"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, Music, Politics, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt and Dr. Alicia Triche, expert brief writer, practical scholar, emeritus Editor-in-Chief of The Green Card (FBA), and 2022 Federal Bar Association Immigration Section Lawyer of the Year. She is a/k/a “Delta Ondine,” a blues-based alt-rock singer-songwriter, who performs regularly in Memphis, where she hosts her own Blues Brunch series, and will soon be recording her first full, professional album. Stay tuned! 🎶 To see our complete professional bios, just click on the link below.
It is not news that the Republican Party has a stagnant governing agenda cobbled together from the long-discredited dogmas and shibboleths of the conservative movement. “The current iteration of the G.O.P. is indifferent to the substance of government,” Steve Benen, a political writer and producer for The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, writes in “The Impostors: How Republicans Quit Governing and Seized American Politics”:
It is disdainful of expertise and analysis. It is hostile toward evidence and arithmetic. It is tethered to few, if any, meaningful policy preferences. It does not know, and does not care, about how competing proposals should be crafted, scrutinized or implemented.
What is news is the extent to which the Republican Party has embraced the trappings of its leader, which is to say, the trappings of a right-wing cable news network: a nonstop parade of conspiracy, demagogy and grievance, in service to a cult of personality, all for the sake of a politics of plunder, theft and extraction.
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Read the rest of Jamelle’s op-ed at the link.
Pretty good explanation of The Party of Trump (formerly known as “The Party of Lincoln”).
My question is why the so-called “mainstream media” (excluding Jamelle and a few others) handles with “kid gloves” folks like Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, and Melania, who go on national TV and present knowingly bogus, totally disingenuous, fabricated portraits of Trump as a benign presence in U.S. politics. In a vain, continuing search for “normalization” of overt 21st century Jim Crow nationalist fascism, the “mainstreams” appear ready to credit speaking in complete, largely grammatical, sentences in the English language and not screaming racist tropes or absurdist internet conspiracy theories as all that is necessary to be considered “credible” and a “moderating force” in today’s “Trumpized” GOP!
The disingenuous treatment by the “mainstreams” of dishonest attempts to “soften” Trump’s true “Mini-Mussolini” persona as election-season gimmick is a gross dis-service to the public welfare and the abdication of the duty of courageous independent journalism to provide critical coverage — not just regurgitate RNC propaganda!
Why are “the mainstreams” rolling over for the RNC?
This November, vote like your life and the future of the world depend on it! Because they do!
With coronavirus cases rising across the country and the U.S. death toll topping 137,000, President Trump on Sunday dismissed concerns about the spike in infections, telling Fox News that “many of those cases shouldn’t even be cases.”
“Many of those cases are young people that would heal in a day,” the president told Fox News host Chris Wallace in an interview. “They have the sniffles and we put it down as a test.”
While young people make up an increasing share of new cases, the virus has affected people in all age groups. A surge of infections is driving deaths back up again after months of decline, and hospitals in hard-hit states such as Florida, Texas and Arizona are facing an influx of patients that health officials say could soon overwhelm medical systems. Nationwide, hospitalizations were on track to exceed their previous peak of roughly 60,000, reached in the pandemic’s early months.
Here are some other significant developments.
• The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in an upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday. The administration is also trying to block billions that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the people said.
• A growing number of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the pandemic. Currently, 38 percent approve of his handling, and 60 percent disapprove, according to a new Post-ABC News poll.
• A study from South Korea could bolster those who argue that reopening classrooms in much of the United States is too risky, suggesting that while children under 10 are less likely to spread the coronavirus, those between ages 10 and 19 will spread it similarly to adults.
• Georgia’s presentation of its coronavirus data is again under scrutiny, with a viral tweet pointing out how the color-coding of a government map has evolved. At the beginning of the month, for instance, a county needed at least 5,959 coronavirus cases to be colored red in the state’s map of the outbreak. Now, a county needs at least 9,597 — with the result that no other county has newly joined the four that have been colored red since July 1, even as the state’s cases have jumped by more than 37 percent in that period.
• Health authorities are seeking to conduct testing faster while conserving resources. The Food and Drug Administration on Saturday reissued an emergency use authorization to Quest Diagnostics for a coronavirus test to be used in pool testing, which involves combining samples from several people and testing them all at once.
Trump’s remarks came after another week of grim data highlighting the uncontrolled spread of the virus. Infections rose in states from every region of the country, with more than a dozen states on Saturday reaching record highs in their seven-day averages for new daily cases.
Georgia, Missouri, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Kentucky reported new single-day case records on Saturday, while states from Vermont to North Dakota to Oregon showed significant increases in their weekly averages, according to tracking by The Washington Post.
More than 20 states are reporting seven-day averages in coronavirus-related deaths that are higher than at the end of June, underscoring the turnaround since May and June, when deaths declined nationally — which Trump had touted as a sign of progress.
Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.), whose district encompasses parts of Miami with widespread infections, pushed back on the notion that the new cases were limited to young, healthy people and weren’t a cause for concern.
“It’s the working poor, it’s seniors, it’s now young people, and it’s totally out of control,” Shalala, a former health and human services secretary, said on ABC News’s “This Week.” “We need to close down again … That’s our worst nightmare, and we’re going to have to do that.”
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You can read the rest of this article about the Trump kakistocracy in action at the link.
It’s a dark and disturbing tale of unrelenting stupidity, evil, corruption, and cowardice on the part of those who refuse to stand up to a would be emperor who has never had any clothes.
THE WORLD CHANNELS “COURTSIDE” — A Shocked & Dismayed World Now Sees America Under The Trump Clown 🤡🤡 Kakistocracy For What It Is: A Rich, Arrogant, Willfully Ignorant, Dishonest, Dangerous “Failing State” To Be Pitied — Not To Be Trusted, Followed, Or Admired — “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
The Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that the US is “leading the world” with its response to the pandemic, but it does not seem to be going in any direction the world wants to follow.
Across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, views of the US handling of the coronavirus crisis are uniformly negative and range from horror through derision to sympathy. Donald Trump’s musings from the White House briefing room, particularly his thoughts on injecting disinfectant, have drawn the attention of the planet.
“Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the columnist Fintan O’Toole wrote in the Irish Times. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.”
The missing six weeks: how Trump failed the biggest test of his life
The US has emerged as a global hotspot for the pandemic, a giant petri dish for the Sars-CoV-2 virus. 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.
People gather to protest the stay-at-home orders outside the state capitol building in Sacramento, California, this month. Photograph: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images
The president’s abrupt decision to cut funding to the World Health Organization last month also came as a shock. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, a former Spanish foreign minister, wrote on Twitter: “There is no reason justifying this move at a moment when their efforts are needed more than ever to help contain & mitigate the coronavirus pandemic.”
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.
Dacian Cioloș, a former prime minister of Romania who now leads the Renew Europe group in the European parliament, captured a general European view this week as the latest statistics on deaths in the US were reported.
“Post-truth communication techniques used by rightwing populism movements simply do not work to beat Covid-19,” he told the Guardian. “And we see that populism cost lives.”
Around the globe, the “America first” response pursued by the Trump administration has alienated close allies. In Canada, it was the White House order in April to halt shipments of critical N95 protective masks to Canadian hospitals that was the breaking point.
The Ontario premier, Doug Ford, who had previously spoken out in support of Trump on several occasions, said the decision was like letting a family member “starve” during a crisis.
‘It will disappear’: the disinformation Trump spread about the coronavirus – timeline
“When the cards are down, you see who your friends are,” said Ford. “And I think it’s been very clear over the last couple of days who our friends are.”
In countries known for chronic problems of governance, there has been a sense of wonder that the US appears to have joined their ranks.
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Read the full article at the above link.
Are we still “to be feared,” even if no longer admired or respected?Good question!
Probably, insofar as our collapse would take down a chunk of the world’s economy with it, leave a leadership vacuum, and change the balance of power, perhaps in favor of China, Russia, South Korea, Canada, and India. We also still have a big military and lots of sophisticated weapons, although modern terrorism has shown that sophistication in expensive weaponry is not always the “be all and end all” either for winning wars or causing mass disorder, death, and mayhem.
Still, as our civil governance and international influence disintegrates, what happens with and to our military is a huge concern and a “big X factor.” Will the tradition of “civilian control over the military” also fall victim to the kakistocracy and the failure of civilian governing institutions? What’s happened to our intelligence community under the Trump kakistocracy is likely a bad omen.
Who would have thought that Trump could do so much permanent or at least long-term damage in such a short period of time? And who would have believed that our centuries-old constitutional and democratic institutions, meant to protect individual rights, enforce the rule of law, and check unrestrained abuses of power by a megalomaniac, yet highly incompetent, dishonest, dangerous, and evil Executive would have crumbled so quickly and performed so haplessly when confronted by a President and an unscrupulous, corrupt, authoritarian regime and party of toadies perfectly willing to press aggressively inane and illegal policies and false narratives to destroy the nation and everyone in it as a means of pillaging and enhancing their own power?
Yet, here we are! Much of the rest of the world appears to “get” it. Yet tens of millions of Americans who continue to support and enable the kakistocracy don’t, or they simply don’t care about our nation and the common good.
This November, vote like your life depends on it! Because it does!
President Trump is spinning his new decision to suspend funding to the World Health Organization as an act of decisive leadership — one that showcases his devotion to effective crisis management, to gathering good empirical information, and to holding people accountable for leadership failures that had catastrophic human consequences.
In just about every conceivable way, this is the opposite of the truth.
In making this new move, Trump is inviting us to review the basic timeline of events. And it demonstrates that the WHO, for all its initial failures, was still far ahead of Trump in embracing the need for a comprehensive response to coronavirus.
The timeline also once again illustrates Trump’s epic failures in that regard, and reveals the degree to which Trump is now relying on transparently ridiculous scapegoating to erase his own central role in this catastrophe.
[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]
In announcing an end to funding for the WHO, Trump claimed the organization was complicit in China’s early coverup of the outbreak’s severity there. He insisted the WHO “pushed China’s misinformation,” and ripped WHO for “severely mismanaging and covering up the spread.”
Trump also claimed that if not for WHO, “the outbreak could have been contained at its source with very little death.” He lamented that the U.S. can’t rely on WHO for “accurate, timely and independent information to make important public health recommendations and decisions.”
For Trump to position himself in this manner as a spokesperson for crisis management, empiricism and accountability would be positively comical, if the stakes weren’t so monumentally dangerous.
The WHO’s initial mistakes were real, and many critics beyond Trump have pointed to them. The organization was too trusting of China’s early obfuscations about coronavirus, and failed to aggressively push China to be more transparent. The WHO also arguably was too slow to declare a global public health emergency.
But cutting off funding as a punishment is counterproductive and deeply absurd. Indeed, even if you accept that the WHO committed serious errors, the timeline is still far more damning to Trump, by the terms that he himself has set through his criticism of the organization.
The timeline is far more damning to Trump
By Jan. 23, the WHO was already warning that coronavirus could “appear in any country,” and urged all countries to be “prepared for containment” and get ready to exercise “isolation” and “prevention” measures against its spread.
At around the same time, on Jan. 22, Trump was asked point-blank whether he worried about coronavirus’s spread, and he answered: “No, not at all,” insisting it was just “one person coming from China” and that “we have it totally under control.”
And on Jan. 24, Trump hailed China’s “effort” against coronavirus and its “transparency” about it, predicting that “it will all work out well.”
So Trump showed less concern about its spread in countries outside China — including in our own — than the WHO did.
On Jan. 30, the WHO declared coronavirus a global public health emergency. While WHO was still too credulous toward China’s response, WHO also warned that all countries must review “preparedness plans” and take seriously what was coming.
By contrast, on Jan. 30, Trump was directly warned by his Health and Human Services secretary of the threat coronavirus posed. Trump dismissed this as “alarmist.”
And on Feb. 2, Trump boasted to Sean Hannity: “We pretty much shut it down, coming in from China.” He hailed our “tremendous relationship” with that country. Trump continued praising China’s handling of coronavirus all through the entire month of February.
So at the very least, Trump showed precisely the same credulity about China that Trump is now faulting the WHO for showing, but without appreciating the urgency of the international threat coronavirus posed to the degree that the WHO did.
As MSNBC’s Ari Melber aptly put it, these attacks on the WHO are “only calling attention to the fact that the WHO was ahead of President Trump.”
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Trump is attacking the WHO right now so we’ll talk about the WHO’s shortcomings, and not his own role in this catastrophe. But this blame-shifting utter nonsense, and no one should grant it the slightest shred of credibility.
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Greg Sargent Opinion Writer Washington Post
At the link, read Greg’s complete article which also dismembers Trump’s bogus claim that his “Chinese travel ban” had a major impact on deterring the spread of the pandemic.
So, here’s what really appears to be happening as America’s national government disintegrates under Trump’s malicious incompetence. America is breaking up into a number of “Regional Federated States” which have banded together for mutual assistance under decisive governors, largely, but not exclusively Democrats. We already have one on the West Coast and one in the Northeast. I’d look for the governors of Virginia and Maryland and the Mayor of DC to perhaps form a “DMV Region” to manage the pandemic and the recovery.
That covers about 1/3 of the U.S. population and much of the economic and tax base. The rest of the states will have to limp along as best they can with governors largely in charge and trying to get as much help as they can from the sinking Federal ship by going around Trump and dealing with Pence, Fauci, and Birx. Everyone also counts on some help from the Fed, which isn’t immune from Trump’s blustering nonsensical attacks, but is largely beyond his control and therefore free of his blundering ineptness.
There’s likely to be very bad news for the health and safety of those in states whose GOP governors have proved to be as inept and willfully blind as Trump and the rest of his kakistocracy. South Dakota is a prime example of what happens under a clueless GOP Governor.
Notably, most of the initial victims in South Dakota were Latinos working in the supposedly “essential” meat packing industry under conditions that clearly violated best health practices. The Governor claims that the plant would have remained open even under a “Stay at Home” order. Now, however, workers are sick and all those plants are closed anyway. The worst possible result. So, we’ll see how “essential” they really were. Perhaps if everybody had stayed home, the disease wouldn’t have spread and the plants could have reopened on a more limited basis with proper social distancing and protective equipment. And, if workers are really “essential,” why aren’t we looking out for their health, safety, and income protection?
Internationally, world leaders have long ago learned that Trump is incapable of leadership and that under him the U.S. is no longer a trustworthy or reliable partner. Nothing in Trump’s inept handling of the Pandemic in the U.S., his pathetic attempts to shift the blame elsewhere, and his incredibly stupid decision to stop funding the WHO would convince them otherwise.
Sure, like the drunken bully/oaf in the bar, the “Trumped-up U.S.” throws its weight around in unpredictable ways and is too big to be ignored or easily removed from the premises. So, world leaders have figured out how to move on without the U.S. and hope to largely avoid the irrational acts of petty vengeance and retribution for which he is famous.
Not a pretty picture. But, it will be even worse if we don’t remove Trump and the GOP from power in November.
Dana Milbank had a “spot on” assessment of “Captain Clown” 🤡 in today’s Post:
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Like Bligh, he is abusive. Unlike Bligh, he is a poor navigator. The Trump-as-errant-captain theme has been explored, delightfully, by novelist Dave Eggers in his recent allegory, “The Captain and the Glory”:
“He nudged the wheel a bit left, and the entire ship listed leftward, which was both frightening and thrilling. He turned the wheel to the right, and the totality of the ship, and its uncountable passengers and their possessions, all were sent rightward. In the cafeteria, where the passengers were eating lunch, a thousand plates and glasses shattered. An elderly man was thrown from his chair, struck his head on the dessert cart and died later that night. High above, the Captain was elated by the riveting drama caused by the surprises of his steering.”
So it is with our captain, who claims absolute authority but takes no responsibility. He announces he’s cutting off funding to the World Health Organization in the middle of the pandemic. He condemns the WHO for praising China’s transparency, even though he said in January he “greatly appreciates [China’s] efforts and transparency.” His conflicting messages about reopening the economy throw the country into confusion. He assembles so many coronavirus task forces that he will need another to keep track of them all. And after his long delayed and botched virus response, even now the number of tests in U.S. commercial labs is falling.
At Wednesday evening’s session, Trump turned the tiller randomly. After proclaiming the United States has “passed the peak” of the virus, he swerved into complaints about “partisan obstruction” holding up his nominees and threatened the never-before-tested “constitutional authority to adjourn both houses of Congress,” which would provoke another crisis in the middle of the pandemic.
He veered into complaints about the “disgusting”Voice of Americaand the “impeachment hoax.”He lurched into attacks on the World Trade Organization , various Democrats and governors generally, asserting that “we have the right to do whatever we want.”He accused the WHO of a conspiracy to hide the virusand boasted about his name going on government-issued relief checks: “People will be very happy to get a big fat beautiful check, and my name is on it.”
The ship has become accustomed to such unpredictable steering: He touts a virus treatment that so far shows more alarming side effects than efficacy. He announces virus-testing schemes that don’t exist. He talks about pardoning Joe Exotic. He blames everybody except his own administration, which is doing things very, very strongly and powerfully. “The Defense Production Act was used very powerfully, more powerfully than anybody would know, in fact, so powerfully that, for the most part, we didn’t have to officially take it out,” he proclaims.
[[The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.]]
As the captain propounds powerful gibberish, the mutiny builds. Regional blocs make their own pandemic-recovery plans. Allies condemn his assault on the WHO. Republican Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) tells Politico that Trump has been “very uneven.” Even Trump-friendly outlets such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page offer some criticism.
“WSJ is Fake News!” shouts the captain.
“What the hell is happening to @FoxNews?”
What’s happening, captain, is you’ve hit the rocks.
Those who complain about the media’s relentless focus on President Trump during a pandemic have yet to internalize the horrendous reality of his pandemic response: Trump’s failures of leadership and character have increased the death toll and continue to threaten lives.
For me, that is a difficult sentence to write. Having spent time in the executive branch, I realize how complicated presidential decisions can be. America’s chief executives are often forced to make momentous choices, based on scant information, under the pressure of a ticking clock. It is easier to attack such decisions than to make them.
But the fact of Trump’s deadly negligence is now demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. Detailed investigative articles in The Post and New York Times have established that there were six weeks of denial and dithering between a credible warning about the virus and decisive action by the president. It is now evident that Trump:
• ignored early intelligence reports of a possible pandemic;
• delayed the ramp up of practical preparations;
• was often more focused on political considerations, on the news cycle and on stock market performance than on epidemiological reality;
• deceptively played down what he knew to be a rising threat;
• coddled China when it should have been confronted;
• instinctively distrusted experts and seemed unable to absorb simple information and sound advice;
• lashed out at aides who took the crisis seriously;
• shifted reluctantly and belatedly from a strategy of containment to mitigation;
• is strangely obsessed with unproven treatments for the novel coronavirus; and
• has systemically lied about the promptness of his own response.
These accounts reveal a White House staffed by incompetent loyalists, distracted by turnover and riven by feuds. A White House carefully pruned and shaped to resemble the chaos in Trump’s mind.
[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]
I urge you to read the articles themselves. In this case, it is a duty of informed citizenship. Americans need to understand the epic smallness of our president in times that demanded something more.
The tension between National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony S. Fauci and President Trump has been simmering for weeks. (Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
All this is bad enough. But our interest, unfortunately, should not be merely forensic. Trump draws bitterness and resentment out of his experience of the world. He does not draw lessons or wisdom. And he remains just as dangerous to public health on the back side of the curve as he was on the front.
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Read the complete op-ed at the link.
“Deadly negligence,” “ malicious incompetence,” “criminal recklessness” — call it what you will, there is more than ample proof that Trump is unqualified in every imaginable way for the office he holds.
Of course, Trump will remain a danger to our national health, safety, and welfare. He has neither the capacity for nor interest in anything beyond himself.
Since the early days of the Trump administration, an impassioned group of mental health professionals have warned the public about the president’s cramped and disordered mind, a darkened attic of fluttering bats. Their assessments have been controversial. The American Psychiatric Association’s code of ethics expressly forbids its members from diagnosing a public figure from afar.
Enough is enough. As I’ve argued before, an in-person analysis of Donald J. Trump would not reveal any hidden depths — his internal sonar could barely fathom the bottom of a sink — and these are exceptional, urgent times. Back in October, George T. Conway III, the conservative lawyer and husband of Kellyanne, wrote a long, devastating essay for The Atlantic, noting that Trump has all the hallmarks of narcissistic personality disorder. That disorder was dangerous enough during times of prosperity, jeopardizing the moral and institutional foundations of our country.
But now we’re in the midst of a global pandemic. The president’s pathology is endangering not just institutions, but lives.
TWITTER CHATS During these extraordinary times, Opinion columnists and writers will be going live on Twitter every weekday at 1 p.m. Eastern to chat with viewers. This was Jennifer Senior’s conversation.
Let’s start with the basics. First: Narcissistic personalities like Trump harbor skyscraping delusions about their own capabilities. They exaggerate their accomplishments, focus obsessively on projecting power, and wish desperately to win.
What that means, during this pandemic: Trump says we’ve got plenty of tests available, when we don’t. He declares that Google is building a comprehensive drive-thru testing website, when it isn’t. He sends a Navy hospital ship to New York and it proves little more than an excuse for a campaign commercial, arriving and sitting almost empty in the Hudson. A New York hospital executive calls it a joke.
Second: The grandiosity of narcissistic personalities belies an extreme fragility, their egos as delicate as foam. They live in terror of being upstaged. They’re too thin skinned to be told they’re wrong.
What that means, during this pandemic: Narcissistic leaders never have, as Trump likes to say, the best people. They have galleries of sycophants. With the exceptions of Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, Trump has surrounded himself with a Z-team of dangerously inexperienced toadies and flunkies — the bargain-bin rejects from Filene’s Basement — at a time when we require the brightest and most imaginative minds in the country.
Faced with a historic public health crisis, Trump could have assembled a first-rate company of disaster preparedness experts. Instead he gave the job to his son-in-law, a man-child of breathtaking vapidity. Faced with a historic economic crisis, Trump could have assembled a team of Nobel-prize winning economists or previous treasury secretaries. Instead he talks to Larry Kudlow, a former CNBC host.
Meanwhile, Fauci and Birx measure every word they say like old-time apothecaries, hoping not to humiliate the narcissist — never humiliate a narcissist — while discreetly correcting his false hopes and falsehoods. They are desperately attempting to create a safe space for our president, when the president should be creating a safer nation for all of us.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
Yup, you heard it here @ “Courtside” long ago — kakistocracy is dangerous to our democracy and our health. Who could have known?
Kate Morrissey reports for the San Diego Union Tribune:
On the same day the first person in immigration custody in San Diego was confirmed to have the new coronavirus, the American Civil Liberties Union sued for the release of certain high-risk detainees at the region’s two detention centers.
In the lawsuit, ACLU attorneys argue that specific detainees at Otay Mesa Detention Center and Imperial Regional Detention Facility who have pre-existing conditions that would make severe symptoms of COVID-19 more likely should be released in order to protect them from likely exposure to the virus. Some similar cases, filed by other groups around the country, have been successful in getting immigrant detainees released.
This coverage of the coronavirus pandemic is part of your subscription to The San Diego Union-Tribune. We also provide free coverage as a service to our community.
“During this pandemic, we’ve seen institutions at all levels take these really drastic, life-altering measures to preserve public safety and community well being,” said Monika Langarica, an attorney with the ACLU of San Diego & Imperial Counties. “(U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement), which oversees massive detention operations across the country, rather than follow the course of these other institutions, has done almost the opposite.”
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Read the rest of Kate’s article at the above link.
Similar suits have produced mixed results throughout the country. While some U.S. District Judges have ordered or threatened to order the release of certain detainees, others have “blown off” legitimate health concerns and the failure of DHS and DOJ authorities to follow health guidelines during the pandemic.
Of course, the idea that social distancing, universal testing, basic hygiene, or individual protective equipment is being employed in any part of the “DHS Gulag” and the Immigration “Courts” is preposterous on its face. Yet, remarkably, some U.S. District Judges prefer the “show me the dead bodies approach” as an alternative to the sensible preventive measures recommended by health professionals. After all, “they are only aliens” in the eyes of the regime and some Federal Judges.
Others, more astutely, have recognized that those stuck in the Gulag and the never-ending dysfunction of the Immigration “Courts” are actually their fellow human beings, most without serious criminal convictions. They are also “persons” under the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, entitled to have their health, safety, and lives protected from dangerous and unreasonable actions by the Federal Government.
PRESIDENT TRUMP likens the struggle against the pandemic to a war that will yield a colossal toll in human lives, but refuses to urge states uniformly to issue stay-at-home orders. The president’s equivocations have produced an uncoordinated jumble of policy subverted by foot-dragging governors who treat the coronavirus less as a national emergency and more as a political annoyance. They are guilty of an abdication of leadership whose consequences will be measured in body bags.
Messaging is critical in this crisis. By telling people in the strongest terms to stay at home, even with certain exceptions, most governors have conveyed the gravity of the spreading threat; that is likely to save many lives. By failing to do that, and treating a plague as one interest to be balanced among many, other governors treat the peril with a nod and a wink. Their message, sotto voce, is: Let’s not all get our knickers in a twist.
[[Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]]
The nod-and-a-wink governors — in the Dakotas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas and elsewhere — pose as powerless to order a lockdown, or note they have already closed schools, restaurants, gyms and other establishments, but won’t order blanket edicts to individuals. They point at other states’ exceptions that allow people to carry on with essential work, or get groceries and pharmaceuticals. In Missouri, Gov. Mike Parson says staying at home is a matter of “individual responsibilities”; in Arkansas, Gov. Asa Hutchinson scoffs there is nothing “magical” about stay-at-home directives; in Iowa, Gov. Kim Reynolds protests that “I can’t lock everybody in their home.”
Those governors, all Republicans, have been enabled by Mr. Trump, who points to states that don’t yet “have the problem,” and remarks that it’s “awfully tough to say, ‘Close it down.’ ” He favors flexibility and is seconded by Vice President Pence, who says the federal government “will defer to state and local health authorities on any measures that they deem appropriate.”
As the White House leads from behind, the effect is to endorse and induce complacency. Faced with a stealthy pathogen that can spread from asymptomatic individuals, or incubate for weeks before a victim falls ill with fever, states are free to delude themselves into thinking the virus has passed them by — until, having bidden its time, it erupts inside their cities and towns. Governors of those states can entertain the illusion of alternative facts, imagining their borders are impermeable. They can, like Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, resist a stay-at-home order for weeks until discovering just this week — surprise! — that the virus is “transmitting before people see signs.”
[[The Opinions section is looking for stories of how the coronavirus has affected people of all walks of life. Write to us.]]
Their magical thinking endangers the nation. It gives people license to minimize the threat — a threat the White House says could kill up to 240,000 people even with effective social distancing. It allows state-to-state gaps in the firewall that will likely encourage a raging disease to erupt in a series of rolling blazes across the country. As many states get tough, even deploying the police to encourage people to stay indoors, their odds of impeding the pandemic’s path of destruction are undercut by their neighbors’ selfishness.
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Steps for survival:
Tune out Trump & his political hack/toadies (the GOP Govs listed in this editorial are prime examples);
Listen to and follow advice from our health professionals;
Stay home unless you are actually performing “essential functions;”
Vote Trump and the GOP out of office, on every level, in November (but you have to survive the Trump/GOP kakistocracy to get to November).
NOTE:Not all GOP Governors are in the “Trump Kakistocracy.” Larry Hogan (MD), Mike DeWine (OH), and Charlie Baker (MA) and others are among those who have heeded public health advice.
Vote Like You Life Depends On It In November! Because Four More Years Of Trump & His GOP Toadies Could Kill Us All!☠️⚰️☠️⚰️☠️⚰️☠️⚰️
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Dr. Anthony Fauci has urged a non-essential employee of the White House Coronavirus Task Force to go home immediately, Fauci confirmed on Friday.
Speaking to reporters, the esteemed virologist said that he made the decision to expel the worker for “the health and safety of others.”
“He said that he felt fine coming to work every day,” Fauci said. “I told him, ‘You may feel fine, but by coming into work you are endangering the lives of countless others.’ ”
Fauci said that his decision to send the non-essential worker home was based on the most recent scientific findings.
“What we’re learning is that breathing and talking can put lives in jeopardy, and this one worker did more breathing and talking than anyone else on the team,” he said.
The employee is expected to spend fourteen hours a day in isolation watching television, a two-hour increase from his normal routine.
One government lawyer who appeared in a crowded Newark, New Jersey, immigration court last month is in a medically induced coma. A New York immigration lawyer and her client are both sick. Immigration judges are being denied sick leave when they use anxiety or safety as reasons. Migrant children are asking their lawyers if they will fall ill if they go to court, and whether they’ll be deported if they don’t show up.
Sickness, panic, and confusion in the midst of a pandemic: These are the acute side effects of immigration courts continuing to operate as the novel coronavirus races across the country. Despite three weeks of intense pleading to close all 69 courts—across a united front of immigration lawyers, the union representing lawyers for ICE, and the immigration judges’ union—more than two-thirds of them remain open.
The courts that have been closed by the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the federal agency that runs them, have often only been shuttered in reaction to a confirmed case of COVID-19 or suspected exposure. The closures are often last-minute, and not clearly communicated, except on Twitter. This week, several immigration legal associations filed two separate federal lawsuits to close the courts because they fear that the government has put their lives in danger.
“I think it’s about time the American people woke up to the fact that EOIR’s willingness to perpetuate and extend this pandemic will inevitably bring the virus to their hometown,” Rebecca Press, the legal director at UnLocal in New York, said Thursday via email. She contracted coronavirus two weeks ago and at least one of her clients is sick. “The longer courts remain open even for filing, and the longer the courts require attorneys and immigrants to engage in the work of preparing evidence, the more likely it becomes that the virus will be brought right back to another community.”
Government lawyers are affected, too. Fanny Behar-Ostrow, the president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 511, the union representing ICE lawyers, is getting calls at all hours of the day from members who worry they have been exposed to the virus. “They are panicked, frightened, desperate, upset,” she said.
In addition to the 36,000 adults in ICE detention facilities, there are some 3,500 migrant children in government custody who are affected by the disarray in the courts. In most courts, children must still attend in-person hearings, putting them at exposure risk. In New York City, the current epicenter of the pandemic, lawyers from Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) have not been told whether EOIR will reschedule cases for next week. They are also unclear about whether the minors even need to come to court at a time when state and city officials have issued stay-at-home orders.
“We are receiving phone calls from children who had their safety net shaken,” said Maria Odom, vice president for legal services for KIND, which is a nonprofit organization contracted to represent unaccompanied minors. “For us serving vulnerable children, there are so many moving pieces and at a time when we should be able to look to the government, they are just contributing to the chaos.”
“I hope that it won’t take a death, but I worry that it will,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, an immigration lawyer and policy counsel for the American Immigration Council. His organization is one of the groups behind a lawsuit filed Monday by the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild.
. . . .
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Read the rest of Liz’s article at the link.
Looks like the dead bodies will have to pile up before the Article IIIs and EOIR will take action. As the rest of us know, but to which U.S District Judges & EOIR appear willfully blind, by the time individuals show symptoms and begin dying, it’s too late to stop the spread. The larger community has already been infected.
I wonder what it is that gives both EOIR officials and Article III Judges such great confidence that they and their families will escape the consequences of their irresponsible behavior? Maybe, it’s that both EOIR Senior Execs and Article III Judges manage to studiously avoid “direct exposure” to Immigration Courts. “Below their pay grade,” so to speak.
But, according to folks like Dr. Fauci, who possibly knows even more about infectious diseases than EOIRDirectorMcHenry and the Federal Judges who continue to defer to the irresponsible EOIR “guidance,” nobody will be immune.
So far, the U.S. has done the worst job of any developed country in the world of “flattening the curve.” Inevitably, we eventually will become the “world leader” in coronavirus deaths. After observing the inept response of EOIR and the failure of the U.S. District Courts to promptly intervene on the side of medical knowledge, common sense, and preserving human lives, I can now see why we are failing as a nation to take the extreme measures necessary for self-preservation.
I would think that as lawyers, judges, and other members of the legal community start dying as a result of EOIR’s policies, that the officials responsible eventually will face legal actions brought by surviving family members and colleagues. Life tenure and the judicial doctrine of “absolute immunity” will protect the feckless Federal Judges from legal accountability. But, it won’t protect them and their reputations from moral accountability and the “judgements of history” which are likely to be harsh and as unforgiving as the Trump Immigration Kakistocracy’s treatment of the most vulnerable among us and their brave lawyers.
Due Process Forever! Trump’s Immigration Kakistocracy & Feckless Federal Courts, Never!
White House adviser Jared Kushner broke the irony meter as he — not someone qualified, such as Anthony S. Fauci — took over the daily coronavirus briefing on Thursday to inform us: “What a lot of the voters are seeing now is that when you elect somebody … think about who will be a competent manager during the time of crisis.”
Yes, President Trump’s voters, along with those who elected the similarly ignorant and slothful Republican governors in Florida and Georgia who failed to act promptly to stem the coronavirus, should remember that next time. Better to elect someone like California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) or Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) rather than someone continually pandering to Trump, resisting readily available scientific advice and attacking the media.
One has the sinking feeling that things are going from bad to worse. Trump and the feds declined to act swiftly, in particular failing to get widespread testing up and running. Now they are failing to remedy the dire medical crisis that their negligence brought on. Kushner said the federal stockpile of medical equipment is for the feds to use, not the states. His father-in-law seems allergic to implementing fully the Defense Production Act, so the bidding war among the states for critical equipment continues.
Republican governors in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama declined to issue prompt stay-at-home orders. Now? Trump refuses to issue one nationally despite Fauci’s advice. “I don’t understand why that’s not happening,” he said in a CNN interview. “As you said, the tension between federally mandated vs. states’ rights to do what they want is something I don’t want to get into. But if you look at what is going on in this country, I do not understand why we are not doing that. We really should be.” The answer: We have a total lack of federal leadership and competence.
Congress set up a $350 billion fund for small-business loans. Beginning Friday, many banks promptly announced that they could accept applications in the absence of clear federal guidance. The chaos, confusion and delays surrounding the Small Business Administration loans might make the unemployment insurance process seem like a fine-tuned machine. (Thousands, if not millions, of unemployment claims remain unprocessed due to overwhelming demand.)
The Defense Department is no better. Trump jettisoned a career professional serving as defense secretary (James Mattis) for a meek, subservient aerospace executive. The result is predictable. Politico reports: “Defense Secretary Mark Esper is under fire for the Pentagon’s response to the coronavirus pandemic as lawmakers, national security experts and people throughout the Defense Department’s ranks fault him for a slow and uneven approach to the outbreak.” His most notable action: Supporting the firing of the Navy commander whose letter pleading to allow his sailors to disembark from a floating petri dish, the USS Theodore Roosevelt, was leaked. The military under Trump can forgive war crimes, just not pleas to save men and women in uniform from incompetent superiors.
This is as exasperating as it is frightening. Governors, if you are lucky enough to live in a state with a competent one, can do only so much when, for example, there are no ventilators to be had. The Democratic-led House can only churn out its version of remedial legislation, but it cannot withstand Senate and White House efforts to scuttle anti-fraud, anti-cronyism measures. (“Most big companies that take advantage of the $500 billion corporate bailout in last week’s coronavirus relief bill are unlikely to face restrictions against firing workers or giving bonuses to executives, according to officials familiar with the program.”) And while the House can bird-dog the executive branch as it distributes money, the House cannot do the executive branch’s job for it.
The chaos, confusion and incompetence at the federal level magnify our daily anxiety and uncertainty. We have lost control of our lives, and those supposed to lead us through this ordeal are deepening our national trauma. Years of contempt for expertise, for competent government and for truth itself on the right now haunt us all. God help us.
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Right on, Jennifer!
As if on cue, about the time I was reading Jennifer’s op-ed, the Blathering Boor was on TV demonstrating his “malicious incompetence” by telling American that we should wear face masks, but then immediately contradicting the message by emphasizing that it was voluntary, not required, and he wouldn’t be doing it. Because he has to meet with dictators, kings, queens, emperors, tyrants, princes, fairy godmothers, etc. Even life or death matters become mere sick jokes under the “Clown Kakistocracy,” where ignorance and lies reign.
Here’smy favorite “Theater of the Absurd” quote from Jennifer’s article: “The military under Trump can forgive war crimes, just not pleas to save men and women in uniform from incompetent superiors.”
So much for the mythical “Gang of Generals” who were supposed to save us from Trump’s “malicious incompetence.” Nope. They all “went long to get along” for awhile and then took cover in vain attempts to save what was left of their shredded reputations. Write a “tell nothing” book, give a few disingenuous interviews, hide on the board of directors of a company profiting from child abuse, whatever! Trump corrupts and destroys everything he touches, including our country!
Unlike those guys, I think there is actually gainful employment out there in the real world for someone like Captain Brett Crozier who puts human lives before a maliciously incompetent “chain of command” looking to cover up its malfeasance.
It’s not like our military hasn’t always had a certain penchant for punishing those who “speak truth to incompetent power!” Just ask the ghost of “Milwaukee Hero” Gen. Billy Mitchell who got court-martialed for being smarter, more creative, and more courageous than his superiors. Who would ever have ever believed that air power, not horse drawn caissons, would win the next World War? Duh! Certainly none of his immediate superiors in the Army after WW I!
Due Process Forever! Vote The Kakistocracy Out In November!
Vote Like Your Life Depends On It! Because It Does!
“There can be a good rebound on the other side of this,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
The coronavirus pandemic is putting unprecedented strain on the U.S. economy, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Thursday in an exclusive interview with Savannah Guthrie on the “TODAY” show, noting, “There can be a good rebound on the other side of this.”
“We may well be in a recession,” Powell said, in a rare live interview. “But I would point to the difference between this and a normal recession. There is not anything fundamentally wrong with our economy. Quite the contrary. We are starting from a very strong position.”
“This is a unique situation,” Powell said, when asked if the economy could withstand a monthlong shutdown. “I think people need to understand this is not a typical downturn. People are being asked to close their business, to stay home from work, and to not engage in certain economic activity, and so they are pulling back. At a certain point, we will get the virus under control and confidence will return.”
The Fed said such extreme action was warranted because “the coronavirus outbreak has harmed communities and disrupted economic activity in many countries, including the United States.”
By making borrowing as cheap as possible, the central bank hopes to give companies and individuals ready access to nearly interest-free cash to invest and spend.
Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak
“We’re trying to make a bridge from a very strong economy to another place of economic strength,” Powell said Thursday, by stepping in and replacing lending to small- and medium-sized businesses and other “places where credit is not being offered.”
The Senate approved the 880-page bill in a unanimous 96-0 vote. The measure would provide billions of dollars in credit for struggling industries, a significant boost to unemployment insurance and direct cash payments to Americans.
With regard to President Donald Trump’s hope to reopen the economy by Easter, Powell said, “We are not experts in pandemics over here. We don’t get to make that decision. We would tend to listen to the experts. Dr. [Anthony] Fauci said something like, ‘The virus is going to set the timetable,’ and that sounds right to me.”
“The sooner we get the virus under control, people will very willingly open back up their businesses and get back to work,” Powell said.
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If we can just “tune out” Trump and his negative leadership, follow the lead of our health professionals, Governors, and Mayors, and all pull together, putting human lives first, we can get through to better days. Until then, unfortunately, things are likely to get worse as America runs short of basic medical supplies, personnel, and hospital space.
Economies can and will be rebuilt. The dead can’t be brought back to life. Every life we re able to save now is valuable and will pay a dividend, whether economic, emotional, or spiritual, on the other side of the crisis. Already, we’re seeing both young and old come together to help, as medical students and retired health professionals volunteer to step into the breach.
I found Jerome Powell’s interview with Savannah Guthrie of NBC’s Today Show one of the best and most reassuring, from an economic standpoint, interview with a Federal official recently. You can watch it in its entirety at the above link.
President Donald Trump’s insistence on downplaying the coronavirus risks reached dangerous levels Monday as he scoffed at medical advice and threatened to open up the economy despite skyrocketing case numbers.
At the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing, the president focused on wanting to reopen businesses very soon despite global guidance to essentially shut down societies and encourage people to stay home.
“It’s bad, and obviously the numbers are going to increase with time, and they’re going to start to decrease, and we’re going to be opening our country up for business because our country was meant to be open,” Trump said, despite the rising COVID-19 death toll.
The U.S. saw confirmed cases rise to more than 41,000 on Monday, with nearly 600 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins medical school’s coronavirus resource center. World Health Organization Director Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Monday that the pandemic is actually accelerating ― stressing that it took 67 days from the first reported case to reach the first 100,000 cases, 11 days for the second 100,000 cases and just four days for the third 100,000 cases.
. . . .
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Yeah, that corrupt GOP vote to acquit could turn out to seal the fate of millions of Americans. With no plan, no brains, and no coherent strategy, you just have to hope you and those you love won’t be among Trump’s victims.
The markets should love chaos and death. But the problem is in Italy other places, they can’t even have funerals. So even “death stocks” might not be a good investment.
Wow! Talk about “malicious incompetence.”Trump is certainly leading the charge!
Until Monday morning, President Trump’s most horrifying utterance with regard to the coronavirus was his sarcastic reaction to news that Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), whose wife has multiple sclerosis and therefore is in the high-risk category for infection, was self-isolating due to potential exposure to the coronavirus. “Gee, that’s too bad,” Trump snarked about his political rival. As bad as that was — mocking the possible life-threatening illness of others — he managed to top that with a truly horrifying tweet:
The cure — social distancing — has been imposed to save thousands of lives. But in Trump’s mind, the resulting economic slowdown and bear market from those measures are worse than a potentially catastrophic death toll. That’s the only reasonable interpretation of his outburst, which coincides with reporting from the New York Times that, “at the White House, in recent days, there has been a growing sentiment that medical experts were allowed to set policy that has hurt the economy, and there has been a push to find ways to let people start returning to work.”
For Trump and many in his party, what matters most is money. (“Some Republican lawmakers have also pleaded with the White House to find ways to restart the economy, as financial markets continue to slide and job losses for April could be in the millions.”) To them, letting medical experts set policy to combat a pandemic is a serious error. “Worse” than the deaths of thousands of Americans, in the minds of the narcissistic president, is the chance that his reelection could be impaired by bad economic numbers. Does it dawn on him that thousands of dead Americans might reflect poorly on him as well?
[More coverage of the coronavirus pandemic]
Trump’s latest spasm of indifference to other humans comes at a time when one of those experts, Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams, warns that the situation is about to get much worse. In a CBS interview, Adams said: “I didn’t expect to be starting off my week with such a dire message for America, but the numbers are going to get worse this week.” He reiterated, “Things are going to get worse before they get better. And we really need everyone to understand this is serious, to lean into what they can do to flatten the curve.”
Here we see the gap between Trump’s pecuniary and political interests (which he thinks depend entirely on the stock market) and the experts trying to get us to do things that would prevent greater loss of life. Trump’s behavior — denying the crisis, painting it as a threat from foreigners (when community spread is already well underway), constantly lying about progress being made, attacking political rivals and congratulating himself on his response (and forcing recitals of praise from advisers) — tells us that even a pandemic, in his mind, is all about him.
Trump may think he can sugarcoat coronavirus, but media critic Erik Wemple says it is time for the government to speak with one clear voice about public health. (Erik Wemple/The Washington Post)
With thousands of families facing a health crisis and millions suffering economic tragedy, Trump whines that he has not received sufficient credit for his actions (which mayors, governors and scientists say were grossly negligent and insufficient). All the while, he remains poised to thrust his hand into the cookie jar of government bailout money.
The experts must be heeded. The governors and mayors must be supported. Trump must be ignored or must delegate all significant decision-making to someone competent and conscientious of the human suffering unfolding before us. Otherwise, we are in grave trouble.
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With Trump, the goalposts are continually moving; what we might once have thought of as the “rock bottom” in the “race to the bottom” suddenly becomes just another milepost.
We are already in “grave trouble,” Jennifer! With a dim-witted narcissist sociopath in charge, a party of elitist grifters running the Senate, an irresponsible minority of the electorate mindlessly committed to Trump’s insanity, and a system that facilitates minority rule, the majority of us who are interested in saving lives (including those of the foregoing group) and preserving our democratic republic are, indeed, in dire straits.
Let’s flip Steven’s warped thinking around: Instead of giving a $500 billion bailout to America’s fat cat corporations, why not give a mere $1 billiondirectly to each of America’s335 million people. They could decide how best to spend it to “pump up” the economy: their own health care, investing in corporations, buying bonds, endowing universities, building houses, starting small businesses, going to the racetrack, taking cruises, philanthropy, or just spending it all wildly on rampant consumerism. Much cheaper than the bailout. Hell, Trump supporters could even choose to spend a night at every Trump property in the world!
And, better yet, neither Moore, “Munchkin,” Kudlow, Kushner, nor any of the other grifter/kakistocrats surrounding Trump could tell “average Americans” how to spend their money. After all, forgotten to Trump and his GOP, it actually is the people’s money with which they are lining their pockets and the those of their fat cat corporate buddies while tuning out our health care concerns. Heck, what’s a human life compared with a dollar?
“I’m not denying what a nasty disease COVID-19 can be, and how it’s obviously devastating to somewhere between 1 and 3.4 percent of the population,” Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday. “But that means 97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this.”
“But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways. It’s a risk we accept so we can move about,” Johnson continued, in apparent reference to recent guidance issued at the federal and state levels for people to avoid large groups and stay away from bars, restaurants and other businesses to help blunt the spread of coronavirus. “We don’t shut down our economies because tens of thousands of people die from the common flu.”
The recommendations — which come as the coronavirus continues to take hold in the US with at least 8,525 cases and 145 deaths as of Wednesday night — has caused some states and cities to implement drastic regulations on businesses. But the death toll from the virus, the nation’s top infectious disease expert has warned, depends on how seriously Americans commit to the actions necessary to curb the outbreak.
Johnson said that he was not discrediting those restrictions, but said they were disproportionate to the virus’ actual threat.
“I really don’t want to say that” efforts to contain the virus have gone too far, Johnson said. “It may be exactly what we need to do. But again, what I do want to do is put this all in perspective as we move forward here.”
. . . .
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Read the rest of Caroline’s article at the above link.
Hey Ron, 1% of the U.S. population would only be 3.3 million. 3.4% would be around 11.2 million. But, who cares about little stats like that?
And, Ronnie, my man, here’s what experts say could happen in the U.S. if others do as you suggest and put short-term economic considerations over public health:
Between 160 million and 214 million people in the United States could be infected over the course of the epidemic, according to a projection that encompasses the range of the four scenarios. That could last months or even over a year, with infections concentrated in shorter periods, staggered across time in different communities, experts said. As many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die.
And, the calculations based on the C.D.C.’s scenarios suggested, 2.4 million to 21 million people in the United States could require hospitalization, potentially crushing the nation’s medical system, which has only about 925,000 staffed hospital beds. Fewer than a tenth of those are for people who are critically ill.
The assumptions fueling those scenarios are mitigated by the fact that cities, states, businesses and individuals are beginning to take steps to slow transmission, even if some are acting less aggressively than others. The C.D.C.-led effort is developing more sophisticated models showing how interventions might decrease the worst-case numbers, though their projections have not been made public.
200,000 to 2.1 million dead! While those might be “little numbers“ to you, Ronnie, I’m guessing they will seem rather serious to the families of those who needlessly die! Could cause quite a stench if all of those bodies were piled up at your door! Perhaps taking an “economic hit” that is more or less inevitable in the time of worldwide pandemic anyway is better than running the risk of killing hundreds of thousands to millions, something that appears to have gone over Ronnie’s head.
Scary as the image might be, Johnson actually would be more at home with the young idiots partying down on Clearwater Beach. The thought of him as a legislator is positively terrifying.
Unfortunately, Wisconsin voters won’t be able to oust this fool they have inflicted on America until 2022. But, the rest of us could be saving our country and our lives if we get rid of Mitch and the GOP wrecking crew in November! That would consign Ron and others like him to the “back benches” where they could do less damage to our nation until the time comes when they can be voted out of office.
“Four Clowns” for you, Ronnie!🤡🤡🤡🤡
Vote ‘Em Out!
PWS
03-19-20
PW
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UPDATE FROM THE GUARDIAN: FAUCI RIPS JOHNSON FOR DANGEROUS STUPIDITY:
Dr Anthony Fauci criticized senator Ron Johnson for downplaying the threat of coronavirus and questioning the drastic government response to it.
“I’m not denying what a nasty disease COVID-19 can be, and how it’s obviously devastating to somewhere between 1 and 3.4 percent of the population,” Johnson saidearlier this week.
“But that means 97 to 99 percent will get through this and develop immunities and will be able to move beyond this. But we don’t shut down our economy because tens of thousands of people die on the highways.
Fauci said it was a “false equivalency to compare traffic accidents” to coronavirus and emphasized a drastic response was necessary when a new and dangerously contagious virus was uncovered.
