[awm]

I don’t think Biden would be the best president, but he might be a good candidate. Elections with an incumbent president are mostly referendums on his performance. Trump is a lousy president, he’s been unpopular his whole term, and now we have an avoidable disaster killing Americans and crashing the economy on his watch.

All we need is a candidate that won’t have some of the many voters who dislike Trump saying: “Trump is lousy but this Democratic candidate scares me.” A candidate who is an older white male with lots of governing experience and mostly pledges to return to the “status quo pre-Trump” seems unlikely to scare off any of these voters. Even Republicans (those few who don’t love Trump) seem pretty comfortable with Biden.

[shyams]

hrothgar, on 2020-April-23, 15:13, said:

Who do you think would have been a better candidate in the general election and, more importantly, how is this claim consistent with that candidates inability to execute during the Democratic primary?

Probably some of the candidates you named -- Warren, Klobuchar -- or even Sanders (if the Dem establishment could somehow accept such a hard-left candidate). Even a left-field candidate like Cuomo might be better.

As for the Dem primaries, is it really a fair fight? The only way Mayor Pete or Senator Bernie would ever actually succeed would be if they were obnoxious and thick-skinned like Trump was during the 2016 Rep primaries. I wouldn't be too surprised if the Republican establishment had tried to derail Trump's candidacy during the early days of the 2016 primaries --- only that he browbeat every fellow Republican into submission.

And as for Biden (reference to awm's post) and "return to the status quo pre-Trump" isn't the average American voter worried about back-seat driving by the Obamas or by Mrs. Biden (a la Edith Wilson)?

[Winstonm]

awm, on 2020-April-23, 15:26, said:

I don’t think Biden would be the best president, but he might be a good candidate. Elections with an incumbent president are mostly referendums on his performance. Trump is a lousy president, he’s been unpopular his whole term, and now we have an avoidable disaster killing Americans and crashing the economy on his watch.

All we need is a candidate that won’t have some of the many voters who dislike Trump saying: “Trump is lousy but this Democratic candidate scares me.” A candidate who is an older white male with lots of governing experience and mostly pledges to return to the “status quo pre-Trump” seems unlikely to scare off any of these voters. Even Republicans (those few who don’t love Trump) seem pretty comfortable with Biden.

I agree. Because it is such a hurdle to defeat an incumbent president to begin with, now is not the time to bring out the big-ticket progressive platform for referendum. First things first. Rid us of Trump. Take back the Senate. Keep control of the House. Two years down the road or even 4 years, then might be the time to take a swing at the fences.

[hrothgar]

shyams, on 2020-April-23, 16:39, said:

Probably some of the candidates you named -- Warren, Klobuchar -- or even Sanders (if the Dem establishment could somehow accept such a hard-left candidate). Even a left-field candidate like Cuomo might be better.

None of the candidates that you suggested were able to attract any kind of significant support during the Democratic primaries. And, for better or worse, elections in the United States are won by individuals who are able to convince their supporters to show up at the polls a vote.

Quote

As for the Dem primaries, is it really a fair fight?

Yes, it is.

The system can certainly be improved, however not producing the result that you/I would prefer doesn't invalidate the process

[johnu]

shyams, on 2020-April-23, 14:17, said:

Note: I'm not a US Citizen or resident, I cannot vote.
I agree with (1) that your Great President is a clown and has screwed up big time. However, he is not the only world leader to have screwed up on this matter. Your senators and representatives have screwed up as well... really badly. So there are many people to blame for the bad situation and Trump will probably get away without bearing all of the blame for this.

I give you credit for correctly identifying and naming the Clown President. To the extent that Congress has screwed up, it is in the lack of ironclad oversight on the relief money in the Coronavirus bills that have been passed. As a basic principle, Congress has very little say in the Federal response to national emergencies besides budgeting money. The president controls all the Federal agencies as well as the Defense Production Act. The president also has the bully pulpit to sway public opinion. It is telling that while other presidents saw their favorable ratings reach into the 80% range during disasters, the Clown in Chief has seen his favorable ratings drop down to his core supporters, ie. in the low 40% range.

From diminishing the coronavirus threat for months, to the refusal to take supercharge and take control of the PPE supply chain, to appointing unqualified people to lead key positions in trying to stop the virus, to spreading misinformation about the virus every single day of week, to undermining health officials, state and local officials, and even contradicting himself, sometimes the same day, the Grifter in Chief has the overwhelming blame for US failures. Almost everybody else has only trace percentages of blame.

shyams, on 2020-April-23, 14:17, said:

I don't know what you folks find good about Biden. He has a track record of selling out to corporate interests (I'm not referring to his son), he doesn't have a strong record of suggesting citizen-friendly policies, and finally some of his rambling responses suggest an absence of coherent thought. And if you think the rambling responses aren't a concern, my guess is that this one factor alone will be exploited by Trump, the Republicans and those Super PACs to ensure that Trump is reelected.

In summary, I think Biden makes a poor candidate to oppose Trump in the Presidential elections.

I was not a Biden supporter in the primaries. Still, at least now, Biden appears to be the strongest possible Democratic candidate because he has consistently polled the best against the Manchurian President, even before he entered the Democratic primary. He polled from better to much better than any of the 25+ other candidates who were running in the primary.

As we know, polls predict elections, but they can be wrong, as they were in 2016. Still, any Democratic candidate who beats the Grifter In Chief is a great candidate in my view.

[johnu]

Another of those you can't make this sh*t up moments:

Trump Suggests Injecting Disinfectant, Shining UV Light Inside Patients to Kill Coronavirus in Bizarre, Rambling Tangent

The title of the article pretty much speaks for itself.

Quote

“So, supposing we hit the body with tremendous, I don’t know if it’s ultraviolet or very powerful light, and I think you said that has been checked but your’e going to test it,” Trump said, turning to Bryan in a sidebar moment at the end for confirmation. “Then I said what it if you brought the light inside of the body which you could do either through the skin or some other way and I think you said you were going to test that, too, sounds interesting,” he added next, again turning to Bryan for validation.

But then Trump even went further, connecting the household bleaching agents in most surface disinfectants to a possible internal treatment for humans, which would be toxic and possibly fatal. “Then I see the disinfectant, one minute. Is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside, or almost a cleaning.

[y66]

Paul Krugman at NYT: https://www.nytimes....pgtype=Homepage

Quote

Covid-19 has killed tens of thousands of Americans, and will clearly kill many more. The lockdown needed to contain the coronavirus is causing an economic slump several times as deep as the Great Recession.

Yet this necessary slump doesn’t have to be accompanied by severe financial hardship. We have the resources to ensure that every American has enough to eat, that people don’t lose health insurance, that they don’t lose their homes because they can’t pay rent or mortgage fees. There’s also no reason we should see punishing cuts in essential public services.

Unfortunately, it’s looking increasingly likely that tens of millions of Americans will in fact suffer extreme hardship and that there will be devastating cuts in services. Why? The answer mainly boils down to two words: Mitch McConnell.

On Wednesday, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, declared that he is opposed to any further federal aid to beleaguered state and local governments, and suggested that states declare bankruptcy instead. Lest anyone accuse McConnell of being even slightly nonpartisan, his office distributed two memos referring to proposals for state aid as “blue state bailouts.”

A number of governors have already denounced McConnell’s position as stupid, which it is. But it’s also vile and hypocritical.

When I say that we have the resources to avoid severe financial hardship, I’m referring to the federal government, which can borrow vast sums very cheaply. In fact, the interest rate on inflation-protected bonds, which measure real borrowing costs, is minus 0.43 percent: Investors are basically paying the feds to hold their money.

So Washington can and should run big budget deficits in this time of need. State and local governments, however, can’t, because almost all of them are required by law to run balanced budgets. Yet these governments, which are on the front line of dealing with the pandemic, are facing a combination of collapsing revenue and soaring expenses.

The obvious answer is federal aid. But McConnell wants states and cities to declare bankruptcy instead.

This is, as I said, stupid on multiple levels. For one thing, states don’t even have the legal right to declare bankruptcy; even if they somehow managed all the same to default on their relatively small debts, it would do little to alleviate their financial distress — although it could cause a national financial crisis.

Oh, and the idea that this is specifically a blue state problem is ludicrous. Fiscal crises are looming all across America, from Florida to Kansas to Texas — hit especially hard by crashing oil prices — to, yes, McConnell’s home state, Kentucky.

And if states and local governments are forced into sharp budget cuts, the effect will be to deepen the economic slump — which would be bad for Donald Trump and could cost Republicans the Senate.

So yes, McConnell’s position is stupid. But it’s also vile.

Think of who would be hurt if state and local governments are forced to make drastic cuts. A lot of state money goes to Medicaid, a program that should be expanding, not shrinking, as millions of Americans are losing their health insurance along with their jobs.

As for the state and local government workers who may be either losing their jobs or facing pay cuts, most are employed in education, policing, firefighting and highways. So if McConnell gets his way, America’s de facto policy will be one of bailing out the owners of giant restaurant chains while firing schoolteachers and police officers.

Last but not least, let’s talk about McConnell’s hypocrisy, which like his stupidity comes on multiple levels.

At one level, it’s really something to see a man who helped ram through a giant tax cut for corporations — which they mainly used to buy back their own stock — now pretend to be deeply concerned about borrowing money to help states facing a fiscal crisis that isn’t their fault.

At another level, it’s also really something to see McConnell, whose state is heavily subsidized by the federal government, give lectures on self-reliance to states like New York that pay much more in federal taxes than they get back.

We’re not talking about small numbers here. According to estimates by the Rockefeller Institute, from 2015 to 2018 Kentucky — which pays relatively little in federal taxes, because it’s fairly poor, but gets major benefits from programs like Medicare and Social Security — received net transfers from Washington averaging more than $33,000 per person. That was 18.6 percent of the state’s G.D.P.

True, relatively rich states like New York, New Jersey and Connecticut probably should be helping out their poorer neighbors — but those neighbors don’t then get the right to complain about “blue state bailouts” in the face of a national disaster.

Of course, McConnell has an agenda here: He’s hoping to use the pandemic to force afflicted states to shrink their governments. We can only hope both that this shameless exploitation of tragedy fails and that McConnell and his allies pay a heavy political price.

[kenberg]

I have come to think of McDonnell as the evil monster behind the mad emperor.
Or something.
At any rate, it is seriously bad.

[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2020-April-23, 18:32, said:

I have come to think of McDonnell as the evil monster behind the mad emperor.
Or something.
At any rate, it is seriously bad.

McConnell is but one of the many heads of the Republican Hydra. There is no bottom to their depravity.

[Winstonm]

Barry,

Would you please move the above ramblings to the hijacked thread thread? Thanks.

[jandrew]

johnu, on 2020-April-23, 18:01, said:

Another of those you can't make this sh*t up moments:

Trump Suggests Injecting Disinfectant, Shining UV Light Inside Patients to Kill Coronavirus in Bizarre, Rambling Tangent

The title of the article pretty much speaks for itself.

I suppose that if the president were to lead by example, and show us how to inject and/or drink an effective dose of disinfectant, one of the world's major problems might be solved at a stroke.

[y66]

Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg: Trump’s Disinfectant Idea Is More Than a Silly Soundbite

Quote

President Donald Trump outdid himself in Thursday’s press conference with an extended riff on miracle cures for the coronavirus that ended with a suggestion that maybe injecting disinfectant into the body would do the trick. (Disclaimer: Do not try this at home. No, really.) It seems destined to go down as the “inject bleach” speech, although he didn’t actually use those words. Jimmy Carter didn’t say “malaise” either.

There’s a clip circulating of Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the coronavirus task force, reacting in resigned disbelief as Trump launches into this digression. It was astonishing in a sense. But also: par for the course. Birx is every trade expert when Trump talks tariffs, every health-policy expert when he talks health care, every defense expert when he talks about the military. He combines uncanny confidence with a total lack of knowledge on topic after topic.

To listen to him in his briefings and other appearances is to hear howler after howler if one has a reasonable grasp of politics and government. The U.S. military, he says, was out of ammunition when he became president. NATO allies owe us money because they’re behind on their dues. Trade deficits are simply unilateral transfers of money from one nation to another. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know what “pre-existing conditions” means, even though I’ve heard him discuss the topic dozens of times.

All presidents enter the White House with significant gaps in their knowledge of public policy. Every modern one has worked reasonably hard or very hard to catch up. Trump by all accounts (including his own) instead watches hours of cable news every day. As I’ve said, there’s nothing wrong with presidents monitoring the media, even though they have much better sources of information. It’s a good way to get outside the White House bubble and understand what other people are hearing. But Trump appears to use cable news as a substitute, not a supplement, to basic briefings.

All of which gets us to the worst moment of Trump’s Thursday session. After a discussion of whether the pandemic might prove to be seasonal, a reporter asked him: “If there is a summer sort of ebb with this virus, what would the federal government need to do to take advantage of that time to be better prepared for a possible resurgence in the fall than we were the first time?” Trump didn’t even appear to understand the question. At first, all he could come up with was, “I think a lot of people are going to go outside all of a sudden.” Then he got distracted and talked about a lab he thought was impressive. Then, when the reporter repeated the question, he looked stumped and asked Vice President Mike Pence to step in.

That's a pretty basic question. And Trump’s confused answer underlines the extent to which he is still, even now, disengaged from any real planning to control the pandemic and revive the economy. Perhaps he realized that talking about preparations for the fall might contradict his insistence that the federal response is perfect right now. But even then it’s shocking that he didn't have some kind of prepared answer for a question that’s so central to the crisis.

Yes, there’s a long history of presidents who deliberately or otherwise sound worse in public than they do in private. It is possible Trump is part of that tradition. Unfortunately, his own staffers regularly tell reporters that he’s no better in private than he is in public. It’s hard to do a good job as president if you don’t do your homework. And watching hours of cable news won’t cut it.

[Winstonm]

Thank you, Barry.

[Winstonm]

The king of snake oil can raise a "misson accomplished" banner now:

Quote

April 24 (Reuters) - The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Friday cautioned against the use of malaria drugs, hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, in COVID-19 patients outside of hospitals and clinical trials, citing risks of serious heart rhythm problems.

The agency’s announcement comes a day after the European Union’s drug regulator warned of the drugs’ side effects and urged medical professionals to closely monitor patients on the medicines.

The FDA said it was aware of increased use of these medicines through outpatient prescriptions and the drugs could cause abnormal heart rhythms and dangerously rapid heart rate.

my emphasis

[Winstonm]

I didn't think The Onion reported real news:

And then, of course, there is the Trump supporter:

[kenberg]

Are we at a transition?

My understanding is that there are now quite a few Trump supporters who think he is doing a lousy job with covid and certainly listen to local advice or medical advice and ignore the t=president. They will not be injection bleach, but they also will continue social distancing, wear masks, and take care.

History is replete with cases where a leader had support until, suddenly, he no longer had that support. A child observes the emperor has no clothes and suddenly everyone sees that the emperor has no clothes.

Few anticipated the pandemic. But we can all anticipate that a crisis of some sort will arise fairly frequently. When it happens, it is very useful, to put it very mildly, to have a person in the White House that can be trusted. That does not describe the current occupant and, very importantly, this is now becoming clear to many Republicans. I realize that DT did not actually, not explicitly, tell people to inject bleach. But he speculated about injections, how maybe it could be a good idea, and there are more than a few people out there who get some pretty crazy ideas about what to do. A responsible person does not say what DT said, even if he now wants to say he was just being sarcastic. Everyone understands that. And everyone has heard the excuse "Oh, I as just joking". As president, speaking of the pandemic? Really?

So: Time is up. This is no longer R or D, it isn't about conservative or liberal, it is about not having an irresponsible nut as president. This must be becoming clear to just about everyone. People put up with a lot. But most people, at some point, decide they have seen enough. You can always find exceptions, people who drink the kool-aid if told to do so, but most decide otherwise. It's time.

[shyams]

shyams, on 2020-April-16, 19:28, said:

I have previously bored this audience by quoting betting odds of Trump winning a second term. Here is another quote from today.As per a UK betting website, the current odds that Joe Biden will not be the Democratic Party nominee for President are quoted as 7.5%...

Interesting! The market still factors a 7.5% doubt!!

shyams, on 2020-April-19, 02:38, said:

... which has, as of this morning, widened to 10.0%. Worth a gamble? A roughly 10% return after costs over a period of (approx.) 4 months

When I checked this morning, it had widened to 12.3%. Now, this is a British/European betting website but the market is deep (£22.7 million has been traded on this specific outcome -- of which approx. £1.5m of trades occurred in the last 10 days).

[y66]

Fintan O'Toole at Irish Times: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again

Quote

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.

However bad things are for most other rich democracies, it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful.

Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of warning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic.

As the American writer George Packer puts it in the current edition of the Atlantic, “The United States reacted ... like Pakistan or Belarus – like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering.”

It is one thing to be powerless in the face of a natural disaster, quite another to watch vast power being squandered in real time – wilfully, malevolently, vindictively. It is one thing for governments to fail (as, in one degree or another, most governments did), quite another to watch a ruler and his supporters actively spread a deadly virus. Trump, his party and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News became vectors of the pestilence.

The grotesque spectacle of the president openly inciting people (some of them armed) to take to the streets to oppose the restrictions that save lives is the manifestation of a political death wish. What are supposed to be daily briefings on the crisis, demonstrative of national unity in the face of a shared challenge, have been used by Trump merely to sow confusion and division. They provide a recurring horror show in which all the neuroses that haunt the American subconscious dance naked on live TV.

If the plague is a test, its ruling political nexus ensured that the US would fail it at a terrible cost in human lives. In the process, the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated.

Other than the Trump impersonator Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?

It is hard to remember now but, even in 2017, when Trump took office, the conventional wisdom in the US was that the Republican Party and the broader framework of US political institutions would prevent him from doing too much damage. This was always a delusion, but the pandemic has exposed it in the most savage ways.

Abject surrender

What used to be called mainstream conservatism has not absorbed Trump – he has absorbed it. Almost the entire right-wing half of American politics has surrendered abjectly to him. It has sacrificed on the altar of wanton stupidity the most basic ideas of responsibility, care and even safety.

Thus, even at the very end of March, 15 Republican governors had failed to order people to stay at home or to close non-essential businesses. In Alabama, for example, it was not until April 3rd that governor Kay Ivey finally issued a stay-at-home order.

In Florida, the state with the highest concentration of elderly people with underlying conditions, governor Ron DeSantis, a Trump mini-me, kept the beach resorts open to students travelling from all over the US for spring break parties. Even on April 1st, when he issued restrictions, DeSantis exempted religious services and “recreational activities”.

Georgia governor Brian Kemp, when he finally issued a stay-at-home order on April 1st, explained: “We didn’t know that [the virus can be spread by people without symptoms] until the last 24 hours.”
This is not mere ignorance – it is deliberate and homicidal stupidity. There is, as the demonstrations this week in US cities have shown, plenty of political mileage in denying the reality of the pandemic. It is fuelled by Fox News and far-right internet sites, and it reaps for these politicians millions of dollars in donations, mostly (in an ugly irony) from older people who are most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

It draws on a concoction of conspiracy theories, hatred of science, paranoia about the “deep state” and religious providentialism (God will protect the good folks) that is now very deeply infused in the mindset of the American right.

Trump embodies and enacts this mindset, but he did not invent it. The US response to the coronavirus crisis has been paralysed by a contradiction that the Republicans have inserted into the heart of US democracy. On the one hand, they want to control all the levers of governmental power. On the other they have created a popular base by playing on the notion that government is innately evil and must not be trusted.

The contradiction was made manifest in two of Trump’s statements on the pandemic: on the one hand that he has “total authority”, and on the other that “I don’t take responsibility at all”. Caught between authoritarian and anarchic impulses, he is incapable of coherence.
Fertile ground

But this is not just Donald Trump. The crisis has shown definitively that Trump’s presidency is not an aberration. It has grown on soil long prepared to receive it. The monstrous blossoming of misrule has structure and purpose and strategy behind it.

There are very powerful interests who demand “freedom” in order to do as they like with the environment, society and the economy. They have infused a very large part of American culture with the belief that “freedom” is literally more important than life. My freedom to own assault weapons trumps your right not to get shot at school. Now, my freedom to go to the barber (“I Need a Haircut” read one banner this week in St Paul, Minnesota) trumps your need to avoid infection.

Usually when this kind of outlandish idiocy is displaying itself, there is the comforting thought that, if things were really serious, it would all stop. People would sober up. Instead, a large part of the US has hit the bottle even harder.

And the president, his party and their media allies keep supplying the drinks. There has been no moment of truth, no shock of realisation that the antics have to end. No one of any substance on the US right has stepped in to say: get a grip, people are dying here.

That is the mark of how deep the trouble is for the US – it is not just that Trump has treated the crisis merely as a way to feed tribal hatreds but that this behaviour has become normalised. When the freak show is live on TV every evening, and the star is boasting about his ratings, it is not really a freak show any more. For a very large and solid bloc of Americans, it is reality.

And this will get worse before it gets better. Trump has at least eight more months in power. In his inaugural address in 2017, he evoked “American carnage” and promised to make it stop. But now that the real carnage has arrived, he is revelling in it. He is in his element.

As things get worse, he will pump more hatred and falsehood, more death-wish defiance of reason and decency, into the groundwater. If a new administration succeeds him in 2021, it will have to clean up the toxic dump he leaves behind. If he is re-elected, toxicity will have become the lifeblood of American politics.

Either way, it will be a long time before the rest of the world can imagine America being great again.

I appreciate the optimistic note in "will have become" in the second to last paragraph.

[Chas_P]

y66, on 2020-April-26, 17:09, said:

Fintan O'Toole at Irish Times: Donald Trump has destroyed the country he promised to make great again


I appreciate the optimistic note in "will have become" in the second to last paragraph.

Opinions are just like assholes. Everybody has one.

[johnu]

Chas_Troll, on 2020-April-26, 18:37, said:

Opinions are just like assholes. Everybody has one.

The lack of irony displayed is Grifter in Chief worthy.