First he established a “strike force” to advise on reopening Texas, headed by three medical professionals (John Zerwas, MD, Executive Vice-Chancellor for Health Affairs at the University of Texas System, Mark McClellan, MD, PhD, former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, and Parker Hudson, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Internal Medicine and Infectious Diseases at the Dell Medical School). I think the makeup of the strike force itself is way too heavy on CEOs and light on small business owners, with a few exceptions like Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and Balous Miller (owner of Bill Miller Bar-B-Q).
Further loosening will depend on the data. These are hardly reckless moves.
The entire point of the lockdown was to bend the curve to the point that cases didn’t overwhelm the hospital beds needed to effectively treat them, especially the ICU beds needed to treat the worst cases. The latest data indicates that it probably did just that. Peak Texas coronavirus resource usage was actually on April 15th.
In Harris County, Houston has one the largest caseloads of Wuhan Coronavirus in the country, but the current caseload is well below bed and ICU bed capacity. In Travis County, they have three times as many beds as confirmed cases.
With mask production up and hydroxychloroquine continuing to show results in trials (hat tip: Robert Stacy McCain), we now have a lot more weapons to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus, even if cases increase. The economy can’t wait the 6-12 months for an effective vaccine to be developed. We have the capacity to address additional infections, and (if need be) reverse course if there’s a huge infection snapback.
The Wuhan Cornavirus shutdown may kill off a lot of legacy media. No one is going to be sad to see Buzzfeed die, but the Chicago Tribune is another thing. Still, for the last twenty years or so, newspapers have had a chance to choose to be profitable or liberal, and an overwhelming majority choose liberal.
Airlines are farked. United “will fly fewer people during all of next month than on a single day in May 2019.”
Know who else is screwed? China. Not just from the lies and the virus and the killing and the GLAVIN, but also the $1 trillion bursting debt bubble of their smoke and mirrors economy.
668 sailors infected with the Wuhan coronavirus on France’s Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier. The de Gaulle has had numerous maintenance issues over the years, but last year it helped fly strike packets against the last remnants of the Islamic State at Baghuz Fawqani.
Speaking of China and aircraft carriers, a Chinese naval group featuring the Shandong, their newest carrier, is carrying out maneuvers near Taiwan.
Among the complaints was that Whitmer had prohibited sale of seeds and other garden supplies, at a time when vegetable gardens need to be planted. Executive Order 2020-42 is titled, “Temporary requirement to suspend activities that are not necessary to sustain or protect life,” and is quite specific about which activities are and are “not necessary.” Stores with “more than 50,000 square feet” (e.g., Walmart, Lowes, Home Depot) are ordered to close areas of the store “by cordoning them off, placing signs in aisles, posting prominent signs, removing goods from shelves, or other appropriate means” that sell carpet or flooring, furniture, and “garden centers and plant nurseries.” So if Grandma went to Walmart for groceries and hoped to pick up some tomato plants or cucumber seeds while she was there — sorry, Grandma! You could get a thousand-dollar fine and 90 days in jail for disobeying Whitmer’s orders.
Posting photos from a Walmart in Grand Rapids showing the now-banned seeds cordoned off with yellow tape, one Twitter user declared: “@GovWhitmer has banned us from growing our own food. This is [bleeping] insane.” Another user posted a photo indicating that it’s now apparently forbidden to sell American flags in Michigan. Barbecue grills, lawn chairs — anything in the garden section is now streng verboten in Michigan. References to Whitmer as a “dictator” proliferated on social media over the weekend, as Michigan residents came to grips with the consequences of the governor’s draconian order.
“The Only 2016 Campaign That Deliberately Colluded With Russians Was Hillary Clinton’s”:
or more than two years, the campaign, presidential transition, and official government administration of Donald Trump operated under a cloud of suspicion that they had engaged in a treasonous conspiracy to steal the 2016 election from former secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Trump and his top associates were accused of collusion and of conspiring with the Russians to subvert American democracy.
The former director of the Central Intelligence Agency publicly declared Trump to be guilty of treason, an offense punishable by death. The former head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the country’s premier law enforcement agency, intimated that the president had illegally obstructed justice.
In the end, none of it was true. After a nearly two-year-long investigation that issued 2,800 subpoenas, interviewed 500 witnesses, and used nearly 300 wiretaps and pen registers, Special Counsel Robert Mueller concluded that there was no evidence of collusion by Trump or his associates.
But that doesn’t mean 2016 was free of Russian collusion. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that a 2016 presidential campaign willfully and deliberately colluded with Russians in a bid to interfere with American elections. It wasn’t Trump’s campaign that colluded with shady Russia oligarchs and sketchy Russian sources to subvert American democracy: it was Hillary Clinton’s.
In fact, the entire Russian collusion conspiracy that held the nation hostage for more than two years was the brainchild of a foreign national who was working on behalf of a sanctioned Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin. At the same time he was telling the media that Trump was the undisclosed agent of Russia, that foreign national was lobbying the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to ease up on his Russian benefactor.
As it turns out, the DOJ official being lobbied was the spouse of one of that foreign national’s co-workers at the firm that hired the two of them to foment Russian hysteria on behalf of the Clinton campaign. And in a twist almost too absurd for even the most bizarre Franz Kafka novel, that firm was itself working on behalf of a Russian billionaire’s corporation that had been charged by U.S. federal prosecutors with illegally evading U.S. sanctions.
Feverish Wuhan coronavirus-infected Fredo Cuomo breaks quarantine and complains that he’s not allowed to punch strangers out because he’s a celebrity.
Black Georgia State Democratic Rep. Vernon Jones says he’s going to vote for President Trump. “President Trump’s handling of the economy, his support for historically black colleges and his criminal justice initiatives drew me to endorse his campaign…When you look at the unemployment rates among black Americans before the pandemic, they were at historic lows. That’s just a fact.”
Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.
Speaking of which…
Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?
Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?
CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)
Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed immunity to it.
The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.
The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.
The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.
At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.
The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.
Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.
I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.
To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.
Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.
Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.
A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.
“Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”
Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.
Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.
British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.
In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.
All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.
Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.
The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.
Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.
“‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”
Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:
I went to downtown Austin to see if the homeless were practicing social distancing. They weren’t. Also getting more territorial and violent. No law enforcement in sight. pic.twitter.com/zTEJQ3YBiu
Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.
FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.
Since the Wuhan Coronavirus has delivered a quick kick to the nads of the economy, I’m sure being out of work really sucks right now. Here’s a quick roundup on economic resources that might help, both in Texas and elsewhere.
Candor has a long list of companies that covers which are still hiring (and there are many), which have hiring freezes in place, which are having layoffs, etc., along with more info, links to company hiring portals, etc.
Some newly unemployed Texans have complained that they can’t get through to Texas Workforce Commission by using either the website or by either telephone numbers (800-939-6631 for claims or 800-558-8321 for Tele-Serve). Two pieces of advice: For the website, try late at night or early morning when it’s not so slammed. For the telephone, the listed hours are 8 AM to 6 PM on weekdays, and I hear the best times to call are between 5-6 PM (when the phones are still staffed in El Paso).
If you’re stuck home under quarantine, now is a good time to increase your skill stack by taking courses to give your resume buzzword compliance. If you’re signed up through TWC, they have free online courses in a variety of areas.
Cisco also has an online learning portal and access to some sandbox tools, not only for their own stuff but also several basic technology tools.
It seems forever since Texas went into full lockdown mode over the Wuhan coronavirus, but it’s only been a week. Since I was already working from home full-time, I’m doing fine, but I can understand how more social people might be climbing the walls by now. Here’s a quick roundup of notable Texas coronavirus news.
(The “per county” cases can be found on the “Admin2” tab on the lower left.) For those unfamiliar with Texas geography, Denton and Collin are both Metroplex suburban counties, while Fort Bend is directly southwest of Harris.
Gov. Greg Abbott on Sunday tightened travel to Texas by ordering some motorists from Louisiana to self-quarantine for two weeks.
The new restrictions, effective noon Monday, came as President Donald Trump extended social distancing guidelines through April 30, preventing all nonessential travel in the country.
Louisiana’s status as a hot spot for the novel coronavirus grew Sunday to more than 3,500 positive cases statewide. Under the new rules, drivers with commercial, medical, emergency response, military or critical infrastructure purposes for entering Texas would be exempted.
A spokesman for the Department of Public Safety said Sunday the agency was not prepared to comment on the details of the new measures.
If the local HEB is any measure, the worst of the panic buying appears to be over, though there are still hole in the shelves. Meat was abundant, I was able to find olive oil (missing last week), and everything except toilet paper seemed obtainable.
All in all, we seem to be doing a lot better than New York and California. Which is usually the case in non-emergency times as well…
Mayor Steve Adler, Travis County Judge Sarah Eckhardt and Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell all signed shelter-in-place orders Tuesday. The orders take effect at midnight and runs through April 13.
The orders dictate that all residents must remain in their home unless performing essential activities, such as buying groceries, pet supplies and other items needed to work from home. People can also leave their homes to exercise and walk their pets as long as they comply with social distancing rules, the order states. Travel is also permitted when needed to take care of another person or pet at another home.
Since I live in Williamson, I’m definitely included in the lockdown area. Harris County (Houston), Dallas County, and Bexar County (San Antonio) are all under similar lockdowns.
HEB, our local supermarket chain, has taken to queuing people six feet apart outside before you can even get into the store. Yesterday stock was somewhat picked, and there were limiting quantities on just about all items, but you could find all the staples if you were willing to make substitutions. (Didn’t try to get toilet paper, but I did find a bottle of rubbing alcohol.)
I’m better equipped for this than most people. My job allows me to work from home, I have dogs, books, and video games to keep me occupied, and this will give me a jump on doing my taxes…
I hope you’re enjoying your splendid isolation on the first day of spring. As in previous weeks, the Wuhan coronavirus dominates the news with the reminder that the Gods of the Copybook Headings are never far away…
President Donald Trump invokes the Defense Production Act of 1950 to fight the Wuhan Coronavirus. “The legislation allows the president to require production and orders from certain industries to prioritize the response to a national emergency.”
Not just the flu. “On a scale of 1 to 10, he said, the pain was 15… Imagine your lungs turning solid. It’s like suffocating.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Don’t let the MSM revisionism fool you; President Trump was relentlessly slammed by Our Media Betters for that decision:
Holy crap—flashback to @wapo quoting the Chinese FM slamming the Trump administration's 1/31 travel ban AND noting that WHO (still operating under Chinese disinformation about #COVID19) was against Trump's move to stop entry into the US from China. pic.twitter.com/kkHfgwrv4Y
From the Verge 1/31 – apoplectic that Trump was going against WHO recommendations (because he's such an anti-science xenophobe…) pic.twitter.com/G83YAaVhsT
All of this PALES in comparison to Laurie Garrett in @ForeignPolicy lavishing praise on the Chinese for their response while viciously admonishing the Trump administration for going against WHO recs—calling the travel ban an “improvisation”
The Centers for Disease Control has a $6.6 billion budget and one job which it messes up every time.
The last time the CDC had a serious workout was six years ago during the Ebola crisis. Back then CDC guidelines allowed medical personnel infected with Ebola to avoid a quarantine and interact with Americans until they showed undeniable symptoms of the disease. There were no protocols in place for treating the potentially infected resulting in the further spread of the disease inside the United States.
At the height of the crisis, confidence in the CDC fell to 37%. Meanwhile, CDC personnel had managed to mishandle Ebola virus samples, accidentally sending samples of the live virus to CDC labs. And the heads of the health bureaucracy blamed the lack of funding for their failure to have an Ebola vaccine.
Snip.
During the Ebola crisis, the CDC had been spending a mere $2.6 million on gun violence studies. But the CDC has a history of wasting money on everything from a $106 million visitor’s center with Japanese gardens, a $200K gym, a transgender beauty pageant, not to mention promoting bike paths.
The occasional outbreak only calls the CDC’s general incompetence to everyone’s attention. The rest of the time its incompetence, like that of other government agencies, just ticks along wasting money.
In 1999, the CDC announced a plan to end syphilis in 5 years. The Clinton era National Plan to Eliminate Syphilis was an unserious social welfare proposal that wanted to battle racism and was such a success that by 2018, syphilis rates had hit a new record high. But Democrat presidential candidates using the CDC for imaginary proposals to end a disease, not by utilizing science, but social welfare, had become a bad habit under Obama, diverting resources from what the CDC could realistically do for political scams.
In 2011, Hillary Clinton had promised an “AIDS-free generation” by, in part, using the CDC. Like her presidency, the “AIDS-free generation” never arrived and was never going to.
The CDC isn’t prepared to fight epidemics because it’s too concerned with pushing gun control, fighting obesity, and waging social justice. (Hat tip: Zerohedge.)
What Beijing cares about is clear from its sustained war on global public opinion. Chinese propaganda mouthpieces have launched a broad array of attacks against the facts, attempting to create a new narrative about China’s historic victory over the Wuhan virus. Chinese state media is praising the government’s “effective, responsible governance,” but the truth is that Beijing is culpable for the spread of the pathogen around China and the world. Chinese officials knew about the new virus back in December, and did nothing to warn their citizens or impose measures to curb it early on.
Instead of acting with necessary speed and transparency, the party-state looked to its own reputation and legitimacy. It threatened whistleblowers like the late Dr. Li Wenliang, and clamped down on social media to prevent both information about the virus and criticism of the Communist Party and government from spreading.
Unsurprisingly, China also has enablers abroad helping to whitewash Beijing’s culpability. World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus refused for months to declare a pandemic, and instead thanked China for “making us safer,” a comment straight out of an Orwell novel. This is the same WHO that has refused to allow Taiwan membership, due undoubtedly to Beijing’s influence over the WHO’s purse strings.
Most egregiously, some Chinese government officials have gone so far as to claim that the Wuhan virus was not indigenous to China at all, while others, like Mr. Tedros, suggest that China’s response somehow bought the world “time” to deal with the crisis. That such lines are being repeated by global officials and talking heads shows how effectively China’s propaganda machine is shaping the global narrative. The world is quickly coming to praise the Communist Party’s governance model, instead of condemn it.
The reality is that China did not tell its own people about the risk for weeks and refused to let in major foreign epidemiological teams, including from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. Thus, the world could not get accurate information and laboratory samples early on. By then, it was too late to stop the virus from spreading, and other world capitals were as lax in imposing meaningful travel bans and quarantines as was Beijing.
Because of China’s initial failures, governments around the world, including democratic ones, now are being forced to take extraordinary actions that mimic to one degree or another Beijing’s authoritarian tendencies, thus remaking the world more in China’s image. Not least of the changes will be in more intrusive digital surveillance of citizens, so as to be able to better track and stop the spread of future epidemics, a step that might not have been necessary if Beijing was more open about the virus back in December and if the WHO had fulfilled its responsibilities earlier.
Are Chlorequine or Hydroxychloroquine a cure for the Wuhan Coronavirus? They just got approved for that use so I suspect we’re going to find out. Props to reader Greg Timoney for pointing out this post a few days before the news broke more generally.
Pretty good thread on what is and isn’t available in various supermarkets in various parts of the country. This week week at my local HEB, chicken was low but ground beef was available, as well as bread and eggs. Lots of things were picked but usually alternates were available if you were willing to switch brands or sizes. Didn’t check toilet paper.
List of which Austin-area employeers are letting their employees work from home, and which aren’t. I can well understand semiconductor manufacturers like Samsung and AMD keep running their fabs; an idle fab line can lose up to $1 million an hour, and you’re not going to catch coronavirus in a bunny suit in a cleanroom anyway…
Last year, ProPublica published a list of ER wait times at New York hospitals. Keep these pre-Wuhan virus wait times in mind when media begin to claim, in order to foment fear and hysteria, that long waits at NYC ERs are a new phenomeneon (they're not). https://t.co/rMhfdnXXltpic.twitter.com/ET2nEMGvJc
The Austin City Council has decided that there’s no need to clean up homeless encampments in the present crisis. “In the current situation, however, homeless encampments ought to be the first place you look to shut down transmission of infectious diseases. Instead, those are the one place that will be left completely alone.”
After two years of hiding public voter data, the state’s biggest county will finally disclose records of foreigners illegally voting in Texas elections, ending a court battle initiated by an election integrity group.
This week, Harris County settled a lawsuit brought against its top voter registration official and agreed to release all records of noncitizen voters requested by Public Interest Legal Foundation, a conservative law firm that specializes in fighting to enforce federal voter roll maintenance laws.
Snip.
PILF sued Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Ann Bennett in 2018, after Bennett’s office refused access to records of registered voters identified as noncitizens, as well as actions taken by the county regarding those registrations.
“Baltimore Mayor Begs Residents To Stop Shooting Each Other So Hospital Beds Can Be Used For Coronavirus Patients.”
Production on Saturday Night Liveshut down. I’m so old I remember when it was funny…
Hitchens detested tribal and parochial feelings of any kind, which is why he was dismayed when he witnessed the emergence of identity as a catalyst for political mobilization in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In his memoir, Hitch-22, Hitchens attacked radicals who thought it was “enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic ‘preference,’ to qualify as a revolutionary.” When Hitchens first heard the expression “the personal is political,” he knew “as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news.” As he put it in a 2008 article:
People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of ‘race’ or ‘gender’ alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.
In the summer of 1992, actress Mia Farrow found out that her adopted daughter Soon-Yi was still romantically involved with Mia’s ex-long-time-boyfriend and collaborator, Woody Allen. According to then-21-year-old Soon-Yi, Mia responded by telling a psychologist that Woody was “satanic and evil,” and that she needed to “find a way to stop him.” Three days later, seven-year-old Dylan Farrow, Mia’s daughter, accused Allen of molesting her in Mia’s Connecticut house. But when the child’s accusations, which were captured on videotape with reported coaching from Mia, were investigated by the Connecticut State Attorney, the Child Sexual Abuse Clinic of Yale-New Haven Hospital and the New York Department of Social Services, no credible evidence could be found to support the allegations. As Kyle Smith reported in a definitive National Review article, Mia’s own nanny “quit the family rather than support Mia’s version of events.” And Dylan’s brother Moses wrote in 2018 that the Mia-Dylan abuse narrative simply made no sense given the architecture of the Connecticut house where the abuse allegedly took place. Yet Woody Allen was nonetheless smeared as a rapist and pedophile. And last week, his publisher, Hachette Book Group, announced it would cancel its deal to publish Allen’s memoirs.
The accusation always struck me as bunk. You can believe that Allen marrying his girlfriend’s stepdaughter is a creeper move without believing he’s a pedophile.
Austin on Tuesday joined other major Texas cities in closing bars and restaurant dining rooms to curb the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, which has now resulted in the state’s first death.
Dr. Mark Escott, director of Austin-Travis County Health Authority, also announced that pubic gatherings in the Texas capital are now limited to 10 people, following recommendations released a day earlier by the Trump administration. That’s more restrictive than similar measures taken in Dallas, which on Monday ordered that public gatherings should not exceed 50 people.
Those shutdowns are scheduled to last through May 1st. “Food establishments must now close common dining areas and are encouraged to give take-out, delivery or drive-thru options.”
Six weeks is a long damn time for a restaurant or bar owner, many of whom just barely scrape by. I wonder how many restaurants and bars this will drive into bankruptcy.
With all these draconian bans coming down, do you think the city of Austin will do anything about the illegal encampments of transient drug users Mayor Steve Adler has lured here?
Between almost everyone dropping out, Biden continuing to rack up victories, and the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic, almost all the air has been sucked out of the Democratic Presidential race. So this is going to be a relatively short and subdued Democratic Presidential clown car update.
Eh, not posting any individual polls this week, as Biden is stomping Sanders in every single one of them, usually by just shy of a 2-1 ratio. The closest thing to a surprise is that Hill/Harris X has Gabbard at 5% nationally, which suggests that 4% is the level of “Operation Chaos”-type effects.
Election betting markets. Biden’s first at a whopping 87.3%. However, second place is not Sanders, it’s Hillary at 5.1%. (strokes chin)(stops)(washes hands annoyingly long period of time) (strokes chin again)
Coronavirus is one of the topics that dominated last night’s Biden-Sanders debate, as well it should, as both Biden and Sanders are part of the target demographic most likely to drop dead of it. Plus coronavirus provides Biden the perfect excuse to run the first “front porch” campaign since Warren G. Harding.
The electoral patterns in Texas, which Biden narrowly won, were marked by divisions of age and ethnicity. Voters over 65 went for Biden nearly four to one, according to Washington Post exit polls. By contrast, among voters under 30, Sanders cleaned up, beating Biden 59 percent to 13 percent. African-Americans, who constitute 20 percent of the state’s electorate, gave nearly three-fifths of their votes to Biden, almost four times Sanders’s share. Carroll Robinson, who served on the Houston City Council for six years and is chairman of the Coalition of Black Democrats, notes that Sanders failed to connect, particularly with older black voters; he cites in particular his being the only major candidate not to attend the 55th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as reflective of his “signaling problem” with African-American voters.
Black voters, Robinson notes, were critical to Biden’s small margin of victory, boosting his totals in Harris County, which includes Houston, and in Dallas County. In contrast, Latinos, already roughly one-third of the state’s Democratic voters, voted heavily for Sanders. The Vermont senator won roughly 40 percent of Latino voters, compared with about a quarter who opted for Biden. Sanders won easily in heavily Latino Bexar (San Antonio), Hidalgo (the Rio Grande Valley), and El Paso Counties.
Sanders also appealed to younger voters in Texas, as elsewhere, beating Biden among voters under 30—making up some 15 percent of the electorate—by almost four to one. He won hugely in Austin, the state’s epicenter of millennial culture, with its high concentration of tech workers. Sanders easily took Travis County over Biden, 83,000 to 52,000.
Moderate Texas Democrats can take heart in halting the momentum of a socialist candidate, but the broader trend is against them. According to exit polls, some 56 percent of Texas Democrats view socialism favorably. In Houston, voters elected an inexperienced 27-year-old progressive, Lina Hidalgo, as judge of Harris County in 2018. Despite its title, the role is nonjudicial; Hidalgo is actually the chief executive of the nation’s third most-populous county. This year, Christian Menefee, a young social-justice advocate, won the primary for Harris County Attorney over more mainstream opposition, on a platform of progressive criminal-justice reform. “There’s an incipient change among the grassroots activists,” notes Bill White, former Houston mayor and deputy energy secretary under Bill Clinton. “There’s a whole new group who are very anti-establishment and gaining influence.” White suspects that the ascendency of these forces may just be beginning. Sanders and Warren—before she dropped out of the race on Thursday—enjoyed a combined 40 percent support of the Texas Democratic electorate, running strongest among the fastest-growing demographic groups.
This leftward transformation is even further along in California. As Morley Winograd, a longtime Democratic activist and former aide to Al Gore, suggests, the state is not only “unique politically, but also big enough to have its own weather system. Democrats in the state feel the economy is strong enough to allow it to maintain its current high-tax, high regulation environment without causing a major downturn.” Socialism remains in vogue. At last year’s state party convention, when former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, then a presidential aspirant, suggested that “socialism is not the answer,” he was lustily booed.
As in Texas, Sanders won biggest among Latinos and millennials, who represent the party’s future. He won an astounding 55 percent of Latino voters, according to New York Times exit polls, compared with a mere 21 percent for Biden. He won 72 percent of voters under 30 and 57 percent of voters in the 30-to-44 age range, beating Biden by wide margins. Biden did win older voters and among African-Americans, but blacks constitute only 7 percent of the state’s Democratic electorate, barely a third of their Texas share.
You may have wondered “With everyone else out, will Tulsi Gabbard start picking up protest votes?” Looking at the various vote totals, the answer appears to be “No.” She does not appear to have broken 1% in any state last week.
Here’s a piece that argues that Cory Booker could have been the nominee if only he hadn’t taken that hard-left turn. There’s a bit of truth to it, but Booker was already looking a little goofy before the pandering began, and primaries are littered with candidates who looked formidable on paper.
Bloomberg last month: Oh sure, I’m going to pay you campaign staffers through the end of the year whether I stay in or not. Bloomberg this month: Psych!
Joe Biden is clearly not well. The comeback front-runner for the Democratic nomination hasn’t lost a step; he’s lost the plot. You’re not supposed to diagnose or psychoanalyze people from afar, I know. It is rude. Having any conversation about the frailty of an elderly public figure always feels rude. Such conversations are difficult to have even about elderly family members, behind closed doors.
But this subject needs to be broached right now. Accusations that Hillary Clinton was unwell were treated as a conspiracy theory up until the moment she seemed to collapse at a 9/11 memorial and was pushed into the side of a van like a sack of meat. Though that viral clip surely hurt Clinton, it was a one-day story and she performed reasonably well on the campaign trail afterward. Biden is amassing a series of viral clips that are much worse. He’ll forget the name of former president Barack Obama, or the state he’s in, or stock phrases of American oratory: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women created by . . . you know . . . you know the thing.” He’ll announce to a baffled crowd that “I’m Joe Biden’s husband and I work for Cedric Richmond” (Richmond is a congressman, in case you were wondering.)
Yes, we need to make room for verbal slip-ups among people who are tirelessly barnstorming around the country and giving public speeches. But any look at a video of Biden in a previous campaign for president shows that the former vice president has diminished.
For some damn reason, Biden decided that he needed to put Beto O’Rourke’s campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon in charge of his campaign. Certainly the lackluster Biden campaign has needed a shakeup for a long time (current run of success notwithstanding), but why you’d hire the person who couldn’t even get their candidate to the primary is beyond me. (Who he should be hiring is Buttigieg’s head of fundraising.) In the debate, Biden promised to pick a woman as Veep, which is exactly the sort of pander you expect of Democrats these days:
Pledging to "pick a woman" for VP doesn't deserve praise, it deserves ridicule because it's insultingly superficial — just like all bullshit attempts to elevate the primacy of identity traits
James Clyburn and James Carville say the quiet part out loud, that debates should be shut down so Biden doesn’t embarass himself. Thanks to the Wuhan Coronavirus, Biden’s fundraising is now being done on the intertubes. Also: “According to campaign finance records, Biden raised $11 million immediately after his South Carolina primary win and $7 million following his Super Tuesday victories. The victories helped alleviate some of the campaign’s money woes, but it’s unclear how a ban on actual campaign events and fundraisers may impact his ability to raise money.” Those are good but not out-of-the-park numbers. He got endorsed by the NEA. Also endorsed by Andrew Yang. Joe Biden’s “bioethics advisor” (and ObamaCare architect) Ezekiel Emanuel wants people to die at age 75 (i.e., younger than Biden is now).
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs.
A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
I’m sure that will go over great with Biden’s core of supporters…
Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard: In. Twitter. Facebook. Does Tulsi have any chance in the race? I could say “if both Biden and Bernies keeled over dead,” but even then I would expect someone like Warren or Bloomberg to jump back into the race and do better than Gabbard. She goes full Andrew Yang in calling for a Universal Basic Income, which should douse any remain fires for her on the right. “Tulsi Gabbard Says Her Sick Friend and Three Others Were Denied Coronavirus Testing in Hawaii.” Interesting (especially since Democrats absolutely dominate Hawaii), but rather peripheral to the race.
What can only be characterized, at best, as an election-year makeover campaign began to fall apart on Feb. 23 in an interview Anderson Cooper on “60 Minutes.” Among other things, Sanders stated: “We’re very opposed to the authoritarian nature of Cuba but you know, it’s unfair to simply say everything is bad. You know? When Fidel Castro came into office, you know what he did? He had a massive literacy program. Is that a bad thing? Even though Fidel Castro did it?”
Right afterward, Sanders doubled down, which was really his only play, lest he come off as a flip-flopper. Despite his proclamation “Truth is truth,” his point wasn’t clear. Does improved literacy that occurred in the context of indoctrinating the population in communist ideology redeem Cuba in any way? Should the United States become more like such countries? Ultimately, these remarks went nowhere, perhaps because there wasn’t anywhere to go but down.
Again, these remarks aren’t new and are entirely consistently with Sanders’ history. But, as even left-wing Vox conceded, it made for a bad look: “The other read, though, is more in line with Sanders’ past. Time after time, he has apologized for the actions of brutal left-wing dictatorships from Cuba to Nicaragua to the Soviet Union, partly out of a critique of America’s meddling in these countries but also – some argue – because of his ideological sympathies toward them.”
In a single interview, Sanders may’ve forever demolished the effort to convince the American electorate the 78-year-old career politician is a perfectly benign “democratic socialist” and not the hard-left socialist he’s always been.
Sure, socialism carries much less of a stigma in Democratic politics than it did a decade ago. Polling continually indicates that America’s young people have a much more positive attitude toward socialism than their parents and grandparents did. But that is a separate question from whether an openly socialist candidate can win elections — though it is worth noting that the two biggest Democratic Socialists of America victories in 2018 came from the wins of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib in the Democratic primaries of deep-blue House districts.
The response of the rest of the party to Sanders’s rise proved illuminating. Democrats feared that a 2020 cycle with Sanders atop the ticket would risk their House majority, destroy them in swing states such as Florida and Pennsylvania, and obliterate them in red states.
In theory, socialism is supposed to appeal to the working class, including the white working class, which drifted toward Trump in 2016. But on Super Tuesday, Joe Biden ran ahead of Sanders among white non–college graduates in the states that Biden won, and the former vice president largely kept it close among this demographic in the states that Sanders won.
Bernie doesn’t let facts get in the way of True Belief:
This is your must watch clip from the Bernie townhall.@marthamaccallum explains to Bernie that Sweden and Denmark are not even remotely close to being socialist countries.
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
Colorado Senator Michael Bennet (Dropped out February 11, 2020)
li>Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Dropped out March 4, 2020 and endorsed Biden)
New Jersey Senator Cory Booker (Dropped out January 11, 2020)
Former San Antonio Mayor and Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro (Dropped out January 2, 2020)
Former First Lady, New York Senator, Secretary of State and losing 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton: Stated again and again she’s not running, but there’s still a cottage industry in predicting she’ll displace Biden at the DNC or be the veep pick. Not really seeing either, but stranger things have happened this year…
From the outset of Donald Trump’s entry into the world of politics he espoused a series of key tenets around what he called his “America-First” objectives:
The U.S. needed to have control over our borders, and a greater ability to control who was migrating to the United States. A shift toward stopping ‘illegal’ migration.
The U.S. needed to stop the manufacture of goods overseas and return critical manufacturing back to the United States. A return to economic independence.
The U.S. needed to decouple from an over-reliance on Chinese industrial and consumer products. China viewed as a geopolitical and economic risk.
Donald Trump was alone on these issues. No-one else was raising them; no-one else was so urgently pushing that discussion. In 2015, 2016 and even 2017, no-one other than Trump was talking about how close we were to the dependence point of no return.
Given the status of very consequential issues stemming from the Chinese Coronavirus threat; and the myriad of serious issues with critical supply chain dependencies; wasn’t President Trump correct in his warnings and proposals?
The idea driving this is not to stop all transmission of coronavirus (nice though that would be), but to flatten the curve so that American health care resources are not overwhelmed.
In Italy, you can say goodbye to Grandma. “Doctors are being told that they’ll likely need to deny care to senior citizens and those with other health conditions as the virus explodes across the nation.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
The Chinese Communist Party has gone into overdrive pushing the lie that the #Wuhanvirus started in the US. It started in #China, and it was spread around the world thanks to Chinese government negligence and lies. They are 100% responsible for every death. #Coronavirus#CCPvirus
Before the coronavirus epidemic, U.S. companies were heading for record-low profitability in China as business conditions deteriorated and China’s economy slowed to its lowest rate in decades, according to a new survey of U.S. companies with operations in China…
American companies surveyed by AmCham reported their lowest levels of profitability since the Chamber first began asking the question 18 years ago: 61% of members described their 2019 financial performance as profitable or very profitable, an eight-percentage point drop from the year before.
He is charged with embezzling more than $1 million in union funds and properties to buy “luxury condos” in California, “lavish” dinners with “premium liquor,” five sets of custom-made golf clubs, horseback riding on a beach, and other non-union expenses that prosecutors allege the UAW covered up by mislabeling them as payments to vendors or meals for UAW officials, according to Matthew Schneider, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan.
Sadly, Troy Hurtubise is no longer around to design a monkey-proof suit…
Woof, woof, woof, woof, woof:
The World Health Organization has announced that dogs cannot contract Covid-19. Dogs previously held in quarantine can now be released. To be clear, WHO let the dogs out.
