Donald Trump is threatening to move the Republican National Convention out of Charlotte, North Carolina unless he can get a guarantee from the governor the event will take place in the extravagant manner Trump craves.
It doesn't look like the guarantee can be made, since the folks overseeing the venue want contingency plans submitted by the RNC to demonstrate the Republicans can organize a safe convention in whatever conditions may exist at the end of August.
I doubt that's going to fly with the president.
He wants the big boy, the Full Monty, lots of red, white, and blue balloons, etc., not to mention throngs of loud, adoring people. He wants to cram 50,000 Republican lunatics into the Spectrum Center so he can hear their heartfelt chant: "Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!"
The state's opening-up rules currently allow 10 souls to congregate inside a building. I wonder if balloons count, for or against.
(Probably against. Folks dodging a barrage of balloons might collide with one another, creating a greater chance of infection.)
Maybe the president is hoping to wedge the convention into what may be a very small gap between the first and second waves of the pandemic. Or maybe just between surges of the first wave, the second wave not due for several more months, when it can join forces with seasonal flu.
Consider the timing. A little more than two months between the convention and the election. The Republican wave caused by their enthusiastic rally will have died out by then, along with a substantial number of high GOP mucky-mucks. The next wave, gathered up out of the crush at those well-attended funerals, would just be starting up.
The real death rush will crest as secondary and tertiary infections run their courses, along with their funerals, and so on.
Turns out a couple of traditional political conventions might just be the impetus to kick off the Second Wave.
(Crowded celebrations marking the Armistice at the end of the Great War may have ushered in the second wave of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. Of the three waves of infections that hit the US in 18 months, the second was by far the worst.)
Is Trump trying to wipe out the Republican elite? Along with his entire base? The man is pushing for full-on open country ASAP: schools, churches, retail businesses, bars and restaurants, you name it.
Give the people what they want, right?
(Well, the minority of the people, the folks who think wearing a mask in public is a case of political correctness and a sign of weakness. The majority of Americans have children and parents to worry about it. They want to go slow.)
As far as he can see, President Trump sets the tone for us all. Let the call go forth: The Pandemic is behind us! (VP Pence already predicted this for Memorial Day.) Now it's time to get your party on! Howl at the moon! Fire off all your guns at once!
We're back, baby!
Maybe we ought to think of it as a pre-Second Wave celebration. Get the ball rolling on the end of the world.
Remember when we used to think Kim Jong-un would be needed for that?
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Friday, May 15, 2020
OVERRATED
Yesterday, when Donald Trump visited a medical supply company in Allentown, PA, he made some interesting comments about testing. One thing we learned is that the president is ambivalent about testing.
He catches, he thinks, way too much flak over the failure of the federal government to produce enough tests. In fact, he says (quite often), this country tests more people than anybody else in the world.
(This is true, but misleading, because the real standard for testing is not the total number but the number of tests per capita.)
Trump says he doesn't get enough credit for all the testing, that folks are always clamoring for more and more tests. But it's a bit like he showed up at a house fire with a glass of water. It's nice to have some water to throw on the fire, but his contribution is simply not enough.
Oddly, though, in one sense he's right: Testing may not always be that valuable.
If a person finds himself in severe respiratory distress, it's time to visit a hospital. But since there is no specific treatment for covid-19, it doesn't matter if that person is given a test or not.
Except this: Because medical professionals are not protected by vaccines, they must take special precautions with folks who might have covid. For their own safety and the safety of others in the hospital.
The only way around this is to designate certain hospitals to treat pandemic-possible people. That way, you just assume everybody has covid and act accordingly. Let other hospitals deal with heart-attack patients and such.
The main drawback: Seasonal flu patients would find themselves lumped in with covid folks, increasing the chance they would contract that virus along with the others.
And die more often as a result.
But all of this is about testing potential covid patients when they come to the hospital short of breath. We're not out of those woods yet, but the new clamor for testing is not about this. It's about making it safe for folks to go back to work, to hit the mall, to resume normal life.
People want to know they are walking onto a factory floor populated by virus-negative workers. They want to know they won't get covid that day from work and bring it home to their children, their spouses, their parents and grandparents.
For that, you'll need to test everybody every morning and get the results before workers head to their stations to begin the day. And that will take a great deal more tests than can be administered today.
Which is why Trump is still getting flak for not producing enough tests.
Yesterday he said he thought tests were "overrated."
"When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases."
This is magical thinking at best.
But it's true: If we tested nobody for covid-19, we'd have no cases in this country. Sure, the virus would be everywhere, tearing things up, but we'd have no known covid cases.
Under these conditions, there might be no "stay-at-home" orders. The economy might not have taken a great hit. There would be no debate over when and how to re-open the country. It would still be open. And Donald Trump would be sailing along toward re-election.
(Maybe. The stock market might still have tanked, based on oil-price disputes between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Not to mention the covid mess all around the rest of the world.)
And while there would be none of that mess in the US (not officially), there would still be mountains of dead bodies stacked up all over the place. With no social distancing, we might get the one or two million deaths first predicted.
The good news: Trump would get what he described in the beginning—an invisible wave of "something" that would wash over the country ...pushing the corpses of our elderly (and others) out into the ocean.
Just get 'er done and move on!
Unless he's gone to the dark side of the conspiracy zone, suggesting the covid test literally causes covid-19.
Then he'd be faced with the most difficult decision of his presidency: Was covid-19 created by China or Barack Obama?
On the other hand, maybe it will turn out his "no tests, no cases" rhetoric was just one of his little jokes.
Ha, ha, very funny, Mr. President. Not at all tasteless.
But is this really the hill you want to die on?
He catches, he thinks, way too much flak over the failure of the federal government to produce enough tests. In fact, he says (quite often), this country tests more people than anybody else in the world.
(This is true, but misleading, because the real standard for testing is not the total number but the number of tests per capita.)
Trump says he doesn't get enough credit for all the testing, that folks are always clamoring for more and more tests. But it's a bit like he showed up at a house fire with a glass of water. It's nice to have some water to throw on the fire, but his contribution is simply not enough.
Oddly, though, in one sense he's right: Testing may not always be that valuable.
If a person finds himself in severe respiratory distress, it's time to visit a hospital. But since there is no specific treatment for covid-19, it doesn't matter if that person is given a test or not.
Except this: Because medical professionals are not protected by vaccines, they must take special precautions with folks who might have covid. For their own safety and the safety of others in the hospital.
The only way around this is to designate certain hospitals to treat pandemic-possible people. That way, you just assume everybody has covid and act accordingly. Let other hospitals deal with heart-attack patients and such.
The main drawback: Seasonal flu patients would find themselves lumped in with covid folks, increasing the chance they would contract that virus along with the others.
And die more often as a result.
But all of this is about testing potential covid patients when they come to the hospital short of breath. We're not out of those woods yet, but the new clamor for testing is not about this. It's about making it safe for folks to go back to work, to hit the mall, to resume normal life.
People want to know they are walking onto a factory floor populated by virus-negative workers. They want to know they won't get covid that day from work and bring it home to their children, their spouses, their parents and grandparents.
For that, you'll need to test everybody every morning and get the results before workers head to their stations to begin the day. And that will take a great deal more tests than can be administered today.
Which is why Trump is still getting flak for not producing enough tests.
Yesterday he said he thought tests were "overrated."
"When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases."
This is magical thinking at best.
But it's true: If we tested nobody for covid-19, we'd have no cases in this country. Sure, the virus would be everywhere, tearing things up, but we'd have no known covid cases.
Under these conditions, there might be no "stay-at-home" orders. The economy might not have taken a great hit. There would be no debate over when and how to re-open the country. It would still be open. And Donald Trump would be sailing along toward re-election.
(Maybe. The stock market might still have tanked, based on oil-price disputes between Russia and Saudi Arabia. Not to mention the covid mess all around the rest of the world.)
And while there would be none of that mess in the US (not officially), there would still be mountains of dead bodies stacked up all over the place. With no social distancing, we might get the one or two million deaths first predicted.
The good news: Trump would get what he described in the beginning—an invisible wave of "something" that would wash over the country ...pushing the corpses of our elderly (and others) out into the ocean.
Just get 'er done and move on!
Unless he's gone to the dark side of the conspiracy zone, suggesting the covid test literally causes covid-19.
Then he'd be faced with the most difficult decision of his presidency: Was covid-19 created by China or Barack Obama?
On the other hand, maybe it will turn out his "no tests, no cases" rhetoric was just one of his little jokes.
Ha, ha, very funny, Mr. President. Not at all tasteless.
But is this really the hill you want to die on?
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
MISSION IMPROBABLE
Donald Trump desperately wants to reopen the nation to business. He acknowledges there will be additional deaths directly related to this reopening, but says Americans are up for the challenge.
"We have to get back to work!"
In a recent podcast, Chris Christie points out this is war, and Americans know how to sacrifice in wartime.
Okay, fine.
But I find it unseemly for an American president to exhort his people to "fight and die" in a war with an invisible enemy if he stands to benefit personally from those deaths.
Trump says he expects to win in a landslide in 2020, because—as he has often said—everybody loves Trump. Far as he knows, he did a terrific job battling the coronavirus, and now that the war is all but over, he plans to reap the reward.
But his re-election trump card has always been the booming economy he's willing to take full credit for creating. (I'm pretty sure it would not go over very well with him to point out the economy was moving in that direction like a runaway freight train by the end of the Obama presidency.)
Realistically, after botching the covid-19 response so badly, Trump needs that wonderful economy to be on the rebound—big time—by November 3rd. And that can't happen unless folks crawl out of their holes and start to buy stuff at an unprecedented rate.
Trump needs a blindingly fast reopening and no second wave of the virus. And since he has no control of the second element, he has to push the first.
And maybe it is good for the country, despite an increase in deaths. Maybe it is worth it for folks to make that sacrifice.
But Donald Trump needs to take his personal payday off the table. He needs to make the so-called Shermanesque Statement.
Lyndon Johnson did it on March 31, 1968: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."
Mike Pence should make a similar statement.
In fact, I'd like to see the entire Republican party excuse itself from the 2020 presidential election. Think of it as atonement for the acquittal hoax.
Let Democrat Biden battle it out with Independent Sanders.
Yeah, right. Look, I'm not holding my breath waiting for Trump or any Republican to do the right thing.
The reopening of America will probably fizzle. The vast majority of folks don't want to risk infecting their children or losing whatever parent or grandparent they're still holding onto.
And Trump can't send troops into houses to drag reluctant citizens out and plop their butts down in a movie theater to see Mission Impossible 99: Bite the Big One.
Until there's a working vaccine—or herd immunity—nobody's going back to business as usual any time soon.
"We have to get back to work!"
In a recent podcast, Chris Christie points out this is war, and Americans know how to sacrifice in wartime.
Okay, fine.
But I find it unseemly for an American president to exhort his people to "fight and die" in a war with an invisible enemy if he stands to benefit personally from those deaths.
Trump says he expects to win in a landslide in 2020, because—as he has often said—everybody loves Trump. Far as he knows, he did a terrific job battling the coronavirus, and now that the war is all but over, he plans to reap the reward.
But his re-election trump card has always been the booming economy he's willing to take full credit for creating. (I'm pretty sure it would not go over very well with him to point out the economy was moving in that direction like a runaway freight train by the end of the Obama presidency.)
Realistically, after botching the covid-19 response so badly, Trump needs that wonderful economy to be on the rebound—big time—by November 3rd. And that can't happen unless folks crawl out of their holes and start to buy stuff at an unprecedented rate.
Trump needs a blindingly fast reopening and no second wave of the virus. And since he has no control of the second element, he has to push the first.
And maybe it is good for the country, despite an increase in deaths. Maybe it is worth it for folks to make that sacrifice.
But Donald Trump needs to take his personal payday off the table. He needs to make the so-called Shermanesque Statement.
Lyndon Johnson did it on March 31, 1968: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."
Mike Pence should make a similar statement.
In fact, I'd like to see the entire Republican party excuse itself from the 2020 presidential election. Think of it as atonement for the acquittal hoax.
Let Democrat Biden battle it out with Independent Sanders.
Yeah, right. Look, I'm not holding my breath waiting for Trump or any Republican to do the right thing.
The reopening of America will probably fizzle. The vast majority of folks don't want to risk infecting their children or losing whatever parent or grandparent they're still holding onto.
And Trump can't send troops into houses to drag reluctant citizens out and plop their butts down in a movie theater to see Mission Impossible 99: Bite the Big One.
Until there's a working vaccine—or herd immunity—nobody's going back to business as usual any time soon.
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