The Never Trump Republicans of the Lincoln Project have criticized Trump more than once, and are now burrowed deep under his oddly-pigmented skin. They’re highly effective in the way that Russian dissidents were highly effective against the brutality of the Soviet Union: no one knew both those experiences and the character of the regime that inflicted them better than the dissidents. A hundred Western critics weren’t as compelling as a single, insightful Soviet émigré.
Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, has had a meteoric rise (in the way Jay Gatsby had a meteoric rise) and like the Trump family, he’s done all he can to cash in. The GOP Cribs video both highlights the campaign manager’s greed and plays to Trump’s own doubts about whether he can trust Parscale.
A rare and harrowing look inside a hospital hard-hit by the coronavirus in northern Italy, following the stories of an ER doctor, her staff and patients battling COVID-19.
With unprecedented and intimate access, FRONTLINE goes inside a besieged hospital unit in the region at the epicenter of Italy’s coronavirus outbreak, where doctors and nurses try to save the lives of patients battling COVID-19 without contracting the highly infectious disease themselves. Filmed during the height of the coronavirus pandemic, “Inside Italy’s COVID War” documents haunting, heroic scenes — from the darkest days, to the signs of hope.
A nearby newspaper, the Janesville Gazette, part of an out-of-state chain (APG) owned by a family that made billions in billboard advertising, recently tried to position half-off advertising as a ‘community grant‘ program. See That’s Not a ‘Community Grant’ – It’s Half-Off Advertising.
It’s an old – often true – adage that bad goes to worse, and so it is here: the Gazette is now offering a seminar on “CRISIS MARKETING & RE-BOOT STRATEGIES for Wisconsin Business Owners with featured speaker Ryan Dohrn, Marketing Expert.” As it turns out, Dohrn has built a career as an ad sales consultant (“Learn about the ad sales training system that is changing the way media companies sell advertising”).
Honest to goodness: a company that made its money in ad sales, and disingenuously describes half-off advertising as a community grant, now uses an ad sales consultant as a CRISIS MARKETING and RE-BOOT strategist.
Positioning this crude, selfish effort as ‘crisis’ advice to Wisconsin businesses is about as disreputable as selling time-shares in Florida. (Indeed, there are apparently companies that do nothing except try to get unfortunate time-share victims out of their time-share contracts.) Other than a Nigerian email offer, it’s hard to think of anything more laughably repulsive.
In a post from 5.6.20 (Saving What’s Left of the Janesville Gazette), I recommended firing the paper’s managing editor. That’s still a fair suggestion, as he’s run the paper into the ground. It is, however, the whole APG chain that’s rotten.
Pretending that ad sales are community grants, or describing shabby sales pitches as crisis marketing, will do as much to ruin this paper in its own community as any of the low-quality stories of the last few years.
The young reporters at the Gazette aren’t working for a newspaper – they’re closer to working for Mitch and Murray from Glengarry Glen Ross.
These reporters are not pursing a serious career in journalism at this paper – they’re supplying content to keep an ad sales pipeline going a bit longer while an out-of-state chain wrings the last drops from struggling local businesses into ineffectual ad buys. Along the way, they’re giving older, mediocre editors – who have plainly taught few valuable lessons – a few more years of undeserved employment.
Sketchy offers like this aren’t worthy commitments to one’s community, or evidence that ‘local matters’ – they’re selfish acts at the expense of local businesses.
Wednesday in Whitewater will see clouds giving way to some sun with a high of sixty-six. Sunrise is 5:25 AM and sunset 8:16 PM, for 14h 51m 03s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 4.8% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Parks & Recreation Board meets via audiovisual conferencing at 7 PM.
On this day in 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis receive a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets.
Republican political operatives are recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to go on television to prescribe reviving the U.S. economy as quickly as possible, without waiting to meet safety benchmarks proposed by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to slow the spread of the new coronavirus.
The plan was discussed in a May 11 conference call with a senior staffer for the Trump reelection campaign organized by CNP Action, an affiliate of the GOP-aligned Council for National Policy. A leaked recording of the hourlong call was provided to The Associated Press by the Center for Media and Democracy, a progressive watchdog group.
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Tim Murtaugh, the Trump campaign communications director, confirmed to AP that an effort to recruit doctors to publicly support the president is underway, but declined to say when the initiative would be rolled out.
“Anybody who joins one of our coalitions is vetted,” Murtaugh said Monday. “And so quite obviously, all of our coalitions espouse policies and say things that are, of course, exactly simpatico with what the president believes. … The president has been outspoken about the fact that he wants to get the country back open as soon as possible.”
The president has botched the pandemic response, and he is now botching the economic recovery. But he could put his talents to use by serving as a full-time lab animal, a national guinea pig, a cavy-in-chief. He probably won’t find a cure, but Trump, by acting as a one-man FDA, would do something almost as helpful: Distract himself from doing yet more damage to the country.
He’ll quaff a bitterroot tonic from Madagascar called Covid Organics, together with a blend of “purgative” herbal extracts from China said to combat the “noxious dampness” responsible for the pandemic.
And of course, he’ll go through a couple of bottles of his favorite quarterback Tom Brady’s “immunity blend supplement,” out this week, featuring larch tree extract and elderberry. “You’re gonna love it,” Brady says.
You know what else Trump will love? Covering himself in cow dung and drinking cow urine. Some in India believe this to be particularly effective if done while performing a ritual in front of a fire.
However, some in the Middle East believe camel urine to be more effective as an antiviral; Trump will be able to settle this dispute conclusively.
Tuesday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with a high of sixty-two. Sunrise is 5:26 AM and sunset 8:16 PM, for 14h 49m 13s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 9.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s common council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.
On this day in 1942, after the Battle of the Coral Sea, Task Force 16 heads to Pearl Harbor.
On a day when COVID-19 cases soared, healthcare supplies were scarce and an anguished doctor warned he was being sent to war without bullets, a cargo plane landed at the Los Angeles International Airport, supposedly loaded with the ammo doctors and nurses were begging for: some of the first N95 medical masks to reach the U.S. in almost six weeks.
Already healthcare workers who lacked the crucial protection had caught COVID-19 after treating patients infected with the highly contagious new coronavirus. That very day an emergency room doctor who earlier texted a friend that he felt unsafe without protective supplies or an N95 mask, died of the infection. It was the first such death reported in the U.S., according to the American College of Emergency Physicians.
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But the day before they arrived, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a very specific warning: all Shanghai Dasheng N95 masks with ear loops were counterfeit.
Ear loop masks are less expensive to manufacture because the straps are attached with glue to the face covering, while headbands on genuine N95s, also called respirators, must be stitched, stapled or soldered to establish a tighter seal over the nose and mouth.
The anonymized location data was captured from opt-in cellphone apps, and data scientists at the firm VoteMap used it to determine the movements of devices present at protests in late April and early May in five states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado and Florida.
They then created visualizations that tracked the movements of those devices up to 48 hours after the conclusion of protests. The visualizations only show movements within states, due to the queries analysts made in creating them. But the data scientist Jeremy Fair, executive-vice president of VoteMap, says that many of the devices that are seen to reach state borders are seen to continue across them in the underlying raw data.
One visualization shows that in Lansing, Michigan, after a 30 April protest in which armed protesters stormed the capitol building and state police were forced to physically block access to Governor Gretchen Whitmer, devices which had been present at the protest site can be seen returning to all parts of the state, from Detroit to remote towns in the state’s north.
One device visible in the data traveled to and from Afton, which is over 180 miles from the capital. Others reached, and some crossed, the Indiana border.
In the 48 hours following a 19 April “Operation Gridlock” protest in Denver, devices reached the borders of neighboring states including Wyoming, Nebraska, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Utah.
Last night, 60 Minutes broadcast an interview with Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell in which Powell discussed current economic conditions and prospects for recovery. (Powell sat for the interview on Wednesday, 5.13.20 with Scott Pelley of CBS News.) The interview is available online, as is a transcript.
Below are excerpts from the transcript (although Powell’s remarks are well worth reading or viewing in full):
Scott Pelley: What economic reality do the American people need to be prepared for?
Jerome Powell: Well, I would take a more optimistic cut at that, if I could, and that is, this is a time of great suffering and difficulty. And it’s come on us so quickly and with such force, that you really can’t put into words the pain people are feeling and the uncertainty they’re realizing. And it’s going to take a while for us to get back. But I would just say this. In the– in the long run, and even in the medium run, you wouldn’t want to bet against the American economy. This economy will recover. It may take a while.
It may take a period of time. It could stretch through the end of next year. We really don’t know.
Scott Pelley: Can there be a recovery without a reasonably effective vaccine?
Jerome Powell: Assuming there’s not a second wave of the coronavirus, I think you’ll see the economy recover steadily through the second half of this year. So, for the economy to fully recover people will have to be fully confident and that may have to await the arrival of a vaccine.
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Scott Pelley: In terms of the workforce, Mr. Chairman, who is getting hurt the worst by this downturn?
Jerome Powell: The people who’re getting hurt the worst are the most recently hired, the lowest paid people. It’s women to an extraordinary extent. Of the people who were working in February, who were making less than $40,000 per year, almost 40% have lost their jobs in the last month or so.
Monday in Whitewater will be mostly cloudy with scattered showers and a high of sixty. Sunrise is 5:27 AM and sunset 8:15 PM, for 14h 47m 21s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 16.1% of its visible disk illuminated.
The Whitewater School District’s distinctions committee meets at 2 PM via audiovisual conferencing.
On this day in 1863, the Siege of Vicksburg begins (“seventeen different Wisconsin regiments were involved in the assault that began the next day – “8th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 20th, 23rd, 25th, 27th, 29th and 33rd Wisconsin Infantry regiments and the 1st, 6th and 12th Wisconsin Light Artillery batteries as well as the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry”).
The CDC drafted the reopening guidance more than a month ago and it was initially shelved by the administration, the AP reported last week.
The agency also had prepared even more extensive guidance — about 57 pages of it — that has not been posted.
That longer document, which the AP obtained, would give different organizations specifics about how to reopen while still limiting spread of the virus, including by spacing workers or students 6 feet apart and closing break rooms and cafeterias to limit gatherings. Many of the suggestions already appear on federal websites but they haven’t been presented as reopening advice.
Some health experts and politicians have been pushing for the CDC to release as much guidance as possible to help businesses and organizations decide how to proceed.
“They want to be able to tell their own employees the guidance of the federal government,” Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University, said at a congressional hearing Wednesday. “They want to be able to tell their customers, ‘We’ve done everything that’s been asked of us.’”
U.S. national security experts warned years ago that Russia would meddle in our 2020 elections. The reality is worse: President Trump’s supporters are mirroring Russian tactics.
In 2017, I was attacked by the far right as well as Russian actors after speaking publicly as President Obama’s deputy assistant defense secretary for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia; today, the campaign against me appears to be domestic, albeit aided by Russian trolls. The political stakes are higher for all Americans this year, not just me. The tactics behind these attacks reveal a frightening development for American democracy.
In President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, disinformation and intimidation tactics are commonly used to silence domestic opposition. (So is murder.) False allegations, followed by contradictory, also false, narratives are the norm in Russian media and political discourse. Misinformation is so prevalent that many Russians are largely indifferent to what is actually true. In Trump’s America, similar tactics are taking hold. What began as a disconcerting nexus between Russia and the reactionary right in this and other countries has become part of the American right-wing repertoire.
Sunday in Whitewater will be rainy with a high of fifty-seven. Sunrise is 5:28 AM and sunset 8:13 PM, for 14h 45m 25s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 23.3% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1673, Louis Jolliet, Father Jacques Marquette, and five French voyageurs depart from the mission of St. Ignace, at the head of Lake Michigan, to reconnoiter the Mississippi River.
Facebook last week announced the formation of a 20-member “oversight board.” The panel will rule on difficult content issues, such as whether specific Facebook or Instagram posts constitute hate speech. Some of its rulings will be binding; other will be considered “guidance.”
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If gold-plated résumés were the answer, we’d be all set. But as one of the top technology critics in the country, Recode co-founder Kara Swisher, put it recently, they’ve been charged with the impossible — “trying to push back the ocean with one hand.”
To this, I’d add some other concerns. Anyone who has ever served on a committee, especially a large one or one populated with big egos, knows that it’s not an ideal way to get things done.
With rare exceptions, the committee format is unwieldy and inefficient, long on lofty discussions, short on definitive action. And certainly not a proven way to cut through a vast amount of information, take on the thorniest of problems and make hugely important decisions on issues that constantly arise in real time.
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What’s more, the members’ paid participation may actually end up muting their voices at a time when they could be serving as some of Facebook’s most influential critics.
“They are now effectively within the Facebook corporate tent,” Emily Bell, director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told Columbia Journalism Review. That “buys up potential dissent or criticism.”
The latest developments in the Michael Flynn case should prompt us to revisit one of the most glaring failures in political journalism, one that lends credibility to baseless narratives pushed for purely instrumental purposes, perversely rewarding bad-faith actors in the process.
News accounts constantly claim with no basis that new information “boosts” or “lends ammunition” to a particular political attack, or “raises new questions” about its target. These journalistic conventions are so all-pervasive that we barely notice them.
But they’re extremely pernicious, and they need to stop. They both reflect and grotesquely amplify a tendency that badly misleads readers. That happened widely in 2016, to President Trump’s great benefit. It’s now happening again.
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When critics say Clinton was unfairly placed on an equivalent plane to Trump in this regard, journalists defensively point out that Democrats must be scrutinized, too. But this misses the objection, which centers not on a demand for light scrutiny of Democrats, but on a criticism of presentation and proportionality, and the ways in which getting that lopsidedly wrong misinforms in a larger and more intangible sense.
Saturday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of sixty-seven. Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:12 PM, for 14h 43m 27s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 31.6% of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1913, Woody Herman (American jazz clarinetist, saxophonist, singer, and big band leader) is born.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday conceded that he had been “wrong” to claim, as he did during an appearance on the Trump campaign’s YouTube channel earlier this week, that the Obama administration had failed to leave guidance on preparing for a pandemic.
“I was wrong,” the top Senate Republican told Fox News. “They did leave behind a plan. So I clearly made a mistake in that regard.”
McConnell, however, refused to make a judgment on whether President Trump had failed to follow the playbook. “I don’t have any observation about that because I don’t know enough about the details of that to comment on it in any detail.”
But McConnell’s claim of ignorance didn’t stop him from making his false allegation on Monday.
U.S. officials are preparing to begin checking passengers’ temperatures at roughly a dozen airports as soon as next week, as the coronavirus pandemic has heightened anxieties about travel, according to people familiar with the matter.
Details of the plan are still being completed and are subject to change, the people said. It couldn’t be determined which airports will initially have the new scanning procedures. A senior Trump administration official said the initial rollout is expected to cost less than $20 million, and that passengers won’t be charged an additional fee.
Airlines have been pushing for the Transportation Security Administration to start taking passengers’ temperatures as part of a multifaceted effort to keep potentially sick people from boarding planes and to make passengers feel more comfortable taking trips again. Demand for air travel has dropped more than 90% amid transport restrictions and stay-at-home orders.
Drug tolerance occurs when a drug user experiences a lesser reaction to a drug after its repeated use. One solution – although a possibly dangerous and self-defeating one – is to take even more of that same drug as its effects decline. The horde that fanatically follows Trump requires ever-more fantastic claims to produce the same emotional response. Trump and his operatives understand this well (even if they understand little else), and so they craft crazier and crazier claims to excite their needy, addicted base.
Has Trump really turned up the heat or have we just been sitting in his saucepan so long it just feels that way? My intuition tells me that both his supporters and critics have grown numb to his previous rhetorical excesses and need for him to cross new boundaries, violate new taboos, and break fresh panes of glass in order remain engaged. Then there’s the matter of his Trump’s recent dip in the polls, reportedly putting him in a “foul mood.” He knows he can’t charm his way back to better numbers, so he’s trying furiously to stay in the public eye by displaying more ferocity. And don’t forget the Biden problem. “Sleepy Joe,” as Trump often taunts him, has been hiding like a possum in his basement where Trump can’t get to him, and that’s got to frustrate him.
So he keeps harping on China as the responsible party for the 80,000-plus coronavirus deaths in the United States. While offering absolutely no proof for the charge, Trump obscures his own neglect of the pandemic and misdirects culpability to a foreign country. These techniques might not work on you, but that doesn’t bother Trump. His hardcore supporters are the target of the tweets, speeches, pressers and conspiracy theories. The more he does to make himself look persecuted and reviled by the “elites” and the press, the more heroic he appears to his base.
Trump’s fanatical band – bund, one might say – needs stronger and longer hits.
