The Carpentariat

Bring back Trump's rallies; they weren't daily, and they'd thin the unAmerican herd

If you want more boredom this afternoon, Trump, during his propaganda hour at the White House briefing room, is sure to be asked about the Wall Street Journal editorial board's "Trump’s Wasted Briefings: The sessions have become a boring show of President vs. the press." And Trump is sure to monotonously respond with predictable huffs and puffs about his vastly informative sermons and his even more vastly brilliant performances.

As the WSJ puts it, he "opens each briefing by running through a blizzard of facts and numbers showing what the government is doing — this many tests, that many masks, so many ventilators going from here to there, and what a great job he’s doing."

Or, as the Washington Post puts it: "These pronouncements and pledges have turned out, again and again, to be a description of the administration’s aspirational response to the pandemic, not the one doctors, nurses and stricken families are reporting from the front."

That's one helluva polite way to describe Trump's daily outpouring of lies. Yesterday, in particular, was a beaut; a kind of greatest hits of everything he's lied about over the past several weeks, from those nonexistent tests in the mail to his never having "closed the border" to China.

"Then," observes the Journal, "Trump opens the door for questions, and the session deteriorates into a dispiriting brawl between the President and his antagonists in the White House press corps."

I'm not sure where the Journals' editorial board members have been for the past four or five years, but in further noting that "Trump always takes the bait" from antagonistic reporters and his "outbursts against his political critics are … notably off key" suggests they haven't been following this president of America's red states only. Those regions' inhabitants positively live to hear their tell-it-like-it-is man belittle honest reporters and disparage all informed voices of disgust aimed at this useless, deeply corrupt POTUS. Trump is only meeting his most urgent public demand.

Still, it was pleasant to see the Journal's headline, even if "Wasted Briefings from a Waste of a Presidency" would have been an improvement.

Trump's snake-oil supply chain

Writes James Hamblin, M.D., a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health and Atlantic contributor:

"Two weeks ago, French doctors published a provocative observation in a microbiology journal. In the absence of a known treatment for COVID-19, the doctors had taken to experimentation with a potent drug known as hydroxychloroquine. For decades, the drug has been used to treat malaria—which is caused by a parasite, not a virus. In six patients with COVID-19, the doctors combined hydroxychloroquine with azithromycin (known to many as 'Z-Pak,' an antibiotic that kills bacteria, not viruses) and reported that after six days of this regimen, all six people tested negative for the virus."

Television huckster Mehmet Oz informed one of Trump's top advisers, the charlatan Sean Hannity, that one of the French doctors, Didier Raoult, is a "very famous infectious-disease specialist." As many of his colleagues see him, he is also an infamous quack; Raoult doubts climate change and even Darwinian evolution. As for the good doctor's one-week study of six patients, the Pasteur Institute's chief epidemiologist says it was so unprofessionally done, "it is impossible to interpret the described result as being attributable to the hydroxychloroquine treatment."

Thus a suspected quack announced a covid-19 cure in a YouTube video (not a journal article), which was watched by a television huckster, who passed its "very impressive" contents along to a dirtbag charlatan. At the end of this snake-oil supply chain was quackism-consumer³ Donald Trump.

"The day after Raoult’s study was published, Donald Trump tweeted about it: 'HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE & AZITHROMYCIN, taken together, have a real chance to be one of the biggest game changers in the history of medicine.' In the days since, Trump has repeatedly returned to this claim. On Saturday, he said that the term game changer wouldn’t even adequately describe the drug: "It will be wonderful. It will be so beautiful. It will be a gift from heaven, if it works."

Having no idea if it works, Trump nevertheless advises the ill to pop it, because "What do you have to lose?" The American Medical Association's president, Dr. Patrice Harris, has answered, "Your life."

The at-home pleasure of my internet provider

This morning I managed to get one post up (below), but future posts may be tricky. It rained here last night, you see, and Mediacom's high technology is incompatible with moisture, especially if the wind exceeds 3 mph. Generally a sprinkle will knock me off the internet altogether until a tech shows up, but this week Mediacom is treating me to an online range of fun flaws, from internet slowness to, on some sites, permanent hangups. Its comically named "Customer Service" department first told me this morning that a tech would arrive in — 30 days. About this, I gently objected. So Mediacom then promised to rush out a tech next Wednesday. 

Nevertheless, I shall persevere. Thus I hope to see you again real soon, perhaps even today. —PM  

Survey says! (America's two families feud.)

From a SurveyUSA News poll (graded "A" by FiveThirtyEight) with a ± 3.8 percentage MOE, conducted Apr. 6-7 among 1,000 adults, who for three weeks have "listen[ed] to America's cheerleader-in-chief rant and ramble," as the pollster eloquently puts it:

"When it comes to the coronavirus, do you find it better to listen to Donald Trump? Or ignore Donald Trump?"

Although today's fools evenly counterbalance the wise, two weeks ago the aforementioned obtuse outweighed the intelligent, 49 percent to 35 percent. So in that narrow sense, the country is on the right track.

"When all is said and done, do you have confidence? Or no confidence? ... in President Trump's ability to lead the nation through these trying times?"

This is when margins of error come in so handy. For the pliable imagination in search of deeper emotional solace, it could be that the "Confidence"-in-Trump crowd is actually populated by about 39 percent of those surveyed, and the "No Confidence" contingent scores as high as 52 percent. In blocks of apocalyptic times such as America-under-Trump, wishful thinking is but a harmless vice.

As for the president's "Net Virus Approval," three weeks ago it was a positive 11;
two weeks ago, a positive 9; and today a negative 2 (48 percent approve, 50
 percent disapprove). This compares to governors Cuomo and Newsom's 39 and 36 positive ratings, respectively. Florida's Gov. DeSantis? At a negative 5, he's in Trump territory.

What remains hard to imagine is that given the nation's dedicated division between red brains and blue, the ranting, rambling cheerleader in chief will ever do much worse.

Bernie blows out

An important point: Sanders ending his campaign and letting Biden consolidate the nomination officially gets this guy off the sidelines... pic.twitter.com/xpcIJhxIfk

— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) April 8, 2020

I have written so much on the need for Bernie to drop out — and that he should have done it weeks ago — there is no point in rehashing the preexisting need — or praising him for finally meeting it.

What I will say for now is that I agree with Ms. Reid, and to President Obama I'll just say, Go get 'em.  

Oh, one other thing. Danke Gott! political journalists can now stop writing that gibberish about Joe Biden being the "likely" nominee. He's been the de facto, which is to say, actual, nominee since March 3rd.

Does God just not like Mississippians?

​​​​Throughout March, as most other governors were seeing the vastly disseminated wisdom of their citizens simply staying at home, Mississippi's Gov. Tate Reeves was instead counseling his citizens on the "power of prayer" to overcome and defeat the covid pandemic.

Many of the state's municipalities, in frustration and on their own, issued shelter-in-place orders. Gov. Reeves, however, soon came along to suppress those orders by lifting any unholy "limitation or restriction" on churches, gun stores, beaches, car dealerships, restaurants and bars, real-estate offices, construction services, movie theatres, coffee shops, and Uber and Lyft, as The New Yorker reports. He reopened all of Mississippi for further contagion and death.

But what, Reeves worry? Not on your life — or precisely on your life if you're a luckless Mississippian and therefore subject to the governor's religious medievalism in (not) confronting America's greatest secular threat since the Second World War. Notes The New Yorker:

"On March 22nd … Reeves … held a Sunday-morning prayer session. The event was live-streamed from the governor’s mansion. After offering a few reassuring passages of scripture ('In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer'), he bowed his head. 'Thank you for looking over us,' he prayed."

Yet an evidently indifferent heaven had failed to "look over" the state. "By April 1st … Mississippi had a thousand and seventy-three confirmed cases, with twenty-two deaths and the country’s highest hospitalization rate for those infected" (further confirming that black America is paying a far higher toll). So Reeves temporarily marooned his prayers, changed his mind, and issued a fatally belated stay-at-home order.

God indeed works in mysterious ways, and one of his bigger mysteries is the prominence of idiots like Mississippi's Gov. Tate Reeves.

The IHME sees ramped-up light at the end of Trump's pitch-dark tunnel

Somewhere, yesterday, I ran across a brief description of the latest mortality forecast from Washington state's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. As I recall, the news story reported that the globally respected IHME had issued a "less dire prediction" for the number of covid-19 deaths in the United States.

I was excited, thrilled in fact, to finally read some good news about this rampaging plague; so excited, I immediately abandoned the news story's subsequent elaboration and instead headed directly to the IHME's website. The phrase "less dire" promised a lot of hope, and I wanted to touch it straight from the originating source.

Although a bit less than the bottom mortality forecast from Fauci, Birx & Co., the IHME had predicted a grim 90,000 deaths in the US. So what, yesterday, was the institute's new and less dire prediction? Nearly 82,000 covid-19 deaths by 4 August 2020, "assuming full social distancing through May 2020." This was an immense relief to 8,000 souls, I'm sure, but remarkably short of my hopes.

As it absorbs fresh data, however, the IHME publishes daily updates. And this morning when I checked, its revised prediction of 82,000 had been pared by another 20,000+, to 60,415 — again, assuming full social distancing through spring.

This offers yet more hope that states are on the right track, and that the Fauci-Birx prediction of 100,000 to 200,000 deaths is a permanent thing of the past — assuming states maintain full sociopolitical distancing from the Trump administration's monumental incompetence.

Lunatics. Paranoid lunatics. Absolutely paranoid lunatics.

The Daily Caller, merely one of Trump's outlets for "Patriots Only," says the site's banner, gives voice to the millions of mentally unbalanced crackpots who see anti-Trump bogeymen positively everywhere, and for reasons known only to abnormal-psychology specialists, need the world to know that they're positively nuts.

Case in point: Yesterday, as Dr. Anthony Fauci was the leaving Trump's propaganda dais, ABC's Jonathan Karl, still in the press audience, gave him a little salute — one assumes for the fantastic job he's been doing while laboring under a nitwit president.

That was all … a little salute. In polite return, Dr. Fauci gave Karl a little hand signal — dubbed "finger guns" — one assumes in simple acknowledgement of Karl's salute. That was all … a polite little hand signal.

Whereupon the Daily Caller, writing for the crackpotted millions, jumped into paranoia alert, noting ominously that Karl had "liked" a tweet from somebody "wondering who Fauci was shooting his finger guns at."

Hence the anti-Trump Karl-Fauci conspiracy was exposed. And the Daily Caller confirmed it by posting a truly terrifying gif of Dr. Fauci's secret signal to his compatriot in Political CrimeThink.

Hardcore Trumpeteers are absolutely, paranoiacally fucking nuts. Period. 

My - and maybe your - daily moment of distressed meditation

 

Stephanie, we hardly knew ye - in fact, not at all

Also from Politico's "Breaking News," via email:

"White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham will leave her position as President Donald Trump's chief spokeswoman,"

But how could we have known that she was ever there? 

"Grisham, who stepped into the job [of press secretary] less than a year ago, did not host a press briefing at any point during her tenure."

Someday, whenever the Trump administration's board game of "Where's Waldo" comes out, she will be he.  

Holy shit! and no surprise - Trump sacks the top $2-trillion watchdog

From Politico's emailed "Breaking News":

Trump has upended the panel of federal watchdogs overseeing his implementation of the $2 trillion coronavirus law, tapping a replacement for the Pentagon official who was supposed to lead the effort.

A panel of inspectors general had named Glenn Fine — the acting Pentagon watchdog — to lead the group charged with monitoring the coronavirus relief effort. But Trump on Monday removed Fine from his post, instead naming an EPA inspector general to serve as the temporary Pentagon watchdog….

"Mr. Fine is no longer on the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee," [announced] a spokesperson for the Pentagon inspector general's office.

Move over, second-rate grifters of the world. Trump is still in town — and what's still astonishing is that his Everyman marks are still buying tickets to his colossal shitshow.

***

Needless to add, I should think, is that Glenn Fine, a magna cum laude Harvard Law graduate, joined the DOD's inspector general's office during the Obama administration. EPA's IG Sean O'Donnell is a 2019 Trump appointee.

The curiously corrupt case of a counterfeit cure? Trump, snake-oil salesmanship, and hydroxychloroquine

"​​​​​Hydroxychloroquine."

"That one word," writes Eugene Robinson, "illustrates Trump’s arbitrary, anecdote-based method of making decisions; his reliance on cronies who have no relevant expertise; his rejection of science, or perhaps his failure to understand how science even works; his defiant stubbornness in clinging to what he 'knows,' even when he doesn’t actually know it; his obsessiveness even in the face of contrary evidence; and his imperviousness to fact-based arguments he does not want to hear."

All true, though in the instance of Trump's miracle drug, we should add that there may be a cash-based method of decision-making as well.

"If hydroxychloroquine becomes an accepted treatment," reports the Times, "several pharmaceutical companies stand to profit, including shareholders and senior executives with connections to the president. Mr. Trump himself has a small personal financial interest in Sanofi, the French drugmaker that makes Plaquenil, the brand-name version of hydroxychloroquine."

There's an incestuous triangle of pharmaceutical interests, personal connections and Gordon Gekko greed that rests comfortably in this president's king-sized bed of political corruption. Fisher Asset Management is heavily invested in Sanofi; the mutual fund is run by billionaire Ken Fisher, who, along with his wife, have contributed a quarter-million dollars to Trump's reelection campaign. Scattered throughout his family trusts, Trump himself has cash in another mutual fund whose largest investment is in Sanofi.

The co-founder of Amneal Pharmaceuticals, which is readying a generic version of Plaquenil, has played golf with the president at his private course in Bedminster, New Jersey. And board member Robert Mignone of Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, another marketer of hydroxychloroquine, contacted Jared Kushner's office through one Nitin Saigal, a former Mignone employee and Kushner friend. Mignone then asked that US-import restrictions on India be eased so that Teva could sell that country's HCQ pills here at home. The easing was done.

With almost any other president, questions of politico-financial irregularities concerning a possibly crisis-treating drug would improbably be asked. But given this president's history of corruption, cronyism, nepotism, lawlessness, scandal and kleptocratic grifting, such questions falleth like the torrential rain.

Newly revealed, January West Wing memo: This could be "a full-blown pandemic," Trump was warned

Jan. 29: Internal White House Memo, from Assistant to the President Peter Navarro:

"The lack of immune protection or an existing cure or vaccine would leave Americans defenseless in the case of a full-blown coronavirus outbreak on U.S. soil. This lack of protection elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans."

Navarro added that U.S. covid-19 deaths could exceed a half-million and cost the economy trillions of dollars.

Contemporaneously and throughout Feb., said Trump publicly:

"We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine"; "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China"; "We’re going down, not up [in the number of cases]. We’re going very substantially down, not up…. We’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time."

In his statesmanlike quest to keep partisan politics out of the growing crisis, Trump repeatedly said the pandemic was Democrats' "new hoax." Dutifully, his army of mouthpieces throughout the right's crackpot media contraption spread the message as well.

And, as Trump said then and still does, "Nobody could have predicted something like this" — except for Navarro's prediction, sitting on the Resolute Desk, Jan. 29.

A clinical depiction of covid-19's devastating effect on lungs

From the Times, this 5.5-minute video offers a clinical view of covid-19's effects on the human body. If you've limited time to watch, most interesting, I think, is the approximately 1-minute segment beginning at 1:35, in which the virus' precise effect inside the lungs is shown.

HHS' inspector general validates Trump's "beautiful" healthcare system

A recent survey of 323 hospitals across the United States by the Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general has confirmed the brilliance of Trump's efficacious management of the covid-19 crisis.

Among those hospitals, the IG's office reports that it found only "Severe Shortages of Testing Supplies and Extended Waits for Results," "Widespread Shortages of PPE," "Difficulty Maintaining Adequate Staffing and Supporting Staff," "Difficulty Maintaining and Expanding Hospital Capacity to Treat Patients," "Shortages of Critical Supplies, Materials, and Logistic Support," "Anticipated Shortages of Ventilators," and "Changing and Sometimes Inconsistent Guidance."

Trump really dodged a bullet. Other than sustaining those minor hiccups, America's healthcare system remains the best in the world. This is due in significant part because we yell USA, USA, USA is #1, but it's primarily due to the president's replacement of lousy Obamacare with his own, special, cheaper and truly beautiful health-insurance system, just as he promised in 2016: