carry their assault weapons into the capitol.

Concern about Thursday’s gathering was higher than previous protests. But rain and an interruption in planning — Facebook reportedly removed the organizers’ private group from their platform for inciting violence — may have curbed the crowed which seemed substantially smaller than two weeks ago. That was when armed protesters brought signs that compared Gov. Whitmer to Hitler, showed nooses and confederate flags. Some signs read, “Tyrants Get The Rope.”

It’s judgement day! But it’s also raining so…meh…I’m staying home and watching tv.

Meanwhile guns guns guns GUNS.

After the second protest, state Democratic lawmakers requested that the Michigan Capitol Commission ban guns on the premises. On Monday, the Democratic attorney general issued an opinion saying the appointed body had the authority to do so, warning against a “powder keg dynamic” created by heavily armed protesters.

But the commission said nah let’s do a study instead.

The Republican Senate Majority Leader, Mike Shirkey, later called the notion of a gun-ban “cowardly” in a floor speech, calling for protesters who are threatening on Thursday to be arrested by state police.

It’s “cowardly” to want not to be gunned down for being a Democratic legislator? It’s easy for a Republican to say, isn’t it, because the gun lunatics aren’t threatening Republicans. Basically the disagreement is over whether or not it’s ok to kill/threaten to kill Democrats inside the capitol, and Republicans are saying hell yes it’s ok.

“This is a terribly concerning development in that we have legislators who are showing up to work wearing bulletproof vests. That is disenfranchising thousands of people in our state if their legislator doesn’t feel safe enough to go to work and to do what their job is,” said Whitmer in her interview on The View.

And it’s true on a national level. We’re being steadily trained to fear that right-wing lunatics will perform an armed coup. Such things do happen, and it’s getting more and more obvious that we’re now the kind of place where such things happen.

Pray for rain, I guess.

Speaking of magical thinking and reckless behavior – the Wisconsin Supreme Court has thrown out the stay home order.

In a 4-3 decision, the Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down the state’s stay at home order, handing a defeat to Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in his administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. 

And consigning who knows how many hundreds or thousands of people to a hideous death, and more to a horrible illness that can take weeks to recover from and leave permanent damage to the heart, brain, blood vessels, kidneys, lungs – pretty much everything.

In its order, the Supreme Court said Evers’ stay at home order is “invalid, and therefore, unenforceable,” so some businesses and restaurants presumably may open immediately. But some counties, such as Dane, have already issued replacement orders enforcing the elements of the governor’s order, and therefore must remain closed.

The virus will probably take note of this show of defiance and decide to leave Wisconsin entirely alone. Right?