Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

America Needs to Know What Went Wrong

With the latest "good news" projections indicating between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans will die of COVID-19 before the pandemic is over - which assumes strict social distancing even as some states have imposed no lock down orders - Americans need to know what went so terribly wrong.  One will not get this answer listening to Donald Trump's statements during his daily news conferences which are all aimed at political spin.  Nor is his panel of experts inclined to provide the real story either as the members try to deal with a largely out of control situation.  As a consequence, some in Congress want a commission established to review how this disaster happened and, in the process, make sure the USA never again finds itself so unprepared.  Any investigation will likely find that much of the blame traces to the top of the Trump/Pence regime which tried to bury inconvenient facts and spin matters to assist Trump's re-election effort first and foremost.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the first stages of this effort.  Here are highlights:

When America has recovered from the coronavirus crisis and people are back to work, Rep. Adam B. Schiff thinks Congress should consider a 9/11-style independent commission to examine why the nation was so unprepared for the pandemic.

Schiff, a California Democrat, told me in an interview Monday that his staff has already started working on a discussion draft modeled after the 9/11 Commission, and that he would be talking about the possibility with others in Congress. And he said the House Intelligence Committee, which he chairs, has begun reviewing the committee’s intelligence materials on the pandemic.

“We will need to delay the work of the commission until the crisis has abated to ensure that it does not interfere with the agencies that are leading the response,” Schiff explained in an email. “But that should not prevent us from beginning to identify where we got it wrong and how we can be prepared for the next pandemic.”

A review of the Trump administration’s performance would find many negatives but also some pluses. President Trump’s public statements appeared to minimize the virus and its impact until recently. But the National Security Council staff, led by deputy Matthew Pottinger, a Chinese-speaking former Wall Street Journal correspondent in Beijing, was aggressive.

What accounts for the failure to translate this concern into action? One explosive issue in any inquiry would be whether Trump discounted intelligence warnings because of concerns about the impact of the virus on his reelection campaign. Indeed, the question implicates a broader set of concerns among Schiff and other critics about what they see as the politicization of intelligence, in particular Trump’s firing in February of Joseph Maguire and Andrew P. Hallman, the acting director of national intelligence and his deputy, respectively, and then the replacement of the top two officials at the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC).

Career officials fear that Richard Grenell, the acting DNI, is trying to shape intelligence that might challenge or embarrass Trump. “Grenell is a professional press spokesman,” said one senior retired intelligence officer, referring to Grenell’s stint as U.S. press spokesman at the United Nations during the George W. Bush administration. “Over the next six months, Trump wants someone [as DNI] who has his back.”

On March 19, just after the NCTC shake-up, Grenell received a previously undisclosed cautionary letter from Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.), the chairman and ranking minority member, respectively, of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The letter, as described by a Senate source, urged Grenell to consult with the committee before making further changes in the DNI’s office; to keep Congress fully informed about intelligence activities, as required by law; and to refrain from further personnel changes until Trump’s nominee for a permanent DNI had been confirmed or rejected by the Senate. Grenell responded briefly, the Senate source said.

Schiff fears that, as intelligence is politicized, career officers are becoming gun-shy. “I don’t think that there’s any question it’s affecting the work product of the intelligence community,” he told me. There’s less reporting to Congress, with fewer details, on issues that might embarrass Trump, such as election security, Schiff noted.

The coronavirus pandemic has some eerie similarities to 9/11. Trump certainly didn’t cause the virus, any more than President George W. Bush plotted Osama bin Laden’s attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. And Trump’s NSC laudably tried to ring the alarm. But did the White House “connect the dots” and take action that could have reduced the coronavirus damage?

The last thing America needs right now is more partisan squabbling. But when we’re back on our feet, the country needs to know what went wrong. The challenge, now as in 2001, is to prevent the next attack.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

History's Verdict on Trump Will be Devastating

A biographer of Donald Trump has a column at CNN which lays out what any sentient American not motivated by racism, religious extremism and bigotry in general ought to know, namely that Trump is a disaster as president and that history will be brutal in its assessment of him.  This is particularly true of his utterly incompetent handling of the coronavirus pandemic where all of his defining traits - narcissism, lack of empathy, rejection of experts and objective fact, and divisiveness - are on constant display.  Hopefully, history will judge him extremely harshly,  But history needs to be equally harsh in its judgment of those who voted for him and, worse yet, continue to support him. Good, moral people cannot support an individual like Trump and his supporters - especially evangelical Christians - have shown their moral bankruptcy to the world. Here are column excerpts:

In a crisis, all is revealed.  After a lifetime devoted to avoiding responsibility and accountability -- for his lies, his deceptions, his hype, and his cruelty -- President Donald Trump has met his match in the pandemic of 2020. His bluff and bluster are powerless as thousands of Americans die and the blame falls, in part, on his failure to heed the warnings and execute a robust national response. This occurred even though a pandemic playbook had been left behind by the Obama administration.

On one level, Trump's failure can be traced to his original lie: the false image he sold to the American people in order to hide his shortcomings. Never a competent manager of complex organizations -- witness his many bankruptcies -- Trump rose to fame pitching the illusion that he was a great businessman. As he sought the presidency he used counterattacks, lies, and skillful denials to avoid answering for his record and gain the White House.

As someone who has studied Trump for years, I thought it was inevitable that he would eventually reach a moment of reckoning as president. I couldn't have imagined that it would come with the catastrophic consequences now facing the nation. . . . . Trump's profound personal shortcomings -- deficiencies of his heart and mind -- helped bring us to this moment.

The first of Trump's weaknesses? His lack of emotional intelligence and empathy, which causes him to struggle to relate to human suffering. The developer who made tenants miserable so they would move out allowing him to build luxury condos, became the president who downplayed hurricane deaths in Puerto Rico, and now barely speaks of those stricken and killed by the coronavirus. Instead, he obsesses over TV ratings . . . .
 The second of Trump's deficiencies is a habit of mind that discounts expertise and elevates convenient opinions supported by cherry-picked sources of misinformation. Businessman Trump exhibited this willful ignorance when, for example, he said the scientific connection between asbestos exposure and disease was a matter of a conspiracy carried out by mobsters. Candidate Trump discounted the expertise of experts leading the war on terror. [I]t puts America's fate into the hands of a man who was incapable of learning even from his own aides. Faced with an enemy that is literally killing people he stayed true to form as he pushed an unproven coronavirus treatment that's still under scientific review. Ignorant as he can seem, [Trump] the President seems to sense that this moment will establish his reputation in perpetuity. He said as much last week when he observed that, "the history books will never forget" America's response to the coronavirus. What he did not mention, however, is that his response to the pandemic will be examined in minute detail -- it is this prospect, the prospect of accountability, that looms over him now. Until this crisis, Trump had avoided accountability with remarkable consistency. Born into astounding wealth, he avoided accountability by persuading creditors that he was too big to fail even after he ran businesses into the ground. In politics, he deflected accountability by blaming others, especially the press and Democrats, for problems that occurred on his watch. Historians will eventually write books detailing what journalists already know about the Trump administration's dereliction of duty when the pandemic hit. America's Covid-19 death toll now passes 2,800 and the caseload exceeds 157,200 cases, But through much of the time that the number of cases was growing, the White House offered no coherent national response to the crisis. No federal agency is rallying health care workers to move to hot spots where they are needed. Instead of assertively coordinating and distributing vital equipment, the administration is letting states, hospitals, and federal agencies compete against each other. Recently Trump introduced a bit of personal petulance to this dynamic, suggesting that governors who aren't sufficiently deferential should be ignored by the White House. [Trump's] The president's complaints about not being appreciated remind us that he takes everything personally and that his personal qualities of heartlessness and intellectual dishonesty will hobble his response to our suffering. Acutely attuned to his own feelings, he's so numb to the pain of others that he avoids talking about it. . . . . Likewise, he remains devoted to discounting reliable scientific information that shows things getting worse in favor of happy talk. Meanwhile, governors across the country are demonstrating what competence, empathy, and intelligence look like. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, for one, has used his televised briefings to offer accurate information and authentic human concern. . . . Where Trump repeats buzzwords and tries to sell himself as all-powerful, Cuomo demonstrates that he understands the pandemic and can communicate the facts. Cuomo has been reminding us that the worst of the crisis is just beginning. The same is true for history's assessment of President Trump. The coronavirus is immune to his manipulation and spin. It is the defining challenge of his presidency and of his life. Compared with other presidential crises, like the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina, it has occurred slowly, with ample warning, giving [Trump] the president many opportunities to act and, we see now, fail.
 The accounting will continue. And like the pandemic, it will be devastating.

Monday Male Beauty

Florida Pastor Arrested for Defying Social Distancing Ordinance

Howard-Browne.

Despite gubernatorial orders imposing social distancing measures and restrictions on gatherings of more than 10 people, mega-church pastors and scamvangelists like Jerry Falwell, Jr., have ignored the orders and held church services and gatherings that could increase the spread of coronavirus thereby putting the lunacy and social irresponsible nature of Christofascists on open display. In Texas, three pastors are challenging the constitutionality of a stay-at-home order issued by Texas officials in Harris County (which encompasses Houston).  The whining charlatans claim the mandate improperly tramples on individual freedoms by closing churches.  Their related bitch is that the order failed to designate gun stores “essential” businesses.  Of course, the real reason for their complaint is that they will miss out on collections at services if they comply with the order, showing once again that money is their true god.  Also of note is that among these pastors is notorious anti-LGBT activist and hate group leader Steven Hotze, who has compared LGBT individuals to murders, rapists, and pedophiles. 

Thankfully, in Florida one of this type of religious extremists in the Tampa area has been arrested for failure to comply with that state's ban on large gatherings. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the mega-church pastor who has ignored the ban on large gatherings for weeks now, endangering both his lemming like parishioners and the larger community.  Here are article highlights: 

You knew it had to transpire sooner or later: a religious leader claiming both spiritual and constitutional immunity from laws aimed at protecting people from COVID-19. As it happens, the first “martyr” to this dubious cause was a controversial Tampa pentecostal minister named Rodney Howard-Browne who has been defying official guidelines on protecting the members of his flock for weeks now. Here’s the Tampa Bay Times’ write-up of the arrest he deliberately provoked:

The pastor of a Tampa megachurch who held two services on Sunday for scores of worshipers was arrested Monday for violating a county order requiring residents to stay at home to limit the spread of coronavirus. Pastor Rodney Howard-Browne, co-founder of the River at Tampa Bay Church, turned himself in to the Hernando County jail and was booked on Hillsborough charges of unlawful assembly and violating quarantine orders during a public health emergency, jail records show.

He got sprung on bail immediately, and will likely use the incident for massive publicity purposes.

Howard-Browne encouraged personal contact and claimed his sanctuary contained “machines” that would “kill every virus in the place,” making it “the most sterile building in…all of America.” He is also, of course, arguing the local order he defied violated his religious liberty rights. . . .

Howard-Browne has also suggested those believers who fear the coronavirus are “pansies,” and as reported in the New York Times, has argued he’s fighting a global socialist conspiracy:

“Because the climate change narrative for global governance failed,” Mr. Howard-Browne said in a video of the [March 15] service, “they are using the World Health Organization to then come in and take over the control of nations.” He added, “There’s going to be forced vaccines” to “kill off many people.”

You might think Howard-Browne is cuckoo-for-Cocoa-Puffs and dismiss him as a fringe character. But he seems to have some friends in high places: He shared a photo to Facebook on July 11, 2017, as he stood over President Donald Trump with his hands on the president’s back. Vice President Mike Pence can be seen amongst the men in the group, with his head bowed in prayer.

If the spread of the infection could be limited to these pastors and their followers, a cynic might argue that it would be a good thing - Darwin's theory in action, if you will  - but they selfishly will be exposing others.  It is also disturbing that this type of lunatic has access to the White House.

More Sunday Male Beauty

Medical Expert Who Corrects Trump Targeted By the Far Right

The sickness of the far right in America is truly frightening.  In a time when the nation faces an extreme health threat and people are literally dying, many on the far right are attacking medical experts who, in their sick and warped view, criticize or challenge their "glorious leader," Donald Trump.  The embrace of ignorance and partisanship is stunning yet is in keeping with the Republican Party's descent into a body where ignorance is celebrated, unqualified individuals are appointed to positions because of their extreme ideology, and loyalty to a man who is loyal to no one. The latest preferred target is Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.  Speaking the truth and medically correct information is unacceptable to the Far right and Trump cult members. A piece in the New York Times looks at the right wing lie machine.  Here are excerpts:

At a White House briefing on the coronavirus on March 20, President Trump called the State Department the “Deep State Department.” Behind him, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dropped his head and rubbed his forehead.

Some thought Dr. Fauci was slighting the president, leading to a vitriolic online reaction. On Twitter and Facebook, a post that falsely claimed he was part of a secret cabal who opposed Mr. Trump was soon shared thousands of times, reaching roughly 1.5 million people.

A week later, Dr. Fauci — the administration’s most outspoken advocate of emergency measures to fight the coronavirus outbreak — has become the target of an online conspiracy theory that he is mobilizing to undermine the president.

That fanciful claim has spread across social media, fanned by a right-wing chorus of Mr. Trump’s supporters, even as Dr. Fauci has won a public following for his willingness to contradict the president and correct falsehoods and overly rosy pronouncements about containing the virus.

The anti-Fauci sentiment is being reinforced by posts from Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, a conservative group; Bill Mitchell, host of the far-right online talk show “YourVoice America”; and other outspoken Trump supporters such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who has falsely claimed to be the inventor of email.

The torrent of falsehoods aimed at discrediting Dr. Fauci is another example of the hyperpartisan information flow that has driven a wedge into the way Americans think. For the past few years, far-right supporters of President Trump have regularly vilified those whom they see as opposing him. Even so, the campaign against Dr. Fauci stands out because he is one of the world’s leading infectious disease experts . . .

It is the latest twist in the ebb and flow of right-wing punditry that for weeks echoed Mr. Trump in minimizing the threat posed by the coronavirus and arguably undercut efforts to alert the public of its dangers. . . . [right wing “news” outlets] now accuse Democrats and journalists of trying to use the pandemic to damage Mr. Trump politically.

“There seems to be a concerted effort on the part of Trump supporters to spread misinformation about the virus aggressively,” said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington who has studied misinformation.

The Trump administration has previously shown a distaste for relying on scientific expertise, such as when dealing with climate change. But misinformation campaigns during a pandemic carry a unique danger because they may sow distrust in public health officials when accurate information and advice are crucial, said Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor at Syracuse University who teaches digital ethics.

“What this case will show is that conspiracy theories can kill,” she said.

Ms. Phillips, the Syracuse assistant professor, said the campaign was part of a long-term conspiracy theory propagated by Mr. Trump’s followers.

“Fauci has just been particularly prominent,” she said. “But any public health official who gets cast in a conspiratorial narrative is going to be subject to those same kinds of suspicions, the same kinds of doubt.”

On Thursday, he joined a 30-minute Instagram Live discussion about the coronavirus hosted by the National Basketball Association star Stephen Curry.

In the session, Dr. Fauci, with a miniature basketball hoop behind him, conveyed the same message that he had said for weeks about the outbreak. “This is serious business,” he said. “We are not overreacting.”

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

The Missing 6 Weeks: How Trump Failed the Biggest Test

Yesterday Donald Trump inflicted himself on Norfolk, Virginia, just across the harbor from where I sit.  Trump visited Norfolk for the photo op of the Navy hospital ship Comfort casting off to head to New York City.  Trump desperately wants to remain the center of the news - such is what happens when one is a malignant narcissistic - and wants to rewrite history to hide the reality that when leadership was needed back in January, 2020, he miserably failed the test,  Rather that act boldly when the first case of coronaviris appeared in the USA, Trump equivocated and lied, all standard  mode of operation for a man who cares about no one but himself.  Norfolk and the Navy needed Trump in town like a hole in the head but none of that mattered.  It was all about the photo op for the narcissist.  A long piece in The Guardian (it is a must read) looks at Trump's massive failure when it counted most.  The lesson?  Do not elect a reality TV personality to hold a critically important position.   Every American who voted for Trump due to his pandering to their prejudices, racism and bigotry shares a responsibility for the disaster that continues to unfold.  Here are article excerpts: 

When the definitive history of the coronavirus pandemic is written, the date 20 January 2020 is certain to feature prominently. It was on that day that a 35-year-old man in Washington state, recently returned from visiting family in Wuhan in China, became the first person in the US to be diagnosed with the virus.

On the very same day, 5,000 miles away in Asia, the first confirmed case of Covid-19 was reported in South Korea. The confluence was striking, but there the similarities ended.

In the two months since that fateful day, the responses to coronavirus displayed by the US and South Korea have been polar opposites.

One country acted swiftly and aggressively to detect and isolate the virus, and by doing so has largely contained the crisis. The other country dithered and procrastinated, became mired in chaos and confusion, was distracted by the individual whims of its leader, and is now confronted by a health emergency of daunting proportions.

Within a week of its first confirmed case, South Korea’s disease control agency had summoned 20 private companies to the medical equivalent of a war-planning summit and told them to develop a test for the virus at lightning speed. A week after that, the first diagnostic test was approved and went into battle, identifying infected individuals who could then be quarantined to halt the advance of the disease.

Some 357,896 tests later, the country [South Korea] has more or less won the coronavirus war. On Friday only 91 new cases were reported in a country of more than 50 million.

The US response tells a different story. Two days after the first diagnosis in Washington state, Donald Trump went on air on CNBC and bragged: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming from China. It’s going to be just fine.”

A week after that, the Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by two former top health policy officials within the Trump administration under the headline Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic. Luciana Borio and Scott Gottlieb laid out a menu of what had to be done instantly to avert a massive health disaster.

It was not until 29 February, more than a month after the Journal article and almost six weeks after the first case of coronavirus was confirmed in the country that the Trump administration put that advice into practice. Laboratories and hospitals would finally be allowed to conduct their own Covid-19 tests to speed up the process.

Those missing four to six weeks are likely to go down in the definitive history as a cautionary tale of the potentially devastating consequences of failed political leadership. Today, 86,012 cases have been confirmed across the US, pushing the nation to the top of the world’s coronavirus league table – above even China.

More than a quarter of those cases are in New York City, now a global center of the coronavirus pandemic, with New Orleans also raising alarm. Nationally, 1,301 people have died.

Most worryingly, the curve of cases continues to rise precipitously, with no sign of the plateau that has spared South Korea.

“The US response will be studied for generations as a textbook example of a disastrous, failed effort,” Ron Klain, who spearheaded the fight against Ebola in 2014, told a Georgetown university panel recently. “What’s happened in Washington has been a fiasco of incredible proportions.”

[T]he White House had all the information it needed by the end of January to act decisively. Instead, Trump repeatedly played down the severity of the threat, blaming China for what he called the “Chinese virus” and insisting falsely that his partial travel bans on China and Europe were all it would take to contain the crisis.

“We didn’t use that time [the six week period] optimally, especially in the case of testing,” said William Schaffner, an infectious diseases specialist at Vanderbilt University medical center. “We have been playing reluctant catch-up throughout.”

As Schaffner sees it, the stuttering provision of mass testing “put us behind the eight-ball” right at the start. “It did not permit us, and still doesn’t permit us, to define the extent of the virus in this country.”

In the absence of sufficient test kits, the US Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) initially kept a tight rein on testing, creating a bottleneck. “I believe the CDC was caught flat-footed,” was how the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, put it on 7 March. “They’re slowing down the state.”

The CDC’s botched rollout of testing was the first indication that the Trump administration was faltering as the health emergency gathered pace. Behind the scenes, deep flaws in the way federal agencies had come to operate under Trump were being exposed.

In 2018 the pandemic unit in the national security council – which was tasked to prepare for health emergencies precisely like the current one – was disbanded. . . . . Disbanding the unit exacerbated a trend that was already prevalent after two years of Trump – an exodus of skilled and experienced officials who knew what they were doing.

“There’s been an erosion of expertise, of competent leadership, at important levels of government,” a former senior government official told the Guardian.

“Over time there was a lot of paranoia and people left and they had a hard time attracting good replacements,” the official said. “Nobody wanted to work there.” . . . . It was hardly a morale-boosting gesture when Trump proposed a 16% cut in CDC funding on 10 February – 11 days after the World Health Organization had declared a public health emergency over Covid-19.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the diagnostic tests and will control any new treatments for coronavirus, has also shown vulnerabilities. The agency recently indicated that it was looking into the possibility of prescribing the malaria drug chloroquine for coronavirus sufferers, even though there is no evidence it would work and some indication it could have serious side-effects.

The decision dismayed experts, given that Trump has personally pushed the unproven remedy on a whim. It smacked of the wave of anti-science sentiment sweeping federal agencies under this presidency.

As the former senior official put it: “We have the FDA bowing to political pressure and making decisions completely counter to modern science.”

Trump has designated himself a “wartime president”. But if the title bears any validity, his military tactics have been highly unconventional. He has exacerbated the problems encountered by federal agencies by playing musical chairs at the top of the coronavirus force.

On 24 February, Trump claimed “the coronavirus is very much under control in the USA”. The next day, Nancy Messonnier, the CDC’s top official on respiratory diseases, took the radically different approach of telling the truth, warning the American people that “disruption to everyday life might be severe”.

Trump was reportedly so angered by the comment and its impact on share prices that he shouted down the phone at Messonnier’s boss, the secretary of health and human services, Alex Azar.

“Messonnier was 100% right. She gave a totally honest and accurate assessment,” Konyndyk told the Guardian. And for that, Trump angrily rebuked her department. “That sent a very clear message about what is and isn’t permissible to say.”

Konyndyk recalls attending a meeting in mid-February with top Trump administration officials present in which the only topic of conversation was the travel bans. That’s when he began to despair about the federal handling of the crisis.

“I thought, ‘Holy Jesus!’ Where’s the discussion on protecting our hospitals? Where’s the discussion on high-risk populations, on surveillance so we can detect where the virus is. I knew then that the president had set the priority, the bureaucracy was following it, but it was the wrong priority.”

So it has transpired. In the wake of the testing disaster has come the personal protective equipment (PPE) disaster, the hospital bed disaster, and now the ventilator disaster.

In a phrase that will stand beside 20 January 2020 as one of the most revelatory moments of the history of coronavirus, he said: “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment – try getting it yourselves.”

To date, the Trump administration has supplied 400 ventilators to New York. By Cuomo’s estimation, 30,000 are needed.

“We are seeing the emergence of 50-state anarchy, because of a total vacuum of federal leadership. It’s absurd that thinktanks and Twitter are providing more actionable guidance in the US than the federal government, but that’s where we are.”

Early on in the crisis, Griffeth said, it dawned on her and many of her peers that the federal government to which they would normally look to keep them safe was nowhere to be seen. They resigned themselves to a terrible new reality.

What is most distressing is that the death toll in rural areas and many red states that put Trump in office will likely be far less severe than in urban areas where voters knew Trump was incompetent and unfit for office and voted for Hillary Clinton who would have relied on experts rather than boasting and lying on Twitter.