Tag Archives: The President

Let the Pigs Fly!

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The president issued some executive orders yesterday at one of his country clubs while being protected at great expense by the Secret Service. The people who write headlines gave us stuff like this from the widely-printed Associated Press:

President Txxxx moves to authorize more unemployment pay and a payroll tax deferral for coronavirus relief

The nation would have been so much better served if there had been headlines like this (I grant you it’s rather long) written by a Republican political consultant:

If you actually needed more proof that the Republican Party was a non-serious party with no interest in governing, Txxxx signing meaningless executive orders he doesn’t understand at a golf club he’s using to scam more taxpayer dollars is pretty much the perfect trifecta.

After almost four years, reporters still write as though this is a normal president doing things that presidents normally do. So we are told that “Txxxx directs Post Office to employ flying pigs in cost-cutting measure” as if Txxxx has the authority to do such a thing and it’s actually going to happen. He gets his headline and appears to be doing something significant. That’s all that matters to him. It’s good publicity.

As time passes, there will be articles analyzing what the president actually did or didn’t do. By then, he will have moved on to his next performance piece. It will turn out, however, that the Post Office, run by one of his cronies, did spend time and money trying to get pigs to fly but, damn it, somehow failed.

We do have Twitter, however. From Paul Krugman:

I don’t know if anyone else has said this, but payroll tax cuts are the hydroxychloroquine of economic policy. They won’t do anything to solve the employment crisis, but will have dangerous side effects.

Yet Txxxx remains obsessed with them as a cure. We’ve lost millions of jobs, not because employers lack incentives to hire, but because many activities, like bars, indoor dining, inessential travel, elective medical care have been put on hold because of the risk of contagion.

Letting employers keep money they were supposed to be paying into Social Security and Medicare — no good reason to believe they’ll pass the savings on to workers — does nothing to remedy this problem.

It will, however, undermine the finances of programs that are absolutely crucial to the lives of older Americans. If you measure the quality of policy ideas on a scale of 1 to 10, this is a minus 5 or worse.

Even Senate Republicans consider this a terrible idea. So where’s Txxxx getting it from? The immediate answer seems to be Stephen Moore, whose previous greatest hits include predicting that tax cuts would create a Kansas economic miracle [Note: Kansas fell apart after severe tax cuts].

Just a word about the other Txxxx “policy”, on unemployment benefits. He is NOT proposing to extend supplemental benefits. He’s calling for a new program, without Congressional authorization, that states are supposed to set up and provide with matching funds.

Two realities here: 1. The administrative capacity of state unemployment offices is stretched to the limit — it took months to provide expanded benefits, and some people never got them. They’re in no position to add a new program.

2. States are also broke because of coronavirus revenue losses and expenses. Even if they could reprogram their COBOL-driven computers fast enough, they wouldn’t have the money.

So this is policy by reality TV: an attempt to pretend that Txxxx is doing something, while providing no real relief. The fact is that Txxxx and those around him don’t know how to do policy.

But they do know how to get publicity.

In spades.

As if pigs began to fly.

“Nobody likes me. It can only be my personality.”

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From The Lincoln Project, made by Republicans for Republicans:

From a group calling themselves Republican Voters Against Txxxx:

They call themselves MeidasTouch:

I bet lots of his supporters would appreciate seeing these.

Note: “Nobody likes me”.

Hope vs. Reality, or the Vaccination Blues

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From The New York Times:

In April, with hospitals overwhelmed and much of the United States in lockdown, the Department of Health and Human Services produced a presentation for the White House arguing that rapid development of a coronavirus vaccine was the best hope to control the pandemic.

“DEADLINE: Enable broad access to the public by October 2020,” the first slide read, with the date in bold.

Given that it typically takes years to develop a vaccine, the timetable for the initiative, called Operation Warp Speed, was incredibly ambitious. With tens of thousands dying and tens of millions out of work, the crisis demanded an all-out public-private response, with the government supplying billions of dollars to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, providing logistical support and cutting through red tape.

It escaped no one that the proposed deadline also intersected nicely with President Txxxx’s need to curb the virus before the election in November.

“Hey, if Operation Warp Speed ‘curbs the virus’ by October, the 200,000 dead will be forgotten and I’ll win a beautiful victory, the biggest win ever!”

Thus our president is hoping. 

I hope his staff doesn’t disappoint him by sharing this from The Washington Post.

In the public imagination [and between the president’s ears], the arrival of a coronavirus vaccine looms large: It’s the neat Hollywood ending to the grim and agonizing uncertainty of everyday life in a pandemic.

But public health experts are discussing among themselves a new worry: that hopes for a vaccine may be soaring too high. The confident depiction by politicians and companies that a vaccine is imminent and inevitable may give people unrealistic beliefs about how soon the world can return to normal — and even spark resistance to simple strategies that can tamp down transmission and save lives in the short term.

Two coronavirus vaccines entered the final stages of human testing last week, a scientific speed record that prompted top government health officials to utter words such as “historic” and “astounding” . . .

As the plotline advances, so do expectations: If people can just muddle through a few more months, the vaccine will land, the pandemic will end and everyone can throw their masks away. But best-case scenarios have failed to materialize throughout the pandemic, and experts — who believe wholeheartedly in the power of vaccines — foresee a long path ahead.

“It seems, to me, unlikely that a vaccine is an off-switch or a reset button where we will go back to pre-pandemic times,” said Yonatan Grad, an assistant professor of infectious diseases and immunology [at Harvard].

Or, as Columbia University virologist Angela Rasmussen puts it, “It’s not like we’re going to land in Oz.”

The declaration that a vaccine has been shown safe and effective will be a beginning, not the end. Deploying the vaccine to people in the United States and around the world will test and strain distribution networks, the supply chain, public trust and global cooperation. It will take months or, more likely, years to reach enough people to make the world safe.

For those who do get a vaccine as soon as shots become available, protection won’t be immediate — it takes weeks for the immune system to call up full platoons of disease-fighting antibodies. And many vaccine technologies will require a second shot weeks after the first to raise immune defenses.

Immunity could be short-lived or partial, requiring repeated boosters that strain the vaccine supply or require people to keep social distancing and wearing masks even after they’ve received their shots. And if a vaccine works less well for some groups of people, if swaths of the population are reluctant to get a vaccine or if there isn’t enough to go around, some people will still get sick even after scientists declare victory on a vaccine — which could help foster a false impression it doesn’t work.

A proven vaccine will profoundly change the relationship the world has with the novel coronavirus and is how many experts believe the pandemic will end. In popular conception, a vaccine is regarded as a silver bullet. But the truth — especially with the earliest vaccines — is likely to be far more nuanced. Public health experts fear that could lead to disappointment and erode the already delicate trust essential to making the effort to vanquish the virus succeed.

The drive to develop vaccines is frequently characterized as a race, with one country or company in the lead. The race metaphor suggests that what matters is who reaches the finish line first. But first across the line isn’t necessarily the best — and it almost certainly isn’t the end of the race, which could go on for years.

“The realistic scenario is probably going to be more like what we saw with HIV/AIDS,” said Michael S. Kinch, an expert in drug development and research at Washington University . . . “With HIV, we had a first generation of, looking back now, fairly mediocre drugs. I am afraid — and people don’t like to hear this, but I’m kind of constantly preaching it — we have to prepare ourselves for the idea we do not have a very good vaccine. My guess is the first generation of vaccines may be mediocre.”

Unquote.

In other words, reality isn’t reality TV.

Another Stalwart Republican Breaks Ranks

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Law professor Steven Calibresi is a leading Republican. He is a co-founder of the right-wing Federalist Society. He voted for this president and opposed his impeachment. However, the maniac’s latest pronouncement was too much even for Calibresi:

. . . I am frankly appalled by the president’s recent tweet seeking to postpone the November election. Until recently, I had taken as political hyperbole the Democrats’ assertion that President Txxxx is a fascist. But this latest tweet is fascistic and is itself grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment again by the House of Representatives and his removal from office by the Senate.

Here is what President Txxxx tweeted:

With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history. It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely and safely vote???

The nation has faced grave challenges before, just as it does today with the spread of the coronavirus. But it has never canceled or delayed a presidential election. Not in 1864, when President Abraham Lincoln was expected to lose and the South looked as if it might defeat the North. Not in 1932 in the depths of the Great Depression. Not in 1944 during World War II.

So we certainly should not even consider canceling this fall’s election because of the president’s concern about mail-in voting, which is likely to increase because of fears about Covid-19. It is up to each of the 50 states whether to allow universal mail-in voting and Article II of the Constitution explicitly gives the states total power over the selection of presidential electors.

Election Day was fixed by a federal law passed in 1845, and the Constitution itself in the 20th Amendment specifies that the newly elected Congress meet at noon on Jan. 3, 2021, and that the terms of the president and vice president end at noon on Jan. 20, 2021. If no newly elected president is available, the speaker of the House of Representatives becomes acting president.

President Txxxx needs to be told by every Republican in Congress that he cannot postpone the federal election. Doing so would be illegal, unconstitutional and without precedent in American history. Anyone who says otherwise should never be elected to Congress again.

Unquote.

It was announced this morning that the country’s Gross Domestic Product went down by 9.5% in the second quarter, the largest drop ever recorded. We’re on track to easily pass 200,000 coronavirus deaths by November.

No wonder the president is nervous. Today he tried to make the idea of a delayed election sound plausible:

You’re sending out hundreds of millions of universal mail-in ballots. Hundreds of millions,” Mr. Txxxx said. “Where are they going? Who are they being sent to?”

Given current circumstances, Txxxx probably feels like hundreds of millions of angry voters are bearing down on him. But America only has around 150 million registered voters. They’re the only people who might possibly receive a mail-in ballot. They’re the only people whose mail-in ballot would be accepted by election officials. So at most there are only 150 million or so angry voters bearing down on him. 

Hey, Mr. President, not to worry!

Note: The Republican leaders of the Senate and House agreed today that the election will be held in November. Someone orange isn’t going to be happy.

A Republican Confesses

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The Republican Party has been rotten since the days of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Some of the less crazy Republicans are now acknowledging the party’s downward trajectory. This apology was written by a political consultant, Stuart Stevens, for The New York Times (I’ve removed some historical and self-serving parts):

I spent decades working to elect Republicans, including Mr. Romney and four other presidential candidates, and I am here to bear reluctant witness that Mr. Txxxx didn’t hijack the Republican Party. He is the logical conclusion of what the party became over the past 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race-baiting, self-deception and anger that now dominate it. Hold Dxxxx Txxxx up to a mirror and that bulging, scowling orange face is today’s Republican Party.

I saw the warning signs but ignored them and chose to believe what I wanted to believe: The party wasn’t just a white grievance party; there was still a big tent; the others guys were worse. Many of us in the party saw this dark side and told ourselves it was a recessive gene. We were wrong. It turned out to be the dominant gene.

What is most telling is that the Republican Party actively embraced, supported, defended and now enthusiastically identifies with a man who eagerly exploits the nation’s racial tensions. In our system, political parties should serve a circuit breaker function. The Republican Party never pulled the switch. . . .

There is a collective blame to be shared by those of us who have created the modern Republican Party that has so egregiously betrayed the principles it claimed to represent. My j’accuse is against us all, not a few individuals who were the most egregious.

How did this happen? How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months? You don’t. The obvious answer is those beliefs weren’t deeply held. What others and I thought were bedrock values turned out to be mere marketing slogans easily replaced. I feel like the guy working for Bernie Madoff who thought they were actually beating the market.

Mr. Txxxx has served a useful purpose by exposing the deep flaws of a major American political party. Like a heavy truck driven over a bridge on the edge of failure, he has made it impossible to ignore the long-developing fault lines of the Republican Party. A party rooted in decency and values does not embrace the anger that Mr. Txxxx peddles as patriotism.

This collapse of a major political party as a moral governing force is unlike anything we have seen in modern American politics. The closest parallel is the demise of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, when the dissonance between what the party said it stood for and what citizens actually experienced was so great that it was unsustainable.

This election should signal a day of reckoning for the party and all who claim it as a political identity. Will it? I’ve given up hope that there are any lines of decency or normalcy that once crossed would move Republican leaders to act as if they took their oath of office more seriously than their allegiance to party. Only fear will motivate the party to change — the cold fear only defeat can bring.

That defeat is looming. Will it bring desperately needed change to the Republican Party? I’d like to say I’m hopeful. But that would be a lie and there have been too many lies for too long.