Today is April Fool’s Day. Which John Lennon and Yoko Ono celebrated in 1970 by announcing they were having sex-change operations.
Today in 1972, the Mar y Sol festival began in Puerto Rico. The concert’s location simplified security — it was on an island accessible only by those with tickets.
Some of these politicians have become way too intoxicated with this sudden power they’re brandishing like a club over the heads of their fellow citizens — I’m talking about you, Charlie Baker, and Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island makes two.
Check out the stories from around the country — two (Democrat) governors have taken to threatening physicians and pharmacists who dispense legal anti-malarial drugs to coronavirus victims.
In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen “Half” Whitmer is openly calling for “professional consequences” for any health care professionals who defy her edict, a directive the Detroit News said “deviates into open threats.”
Other Democrats are setting up snitch lines to report “non-essential” businesses.
On Friday night, the mayor of Los Angeles admitted to one of his comrades on CNN that they’re tracking cellphone data to keep tabs on the movements of citizens.
This Democrat has also threatened to cut off electricity and water to any businesses that won’t obey. All of this is going on in a jurisdiction where 1,700 prisoners have been cut loose … and the gun stores have been threatened with shut downs (as in Delaware, by yet another Democrat).
In Laguna Beach, where drones are outlawed for private use, law enforcement are using their drones to enforce “social distancing” on public beaches. In Lakewood, N.J., on Thursday, cops broke up a wedding — per orders of the governor, they claimed.
Closer to home, Tall Deval — or, if you prefer his newer nickname, Charlie Parker — wants to “ramp up” tracking those of us who will not obey his high-handed orders.
Yardbird now demands that everyone coming into the state “self-quarantine” for two weeks. Really? As one of my listeners asked Friday:
“I work in Massachusetts — you know, I pay taxes — and I live in New Hampshire. So do I have to ‘self-quarantine’ every morning for two weeks when I cross the border into Mass?”
Then there’s Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo.
“In a move without precedent in state history,” as the Providence Journal described it, she ordered that “anyone entering Rhode Island from New York state by any means of grounds transportation — passenger vehicle, bus or train — must provide personal information to authorities and self-quarantine for 14 days.”
So … being in an automobile with NY license plates is now considered “probable cause” for a police stop? I have a question: surely this doesn’t apply to illegal immigrants? I mean, after all, Rhode Island is for all intents and purposes a sanctuary state for criminal illegals.
According to the RI state police, New Yorkers who are stopped — citizens, anyway — will be asked their plans.
“If the response is ‘passing through,’ we will send them on their way.”
The paper continued, “Those responding that their destination is somewhere in Rhode Island will be asked for their information and will be ordered to self-quarantine.”
Asked for information? Sounds like something out of an old World War II movie, in which the Nazi guards were always demanding to see “your papers.”
The Rhode Island ACLU pointed out the existence of something called the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits illegal search and seizure, even of taxpaying citizens.
If that’s not enough, let us turn to Article 4, Section 2 of the Constitution:
“The citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.”
In other words, a New Yorker has as much right to be in Rhode Island as a Rhode Islander.
You may notice that the two New England governors who seem most eager to stomp on their fellow citizens’ rights are the same two who have been desperately trying to impose an unconstitutional gasoline tax on motorists under the guise of “climate change.”
Coincidence?
Down in Virginia, Gov. Ralph “Blackface” Northam is one of many who has banned gatherings of more than 10 people. In the Old Dominion, some deplorables are asking the obvious follow-up question: in addition to proscribing Christian services, will the newly woke Gov. Blackface also be breaking up religious gatherings at, say, mosques?
That’s about as likely, of course, as a Muslim baker being sued for refusing to bake a gay wedding cake.
Just a month ago, most of these same hacks were wringing their hands and calling President Trump a “fascist” or a “dictator.” Now the mayor of LA is organizing vigilante groups in the city’s neighborhoods, calling them, in his best Orwellian speak, “the Safer at Home Business Ambassadors Program.”
Meanwhile, not a single shiftless hack on the Massachusetts state payroll has been laid off, not even at UMass or Massport or at the deserted courthouses. That’s coming next, right, Tall Deval? We’re all in this together, aren’t we? Right? Right?
Much of what you read there — statewide gathering bans, businesses arbitrarily classified as “essential” and “nonessential,” and threats of jail for such horrible activities as going to church — have taken place in Wisconsin with Gov. Tony Evers (or his handlers, such as his chief of staff and chief legal counsel) and his Safer at Home order. (George Orwell would appreciate that doublespeak.)
Once this ends, the Legislature should immediately change the law to require legislative approval of governor-proclaimed states of emergency. And the Legislature should vote on Safer at Home and all his other edicts.
There used to be such a thing as separation of powers, checks and balances, and constitutional rights.
For many Democrats, it’s the election of a lifetime. Yet the question preoccupying the party for several days this month was whether their presumptive presidential nominee, Joe Biden, could get the webcast working in his rec room.
It was a telling obsession, one that revealed the extent of the party’s anxiety as it comes to a nail-biting conclusion: Despite all the arguments Democrats have crafted and all the evidence they have amassed against Donald Trump, his reelection is likely to rise or fall on his handling of the coronavirus crisis and its fallout alone.
“It’s the most dramatic example I can think of in my lifetime about how you cannot control the agenda,” said Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former deputy White House chief of staff in the Carter administration.
“If life were fair,” he said, Trump would already be paying a price for his chaotic handling of the pandemic. Instead, the president’s approval rating has not taken a hit, and the dominant images are of him “at the podium in the White House, quote, in charge,” Francis said. “If those stick and they’re not countered effectively, he could get reelected.”
The effect of the coronavirus on Trump’s popularity will not become clear for weeks or months. But the pandemic’s impact on the Democratic Party has already been severe. Primary elections are being postponed, allowing Bernie Sanders to linger in the race and delay until June the ability of Biden to mathematically clinch the nomination and fully turn his focus to Trump.
The public’s unbreakable focus on the virus is narrowing the range of issues on which Democrats can effectively draw contrasts with Trump — temporarily sidelining a broader agenda involving once-pressing issues such as climate change and gun control.
“It was always going to be a referendum on Trump,” said Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who ran unsuccessfully for president in 2004. “But the referendum was going to be about things like climate change and how you want to reform health care and all these other things. Now it’s only going to be about this one thing — whether Trump is competent and sane.”
Trump, he said, is “a deeply disturbed narcissist who is incapable of being a leader, and that’s what the referendum is going to be on.”
Most Democratic strategists believe, like Dean, that Trump’s reelection prospects will be diminished by the pandemic, with its rising death toll and ruinous effect on the economy. But the general election is more than seven months away and Trump’s public approval rating has ticked up as the coronavirus has spread — though not nearly as high as the last Republican president, George W. Bush, following the 9/11 terrorist attacks,
Scott Brennan, an Iowa Democratic National Committee member and a former state party chairman, said, “If the economy pops back … it’s hard to know what people are going to think.”
In an effort to influence those voters, Biden has resolved the technological difficulties that marred his earliest appearances from his home in Wilmington, Del. He is now making regular appearances, via webcast, to speak about the coronavirus pandemic, including town hall meetings and a rush of TV interviews.
But the effectiveness of his counterprogramming is unclear, as Biden competes for attention not only with Trump, but with high-profile Democratic governors such as California’s Gavin Newsom, New York’s Andrew Cuomo and Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer, who — unlike Biden — are sitting executives involved in the coronavirus response.
Biden, said Darry Sragow, a longtime California Democratic strategist, “has no control over this at all.”
“To me, it’s like you’re in a bar and a brawl breaks out,” Sragow said. “You’ve got to park your immediate instinct. You have no control over the immediate outcome of the brawl.”
One problem for Democrats is that the nation’s battle with coronavirus — and Trump’s position at the center of it — may go on for months. The party’s marquee political event, the Democratic National Convention, scheduled for July, is the subject of contingency planning in case the coronavirus still precludes large crowds from gathering. DNC officials said last week that planning is moving forward for the Milwaukee event. But many Democrats are doubtful — and fearful of a worst-case scenario in which the pandemic upends the Democratic convention, but not the Republican gathering the following month.
“It matters for this reason,” said Bob Mulholland, a DNC member from California. “That Thursday night speech by our nominee could be seen by 50 to 60 million Americans, most of them who haven’t paid a minute of attention to the primary. That’s the conversation that takes us to winning.”
He said, “If we have to cancel and Trump has a convention with 40,000 people screaming and yelling … that’s an advantage to Trump, because nobody saw us except some text they got, and then they watched Trump.”
Jay Jacobs, chairman of the New York Democratic Party, suggested last week that Democrats should at least consider putting their convention off until late August. Even if the coronavirus pandemic has eased by late spring, he said, “everybody’s going to be absolutely exhausted.”
At a minimum, the pandemic is shortening the time frame with which Democrats will run their fall campaign. And it is changing expectations about the resonance of any issue other than the coronavirus.
Advocates of “Medicare for All” have seized on the pandemic as a way to highlight their concerns about health care. Gun control activists have drawn connections to the crisis, raising alarms about domestic violence and unsafe gun storage with Americans spending far more hours at home. Climate change activists have advanced the “Green New Deal” as a tool for economic recovery, while also pointing to the world’s massive response to the coronavirus as a template for climate mobilization.
Peter Ambler, executive director of the gun control group Giffords, said gun control — which was once a major focus of the Democratic primary — is “baked into our politics and our culture in a way that’s not going to evaporate.”
“I do think it’s important at a time like this for people who care about climate to keep on fighting for climate change solutions, because that challenge isn’t going to go away, the people who care about immigration reform to keep on having that conversation because clearly our immigration system is in need of reform, and likewise when it comes to gun violence,” he said.
Yet there’s little evidence to date that the coronavirus crisis is altering those debates in a material way.
As one strategist who has worked on climate change for several years said, “None of that stuff is happening right now. … It looks tone deaf to not be focused on the thing that’s gripping and changing people’s lives in a once-in-a-lifetime way.”
Great leaders aren’t born; they’re made—forged by the moments that end up defining them.The greatest crises, then, the most challenging moments, can make the greatest leaders.But what if the greatest crisis is one of leadership?
Sadly, Wisconsin is finding out.To say that Governor Evers has failed to meet his moment would be a gross understatement, and his failure won’t just define him; it has already consumed him.If great leaders rise to the greatest challenges, Evers has shrunk smaller than any point of his governorship.
His dithering or outright dishonesty about whether he would issue an order effectively shutting down Wisconsin lulled the state into a false sense of security in its way of life before his sudden about-face on Monday morning whipped millions of his constituents into a state of abject panic.
Would they be able to go to work the next day?Would their business have to be closed…maybe for good?With a brief, detail-free Twitter thread announcing his intention to issue what he cryptically termed a “Safer at Home” order the next day, Evers touched off hours of uncertainty.
With a shaky, confused press conference Monday afternoon, Evers touched off a growing belief that he himself wasn’t sure what his order would include.Which businesses were “essential” and which were “non-essential?”Evers wasn’t specific.What made him change his mind so quickly and issue an order three days after assuring the state that he wouldn’t?Evers didn’t say.How would that order prevent the spread of Coronavirus in a way that his previous order banning public gatherings of ten people or more would not?Evers wasn’t exactly sure.When would conditions improve to the point that the order could be lifted?Evers just sort of shrugged.
Worse yet, a thoroughly confused public couldn’t contact its state representatives for clarification because, well, the Legislature learned about Evers’ order when the public did and received no more clarity.
“The governor’s executive order came as a surprise to the Legislature,” Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said in a statement.“It was a complete reversal from his repeated assurances. It should be noted that legislative leaders have asked on a daily basis whether or not this was the direction the governor was headed, and we were told it was not.
“The governor’s sudden change of course and lack of specific guidance have increased the level of uncertainty and anxiety in our state. The people of Wisconsin deserve clear communications during a public health emergency.”
They have gotten anything but.
Even after Evers’ order was officially issued on Tuesday morning, confusion abounded and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation was flooded with calls from business owners big and small wondering whether they would need to close for the next month.
As bad as the lack of clarity and communication have been, however, the Evers order’s draconian crackdown on individual liberty was far worse.
“All public and private gatherings of any number of people that are not part of a single household or living unit are prohibited,” states the order, which makes violations “punishable by up to 30 days imprisonment, or up to $250 fine, or both.”
Shockingly, this makes family get-togethers with Grandma and Grandpa punishable by jail time.First Amendment protections of freedom of association could not possibly be any more infringed upon.For the next month, Wisconsinites are not free to associate with anyone outside of their households.
And they can forget about freely exercising religion, because “religious facilities, entities, groups, and gatherings, and weddings and funerals…shall include fewer than 10 people in a room or confined space at a time.”
The rights of the free exercise of religion and of association are among the most basic of American society, while the ability of the individual to use private property, to own and maintain private enterprise, and to move freely have become nearly unanimously accepted as necessary to preserve a free society.
Never before in Wisconsin’s history have such freedoms been so dramatically curtailed, and never before has Wisconsin’s leadership been so unable to explain why.
Inasmuch as Wisconsin now faces a crisis, it is a crisis of leadership. Real leaders rise to meet the moment with poise and confidence, honestly communicate a clear vision, and boldly enact a plan that provides for the safety of the collective while upholding the rights of the individual.
Evers has done none of this.His moment has met him, and he has proven himself wholly unprepared for it.
The problem with O’Donnell’s thesis is that O’Donnell assumes that Evers is actually the governor of Wisconsin.
The actual governor of this state appears to be Maggie Gau, Evers’ chief of staff and apparently chief thinker, profiled by The Cap Times a year ago:
Politics has always been a part of Gau’s life, extending to before she was born. Both sets of the Wausau native’s grandparents were politically active, but that was particularly true on her dad’s side of the family.
Noting that the couple was close with former U.S. Rep. Dave Obey, a Democrat who represented the northwestern part of the state for four decades, Gau relayed a story about a family trip that included piling everyone into the car for a drive to the nation’s capital.
“And (my grandparents were) like, ‘We’re going to Washington, D.C. We’re going to visit Dave Obey.’ And the kids were like, ‘Really?’” she said with a laugh.
Gau has her own tribute to that side of the family — and Obey himself — on her desk. Situated there, to the left of an old photo of her grandfather and Obey, is Obey’s memoir, “Raising Hell for Justice: The Washington Battles of a Heartland Progressive.”
“People would say that I had (politics) in my blood, like from the second I was born,” she said.
But it wasn’t until high school, during her four years involved in Wausau West’s debate program where “politics were a part of that sort of narrative and our strategy,” that Gau got to experience “a taste of it” herself.
Gau ran for student council secretary in middle and high school and got involved in various efforts, including one where students sought to keep their lunchtime open-campus privileges. She touted that push in her 2005 high school graduation speech which was then mentioned by the local newspaper.
Gau’s aunt, Mary Seidl, a Madison elementary school principal, recalled Gau playing with a portable microphone toy growing up: she “loved using that to be able to elevate herself.”
“If she believed in something, she just throws her whole passion behind it and sometimes at the expense of herself,” Seidl said. “When you’re growing up, that’s hard. (During school), if you get behind something, some people may see that as intimidating or may not get behind that, but that never mattered to her.”
But Gau said she wasn’t necessarily interested in running for office herself, opting to maintain her sense of privacy while working “behind the scenes.”
“One of the most valuable things that you can give to someone is your time and your labor and to be able to help promote and support and help others in that capacity,” she said. “That’s exactly where my strength is and why I’m where I am.”
Asked if Gau would run for office at some point, Seidl said it’s something she’s repeatedly asked her niece, who she views as someone who “really, really wants change, like at her core.”
But, she added: “She recognizes that she doesn’t want to be the people giving the speech, she wants to write the speech because there’s more power in writing the speech than giving it.”
Today in 1949, RCA introduced the 45-rpm single to compete with the 33-rpm album introduced by CBS one year earlier.
The first RCA 45 was …
Today in 1964, the Beatles filmed a scene of a “live” TV performance before a studio audience for their movie “A Hard Day’s Night.”
In the audience as an extra: Phil Collins.
There are, as far as I know, only two people in my extended family who were paid to write for publication. The other one was my great-aunt, who worked at the Morrison County Record in Little Falls, Minn., and doubled as their cooking columnist.
That does not mean the non-writers in the family cannot tell stories. And so my mother makes her worldwide writing debut:
Yesterday Steve went into panic mode since he was eating his last banana for breakfast. He says he’s going to go to the store and get three or four. He is very picky about his bananas and won’t eat one if it has a brown spot so can’t stockpile.
That is, by the way, my father (Steve is his middle name), not the writer of this blog. His actual first name is Paul, the same as his father’s, but back in the days when many people went by their middle names he was Paul Stephen, since he was born on St. Stephen’s Day, and not Paul Leonard. Their decision to name me for Paul Stephen, but in reverse, set in motion years of confusion over the intended recipients of phone calls and mail.
Me: You’re going to risk life and limb for a few bananas?
I tell him I’ve got it covered, so at bedtime I set my alarm for 6:30 a.m. to take advantage of the store’s senior early hours, 6:30–8:30 a.m. Didn’t sleep well knowing I had this daunting task that I was committed to.
That is apparently hereditary. Back in my business magazine days I would make 6 a.m. morning TV appearances at a Green Bay TV station an hour from the house. I was paranoid that I would not get there in time, knowing full well that if you don’t get there on time, they’re not going to move you elsewhere in the show. I always did get there in time, but I spent the rest of the day in a caffeine-fueled haze due to my lack of sleep.
At 6:13 a.m this morning my eyes pop open — I beat the alarm clock. Ran and shut the window (I like it cold to sleep), ran to turn up the furnace since I like it warm to get dressed, started my first cup of coffee in the Keurig. Did my daily blood sugar test and it was good — yay, more carbs today! Day is starting off great. Checked out the window and it is dark and raining. Great, since it might keep the old farts indoors. Went to the bathroom for a quick tooth brushing, used a cold wash cloth to wake myself up, applied lots of moisturizer so wrinkles don’t resemble the Grand Canyon. Penciled on two misaligned eyebrows (I’m not going anywhere, even for bananas, without my eyebrows). They work if I don’t smile or squint. I’ve got this! Serious case of bed head — rainy and cold so a knit hat works, plus I have matching cloth gloves to wear in the store. No touchy anything! Gloves can be washed or left in the car until spring.
I am dressed, in the car and on the road at 6:48. Weird because there is not a car in sight. Made me wonder if the store would be open. I take a risk and drive 30 in a 25 mph zone. Figured no cop would give a ticket to a “fragile” (doctor’s label, not mine, since I think of myself as a flyweight Ninja Grandma) senior who is doing an emergency food run for the family.
Get to the store — wait, there are cars in MY store’s parking lot. I don my gloves and bravely walk in the door. Wow, only saw a couple bodies and they were stocking, etc.Good news — there were muffins. Hooray, since I allow myself one-fourth of a muffin as a treat. God is soooooooo good — bought two packages. No, that’s not hoarding because there were plenty on the table.
Go to produce and found four perfect greenish yellow bananas, beautiful raspberries that I plan to do a reverse mortgage to afford. (If hunky Tom Selleck says reverse mortgages are good, I’m there.)
Peppers look good though with my neuropathy glove-covered hands there is no way I can open up the freaking plastic bags — was holding up progress so gave up. My beloved grapefruit were plentiful so I grabbed a bag of seven, and my favorite lettuce blend.
I’m definitely on a roll … until this young guy invades my personal space. I’m thinking about giving him the finger but have never been able to determine what one to use. I’m told a thumbs-up gesture does not convey the message appropriately. Oh well, the glove probably would make it difficult anyway.
Observation: women are being respectful; men are clueless! Nothing new there. Probably a dozen or so people in the whole store. Shelves are bare in the toilet paper area, but I did find some Pinesol liquid so I can make my own spray if my supply runs out.
Picked up one dozen eggs and several of my low-carb yogurt. I’m definitely on a roll since I was able to find most of what I wanted/needed. Hooray and worth the trip!Stopped to profoundly thank a manager type who was checking prices. Seemed to make her so happy and she in turn thanked me for shopping their store. I’m thinking people are going to bigger probably better stocked shelves.
By this time my stomach is growling so loud that my social-distancing fellow shoppers are looking at me probably wondering if one of the first signs of the virus is noisy stomachs. They’re definitely looking fearful. So as not to offend, I head to the checkout where I am delighted to find my favorite youngsters at the register — a cute little Asian guy bagger and a young woman who is sooooooo good at her job. She remembers everything and always reminds the bagger to not make my bags heavy since I have a bad back. How sweet is that? I thank them both profusely and ask what time they had to get to work. Turns out they reported in at 6 a.m. but she has the day off tomorrow.
It is now 7:31 a.m. and I push my treasures in my cart and can’t get the right button (remember gloves here) to open the back door. Finally throw caution to the wind and open it myself. I duck as it raises up. I load my bags in the car and drive home. Still no traffic on the road. So eerie!Get home and take only the perishables into the house. I saw the instructions of how to handle groceries. I spend the next hour cleaning everything — if the peppers taste a little weird so-be-it.
At 8:36 sleeping Jesus emerges in his jammies from the bedroom and says (drum roll, please) “Are you going somewhere?” Dane County has another C-19-related casualty.
I have never heard of my father referred to as “sleeping Jesus.” Apparently he outgrew being a morning person.
I must say I haven’t had such an adventure since I skipped an afternoon of school in the ninth grade. I was terrified the whole time and vowed it wasn’t worth it. Didn’t get caught but I believe I’m still being punished by getting frequent urinary tract infections.
Of all the people I know, my mother is the last person I would have thought would have ever skipped school. Proof of the cosmic unfairness of the universe: Had I ever skipped school, or for that matter done one-tenth of what my father allegedly did when he was in school, I would still be locked in their basement on lifetime grounding.
While this is meant to be a joke, I sit here with tears in my eyes and a lump in my throat. I am so blessed to live in a country where the aged are being treated aggressively for the virus, unlike some other countries who triage them out as hopeless. My beloved family and friends are well at this point and the grocery stores are making special hours to help us seniors stay healthy. What else could I wish for except for solutions to be found to fight this terrible disease.
I close by wishing you continued good health. Stay well!
The president is not America. Our fortunes are not his fortunes. He is not, as Chris Rock once said of President Obama, “the dad of the country.”
Yeah, well, Rock was wrong.
If we happen to be of an opposing political faction, the president’s misfortunes may fill us with glee, or his triumphs may cause us anguish. If you hate the president, by all means do everything you can to bruise him. Rejoice in his every misstep. Luxuriate in his errors. Pounce on his gaffes. Make his life a living hell.
But not now.
No one expects the mainstream media to be even-handed anymore. We don’t even expect the media to be professional. That ship has sailed. We get it: You loathe Trump and will put the worst possible spin on everything he says and does until he’s out of office. (At which point you’ll do the same for whoever the new highest-ranking Republican is.) But, for a limited time, is it too much to ask that the media broaden their scope to include the country and the world instead of just their own Ahabian obsessions about Trump? As far as I know, every member of the Washington press corps, even Jim Acosta, is a resident of Planet Earth. Why are they all acting as if they’re looking down from the Nebulon-235 system and not subject to everything that is happening?
For better or worse, during this uncertain flight on a wobbly plane through this storm-wracked air, Captain Trump is at the controls. No amount of whining will make Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden president in the next few months. So can we just call timeout from Silly Season, please? When this is over you can all go back to telling us that ten dollars’ worth of Russian Facebook memes of Jesus arm-wrestling Satan subverted the 2016 election.
At some point the coronavirus scare will no longer be the leading story in the world. There will be plenty of time later to analyze Trump’s performance during this crisis, to mull his overly optimistic early reports and the velocity of his adaptation to changing circumstances. But must the Democratic Party and its communications subsidiary, better known as virtually every major news organization, be so relentlessly hostile right now? Could they maybe knock off the rabid-wolverine behavior for a few weeks?
The president is not us, but for now he is tied up with us. We want him to succeed, do we not? Is it not obvious that, even if you despise everything the man has ever said and done and want his presidency to end so spectacularly it’ll make the Hindenburg look like a Duraflame log, it would be good for us if he got us through these next few months with the least conceivable damage to life, health, and wealth?
We know that the president is unusually thin-skinned and capricious, that he is keenly and perhaps unhealthily focused on what the media are saying about him at any given nanosecond, that he has a short temper and a quick fuse. He goes through cabinet secretaries like a newborn goes through diapers. And pointing out his errors is the legitimate business of CNN, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, the Washington Post, etc. But the way the media are trying to gin up a feud between Trump and Dr. Anthony Fauci is disgraceful and disgusting.
Folks, and by “folks” I mean you absolute freaking Muppets, are you trying to get Fauci fired? Do we really want to start over with a new specialist in infectious diseases in the White House? Would you be happy if Omarosa were Trump’s chief adviser on epidemiology? Would you be more secure if Jared were the last man standing during the medical briefings?
The incandescently moronic jibber-jabber (I won’t call it “reporting”) about the bizarre case of the Arizona woman whose husband died after taking fish-tank cleaner he and she incorrectly supposed to be the drug Trump touted in the White House is the kind of barnyard waste product that shouldn’t even make it to national news reports, and ordinarily wouldn’t, except that the media seem to be getting a near-erotic thrill out of any scrap of information they think might set off Trump. The dead Arizona man didn’t take chloroquine. He took chloroquine phosphate, in a massive dose. Please run the tape for me where Trump said, “Everybody take a spoonful of fish-tank cleaner to save your lives.” “The difference between the fish tank cleaning additive that the couple took and the drug used to treat malaria is the way they are formulated,” dryly noted CBS News. Oh, you don’t say? Because I was going to put rubbing alcohol in my martini tonight. Or is rubbing alcohol differently formulated than gin?
This kind of inverted pyramid of piffle is exactly the kind of thing that seems specifically engineered to distract Trump or send him into a rage spiral when we all need him to be calm, measured, and focused on things that matter. The president’s character flaws are well known. Why aggravate them? Could the media take a deep breath and not be utterly insane for, say, 120 days?
Then go back to being nuts! Write all the “Has Trump Been a Russian Asset Since 1987?” stories you want. Write earnest “reporter’s notebook” pieces on how Trump let the contagion spread because he secretly wanted a federal bailout for his hotels. Or, should the havoc wrought by the virus turn out to be much less than feared, go back to rewriting all those “Trump is a xenophobic lunatic for overstating the threat from China” pieces you were doing six weeks ago. For now, though, please stop acting as though the principal duty of the press is to make the president even more erratic than he is already inclined to be.
The number one single today in 1957 was the first number one rock and roll single to be written by its singer:
The number one single today in 1963 …
… which sounds suspiciously similar to a song released seven years later …
… which resulted in, of course, a lawsuit, the settlement for which included:
The number one British single today in 1963 may make you tap your foot:
Today in 1966, Mick Jagger got in the way of a chair thrown onto the stage during a Rolling Stones concert in Marseilles, France.
The title and artist are the same for the number one album today in 1969:
The Wall Street Journal:
It’s as if the media is rooting for the worst that could happen, or something.Give Neil Ferguson a break. Nearly two weeks ago Mr. Ferguson, an epidemiologist with Imperial College London, issued a report on Covid-19. Much of the public attention focused on his worst-case projection that there might as many as 2.2 million American and 510,000 British deaths. Fewer paid attention to the caveat that this was “unlikely,” and based on the assumption that nothing was done to control it.The report was one reason that led Prime Minister Boris Johnson to change policy and lock Britain down. Under the Imperial College model, the projection was that the steps Mr. Johnson had been taking would cut the number of projected deaths in half but still leave about a quarter million British dead.
Now Mr. Ferguson has clarified his estimates. He told Parliament this week that he now reckons the number of deaths in the U.K. “would be unlikely to exceed 20,000”—and that many would be older people who would have died from other maladies this year. With the measures now in place, he believes Britain’s health service won’t be overwhelmed.Critics are bashing him for the revisions, but not so fast. Mr. Ferguson didn’t change his model so much as adjust for new circumstances. In particular he believes that Covid-19 is more transmissible than he previously had thought—but because strong measures had been implemented, deaths would be far lower than his worst-case scenario.
There’s a warning here about science and journalism. Surely if we hope to neutralize a pandemic we don’t fully understand, we need to encourage a culture in which scientists feel able to adapt and clarify with new evidence. Scientists would also help themselves if, in explaining their findings, they would be more candid about the assumptions and variables.
This goes double for the press. It’s no secret that the press’s reputation has taken a credibility hit in this crisis. Nor is it any secret why: Instead of a presentation of what we know and don’t, too often the focus has been political scapegoating or sensationalizing.
[Last] week on “CBS This Morning,” U.S. Surgeon-General Jerome Adams complained about a press that runs with projections “based on worst-case scenarios.” He was talking about ventilators, but his point applies across the board. Deborah Birx, coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, said the same regarding apocalyptic forecasts not backed by data about hospitals having to issue Do Not Resuscitate orders.
In the battle to save lives and address the scourge of Covid-19, good information is paramount. Credit to Neil Ferguson for clarifying his projections when the situation changed.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 