Kyle Cheney and Connor O’Brien on Trump’s attack on the people overseeing the pandemic response:

President Donald Trump has upended the panel of federal watchdogs overseeing implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus law, tapping a replacement for the Pentagon official who was supposed to lead the effort.

…

Fine’s removal is Trump’s latest incursion into the community of independent federal watchdogs — punctuated most dramatically by his late Friday ouster of the intelligence community’s inspector general, Michael Atkinson, whose handling of a whistleblower report ultimately led to Trump’s impeachment.

You know, if they’re really independent watchdogs, it should be impossible for the president to get rid of them.

Trump has also begun sharply attacking Health and Human Services Inspector General Christi Grimm, following a report from her office that described widespread testing delays and supply issues at the nation’s hospitals.

“Another Fake Dossier!” Trump tweeted, mentioning Grimm’s tenure as inspector general during the Obama administration. He didn’t mention, though, that Grimm has been serving as a federal watchdog since 1999, spanning administrations of both parties.

So fucking scary. His rancid hide comes before everything, including the survival of 327 million people.

Trump’s targeting of Atkinson drew an unusual rebuke from Michael Horowitz, the inspector general of the Justice Department who also oversees a council of inspectors general. Horowitz said Atkinson handled the whistleblower matter appropriately and defended the broader IG community.

“The Inspector General Community will continue to conduct aggressive, independent oversight of the agencies that we oversee,” he said in a statement after Atkinson’s ouster. Atkinson, too, issued a lengthy statement Saturday accusing Trump of removing him for following whistleblower laws.

But nobody can stop him, apparently.

Trump keeps saying nobody knew. People did know. People around him knew, and they told him.

On Tuesday, Axios published internal White House memos that make the statements from President Donald Trump downplaying the coronavirus before it became a full-blown crisis look even more willfully ignorant.

[In] A February 23 memo labeled as a “MEMORANDUM TO PRESIDENT” sent through the National Security Agency, then-acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, and the Covid-19 task force warns in its very first sentence that “[t]here is an increasing probability of a full-blown COVID-19 pandemic that could infect as many as 100 million Americans, with a loss of life of as many as 1-2 million souls.”

Three days later, however, Trump held a news conference in which he suggested the coronavirus would soon go away on its own in the United States.

“When you have 15 [coronavirus cases], and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done,” Trump said.

This is the problem with putting a conceited ignorant corrupt incompetent in the White House.

The memo said stock up on ventilators and PPE now, as a matter of urgency. Trump of course never read it, because he never reads anything.

The Associated Press’s Michael Biesecker reported on Sunday that a review of federal purchasing contracts “shows federal agencies largely waited until mid-March to begin placing bulk orders of N95 respirator masks, mechanical ventilators and other equipment needed by front-line health care workers.”

“By that time, hospitals in several states were treating thousands of infected patients without adequate equipment and were pleading for shipments from the Strategic National Stockpile,” Biesecker added. When asked about the federal government’s slow response, Trump’s line has been that the states should have done more on their own.

…

Then, during a Fox & Friends interview on March 30, Trump said of the coronavirus pandemic that “nobody could have predicted something like this.” But the memos indicate Trump’s own advisers had not only anticipated it but tried to warn him about it.

Nobody could have except everybody.

Arwa Mahdawi on the Kushner threat:

On Thursday, Kushner, who has taken on vast responsibilities in the Trump administration’s response to Covid-19, made his first public appearance at the White House daily coronavirus briefing. His moment in the spotlight seemed to serve as a wakeup call for the US. All of a sudden, it was glaringly obvious how dangerous Kushner’s hubris is…

…Kushner was supposedly at the press briefing to explain the work he has been doing. However, despite him repeating the word ‘“data” 13 times, it quickly became clear that he has no idea what he is doing. He doesn’t even seem to know what the purpose of a federal stockpile of medical equipment is. “It’s supposed to be our stockpile,” he explained haughtily to reporters. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

…

During his 39 years on Earth, Kushner has continuously failed upwards. Despite being an unremarkable student, he got a place at Harvard; according to spokespeople for Kushner Companies, this was unrelated to his dad giving $2.5m to the university. After buying a skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market, Kushner was miraculously bailed out by a company with links to the government of Qatar – just months before a potentially ruinous $1.4bn mortgage was due. Wherever Kushner is, questionable deals, questionable ethics and a crowd of yes men seem to follow. The world is constantly remade to reflect the reality that he wants to see. Indeed, shortly after the backlash to Kushner’s comments about the federal stockpile, the government’s website appeared to change to more closely reflect Kushner’s assertions.

And the stakes have risen.

Horribly sad and also terrifying.

Major supermarket chains are beginning to report their first coronavirus-related employee deaths, leading to store closures and increasing anxiety among grocery workers as the pandemic intensifies across the country.

You can see how it’s both. Horribly sad for the workers and terrifying for all of us (the workers included) because how will we get food.

A Trader Joe’s worker in Scarsdale, New York, a greeter at a Giant store in Largo, Maryland, and two Walmart employees from the same Chicago-area store have died of covid-19 in recent days, the companies confirmed Monday. In March, a Seattle neighborhood grocer died from the effects of COVID-19.

Though more than 40 states have ordered nonessential businesses to close and told residents to stay home to stem the spread of the virus, supermarkets are among the retailers that remain open. Thousands of grocery employees have continued to report to work as U.S. infections and death rates continue to climb, with many reporting long shifts and extra workloads to keep up with spiking demand. Many workers say they don’t have enough protective gear to deal with hundreds of customers a day. Dozens of grocery workers have tested positive for the coronavirus in recent weeks.

They should be getting hazard pay.

Another rally.

Yes. That’s right. It’s like movies. War isn’t actually a real thing, with real bullets and explosions and death and mutilation, it’s a thing you watch, with suited up guys running up hills. Then you have cookies and milk and go to bed.

Bit of a discrepancy there.

It always does.

I wish we had a fair president. We really don’t.

Shouldn’t be allowed to win. Interesting concept. I wonder what he has in mind.

Welllll, more than 100 billion a year is kind of like nothing. Not that different.

Johnson and his people have been lying a blue streak.

There was a rumor on Thursday that he was on the point of going into hospital, but they denied it.

Johnson’s aides were emphatic. His condition had not deteriorated, he still had only “mild symptoms”, he hoped to be at work from Friday when his coronavirus isolation period was up – and he had not been admitted to St Thomas’ hospital for treatment. When on Monday evening it emerged that contrary to reassurances about him getting on with his red box, he was being admitted to intensive care, the denials were coming under increasing scrutiny.

FDR and polio. Kennedy’s extremely bad health and addiction to uppers. Reagan’s dementia. Woodrow Wilson’s stroke. They keep doing this.

Thursday lunchtime, having denied the first round of rumours about St Thomas’, Downing Street floated the idea that Johnson might not be back at work on Friday as planned if his temperature remained high.

A cough was not mentioned, but his official spokesman told a daily briefing with journalists that he would only go back to work the next day if his temperature came down.

That evening at 8pm, despite his isolation, the prime minister appeared at the door of No 10 to applaud the work of NHS workers. Despite the appearance, the health rumours did not go away: St Thomas’ was on standby because Johnson’s condition had worsened, the first source insisted – only for Downing Street, when pressed, to deny that he was about to be admitted that night.

On Friday lunchtime, the situation began to unravel. An unkempt, gravelly-voiced and clearly unwell Johnson released a video in which he said, somewhat implausibly, “I’m feeling better,” before conceding he could not fully return to work. “Alas, I still have one of the symptoms, a minor symptom, I still have a temperature,” he insisted.

That’s ok, it’s none of our business if heads of government are dropping like flies, we just work here.

Shortly before 8.30pm on Monday, further news came: the prime minister had been admitted to intensive care at St Thomas’ 90 minutes earlier.

Several sources say Johnson has required oxygen to help with his breathing following his admission to hospital – an assertion that was not denied by Downing Street – although his official spokesman said that Russian reports that he was on a ventilator were “disinformation”.

He’s not on a ventilator yet.

Some Conservative MPs are worried that Downing Street’s evasiveness on the seriousness of the prime minister’s condition will undermine trust in what they say going forward.

Ya think?

Back in 1918…

NHS workers could do worse than examine the experience of another London hospital during the Spanish influenza pandemic just over 100 years ago. Today, that hospital is named St Charles and offers walk-in care at the northern end of Ladbroke Grove, Kensington. But in 1918 it was known as St Marylebone Infirmary and had 744 beds for the “sick poor”, many of whom had tuberculosis and other chronic lung conditions.

In October 1918, as a second wave of Spanish influenza spread across Britain, its wards were inundated with pneumonia cases…

“All training, and indeed every sort of trimming, went by the board,” Hood recalled in his notebook 30 years later. “The staff fought like Trojans to feed the patients, scramble as best they could through the most elementary nursing and keep the delirious in bed!”

The timing was bad because around half of all trained nurses were in military service.

“Each day the difficulties became more pronounced as the patients increased and the nurses decreased, going down like ninepins themselves,” Hood wrote. “Sad to relate some of these gallant girls lost their lives in this never-to-be-forgotten scourge and as I write I can see some of them now literally fighting to save their friends then going down and dying themselves.”

Hood made the nurses wear lint masks and advised them “not to interpose their faces too near the blast of those coughing”. But when it came to tending to a fellow nurse, many refused to wear the masks for fear of distressing their colleague.

In the case of one nurse, Hood noted: “Nothing I could do or say had the slightest effect in influencing her to diminish the risks to herself. She was consumed with a burning desire to save her … inevitably, the nurse developed a lung infection, dying soon after the woman she had been nursing.”

By December, Hood was exhausted and went on sick leave. When he returned in February, the epidemic was still raging and two more nurses had died, bringing the fatalities to nine.

“One poor nurse, I remember, with a terribly acute influenzal pneumonia, became so distressed she could not stay in bed and insisted on being propped up against the wall by her bed until she was finally drowned in her profuse, thin blood-stained sputum.”

Not something to look forward to.

Boris Johnson is now in intensive care.

Nebraska is still open.

The pretend Secretary of the Navy says his speech to the sailors was fine.

The crew doesn’t seem to have agreed with the pretend secretary.

CNN tells us:

The Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly blasted the now ousted commander of the USS Theodore Roosevelt as “stupid” in an address to the ship’s crew Monday morning, in remarks obtained by CNN.

Modly told the crew that their former commander, Capt. Brett Crozier, was either “too naive or too stupid” to be in command or that he intentionally leaked to the media a memo in which he warned about coronavirus spreading aboard the aircraft carrier and urged action to save his sailors.

Who is Thomas Modly? A businessman who has served as Acting United States Secretary of the Navy since November 24, 2019. A whopping four months in the job and the highly relevant qualification of being a businessdude.

“It was a betrayal. And I can tell you one other thing: because he did that he put it in the public’s forum and it is now a big controversy in Washington, DC,” Modly said, according to a transcript of remarks Modly made to the crew, copies of which have been provided to CNN by multiple Navy officials.

I suspect those multiple Navy officials are the real kind as opposed to the businessdude until ten minutes ago kind, and I suspect they are pissed.

In remarks that were piped over the vessel’s PA system, Modly suggested Crozier leaked the memo on purpose or was “too naive or too stupid” to be in command if he didn’t think that sending it to over 20 people would not result in it getting out to the public.

“If he didn’t think, in my opinion, that this information wasn’t going to get out to the public, in this day and information age that we live in, then he was either A, too naïve or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this,” Modly said. “The alternative is that he did this on purpose.”

Modly went on to say it was a “betrayal of trust, with me, with his chain of command.”

That’s an interesting thing to say to that audience in that situation. He’s talking to the people whose lives were at risk because of a massive virus outbreak on the ship, and he’s whining about a betrayal of his trust. Crozier put his crew’s lives first, and Modly is telling that crew how naughty that was. I bet the applause was light and scattered.

A defense official familiar with Modly’s remarks offered his opinion of Modly’s address, saying the acting secretary “should be fired. I don’t know how he survives this day.”

Let’s hope so.

Several senior military officials, including the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Mike Gilday, recommended against Modly’s decision to fire Crozier before an investigation into the matter was complete and in the midst of an evacuation, two US officials tell CNN.

The assholes have taken over the ship.

Watch Trump physically prevent Fauci from answering a question about hydroxychloroquine.

Trump is still insisting on noisily promoting a drug that’s untested for use against the virus.

Ooh ooh ooh I know the answer to that one. Sometimes the powerful drugs kill things you DO want living within your body and you wind up dead.

Trump knows better than the people who do this full-time after getting the appropriate education.

Interesting how Trump keeps singling out Yamiche Alcindor to disparage and snarl at her. I wonder why that could be.

He won’t of course. He much prefers to insult her from the White House podium.

Originally a comment by Bruce Gorton on Worst ever.

Recently I heard a rant by Ben Shapiro. I generally avoid Shapiro, because I don’t like disingenuous little shits who think being captain of the debate club equals having an education, but still, I heard it.

Shapiro was going on about how workers who went on strike were just as bad as price gougers right now, and it struck me.

For years the US has had the most expensive medicine in the world. It has gotten so bad that prior to the lockdown, Americans were going to Mexico to buy diabetes medication.

So when it was not a pandemic, and people will die from lack of medication, Shapiro was absolutely fine with corporations doing the same thing he condemns workers for doing now.

And America has always been kind of stupid when it comes to healthcare. It has always treated healthcare as if it is a privilege, not a social necessity.

One of the things I watched as my country went into lockdown was Pandemic on Netflix, and part of what it went into was efforts to vaccinate migrants.

In December the New York Times reported that several doctors had been arrested during a protest – after they had been refused permission to vaccinate migrants.

In other words, Americans hate the idea of “illegals” benefiting from their tax dollars so much, they’re willing to compromise their own herd immunity over it. Hell, another character highlighted by the documentary was an awful anti-vaxer, who seemed to be a complete narcissistic idiot so focused on her bullshit idea of personal autonomy that she couldn’t fathom the idea of individuals having responsibilities to their communities.

For most of the series, it followed another woman working a 72 hour shift in a rural hospital where she was the only doctor on call. It struck me, they also showed doctors fighting Ebola in the Congo – and there was more than one doctor on duty over there.

American healthcare has been badly neglected for years, so I’m not sure that we can say that an outbreak like Covid-19 wasn’t inevitable. While prior presidents have put together response teams, those rural hospitals kept closing.

Having a response team sounds good and all, but they can’t magic up more hospitals on the spot. The basic infrastructure has been allowed to collapse.

Donald Trump is not only a bad president in and of himself, but an end point to bad decisions going back decades. Decisions driven by the constant need to try and cut taxes, as inflation meant that the stuff government needed to be doing became more expensive.

Everything where the impact wouldn’t be felt immediately, has been neglected and that is something I think somebody is going to have to address. In a lot of ways Donald Trump is everything wrong with American politics on steroids, including the tendency to ignore consequences in favour of short term electoral gains.

Trump is the mudslide at the end of years of erosion, when he leaves office, whether it is after this election or the next one, he is going to be leaving behind a mess. Whether Trump goes down as the worst president in US history is going to depend heavily on whether the next president is willing to go to the expense cleaning that mess up is going to entail.

The longer Trump remains, the worse it is going to be, and the more extreme the action required to fix it is going to be. Can the Democratic Party provide the radical course correction required? And can such a course correction win at the ballot box?

If only it were Trump.

Boris Johnson has been admitted to hospital with coronavirus after suffering persistent symptoms for 10 days.

Downing Street insisted it was just a precautionary measure but Johnson’s admission on a Sunday evening comes after days of rumours that his condition has been worsening.

…

The Guardian was told last week that Johnson was more seriously ill than either he or his officials were prepared to admit, and that he was being seen by doctors who were concerned about his breathing.

But Downing Street flatly denied that the prime minister’s health had seriously deteriorated, and insisted there were no plans at that point for him to be admitted to hospital.

And Downing Street would never lie to the Guardian I’m sure.

But still, I wish it were Trump.

Sad and infuriating:

A California megachurch has found itself at the center of a coronavirus outbreak after public health officials connected it to 71 cases , even as church leaders say they have been unfairly blamed for failing to take action to stop the spread among church members.

County health officials have put Bethany Slavic Missionary church, a Pentecostal house of worship in a suburb of Sacramento, at the heart of one of the largest outbreak clusters in the country. The church is reported to be the largest Slavic congregation in the US, with 3,500 members and a total attendance at some services of up to 10,000.

The county’s public health director said that a third of all coronavirus cases in Sacramento county have been linked to places of worship. As of Thursday, health officials tallied the number of county cases at 350, with 10 deaths.

The pursuit of the phantom god is lethal. Religious wars in the 16th and 17th centuries, megachurches and “Liberty University” in the 21st.

Seventy-one of the members who tested positive live in Sacramento county, and members who live in other counties may also be infected. One parishioner has died, officials said, and a pastor indicated in an online sermon the church’s senior pastor has been hospitalized and two others are critically ill.

All for a god that doesn’t exist. Tinkerbell doesn’t exist and the god that collects people in groups to infect them with a lethal virus doesn’t exist.

Health officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but the Sacramento county public health director, Peter Beilenson, told the Los Angeles Times it is “outrageous this is happening”, adding that public health guidelines trump the freedom of religious expression.

Beilenson said Thursday that in-person services at the Slavic megachurch have now ceased.

But he said church leaders rebuffed previous attempts to discuss the cases. “They’ve basically told us to leave them alone,” Beilenson told the Sacramento Bee. “This is extremely irresponsible and dangerous for the community.”

Public health officials can’t leave them alone, any more than the fire department could if they were building huge bonfires during fire season. They’re not leaving the people of Sacramento County alone by spreading infection, so the health department can’t leave them alone.

Faith Presbyterian church, also in Sacramento, has had two parishioners die from the virus and a total of five people test positive for the virus, the Sacramento Bee reported.

Forty minutes south, in Lodi, church leaders sent the city a “cease and desist” letter after police entered the church during a service on 25 March, telling authorities the church “intends to continue to meet this Sunday and all future Wednesdays and Sundays”.

No you cease and desist.

Another press briefing campaign rally, perhaps the weirdest yet.

At this stage of the rally, the early stage, he comes across as drunk, exhausted, sick, something – gabbling, slurring, and seeming to talk through a gallon or two of his own drool.

“…when thee brunt of it comes, which is coming quickly, you see it, you see it as sure as you can see it” [rising hand gesture to illustrate “brunt”]

Lots of drunk – slurring – weaving – struggling in this one:

No, people with expertise in researching and testing new medications are going to have to do that.

That one is particularly disgusting. He goes on and on about who stroked his ego enough and who didn’t, as if that were the whole point. It makes me wish I could bash his head in myself.

Yes, “inappropriate” to go public to save the lives of his crew.

It’s true about the bizarre hushed tones. He’s doing the creepy-daddy whisper at this point, and it makes one want to run for the hills.