Apr 14 2020

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

Neal K. Katyal: It’s the Worst Possible Time for Trump to Make False Claims of Authority

He does not have “total” authority over states.

I teach my law students that every so often in the law, the best way to understand the veracity of a claim is just to say it out loud. They got a great example of this on Monday when President Trump made a contribution to the legal lexicon: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s got to be. It’s total.”

In terms that would even have made President Richard Nixon blush, our commander-in-chief sounded more like the leader of some tinpot dictatorship than of the United States.

The design of our Constitution was designed to rebel against such arrogation of power. Separation of powers and federalism aren’t fusty concepts designed to please rebellious aristocrats; they are the living embodiment of our founders’ desire to divide and check power — not vest “total” “authority” in one person, no matter how wise that person may be. [..]

You’ve heard this before — Mr. Trump is asserting powers way beyond the Constitution. So why is this night different from all other nights? Consider four things.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump says his “authority is total” — while he blames everyone else for his failures

In Trump’s evil, incoherent theory of government, he has all the power — but none of the responsibility

Donald Trump is melting down. Well, more than usual, anyway. Berating America in a tone that evokes Eric Cartman of “South Park,” Trump lashed out on Monday at anyone who would dare question his A-THOR-ATE-I. Monday’s propaganda session disguised as a “coronavirus briefing” was wilder than usual, with Trump going well beyond his already megalomaniacal daily  rants, subjecting the viewers at home and the beleaguered White House reporters to a mendacious propaganda video that attempted to spin his wild failures into some story of great success. And throughout this meltdown, Trump was asserting his godlike powers in the same tone used to lecture trophy wives about how they need to show a little more gratitude to the man whose ill-gotten gains keep them flush with golden toilets.

“When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total, and that’s the way it’s got to be,” Trump declared to the reporters who risk their health to show up daily to bear witness to a character who makes Emperor Palpatine’s on-screen villainy seem subtle and underplayed.  [..]

But this isn’t just about Trump lying, which comes to the Pussy-Grabber-In-Chief more naturally even than camera-hogging. That particular lie — that he holds full power over everyone and everything — cuts directly against another one that Trump has been hiding behind throughout this coronavirus crisis and the economic fallout: That all this is someone else’s fault.

From the moment Trump realized he couldn’t just bullshit people into believing the coronavirus was a hoax, he has focused his energies almost entirely on trying to find someone else to pin the blame on, since he holds entirely blameless, as he does for all the other times he’s failed as a leader, a businessman, a husband and father, and a human being. While other presidents might put at least some effort into helping Americans get through this tragedy — try to imagine the tone Barack Obama would have struck — Trump’s singular focus is on arguing that this is not his fault

Jamelle Bouie: Why Coronavirus Is Killing African-Americans More Than Others

Higher rates of infection and death among minorities demonstrate the racial character of inequality in America.

We know that Covid-19 is killing African-Americans at greater rates than any other group. You can see this most clearly in the South. In Louisiana, blacks account for 70 percent of the deaths but 33 percent of the population. In Alabama, they account for 44 percent of the deaths and 26 percent of the population. South Carolina and Georgia have yet to release information on death disparities, but in both states blacks are more likely to be infected than whites. The pattern exists in the North as well, where African-American populations in cities like Chicago and Milwaukee have high infection and death rates.

Federal officials have tied these disparities to individual behavior — the surgeon general of the United States, Jerome Adams, who is African-American, urged blacks and other communities of color to “avoid alcohol, tobacco and drugs” as if this was a particular problem for those groups. In truth, black susceptibility to infection and death in the coronavirus pandemic has everything to do with the racial character of inequality in the United States.

To use just a few, relevant examples, black Americans are more likely to work in service sector jobs, least likely to own a car and least likely to own their homes. They are therefore more likely to be in close contact with other people, from the ways they travel to the kinds of work they do to the conditions in which they live.

Today’s disparities of health flow directly from yesterday’s disparities of wealth and opportunity. That African-Americans are overrepresented in service-sector jobs reflects a history of racially segmented labor markets that kept them at the bottom of the economic ladder; that they are less likely to own their own homes reflects a history of stark housing discrimination, state-sanctioned and state-sponsored. And if black Americans are more likely to suffer the comorbidities that make Covid-19 more deadly, it’s because those ailments are tied to the segregation and concentrated poverty that still mark their communities.

 
Eugene Robinson: President Trump can’t reopen the country. Only we can do that.

Controversy over when President Trump will “reopen the country” is nothing more than another ploy to spice up his tiresome reality-show drama. Trump won’t determine when it’s safe again for us to mingle again at work and play. We will.

Trump said Friday that when to restart what he called “the greatest economy ever created” will be “by far the biggest decision of my life.” He claimed Monday in a tweet that when to “open up the states . . . is the decision of the president, for many good reasons.” He pretends there is a switch and that he alone can flick it, but of course no such thing exists. This crisis is not all about him. It’s all about us.

For one thing, Trump is not the one who decided to shut everything down: He never issued a nationwide stay-at-home order. We are sequestered and socially distanced because our governors and mayors told us we needed to be. And we continue housebound, wearing masks when we infrequently venture outside and dutifully scrubbing our hands when we return, because we understand the need to protect our health and that of others. I’d love it if everything suddenly went back to normal. But I know that isn’t possible.

Imagine that Trump were to unilaterally set a date certain for social distancing to end — May 1, say, or May 15, or perhaps June 1. Imagine, improbably, that all state and local officials went along. What would you do?

Katrina vanden Heuvel: This crisis has created a new and profound sense of solidarity

In the 1960s, organizers from the United Farm Workers needed a way to communicate across language barriers. They created the “unity clap” — a tradition that’s used by activists, community organizers and labor movements to this day. It starts out slow, like a heartbeat, and picks up speed as more and more people join in, until everyone is clapping together. Most of the farm workers decades ago were Latinx and Filipino; many didn’t speak English — let alone each other’s languages. But all of them understood the meaning of the clap.

Every night recently, from my apartment in Manhattan, I can hear New Yorkers join in a unity clap of our own: a standing ovation for the doctors, nurses, first responders, custodians, cooks and other health-care workers who are risking their lives to save ours.

This crisis has exposed many cruel weaknesses in our medical, political and economic systems. At the same time, it has generated a new and profound sense of solidarity. In the past few weeks, people around our city, our country and our world have gone to great lengths to support those around them.

Apr 14 2020

Nancy Pelosi in the News

Pelosi looks to seize Trump’s bully pulpit
By HEATHER CAYGLE and SARAH FERRIS, Poltico
04/14/2020

As President Donald Trump beams into American homes with his daily coronavirus briefings, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has decided the best way to counter him is to be everywhere — even if that means doing so from her San Francisco kitchen.

Almost daily, Pelosi pops up on one network or another — even cycling through the late-night talk show junket — dropping in for interviews from a computer propped up on a dining room table that sits just off her West Coast kitchen.

“He has the bully pulpit and that’s a good thing for a president to have. It’s a bad thing for the health of the country if the president is not speaking truth,” Pelosi said in an interview. “Our purpose is really to say how do we follow the science, the evidence, the data … that will take us down from this.”
…
And as a top negotiator in those trillion-dollar talks, Pelosi has worked to hold the line against Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, demanding to go bigger even if it meant delaying a deal for days as unemployment numbers and political pressure increased.

“When you’re in a war, your first priority is force protection, protecting the troops. Our front-line workers need the equipment they deserve,” Pelosi said of the ongoing negotiations on a private call with her caucus on Monday, according to multiple Democrats.

Pelosi lashed Trump for talking about rushing to reopen the economy — possibly as soon as May 1 — without evidence that the virus will have abated enough to ensure Americans are safe.

“During this period of reflection and the rest, I am really very afraid of what the president may do. He’s not learning from his past mistakes,” Pelosi told Democrats on the call. “He’s talking about reopening — and on the basis of what?”

Congressional stalemate deepens as Pelosi, Schumer say they won’t budge on coronavirus funding demands
By Erica Werner, Washington Post
April 13, 2020

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said Monday that they won’t agree to the Trump administration’s insistence on more money for small business loans unless their demands are met for additional funding for hospitals, state and local governments and food stamp recipients.
…
Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Schumer (D-N.Y.) also rejected suggestions from President Trump that the country could reopen quickly, saying “there is still not enough testing available to realistically allow that to happen.”

The back-and-forth between Mnuchin and the Democratic leaders on Monday followed a Saturday statement from congressional GOP leaders in which they, too, rejected the Democrats’ demands and showed no interest in negotiating.

The developments appeared to harden a stalemate on Capitol Hill over how or when the federal government will take further action to address the worsening economic impacts of the coronavirus, with millions newly unemployed and much commerce in the nation at a virtual standstill as the U.S. confronts recession conditions.

She should hang tough because Republicans are desperate to avoid a declining Economy headed into November even though at this point it’s inevitable. Also they’ve already started to cheat on Phase 3, why indulge them? Clawbacks and restrictions! More Aid to States to shore up Budgets and to the Poor who don’t have any money and can’t get any.

‘Almost sinful’: Pelosi skewers Trump over threats to reopen country too soon
By SARAH FERRIS and HEATHER CAYGLE, Politico
04/13/2020

Speaker Nancy Pelosi lashed President Donald Trump during a private call with her caucus Monday, saying he was putting Americans in grave danger if he rushes to reopen the economy at the end of this month.

Pelosi sharply criticized Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak, telling Democrats it was “almost sinful” how his administration had failed to live up to promises to make testing available to all Americans and quickly address the mask, gown and glove supply shortage in hospitals across the country.

“The more misrepresentations he puts out there, the more it obscures the truth,” Pelosi told Democrats, according to multiple sources on the call. “We have to insist upon the truth — what they’re saying is not knowledge, is not facts, is not real.”

Pelosi returned to her criticism of Trump multiple times during the two-hour call, saying without a plan for adequate testing and contact tracing, it would be impossible for the president to guarantee Americans a safe reentry into their normal life.

The California Democrat said it was up to Democrats to speak out about the administration’s missteps, calling the lack of national testing and protective equipment for medical providers months after the first U.S. coronavirus case “a complete failure.”

“And we cannot let them lie about it,” she added, according to Democrats on the call.

Apr 14 2020

Cartnoon

Only as bad as the Flu.

Apr 14 2020

Cold Open

Fake News

Not News But True

As an aside, he’s suing one of the TV Stations that aired it but not Priorities USA.

Trump Campaign Sues Small Wisconsin TV Station Over Critical Super PAC Ad
By Matt Shuham, Talking Points Memo
April 13, 2020

The owner of a northern Wisconsin television station is stumped as to why the President’s reelection campaign is suing over a critical super PAC ad it ran.

“Why they selected my little station in Northern Wisconsin, I have no idea,” Rockfleet Broadcasting President R. Joseph Fuchs told TPM on the phone Monday. Rockfleet owns three stations including WJFW-TV, the NBC affiliate in Rhinelander, Wisconsin targeted by the campaign.

Trump’s slim victory in Wisconsin in 2016 was key for his ultimate edge in the Electoral College against Hillary Clinton.

Now, his campaign is suing the TV station there over an ad that’s gone viral in recent weeks, from the Democratic-aligned super PAC Priorities USA. Last month, the campaign said it’d sent “cease-and-desist” letters to stations in several key swing states over the ad.

Dave Heller, deputy director of the Media Law Resource Center, told TPM it seemed likely that the Trump campaign was sending a “shot across the bow to other local television stations” by suing WJFW rather than the super PAC that paid to air the ad.

“It’s really a very risky area to go into, to be asking courts to subject every statement back-and-forth between candidates to the standards of a defamation suit,” Heller said.
…
Splicing two separate bits of audio together, the ad quotes Trump as saying at a campaign rally, “The coronavirus … this is their new hoax.”

Trump contends he was referring to Democrats’ effort to criticize his handling of the pandemic as a “hoax” — not the virus itself.

“Absent the deceitful alteration of the audio, it is clear that ‘this’ does not refer to the coronavirus and instead refers directly to the Democrats’ politicization of the pandemic,” the suit alleges.

Heller, of the Media Law Resource Center, said it may prove difficult for the campaign to make its case if the suit ever goes to trial.

“Obviously, broadcasters and news publishers try as best they can to point out when the candidates are not being truthful or are saying false statements,” Heller said. “But that’s a far different proposition from saying, ‘Oh, well, you broadcast something that may be false, therefore you’re responsible for defamation damages.’”
…
Rather than targeting the super PAC behind the ad, the Trump campaign said in a press release on its cease-and-desist letter last month that it was targeting “local television stations” in the key swing states where it was running: “Florida, Michigan, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.”

In a statement Monday, Priorities USA Chairman Guy Cecil said Trump “doesn’t want voters to hear the truth and he’s trying to bully TV stations into submission.”

“We will never stop airing the facts and holding the president accountable for his actions,” Cecil said.

So there was that, and also the piece in The New York Times I alluded to Sunday.

“Any way you cut it, this is going to be bad,” a senior medical adviser at the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Carter Mecher, wrote on the night of Jan. 28, in an email to a group of public health experts scattered around the government and universities. “The projected size of the outbreak already seems hard to believe.”

I like to do my Doom early, gets it out of the way.

It was, I understand, a horror show from start to finish.

Wounded by media scrutiny, Trump turned a briefing into a presidential tantrum
by David Smith, The Guardian
Tue 14 Apr 2020

Donald Trump, starved of campaign rallies, Mar-a-Lago weekends and golf, and goaded by a bombshell newspaper report, couldn’t take it any more. Years of accreted grievance and resentment towards the media came gushing out in a torrent. He ranted, he raved, he melted down and he blew up the internet with one of the most jaw-dropping performances of his presidency.

This was, as he likes to put it, “a 10”.

Trump’s Easter had evidently been ruined by a damning 5,500-word New York Times investigation showing that Trump squandered precious time in January and February as numerous government figures were sounding the alarm about the coronavirus.

With more than 23,000 American lives lost in such circumstances, some presidents might now be considering resignation. Not Trump. He arrived in the west wing briefing room determined to tell the world, or at least his base, that he was not to blame. Instead it was a new and bloody phase of his war against the “enemy of the people”: the media. Families grieving loved ones lost to the virus were in for cold comfort here.

A CNN chyron is a worth a thousand words: “Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes”; “Trump uses task force briefing to try and rewrite history on coronavirus response”; “Trump melts down in angry response to reports he ignored virus warnings”; “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session”.

The thin-skinned president lashed out at reporters, swiped at Democrat Joe Biden and refused to accept that he had put a foot wrong. “So the story in the New York Times is a total fake, it’s a fake newspaper and they write fake stories. And someday, hopefully in five years when I’m not here, those papers are all going out of business because nobody’s going to read them,” Trump said.

With a dramatic flourish, the president ordered the briefing room lights dimmed. In a James Bond film, it would be the moment that poisoned gas is piped into the room. What happened wasn’t far off: a campaign-style montage of video clips, shown on screens set up behind the podium. There was footage of doctors saying in January that the coronavirus did not pose an imminent threat, Trump declaring a national emergency, and Democratic governors praising him for providing federal assistance.

Veteran White House reporters said they could never remember such a film being played in that room. It had been put together in a couple of hours by Dan Scavino, the director of social media at the White House, and a team in less than two hours, Trump explained. “We could give you hundreds of clips like that.”

Jon Karl of ABC News asked in consternation: “Why did you feel the need to do that?”

Trump replied: “Because we’re getting fake news and I like to have it corrected … Everything we did was right.”

Over and over, Trump highlighted his decision to ban some flights from China in late January before there were any virus-related deaths confirmed in the US – even though nearly 400,000 people travelled to the US from China before the restrictions were in place and 40,000 people have arrived there since.

The CBS News correspondent Paula Reid was having none of it and cut to the chase. “The argument is that you bought yourself some time,” she said “You didn’t use it to prepare hospitals. You didn’t use it to ramp up testing. Right now, nearly 20m people are unemployed. Tens of thousands of Americans are dead.”

Trump talked over her: “You’re so disgraceful. It’s so disgraceful the way you say that.”

Reid demanded: “How is this newsreel or this rant supposed to make people feel confident in an unprecedented crisis?”

Trump reverted to his China travel restrictions but Reid continued to push him on his inaction in February. Trump was unable to muster a reasonable response. It was a case study in how, when he loses an argument, his instinct is to attack the accuser. He trotted out his frayed, timeworn insult: “You know you’re a fake, your whole network the way you cover it is fake … That’s why you have a lower approval rating than probably you’ve ever had before times three.”

Democrats can only hope Biden was watching Reid for tips on how to debate the president.
…
The briefing went on for well over two hours. Even Fox News gave up before the end. Adam Schiff, the chair of the House intelligence committee, spoke for many when he tweeted: “Why do reputable news organizations carry these daily Trump press conferences live?

“They are filled with misinformation and propaganda. From the president himself, no less. The country would be far better served and informed if they used highlights later. Enough is enough.”

Oh, enough is never enough.

Trump claims ‘total authority’ and attacks media in chaotic coronavirus briefing
by Tom McCarthy, The Guardian
Tue 14 Apr 2020

Donald Trump has declared in a White House briefing that his “authority is total” when it comes to lockdown rules during the coronavirus pandemic, and he denied that he was weighing firing Dr Anthony Fauci, the country’s foremost infectious diseases expert who sits on the coronavirus task force.

After a weekend reprieve from presidential briefings that have been likened to Trump rallies for their uninterrupted flow of Trumpian id, the president returned to the lectern on Monday to deliver one of his most bizarre performances yet.

He played a campaign video produced by White House staff, in a possible violation of elections laws, that he said highlighted the media’s downplaying of the coronavirus crisis in the early stages of the pandemic.

He jousted with journalists who questioned a tweet he had sent earlier in the day, in which he claimed to have fiat power to override orders by state governors to close nonessential businesses and public spaces and encourage residents to shelter at home.

And Trump bristled at the suggestion that his power was restricted by the American federalist construct, which grants autonomy to the 50 states, and which he has repeatedly during the coronavirus crisis attempted to disrupt.

“When somebody is the President of the United States, the authority is total,” Trump said, referring to matters of public health and police powers inside the states. The assertion was dogpiled by legal analysts as a gross and wild misreading of the Constitution.

But Trump not just challenged on the airwaves and on Twitter – he was challenged in the room, including by Paula Reid of CBS News, who asked him what his administration did in the month of February, when the health department declared an emergency, to fight the virus.

In response he attacked the media’s “approval rating”.
…
Then Trump was confronted by CNN White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who asked him about his “authority is total” line.

“That is not true,” Collins said.

Trump spluttered in reply: “You know what we’re going to do? We’re going to write up papers on this. It’s not going to be necessary. Because the governors need us one way or the other. Because ultimately it comes with the federal government. That being said we’re getting along very well with the governors, and I feel very certain that there won’t be a problem.”

Has any governor agreed that you have the authority? Collins asked.

“I haven’t asked anybody. You know why? Because I don’t have to,” Trump said.

Who told you that the president has a total authority? Collins asked.

“Enough. Please,” said Trump.

See?

The whole spectacular meltdown

It’s not generally our policy to embed Pressers like this, but it’s right up there with Lester Holt in ‘Greatest Hits’.

Apr 14 2020

The Breakfast Club (Reason To Fight)

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 Abraham Lincoln assassinated; Titanic strikes iceberg; First videotape demonstrated; Loretta Lynn born.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.

Anne Sullivan

Continue reading

Apr 13 2020

These Lifeboats are so popular.

Oh yeah, that John Oliver piece.

Judith Kudlow’s Still Lifes (in this case it’s lifes not lives because we are talking about multiple paintings each of which is a Still Life) are all about Clothes. It could be Cats I suppose.

Or Dogs Playing Poker or Black Velvet Elvis.

Apr 13 2020

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

Robert Reich: America’s billionaires are giving to charity – but much of it is self-serving rubbish

Well-publicized philanthropy shows how afraid the super-rich are of a larger social safety net – and higher taxes

As millions of jobless Americans line up for food or risk their lives delivering essential services, the nation’s billionaires are making conspicuous donations – $100m from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for food banks, billions from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates for a coronavirus vaccine, thousands of ventilators and N95 masks from Elon Musk, $25m from the Walton family and its Walmart foundation. The list goes on.

On Wednesday, Forbes released its annual billionaires list, happily noting that “the planet’s wealthiest are helping the global effort to combat the Covid-19 outbreak”.

I don’t mean to be uncharitable, but much of this is self-serving rubbish.

First off, the amounts involved are tiny relative to the fortunes behind them. Bezos’s $100m, for example, amounts to about 11 days of his income.

Well-publicized philanthropy also conveniently distracts attention from how several of these billionaires are endangering their workers and, by extension, the public.

Ruth marcus: Will the Supreme Court let Texas’s latest assault on women’s rights proceed?

No constitutional right is absolute; the Constitution, we are told, is not a suicide pact. In a pandemic, otherwise sacrosanct rights must yield to the common good.

So, to prevent the spread of the virus, governors can order the cancellation of mass gatherings — even when those gatherings are religious services, so long as their edicts do not single out religion. Similarly, the Second Amendment right to bear arms would probably not prevent orders closing gun shops among other “non-essential” businesses during the pandemic, any more than the First Amendment would prohibit the shuttering of bookstores.

And in the archetypal case involving the power of public health authorities to prevent the spread of disease, the Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states can compel vaccination even over the objections of those who claim an unconstitutional “invasion” of their “individual liberty.”

But if pandemics can justify intrusions on constitutional rights, they cannot be employed as excuses for interfering with or eliminating them. And that, of course, is exactly what Texas is up to in its order prohibiting abortions during the pandemic.

Amanda Marcotte: Trump’s voters will never admit they were wrong — even in the face of national catastrophe

Trump’s fans will never admit they made a mistake — that’s the hill they’ll die on, and not just metaphorically

In the age of the coronavirus, with most of us locked away in our homes, we turn to numbers to get a sense of what the hell is happening in this country. Number of diagnosed cases of the novel coronavirus: 555,371, though experts believe the real number is far higher due to under-testing. Number of deaths: 22,056, though experts believe the real number is far higher because of people who die at home or have their deaths misclassified. Number of newly unemployed: 17 million, though experts believe it’s likely higher because so many laid-off workers were unable to file for unemployment. Unemployment rate: 13%, and there are concerns it could go as high or higher than the unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

There’s one number that’s holding steady, however, and it’s the number that may very well decide if we are looking at four more years of this hellscape or if we’ll get new leadership that actually takes competence in government seriously: Donald Trump’s approval rating. That hasn’t budged below its baseline of around 40 to 42%. The initial boost Trump got from the rally-round-the-flag effect during this crisis has pretty much evaporated. But so far, that baseline is as immovable as Trump is from a TV camera.

 
Charles M. Blow: The Brother Killer

Many factors make blacks, especially black men, particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus.

A few weeks ago, Hannah Sparks of The New York Post reported on “a morbid — and chillingly astute — new slang term for the coronavirus pandemic: boomer remover,” because the virus has proved particularly deadly for the elderly.

But, because it is also disproportionately deadly for men and for African-Americans, I worry about how it will affect black men in particular, and have come to use another chilling term to characterize it: a “brother killer.”

And I fear that the worst may be yet to come, at least until treatments are developed and a vaccine discovered. There are silent populations of black men, largely removed from public view and public consciousness, who will remain vulnerable long after we “open the country back up,” whatever that looks like, and return to some semblance of normalcy.

For these men, the devastating effects of this virus may be as much about pre-existing social conditions as pre-existing medical ones.

Jennifer Senior: The One Kind of Distancing We Can’t Afford

The only way to fight this pandemic is through identification with its victims, not deliberate estrangement from them.

Last week, within the space of just 24 hours, two friends of mine — one an I.C.U. nurse, the other an E.R. doctor — told me that they’d each watched a 50-year-old woman die of Covid-19.

I, too, am a 50-year-old woman. As I listened to their stories, I had to stifle the same unlovely impulse. “But did your patients have a pre-existing condition?” I wanted to ask. “Were they fighting cancer, were they smokers, were they already floridly unwell?”

Which is ridiculous, honestly. Even if their patients had a history of heart disease or were partial to Camels, they no more deserved to die a frightening and solitary death than anyone else.

But my reaction, I think, was fairly typical of this exceptional moment, when reminders of our own mortality are never more than a few paces from our conscious, clattering minds: We are silently building moats that separate ourselves from the dead.

It’s the other culturewide distancing campaign.

Apr 13 2020

The Destruction of Wealth

Let’s say you went out to the Market and bought a Million Dollars worth of Stock at the very Peak Price.

What happened?

Well, you gave someone some Money and in turn you received some Claim on the future Profits of a Company.

Now let’s say that almost instantly the Company goes out of Business. Your Claim is against future Profits of $0 and the Market won’t buy it.

Was that Wealth destroyed?

No, are you kidding? That guy who sold you the Stock is walking around with a Million Bucks in their pocket feeling pretty good about themselves. You just lost the same betting on Black. Sucks to be you.

But the truth is that you lost that Money the moment you put it on the table. You traded your nice fungible universally accepted Cash for your very real Claim on future Profits (now Valueless) and the Notional Value that the Stocks held based on the concept that there will be a Market where you can sell them and if not find a bigger Sucker than you, at least be able to mitigate the damage by selling at a Loss.

So when you hear these Gasbag Traders on CNBC (I trust you have the good taste to have blocked Faux entirely) lament about “Destruction of Wealth” they’re mostly having a Pity Party that they’ll have to work harder to Con the Marks.

Why do you think they call it the Mark(et)?

Apr 13 2020

Cartnoon

Words that are used very differently.

Apr 13 2020

The Breakfast Club (Unwell)

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

An explosion cripples Apollo 13 on its way to the Moon; President Thomas Jefferson born; Pope John Paul II visits a synagogue; Actor Sydney Poitier achieves an Oscar milestone; Golfer Tiger Woods wins the Masters for the first time.

Breakfast Tunes

Something to Think about over Coffee Prozac

We are all born mad. Some remain so.

Samuel Beckett

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