April 17, 2020

Michigan Gov: 'Better To Be Six Feet Apart Right Now Than Six Feet Under'

(TalkingPointsMemo) Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D) dug in her heels on Friday on her stay-at-home order that has sparked protests from right-wingers in her state.

“You know, I can take it. If it makes people feel better to take their frustrations out on me, that’s fine,” she told “Good Morning America” anchor George Stephanopoulos. “All I ask is let’s not get overly political here. Let’s focus on the public health.”

The governor recognized that her order comes with a price as people get laid off and children are prevented from going to school, but also that the order was necessary to protect Michiganders from the COVID-19 outbreak.

“It’s better to be six feet apart right now than six feet under,” she said.

On Wednesday, a throng of right-wing protesters swarmed Lansing to protest against Whitmer, who has also been targeted by President Donald Trump. The mass demonstration was organized by Michigan Conservative Coalition and Michigan Freedom Fund, which has ties to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Several of the protestors waved pro-Trump and even Confederate flags, despite the clear fact that Michigan was never part of the Southern Confederacy.

(link to video) https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/michigan-governor-whitmer-better-six-feet-apart-right-now-under-coronavirus

April 17, 2020

This is where all 50 states stand on reopening

(CNN) More than 90% of the US population is currently under a stay-at-home or shelter-in-place order as the coronavirus pandemic continues to upend life as we know it. But worries for the economy -- and people's mental health -- are raising the question: When will things go back to normal?

President Donald Trump has indicated many states can reopen by May 1, and on Thursday shared federal guidelines for restarting the economy with governors.

Across the country, governors have been forming pacts. Those leaders are highlighting the importance of using science and advice from health officials rather than politics to choose when to reopen the economy. Expanded testing, tracking contacts of people who had the virus, improved treatment options and vaccine development are important, they say.
Here's the latest on where states stand in their plan to reopen:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/15/us/states-reopen-coronavirus-trnd/index.html

April 16, 2020

So I sent this Newsweek article & link to a friendly trumpish neighbor.

I never do stuff like that - but he is trying to be "helpful" by sending out Covid19 info to folks in the neighborhood (he sits on homeowners board) unfortunately from unreliable sources like Fux. I don't know if he will think twice in the future about sending out garbage, but I felt unable to resist the urge to push back. I don't have very many trumpy neighbors, but this is one...

JOURNALISM PROFESSORS CALL FOR AN END TO FOX NEWS CORONAVIRUS 'MISINFORMATION' IN OPEN LETTER TO RUPERT MURDOCH

Columbia Journalism School Professor Todd Gitlin and 73 others said: "The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health. Indeed, it is not an overstatement to say that your misreporting endangers your own viewers—and not only them, for in a pandemic, individual behavior affects significant numbers of other people as well.

"Yet by commission as well as omission—direct, uncontested misinformation as well as failure to report the true dimensions of the crisis—Fox News has been derelict in its duty to provide clear and accurate information about COVID-19."

https://www.newsweek.com/journalism-professors-fox-news-end-coronavirus-misinformation-open-letter-1495688

April 15, 2020

The Pre-pandemic Universe Was the Fiction

(Atlantic Monthly) What the coronavirus outbreak reveals is not the unreality of our present moment, but the illusions it shatters.

snip

One word I’ve been hearing a lot lately is unreal. Mostly, I hear it from my own mouth, because I haven’t left the house in a month, but also I hear it from friends on Zoom or Skype, and from the news on TV or online. Unreal, or its variations: not real, surreal, this can’t be real. That we have departed from it into strange territory.

But what if it’s exactly the other way around?

What the current crisis and our responses to it, both individual and institutional, have reminded us of is not the unreality of the pandemic, but the illusions shattered by it:

The grand, shared illusion that we are separate from nature.

That life on Earth is generally stable, not precarious.

That, despite what we know from the historical and geological and biological record, human civilization—thanks to advancements in science and medicine and social and governmental structures—exists inside a bubble, protected from the kind of cataclysmic event we are currently experiencing.

What I’ve learned in the past few weeks is that this supposed technological bubble was just that: a thin layer that popped easily.

The stronger bubble, the one that persists, is the psychological one. Even as our stark new reality becomes clear, it remains hard to accept that “normal” was the fiction. It will take some time to let go of the long-held, seldom-questioned assumptions of everyday life: that tomorrow will look like yesterday, next year like the last.

snip

Five hundred years ago, Copernicus re-centered the universe away from us, outward. The COVID-19 outbreak is a reminder: The world isn’t for us; we are part of it. We’re not the protagonists of this movie; there is no movie. After all the suffering and wreckage have subsided, one good thing for our long-term viability will be to have changed our ways of thinking. To have regained a humility.

I say humility because, as it turns out, unimaginable says more about the limits of our imagination than about reality itself. What we really mean when we say that this pandemic feels “unimaginable” is that we had not imagined it. Just as imagination can mislead us, though, it will be imagination—scientific, civic, moral—that helps us find new ways of doing things, helps remind us of how far we have to go as a species. How little we still understand about our place in this world—terrifying and awful at the moment—but also how much we still get to discover. How fragile and rare our ordered structures are, our fictions, and how precious. How next time, we might rebuild them, stronger.

Read More: https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/04/charles-yu-science-fiction-reality-life-pandemic/609985/

April 10, 2020

I wish I could tell Mike Bloomberg

You always said you would do whatever it takes so trump does not return for a second term in office. TV ads are helpful, but you can do more. There are almost 6 million Americans in over 30 states that can't vote in November because paying off their court ordered costs is a direct or indirect requirement for voting - those financial requirements fall especially hard on poor people who are struggling just to put food on the table - but you can help. If you pay off all their legal financial obligations so their voting rights are restored, those 6 million folks could swing the outcome of a national election and save us from a second term of terror.

*I know there were legal restrictions in place when he was an official candidate, but he is free to help out in this way if he wants, right?

April 9, 2020

Trump family loses bid to move marketing scam lawsuit to arbitration

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge in Manhattan rejected an effort by U.S. President Donald Trump and his adult children to send a lawsuit accusing them of exploiting their family name to promote a marketing scam into arbitration.

In a Wednesday night decision concerning the American Communications Network, U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield accused the Trumps of acting unfairly by seeking arbitration after first obtaining “the benefits of litigating in federal court,” including the dismissal of a racketeering claim.

“This conduct is both substantively prejudicial towards Plaintiffs and seeks to use the [Federal Arbitration Act] as a vehicle to manipulate the rules of procedure to Defendants’ benefit and Plaintiffs’ harm,” Schofield wrote.

Defendants included Trump’s adult children Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka, and an affiliate of the Trump Organization.

“The court erred, and while we are disappointed, we will take an immediate appeal,” Joanna Hendon, a lawyer for the Trumps, said in an email.

In the October 2018 complaint, the Trumps were accused of misleading victims into becoming salespeople for ACN, a multi-level marketing company that charged $499 for a chance to sell videophones and other goods.

According to the plaintiffs, the Trump family conned them into thinking Donald Trump, who had yet to become president, believed their investments would pay off.

They said the real goal was for the Trumps to enrich themselves, including through the receipt of millions of dollars in secret payments from 2005 to 2015.

The Trumps have called the lawsuit politically motivated, and said Donald’s Trump’s endorsement of ACN was merely his opinion.

In rejecting arbitration, Schofield noted the plaintiffs’ claim that they had no reason to believe their agreements to arbitrate with ACN also covered the Trumps.

Roberta Kaplan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in an email she looked forward to pursuing the proposed class action on behalf of her clients and “thousands of others like them who were defrauded by the Trumps.”

Last July, Schofield said the plaintiffs could pursue state law claims of fraud, false advertising and unfair competition against the Trumps, despite dismissing the racketeering claim.

The case is Doe et al v Trump Corp et al, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 18-09936.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-marketing-lawsuit/trump-family-loses-bid-to-move-marketing-scam-lawsuit-to-arbitration-idUSKCN21R2OH

April 8, 2020

The Coronavirus Has Not Halted Trump's Power Grab

* Long article, contains paywall so I only posted snips...

(Atlantic Monthly) An hour or so into Monday’s daily presidential briefing on the coronavirus pandemic, Trump declared that his political opponents should “not be allowed” to win the 2020 presidential election.

snip

Although the pestilence that has killed more than 10,000 Americans and shut down the U.S. economy is understandably dominating the headlines, the Trump administration’s efforts to erode democracy and the rule of law have not subsided. The authoritarianization of the federal government has hampered its response to the pandemic, squandering scarce resources on shoring up the president’s lies and pursuing his political interests at the public’s expense. This is the predictable result of an authoritarian logic in which the preservation of the regime takes precedence over the safety of its own citizens, because the leader is the incontestable expression of popular will.

snip

The president and the institutional GOP are executing parallel, complementary campaigns: Trump is attempting to undermine the rule of law for personal and political gain; keeping him in office is crucial to the Republican Party’s larger goal of locking its opponents out of power by narrowing, restricting, or altering the franchise to insulate the party from a changing electorate.

The president’s goals are venal and petty; the GOP’s long-term objectives are far more ambitious. Trump is simply a convenient vehicle for the latter, a figure whose prejudice channels the Republican base’s moral instinct that those unlike them have a lesser claim on American citizenship, and that democracy would be more genuine without their influence. Americans hoping to change the direction of the country will have to battle a plague and fight for the freedom to choose their own leaders at the same time.

Senate Republicans, who might conceivably restrain Trump’s undemocratic impulses, have been muted. As long as Trump maintains his support among the GOP rank and file, the president may defy the rule of law as he likes, without meaningful protest. Checking Trump could interfere with the conservative capture of the federal judiciary, which is vitally important to the Republican Party’s plans for long-term domination.

snip

Trump’s declaration from the podium, that his opponents “should not be allowed to win” is not just the crude bluster of a showman. Rather, it is a statement of ideological conviction shared throughout the party, from the halls of Congress to the Supreme Court, from Washington, D.C., to Madison, Wisconsin. This will not be the last time we hear it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/the-plague-has-not-halted-trumps-power-grab/609643/

April 7, 2020

Kahlo and O'Keeffe -- the formative friendship between two artistic giants

(CNN) Frustrated, Frida Kahlo was finding that none of the letters she was writing felt quite right, and she tore them up, one by one. The young Mexican artist was penning a note to Georgia O'Keeffe -- an artistic rock star nearly twice her age, whom she'd befriended while living briefly in New York about a year before. "I can't write in English all I would like to tell, especially to you," reads the two-page letter Kahlo ultimately deemed worthy of sending. "I thought of you a lot and never forget your wonderful hands and the color of your eyes. I will see you soon."

That letter, sent on March 1, 1933, is currently housed at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University and is the sole document filed in the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe archive's Kahlo folder.

But "Frida in America" (2020), a new book about the Mexican painter's first trip to the United States -- from 1930 to 1933, accompanying her husband Diego Rivera on multiple mural commissions -- reveals more details about the friendship between a 24-year-old Kahlo, then barely known as a painter, and a venerated and successful 44-year-old O'Keeffe.

Imagining the unibrowed self-portraitist hobnobbing with the eccentric painter of abstracted flora is a fantastic and downright fun image. Understanding Kahlo's friendship with O'Keeffe also helps flesh out the impact these formative American years had on the budding artist, as she bounced between San Francisco, New York, and Detroit.

"It's important to understand more about this relationship between Frida and Georgia because it provides a fuller context, at least for Frida's creative development," said Celia Stahr, author of "Frida in America." "What did Frida see while she was in the United States, what did she experience?"

(Read more) https://edition.cnn.com/style/article/frida-kahlo-georgia-okeeffe-artsy/index.html?fbclid=IwAR3omWCd2Uznp4SRzJC-gFsOHTB_2bL_w7Pu1WQQPTxQzbPnyYzW-ZoFJ3c

April 7, 2020

UK PM Johnson stable overnight and in good spirits: spokesman

LONDON (Reuters) - British prime minister Boris Johnson was stable overnight in intensive care after suffering a deterioration of his COVID-19 symptoms and he remains in good spirits, his spokesman said on Tuesday.

The spokesman told reporters the prime minister, who was admitted to hospital on Sunday, was receiving standard oxygen treatment and was breathing without any other assistance. He did not require a mechanical ventilator.

“The prime minister has been stable overnight and remains in good spirits. He is receiving standard oxygen treatment and breathing without any other assistance. He has not required mechanical ventilation, or non-invasive respiratory support,” the spokesman said.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-johnson-stable/uk-pm-johnson-stable-overnight-and-in-good-spirits-spokesman-idUSKBN21P1NV

April 7, 2020

China Reports No New COVID-19 Deaths Over The Past Day

(TalkingPointsMemo) BEIJING. — China on Tuesday reported no new deaths from the coronarivus over the past 24 hours and just 32 new cases, all from people who returned from overseas.

Another 12 suspected cases — also all imported — were being kept under observation, along with an additional 30 asymptomatic cases. China now has 1,242 confirmed cases in treatment and 1,033 asymptomatic cases under isolation and monitoring.

The country that gave rise to the global pandemic has recorded 3,331 deaths and 81,740 total cases. Numbers of daily new deaths have been hovering in the single digits for weeks, hitting just one on several occasions.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/china-no-new-coronavirus-deaths

*China went from one new case in November to none new in April - trump is out of his mind if he thinks that this will be all over in a flash....