Trump's Super-Spreader Event-- Bringing The Hate To Freeland, Michigan

RealClearPolitics' current Michigan polling average shows Trump down by 4.2%-- but the poll includes a made up poll by Republican Party disinformation group, Trafalgar (that has Trump up by 2 points, the only poll out of dozens this year showing Trump winning in Michigan. Even Rasmussen, also a Republican polling firm, showed Trump down by 8 points-- 51% to 43% on Thursday. Without cheating, Michigan is unlikely to be in Trump's column in November.

Detroit News poll this week

On Thursday, Michigan reported 983 new COVID cases, bringing the state's total to 120,846, which translates to 12,101 cases per million Michiganders, significantly below the national average of 19,904 cases per million residents. 6,894 Michiganders have died of COVID, 690 deaths per million residents. Trump's event Thursday is sure to result in hundreds of more cases in a state that has been successfully flattening the curve but not allowing events like the one Trump just hosted.

In Freeland, about 5,000 people came out to bask in the ugly divisiveness and hatred Trump employs at his rallies. No social distancing no masks. The super-low-IQ crowd seemed happy with Trump's excuses for the revelations in Woodward's book that he lied about the pandemics danger. Excuse #1: Bob Woodward is a "whack job." Trumpist goons tracked down local NY Times reporter Kathy Gray and kicked her out for reporting on Twitter that the crowd was basically maskless.

Reporting on Trump's latest super-spreader event for the Detroit News, Craig Mauger wrote that "Trump took credit for rescuing an already revived auto industry and told his supporters their votes 'will save America' as he roared back into Michigan for his first campaign rally in the state since the COVID-19 pandemic hit. 'After the last administration nearly killed the U.S. auto industry, I saved the U.S. auto industry,' said Trump, making a questionable claim as he took direct aim at Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden. After winning Michigan by 10,704 votes in 2016, the Republican president is hoping for a repeat on Nov. 3. Much of his speech Thursday night outside of an airport hangar in Freeland focused on what he considered his accomplishments related to the state and criticisms of Democratic leaders in office here... 'No president has done for Michigan what President Trump has done for Michigan,' said Trump at one point, before adding, 'I am going to remember Michigan.'"

Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told CNN he was "pretty puzzled" and "rather disheartened" by Trump’s crowded campaign rally in Michigan-- at which few of the several thousand attendees could be seen wearing face masks and virtually none appeared to be practicing social distancing.

After Trump's rally, Fauci's boss, National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins told Sanji Gupta and Anderson Cooper: "How did we get here? Imagine you were an alien who landed on planet Earth, and you saw that our planet was afflicted by an infectious disease and that masks were an effective way to prevent the spread. And yet, when you went around, you saw some people not wearing them and some people wearing them. And you tried to figure out why, and it turned out it was their political party. And you would scratch your head and think, 'This is just not a planet that has much promise for the future, if something that is so straightforward can somehow get twisted into decision-making that really makes no sense.' As a scientist I'm pretty puzzled and rather disheartened."

I've been saying since April that it's going to take a million deaths before the Trump crowd-- personifications of the word "idiot"-- can be persuaded to take the pandemic seriously. It's a shame that it won't just be a million Trumpists who die, but normal people as well. I may have been wrong; it could take 2 million. Yesterday Time Magazine reported that "Among the world’s wealthy nations, only the U.S. has an outbreak that continues to spin out of control. Of the 10 worst-hit countries, the U.S. has the seventh-highest number of deaths per 100,000 population; the other nine countries in the top 10 have an average per capita GDP of $10,195, compared to $65,281 for the U.S. Some countries, like New Zealand, have even come close to eradicating COVID-19 entirely. Vietnam, where officials implemented particularly intense lockdown measures, didn’t record a single virus-related death until July 31."

At this point, we can start to see why the U.S. foundered: a failure of leadership at many levels and across parties; a distrust of scientists, the media and expertise in general; and deeply ingrained cultural attitudes about individuality and how we value human lives have all combined to result in a horrifically inadequate pandemic response. COVID-19 has weakened the U.S. and exposed the systemic fractures in the country, and the gulf between what this nation promises its citizens and what it actually delivers.

Although America’s problems were widespread, they start at the top. A complete catalog of President Donald Trump’s failures to address the pandemic will be fodder for history books. There were weeks wasted early on stubbornly clinging to a fantastical belief that the virus would simply “disappear”; testing and contact tracing programs were inadequate; states were encouraged to reopen ahead of his own Administration’s guidelines; and statistics were repeatedly cherry-picked to make the U.S. situation look far better than it was, while undermining scientists who said otherwise. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told the journalist Bob Woodward on March 19 in a newly revealed conversation. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.”

Common-sense solutions like face masks were undercut or ignored. Research shows that wearing a facial covering significantly reduces the spread of COVID-19, and a pre-existing culture of mask wearing in East Asia is often cited as one reason countries in that region were able to control their outbreaks. In the U.S., Trump did not wear a mask in public until July 11, more than three months after the CDC recommended facial coverings, transforming what ought to have been a scientific issue into a partisan one. A Pew Research Center survey published on June 25 found that 63% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents said masks should always be worn in public, compared with 29% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.

...Americans today tend to value the individual over the collective. A 2011 Pew survey found that 58% of Americans said “freedom to pursue life’s goals without interference from the state” is more important than the state guaranteeing “nobody is in need.” It’s easy to view that trait as a root cause of the country’s struggles with COVID-19; a pandemic requires people to make temporary sacrifices for the benefit of the group, whether it’s wearing a mask or skipping a visit to their local bar.

Americans have banded together in times of crisis before, but we need to be led there. “We take our cues from leaders,” says Dr. David Rosner, a professor at Columbia University. Trump and other leaders on the right, including Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi, respectively, have disparaged public-health officials, criticizing their calls for shutting down businesses and other drastic but necessary measures. Many public-health experts, meanwhile, are concerned that the White House is pressuring agencies like the Food and Drug Administration to approve treatments such as convalescent plasma despite a lack of supportive data. Governors, left largely on their own, have been a mixed bag, and even those who’ve been praised, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, could likely have taken more aggressive action to protect public health.

Absent adequate leadership, it’s been up to everyday Americans to band together in the fight against COVID-19. To some extent, that’s been happening-- doctors, nurses, bus drivers and other essential workers have been rightfully celebrated as heroes, and many have paid a price for their bravery. But at least some Americans still refuse to take such a simple step as wearing a mask.

Why? Because we’re also in the midst of an epistemic crisis. Republicans and Democrats today don’t just disagree on issues; they disagree on the basic truths that structure their respective realities. Half the country gets its news from places that parrot whatever the Administration says, true or not; half does not. This politicization manifests in myriad ways, but the most vital is this: in early June (at which point more than 100,000 Americans had already died of COVID-19), fewer than half of Republican voters polled said the outbreak was a major threat to the health of the U.S. population as a whole. Throughout July and August, the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force was sending private messages to states about the severity of the outbreak, while President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence publicly stated that everything was under control.

Some incredulity about the virus and public-health recommendations is understandable given the reality that scientific understanding of the newly emergent virus is evolving in real time. The ever shifting advice from health officials doesn’t instill public confidence, especially in those already primed to be skeptical of experts. “Because this is a new infectious disease, a new virus, we don’t have all the answers scientifically,” says Colleen Barry, chair of the department of health policy and management at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “I think that creates an environment that could potentially erode trust even further over time.” But the trust fractures on partisan lines. While 43% of Democrats told Pew in 2019 that they had a “great deal” of trust in scientists, only 27% of Republicans said the same.

Truly worrying are the numbers of Americans who already say they are hesitant to receive an eventual COVID-19 vaccination. Mass vaccination will work only with enough buy-in from the public; the damage the President and others are doing to Americans’ trust in science could have significant consequences for the country’s ability to get past this pandemic.

There’s another disturbing undercurrent to Americans’ attitude toward the pandemic thus far: a seeming willingness to accept mass death. As a nation we may have become dull to horrors that come our way as news, from gun violence to the seemingly never-ending incidents of police brutality to the water crises in Flint, Mich., and elsewhere. Americans seem to have already been inured to the idea that other Americans will die regularly, when they do not need to.

It is difficult to quantify apathy. But what else could explain that nearly half a year in, we still haven’t figured out how to equip the frontline workers who, in trying to save the lives of others, are putting their own lives at risk? What else could explain why 66% of Americans-- roughly 217.5 million people-- still aren’t always wearing masks in public?

Meanwhile, back in Freeland, some Democratic smart ass-- Republican dumb ass?-- played an old Credence Clearwater Revival anthem to rev up the maskless crowd of dummies, "Fortunate Song," a stinging condemnation of rich draft dodgers like Trump, written in 1969, when Trump was dodging the draft.

Some folks are born, made to wave the flag
Ooh, their red, white and blue
And when the band plays "Hail to the Chief"
Ooh, they point the cannon at you, Lord

It ain't me
It ain't me
I ain't no senator's son, son
It ain't me
It ain't me

I ain't no fortunate one, no
Some folks are born, silver spoon in hand
Lord, don't they help themselves, y'all
But when the taxman comes to the door
Lord, the house looks like a rummage sale, yeah

It ain't me
It ain't me
I ain't no millionaire's son, no, no
It ain't me
It ain't me
I ain't no fortunate one, no

Yeah, yeah
Some folks inherit star spangled eyes
Ooh, they send you down to war, Lord
And when you ask 'em, "How much…

Eventually We'll Be Forced To Do Something About Anti-Maskers

Having spent years in Asia and having adapted to mask wearing on airplanes decades ago, I was an early adapter to masks for dealing with the pandemic sometime in March when the government was still urging people to not wear masks. I detected the disconnect between, "masks won't help" and "we need masks for our frontline workers." My doctor is an internationally acclaimed cancer researcher who told me the N-99 I had from use in Nepal was perfect and would protect me but needed to be discarded if I came down with COVID-19 because it would increase the viral load. That was in early March.

Around that time I took great delight wearing my mask (plus wrap-around shades-- since replaced with surgical goggles-- and latex gloves) to the grocery store, while I stocked up on all the essentials for a 6 month siege. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy. The cashiers hadn't hear about a pandemic yet and no one was stocking up on pasta or toilet paper yet. People saw me coming down the aisle and ran away-- better yet. Roland was embarrassed to be seen with me. "You'll be wearing a mask soon too, I told him. "Everyone will." He laughed and said I was crazy. Today he still asks how I knew, even though I've told him over and over again exactly how I knew (months of this).

By April, the tide had turned. People in L.A. were masking up and stores will starting to observe social distancing strictures. In April I saw two guys refusing to wear masks get the crap kicked out of them in upscale Los Feliz within a week of each other. I'm not into vigilantism or violence but I have to admit I wasn't sorry to see each of the victims run away, one with a bloody face.

One of the unintended consequences of the internet is that everyone's brother-in-law is as stupid as mine-- and now thinks he knows better than experts. It's certainly why we have Trump in the White House and why we're likely to have more Trump-like figures elected to leadership roles. Conspiracy theories and ignorance rule!

Marc Fisher's Washington Post mask update yesterday, shows how fed up normal people are getting with the anti-masker lunatics, who are, after all, endangering society in a way anti-seat belt kooks never really did-- since they were mostly just killing themselves not, like the anti-maskers-- the rest of us. Fisher pointed out that not only are masks effective weapons against the spread of the contagion but that "Three-quarters of Americans favor requiring people to wear face coverings in public to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, including 89% of Democrats and 58% of Republicans, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll in July. So far, 34 states and Washington D.C. have adopted mask requirements. Now, mask advocates want police to enforce those orders, a move some police chiefs have said they are reluctant to make. They are seeking legal protection for retail workers put in the awkward position of enforcing mask rules. And they are lobbying for a coordinated federal mask policy."

Politicians, most of them Democrats, have adopted increasingly sharp rhetoric to push for compliance with mask orders and recommendations. Masks were highly visible throughout the first night of the Democratic National Convention. The party showcased masked health workers risking all to save victims of covid-19, presented multiple images of Joe Biden wearing a mask, and topped off the evening with Michelle Obama’s lament that the nation’s children “see people shouting in grocery stores, unwilling to wear a mask to keep us all safe.”

Biden has said that, if elected, he would use his executive power to mandate mask-wearing nationally. Until then, Biden put the onus on the nation's governors, calling on them last week to require mask-wearing in public for at least the next three months.

Well it's good he used the phrase "at least," since hopes and wishes aren't determining the timetables; the cold hard reality of when we find and distribute an effective virus is what determines when we can stop wearing masks, eat in restaurants, travel safely, vote in person, stop tempting inflation, etc.

"The battle over masks," continued Fisher, "like earlier faceoffs over requiring seat belt use in cars or banning smoking in public places, pits defenders of science against defenders of personal liberty-- a classic American faceoff of the collective good against individual rights. But unlike those earlier debates, the mask battle has become politicized making masks one more weapon in a national tussle over values and factional power." He forgot the mention the word idiot:

Nor did he get into a discussion of the mental illness of the people refusing to wear masks, something that will launch papers and books for decades. Some people just have to be contrarians-- even if it endangers others. Some people are persuaded that their is no pandemic but that the Deep State and that guy from Microsoft want to inject a chip in everyone to control them but mass vaccinations. Maybe these folks, if they make it impossible to control the spread of the virus, will need to be, humanely, put down at some point. "[M]any of Trump’s fans," wrote Fisher, "have latched onto his objections. While 94 percent of Democrats said in a July Gallup poll that they’d worn a mask 'always' or 'very often' when outside their homes, only 46 percent of Republicans said the same."

[David] Canepa, who serves on the board of supervisors in northern California’s San Mateo County, said he has heard enough from science-deniers, especially in light of new evidence showing that masks appear to protect the wearer as well as people who might breathe in their exhalations.

“People need to rely on the science and not on their high school buddy who took science with them,” Canepa said. “I didn’t get into elective office to tell people what to do, but this is a health emergency, and we have a silent majority that’s doing the right thing. We’ve done the education, we’ve tried to work collaboratively. Now we need to enforce.”

Earlier this month, San Mateo’s board voted unanimously to fine anyone found in public places without a mask. Police, park rangers, building inspectors and other county workers will hand out both masks and summonses. Fines are $100 for a first offense and up to $500 for further transgressions.

“Small business owners don’t want to confront customers. I understand: We’ve all seen those ugly confrontations on YouTube,” Canepa said. “Now we’re giving them a way to say, ‘Hey, it’s the county making me do this. If I don’t enforce it, they’ll fine me.'”

Businesses and their employees have good reason to be wary of acting as mask enforcers. The most vehement mask opponents have occasionally turned violent.

In Lansing, Mich., when Sean Ruis entered a convenience store last month without a mask, a store employee asked him to cover his face. Ruis reacted angrily-- and stabbed a 77-year-old customer. A sheriff’s deputy shot and killed Ruis outside his home a half-hour later.

More often, though, anti-maskers pose a more prosaic threat.

In Caldwell, Idaho, when the local health board voted last month simply to recommend-- not require-- masks in public, bare-faced residents packed a local courtroom and loudly booed all mention of masks, infection tracing and virus hot spots.

That same week, hospitals in the area reported that their intensive care units were at capacity, filled almost entirely by patients suffering from covid-19.

On Tuesday, Idaho reported 384 new confirmed cases, bringing the state's total to 28,326, which seems pretty small. It isn't. Idaho now has 15,851 cases per million residents. That's worse than any of the dozen hardest hit western European countries, even the ones that are experiencing a second wave now:

• Sweden- 8,431 cases per million residents
• Spain- 8,218 cases per million residents
• Belgium- 6,772 cases per million residents
• Ireland- 5,561 cases per million
• Portugal- 5,342 cases per million
• U.K.- 4,715 cases per million
• Switzerland- 4,438 cases per million
• Italy- 4,212 cases per million
• Netherlands- 3,732 cases per million
• France- 3,389 cases per million
• Denmark- 2,736 cases per million
• Germany- 2,721 cases per million

Remember when we were all shuddering at the mere thought of getting into a situation as dire as Italy's or Spain's. On a per capita basis, Idaho-- a politically backward and primitive state loaded with Trump supporters, pandemic-deniers and anti-maskers-- now has it over three times worse than Italy.

Many Republicans Besides Just Louie Gohmert Are Public Health Threats

I'm sure you know by now that Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert tested positive for COVID-19... in between chatting, maskless, with William Barr (also maskless) and boarding AirForce One for a flight to Texas with Trumpanzee, the reason he was tested. He was then rejected as a passenger. Louie, a general all-around neo-fascist three-ring circus, was one of the leaders of the House Anti-Masque Caucus. He's so anti-mask, in fact, that he now claims he got COVID by wearing a mask, which he rarely does. He was the last straw for Pelosi, who finally instituted a mask mandate on the chamber floor last night.

Jake Sherman, who broken the story about the now COVID-infected Gohmert received an e-mail from a nameless Gohmert staffer: "Jake, thank you for letting our office know Louie tested positive for the Coronavirus. When you write your story, can you include the fact that Louie requires full staff to be in the office, including three interns, so that ‘we could be an example to America on how to open up safely.’ When probing the office, you might want to ask how often were people berated for wearing masks."

Sherman wrote that most people in DC are taking masking up seriously, "but not everyone. And all it takes is one irresponsible person-- an armchair scientist who decides masks aren’t for them, or their entire office should work in person in the middle of a pandemic-- for many of us to get sick with a virus that could kill us. Members of Congress arrive here from all over America nearly every week. They can’t conduct their business from afar-- fair enough... The Capitol has superspreader written all over it. People are coming off planes, out of cars, and many of them can’t be relied upon to follow basic masking rules that are mandatory across the country. Gohmert went back to his office after he tested positive to talk to his staff!"

As Mike Tillis reported for The Hill, that Steny Hoyer "hammered Gohmert and Rep. Gym Jordan (R-OH), another conservative Freedom Caucus member who refuses to wear a mask, saying they jeopardized the health of everyone around them. '[Gohmert] came into the room without a mask on. Jordan did the same. Totally irresponsible behavior, not for themselves-- clearly irresponsible for themselves-- but irresponsible to everybody else who was in that room. Everybody else they've come in contact with, Hoyer said." His point is that these anti-mask Republicans are a public health threat.

For members of a Republican Party that often touts the importance of personal responsibility, those lawmakers have exhibited "no personal responsibility or consideration for others," Hoyer charged.

"Very frankly, too many Republicans have continued to act extraordinarily irresponsibly," Hoyer told reporters on a press call.

Reporting for the Washington Post Griff Witte, Ariana Eunjung Cha and Josh Dawsey wrote had Ohio Governor Mike DeWine (R) was one of the first governors to take medical advise and grok what the pandemic was all about. He moved a lot faster and a lot smarter than Cuomo or Newsom in shutting down his state. But when he tried mandating masks, the far right freaks flipped out. "The backlash," they wrote, "came instantly. An avalanche of abuse on social media. Calls from anguished citizens. Angry recriminations and threats. The next day, a chastened DeWine backed down. Asking people to wear a mask 'is offensive to some of our fellow Ohioans,' the Republican declared somberly. 'And I understand that.' It would be three months-- plus tens of thousands of cases and thousands of deaths-- before the governor would try again.





The catastrophe that DeWine averted in March with his early efforts have been erased by the lunatic fringe. The state is a COVID-hotspot now. Tuesday, the state reported 1,325 new cases, 11th worst in the country, and yesterday Ohio reported another 1,362 cases, bringing the state total to 87,893, which translates to a steadily increasing 7,519 cases per million Buckeyes. Many Republicans in this state run by Republicans refuse to wear masks.

The mask is the simplest and among the most effective weapons against the coronavirus in the public health arsenal. Yet from the start, America’s relationship with face coverings has been deeply fraught.

Faulty guidance from health authorities, a cultural aversion to masks and a deeply polarized politics have all contributed. So has a president who resisted role modeling the benefits of face coverings, and who belittled those who did.

The result, experts say, is a country that squandered one of its best opportunities to beat back the coronavirus pandemic this spring and summer. In the process, the United States fell far behind other nations that skipped the fuss over masks, costing lives and jeopardizing the recovery heading into the fall.

“Some countries took out their masks as soon as this happened,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious-disease specialist from the University of California at San Francisco, “and their rates of death are very low.”

In a coronavirus response that has been full of missteps and unforced errors, delayed acceptance of universal masking, Gandhi said, may be the single biggest mistake the United States has made.

In interviews, elected leaders, health specialists and mask advocates say it did not have to be that way-- and very nearly wasn’t.

The country hit a tipping point on widespread mask use only this month, with a majority of states and the nation’s largest retailers all mandating them. But the science has long been pointing toward the efficacy of masks-- even if the guidance from health authorities wasn’t.

...In the last week of March-- as the official case count was approaching 100,000-- the CDC presented what was then considered a radical proposal to the White House, recommending routine masking by the public. Senior administration officials, particularly members of the vice president’s office on the coronavirus task force, pushed back, arguing it was unnecessary.

The new guidance was somewhat of a compromise. It encouraged-- but did not require-- people to cover their faces in “public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain (e.g., grocery stores and pharmacies) especially in areas of significant community-based transmission.”

On April 3, President Trump stood at the White House podium and issued the recommendation. “It may be good” advice, he offered. But he immediately undercut the guidance by announcing he would not be wearing a mask himself.

“Somehow sitting in the Oval Office, behind that beautiful Resolute Desk” as he met with “presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens,” Trump said, “I don’t know, somehow I don’t see it for myself.”

Initially, some Trump aides said they did not like the idea of him wearing a mask publicly because they believed it would be bad politically and make the president look weak. They thought it might lead others to panic or think the pandemic was worse than it was. There were also fears among some in the president’s circle that his supporters would rebel against anything that smacked of a government directive.

Among some of Trump’s most ardent fans, anti-mask insurrections were already brewing. In dark corners of the Internet, mask conspiracy theories took shape. On the steps of state capitol buildings, activists shouted their objections to a masked attack on “liberty.”

Some of the president’s advisers, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, expressed repeated skepticism of masks and whether they made a difference, campaign and White House officials said. Trump campaign masks were produced and presented to the president but never sold. Some aides were fearful of selling merchandise he did not wear and appearing to profit off a pandemic, officials said.

“The President’s position has been consistent on this,” White House spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said in a statement. “In late March, before there was even a recommended but not required guidance given by the CDC on mask-wearing, he supported facial coverings.”

With little hope for progress at the White House, Howard had begun to make his data-based case for masks to the governors, focusing especially on Republicans who had shown a willingness to embrace a scientific approach to attacking the coronavirus. DeWine was at the top of his list.

The 73-year-old Ohioan had won plaudits from public health experts for the speed with which he shut down gatherings, businesses and schools in March when the coronavirus began to spread in the state. Cases stayed low, even as the economic damage rippled.

As pressure intensified on DeWine to reopen the state in late April, the governor seized on a mask requirement in stores and other businesses as a way to do so safely.

Masks would not be “forever,” the governor announced April 27, “but if we want to get back to work, we have to protect our employees.”

Within hours, as protests over the governor’s assault on “freedom” poured in, DeWine knew it had been a mistake that would need to be reversed.

“After 40 years of representing Ohioans in many different jobs, I’ve got a pretty good ability to gauge these things,” he said in an interview. “And with the pushback we got, my instinct was that this was too far.”

Unlike closing schools-- which could happen with the stroke of a pen-- requiring masks would involve getting “millions of Ohioans making individual decisions dozens of times a day.”

And unlike in Asia-- where DeWine had traveled pre-pandemic and seen the widespread use of face coverings to ward off disease-- there was no culture of mask-wearing for public health benefits in the United States.

The president’s unwillingness to set an example by wearing a mask didn’t help.

“I would have liked to have seen the president do that,” DeWine said.

Also unhelpful, the governor said, was guidance from some public health authorities that continued to be contradictory, even as the science behind masks became increasingly clear.

Studies suggesting masks could be effective in curbing the risk of transmission continued to accumulate. But the WHO-- which has been criticized throughout the pandemic for being slow to respond to emerging data-- took until June 5 to issue a mask recommendation for the general public. Even then, it was tepid and full of asterisks, with the global health body insisting the change was consistent with its original guidance.

U.S. officials have been more forthright in acknowledging their advice has shifted, arguing it was in response to shifting data.

“If you acted on the best information you had at the time and then later you get new evidence that points in a different direction, does that mean what you did three months ago was wrong? Well, existentially, yes it was. But it was based on the evidence we had at the time,” Fauci said in an interview Friday.

Once policy did shift, Fauci said, medical officials were united in getting behind the new recommendation. But other senior administration officials weren’t on board.

“That was a problem,” he said.

Trump was foremost among those who weren’t interested in promoting masks.

When, in late May, he toured a Ford plant in Michigan where masks were required, he refused to put one on in front of the cameras. “I didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it,” he said.

Over Memorial Day weekend, he retweeted a mocking criticism of his election opponent, former vice president Joe Biden, for wearing a mask.

Videos began going viral as Americans squared off on what to do about customers in stores who refused to mask up. Social media groups devoted to casting doubt on their efficacy proliferated. Face coverings had become debate points in the U.S. presidential campaign and potent symbols in the culture war.

Public health specialists could only shake their heads.

The debate radiated through big cities and small ones as the coronavirus began a resurgence in June, with many areas that had dodged the first round of infection getting hammered this time.

Joplin had no active cases at the start of June. Weeks later, the city of 50,000 in southwest Missouri had one of the nation’s fastest rising infection rates.

For five hours in late June, the city council debated whether to mandate masks, only to defeat the motion by a single vote.

Two weeks later, with hospitals hitting their capacities, the council voted again. This time, the mask mandate passed 6 to 3.

Mayor Ryan Stanley was among those who changed his mind. He had initially thought that a mandate was unenforceable and that, in a deeply conservative, pro-Trump region, it would only encourage defiance. But when he visited local businesses the weekend after the requirement kicked in, he was astonished by what he saw.

“We were getting 15 percent adoption before. I was crossing my fingers and hoping for 50 to 60 percent,” he said. “But now it’s at 90 to 95 percent. It’s certainly doing its job.”

Stanley said mask opponents had been loud-- staging noisy demonstrations and dominating the debate. But they hadn’t actually been that numerous.

Public opinion polls bear that out, with large majorities of voters overall favoring mandates, although Republicans are less supportive.

Policies have begun to match those attitudes. A cascade of states-- including Ohio-- have instituted requirements in recent weeks, with DeWine identifying compliance as critical to the state’s hopes of bringing down infection rates and opening schools.

Major retailers such as Walmart have as well, making shopping trips difficult without a mask.

Evidence shows the mandates are working.

“There were seat belts in cars for decades. There were lots of public service announcements, people saying, ‘Wear seat belts’” said David Keating, who worked with Howard to found the nonprofit advocacy group #Masks4All. “But it’s when the law started requiring it that seat belt usage soared.”

Even the president has joined in-- though still somewhat tepidly. On a visit to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center earlier this month, he wore a mask in public for the first time. Last Tuesday, he tweeted a photo of himself in a mask with the explanation that “many people say that it is Patriotic to wear a face mask when you can’t socially distance.”

Trump wore a mask again on Monday while touring a biotechnology plant. But as recently as last week, he was barefaced while in public at his hotel in D.C., despite local rules that require a face covering.

Political advisers and campaign officials say there has been a concerted effort around Trump-- from aides to family members to advisers to lawmakers-- to show that wearing a mask is the right thing to do. Aides have encouraged people to praise the president for wearing a mask, hoping that he will continue to embrace it, officials said.

It had been clear for months-- as America’s coronavirus case count has climbed above 4 million and the death toll closes in on 150,000-- that masks are a public health imperative. But with grim polls showing Trump trailing in almost every key state, they have now become a political one, too.

“He was basically on an island even among his own supporters,” said Brendan Buck, a longtime Republican operative who last worked for then-Speaker Paul D. Ryan. “It doesn’t take a genius to understand that this pandemic is why he’s losing so badly.”

I travel a lot and I've been wearing masks on planes for a couple of decades. When I got back from Thailand last January and understood that what was starting in Wuhan would soon be in the local Trader Joe's in my neighborhood. By the first week in February I had stopped going out without a hospital mask, even though I would invariably get bad vibes. By the end of February I stopped fooling around with the hospital masks, laughed at the cloth masks that do almost nothing and started wearing an N-99 (better than an N-95), along with wrap-around goggles and disposable latex gloves. In grocery stores there was a fantastic bonus-- people fled when they saw me walking down the aisles. About a month later half the people in my neighborhood were wearing masks. Then it became mandatory in L.A. and soon after mandatory in California. Unfortunately, it was too late for almost 9,000 dead Californians (almost half of whom are Angelinos). Too bad Newsom didn't have the guts to do what the 6 Bay Area counties did in mid-March.

Today 11 governors of states with out-of-control pandemics still have not issued statewide mask mandates. Can you guess what they all have in common, besides lots of dead and dying constituents?

• Doug Ducey (R-AZ)- 168,273 cases (23,118 per million Arizonans)
• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)- 451,423 cases (21,018 per million Floridians)
• Tate Reeves (R-MS)- 55,804 cases (18,750 per million Mississippians)
• Brian Kemp (R-GA)- 178,323 cases (16,795 per million Georgians)
• Henry McMaster (R-SC)- 85,846 cases (16,673 per million South Carolinians)
• Bill Lee (R-TN)- 100,822 cases (14,763 per million Tennesseans)
• Kim Reynolds (R-IA)- 43,277 cases (13,717 per million Iowans)
• Pete Ricketts (R-NE)- 25,157 cases (13,005 per million Nebraskans)
• Kristi Noem (R-SD)- 8,641 cases (9,768 per million South Dakotans)
• Kevin Stitt (R-OK)- 34,623 cases (8,750 per million Oklahomans)
• Doug Burgum (R-ND)- 6,227 cases (8,171 per North Dakotans)

Masks For All? Good Luck With That

Huntington Beach is in Orange County, between Los Angeles and San Diego. It's the population center of the 48th congressional district and if you want to know how a reactionary Russian spy and psychotic bigot like Dana Rohrabacher could have been elected to Congress 15 times... just watch the video above and try to get into the heads of his people. The current congressman, freshman Harley Rouda isn't nearly as bad as Rohrabacher. He beat Rohrabacher in the anti-red wave of 2018-- 157,837 (54%) to 136,899 (46%). Rouda ran as a Democrat, but he isn't really a Democrat; he's a moderately conservative Republican who calls himself a New Dem and has quickly earned himself an "F" rating from ProgressivePunch-- 64.47% (out of 100).

CA-48 was almost equally divided in the 2016 presidential race, Hillary edging Señor Trumpanzee 47.9% to 46.2%. The one from that 46.2% cohort introduced themselves in that video. Have you watched it yet. Watch it; it's fun tragic and sad and will help you understand why the U.S. may well wind up with marshall law-- and whole lot of conspiracy theories... a dangerous thing in a country with so many people with semi-automatic weapons.

There is tremendous resistance to social distancing and mask wearing there-- and very aggressively so. The county has been hit hard by the pandemic but that doesn't stop a very vocal part of that 46.2% cohort from claiming it's all a hoax. On Friday the county reported 710 more confirmed COVID cases, bringing their total to 33,358. There have been 556 deaths in Orange County so far.

Orange County doesn't have any Republicans left in their congressional delegation-- unless you still insist on counting Rouda as a Republican-- but it's not what I would call a safely blue county. Still, Bernie won the county in the March primary-- and with a slightly larger margin than he did statewide. Yesterday, Bernie sent a note to his followers-- in Orange County and everywhere else-- about masks and his legislation that would make masks available to everyone in the country. "Tragically, because of the inept leadership of Donald Trump," Bernie wrote, "the United States is losing the struggle against the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, many thousands of our fellow Americans have unnecessarily died or become ill. Trump has rejected science with regard to the pandemic. We will not. Together, we will fight back and implement policies based on science which will protect the health and well-being of the American people. That's why I am urgently calling for a simple and inexpensive way to protect Americans during the coronavirus pandemic: Masks for All." He explained the bill he's hoping to get through the Senate:

Our goal must be to manufacture and distribute high-quality masks to medical professionals and to every man, woman and child in this country at no cost. And next week, I will introduce legislation to do just that.

...Here is what the legislation would do:

• Direct the Trump administration to use the Defense Production Act to produce and deliver three high-quality, reusable masks to every person in the country.
• Work with state and local governments to deliver masks to homeless shelters, jails, detention centers, testing sites, post offices, pharmacies and other congregate-care settings.

The science is clear: Wearing a mask is the best way to protect ourselves from the coronavirus and save lives, and the widespread use of masks will get Americans back to work sooner and reunite families who have stayed apart.

As the United States reports a record number of new cases-- 4 million total confirmed cases announced this week-- research about mask wearing shows that masks are crucial to decreasing the spread of the coronavirus. When the virus can't easily find hosts, it dies out.

South Korea, one of the more successful countries in responding to the pandemic, began the process of procuring high-quality masks in late February and provided them affordably to its citizens by partnering with pharmacies across the country. Taiwan, the Czech Republic, Germany, Vietnam and dozens of other countries have also demonstrated that as mask wearing became commonplace in public, coronavirus cases were contained. And only when the virus is contained can our society finally go back to normal.

Other countries have successfully provided masks to their people, and now it is time for the United States to do the same.

Not only will widespread mask wearing help save lives-- it can help slow our growing economic crisis as well. One estimate says that widespread use of masks could be worth up to $1 trillion to our economy by preventing shutdowns and getting people back to work earlier.





To make enough high-quality masks for all Americans, this legislation requires the administration to invoke the Defense Production Act, which was written explicitly for these purposes. This will mandate that manufacturers put in place the additional capacity necessary to meet the needs of the public and provide assistance to companies who want to begin producing masks or scale up production. Communities hard hit by job losses could and should benefit greatly from these new employment opportunities.

Unfortunately, given Trump's anti-science mentality, it is absolutely clear that we cannot wait for this administration to take action... Let us not forget: Our country is facing a series of unprecedented crises, but we will get through them as long as we stand together.

Watch this video from the tweet below to better understand what America is up against when it comes to the 46.2% OC cohort deciding that the best way to own the libs is to spread the contagion.

Up the road a bit is Los Angeles. Eric Garcetti also sent an e-mail out yesterday warning the residents that "COVID-19 is not going away anytime soon. It will be with us-- and remain a threat-- for the foreseeable future." He rates it a threat level orange, meaning that "the virus is a danger to all of us and continues to spread throughout the community. In order to stay safe, we need to continue wearing masks, avoid gatherings, wash our hands frequently, and keep physical distance from others... Wearing a mask is particularly important and will help to keep our community safe and reopen our economy.

COVID-Wise, Will All Of America Be Like Texas? Or Much Worse-- Like Florida?

On Friday, Texas had a relatively good day in the new case department, "only" 8,552 confirmed new cases. Yesterday there were 7,735 more, bringing the total to 393,683 in total-- 13,577 cases per million Texans. The population of the state is around 29.9 million, about half as many people as Italy, which is one of the hardest-hit countries in the world. But with twice as many people, Italy only has 245,864 cases (4,067 cases per million Italians). So far 35,102 Italians have died and both new cases and new deaths have petered out (only 274 new cases yesterday and 5 new deaths). The pandemic is still relatively young and virulent in Texas, which has already had over 5,000 deaths and 135 new deaths announced yesterday). It's going to get much worse in Texas, although it doesn't have to. At least it wouldn't have to if Texas wasn't so tightly controlled by aggressively science-denying Republican politicians, all vying with each other to see who can be the most extreme and the furthest up Trump's ass.

With dozens of sheriffs telling Abbott they refuse to enforce his mask mandate, there's a new wrinkle in Texas Republicans' assertion that they have the right to spread the contagion no matter how many people they kill. Late yesterday, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that "Almost 800 bar owners across the state will participate in Freedom Fest, an event where bar owners will defy Abbott’s June 26 order that closed bars as the state’s coronavirus numbers surged." Bars that open illegally could see their liquor license suspended but no one expects that to actually happen.

Writing for the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Elizabeth Findell asked Will Texas Shut Down Again Amid Surge in Covid-19 Cases?. "In Houston, where booming Covid-19 cases have pushed many hospitals beyond their intensive-care unit capacity for the first time," she reported, "doctors have been sounding alarms for weeks. Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, the Democratic elected executive of the county which includes the nation’s fourth-largest city, has been pushing to again implement stay-home orders there. Face coverings, which Republican Gov. Greg Abbott made mandatory this month, remain a lightning rod of controversy. The divide over policies to combat Covid-19 has only deepened in a state where politicians have been at war for months. The governor, who has seen his approval ratings tumble, has struggled to form a consistent public-health response to the crisis as he is buffeted from both right and left. Democrats want tougher restrictions, while many Republicans fear he has already gone too far, leaving him bouncing between policies and yet having appeased no one.

In recent weeks, Mr. Abbott has vacillated between denying another state shutdown is imminent and warning Texans that it will be necessary if things don’t improve.

“I know that many of you are frustrated,” the governor told the state GOP at its virtual convention last week. “So am I. I know that many of you don’t like the mask requirement. Neither do I. It’s the last thing I wanted to do. Actually, next to last. The last thing is lock Texas down again. We must do all we can to prevent that, but every day the facts get worse.”

In Texas, the average number of new Covid-19 cases confirmed each day jumped from around 1,000 in late April and early May to more than 10,000 on many days in July, but has begun to taper slightly. The proportion of tests that are positive, which health experts say should be below 5%, has been nearly 15%. Texans are now dying of the disease at a rate of nearly 140 a day, and more than 4,500 [5,059] have died of it total.

Texas’s largest cities, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and Austin have all seen significant virus spread, with average daily new cases per 100,000 people ranging from 20 to 60 in the past week. The Rio Grande Valley, meanwhile, has seen death rates six times the state as a whole. But some rural counties, especially in the western part of the state, have remained relatively unaffected.

Texas, like Georgia, Florida and Arizona, was relatively spared for the first months of the virus and then saw a rapid rise in cases following Memorial Day, after reopening from fairly short lockdowns. Over the past week, the proportion of positive tests those states have seen was 16%, 19% and 25%, respectively.

Like Florida and Arizona, Texas has closed bars and limited both indoor dining and large gatherings. Texas also has a mask mandate for most residents, unlike Arizona and Florida, which don’t.

In Houston, the 60 hospitals that make up the Texas Medical Center, a medical district considered the largest in the world, have exceeded their normal ICU capacity for the first time in memory and are using 17 of 273 beds added for a “phase two” surge, said Chief Executive William McKeon. The tide of incoming patients is slowing slightly, he said, after the mask mandate.

Despite the rise in Covid-19 cases in Houston, the state Republican party pushed to hold its mid-July 2020 convention in person there, ultimately losing a showdown with Mayor Sylvester Turner, a Democrat.

“This is a convention that Trump wants,” Leslie Thomas, a member of the state’s Republican Party executive committee, said as she voted on July 2 to hold the event in person. “Like it or not, Texas is the Republican state. We bear that. So we need to stand our ground.”

In a recent interview, Ms. Thomas said her vote, weeks before President Trump canceled an in-person convention in Jacksonville, reflected his views on live events, along with her belief that in-person conversations are key to a convention. She said she wasn’t concerned about risks from the virus, likening the convention to going to Walmart.

Mr. Turner blocked the convention, calling it far too dangerous for thousands of people to gather together indoors. The GOP fought it all the way to the Texas Supreme Court, but didn’t obtain the right to go forward. Instead, the party scrambled to hold the event online, where it struggled to get past repeated computer errors.

In the wee hours of Monday morning, state Republicans participating in the online convention voted to replace their party chairman with Allen West, an Army veteran and onetime Florida congressman known for his firebrand style. His statement before the vote derided Mr. Abbott’s Covid-related executive orders as “the despotism, the tyranny that we see in the great state of Texas.”

The view reflects the ire of some of Mr. Abbott’s fellow Republicans in response to making masks mandatory. Some consider such requirements unconstitutional. Local Republican parties in a handful of counties approved censure resolutions to condemn the governor’s move.

Ms. Hidalgo first required masks in the Houston area in April, following other Texas counties and cities. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican, called it “the ultimate government overreach” and local Congressman Dan Crenshaw, a Republican, said penalties could “lead to unjust tyranny.” The Houston Police Officer’s Union called the rules “draconian” and sought a ruling on whether they were legal. Looking back in a recent interview, Ms. Hidalgo said the order was the beginning of a political battle.

“But I didn’t realize how much it would grow,” she said. “It was a harbinger of things to come.”

Typical of Texas politics, which is often marked by tugs-of-war between Republican leaders of the state and Democratic leaders of its largest cities, Mr. Abbott overturned the mask mandates of Harris and other counties when he began reopening the state in May.

Two months later, however, after the number of Covid cases diagnosed each day had increased eightfold, he issued his own statewide mandate requiring face masks. Last month he was also forced to walk back the reopening, closing bars for a second time and reducing restaurant capacity.

Houston resident Kiersten Tapia, 32, said the state reopened too quickly, “like it was red light to green.” She remains a supporter of Mr. Abbott, whom she has long liked, but is concerned the changing requirements regarding masks led many in her area of central northwest Houston to take fewer precautions than she did.

“It was confusing,” she said of the mask shifts. “They should have started out with them being mandatory.”

David Van Delden, however, an owner of 14 bars in Austin, Dallas and Houston, said the state moved too quickly to reverse its reopening and shut bars down again, leaving him unable to pay his workers. Instead, he said, there should have been stronger attempts to enforce rules regarding capacity and distancing at bars.

“You can’t pick and choose who is shut down,” he said. “We need to open back up and people need to be more responsible for their own actions.”

Mr. Abbott, the most popular politician in Texas and one of the most popular governors in the nation, has seen the effects of the virus crisis on his favor. Approval of his handling of the virus has fallen from 60% in late April to 44% in late June, according to the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States, a joint project of four major universities which has surveyed governor approval ratings in all states. Texans’ opinions of their governor are now in the bottom fifth of U.S. states, according to the report.

Some local Democratic officials, meanwhile, are now beginning to test the limits of Mr. Abbott’s authority. In Hidalgo County, on the U.S.-Mexico border in the Rio Grande Valley, which has seen a death rate this month six times that of the state, County Judge Richard Cortez, a Democrat, said Monday he will issue a new stay-home order for nonessential employees.

Mr. Cortez acknowledged in an interview on local radio station KURV that such an order contradicts the state’s reopening-- so he has no way to enforce it. Asked whether he expects a punitive response from Austin, Mr. Cortez replied “I don’t know.”

Monday, Mr. Abbott tweeted that “the mask mandate is successfully slowing the spread of Covid-19 in North Texas” and “a community lock down is not needed as long as masks & other distancing strategies are used.”

Mr. Crenshaw, the congressman who had taken aim at Ms. Hidalgo’s mask mandate, retweeted it, with the comment “This is good news.”

Mike Siegel, the Democratic candidate for a central Texas congressional seat that goes from north Austin all the way into the exurbs of Houston (TX-10), told me that Abbott and his own opponent, Michael McCaul "only care about regular people when election time comes around. It was nearly June, the second half of this year, when McCaul began acknowledging the seriousness of COVID-19. In fact, the three month anniversary was yesterday, of him speaking on the House floor with no mask on. Even now he refuses to acknowledge the poor performance of the Trump administration in handling the virus and passes all the blame away. We need a Congress that cares about the people all the time and especially during a pandemic. Not some one so out of touch that one of that one of their largest campaign expenses is limousine services."

Trump And Republicans In Congress Are Making The Pandemic Worse For Everyone But Their Campaign Donors

Cone of Shame by Nancy Ohanian

On the Senate floor yesterday, Elizabeth Warren reminded her colleagues that the country is "just days away from a housing crisis that could be prevented if Mitch McConnell stopped stalling and the Senate act. This is about our health, our economy, and our values. Forcing thousands of people out of their homes during a pandemic will make a public health crisis worse. Wide spread housing disruptions will also affect essential workers and others who are keeping our economy going. And a wave of evictions will hit communities of color the hardest, further deepening racial inequities in our nation. So first, how bad is this problem? More than 30% of all renters say today that they have little or no confidence they can make their next housing payment. More than 40% of Black and Latinx renters aren't sure they'll be able to make their next rent payment. Nearly two thirds of renters who are not confident about making their rent earn less than $35,000 a year. And more than a quarter of black and Latinx renters couldn't pay last month's rent, or had it deferred. Think about that. That's 1 in every 4 Black or Latino renters who are already behind on their rent. And to add to that, the high unemployment rate, the numbers of workers across the country who have had their hours and income cut, and the number of small businesses that have shuttered and may never reopen, and it's clear that the number of evictions will continue to rise. Experts are predicting an avalanche of evictions if we don't institute new protections. We are already seeing a rise in evictions in cities where local eviction bans have lapsed. This is a crisis we can avoid. Instead of further delay and denial, the Senate can step up now and prevent this catastrophe before millions of people are forced out of their homes."

She and Chuy Garcia, in the House, introduced the Protecting Renters from Evictions and Fees Act which would prevent renters from losing their homes if they lose their job or have their hours cut during the pandemic and can't make their housing payment. Their bill would extend the federal eviction moratorium to last until until March of 2021 instead of expiring this week. Republicans oppose the bill.




The pandemic is horrible enough on its own without the GOP and Trump making thing worse on every front. On a smaller scale, ABC New reported yesterday that Trump's properties aren't enforcing local mask mandates. They are hosting gatherings in cities and counties with mask mandates without enforcing the mandates for guest or employees. And even with Señor Trumpanzee finally being forced by his new campaign manager to say good things about masks and social distancing, his utterances are still, at best, mixed messages.

A Morning Consult poll for Politico shows that a bipartisan majority of registered voters strongly support (that's 53%) state mandates that would fine or jail individuals if they fail to wear a mask in public. Another 19% "somewhat" support the mask mandates-- so 72% overall. And that includes support from 68% of independent voters and 58% of Republicans. Republican statewide elected officials are still sabotaging efforts to stop the spread of the contagion-- governors in states with huge problems-- like Florida, Iowa and Georgia for example-- are being very aggressive in their opposition to mask mandates, Brian Kemp of Georgia and Kim Reynolds of Iowa suing cities that order mask wearing and in Louisiana where there's a Democratic governor, the Republican attorney general, Jeff Landry, has declared that the Louisiana mask mandate are social distancing rules are unconstitutional, encouraging law enforcement officials not to enforce them and citizens not to obey.

Finally-- just the right mask for Trump!

You know that old Abraham Lincoln speech, "A house divided against itself, cannot stand.?" He was talking about slavery in the South. Today the phrase is also applicable mostly to southern states and could be used to the mask problem. By encouraging the spread of disease, right wing politicians like Trump, Ron DeSantis (FL), Brian Kemp (GA), Bill Lee (TN), Henry McMaster (SC), Tate Reeves (MS), Mike Parson (MO), Kristi Noem (SD), Kevin Stitt (OK), Doug Ducey (AZ), etc. negative the efforts the rest of us are making to beat the pandemic.

It's hard to imagine that anyone will believe the Trump regime's and Trump campaign's new attempt to reset their disastrously failed approach to the pandemic-- especially not Trump himself who can't admit a mistake, still claims everything was done right and exhibits support that is, at best, very half-assed. His followers seem to be ignoring the whole thing. The media seems interested... and no one else. The reaction from the Lincoln Project was to add a laugh track to Trump's deceitful bullshit:





Meanwhile, instead of approving the rescue package passed by the House over a month ago, Senate Republicans and Trump Regime officials are discussing a short-term extension of unemployment insurance just to get them through the election. As Beto O'Rourke put it on MSNBC, the Texas Republican Party is a "death cult" that wants to allow people to die. And these are the states that reported the most new cases from Thursday and ---> yesterday (keep in mind today's new cases lead to September's new deaths).

• California +10,278 ---> 12,137
• Texas +9,992 ---> 10,528
• Florida +9,440 ---> +9,785 (back over 10,200 today)
• Arizona +3,500 ---> +1,926 (back over 2,300 today)
• Georgia +3,413 ---> +3,314
• Tennessee +2,190 ---> +2,473
• South Carolina +1,892 ---> +1,705
• Oklahoma +1,714 ---> +918
• Louisiana +1,698 ---> +2,764
• Mississippi +1,635 ---> +1,547
• North Carolina +1,626 ---> +2,306
• Alabama +1,467 ---> +1,455 (back over 2,300 today)
• Missouri +1,328 ---> +1,249