Are we finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel? The Wuhan coronavirus numbers have gone from doubling every two or three days to taking more than a week to double, which suggests successfully bending the curve. If hydroxychloroquine is indeed effective against the virus, we should think about opening the economy back up sooner rather than later, as our ICUs won’t be too overwhelmed to save lives.
Speaking of which…
Are fears of the Wuhan coronavirus overblown? This roundup of reader reports from various hospitals around the country suggests that it is. Lots of hospitals having layoff because so many elective procedures have been cancelled and projected coronavirus ICU cases never materialized. Maybe we’ve flattened the curve enough?
Democrats are going to fight Trump to the death over a stimulus aimed at small business. How are they supposed to get their beaks wet there?
CNN tells the truth that Democrats blocked GOP funding for small business, then changed it, because telling negative truths about Democrats is always bad. (And speaking of bad, Powerline, I’m really not enamored of you launching a full-screen popup ad every time I click on a story (at least on the machine that doesn’t have Ad-Block for everything.)
Public officials across the United States are flying blind against the novel coronavirus epidemic. Because of a government-engineered testing fiasco, they don’t know how fast the virus is spreading, how many people have been infected by it, how many will die as a result of it or how many have developed immunity to it.
The failure to implement early and widespread testing — caused by a combination of shortsightedness, ineptitude and bureaucratic intransigence — left politicians scrambling to avoid a hospital crisis by imposing broad business closures and stay-at-home orders.
The grand failure of federal health bureaucrats foreclosed the possibility of a more proactive and targeted approach, focused on identifying carriers, tracing their contacts and protecting the public in a more measured way through isolation and quarantines.
The initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, was reported at the end of December. The first confirmed case in the United States was reported on Jan. 20, by which time it seems likely that many other Americans were already infected.
At first, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention monopolized COVID-19 tests. When the CDC began shipping test kits to state laboratories in early February, they turned out to be defective.
The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration initially blocked efforts by universities and businesses to develop and conduct tests before relaxing the restrictions that made it impossible to assess the progress of the epidemic. Making a false virtue of necessity, the CDC set irrationally narrow criteria for testing, which meant that carriers without severe symptoms or obvious risk factors escaped detection.
Nate Jones and I dig deep into Twitter’s decision to delete Rudy Giuliani’s tweet (quoting Charlie Kirk of Turning Point) to the effect that hydroxychloroquine had been shown to be 100% effective against the coronavirus and that Gov. Whitmer (D-MI) had threatened doctors prescribing it out of anti-Trump animus. Twitter claimed that it was deleting tweets that “go directly against guidance from authoritative sources” and separately implied that the tweet was an improper attack on Gov. Whitmer.
I call BS. Hydroxychloroquine has looked very effective in several tests in France and China, but it hasn’t passed any controlled trials, and along with all the other promising drugs, it won’t pass those trials until the wave of death has begun to recede. In a world of bad choices, the drug looks like one of a few worthwhile gambles, as even Gov. Whitmer recognized by reversing course and asking to be allocated a lot of doses. Giuliani was closer to right than Whitmer. But Twitter decided that Giuliani’s view was so far from the mainstream that it had to be suppressed.
To be clear, Twitter management decided to suppress a legitimate if overstated view about how to survive the coronavirus. Twitter readers would not be allowed to see that view. That’s a stance that requires some serious justification.
Only Verified Official Coronavirus views are allowed, because Orange Man Bad.
Could the Wuhan coronavirus have been in California already last fall? “[Victor Davis] Hanson said he thinks it is possible COVID-19 has been spreading among Californians since the fall when doctors reported an early flu season in the state. During that same time, California was welcoming as many as 8,000 Chinese nationals daily into our airports. Some of those visitors even arriving on direct flights from Wuhan, the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in China.”
Texas local governments need to start trimming their budgets right now.
A World Poker Tour organizer’s diary of the Wuhan coronavirus’ onset. I’m not really interested in poker tournaments, but this piece is really valuable for it’s detailed, almost minute-by-minute breakdown of those crazy days less than a month ago when the Wuhan Coronavirus went from Something We Might Have To Worry About to The Event Horizon of Absolute Change.
“Diamond Comics Announces They Will ‘Hold Payments To Vendors‘ Amid Coronavirus Pandemic.” Also, they won’t ship comics to stores, either. Given that Diamond has a defacto monopoly on comics distribution, this is going to drive a lot of indie comics makers completely out of business. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
New York Democratic represntative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez draws a well-funded Democratic primary challenger in CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. “Word broke yesterday that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is reportedly planning to endorse Caruso-Cabrera, probably because they don’t want to be the first with their backs up against the wall after AOC’s glorious people’s revolution.”
Colleges and universities are already starting to panic over the loss of revenue. “How long will it take for Democrats to propose a higher education bailout? When that happens, Republicans should hold out until schools start cutting pointless administrators and departments.” Like a malware-infected Windows system, what higher education needs is a shutdown, reboot, reformat and reinstall before it’s safe to start up again.
Corbyn’s tenure has cost Labour the trust and patience of millions, including political observers around the world. By rights, it should have been Corbyn’s hidebound socialism and barely concealed tolerance for anti-Semitism that did him in. But what ultimately cost Corbyn the support of his party was electoral defeat. And not just any defeat, but a disastrous one.
British Labourites and voters more broadly knew who Corbyn was well before the summer of 2017. His first shadow cabinet was a mess. His nostalgic Marxism was laid bare in a manifesto that called for the nationalization of infrastructure and industry alike. His fondness for terrorists—from the IRA to Hezbollah and Hamas—was no secret. But the conservative government under Theresa May plodded into the general election with all the grace of a muskox, confirming voters’ fears that the government could not completely manage Brexit and transforming a 20-point margin in the polls into a 13-seat loss for the Tories. Though it was a defeat for Labour, Corbyn’s party managed a halfway decent showing. It was enough to avoid the impression that Labour had suffered a rebuke.
In the interim, Jeremy Corbyn’s anti-Semitism problem rapidly became Labour’s anti-Semitism problem. The party was wrought by schism when it pledged to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism but amended it to allow its members more freedom to criticize Israel, all without consulting relevant Jewish organizations or even the party’s Jewish members. The unearthing of a variety of Corbyn’s anti-Semitic online affiliations compelled his own members to openly criticize their party’s leadership. Under Corbyn, his party’s affinities trended steadily in one odious direction, leading to the high-profile resignations of many longtime Labour MPs. “I am sickened that Labour is now perceived by many as a racist, anti-Semitic party,” said outgoing MP Mike Gapes.
All this weighed heavily on British voters. One survey found that 85 percent of Britain’s Jews believed Corbyn was himself anti-Semitic, despite his pro forma denunciations of Jew-hatred. Britain’s chief rabbi denounced the Labour Party’s leader as “unfit for office,” a sentiment with which the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed. By the eve of the 2019 general election, only the most unwavering of Labour voters told pollsters that their primary concern about the prospect of a Labour-led government was “Jeremy Corbyn being prime minister.” But the inevitability of the disaster headed Labour’s way was not acknowledged until it was upon them, and by then it was too late. On December 12, Labour turned in the party’s worst electoral performance since 1935. It wasn’t the anti-Semitism that did Corbyn in. It was his failure to deliver at the polls.
Technically, that’s Sir Keir Starmer, providing just the right amount of irony that a party theoretically representing the interests of the working class is now lead by an Oxford-educated lawyer-knight.
The tests are those most people would impose. Is this emergency law within the constitution or a violation of it? And there’s no doubt that it’s constitutional. It was passed by the super-majority that such a law requires. Are there safeguards in it? There are two. First, the constitutional court could reject it in whole or in part, either today or after the epidemic has receded. That is unlikely since all the required constitutional procedures were fulfilled in its passage, but constitutional courts are unpredictable. The second is that Parliament can vote to end the state of emergency at any time by the same two-thirds majority by which it passed the law. I would not entirely rule out that happening if the Orban government were to abuse these powers, but I judge both serious abuse and a parliamentary rebellion against it to be unlikely. Third, are the emergency powers granted to the government too broad? Some of them may be. The fines and prison sentences for breaking quarantine and spreading false rumors, though not unreasonable in themselves when panic and plague are in the air (the latter quite literally), look to me to be too high. But those sentences won’t be imposed arbitrarily; courts will determine them; and the terms of the legislation are tightly written to prevent its being used for political censorship or anything unrelated to the pandemic. So I would urge moderation on the courts and government, and leave it at that. Finally, shouldn’t the legislation have a sunset clause — say of one year on the British model — rather than staying in force indefinitely or until ministers judge the epidemic to be over? And there I think that it should.
Plus it’s not like other European countries haven’t passed similar liberty-abridging laws in response to the crisis.
“‘Voter fraud’? California man finds dozens of ballots stacked outside home.” “The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.”
Austin’s holy homeless don’t need to practice the social distancing that mere citizens are required to observe:
I went to downtown Austin to see if the homeless were practicing social distancing. They weren’t. Also getting more territorial and violent. No law enforcement in sight. pic.twitter.com/zTEJQ3YBiu
Here’s a really good essay by Open Blogger over on Ace of Spades about Quintin Tarantino. I was unaware of the Terry Gilliam connection.
FINALLY! Former Rockets coach Rudy Tomjanovich is being inducted into the basketball hall of fame. A long-overdue honor for the man who guided the Houston Rockets to two NBA championships.
Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) announced on Wednesday that he is dropping out of the presidential race.
Sanders said in a speech from his hometown of Burlington that while his campaign had won the “ideological” battle, “the path toward victory [in the primary] is virtually impossible.”
“In state after state…we received a significant majority of the votes” from people under the age of 50, Sanders said. “The future of this country is with our ideas.”
Sanders added, “I will stay on the ballot in all remaining states and continue to gather delegates. While Vice President Biden will be the nominee, we must continue working to assemble as many delegates as possible…to exert significant influence over the party platform.”
Sanders has remained in the primary despite multiple sweeping victories by rival Joe Biden. The Vermont senator has won 883 delegates in state primaries to Biden’s 1,196. Biden gained support from moderate and African American voters to pull ahead of Sanders, while Sanders has relied on younger voters as well as broad support among Latinos.
Sanders badly misread the moment following his 2016 defeat, thinking his competitive run meant Democrats were yearning for a socialist true believer dedicated to nationalizing everything. What it actually meant was Democrats were desperately yearning for someone who wasn’t Hillary Clinton. The DNC helped engineer his defeat in 2016 and they did so again this year, though we may have to wait a decade or so for tell-all books to describe exactly how the DNC pressured candidates to exit the race after South Carolina to align so perfectly behind Biden right before Super Tuesday, given his campaign’s near-death experience up until then.
There are tons of Bernie supporters claiming they’ll never vote for Biden ever ever ever, but I suspect most are just Twitter-mad rather than real-life mad. Come October most will have their “Trump just said [same thing Trump has said for five years], and that’s the last straw! I’m voting for Biden!” moment. In theory, some should vote for whoever the Green Party candidate is, which seems likely to be co-founder Howie Hawkins, who is also running as the Socialist Party USA candidate. You would think that watermelon green-on-the-outside/red-on-the-inside flavor would be perfect for Bernie supporters, but a lot of the 2016 Green and Libertarian Party vote totals were based on how odious Hillary Clinton was. Ditto probable Libertarian candidate Jacob Hornberger, who seems to be holding off the juggernaut that is Vermin Supreme but is unlikely to reach Gary Johnson’s 4 million plus votes in the general election.
This is clearly Bernie’s last Presidential hurrah, and the hard left will need to pick a new champion for their 2024 campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be constitutionally eligible then, but don’t discount the possibility of a celebrity outsider campaign.
So it’s Biden vs. Trump. Polls show big leads for Biden, but that’s due to The Current Unpleasantness. How quickly does the economy recover, and how long can Democrats hide Biden’s obvious cognitive decline from the American public?
Does this mean an end to the Clown Car update? You’ll have to tune in Monday to find out…
Police are searching for a 12-year-old girl who went missing late Tuesday night and is believed to be in grave or immediate danger.
Amisty Monrreal is described as standing 5 foot tall, weighing 90 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes.
She was last seen wearing a black shirt with the number 45 on the front, blue jeans and black/gray Jordan shoes.
She was last seen around 10 p.m. at a location on Barrett Place, near Hwy. 90 and Nogalitos and police are calling this an abduction. Investigators say she has a medical condition that requires a doctor’s care.
If you’ve seen Amisty, call the San Antonio Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit at (210) 207-7660.
Issued about an hour ago. Something for Texas readers who actually leave their house to be on the lookout for…
According to the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), things became apparent in early January when China claimed “the virus jumped from an animal reservoir to a human and wasn’t being transmitted from human-to-human.”
“Well, it became very clear pretty quickly that that was not the case, that the virus was being transmitted from human-to-human. But not only that, but the nightmare that we have is that not only is it transmitted human-to-human, it does it very efficiently,” he explained. “And when the numbers started coming in as to what the morbidity and the mortality was, it was during that period in early to mid-January that it became clear to me that this was not just another SARS. It wasn’t another MERS, or Middle East Respiratory Syndrome. This was different.”
He also said he didn’t think that would have changed the spread of the disease, but now we’ll never know…
How much higher is the death rate from the Wuhan coronavirus than China’s official death rate? The Washington Post says maybe 16 times higher. “Using photos posted online, social media sleuths have estimated that Wuhan funeral homes had returned 3,500 urns a day since March 23. That would imply a death toll in Wuhan of about 42,000 — or 16 times the official number. Another widely shared calculation, based on Wuhan’s 84 furnaces running nonstop and each cremation taking an hour, put the death toll at 46,800.”
Remember how relentlessly the mainstream media scoffed at the idea the virus might have gotten loose from the Wuhan virology lab? Very sober people are beginning to rethink that:
It is understandable that many would be wary of the notion that the origin of the coronavirus could be discovered by some documentary filmmaker who used to live in China. Matthew Tye, who creates YouTube videos, contends he has identified the source of the coronavirus — and a great deal of the information that he presents, obtained from public records posted on the Internet, checks out.
The Wuhan Institute of Virology in China indeed posted a job opening on November 18, 2019, “asking for scientists to come research the relationship between the coronavirus and bats.”
The Google translation of the job posting is: “Taking bats as the research object, I will answer the molecular mechanism that can coexist with Ebola and SARS- associated coronavirus for a long time without disease, and its relationship with flight and longevity. Virology, immunology, cell biology, and multiple omics are used to compare the differences between humans and other mammals.” (“Omics” is a term for a subfield within biology, such as genomics or glycomics.)
On December 24, 2019, the Wuhan Institute of Virology posted a second job posting. The translation of that posting includes the declaration, “long-term research on the pathogenic biology of bats carrying important viruses has confirmed the origin of bats of major new human and livestock infectious diseases such as SARS and SADS, and a large number of new bat and rodent new viruses have been discovered and identified.”
Tye contends that that posting meant, “we’ve discovered a new and terrible virus, and would like to recruit people to come deal with it.” He also contends that “news didn’t come out about coronavirus until ages after that.” Doctors in Wuhan knew that they were dealing with a cluster of pneumonia cases as December progressed, but it is accurate to say that a very limited number of people knew about this particular strain of coronavirus and its severity at the time of that job posting. By December 31, about three weeks after doctors first noticed the cases, the Chinese government notified the World Health Organization and the first media reports about a “mystery pneumonia” appeared outside China.
Plus more discussion about “bat woman” Shi Zhengli and missing institute researcher Huang Yanling. “Most people believe her to be patient zero, and most people believe she is dead.”
Chinese state media is flooding Facebook and Instagram with undisclosed political adverts whitewashing its role in the coronavirus pandemic and pinning blame on Donald Trump.
Three official news outlets – Xinhua, China Central Television and the Global Times – have targeted users across the world with promoted stories in English, Chinese and Arabic.
The ads, seen millions of times, extolled China’s efforts against Covid-19, downplayed its domestic outbreak, depicted Mr Trump as misguided and racist, and suggested that the virus might have originated in the US.
Yet all of them initially ran without a political disclaimer, allowing them to hide information about who they were targeting and sometimes letting them sidestep Facebook’s strict rules on political advertising….
How are people supposed to tell Chinese propaganda from the usual background noise of Trump Derangement Syndrome?
China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts.
In well-documented efforts, China has sought to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, and to claim that, among all nations, China has halted the scourge.
But China’s communist government also is pushing an alternative explanation of the origins of the new coronavirus—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.
Although that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China–a country that strictly monitors what appears on online platforms, regularly scrubbing what the authorities call “rumors.”
The frozen campaign continues. Slow Joe racks up Pinocchios and launches a podcast, the Democratic Convention has been moved back a month (and may turn into a virtual-only affair), and Bernie’s doppelganger says it’s time to throw in the towel. It’s your Democratic Presidential Clown Car Update!
Wisconsin may or may not have a primary tomorrow. It’s theoretically going ahead but there seem to be numerous legal challenges due to the difficulty of holding it due to the Wuhan coronavirus.
Polls
Yet again, there’s not a single poll that has Sanders up over Biden at the state or national level, and polling itself seems to have dropped off to almost nothing, a victim of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak.
Joe Rogan says he’d rather vote for President Donald Trump than Joe Biden. “I’d rather vote for Trump than [Biden]. I don’t think he can handle anything. You’re relying entirely on his cabinet. If you want to talk about an individual leader who can communicate, he can’t do that. And we don’t know what the fuck he’ll be like after a year in office.” (It’s an interesting interview, but then I get to the part where his guest talks about a friend’s self-trepanation and go “Well, this is a little far afield of fodder for a political blog…”)
Democrats have postponed the start of their convention from July 13 to August 17.
From the nuts and bolts of campaigning (fundraising, door-knocking, holding rallies) to the most basic assumptions about the economy and how the public sees Trump, nearly everything needs to be reassessed. Biden’s Philadelphia headquarters has been cleared out. “Everybody’s working remotely across the whole campaign,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s communications director. “We’re all discovering the joys of a Zoom conference call.”…
The presumed date by which Biden’s delegate nerds predicted Bernie Sanders would be unofficially knocked out of the race has been upended by a series of canceled primaries. Biden had planned to use a predicted victory in Georgia on Tuesday to essentially end the race by declaring that he had achieved “an insurmountable delegate lead.”
Instead, the Georgia primary was moved to May and Biden retreated to a makeshift studio in his basement at home in Delaware to broadcast Zoom videos that have had to compete — poorly, so far — with briefings from elected officials like Trump and Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who are actually responsible for dealing with the crisis.
“Everything that’s happening right now is like nothing I’ve experienced in previous presidential campaigns,” said Dunn.
The first big political issue is whether the Sanders campaign has any chance of returning from the dead. With many remaining primaries getting kicked to May and June, Biden might not be able to deliver his “insurmountable delegate lead” line until the summer. And while the pandemic has essentially erased Sanders from the news, there is an undercurrent of frustration — and a little nervousness — among some Biden aides that he has been robbed of a clean victory as the presumptive nominee at the end of March, as they had assumed he would. “There’s no closure,” said a top Biden adviser.
The pandemic exploded and inserted itself as the only issue that matters just as Biden made his remarkable transition from lost cause to incredible comeback. The rebound was so swift and his dominance over the race so sudden, that a lot of Biden advisers and outside allies are still processing what happened. Did Biden build an excellent team that just took some time to get things right? Or was Biden’s team hapless and he was simply the beneficiary of underlying dynamics in the primary that allowed him to beat Sanders?
The latter view was expressed by an informal adviser to the campaign.
“After Super Tuesday, Biden got catapulted to the front of the line in spite of himself and his campaign,” he said. “The classic example of that obviously is Massachusetts, where he never went there, didn’t spend any money, didn’t have any people on the ground, and he beat Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. It’s extraordinary. And there’s a reason for it: Democratic voters were saying that the most important thing to them is to beat Trump and he was happy to be the beneficiary of that. But perhaps many of us were overly critical of how they ran the campaign and, frankly, how he performed. He has some fundamental strengths that those of us watching this undervalued.”
When Biden has been heard from, he has looked frankly pathetic. After disappearing for more than a week after his primary victories in Missouri, Michigan and Washington, Biden emerged this week for a series of speeches and interviews from his Wilmington, Del., home.
The purpose was obvious — his campaign desperately needs to muscle its way back into the news cycle. But that turned out to be easier said than done…Biden is clearly not working for the Biden campaign.
Gates is a Republican and is certainly no liberal, but his reputation for moderation, pragmatism, and managerial talent was such that Barack Obama wanted to retain him for a long stint as secretary of defense. It wasn’t the easiest of tenures, but for two and a half years, Gates worked diligently and as smoothly as he could with President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the rest of the Obama-Biden national security team.
It is therefore a matter of grave alarm—at least a DEFCON 2 and possibly DEFCON 1, the ultimate state of alert—when Gates, that most centered of centrists, asserts that Biden has “been wrong on nearly every foreign policy and national security issue for the past four decades.”
The entire syllabus of Biden’s foreign policy and national security errors is a target-rich environment for the many American Greatness writers with expertise on particular issues. Anyone who makes the case for Biden’s election to the presidency should be made to defend the extremism and demonstrated failure of Biden’s national security record.
The former VP doesn’t just stick to marginal lies or spin either, he goes directly at major issues knowing that he’ll be shown to be fibbing.
But does he know? That’s a real question when you’ve got a guy who’s clearly losing his mental faculties. As I’ve documented here, here, and here (among many others), Biden’s inability to process his thoughts and his constant “gaffes” are apparent at this point. There have also been bouts of anger on the campaign trail in which he’s berated or even physically accosted Democrat primary voters.
These are the kinds of things someone wouldn’t do if they had the ability to understand what they were doing. Trump may be a brute at times, but you’ll never find him jabbing his finger in a voter’s chest and yelling at them.
All of these things raise serious questions about just how stable Biden is. If you’ve watched him lately, he looks like he’s about to fall over while just trying to do remote TV hits. This is not a guy who looks — or acts — like he’s all there. So while the constant lies are worthy of coverage — and every single one needs to be slammed — the reality of his condition may be much more serious than just a case of being a politician.
If I’m following Joe Biden correctly during this ABC interview, he still wants the Wisconsin primary to proceed this week during a stay-at-home order amid a pandemic, but says out of caution that the DNC Convention should not be held in Wisconsin 3-4 months from now. Check.
Did you know that Joe Biden has a podcast? Speaking of which: “Biden’s New Podcast Available Exclusively On Vinyl.” “Joe Biden did a town hall about coronavirus last night [March 27] on CNN, and I don’t think there is a single news article about it other than on CNN itself, which doesn’t seem to have a transcript.” Biden is running ahead of where Hillary Clinton did against Sanders four years ago. “Biden held onto much of the turf that Clinton won in 2016, but he also captured a lot of territory that Sanders carried four years ago. We found that much of Biden’s success can be explained by his dominance in areas with larger shares of white voters without a college degree.” Time’s Up: We’re here to fight for all women who make accusations of sexual assault. Well, except those against Joe Biden. For Reasons. Related:
It’s kind of strange that after Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault, his Senior Adviser, @SymoneDSanders went through and deleted all of her Tweets about Kavanaugh.
Joe Biden is the presumptive Democratic nominee. Yet many Democrats have ‘buyers’ remorse’ as the COVID virus has driven Biden off centerstage and into a hastily-built basement studio in his Delaware home.
Biden has tried to remain relevant to the public through TV broadcasts, but those appearances have been gaffe-prone and interspersed with lapses in lucidity. Last Friday, he announced on CNN that ‘I speak to all five of my grandkids,’ which must make his very much alive sixth grandchild feel a little neglected. Dave Catanese of McClatchy found his interview last Monday painful to watch: ‘Joe Biden struggled mightily at the top of his MSNBC interview where he looked to be reading from notes to answer a question.’
Democrats openly worry about the lack of enthusiasm for Biden. A new Washington Post/ABC poll found 86 percent of Trump supporters enthusiastic about their choice. Only 74 percent of Biden backers said the same thing. Most ominously, the poll found that 15 percent of Democrats who still back Bernie Sanders say they’d vote for Trump, not Biden, in November. That’s more than the 12 percent of Sanders voters who plumped for Trump in 2016.
The knife-in-the-back anonymous-top-aides-say-he-should-consider-dropping-out stage is already in full swing. Of course, it’s from the Washington Post and contains the magic “just trust me bro” phrase (“according to two people with knowledge of the situation,”) so who knows if it’s real or just more DNC rat-farking. His Saturday Night Live doppelganger Larry David says Sanders should drop out and everybody should back Biden.
Out of the Running
These are people who were formerly in the roundup who have announced they’re not running, for which I’ve seen no signs they’re running, or who declared then dropped out:
This is how you respond to communist tyrants who demand you apologize for telling the truth about them:
The Daily Telegraph this week received a letter from the Australian Consulate General of the People’s Republic of China, who took gentle issue with our excellent coverage of the coronavirus crisis.
Following is a point-by-point response to the Consulate General and China’s communist dictatorship:
Recently the Daily Telegraph has published a number of reports and opinions about China’s response to COVID-19 that are full of ignorance, prejudice and arrogance.
If a state-owned newspaper in China received this kind of complaint, subsequent days would involve journalists waking up in prison with their organs harvested.
Tracing the origin of the virus is a scientific issue that requires professional, science-based assessment.
Sure it does. How professional and science-based was the claim published on March 12 by China’s foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian that “it might be US Army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan”?
The origin of the virus is still undetermined, and the World Health Organization has named the novel coronavirus “COVID-19”.
The World Health Organisation also appointed Zimbabwean murderer Robert Mugabe as its Goodwill Ambassador and declared on March 2 that the “stigma” of the coronavirus “is more dangerous than the virus itself”.
The World Health Organisation does a lot of stupid stuff.
So what is the real motive behind your attempt to repeatedly link the virus to China and even stating that the novel coronavirus was “made in China”?
Our motive is accuracy. That’s why we don’t link the virus to Bognor Regis or state that it was “made in Panama”.
Snip.
The effectiveness of China’s epidemic prevention and control has fully underlined the people-centred philosophy of the Communist Party of China and the strong advantages of the Chinese system.
In 2018, Amnesty International reported that China executed more citizens than the rest of the world combined.
Please tell us more about your “people-centred philosophy” and how many bullets it requires.
Instead of admitting and facing facts, the articles in your newspaper have wantonly attacked and smeared the CPC and the Chinese government with vicious language.
And yet we haven’t been jailed or shot! Where’s the justice in that?
Is your judgement based on the well-being of the people or do you have an ideological prejudice?
We will admit to an ideological prejudice against deadly tyranny. It’s a tragic failing on our part.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, and New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo have each touted chloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria, as a promising treatment option for those infected with Covid-19. Some media quickly pounced on the president’s statement. The commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, Stephen Hahn, quickly clarified that the agency had not in fact approved the drug as a safe and effective treatment for the new disease, shortly after the president claimed that the drug was “approved very, very quickly and it’s now approved by prescription.”
Chloroquine is in fact available for prescription in the United States. It’s already being tried as a treatment for the new virus in U.S. hospitals. And multiple manufacturers are rushing to produce more and get it to doctors.
The confusion over chloroquine—along with the broader performance of U.S. regulatory agencies during this epidemic—highlights how our federal process for reviewing and approving drugs and medical devices still leaves much to be desired. Our regulatory regime is costing lives. The early administrative failings of the FDA and Centers for Disease Control, which greatly worsened the crisis in the United States, show how ugly that can be.
Getting a new pharmaceutical compound to market in the U.S. is an extraordinarily complex process. Development time is usually more than a decade. Costs add up to hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. After an innovator submits an Investigational New Drug application, the FDA requires a three-stage testing process, then the submission of a formal New Drug Application that typically includes hundreds of thousands of pages of documentation.
Some Chloroquine discussion skipped.
With cases and deaths growing exponentially, federal regulatory authorities can be expected to fast-track new approaches. The agencies were much less willing to afford latitude to the private sector just weeks ago, though—and the United States is now much more vulnerable as a result. Chinese authorities uploaded the SARS-CoV-2 genome onto the Internet on January 10. The CDC developed its own testing protocol by January 21; international scientists developed a different test by the same date, which was soon disseminated en masse by the World Health Organization.
The U.S. testing process failed. The day that the CDC announced it had developed its testing protocol, January 21, was the date of the first documented American case of coronavirus. South Korea documented its first case the same day. But by March 17, the United States had administered only 125 tests per 1 million people; South Korea had administered more than 5,000 tests per 1 million over the same time span. By aggressive testing, South Korea was able to trace viral spread and contain it. Without it, the U.S. was left with little choice but the draconian measures that have shut down much of American life.
As has been widely reported, the CDC’s in-house testing design was flawed, thus compromising early testing results. Mistakes happen, but the impact of the test-design flaw was much greater than it should have been—owing to the U.S. bureaucracy’s tightly controlled process. Even had the CDC test worked perfectly, not nearly enough tests would have been available for wide-scale testing on the South Korean model.
We’re happy to note that in recent days and weeks, President Trump has helped ease the regulatory burden of our response to the coronavirus, pushing Health and Human Services, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control, our main health agencies, to bend, suspend and in some cases upend useless rules.
But that doesn’t mean every useless regulation was excised from the rulebooks. Or that our major health care regulators made good decisions with the billions of dollars entrusted to them for basic research.
Far from it. And the coronavirus pandemic and the public panic that ensued is a case in point. To be blunt, U.S. health care regulatory agencies mishandled the crisis.
Indeed, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) fumbled the ball early when it came testing for the Wuhan coronavirus, largely because of bad regulations.
“Even now, after weeks of mounting frustration toward federal agencies over flawed test kits and burdensome rules, states with growing cases such as New York and California are struggling to test widely for the coronavirus,” the New York Times noted in a March 11 story. “The continued delays have made it impossible for officials to get a true picture of the scale of the growing outbreak, which has now spread to at least 36 states and Washington, D.C.”
The Times highlights Dr. Helen Chu, who early on had taken swabs from the noses of patients in Washington State who seemed to be suffering from a particularly nasty virus. She proposed to local, state and federal officials testing those swabs for unusual coronavirus infections.
Instead, the CDC told Dr. Chu she’d have to get FDA approval for her test. The FDA nixed it because the lab she worked in wasn’t “certified” to conduct such tests, something that takes months to do.
So early data that could have helped fight what later became a raging pandemic weren’t available. All because a bureaucracy went strictly by the book.
Let’s hope the current crisis results in significant regulatory reform.
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson thinks that Chinese coronavirus cases may be 40 times higher than stated.
China is waging a propaganda war against the coronavirus on several fronts. In addition to its well-documented efforts to deflect attention from its early suppression of information about the disease and to claim that it has among all nations now halted the scourge, it is also pushing an alternative explanation of its origins—namely that it didn’t start in Wuhan after all, but was a creation of a military biochemical lab in the United States and was brought to China by an American team that competed in the Military World Games in Wuhan last October.
While that conspiracy theory was quickly noted and dismissed in much of the West, it is continuing and broadening all over social media in China – a country that strictly monitors what appears on its online platforms, regularly scrubbing it of what the authorities call “rumors.” But a lot of it, put on platforms that are banned in China, seems aimed outward, part of a concerted effort to convince the world that China, once the villain of the coronavirus story, is actually its hero, and that the real villain is America.
The Chinese Communist Party, led by Chairman Xi Jinping, has a membership of 90 million out of a country of 1.4 billion. Not all may be doctrinaire Marxists or Maoists, but they form a ruling elite for a regime that has managed to bring wealth and prestige to a once-poor people. They have overseen the building of a modern industrial base, and the creation of a first-world military complete with an advanced nuclear arsenal. Their intelligence services are larger and more sophisticated than those of any other nation on earth.
At the heart of China’s communist ideology is a deep-seated resentment against the world. After the Century of Humiliation where China was exploited by the Western powers, Russia, and Japan, they are committed to never letting that happen again.
If one doubts the CCP’s resolve, one need look no further than the fact that they have killed, through famine and other means, almost 100 million of their own countrymen in a series of communist social and economic reforms they believed necessary to modernize their country. In other words, these are not a people to be taken lightly. The presidency of Donald Trump presents the greatest strategic threat to their desire to establish themselves as the world’s preeminent economic and military power.
Although it is not the position of our government that the CCP was behind the creation and weaponization of the Chinese virus, we need to at least entertain the notion that a nation that has, in the recent past, killed tens of millions of its own people would not think twice about killing thousands or even millions of other peoples from other countries if it meant putting them in a greater strategic position and helping them fulfill their objective of a communist world order.
Speaking of filthy: “Chinese markets again selling bats.” Ain’t that a kick in the head?
I’ve seen a lot of experts debunking the idea that the current coronavirus pandemic originated at the Wuhan virology lab. But here’s one expert that thinks it might well have. “Richard H. Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University, told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that there is a real possibility that the virus entered the human population due to a laboratory accident.”
The 15-days Guidelines allowed the nation to prepare to get the equipment and resources needed in-place before a wave of hospitalizations would be required. The 15-days also provided time to garner information possible treatment options for those experiencing symptoms. These include lopinavir-ritonavir, interferon-1β, the RNA polymerase inhibitor remdesivir, chloroquine, a variety of traditional Chinese medicine products, and intravenous hyperimmune globulin from recovered patients.
Based on Task Force briefing discussions with Fauci and fellow member Dr. Deborah Birx, it appears that the team projects that the coronavirus will disappear during the summer, and return in the fall. They are working with the President and the rest of his team to expedite testing, find and produce vaccines, and identify effective treatments while keeping the mortality rate as low as can be achieved in this first wave of infections….
If the curve flattens to around 33,000 deaths, then that is approximately the same as a moderately bad flu year, and far short of the 100,000 the media was presenting this weekend.
President Donald Trump is working hard to reduce the number to as low as can be achieved, based on the advice of Fauci and other team members. They may have access to additional information that indicates the extension of guidelines to the end of April is warranted.
Fauci and his team continue to gather data, and adjustments will be made in the models as speculation is replaced by hard information and results. For now, it appears that Fauci and his team’s original roadmap for the pandemic was good.
More analysis of the numbers. “Germany and the United States have significantly better coronavirus death rates per capita than Italy, Spain, Iran and France. A lot better. This is why the media avoids per capita measurements for confirmed cases, but conveniently remembered when it wanted to fact-check Trump’s testing numbers.”
Scary story about a Washington state choir rehearsal of 60 people, none of whom exhibited any symptoms of illness. “Nearly three weeks later, 45 have been diagnosed with COVID-19 or ill with the symptoms, at least three have been hospitalized, and two are dead.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Funny how all the leftist sorts are insisting you can’t call it the Chinese coronavirus or the Wuhan coronavirus. Almost as though they all received the same marching orders from…somewhere. But no, that would be silly. All the useful idiots can’t be on China’s payroll…
Last week’s unemployment numbers were horrible. This week’s are worse. “US jobless claims skyrocket to 6.6 million.” We knew this was coming. We just need to get to the other side of the “V”…
Know what other numbers are hugely up? NCIS firearms checks run. 3,740,688 checks were run in March, easily a new record.
“Italy Risks Losing Grip in South With Fear of Looting, Riots.”
As Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte fights to hold Italian society together through a crippling nationwide lockdown, the depressed south is turning into a powder keg.
Police have been deployed on the streets of Sicily’s capital, Palermo, amid reports gangs are using social media to plot attacks on stores. A bankrupt ferry company halted service to the island, including vital supplies of food and medicines. As the state creaks under the strain of the coronavirus pandemic, officials worry the mafia may be preparing to step in.
Preventing unrest in the so-called Mezzogiorno, the underdeveloped southern region that’s long lagged behind the wealthy north, has become the government’s top priority, according to Italian officials who asked not to be named discussing the administration’s strategy.
With the European Union’s most dangerously indebted state already fighting the Germans over the terms of the financial aid it needs, the fallout may reach far beyond Rome if Conte fails.
Keep in mind that any postwar Italian government’s grip on power is tenuous in the best of times…(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
Panama is fighting the coronavirus by segregating shipping days by gender. What, are Panamanians so randy they can’t see a member of the opposite sex without wanting to get jiggy with them?
Does anyone not on the payroll of the Chinese Communist Party trust Beijing’s dictatorship with the power to pervasively monitor communications (spy locally as well as globally), interrupt, deny or corrupt digital services, and possibly take surreptitious control of digital devices, say, the air traffic control computers at Los Angeles International Airport?
Outrageous scenario? No, given Huawei’s baggage is a legitimate worry exacerbated by the regime’s criminal dishonesty (e.g., lying about COVID-19/Wuhan virus). For all practical purposes, Huawei is a Chinese Communist Party tool. In spy lingo, a cutout company can hide an espionage operation. Abundant evidence suggests Huawei serves as a cutout.
Alexandria Ocasio Cortez encourages Amazon workers to strike, because Unions. “AOC is so devoted to the commie common good that she wants some of the only people in America who are guaranteed work to voluntarily give that work up for some union talking point.”
What the hell, Vermont? “State officials in Vermont are ordering large retailers that sell critical items such as food and prescription drugs to stop the in-person sale of nonessential products such as clothing and electronics.” An emergency doesn’t give you the excuse to be Shopping Basket Dictator.
Venezuelan patrol ship sinks after ramming cruise ship with reinforced hull. The only way this story could be any better is if the cruise ship was labeled “Donald Trump” and the Venezuelan patrol boat was labelled “The Media.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Since the Wuhan Coronavirus has delivered a quick kick to the nads of the economy, I’m sure being out of work really sucks right now. Here’s a quick roundup on economic resources that might help, both in Texas and elsewhere.
Candor has a long list of companies that covers which are still hiring (and there are many), which have hiring freezes in place, which are having layoffs, etc., along with more info, links to company hiring portals, etc.
Some newly unemployed Texans have complained that they can’t get through to Texas Workforce Commission by using either the website or by either telephone numbers (800-939-6631 for claims or 800-558-8321 for Tele-Serve). Two pieces of advice: For the website, try late at night or early morning when it’s not so slammed. For the telephone, the listed hours are 8 AM to 6 PM on weekdays, and I hear the best times to call are between 5-6 PM (when the phones are still staffed in El Paso).
If you’re stuck home under quarantine, now is a good time to increase your skill stack by taking courses to give your resume buzzword compliance. If you’re signed up through TWC, they have free online courses in a variety of areas.
Cisco also has an online learning portal and access to some sandbox tools, not only for their own stuff but also several basic technology tools.
Here’s a double-shot of Tucker Carlson on two different lies being bandied about but our media (and parts of our various governments) on effective tools to fight the Wuhan coronavirus.
Hydroxychloroquine given in combination with antibiotics looks like an effective combination. So why do so many Democrats insist it doesn’t work, going so far that a douple of Democratic governor’s have tried to ban it’s use for treating coronavirus? “If Trump is for it, they’re against it, even if it might save American lives.”
