April 18, 2020

GOP Rift Grows Over Social Distancing

https://politicalwire.com/2020/04/17/gop-rift-grows-over-social-distancing/

GOP Rift Grows Over Social Distancing
April 17, 2020 at 8:19 pm EDT By Taegan Goddard

April 18, 2020

Cohen Writing Book to 'Spill the Beans' on Trump

https://politicalwire.com/2020/04/18/cohen-writing-book-to-spill-the-beans-on-trump/

Cohen Writing Book to ‘Spill the Beans’ on Trump
April 18, 2020 at 8:11 am EDT By Taegan Goddard

April 18, 2020

Trump Offered Ukraine One Billion Dollars in Cash to Open Biden Investigation

Trump Offered Ukraine One Billion Dollars in Cash to Open Biden Investigation
ericlewis0
Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)
Friday April 17, 2020 · 4:04 PM ED




more...

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/4/17/1938167/-Trump-Offered-Ukraine-One-Billion-Dollars-in-Cash-to-Open-Biden-Investigation?utm_campaign=trending&fbclid=IwAR0fsXJGeViBkP3UkGLt8PV-Etmxr80oBhvS811YUEqZdVz1U58Wn5I8lxU

April 18, 2020

I wonder who in the gop

sleeps well at night, supporting this abomination by their silence? I find it mind-boggling.

April 18, 2020

The Battle to Keep Trump's Coronavirus Response Effort Honest Has Begun

April 16, 2020 10:58AM ET
The Battle to Keep Trump’s Coronavirus Response Effort Honest Has Begun
A group of senators, including Elizabeth Warren, have set their sights on the ethical mess of the administration’s coronavirus response
By Andy Kroll


A president with little regard for ethical norms and a pattern of self-dealing signs into law a relief package that will give out upward of trillions of dollars. A White House that from day one has been dogged by questions about personal interests mingling with public service takes control of a governmentwide pandemic response. Senior members of the administration who have flouted federal ethics rules regarding their own personal finances and business interests turn to the private sector for help as they grapple with one of the worst public-health crises in a century.

What could go wrong?

As the Federal Reserve expands its emergency lending powers, and as President Trump’s $2 trillion coronavirus relief law goes into full effect, there’s a fight brewing over how to keep track of the money to ensure it reaches the people who need it most — and doesn’t end up enriching Trump’s friends and business partners.

On Thursday, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Tom Carper (D-Del.), and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) sent a list of questions to Scott Gast, a senior counsel to the president and the White House’s designated ethics official, about possible ethical and criminal conflict-of-interest issues with the administration’s coronavirus response efforts. “Amidst the coronavirus pandemic,” they write, “the American public should not have to worry that critical public health and economic decisions are being made in secret by public officials influenced by financial connections and personal ties.”

The letter highlighted potential conflicts with the coronavirus working group led by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser. The letter cited reporting in Politico that said private companies assisting Kushner on a voluntary basis were “seeking to entrench themselves in hopes of winning lucrative government contracts down the line.” The senators also noted reporting in the Atlantic that indicated Oscar Health, a tech-centric health insurance company Kushner had previously owned or controlled, had worked with administration officials to develop a coronavirus-testing website. And the letter pointed out that Apollo Global Management, a private-equity firm that lent $200 million to Kushner Cos. in 2017, has urged the Federal Reserve to expand its emergency lending guidelines.

The letter from Warren, Carper, and Blumenthal points out that at least one major donor and another Trump golf club member, who has personally golfed with Trump, also stand to benefit financially from the Food and Drug Administration’s emergency-use authorization of hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 treatment method.

more...

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-coronavirus-paycheck-protection-program-stimulus-check-warren-kushner-oversight-984985/

April 17, 2020

Stimulus cash is being sent to dead people. Their loved ones can probably keep it.

FUBARed.


Stimulus cash is being sent to dead people. Their loved ones can probably keep it.
"We don't want it. It's not who this stimulus was supposed to benefit," said one woman whose mother passed away.
April 17, 2020, 2:27 PM EDT / Updated April 17, 2020, 4:39 PM EDT
By Sahil Kapur and Josh Lederman


WASHINGTON — Jeanne Siracuse didn't know what to do when she got a notification this week that $1,200 had been deposited into her mother's account. Her mother died last August.

Relatives of dead Americans all over the country are receiving coronavirus relief payments from the U.S. Treasury Department on behalf of the loved ones this week. Many are confused. Was it a mistake? Are they required to send it back? Some of them have already tried to. Either way, they can rest easy.

The U.S. government plans to allow heirs or spouses of dead people to keep the money, a source familiar with the matter said. A Treasury spokesperson declined to comment but said guidance on the matter is forthcoming.

more...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/stimulus-cash-being-sent-dead-people-their-loved-ones-can-n1186446?fbclid=IwAR343WWFgtezpM5dWtzGyOeUNFRwYyz_tF8zVwyo-KM6vrcSxX7scdOM6dI

April 17, 2020

Trump's Once-Bright Reelection Prospects Are Darkening Rapidly

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/trumps-re-election-2020-polls-coronavirus.html

vision 2020 Apr. 15, 2020
Trump’s Once-Bright Reelection Prospects Are Darkening Rapidly
By Ed Kilgore

snip//

The evidence is beginning to mount that the damage COVID-19 is doing to the economy Trump so often touted as his supreme achievement, along with meh public assessments of his leadership, have together reversed the arrows and made the incumbent an underdog, as National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar — by no means a liberal or partisan Democrat — explains:



Yes, it’s true that past precedents of poor economic conditions blowing up presidential reelection candidacies (from Herbert Hoover to Jimmy Carter to George H.W. Bush) seem inadequate to the kind of disaster COVID-19 poses. But there’s also no example of a president being reelected in the midst of economic calamity on the grounds that it wasn’t entirely his fault. Given the extraordinarily polarized foundation on which Trump has built his political career and his presidency, it’s hard to imagine a figure less likely to inspire sudden respect and appreciation among those not already in his camp (even the regularly pro-Trump polling from Rasmussen currently shows as many Americans strongly disapproving of the job he is doing as approving of it by any degree). To the extent that every presidential election involving an incumbent is basically a referendum on life during the previous four years, you have to figure Trump’s current mediocre approval ratings (at 44 percent at FiveThirtyEight and 45 percent at RealClearPolitics) are a ceiling rather than a floor, assuming no shocking turnaround on either the public-health or economic conditions of the country.

And, as Kraushaar suggests, the nationally darkening climate for Trump’s reelection is being matched by bad news from states he needs to eke out another Electoral College win:



snip//

But the idea that Trump has some infernal hold on the presidency (the combined product, I believe, of perennial shock over what happened in 2016 and the endless braying braggadocio of Trump’s conservative media voices) is looking shaky now. He clearly will not be able to campaign as the triumphant engineer of an economic boom created by bulldozing the environment and shiftless workers and godless foreigners while showering tax dollars on wealthy American job-creators. His other credentials for a second term are compelling mostly to people who want to return this country to the 1950s. That’s always going to be a decided, if loud, minority.

April 17, 2020

Opening America Now is A Slap in the Face to Healthcare Workers

https://johnpavlovitz.com/2020/04/16/opening-america-is-a-slap-in-the-face-to-healthcare-workers/?fbclid=IwAR3WatWKg3e2w1kLNLNlCAE_VLcR9HWCVMW3VGlqcFU6JbJ3ndqAVWFmGZI

Opening America Now is A Slap in the Face to Healthcare Workers
April 16, 2020 / John Pavlovitz



Opening America.



This united offensive to quickly get Americans back to work is all happening on days when we are losing over two thousand people a day, when we’ve eclipsed 644,000 confirmed cases, when 29,000 have died in the span of eight weeks.

And every single life that is threatened by this vicious, insidious illness—falls squarely on the shoulders of healthcare workers and first responders: doctors, nurses, EMTs, lab technicians, hospital staff, police officers, firefighters.

For weeks they have labored without sleep, without rest, without enough masks to protect themselves, without enough tests to identify the relentless flood of sick people in their midst, without enough ventilators to keep the gravely ill alive; continually stepping into harm’s way to attend to this unprecedented national emergency.

We share the photos of their heavily-bruised faces from marathon sessions in service of the wounded and dying, we relay the heartbreaking stories of them having to facilitate final conversation between dying patients and devastated family members via FaceTime, we pile effusive praise and glowing platitudes upon them for their courage and their selflessness, we share sweetly saccharine memes that salute their efforts.

We just don’t actually give a damn about them.

If we did, if we really grasped how overworked they are and how much trauma they’ve carried and how pushed to the brink they are, we wouldn’t be talking about re-opening America right now.

People wouldn’t be pressed together at state capitol buildings and stopping traffic and parading around in middle-finger-defiance of stay-at-home orders, while giving the virus the greatest boost it could ask for.

If we actually respected the people who take care of us when we are at our most vulnerable, and who stand between those we love and the brink of death—we’d be doing all we could to stay at home, to abide restrictions, to demand more safeguards, not less—and we certainly wouldn’t be rushing people back into frequent and large scale interactions, when millions of people can’t get tested and when a vaccine is months away.

snip//

This is a moment for sacrificing and selflessness and for grieving and for loving our neighbors enough to stay away from them.

It is a time we stopped talking about opening America, and started healing it.

Thank you to all those who spend their lives on behalf of the rest of us.

You deserve better.

(P.S. Re-opening American right now, will also endanger millions of people and risk an expansive re-emergence of the virus, causing further loss of life, longer restrictions, and greater economic burden—so there’s that.)

April 17, 2020

D. Lithwick: Might This Finally Cure Us of Our Pathological Preference for a Television President?

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/04/coronavirus-donald-trump-and-the-wizard-of-oz-presidency.html

Might This Finally Cure Us of Our Pathological Preference for a Television President?
This pandemic is the best example yet that Donald Trump is a Wizard of Oz, and there’s nothing behind the curtain.
By Dahlia Lithwick
April 16, 20206:19 PM

snip//

The staggering irony is that somehow, after years of him attempting to force us to live inside his shiny dream world of ratings and endorsements and fabulousness, we all now live there, all day and all night. After four terrible years trying to escape the reality show of the Trump administration, many of us, and way too many of our children, are trapped inside screens that reduce each of our lives to the familiar Apprentice boardroom set landmarks: human, desk, lamp, water glass. Hours of screens within screens that might really be Zooms now force us into canned reality show tropes: “Look at me! I’m trying to talk! How do I look? Why did I agree to do this again?”

We are, almost poetically, the perfect sum total of the Zoom screen and the chat box and the set we’ve arranged behind us. How Trumpian.

My friends who work in the hospitals tell me that screens are the only possible means of connecting the dying among us to their families, for the purpose of saying goodbye, now. If you haven’t yet attended a Zoom funeral, you assuredly will. Faces. Screens. The centering of faces in screens, the focusing of faces on screens. And if all that weren’t the most tragic outcome of the age of Trump, there is yet one more: In order to attempt to understand what is happening all around us in real life, with real emergency equipment and real scientific research and real bailout funds, we are forced to tune in, night after night, to what any other culture in any other time would most likely dismiss as some kind of darkly impressionist puppet show. We sit at our screens, watching someone who delights only in standing in the center of our screens, as he attempts to program the world with his crabbed reality-show word parfaits: He’s perfect, everyone is awful, he didn’t come here to make friends, oh, and everyone should buy shit. Everyone should buy boxes and bags and buckets of branded shit. And all of these people who have lost their jobs and businesses, and parents and friends, are somehow shoehorned back into this deranged world of Tiger King, in which every performer is a narcissist mugging for the cameras, and all of the endangered cats are us.

When all this passes, and it will certainly pass, it would be good to craft a new way of looking at governance, expertise, and authority that is less bound up in looking at ourselves, and also less caught up in looking at other people looking at ourselves, and in the relentless daily performance of building a brand that those who are looking at us would maybe like to purchase. There is no doubt in my mind that if the response to this pandemic demanded great quantities of kitten heels, sheath dresses, and overpriced real estate, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should have been tasked with the authority to solve it. That we have somehow persuaded ourselves that unexceptional people who look like the kind of people who might pick up phones to call other people about catastrophic problems, possibly on a TV show, are the people who are most fit to govern, well, that is the result of a life lived entirely in thrall to screen time.

When all this passes, as we certainly hope it will, the poets and philosophers and scientists might step up to write (in truth, in words, in indelible black pen) the history of whatever the hell happened that damaged us so badly that we were willing to follow a bunch of character actors up over the embankment and down into a democracy measured in ratings and brand names and how we looked on camera. The revolution was, in fact, televised. And that was our first mistake.

April 17, 2020

Trumps Vendetta Against MailIn Voting Could Cost Him the 2020 Election

2020 Election
Trump’s Vendetta Against Mail-In Voting Could Cost Him the 2020 Election
The president’s claims that mail-in ballots are corrupt, even during a pandemic, could make a fraught process harder, hindering Republican efforts to get out the vote and disenfranchising Trump’s own supporters.
By Ken Stern
April 17, 2020


As last week’s election debacle unfolded in Wisconsin, and tens of thousands of people struggled to get their votes counted, Donald Trump let loose: “Republicans should fight very hard when it comes to statewide mail-in voting,” he tweeted. “Democrats are clamoring for it. Tremendous potential for voter fraud, and for whatever reason, doesn’t work out well for Republicans.” It’s distracting and inaccurate, but the president gets rare points for honesty in admitting that his views on mail-in voting are dictated by electoral self-interest.

But deduct points for political acumen. When I spoke to a cross-section of voting experts, they all rejected the idea that mail-in voting hurts Republicans. Wendy Weiser, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law, told me that it is “very baffling that the point of attack is on a method that favors older, whiter voters.” Michael Hanmer, an election expert at the University of Maryland, argued that there is no evidence that expanding mail-in voting is inherently favorable to either party and that, like most voting efforts, it tends to favor whoever best organizes, educates, and motivates their base. An effective get-out-and-mail strategy by Republicans among older voters has been credited with cementing the party’s strength in both Arizona (where Republicans substantially outpace Democrats on the list of people automatically receiving mail ballots) and Florida.

This year the stakes could be even higher. If coronavirus resurges in the fall, as some experts have warned, older voters could be even more discouraged from in-person voting. In a recent Morning Consult poll, 74% of voters over 65 indicated they would be very or somewhat concerned about in-person voting if coronavirus were still a material threat in November. In what could be a painfully close election, even incremental drop-offs could pose a significant threat to Republican chances. Even worse for the president, confidence among Republicans in mail-in balloting now runs more than 20 percentage points behind Democrats, according to Morning Consult, and voters who are very favorable to Trump are a full 27 points behind those who are very unfavorable. This could well have a negative effect on Trump turnout if in-person voting becomes difficult, as it did in Wisconsin last week.

Because of this, not all Republican leaders immediately fell in behind Trump. Some did; Missouri governor Pat Parson declared he was “not interested in making any drastic changes…out of fear.” (Mail-in voting in Missouri is notoriously difficult: It is permitted only in six statutorily defined situations, and a notary must witness your signature on the absentee ballot in most cases.) Republican officials in other states, including Ohio, Washington, Nebraska, and West Virginia, all openly defended the efficacy of the process, or began pushing changes to make it easier to vote by mail. Even Trump walked back his comments, at least a little bit, tweeting, “Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is ‘RIPE for FRAUD,’ and shouldn’t be allowed!”

more...

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/trumps-vendetta-against-mail-in-voting-could-cost-him-the-2020-election