The Breakfast Club (FAKE OATMEAL)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club!

AP’s Today in History for May 17th

Brown vs. Board of Education ends separate but equal; Watergate hearings begin; NYSE is born; First Kentucky Derby.

Breakfast Tune Sixteen Tons

Something to think about, Breakfast News & Blogs below

 
Updated Patriot Act Finally Legalizes 80% Of Current FBI Operations
The Onion

WASHINGTON—In a 59-37 vote that reauthorized provisions from the 2001 legislation and added several new measures, Congress reportedly passed an updated Patriot Act Wednesday that finally legalized 80% of current FBI operations. “The newly upheld Patriot Act augments current surveillance practices by expanding into several areas where the FBI was already operating,” said Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), adding that the GOP-led Senate struck down an amendment to prohibit warrantless searches of Americans’ internet browsing histories in order to give U.S. intelligence agencies the legal latitude to do what they have already been doing for years. “The original Patriot Act took a huge step in giving legal protection to a lot of traditional FBI tactics that had been illegal up until then. This is an important next step in authorizing the vast majority of illegal FBI operations on the internet, the same way we did with searching on telephones. The men and women of the FBI are just trying to do their jobs, yet have had to operate under conditions where they collect private information and search Americans’ private data while fearing for their careers. These long-overdue reforms should increase the FBI’s productivity since agents won’t have to waste so much time covering their trails or dealing with the occasional lawsuit. Finally, the restrictive measures of previous internet-related legislation will no longer be the circumvented law of the land.” McConnell expressed hope that the remaining 20% of FBI operations not legalized through the expanded Patriot Act would be addressed in an upcoming bill.

 

 

Something to think about over coffee prozac

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Pondering the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition

Pondering the Pundits: Sunday Preview EditionPondering the Pundits: Sunday Preview Edition” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news medium and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

On Sunday mornings we present a preview of the guests on the morning talk shows so you can choose which ones to watch or some do something more worth your time on a Sunday morning.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

The Sunday Talking Heads:

This Week with George Stephanopolis: The guests on Sunday’s “This Week” are: White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro; and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

The roundtable guests are: Former Gov. Chris Christie; former Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D?-Chicago); Democracy for America CEO Yvette Simpson; and Republican Strategist Sara Fagen.

Face the Nation: Host Margaret Brennan’s guests are: Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA); Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Alex Azar; former Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn; former FDA Commissioner, Dr. Scott Gottlieb; and Feeding America CEO Claire Babineaux-Fontenot.

Meet the Press with Chuck Todd: The guests on this week’s “MTP” are: White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro; Director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Dr. Tom Iglesgy; and Research Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Clint Watts.

The panel guests are: POLITICO Senior Washington Correspondent Anna Palmer; White House Correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Yamiche Alcindor; and NBC News White House Correspondent Peter Alexander.

State of the Union with Jake Tapper: Mr. Tapper’s guests are: Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services Alex Azar; Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI); Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA); and Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH).

House

Judas Priest- Epitaph

The Breakfast Club (The Longest Time)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

President Andrew Johnson survives a key vote at his Senate trial after his impeachment; First Oscars are presented; Actor Henry Fonda born; Singer Sammy Davis, Jr. and Muppets creator Jim Henson die.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

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Consumer Society

Or maybe not so much. In March and April the bottom dropped out of Retail.

Retail sales plunged 16.4 percent in April as coronavirus pandemic drives record decline
By Rachel Siegel and Abha Bhattarai, Washington Post
May 15, 2020

Retail sales plunged 16.4 percent in April, by far the biggest drop on record and another reflection of how severely the coronavirus pandemic continues to devastate the U.S. economy.

Data released Friday from the Commerce Department were lower than analysts had expected and were nearly double March’s revised decline of 8.3 percent. Spending at restaurants and bars fell by about half from a year ago, while clothing store sales were down 89 percent in the same period.

Consumers also pulled back on electronics, appliances, furniture and gasoline, and analysts say it could be years before spending inches back up to pre-pandemic levels.

“You’ve got the financial cloud over everybody’s head saying, ‘Hmm, do I really need this?,’” said Wendy Liebmann, chief executive of WSL Strategy Retail, a New York-based consultancy. “This double-barreled convergence of health and financial crises is going to keep people very cautious for the long haul.”

A rebound, she said, would be gradual. More than 20 million American abruptly lost their jobs in April, sending the national unemployment rate soaring to 14.7 percent, the highest level since the Great Depression.

Consumer spending, which typically drives 70 percent of the nation’s economy, remains largely hollowed out as Americans pull back on virtually every category of goods. The two exceptions were grocery stores, where sales rose 13 percent from a year ago, and online sales, which grew about 21 percent.

A growing number of states contend that easing restrictions on malls, restaurants, salons and other businesses is essential to rebooting the economy, even as health officials warn about the deadly threat of moving too quickly.

The pandemic has ushered in a wave of retail bankruptcies, with major chains like J. Crew and Neiman Marcus filing for Chapter 11 protection in recent weeks. Stage Stores — which operates 738 stores in 42 states under Palais Royal, Gordmans and other nameplates — said Monday it will liquidate hundreds of locations and search for a buyer.

“The destruction of retailers, both large and small, has been discussed for weeks but to see the actual impact on the sector is jaw dropping,” Mike Loewengart, managing director of investment strategy at E-Trade said in a note to clients.

Analysts said the list of retailers fighting for survival will only grow. Closures could have disproportionate effects on lower- and mid-tier shopping malls that faced uncertain futures even before the pandemic. For years, Americans shifted their shopping habits away from brick-and-mortar stores to embrace e-commerce offerings. Now, buying online if often the only — or safest — option.

Sung Won Sohn, professor of finance and economics at Loyola Marymount University, said that even as the economy gradually reopens in May, other factors could continue to thwart retail sales. Scores of laid off workers will not return to their jobs anytime soon. Many of the worst-hit industries, like airlines, hotels and theaters, will have to slash capacity to uphold social distancing guidelines and swallow the sales cost.

“There will be massive bankruptcies of small businesses, a large source of jobs in America,” Sohn said. “The behavioral response from the shellshocked consumers is to hunker down and save as much as they can lest the situation gets worse.”

I suggest you go long on Equities. Bet the Farm Clavin.

Pondering the Pundits

Pondering the Pundits” is an Open Thread. It is a selection of editorials and opinions from around the news media and the internet blogs. The intent is to provide a forum for your reactions and opinions, not just to the opinions presented, but to what ever you find important.

Thanks to ek hornbeck, click on the link and you can access all the past “Pondering the Pundits”.

Follow us on Twitter @StarsHollowGzt

Paul Krugman: Covid-19 Reality Has a Liberal Bias

Unfortunately, the virus doesn’t care about political spin.

On Tuesday, the U.S. government’s top experts warned that Covid-19 was by no means under control, and that premature easing of social distancing could have disastrous consequences. As far as I can tell, their view is shared by almost all epidemiologists.

But they were shouting into the wind. Clearly, the Trump administration and its allies have already decided that we’re going to reopen the economy, never mind what the experts say. And if the experts are right and this leads to a new surge in deaths, the response won’t be to reconsider the policy, it will be to deny the facts.

Indeed, virus trutherism — insisting that Covid-19 deaths are greatly exaggerated and may reflect a vast medical conspiracy — is already widespread on the right. We can expect to see much more of it in the months ahead.

At one level, this turn of events shouldn’t surprise us. The U.S. right long ago rejected evidence-based policy in favor of policy-based evidence — denying facts that might get in the way of a predetermined agenda. Fourteen years have passed since Stephen Colbert famously quipped that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

At another level, however, the right’s determination to ignore the epidemiologists is politically reckless in a way previous denials of reality weren’t.

Charles M. Blow: States Keep Failing Black People

The great racial imbalance in Covid-19’s effect and the violent killings of black people are related.

The racially disproportionate effect of the Covid-19 crisis in this country and a recent rash of high-profile senseless killings of black people by the police and vigilantes may seem on their face unrelated.

But, in fact, they are related. The two phenomena have collided as a tragic reminder of how consistently and continuously states have failed black people in this country.

It is state policy — both criminal and health — that leaves black people exposed and vulnerable and with little recourse for safety or justice.

To be sure, the federal government has played a premier role in black oppression and discrimination from the beginning. The Constitution as originally written is a thoroughly racist document, with its three-fifths rule and the effective establishment of the Electoral College, a move to placate slave owners.

It was the federal government that allowed the Freedman’s Bank to fail and allowed Reconstruction to fail.

But during the civil rights movement, the federal government also became black people’s greatest guard against their greatest oppressors: the states. [..]

As John C. Austin recently wrote for the Brookings Institution:

“The pandemic is blowing away the illusion that racism in the North — manifested in practices such as redlining, deeded covenants and shifting public school boundaries when black children began to mingle with white children — was at least not as violent as the lynchings, fire hoses and fire bombings that characterized Southern racism. Almost overnight, the Covid-19 pandemic has turned historically institutionalized racism in the Midwest’s industrial cities into a murder weapon.”

Even when local mayors want to be more cautious to protect black populations, they are often overridden like the mayor of Atlanta was by the governor of Georgia.

People like to talk about “the system” at times like these, as if it is one unit with equal power to inflict pain. But it isn’t. Some levels have far more impact than others. The states in these United States are now the primary instruments of black pain and oppression.

Eugene Robinson: The United States is a country to be pitied

Only a handful of nations on Earth have arguably done a worse job of handling the coronavirus pandemic than the United States. What has happened to us? How did we become so dysfunctional? When did we become so incompetent?

The shocking and deadly failures by President Trump and his administration have been well documented — we didn’t isolate, we didn’t test, we didn’t contact trace, we waited too long to lock down. But Trump’s gross unfitness is only part of the problem. The phrase “American exceptionalism” has always meant different things to different people — that this nation should be admired, or perhaps that it should be feared. Not until now, at least in my lifetime, has it suggested that the United States should be pitied.

No amount of patriotism or pride can change the appalling facts. The pandemic is acting as a stress test for societies around the world, and ours is in danger of failing. [.]

The European Union is working with the World Health Organization and other wealthy nations such as Japan and Saudi Arabia in a crash program to develop a covid-19 vaccine, with initial funding of $8 billion. The United States has decided to go it alone with its own vaccine program, “Operation Warp Speed.” In the past, one might have bet on U.S. ingenuity and drive to win the race. But given our failure in testing, would you still make that bet now? And why is there a race at all, rather than a U.S.-led global effort?

The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the depth of America’s fall from greatness. Ridding ourselves of Trump and his cronies in November will be just the beginning of our work to restore it.

Helaine Olen: Retirement in America is already uncertain. Republicans want to make it worse.

To a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. To a Republican, every crisis is an opportunity to cut benefits.

Not that they would put it that way, of course.

This past weekend, The Post reported on a proposal from a conservative think tank, floated to the White House as a way to limit the impact of novel coronavirus stimulus spending on the national debt. Americans made financially desperate by the pandemic could receive a $5,000 federal payment. The catch? The recipients would need to delay their future Social Security filing to pay it back.

The plan received a hearing from the Trump administration, where it has been dismissed because it doesn’t seem, in the words of The Post, “likely to advance given the political stakes,” and faced “skepticism” from the president himself. But it should have never gotten that far.

It’s worth taking a moment to remind readers that, from the very beginning, the Trump administration has played a disingenuous game when it comes to Social Security. Trump campaigned for president as a champion of the program, someone who would ensure that retirement benefits would never suffer a single cut. But even before he became president, his aides assured anyone who would listen that he didn’t really mean it. Trump himself gave the game away this past winter, admitting in a CNBC interview that he was “going to look” at entitlement reform — that’s Washington insider code for cutting Social Security and Medicare — at the end of the year, after the presidential election.

Amanda Marcotte: The pandemic exposes the truth: Right-wing “individualism” is just selfish garbage

“Every man is an island” was an alluring right-wing philosophy — until folks were marooned indefinitely at home

During Donald Trump’s daily press conference (and, wait — wasn’t he going to quit those?) on Wednesday, the president was unable to hide his irritation at coronavirus task force member Dr. Anthony Fauci, and pooh-poohed the latter’s concerns about re-opening schools and universities. [..]

The coronavirus has exposed this delusion of individualism for what it is. For one thing, the virus doesn’t care if you pop on a tricorner hat and declare yourself a rugged individual. It’ll infect you just as easily as it infects a person who stays home, wears a mask and pays their taxes without complaint. Individualism can’t stop the virus — only collective action can.

But on a deeper level, the virus has exposed the incoherence of the individualist ideology. Right now, the same people who fueled the Tea Party protests, including Trump himself, are out there insisting that the lockdowns end. Why? Well … because they miss the benefits of living in an interconnected society. They want their kids in school. They want to go to the mall or the gym or the hair salon. They want to use public spaces that are either directly funded by taxpayers or only possible because taxpayers pay for roads, utilities and other public infrastructure that make it possible to open stores, gyms and restaurants.

More to the point, the idiocy of this individualistic rhetoric is exactly the reason we can’t just return to normal life. The “every man for himself” philosophy is why Republicans resisted building up the public health infrastructure that could have responded to this crisis with the kind of mass testing and tracing needed to stop the spread. Even when it was clear the virus was spreading, Trump — due to laziness, but also due to his refusal to treat public health as a serious issue — didn’t do what was necessary to ramp up an emergency response.

Obama’s words about how “you didn’t build that” now feel less like an admonishment and more like a warning. Conservatives have rejected the idea that we’re all in this together. Because of the extreme social and political negligence that provoked, they’re now losing the benefits of living a society that they pretended they didn’t want and didn’t even notice. “Every man is an island” sounds like a romantic notion until you actually have to live that way, locked up in your house and unable to interact meaningfully with other people in public spaces. Too bad they had to ruin it for the rest of us, but that, of course, is just more proof that we’re all in this together.

Cartnoon

lindybeige on more things that are different between the UK and the US.

Regime Change

What makes it odd is The Lancet is a very old and well respected Medical Journal that doesn’t normally take partisan positions.

Reviving the US CDC
The Lancet
May 16, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen in the USA with 1·3 million cases and an estimated death toll of 80,684 as of May 12. States that were initially the hardest hit, such as New York and New Jersey, have decelerated the rate of infections and deaths after the implementation of 2 months of lockdown. However, the emergence of new outbreaks in Minnesota, where the stay-at-home order is set to lift in mid-May, and Iowa, which did not enact any restrictions on movement or commerce, has prompted pointed new questions about the inconsistent and incoherent national response to the COVID-19 crisis.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the flagship agency for the nation’s public health, has seen its role minimised and become an ineffective and nominal adviser in the response to contain the spread of the virus. The strained relationship between the CDC and the federal government was further laid bare when, according to The Washington Post, Deborah Birx, the head of the US COVID-19 Task Force and a former director of the CDC’s Global HIV/AIDS Division, cast doubt on the CDC’s COVID-19 mortality and case data by reportedly saying: “There is nothing from the CDC that I can trust”. This is an unhelpful statement, but also a shocking indictment of an agency that was once regarded as the gold standard for global disease detection and control. How did an agency that was the first point of contact for many national health authorities facing a public health threat become so ill-prepared to protect the public’s health?

(F)unding to the CDC for a long time has been subject to conservative politics that have increasingly eroded the agency’s ability to mount effective, evidence-based public health responses. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration resisted providing the sufficient budget that the CDC needed to fight the HIV/AIDS crisis. The George W Bush administration put restrictions on global and domestic HIV prevention and reproductive health programming.

The Trump administration further chipped away at the CDC’s capacity to combat infectious diseases. CDC staff in China were cut back with the last remaining CDC officer recalled home from the China CDC in July, 2019, leaving an intelligence vacuum when COVID-19 began to emerge. In a press conference on Feb 25, Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, warned US citizens to prepare for major disruptions to movement and everyday life. Messonnier subsequently no longer appeared at White House briefings on COVID-19. More recently, the Trump administration has questioned guidelines that the CDC has provided. These actions have undermined the CDC’s leadership and its work during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Administration is obsessed with magic bullets—vaccines, new medicines, or a hope that the virus will simply disappear. But only a steadfast reliance on basic public health principles, like test, trace, and isolate, will see the emergency brought to an end, and this requires an effective national public health agency. The CDC needs a director who can provide leadership without the threat of being silenced and who has the technical capacity to lead today’s complicated effort.

The Trump administration’s further erosion of the CDC will harm global cooperation in science and public health, as it is trying to do by defunding WHO. A strong CDC is needed to respond to public health threats, both domestic and international, and to help prevent the next inevitable pandemic. Americans must put a president in the White House come January, 2021, who will understand that public health should not be guided by partisan politics.

So basically it’s a race to the death. Fascinating drama.

The Breakfast Club (Essence)

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

This Day in History

Alabama Gov. George Wallace shot on presidential campaign trail; Newly-founded Israel attacked by Arab neighbors; The U.S. Supreme Court breaks up Standard Oil.; Country singer June Carter Cash dies.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

The essence of good government is trust.

Kathleen Sebelius

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Prince Prospero’s Party

And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.

After Wisconsin court ruling, crowds liberated and thirsty descend on bars. ‘We’re the Wild West,’ Gov. Tony Evers says.
By Meagan Flynn, Washington Post
May 14, 2020

“We’re the Wild West,” Evers told MSNBC’s Ali Velshi on Wednesday night, reacting to the state Supreme Court’s ruling and the scenes of people partying in bars all across Wisconsin. “There are no restrictions at all across the state of Wisconsin. … So at this point in time … there is nothing that’s compelling people to do anything other than having chaos here.”

Chaos it was.

Right after the Supreme Court’s conservative majority issued a 4-to-3 ruling, invalidating the extension of the stay-at-home order issued by Evers’s appointed state health chief, the Tavern League of Wisconsin instructed its members to feel free to “OPEN IMMEDIATELY!”

With Evers’s statewide orders kaput, local health authorities scrambled to issue or extend citywide or countywide stay-at-home orders, creating a hodgepodge of rules and regulations all across the state that are bound to cause confusion, not to mention some traffic across county lines. It’s a situation unlike any in the United States as the pandemic rages on. But most of all, Evers feared that the court’s order would cause the one thing he was trying to prevent: more death.

Wisconsin has seen more than 10,900 confirmed coronavirus cases and 421 deaths.

“When you have no requirements anymore, that’s a problem,” he said. “We’re just leaving it open. We’re going to have more cases. We’re going to have more deaths. And it’s a sad occasion for the state. I can’t tell you how disappointed I am.”

The state’s high court sided Wednesday with Republican legislators who sued the Evers administration in April, finding that the Democratic governor “cannot rely on emergency powers indefinitely” as the pandemic drags on for months. In a concurring opinion, Justice Rebecca Bradley cited Korematsu v. United States, in which the Supreme Court allowed the internment of Japanese Americans as a way to “remind the state that urging courts to approve the exercise of extraordinary power during times of emergency may lead to extraordinary abuses of its citizens.”

One conservative justice, Brian Hagedorn, joined the other two liberals in dissenting. Justice Rebecca Dallet wrote in her dissent, “This decision will undoubtedly go down as one of the most blatant examples of judicial activism in this court’s history. And it will be Wisconsinites who pay the price.”

The bar scene was crowded in counties apparently without immediate health orders to replace Evers’s.

At the Iron Hog Saloon in the town of Port Washington, drinks flowed but masks and social distancing were lacking, WISN reported. The owner, Chad Arndt, said that he had put more cleaning protocols in place and that if people felt uncomfortable, they didn’t have to come and he would respect that. “I hope they respect my feelings [that] I would like to come out and I would like to start getting the economy going again,” he said.

To one customer, Gary Bertram, it’s a simple decision. “If people want to quarantine, quarantine. If you don’t want to quarantine, don’t quarantine. Go out and do what you normally do,” he told WISN.

It isn’t that simple, of course. Public health authorities have repeatedly warned that those who choose to ignore social distancing and go about their lives may end up spreading the disease — to people who aren’t drinking at bars but just visiting a grocery store.

Other bars that reopened tried to take more precautions. At Jake’s Supper Club in Menomonie, the high tables were spaced farther apart, staff was required to wear face masks, and hand sanitizer stations were set up, owner Peter Gruetzmacher told WQOW.

The biggest challenge, he said, will be keeping the regulars at the required distance, two bar stools away, when “they all kind of consider themselves family.”

The Tavern League of Wisconsin still encouraged bars to follow the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation’s reopening guidelines, which include making employees wear masks, strengthening sanitation policies and keeping groups of customers six feet away from each other. The league’s executive director, Pete Madland, told Fox 11 that he welcomed the ruling because it helped struggling bars.

“They’re seeing their livelihoods melt away … and they were helpless to do anything about it,” Madland said.

Nick’s on 2nd couldn’t immediately be reached for comment early Thursday morning about its policies.

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