The crisis we are facing should not make us forget the many other crises that bring suffering to so many people.
– Pope Francis. From his Easter message about “a contagion of hope.”
Donald’s Election Came Down to 77,744 Votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. Total.
What’s the over/under of coronavirus deaths exceeding that number?
That’s one question.
Second question.
What would you do differently if you were trying to cause additional deaths?
A nasty question for sure.
Hope to hear from all the experts.
Every day I violate the stay at home dictate by walking for an hour.
I always take my dog, Ragnar with me. He won’t let me go by myself.
I tripped over him today. We have walked together maybe a thousand times, he’s not two years old, so I guess I was due. Landed on my left side, ribs and hip. Slammed into the roadway. Now you know why I sold my bikes.
Think Humpty Dumpty, but shaped like an asparagus spear.
Three (3) neighbors rushed out to help. One reached to help me up and my good dog Rags growled like Cujo having a bad day. Nobody touches me but the wife. I am socially distant normally.
In pain all the time anyway, so figure I can deal with it.
The Trump show will go on: Monday, the White House canceled, then un-canceled, its daily presidential press briefing. Trump’s inability to stay away underscores its importance in his political playbook.
The Latest on the Coronavirus (ALEX BRANDON / AP)
Let’s begin by recapping a fraught five days in Washington:On Thursday, the president’s daily press briefing took a dangerous turn when Trump wondered aloud if bleach injections might be used to treat COVID-19. (Doctors quickly issued warnings.)
On Friday, he dismissed the comments as sarcasm.
By Saturday, he threatened to cancel these briefings altogether.
Yesterday, Trump “fired off” what my colleague David Frum called “a sequence of crazy-even-for-him tweets and retweets,” including a deepfake video featuring a likeness of Joe Biden. He also called for journalists to be stripped of their “Noble” prizes, both misspelling the award and, apparently, conflating it with the Pulitzers.
And Monday, the White House made good on Saturday’s threat, but only for a blip, canceling, then uncanceling, the afternoon press briefing.
The reversal doesn’t come as a total shock. Instead, it underscores the briefing’s relative importance in the Trump political playbook. Or, as my colleague Peter Nicholas put it: “It’s a fair bet that the free airtime and chance to push out campaign talking points are, for Trump, an irresistible draw.”
Here’s how to think about these daily dispatches from the White House: They aren’t press conferences so much as “reality shows with no winners.” Trump is using them to build a dystopia in real time, Megan Garber argued last week.
Trump clearly loves the format. “In fact, it’s one of the few presidential duties he actually seems to enjoy,” our politics staff writer David A. Graham points out.
These briefings, by design, keep attention on the president. And with the 2020 contest looming, “incentives to further politicize the stage will only grow,” Peter predicted back in early April.
Trump’s foes watch the spectacle from afar, shot glasses nearby. “I start off with a beer and, depending on the magnitude of crazy, I could be on tequila before too long,” Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chairman and an MSNBC commentator, told Peter.
I will not die of stupid
By Leonard Pitts Jr. for the Miami Herald. 4/26/2020
Someday, I’m going to die.
This, I grudgingly accept. I have no idea how it’s going to happen. Maybe I will die of having a tree fall on me, of eating tainted shellfish, or of being struck by lightning. But this much I guarantee. I will not die of having wagered my life that TV carnival barkers, political halfwits and MAGA-hat-wearing geniuses know more than experts with R.N.s, M.D.s, and Ph.D.s after their names.
In other words, I will not die of stupid.
Not that there aren’t plenty of opportunities to do so. Indeed, in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic and the question of when and how the nation’s economy should be reopened, we seem to have tapped the U.S. Strategic Stupid Reserve. The result has been a truly awe-inspiring display of America’s matchless capacity for mental mediocrity.
Surveys show, for instance, that a solid majority of Americans (63 percent according to a CBS News poll) are more worried about reopening the country too fast and worsening the pandemic than opening it too slowly and worsening the economy. Yet a noisy minority of protesters is furious at government for trying to keep them healthy. They demand their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of acute respiratory distress.
Meantime, there’s Dr. Phil, opining on Fox “News” that “45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools, but we don’t shut the country down for that.” Turns out he’s off a smidge on the number of drownings, which is actually fewer than 4,000. And who knew swimming pools, car accidents and cigarettes were contagious?
Then you have governors like Brian Kemp of Georgia and Ron DeSantis of Florida rushing to reopen their states in defiance of medical advice. “COVID-19 is not here, bro,” one surfer assured a Jacksonville TV news crew. Doesn’t that take a load off your mind?
And let’s not forget Las Vegas, where Mayor Carolyn Goodman went on CNN to demand the reopening of casinos, suggesting her town could be a “control group” to find out if social distancing works — the gambling capital playing craps with the lives of its own people. Not that Goodman would wager her own life. Asked by Anderson Cooper if she would visit the reopened casinos, she demurred, saying she has to get home to her family.
But here’s the thing. There’s been a lot of talk over who has the power to reopen America’s economy. Well, it doesn’t belong to the president, nor to the governors. It doesn’t even belong to business owners. No, ultimately, it belongs to me. And to you. It belongs to us, as consumers.
After all, the president and the governors can issue all the orders they want, the owners can remove all the padlocks, but none of it matters if customers are too afraid to walk back through the doors. And I am. I have no idea how many consumers I represent, but I suspect it’s more than a few.
I get that businesses are suffering. But I refuse to eat in a crowded restaurant, sit in a packed movie house or fly on a full flight again until I feel I can do so safely. And I am emphatically not assured by TV carnival barkers, political halfwits and MAGA-hat-wearing geniuses.
No, I need to hear from serious, credible people. I need to know sufficient testing has been conducted and that they feel the virus is no longer a threat. If other people want to die of stupid, I can’t stop them. But if America wants its economy back — this part of its economy, at least — it better do whatever is necessary to persuade Dr. Anthony Fauci it’s time to give the all-clear.
Look for me two weeks after that.