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…

The Fascist Pig Is Stealing The Election In Plain Sight And Democracy Seems Incapable Of Protecting Itself-- The US Postal Service

I've thought all year that the reason Trump squealed like a stuck pig about the postal service was because he and his Russian allies had the electronic voting machines rigged in enough counties to throw him another electoral college win. Vote by mail would kill that. So he had to kill the post office, conveniently, an institution, Republicans hate anyway. "Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee have taken to the courts dozens of times as part of a $20 million effort to challenge voting rules," wrote Politico's Anita Kumar, "including filing their own lawsuits in several battleground states, including Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Nevada. And around the time Trump started musing about delaying the election last week, aides and outside advisers began scrambling to ponder possible executive actions he could take to curb mail-in voting-- everything from directing the postal service to not deliver certain ballots to stopping local officials from counting them after Election Day... [I]t has allowed Trump to present himself as a fighter on an issue that many of his most fervent supporters have taken up in the last few months. Trump fans, said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host who serves on the Trump campaign’s advisory committee, 'think Trump is going to win legitimately, but the Democrats are trying to steal the election by manipulating mail-out ballots. They want the president to jawbone enough so there’s a level of outrage to get rid of these ballots.' Just because Trump’s claims of rampant mail-in voting fraud aren’t supported by evidence doesn’t mean election experts aren’t concerned about problems holding a presidential election during a pandemic. It’s unknown whether the United States Postal Service can handle a surge of mail-in ballots in a timely fashion."

Writting for the Washington Post yesterday, Jacob Bogage reported about how Louis DeJoy, Trump's crooked new postmaster general is working quickly and ruthlessly to destroy the U.S. postal service from within. "DeJoy unveiled a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s mail service, displacing the two top executives overseeing day-to-day operations... The shake-up came as congressional Democrats called for an investigation of DeJoy and the cost-cutting measures that have slowed mail delivery and ensnared ballots in recent primary elections. Twenty-three postal executives were reassigned or displaced, the new organizational chart shows. Analysts say the structure centralizes power around DeJoy, a former logistics executive and major ally of President Trump, and de-emphasizes decades of institutional postal knowledge. The reshuffling threatens to heighten tensions between postal officials and lawmakers, who are troubled by delivery delays-- the Postal Service banned employees from working overtime and making extra trips to deliver mail-- and wary of the Trump administration’s influence on the Postal Service as the coronavirus pandemic rages and November’s election draws near."

Ted Lieu, a member of the House Judiciary Committee, is watching closely-- and very realistic. "Democrats," he told me last night, "are going to do everything we can to stop voter suppression, including by the Post Office. At the same time, here is the truth: with conservative control of the Supreme Court, the White House, and the Senate, most if not all of the efforts by Democrats will not succeed in the next three months. That means voter suppression will occur. And the best way to overcome it is to prepare voters. That means we need to educate people that if they are going to vote by mail, they need to vote early. If they decide to vote on November 3, they need to prepare for long lines. Bring a meal, a lawn chair, a game, whatever is necessary to wait in a potentially long line to cast the vote. That is how we win, by preparing voters to overcome obstacles instead of promising actions we can't deliver on in the next three months."

DeJoy is at war with congressional Democrats and there's no doubt in my mind that if Pelosi and Schumer could, they'd throw him in prison. But they can't. Bogage reported that Jerry Connolly (D-VA), chair of the House subcommittee responsible for postal oversight, called the reorganization "a deliberate sabotage" to the nation’s mail service and a "Trojan Horse." Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the subcommittee, told me yesterday that "All the Oversight Committee Democratic Members have been focused on defending the Post Office against right-wing attack ever since Trump came to power. The defense of the Post Office now assumes paramount importance and urgency as it will be a central transmission belt for delivery of ballots and votes in Nobember. Trump and his team have been making overtly hostile moves to undermine postal capacity, so expect intensive oversight hearings, demands for information and legislative action to stop Trump’s unfolding sabotage of the Post Office and 2020 presidential election."

The Postal Service will implement a hiring freeze, according to the reorganization announcement, and will ask for voluntary early retirements. It also will realign into three “operating units”-- retail and delivery, logistics and processing, and commerce and business solutions-- and scale down from seven regions to four.

The structure displaces postal executives with decades of experience, moving some to new positions and others out of leadership roles entirely, including McAdams, Williams and chief commerce and business solutions officer Jacqueline Krage Strako, who previously held the title of executive vice president and chief customer and marketing officer.

...[T]he changes worried postal analysts, who say the tone of DeJoy’s first eight weeks and his restructuring have recast the nation’s mail service as a for-profit arm of the government, rather than an essential service.

“He keeps referring to the USPS as ‘our business.’ But he’s been appointed postmaster general. You don’t run a business,” said Philip Rubio, a history professor at North Carolina A&T State University and a former postal worker. “He’s not accountable to shareholders. He’s accountable to the American people and Congress.”

Earlier Friday, congressional Democrats demanded an investigation of DeJoy’s cost-cutting initiatives, which postal workers blame for delivery slowdowns.

A letter signed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-NY) and seven other Democrats, including Connolly, urged Postal Service Inspector General Tammy L. Whitcomb to examine how DeJoy came to implement policies that prohibit postal workers from taking overtime or making extra trips to deliver mail on time, and how such delays specifically affect election mail.

“Given the ongoing concerns about the adverse impacts of Trump Administration policies on the quality and efficiency of the Postal Service, we ask that you conduct an audit of all operational changes put in place by Mr. DeJoy and other Trump Administration officials in 2020,” the letter states.

It also asks Whitcomb to review the finances of DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, the nominee for ambassador to Canada. The couple’s holdings include between $30.1 million and $75.3 million in assets in USPS competitors or contractors, according to a financial disclosure Wos filed with the Office of Government Ethics when she was nominated. Postal Service mail processing contractor XPO Logistics-- which acquired DeJoy’s company New Breed Logistics in 2014-- represents the vast majority of those holdings. Their combined stake in competitors UPS and trucking company J.B. Hunt is roughly $265,000.

DeJoy had 30 days from taking over the agency to disclose any assets that present a conflict of interest, according to the Postal Service. DeJoy in a statement said he had “done what is necessary to ensure that I am and will remain in compliance with those obligations.”

“We would welcome the Inspector General to look into the steps we are taking to make the Postal Service more efficient,” Postal Service spokesman David Partenheimer said. “She will find that much of what we are doing is designed to address recommendations that her office has made in recent years.”

Agapi Doulaveris, a spokesperson for the Office of Inspector General, said the department had received the letter, but could not comment on ongoing work.

“I would absolutely hope the inspector general would look into why the mail is being slowed, because that’s outrageous,” Rubio said. “Especially during the pandemic and with America about to vote, this is the worst time to be changing policies.”

DeJoy met Wednesday with Pelosi, Schumer, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to discuss the new mail-handling procedures and the Postal Service’s tenuous financial position. The agency is projected to run out of money between March and October 2021, though it just accessed a $10 billion Treasury loan authorized last week in an early coronavirus relief package.

During the USPS’s quarterly board of governors meeting Friday, DeJoy said he negotiated the loan terms with Mnuchin. Upon accessing the loan, the Postal Service, subject to confidentiality restrictions, will hand over proprietary contracts for its 10 largest service agreements with private sector shippers. Those businesses use the mail service for “last mile” package delivery from distribution centers to consumers’ homes or businesses.

Mnuchin had sought sweeping operational control of the Postal Service in previous loan terms, including provisions that would allow the Trump administration to approve senior postal personnel decisions, service contracts with third-party shippers, collective bargaining negotiation strategies and high package prices.

In April, shortly after Congress authorized the loan, Trump called the Postal Service “a joke” and said he would not approve any emergency funding unless the USPS quadrupled package delivery prices, a move analysts said would quickly bankrupt the agency by chasing away customers to private-sector competitors.

DeJoy, at the governors meeting Friday, said that though he has a “good relationship” with Trump-- he’s donated more than $2 million to the Trump campaign or Republican causes since 2016, and chaired the finance committee for the 2020 GOP convention-- he does not take direction from Trump on postal issues.

“While I certainly have a good relationship with the President of the United States, the notion that I would ever make decisions concerning the Postal Service at the direction of the President, or anyone else in the administration, is wholly off-base,” he said. “I serve at the pleasure of the governors of the Postal Service, a group that is bipartisan by statute and that will evaluate my performance in a nonpartisan fashion.”

Coronavirus funding for the Postal Service-- and Schumer and Pelosi’s demand that DeJoy roll back the cost-cutting policies-- emerged as a sticking point between Democrats and the White House in negotiations on a “Phase IV” relief package. The House passed a package with $25 billion for the Postal Service that does not need to be repaid to replace the Treasury loan. The Trump administration has objected to any direct aid to the Postal Service.

On his Bradcast radio show Friday, Brad Friedman warned "Never mind the pre-election polling numbers you are hearing. Given the way Donald Trump and his Administration and acolytes around the country are actively working to undermine this year's November 3rd general elections, you'd make a mistake to place Joe Biden's odds of being declared the winner at any better than 50/50 at best at this point. Disturbing comments from our guest today only underscore that concern yet again." Even as Trump, reported Friedman, continues to make false claims about absentee voting (after fraudulently doing so himself!), his recently appointed Postmaster General, Louis DeJoy, is now undermining the U.S. Postal Service itself in advance of what will be, by far, the largest Vote-by-Mail elections in all 50 states in the nation's history. "The Republican Trump mega-donor DeJoy, with no previous USPS experience, issued several directives upon taking office in June that have resulted in the slow down of mail delivery. And while both DeJoy and other leadership at the 250-year old Postal Service (whose first Postmaster General was Benjamin Franklin) have claimed the new directives are not aimed at slowing down mail or doing Trump's bidding to undermine absentee voting, our guest today, Mark Dimondstein, President of the American Postal Workers Union and Postal Service worker since 1983, charges that is exactly what is happening. The new directives purportedly meant as efficiency measures to curb overtime costs, 'can't do anything but slow down mail,' says Dimondstein. 'Our understanding is that it's really happening all over the country, and it needs to be reversed. It needs to be stopped.' The APWU chief, representing more than 200,000 postal workers, charges the new measures, which direct carriers to leave mail behind at sorting stations if waiting for it will delay their route, 'runs counter to our DNA. Our DNA as a postal worker is to serve the customer, leave no mail behind, treat it as if it is our own.'"

The USPS is in crisis mode now, as coronavirus lockdowns have severely curbed regular mail delivery-- though package delivery has increased, he tells me, helping to mitigate that loss somewhat. The Post Office is funded entirely by postage, not tax payer dollars, but its Republican-dominated Board of Governor's, he says, unanimously voted to request a $25 billion emergency bailout from Congress earlier this year. While almost every other company in the nation has received crisis funding during the pandemic, Republicans in Congress and the White House have continued to block the request. "The Post Office does not run on tax dollars in normal times, it runs off the revenue. So if the revenue is not there, then the Post Office will run out of money," Dimondstein warns. "It's not a question of if, it's a question of when."

..."Vote-by-Mail is nothing new for postal workers. We've been doing this for generations. Military personnel have been voting by mail since the days of the Civil War...And of course now, with the pandemic, it's a question of access to the ballot box at all for tens of millions of people who want to vote safely," he tells me, noting ironically that "Trump trusts us to deliver his mail-in ballot!"

..."The idea that the Postal Service is a joke is an insult to every dedicated postal worker. 600,000 plus strong," says Dimondstein. "Out here in this pandemic, on the front lines, can you imagine how we all feel hearing that? And it's an insult to the customers. 91% of the people in this country, in the latest Pew Research Poll [support USPS]. The Postal Service always rates the highest. This year, it was the highest ever, I think out of a deeper appreciation for the role of postal workers in this pandemic."

"The country just laid to rest John Lewis," Dimondstein notes. "His historic role in this country, courageously done, was the question of voting rights for African-Americans in the South of the United States. And it was courageous. He was almost beaten to death. Voting rights now is right here at the epicenter of what's going on right now, and the Post Office is right in the middle of this thing. Because without Vote-by-Mail, people aren't going to be able to vote. It's as simple as that. Tens of millions of people, from seniors to young people, just will not be able to vote during this pandemic if they don't have good access to Vote-by-Mail and don't have the states step up. We have to worry about some of these states that don't want people to vote. That's the reality."

When asked how long before Election Day Dimondstein would advise voters get their absentee ballot into the mail to ensure it arrives n time to be counted, he recommends that if you haven't mailed it by the Tuesday or Wednesday before Election Day, you'd be wise to try and drop it off in person at your precinct or local County headquarters.

If Trump Tries To Steal The Election After He Loses, Jon Hoadley And Kara Eastman Might Be Able To Stop Him. Here's How

You probably heard about the assertion MSNBC founder Tom Rogers and former Colorado Senator Timothy Wirth have been putting out there about how Trump and Barr are planning to steal the election after Trump loses so that they can retain power. It's interesting and it's more or less plausible and you can read the whole thing at the link just above. Let me skip the first steps and get right down to the votes having been cast and Trump having lost significantly. The plot would play out with Barr starting an investigation into what happened with the intention of Republican controlled states not appointing electors by the December 14 deadline, "the very issue that the Supreme Court harped on in Bush v. Gore in ruling that the election process had to be brought to a close, thus forbidding the further counting of Florida ballots. All four swing states Trump won-- Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania-- have Republican control of both their upper and lower houses of their state legislatures. Those state legislatures refuse to allow any Electoral College slate to be certified until Barr's phony "national security" investigation is complete. The Dems start bleating like sheep but the Trumpist Supreme Court-- unless Roberts decides he's a patriot-- just makes the decision that the Electoral College must meet anyway and cast its votes, which it does. But without Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania electors, neither Biden nor Trump has sufficient votes to get an Electoral College majority. That throws the election to the House of Representatives. Here's where it gets interesting:

• The vote in the House is by state delegation, where each delegation casts one vote, which is determined by the majority of the representatives in that state.
• Currently, there are 26 states that have a majority Republican House delegation. 23 states have a majority Democratic delegation. There is one state, Pennsylvania, that has an evenly split delegation. Even if the Democrats were to pick up seats in Pennsylvania and hold all their 2018 House gains, the Republicans would have a 26 to 24 delegation majority.
• This vote would enable Trump to retain the presidency.

No one seems to have checked Rogers' and Wirth's work, but it's a bit confused and not quite as straight forward as they present it to be. First of all, which congressional delegation votes, the one that was sworn in in 2019 or the one that hasn't been sworn in yet? That makes a big difference. They assume it's the new delegations, which is probably a lot better for Biden, since Trump is far more likely to lose delegations, rather than to pick any up.

Let's start with the obvious state-- Michigan, There are 14 congressional seats. The Democrats hold 7 and although Rogers and Wirth may think the GOP controls 7, they don't, at least not any longer. The third district elected Republican Justin Amash as a Republican and he's still in the seat, but as a Trump-hating-- like intensely hating-- independent. He may not be a Biden fan, but he would hold his nose and vote for Biden before I would. If he had to decide, Michigan would not be a 7-7 tie, but an 8-6 pro-Biden vote.

The more interesting premise is the post-election delegations. There is no doubt that the Democrats will control Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Iowa, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, Vermont and Washington (21 delegations).

There can also be no doubt that the Republicans will control Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, probably Texas-- we'll get to that anon-- Utah, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Wyoming (22 delegations).

What could change? Well, what happens if there is a tie? There are 3 possibilities for ties right off the bat. Pennsylvania Democrats manager to lose PA-01, even though Hillary beat Trump there by 2 points. Brian Fitzpatrick (R) has a weak opponent in moderate Democrat Christina Finello who hasn't raised much money ($217,537 to Fitzpatrick's $2,355,082) and generates little enthusiasm. That enthusiasm could become tsunami-like if a second Trump term is dependent on it. PA-10 would be an even harder district to win and Eugene DePasquale, the Democratic nominee is an even less attractive candidate than Finello, a reactionary Blue Dog who would easily be one of the worst Dems in the House. But... once again-- reluctant Democratic voters who would never consider voting for a Blue Dog pile of garbage might think twice because of the stakes. Still, unlike PA-01 (Bucks County), it's a Republican district so I wouldn't bet on this one.

Then there's the Michigan situation. Amash isn't running and the Democrats have a crap centrist in Hillary Scholten who will inspire no one at all. BUT... the Democrats have a great candidate, state Rep Jon Hoadley, running against a fairly weak Republican in MI-06, a purple district that seems ready to give up on Fred Upton. Hoadley is likely to flip the delegation blue. You can contribute to his campaign here.

Right now, Nebraska has 1 Democrat and 2 Republicans but one of the Republicans, Don Bacon, is likely to lose to Kara Eastman (NE-02), which would create a are reality on the ground, taking the state away from Trump in the House. You can contribute to Eastman here.

Then there are 2 states with one member each-- Alaska and Montana-- that could be, with great difficulty, flipped. Alyse Galvin, an Alaska independent running with Democratic support, probably has the better chance. She's outraising GOP incumbent Don Young $1,313,209 to $1,008,895 and brought in 46.5% of the vote in 2018 as a Democrat.

That leaves the two biggest jewels in the Republican electoral crown: Florida and Texas. Both are steep uphill climbs and neither is finished even picking candidates yet. Let's take Florida first, which has 27 members, 13 Democrats and 14 Republicans. There are no obvious seats a Democrat could flip but that doesn't mean there is no hope. There are x seats worth talking about: FL-03, where Ted Yoho is retiring and where progressive Adam Christensen is running a smart grassroots campaign (contribute here), FL-15, where Alan Cohn could possibly beat ethics-challenged freshman Ross Spano, FL-16, where Margaret Good once beat Vern Buchanan's son in a state legislative district and is now attempting to beat the father, and FL-19, where Francis Rooney is retiring and where Cindy Banyai has a very outside chance to flip the seat (contribute here). This morning Adam Christensen told me that "The tide is shifting quickly as a wave of progressive, grassroots organizing is shining a spotlight on the potential in North Central Florida. Everyone is starting to understand that this is the best place in the state to get the votes needed to knock out Trump and Republican control. Come November, we are going to accomplish something that no one thought possible 6 months ago."

And Texas. There are 36 congressional districts; Republicans control 23 and Democrats have 13. Democrats would have to win 5 to tie it up (depriving Trump of the state). That looks next to impossible. But not impossible. With Will Hurd retiring, TX-23 is almost a sure flip. In the 22nd district Republican Pete Olson is also retiring but the Democrat, Sri Kulkarni is likely to be up against self-funder Kathaleen Wall, who has already spent around $7,000,000 of her own just to win the primary! But another retiree, Kenny Marchant, is leaving TX-24 behind, where Candace Valenzuela could probably take the seat if she can beat centrist nothing Dem Kim Olson. There are also 3 flippable seats with GOP incumbents-- TX-10, TX-21 and TX-25-- where, Mike Siegel would probably beat Michael McCaul, Wendy Davis has a shot against Chip Roy and where Julie Oliver has a solid shot against Roger Williams. (You can contribute to Siegel and Oliver on this page.) There are vague chances that incumbents John Carter (TX-31), Dan Crenshaw (TX-02), Van Taylor (TX-03) and Ron Wright (TX-06) could be displaced but none of the recruitment was stellar and I wouldn't want to stake another 4 years of Trump on these seats.

So, several pathways to come to a House delegation majority, probably the best being wins for Kara Eastman in Nebraska, Jon Hoadley in Michigan, Christina Finello in Pennsylvania, Alan Cohn and/or Adam Christensen in Florida and Alyse Galvin in Alaska.

Beware The #NeverTrump Conservatives-- They Are, First And Foremost, Conservatives

David Frum's new book, Trumpocalypse-- Restoring American Democracy, came out a few weeks ago. Who knew? I guess people who watch Morning Joe... plus #NeverTrump Republicans. Speaking of whom... The Bulwark's Brian Stewart reviewed it yesterday. Frum, of course, is eager to go back to the pre-Trump political normal, of two sick corporate parties-- which is how we wound up with Trump. Yes, getting rid of "the impostor president" is just the beginning... of not very much. The book, writes Stewart "predicts the imminent (though belated) end of the Trump era and sketches the contours of a decent Republican future on the ruins of the indecent present."

Trumpocalypse, along with Frum’s previous companion volume Trumpocracy, is part of a chorus of conservative dissent against Trump’s willful corruptions of party and principle. Although Frum exposes the malfeasance and creeping authoritarianism of the Trump presidency, what makes his contribution of special interest is that it upholds a vision of “one-nation conservatism” that used to prevail in Republican politics but is now dormant. The palpable hope of this work is that it is not yet extinct.

Trumpocalypse gives readers a guide to understanding the modern GOP in its various forms-- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let’s take these in reverse order

The Ugly

It's unsurprising that a campaign that sought and received clandestine assistance from the Russian intelligence services has defiled the presidency and profaned American statecraft in novel ways, grave and petty. President Trump has refused to disclose his tax records, and has collected millions of dollars of payments since entering office, not only from party donors and professional grifters but from foreign governments and entities. A legislative branch that passingly attended to its constitutional duties would never have permitted the chief executive to use his office for his own and his family’s private gain in such disregard of the public interest.

Trump has exploited the awesome powers of the American presidency to conduct an off-the-books foreign policy, subverting the national interest to his own private political interest. It was Trump’s brazen betrayal of pledged allies in Ukraine for no higher purpose than to generate dirt on his political opponent that earned him what Frum dubs “the most emphatically justified impeachment in U.S. history.”

America today is more adrift in the world than at any time in living memory, diminished in the eyes of friend and foe alike. This is a depressing development, and a dangerous one. America’s encounter with the world has traditionally been met with as much weary resignation as heartfelt enthusiasm, but the broad international acceptance of American power has been a conspicuous feature of the postwar era. This invaluable jewel is now in jeopardy.

Admittedly, America’s stature has been fading since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as countries that share our values no longer share our fears or even our interests. But with the advent of the “America First” program of illiberal nationalism and xenophobia, American credibility has faded to the point of erasure. The reason is not far to seek. American power, historically a force for the world’s freedom and prosperity, has been increasingly removed from the vocation of maintaining liberal order. American power has seldom been wielded out of altruism, but foreign nations that once accepted (and often admired) America’s sense of enlightened self-interest have begun to doubt if Trump’s unenlightened hegemon is still superior to the alternatives.

Postwar presidents have understood that a substantial share of responsibility for world order came with the job-- until now. Trump never accepted this purpose of American power. Instead, he has openly shunned it, betraying erstwhile U.S. allies (who remembers the Syrian Kurds, the Ukrainians, or, soon, the Afghans?) who were engaged in ferocious power struggles against U.S. adversaries. Trump launched protectionist trade conflicts that undercut American consumers and the global economy on the risible notion that the European trading bloc represents a danger to U.S. national security. He shortchanged the country’s soft power by cutting foreign aid and depleting the senior diplomatic corps. If anyone didn’t recognize it before, many at home and abroad now recognize the peril of (or opportunities for plunder in) a world without American economic, diplomatic, and military leadership.

The Bad

The dereliction of America’s global role has been attended by an alarming conservative turn against democratic practices and institutions at home. Although Republicans used to console themselves that they represented America’s great “silent majority,” that ceased to be true decades ago. As Frum argues, well before Trump declared for president, the Republican party had “dwindled into an extremist faction that had ceased even to try to represent an American majority.” Beholden to the bitter resentments of a culture war and in thrall of libertarian doctrines on economics and immigration, the party had lost touch with the priorities and interests of the American nation.

As president, Trump has doubled down on the cultural chauvinism of the dwindling conservative base, expediting the flight away from the GOP by affluent and educated voters who not so long ago formed the backbone of the Republican party. Meanwhile, the populist economic and immigration agenda that Trump once gestured at-- and that won over many downscale voters, primarily non-college-educated independents and disgruntled Democrats, who seldom if ever cast a Republican vote-- never materialized. On this rickety foundation of a narrow electoral coalition and a nonexistent policy agenda, Trump managed to bend the Republican party to his will.

With the GOP in his pocket, and protecting his pocket, Trump has traduced the norms and subverted the ethos of republican government. He has castigated the press, even inciting violence against members of the fourth estate by referring to them as “the enemies of the people.” He has heaped contempt on the rule of law, repeatedly expressing his desire to tighten up libel laws. He has issued a rhetorical carte blanche to police departments to rough up suspects in their custody. He has inflamed racial divisions amid social crisis. He has indulged pernicious conspiracy theories that bring ill repute on the cause of liberal democracy.

But the wider Republican habit has itself been profligacy and egregious neglect of the nation’s financial health. The resulting deficits at a time (pre-pandemic) of vigorous economic growth have been an enormous breach of what Edmund Burke called the “partnership . . . between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” Modern Republicans have lined up to cater relentlessly to the economic interests and cultural preferences of the baby boomers, even if it means depriving the emerging nation of the economic capital and bourgeois virtues that undergird aspiration and earned achievement.

The long-running populist division between “people” and “the people”-- or between “Democrats and Americans,” as the old saw had it-- has grown more prominent under Trump’s poisonous tribalism. The stark divergence between the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2016 confirmed the non-majoritarian nature of the Republican coalition, and has fueled ethnic chauvinism on the right. As Trumpists increasingly repel a larger portion of a diverse electorate, the party has maneuvered to retain its share of power by increasingly undemocratic means. Look no further than the pernicious practices of voter suppression and party-drawn districting, which combine to restrict the franchise (or the political weight of the ballot) among would-be voters disinclined to pull the lever for Republican candidates.

The Good

Since it emerged on the American political scene as the party of equal political liberty and of the Union, the Republican Party has stood for high and noble purposes even while promoting various causes. The consistent thread has been an unapologetic defense of American democratic nationhood, rooted in the universal ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the political principles enshrined in the Constitution. This adamant philosophical commitment, if it reasserts itself among Republicans, will continue to be a powerful ballast for America’s constitutional order while encouraging industry and enhancing opportunity for all. But if the old categories of left and right continue to dissolve, a civic nationalism, under whatever partisan guise, will be necessary to securing, preserving, and extending liberty’s blessings.

This constitutional conservatism is the theme stressed throughout Trumpocalypse, and for good reason: It has been jettisoned by almost every Republican in federal office in the process of acquiescing to Trump’s endless mischief. But the purpose of American conservatism, rightly understood, is to demonstrate that the philosophy of natural right that laid the groundwork for the American republic is only compatible with limited government. It is such a conception of the state serving society, and not the other way around, that would have forestalled official complicity with a crooked leader like Trump. It also allows for the characteristics that once defined the American system: “enterprise and individuality, markets and freedom, confidence in American moral purpose and American world leadership,” as Frum tersely puts it.

If today’s Republicans ever wish to be known, to others and to themselves, by their fidelity to those values, they will have their work cut out for them. Just as they will not be able to avoid awkward questions about how they abided Trump’s foul antics and cruelties, they will not be able to revert to business as usual. The flaccid consensus that reigned before Trump in favor of libertarian initiatives-- recall the GOP’s call to end the Medicare guarantee for people under the age of 55, its support for upper-income tax cuts, and opposition to universal health coverage-- was not responsive to contemporary challenges. It needs to be left behind.

In its place, a decent conservatism’s mandate in the years ahead will be to champion the cohesion and broad prosperity of the nation. A reformed GOP must vindicate the national interest by furnishing a healthy dose of relief to workers buffeted by the pincer forces of globalization and technological progress while helping to halt the advance of isolation and alienation in American life.

This won’t be easy. Thanks to a profusion of what social scientists call “deaths of despair,” the overall life expectancy of Americans has declined in recent years-- the first sustained drop since the period from 1915 to 1918, when the First World War and a global flu pandemic killed untold millions. Frum also emphasizes the growing separation (and concomitant mistrust) between the sexes. About 60 percent of Americans under age 35 live without a spouse or partner, and an individual in this cohort is more likely to live with a parent than a partner (an outcome not seen since the 19th century). Even one-third of middle-aged Americans, aged 35 to 54, live without a partner. The dwindling vitality of marriage and family life poses grave challenges to the stability of society. The growing American detachment from the forms of human flourishing and civic health-- beginning with the family, but sprawling outward to include civic associations, fraternal bodies, religious communities, commercial enterprises, activist groups and, yes, political parties-- must be rejuvenated.

There will also need to be a broader reckoning on the right with the America of tomorrow. Much has been written about the dangers of a Republican electoral strategy based on maximizing the turnout of older voters who happen to be predominantly nonurban and white. Frum handles this subject deftly, reminding readers that on current trends, by 2040, 70 percent of the American population will live in fifteen states while 30 percent of the population will live in thirty-five states. The political ramifications of this growing divide are enormous and ominous. The dispersed (and disproportionately white, nonurban, older) 30 percent will control a commanding 70 seats in the U.S. Senate, which will almost certainly be employed to harden economic trends that feature a lack of mobility from the bottom, stagnating working-class wages, and a growing plutocratic class.

To check and reverse this breakdown of democracy, Frum proposes a number of structural reforms, from abolishing the filibuster to granting statehood to the District of Columbia, that will restore some clout to majorities and ensure fairer competition in elections to decide those majorities. A more equitable system of representation would demand that Republicans become the kind of party Frum aspires to see: “an ethnically diverse, culturally modern post-Boomer generation party of markets and enterprise for the twenty-first century.” In these times of diminishing opportunity and hardening isolation, such a party cannot form too quickly.

For Republicans Trumpocalypse sounds a reveille: to man the ramparts facing inwards against an imposter who never had any business as a county chairman, much less the presidential nominee, of this gallant old party. For those who still need to hear it, it will probably be of no avail. But Frum dedicates the book to those Republicans who have already heard it, who for four miserable years have held fast to principle over power. He borrows a verse from an old Methodist hymn: “When all were false, I found thee true.” It’s a fitting compliment paid to those happy few conservatives who grasped the responsibility and obligation of a party whose “grandeur derived not from its antiquity, but from its association with equal rights and human freedom.” That association, as Frum observes, has unquestionably been “sullied and betrayed by the Trump presidency.”

The damage done-- both to the Republican party and to the republic at large-- by a single presidential term will undoubtedly take a long time to repair. But does the sheer scale and scope of damage render the Republican party beyond repair? If the president is nominated and elected to a second term, perhaps so. But with his prospects of re-election waning, what if he is repudiated by a decisive margin? After so long and hazardous a journey, is the old craft really going to be stranded now? Surely a party with such a noble mission has earned the benefit of some doubt.

Behavior And The Pandemic-- Connected At The Hip

An old friend of mine is a top academic at "the Harvard" of another western country. One of his colleagues is in charge of the pandemic medical response for the country. He told my friend that they really don't know as much about COVID as they need to know to combat it effectively. Nearly half a year in and they're still shooting in the dark! On top of that, even statistics are untrustworthy. China has probably been sharing fake stats for most of the time. Florida is worse and Texas may be as well. Many countries don't have a grip on how to count cases or even deaths among their own people.

This morning, Politico's Alice Ollstein and Dan Goldberg reported that "The coronavirus is spiking in more than a dozen states and intensive care beds are filling again, but several governors have no plans to reimpose shutdown measures or pause reopenings, a sign that the political will to take drastic measures has dissipated even as the virus is still raging. In Texas, where total cases have shot up by one-third in the last two weeks, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is moving ahead with plans to let virtually all businesses keep expanding capacity by the end of this week. Arkansas Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who insists recent surges in infections and hospitalizations aren’t tied to his lifting restrictions, on Wednesday announced the state's reopening will move forward as planned next week. In North Carolina, which is reporting its highest-ever levels of new infections and hospitalizations, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said reimposing restrictions would be a last resort. Just one state, Utah, has paused the next phase in its reopening plan amid a two-week spike in new cases... The governors’ attitudes mark a shift in the national view of the best way to respond to the virus that is still infecting more than 20,000 people in the U.S every day. State officials hesitant to pause gradually reawakening economies contend they are better equipped to identify and stamp out outbreaks than when Covid-19 emerged just a few months ago. They point out they’ve been stocking up on protective gear for health care workers, expanding the capacity to test for and track the virus, and monitoring outbreaks in meatpacking plants, nursing homes, prisons and other facilities that have been hot spots. They also bluntly acknowledge that the public has quarantine fatigue."

Yesterday, the Washington Post published a piece by reporters Samantha Pell, Candace Buckner and Jacqueline Dupree on one statistic that is reasonably accurate almost anywhere-- maybe not Florida and China, but everywhere else-- hospitalization rate increases. Remember all those liberating parties during the Memorial Day weekend? "As more than a dozen states and Puerto Rico are recording their highest averages of new cases since the pandemic began," they wrote, "hospitalizations in at least nine states have been on the rise since Memorial Day. In Texas, North and South Carolina, California, Oregon, Arkansas, Mississippi, Utah and Arizona, there are an increasing number of patients under supervised care since the holiday weekend because of coronavirus infections. The spikes generally began in the past couple weeks and in most states are trending higher. Data from states that are now reporting some of their highest seven-day averages of new cases is disproving the notion that the country is seeing such a spike in cases solely because of the continued increase in testing."

Many of these states that have experienced an increase in cases have also had an increase in hospitalizations, with a handful of states also nearing bed capacity. Hospitalizations nationwide are difficult to track, with states reporting hospitalization numbers in varying ways, or not at all. Even states that do report hospitalization numbers may not have always received complete data from every hospital in the state at the time of their reports.

Texas has reported 75,616 cases since the pandemic began, and in 10 of the past 15 days, the state’s seven-day average of new cases has increased.

As of Tuesday, it has reported two consecutive days of record-breaking coronavirus hospitalizations. The state has seen a 36 percent increase in new cases since Memorial Day, with a record 2,056 current hospitalizations as of early Tuesday afternoon. It was up from a high of 1,935 hospitalizations on Monday.

Texas was one of the first states to relax their stay-at-home order. Businesses started to open up in early May. According to the state’s health department, Texas has 28.14 percent of available hospital beds open, and 1,723 available intensive-care unit beds.

In Arizona, 28,296 cases have been reported as of Tuesday, and in 13 of the past 15 days the state’s seven-day average of new cases has increased. There have been a record number of hospitalizations in the state over the past few days. As of Tuesday, Arizona reported 1,243 current hospitalizations, a 49 percent increase since Memorial Day, when there were 833 hospitalizations.

Arizona has also been struggling with its bed capacity. On Friday, Banner Health, one of the largest health-care systems in the country, confirmed that ICUs in Arizona were nearing capacity. Roughly 50 percent of all those hospitalized are in Banner Health facilities. As of Monday, 76 percent of all ICU beds in Arizona were in use, according to data from the state health department.

Arkansas has reported 10,080 cases, and in 11 of the past 15 days the state’s seven-day average of new cases has increased. It has had an 88 percent increase in hospitalizations since Memorial Day. Arkansas had 173 hospitalizations reported on Tuesday, compared with 92 on May 25.

According to local reports, hospitals statewide remained below capacity on Monday, and none of the new coronavirus cases had been linked to recent protests in the state.

The Carolinas have also seen a rise in hospitalizations, with North Carolina experiencing the second-largest spike in the nation behind Texas. North Carolina’s upward trend began after Memorial Day. On May 26, the state reported 621 hospitalizations but two weeks later, that number has climbed to 774.

In South Carolina, hospitalizations sharply increased Monday. In that 24-hour span, there were 30 new hospitalizations, or a 6 percent jump, for a total of 507 covid-19 patients. With the current spike, 12 counties in South Carolina have reached 75 percent of hospital capacity or greater, according to the state’s health department.

Mississippi has reported 18,109 cases since the pandemic begin. On Tuesday, it recorded 671 hospitalizations, a new daily high. It has seen an 17 percent increase in hospitalizations since Memorial Day, with 573 reported on May 25.

In Utah, new covid-19 cases are on the rise and as a result, so are hospitalizations. Utah’s coronavirus task force tweeted that the state has seen a spike in coronavirus cases, and it wasn’t because of testing or a lone outbreak.

Similar to other regions, Utah’s numbers have climbed steadily since Memorial Day, as the seven-day average of new cases has increased 12 of the past 15 days. Over that two-week span, Utah’s current hospitalizations more than doubled, and as of Tuesday afternoon, 230 patients were hospitalized with covid-19.

Arizona tourist sites were packed for Memorial Day weekend. Lake Havasu, a popular vacation destination, was full, according to local officials. In South Carolina, a host of entertainment venues, including zoos, aquariums and water parks, were allowed to open the weekend ahead of Memorial Day. In North Carolina, restaurants were allowed to open at reduced capacity and public pools at 50 percent capacity during Memorial Day weekend.

In the video above, you'll hear Chris Martensen explain that Arizona was one of the earlier states to reopen businesses. "What happened," he asked rhetorically and responds, "It turns out that Arizona hospitals are being told to fully activate emergency plans by the state health director. Why? Because COVID-19 numbers continue to spike in Arizona. Arizona reopened 4 weeks ago and... 4 weeks later we're getting the spike."

Arizona has the 20th most cases among states-- but the 11th most active cases, indicating a big recent spike. Other states with huge disparities like that-- where the pandemic is out of control-- include Ohio (19th most cases overall, but 10th most active cases) and Missouri (just 29th most cases but 20th in active cases).

Nebraska Governor COVID-Pete... No masks or social distancing for him

With the 8 worst-hit early states-- New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware-- seeing the pandemic curve starting to flatten, the states where the curve is steepening, is where we can look for problems this summer. These are the cases per million-- Tuesday followed by Wednesday followed by today-- for surging states with anti-social distancing behavior inspired by Trump and Trumpist governors:

• Nebraska- 8,211--> 8,284--> n.a. cases per million
• Iowa- 7,048--> 7,171--> 7,282
• South Dakota- 6,243--> 6,335--> 6,404
• Mississippi- 6,085--> 6,210--> n.a.
• Georgia- 5,015--> 5,084--> 5,178
• Alabama- 4,369--> 4,485--> 4,659
• Tennessee- 4,038--> 4,081--> 4,150
• Utah- 3,917--> 4,013--> 4,134
• Arizona- 3,887--> 4,101--> 4,295
• North Dakota- 3,807--> 3,859--> 3,910
• New Hampshire- 3,774--> 3,808--> 3,831
• Arkansas- 3,340--> 3,436--> 3,584
• Florida- 3,073--> 3,137--> 3,216 (fake stats; numbers likely to be at least double)
• South Carolina- 2,958--> 3,061--> 3,193
• Texas- 2,724--> 2,808--> 2,871
• Missouri- 2,517--> 2,553--> 2,589

Just for comparison's sake, other countries in the COVID-news with their cases per million:

Spain- 6,198
UK- 4,294
Italy- 3,905
Brazil- 3,792
Russia- 3,443
Canada- 2,585
France- 2,383
Germany- 2,230

And just as Señor Trumpanzee announced he's starting his renewed in-personal fundraising with a $10 million dinner in Dallas, that state's health officials announced that there are currently 2,153 COVID patients in its hospitals, "marking the third-straight day of record-breaking coronavirus hospitalizations in Texas.

Texas was among the first states to relax its statewide stay-at-home order, allowing it to expire April 30 and some businesses to resume operations May 1. On June 3, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order to announce the third phase of the state’s plan to open additional businesses and activities.

Coronavirus hospitalizations, like new cases and deaths, are considered a key measure of the outbreak because it helps scientists gauge how severe it may be. Research shows that it can take anywhere from five to 12 days for people to show symptoms from the virus.

Public health specialists warn that a slow burn of infection through the summer could lead to a massive resurgence this fall.

As The Big Cities Begin To Banish COVID-19 With Rigorous Social Distancing, Rural Areas Find Themselves In The Covid-Crosshairs

Wave II of this pandemic is probably going to be centered more in rural areas than Wave I was. And it's started already. Friday morning, Axios ran a series of graphs showing how the Wave I states are showing significant decreases in serious cases in the last 2 weeks. Massachusetts is down 22.5%. New Jersey is down 19.4%. Connecticut is down 16.0%. New York is down 13.0%. Those were the hardest hit states. More rural states, like New Mexico, New Hampshire, Iowa, Minnesota, Kentucky and both Dakotas are in the opposite situation-- with increases in serious cases and hospitalization in the past two weeks. "Coronavirus hospitalizations," wrote Bob Herman, "have declined in many states-- another indication that social distancing has been effective at curbing the virus' spread."

Likely Wave II states, the states with dramatically increasing case loads per million people aren't states where social distancing has been rigorous and taken seriously. The 5 states where the pandemic is growing and the curve has been steepening worst are all Trump states where the pandemic hasn't been seen as a real emergency by brain-dead ideological right-wing governors:

COVID-Kristi

• Pete Ricketts (R-NE)- 5,052 cases per million
• Kim Reynolds (R-IA)- 4,453 cases per million
• Kristi Noem (R-SD)- 4,394 cases per million
• Tate Reeves (R-MS)- 3,629 cases per million
• Brain Kemp (R-GA)- 3,463 cases per million

Last week, Time Magazine reported that rural America is letting down its guard just as the pandemic is gaining strength there. "Over the last month, as urban areas fought for their lives against the entrenched disease, the virus has steadily spread outward to the least populated counties: the average number of infections per capita in rural America has grown eight-fold over that time, and as of May 3, more than 60% of the smallest counties had at least one case." Last month, continuing to make every wrong decision along the pandemic path, Trump declared that largely rural parts of the heartland were "in the clear" and insisting that areas like Nebraska "could think about reopening 'literally tomorrow' because they looked 'a lot different than New York.' It’s an argument that has been repeated by several governors who have resisted lengthy stay-at-home orders, wielding the lack of urban density as a reassurance. 'It’s so important not to turn on the news and look at New York City and think that that’s what Lemmon, South Dakota is going to face in a month,' Gov. Kristi Noem told an April 1 press conference. 'It is absolutely not true.' But as the country’s leaders talk of reopening the shuttered economy, it is precisely these regions of the U.S. that are among the most at risk. A TIime analysis of county-level COVID-19 cases shows that the virus is only just now arriving in much of rural America. That means some of these sparsely populated areas could be letting down their guard just as the disease is about to hit."

COVID-19’s arrival in rural America threatens a particularly vulnerable group of people. Many of these regions have an older, poorer population, and fewer hospital facilities and medical staff. Overall, 18 million people live in counties that have hospitals but no ICU, and about a quarter of those people are over the age of 60. In Nebraska, for example, 81 counties don’t have a single ICU bed and quarantining even a few nurses or doctors could quickly leave hospitals and clinics with no medical professionals at all.

...So far, help from the federal government in both money and guidance has been spotty at best, and rural health officials are worried. More than a dozen local health officials in rural regions and smaller cities across the country tell Time they are struggling to convince their communities to keep their businesses shuttered and avoid social contact in places where the threat doesn’t yet feel real and some local politicians are arguing it is overblown. In these parts of the country, flattening the curve means extending it far, far into the future despite economic pressures. The life or death consequences of how it plays out, they say, will depend on who the public ultimately chooses to believe. “It’s a mixed message to our population,” says Carol Moehrle, the district director of the Idaho North Central District public health department. “Now the public is saying “Who do we trust? I mean some of our politicians are saying this isn’t even real, or that this is over-- do we trust them or public health?”

Mangum, Oklahoma has already learned the hard way how untouched areas of the country remain one traveler away from becoming a hotspot. After a Tulsa pastor visited to preach to a congregation on March 15, some of the people he interacted with unknowingly contracted the virus, a state investigation found. Three days after his visit, the 55-year old pastor became the first Oklahoman to die from COVID-19. By then, a growing number of infections was quickly spreading among Mangum’s 2,700 residents. Five weeks later, 31 patients and 21 staff members in the town’s only nursing home had contracted the virus, and five had died.

...In some rural parts of the country, the urge to reopen is getting ugly. Idaho Republican Gov. Brad Little issued a stay-at-home order on March 25. By then, Blaine County, home to the Sun Valley ski resort, had become a hotspot after a coronavirus outbreak rapidly spread through the area, at one point exceeding the infection rates of New York City and Italy and shutting down the local hospital. But it didn’t take long for some of the state’s famously anti-government rural population to start pushing back.

Starting in early April, Idaho Republican state Rep. Heather Scott, who represents Bonner County, urged her constituents to do just that. “The lying Trump-hating media, who continues to push global and socialist agendas, has told us there is an emergency and it is a pandemic,” Scott says in an April 2 video update sent through her official legislative account. The governor had “bought into this frenzy” by issuing stay at home guidelines, she said, and they would not end without pressure.

Such public calls to action worry health officials like Moehrle, of the Idaho North Central District public health department, in part because she knows it will fall on fertile ground in her five rural counties. The natural social distancing of life in that region makes many feel immune. “It’s hard to get it across to the public because many are thinking this is not a big deal, being isolated is their lifestyle anyway, they’re not feeing the threat,” she says.

But the danger for all these rural counties is real and growing. Still-sparse testing and contact tracing make predicting the next outbreak in many of these places close to impossible, health officials say. While some rural counties may continue to be spared, those that aren’t may see a late surge of COVID-19 cases that could quickly turn tragic.

In the rural county that saw the first case in Kentucky, for example, health facilities have just six ICU beds. Moehrle’s district in Idaho, which has the largest elderly population in the state, has 15 beds for five counties. As of May 4, her district had a total of 68 cases, 16 of them just in the last week, and 13 deaths. Her department had prepared for a late wave, she tells TIME, using the weeks of Gov. Little’s stay at home order to attempt to stock protective gear and prepare their health system as much as possible. But she knows that for many of their residents, a surge in cases will mean death. “We just have nothing to offer them, no vaccines, no treatment,” she says. “We’re so far behind the curve of the metropolitan areas,” Moehrle says. “We’re still waiting for our bomb to hit.”

From Washington, President Trump has nevertheless been urging rural America to get back to work. He has repeatedly contradicted his own health officials’ warnings that his push to reopen the country prematurely will lead to more deaths. He has also dismissed the possibility of a later, more severe wave in the fall, which local health officials tell Time is one of their main concerns.

Even as Trump has touted early opening, health officials in his government have moved to fund mitigation measures for upcoming outbreaks. On April 22, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it would award $165 million in extra funds to 1,779 small rural hospitals to combat the pandemic, as well as additional resources to 14 tele-health resource centers. Of that amount, roughly $2.2 million will go to programs in Idaho, $3.9 million to Kentucky, $5.4 million to Nebraska and $5.1 million to Oklahoma.

Federal official guidance has been a mixed bag, too. According to CDC director Robert Redfield, “reopening the US will be a careful, data-driven, county-by-county approach” designed to balance public health and the need to restart the economy. In some parts of the country, counties may self-enforce county-level quarantines. Small towns like Mangum that have suffered outbreaks have often found themselves shunned by their neighbors. “All the little towns around us started saying, ‘Don’t go to Mangum,’ and I don’t blame them,” says Mayor Mary Jane Scott.

But for many smaller counties, even a staggered “reopening” means the resumption of travel and commerce, bringing goods, people and coronavirus with them. That’s an increasing worry. “What we’re not really addressing is that those areas have neighbors,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, who heads the National Association of County and City Health Officials. “They have neighbors that may not be moving at the same pace, even if they’re 20 miles away or right across the border where people go to the grocery store.”

Ultimately, the main infection route for rural America is coming from cities, even smaller ones with fewer cases, as happened with Mangum and Tulsa. To avoid a repeat of that, both urban and rural residents need to keep sacrificing, says Bruce Dart, executive director of the Tulsa Health Department. His own father, a 91-year old Air Force veteran, is struggling with the financial and psychological toll of closing down the restaurant bar he has spent decades building up. “It’d be breaking my heart to see my business, my livelihood, go down the tubes,” Dart says, but “once we open up there will be a surge in cases, and as bad as the economic effects are, we can recover from that. We can’t recover from deaths.”

How long does rural America need to keep enforcing these measures to stay safe? Government analysts, epidemiologists and local health officials all give different answers, but agree that the demographics and hollowed-out health systems of small counties mean there is a risk until there is a vaccine. Nebraska, where officials had warned against large groups or older workers participating in the spring cattle brandings, should wait until at least early July to begin relaxing social distancing guidelines or risk a second wave of infections, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The estimate for Kentucky, Idaho and Oklahoma hovers around mid- to late-June. But even that relaxation of social distancing would come with conditions that would be impossible to implement in these areas: “containment strategies that include testing, contact tracing, isolation, and limiting gathering size,” according to the researchers.

In the meantime, public health officials in some of the rural counties which have not seen major outbreaks are worried they’ll be drowned before the second wave hits. In Bonner County, Idaho, Sheriff Daryl Wheeler released a letter on April 2 pressing Gov. Little to call an emergency session of the state legislature to assess whether public health officials had deceived Americans about the severity of the pandemic. “I do not believe suspending the Constitution was wise because COVID-19 is nothing like the plague,” he wrote. In response, more than 320 county medical professionals signed a letter published in the local newspaper asking people to “stay the course” and trust their health officials despite the apparent low rate of cases. “Idaho has gone from less than 10 confirmed COVID-19 cases to over 1,000 cases in the last 20 days,” they wrote. “Our regional ICU capacity is already stretched, and the pandemic has yet to fully penetrate our area. This is a health emergency! We are rising to this challenge.”

And, yeah... it won't be long before the U.S.A. is embracing the idea of authoritarianism as the only way to make people behave so we can banish the plague the way normal countries are. Ironic, isn't it!