Trump's Pandemic Policies Aren't Killing Enough People To Impact His Vote Totals, But It's The People Left Behind Who Will Get Their Revenge In November

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I was making fun of the professional prognosticators for rating Montana's Senate race a "lean Republican?" I predicted they would all be backing away from that foolishness by summer. It's still mid-May and the National Journal's Hotline Power ratings has already tipped Montana as a viable target for Democrats-- as well as both Georgia Senate seats!

In his Tuesday email, even Charlie "walking on eggs" Cook-- acknowledging the enormity of the implications of a Democratic takeover of the Senate-- ventured to say that the chance of the GOP holding onto the Senate majority, once 66% in Cook-world, is now a "50-50 proposition." For someone as overly cautious and conservative as Cook, that is tantamount saying the Democrats have a lock on a big win for the Senate races. "Now with popular Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock challenging GOP incumbent Steve Daines in Montana," he wrote, "newly-appointed Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler mired in a horrific political situation and the possibility that Republicans could draw an exceedingly weak candidate in what should be a safe seat in Kansas (filing deadline June 1), among other problems adding to previous woes with incumbents Martha McSally in Arizona, Susan Collins in Maine, Cory Gardner in Colorado and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis all in races that are, at best, toss ups. Combine those... with a recession that has effectively eliminated any tailwind that President Trump had been enjoying from a strong economy and it is hard to see his re-election prospects looking anything but more dire by the week. Today there is more than a one-in-three chance that Democrats will win a trifecta in November, the White House, the Senate and the House. The policy and governing implications are enormous." [This morning Cook speculated that both Georgia Senate seats may be competitive!]

Keep in mind that these outcomes are not independent of each other, a Trump victory would be more likely to be accompanied by retention of the Senate, a Trump defeat would raise the odds of Democrats taking over the Senate. This isn't 'coattails," (I don't believe in coattails), but the turnout dynamics, the issue agenda and priorities and the political environment that would exist to re-elect, or defeat Trump would also be in place for a Senate that is already teetering on the edge. Our system isn't quite parliamentary but is getting increasingly more so, the linkage is greater, the ticket-splitting diminishing.

It would be hard to overstate the importance that the combination of President Trump in the White House and a Mitch McConnell-led Republican Senate majority has had on shaping the Federal judiciary. Two U.S. Supreme Court Justices, 51 judges on the 13 U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals and 138 Federal District judges have been confirmed under this Trump-McConnell combo, two more Circuit and 40 more district judges are in the pipeline, awaiting confirmation. As enormous as the consequences are and will be for a generation or two, the implications of yet another two or four years of Republicans controlling even more judicial nominations is enough to give most on the left or right heart palpitations, out of either joy or terror.

Moving beyond judicial nominations, the policy implications are incredible as well. Back in the day, one party holding the White House and a House majority but a razor-thin edge in the Senate would find itself greatly stymied, real limits on what they could accomplish. But now, with the threshold for most executive and all judicial confirmations down to a simple majority and the possibility of the filibuster being completely scrapped, the governing implications are head-spinning.  

And the unofficial mouth of Inside-the-Beltway conventional wisen, Josh Kraushaar, noted at the same time that "Republicans are growing increasingly worried that President Trump’s shaky political position will not just cost them the presidency, but also sweep in a Democratic Senate majority and further diminish their House minority. The latest round of polling shows the president losing to Joe Biden, as well as Democrats gaining ground in red-state Senate seats that once looked like long shots, from Georgia to Montana to Kansas. There’s a growing chance that Democrats may capture control of the Senate with a seat or two to spare."

It's horrifying that Schumer has it rigged to make sure the new Democratic Senate majority is a dogged conservative, anti-progressive majority. There's still time do something about that in a few states, especially Colorado, where progressive Andrew Romanoff and conservative John Frackenlooper each is a sure bet to beat walking dead GOP Senator Cory Gardner. Schumer is doing all he can to paint Frackenlooper as inevitable. But he isn't and Romanoff is beating him by every metric but corporate cash, which has gushed into the Frackenlooper campaign. Please consider contributing to Romanoff and the other progressive Senate candidates by clicking on the 2020 Senate thermometer on the right and giving what you can. Back to Kraushaar:

The current political environment is reminiscent of 2008, two years after Democrats swept control of the House and Senate under President George W. Bush. It’s mostly remembered for Barack Obama’s historic election, but the Democrats’ downballot dominance was just as remarkable. Riding deep dissatisfaction with GOP leadership, Democrats expanded their Senate majority to a near filibuster-proof margin and won House seats in some of the most reliably conservative territory in the country.

Like the political environment today, the 2008 election took place in the middle of a national crisis. Back then, the Republican presidential nominee insisted that the fundamentals of the country were strong during a deepening recession. Now a Republican president is publicly insisting he has “met the moment” and prevailed, despite rising death rates and massive unemployment from the coronavirus. Then, as now, a Democratic challenger used the GOP candidate’s own words in devastating attack ads.

As the New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman wrote: “The two elections were effectively a single continuous rejection of Republican rule, as some in the GOP fear 2018 and 2020 could become in a worst-case scenario.”

Having covered the 2008 congressional campaigns closely, I’m also struck by how much in common that the two elections share. That year, Democrats netted eight Senate seats, sweeping comedian Al Franken into office while winning races in conservative strongholds such as Alaska and South Dakota as part of a big blue wave. Republicans didn’t even field a candidate in Arkansas, one of the most conservative states on the map. Mitch McConnell faced the closest race of his Senate career, barely defeating a not-ready-for-prime-time Democratic challenger.

“[My race] isn’t going to be a landslide,” McConnell told me at the time. “The president is not popular. The economy is certainly slow, so it’s a much more contested environment.”

Repeat McConnell’s words 12 years later and they hold true today. Look at the wider Senate map, and you can see eerie parallels. A poll conducted by Georgia Republicans shows the state’s senior Sen. David Perdue only polling at 45 percent, just 6 points ahead of Democrat Jon Ossoff. Perdue hasn’t been considered particularly vulnerable, but it’s now plausible to see him locked in a competitive race if the bottom falls out for the president. (This is the “other” Senate election in Georgia, which hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention as the special Senate election involving embattled GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler.)

The possibility of other red-state surprises are apparent: The emergence of conservative hard-liner Kris Kobach as a possible Senate nominee in Kansas is giving Democrats an unusual opportunity in a state that hasn’t voted a Democrat to the Senate in nearly 90 years. Gov. Steve Bullock’s entrance into Montana's Senate race is putting Sen. Steve Daines’s seat squarely in play. McConnell even faces well-funded opposition from another not-ready-for-prime-time Democratic challenger in the middle of another crisis. If Republicans lose even one of these red-state seats, the odds that Democrats win an outright majority in the Senate increases dramatically.

Another major storyline this year is the Republican Party’s inability to recruit credible House candidates, particularly in districts that Trump carried in 2016. Many freshman Democrats representing Trump districts aren’t facing tough Republican opposition. Twelve years ago, that dynamic was similarly apparent on the Senate side. Only one Democratic senator faced credible GOP competition that year-- Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu-- and she still coasted to victory over now-Sen. John Kennedy. Then-Sen. Mark Pryor, a Democrat, ran unopposed by Republicans in Arkansas, a state that John McCain comfortably carried.

...[R]ight now, Trump and his Republican party are in dire shape. The history of embattled presidents facing reelection during a worsening crisis doesn’t offer much comfort. Even Trump, always averse to uncomfortable truths, recognizes this.

In a series of half a dozen tweets this week, Paul Krugman asserted that the GOP has given up "on trying to control Covid and reopen the economy; the propaganda arm (Fox and worse) is going all in for conspiracy theorizing and virus trutherism. At one level this shouldn't be surprising. It's the same script the party has followed on climate change, and the virus truthers are a lot like the inflation truthers who insisted that we had runaway inflation under Obama. But what's going on now seems to involve a new level of political recklessness. Climate change takes place over decades; inflation truthers paid no political or personal price for being wrong again and again. But if the virus erupts, it will happen quickly. In other words, the GOP has in effect decided to ignore the science at the clear risk of being held accountable in the near future both for killing thousands and for wrecking the economy, because that's what a premature opening would do. Why take that risk? Partly they may be high on their own supply, no longer able to conceive that there is an objective reality that might be politically inconvenient. Partly I think it's because they know in their hearts that they can't actually do the job of governing. But anyway, we're witnessing a lethal abdication of responsibility whose consequences will be quickly apparent. It's truly awesome to watch."





Earlier today we saw what Republicans in control of the state legislature and state Supreme Court are doing to Wisconsin. It's as if they want to kill people! And in nearly every state where Republicans can, they are making the pandemic worse. Yesterday, writing for the NY Times, Trip Gabriel reported that GOP defiance of Pennsylvania's lockdown has 2020 implications. Pennsylvania has been horribly hit by the pandemic. There are 63,122 cases-- 6th worst in the country-- with 4,320 more confirmed cases yesterday and 4,931 cases per million in the population, the 11th hardest hit state by the metric. And although, predictably, Philadelphia has been hardest hit, cases have spiked in Trump counties as well. This list shows cases + Trump's 2016 percentage of the votes in the 15 worse hit counties:

• Philadelphia- 19,093 cases-- Trump- 15.5%
• Montgomery- 5,583 cases-- Trump- 37.6%
• Delaware- 5,252 cases-- Trump- 37.4%
• Bucks- 4,248 cases-- Trump- 47.8%
• Berks- 3,530 cases-- Trump- 52.9%
• Lehigh- 3,378 cases-- Trump- 45.9%
• Northampton- 2,566 cases-- Trump- 50.0%
• Luzerne- 2,477 cases-- Trump- 58.4%
• Lancaster- 2,364 cases-- Trump- 57.3%
• Chester- 2,008 cases-- Trump- 43.3%
• Alleghany- 1,551 cases-- Trump- 40.0%
• Lackawana- 1,256 cases- Trump- 46.8%
• Monroe- 1,240 cases-- Trump- 48.1%
• Dauphin- 895 cases-- Trump- 46.6%
• Lebanon- 856 cases-- Trump- 65.9%

Gabriel reported that on Monday, addressing county lawmakers, Governor Tom Wolf slammed the GOP with "a stunning rebuke, as resistance to lockdown orders flares around the country." Wolf "a military metaphor to accuse Republican officials of desertion in the battle against the pandemic: 'To those politicians who decide to cave in to this coronavirus they need to understand the consequences of their cowardly act.'"

The normally mild-mannered governor’s comments turned up the temperature of a national debate over the health emergency, one fanned by President Trump as he eggs on protesters at state capitols, including in Harrisburg, and by lawmakers in Congress, where the government’s top health officials warned this week of dire consequences if the economy reopens too soon.

On Thursday, the president arrived in Pennsylvania, one of several battleground states crucial to his re-election, where the political combat over limiting the virus’s death toll or easing its economic devastation could have weighty consequences in November. While 26 percent of the state’s work force has filed for unemployment, the governor is relying on metrics about the virus’s spread to keep many people in their homes and all but “life-sustaining” businesses in populous regions closed.

Republicans, sensing a gut-level anger in exurban and rural areas after nearly two months of restrictions, see an issue with the potential to drive turnout by voters in a state where Mr. Trump, as elsewhere in the industrial and Midwest region, needs a surge of support to repeat his narrow victory of 2016. In Wisconsin, also a swing state, the State Supreme Court sided with Republicans on Wednesday and threw out the stay-at-home order of Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat. In Texas, armed men have shown up to support businesses defying government orders to stay closed, an extreme sign of the politicizing of social distancing rules.

At the same time, polls show that Mr. Wolf, like other governors moving cautiously and heeding scientific benchmarks to reopen, is enjoying record support, including among many Republicans.

Mr. Trump seemed to address Mr. Wolf on Monday via Twitter. “The great people of Pennsylvania want their freedom now, and they are fully aware of what that entails,” he tweeted. “The Democrats are moving slowly, all over the USA, for political purposes.”

The governor’s accusation of cowardice was directed at officials in half a dozen Republican-led counties that have said they would defy his timeline for reopening businesses. Mr. Wolf has partly lifted restrictions on 37 counties, mainly in rural regions where community spread of the virus is more easily contained.

But with the rest of the state, including its populous southeast, still under a strict stay-at-home order through June 4, officials in some counties said they would ignore the governor and open up starting Friday.

“The health crisis is real, but the economic devastation is real also,” said Josh Parsons, a commissioner of Lancaster County, one of those moving to loosen restrictions despite not meeting all of the governor’s health benchmarks.

He described “chaos on the ground” as people openly disregarded stay-at-home orders in recent weeks. “People have been voting with their feet and going back to work because they have to,” he said.

Some Republican strategists said the issue of reopening Pennsylvania would add motivation to turn out for Mr. Trump against the Democratic Party in November.

“I’ve sensed a very, very strong backlash in, quote, the hinterlands,” said Charlie Gerow, a Republican strategist in Pennsylvania.

Mr. Trump narrowly carried Pennsylvania by 44,000 votes in 2016. To compensate for population growth and rising anger at his presidency in the Philadelphia suburbs, which lifted Democrats in recent elections, he needs higher support among white men, with and without college degrees.

“My sense is there is a significant number of voters who did not vote in 2016 for whatever reasons who will be voting for President Trump in 2020, and part of it is this overreach by Governor Wolf,” Mr. Gerow said.

Mr. Gerow may be on strong drugs. The pre-COVID Morning Consult Trump Tracker showed Trump having lost 11 approval points since his inauguration and his net job approval underwater 49-48%. Since the pandemic kicked in, Trump's numbers have submerged. The Real Clear Politics polling average shows Biden beating him 48.3- 41.8%-- a 6.5% spread. The most recent polling (last week in April) was conducted by a Republican polling firm, Harper. It shows 49% of voters ready to vote for Biden and just 43% ready for Trump. Only 23% of respondents say the disagree with Pennsylvania ordering all non-essential businesses closing under threat of criminal prosecution and only 14% disagreed with Pennsylvania closing all schools for the remainder of the school year. 16% disagreed with the governor's stay-at-home orders. I wonder if Mr. Gerow is ready for those odds.

Gabriel noted that "A survey released this week by the Washington Post/Ipsos showed that 72 percent of Pennsylvania adults approved of how the governor has handled the coronavirus outbreak, including 51 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. Only 45 percent of all adults in the state supported Mr. Trump’s handling of the outbreak. In addition, seven in 10 Pennsylvanians said the United States should keep trying to slow the virus’s spread even if it means keeping businesses closed. Nearly half of Republicans agreed."

“I’m baffled by what the Republican game plan is here,” said J.J. Balaban, a Democratic strategist in Pennsylvania. “I guess they think this will rally their base, but it seems to speak to a narrow base that is already riled up, while alienating them from the kinds of voters they need to carry Pennsylvania.”

In Lancaster County, as well as others that have moved to reopen despite the governor’s orders, the rate of new coronavirus cases remains higher than 50 per 100,000 people over the previous two weeks, a target Mr. Wolf’s administration set for moving counties to a “yellow” phase of partial reopening. Lancaster County also has one of the highest death tolls in the state, with 183 as of Thursday.

Other counties where Republican officials vowed late last week to defy the governor include Dauphin, Franklin, Lebanon, Berks and Schuylkill, roughly the region from the Philadelphia exurbs west to Harrisburg. Some county sheriffs and district attorneys said they would not pursue businesses that opened despite the governor’s orders. On Wednesday, after Mr. Wolf warned that defiant counties would face consequences, Dauphin County’s commissioners backed down and said they would not unilaterally move to yellow status.

Mr. Parsons, the Lancaster County commissioner, and other local Republican officials argue that the county has met more important metrics for reopening than the growth of new virus cases, including the availability of intensive-care beds and ventilators in hospitals. Deaths are high because the county has many nursing homes, he said.

“We need to protect those people in nursing homes, but that doesn’t mean some people can’t safely and prudently go back to work,” Mr. Parsons said.

On Monday, Mr. Wolf threatened to withhold federal coronavirus relief money from counties that disobeyed him and reopened early.

He also told business owners who reopened too early that they risked losing certificates of occupancy, liquor licenses and insurance. “Insurance does not cover things that happen to businesses breaking the law,” he warned.

Orange County, This Coming November

Katie Porter-- a leader

There are some good politicians trying to do a good job through this. And then there are the nightmares like Trump and the Trumpists. Like Trump, governor Asa Hutchinson (R-AR), Kristi Noem (R-SD), Kevin Stitt (R-OK) and, especially, Ron DeSantis (R-FL) make everybody else look relatively good. There's a general consensus that DeSantis is the worst governor in the country, at least in terms of doing the most harm to the most people. Like Trump, who consistently-- even arrogantly-- ignored all warnings, DeSantis, reported the NY Times, helped infect the whole country due entirely to his political cowardice.

Weeks before Florida ordered people to stay at home, the coronavirus was well into its insidious spread in the state, infecting residents and visitors who days earlier had danced at beach parties and reveled in theme parks. Only now, as people have gotten sick and recovered from-- or succumbed to-- Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has the costly toll of keeping Florida open during the spring break season started to become apparent.

Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has blamed travelers from New York, Europe and other places for seeding the virus in the state. But the reverse was also true: People got sick in Florida and took the infection back home.

The exact number of people who returned from leisure trips to Florida with the coronavirus may never be known. Cases as far away as California and Massachusetts have been linked to the Winter Party Festival, a beachside dance party and fund-raiser for the L.G.B.T.Q. community held March 4-10. Another California man died after going to Orlando for a conference and then to a packed Disney World. Two people went to Disney and later got relatives sick in Florida and Georgia.

Slow action by Florida’s governor left local leaders scrambling to make their own closure decisions during one of the busiest and most profitable times of the year for a state with an $86 billion tourism economy. The result was that rules were often in conflict, with one city canceling a major event while a neighboring city allowed another event to continue.

DeSantis finally took action on April 1-- a full month too late. Florida has over 18,500 confirmed cases and nearly 500 deaths, with the epidemic still expanding in the state. Tectonix, a data analytics and visualization firm showed how cellphones that were on one Fort Lauderdale beach at the beginning of March spread across the country-- up the Eastern Seaboard and further West-- over the next two weeks. DeSantis is literally, along with Trump, the Typhoid Mary of this pandemic.

The Orange County in the headline, though, is not Orange County the Orlando, Florida Orange County-- which luckily for the people who live there, started moving in the right direction before DeSantis did. I have the other big Orange County in mind-- southern California's.

Orange County was once the heartland of the Republican Party-- long before Texas or the rest of the Deep South could be counted on. America can thank Orange County for the Nixon and Reagan presidencies. And then Trump happened. In 2016, primary day looked like this:

• Trump- 146,888
• Hillary- 123,723
• Bernie- 100,836
• Kasich- 21,285
• Cruz- 16,844

In November, Hillary beat Trump county-wide-- 556,544 (51.0%) to 472,669 (43.3%). That was the first time Orange County went for a Democrat since 1936-- FDR's first reelection. In 2012 Romney beat Obama 541,592 (53.0%) to 457,077 (44.8%). That was quite a turn-around! And 2 years later, in the 2018 midterms, all 4 Orange County red districts-- each of which Romney had won-- flipped blue.

• CA-39 (even PVI):

Gil Cisneros (New Dem/"ex"-GOP)- 126,002 (51.6%)
Young Kim (R)- 118,391 (48.4%)
[Cisneros narrowly lost the Orange County part of the district but made up for it by winning way ahead in the Los Angeles part of the district.]

• CA-45 (R+3):

Katie Porter (D)- 158,906 (52.1%)
Mimi Waters (R)- 146,383 (47.9%)

• CA-48 (R+4):

Harley Rouda (New Dem/"ex"-GOP)-157,837 (53.6%)
Dana Rohrabacher (R)- 136,899 (46.4%)

• CA-49 (R+1):

Mike Levin (D)- 166,453 (56.4%)
Diane Harkey (R)- 128,577 (43.6%)
[Levin lost the Orange Co. part of the district but cleaned up in the San Diego part.]

Last week Kyle Konik from Sabato's Crystal Ball took a look at the California general election races and changed the rating towards the GOP in 3 of them, declaring incumbents Devin Nunes and Tom McClinton (neither with a strong opponent) as "safe" from likely Republican, and putting the open Katie Hill seat (CA-25) from "leans" Dem to "toss-up."

I'm not going to get into those races here, although I do want to mention that the voters registration plus Trump on the top of the ticket should make the district relatively safe for a Democrat, despite the fact that the Democratic establishment picked an unimaginably bad candidate who will inspire absolutely no one but her friends and whoever happens to like corporate Democrats from the Republican wing of the party and who stand for nothing at all and have nothing to offer other than a "D" next to their name-- a "D" than will turn into an "F" score once she starts voting.

This is how they rate the reelection chances of the 4 Orange County Democratic incumbents we mentioned above:

• Cisneros- CA-39 leans D
• Porter- CA-45- likely D
• Rouda- CA-48- leans D
• Levin- CA-49- safe D

In explaining why the ratings fall this way Kondik uses irrelevant pundit-speak bullshit like this: "Republicans have never won a district where they won less than 50% of the two-party primary voting." What he doesn't do is take into account the jobs the incumbents have been doing. Cisneros and Rouda, the two conservative "ex"-Republicans, are just sitting and doing nothing at all but calling campaign contributors and asking for money. Each is a complete waste of a seat, back-benchers with nothing at all to offer anyone. Contrast that with Levin, who has a relatively decent voting record and an interest in several important policies. Or, better yet, contrast Rouda's and Cisneros' inertness with Katie Porter's activism and brilliance. She is widely considered one of the most worthwhile and accomplished freshmen from the 2018 class. Her constituents-- not the hardcore Trumpists of course, but everyone else-- have come to love her and respect her. Voters in Irvine, Tustin, Villa Park, Mission Viejo, Laguna Woods, Rancho Santa Margarita, Anaheim Hills and Lake Forest have something the others don't-- a member of Congress to actually be proud of.

As of the February 12 FEC filing deadline, Katie had raised $3,825,561, 29.79% from small grassroots donors. The three other OC freshmen:

Rouda- $2,339,456 (8.91%)
Levin $2,046,561 (12.68%)
Cisneros- $1,415,849 (9.04%)

Cisneros and Rouda may sit on the phone all day asking rich people and PAC executives for money, but by primarily doing an outstanding job, Porter has raised more (combined) and has raised gigantically more from small donors who appear to appreciate what she is doing for them, their families and the country. This isn't the kind of information that pundits use in their always-wrong ratings.

Mike Levin has two twitter accounts, one with 111,600 followers and one with 15,100 followers. Harley Rouda has two twitter accounts as well, one with 77,300 followers and one with 14,000 followers. Gil Cisneros also has two twitter accounts, one with 15,800 followers and one with 9,248 followers. So all together 243,048 followers between the 3 of them. And Katie? One account with 204,200 and one with 442,000-- a total of 642,200. Maybe an indication someone gives a damn about what she's doing in Congress?

Below is the third most-viewed Katie Porter YouTube clip-- with 843,000 views. There are 2 clips with over a million views each and 8 with over half a million. None are ads or about election campaigns. Harley Rouda has 3 videos with over 100,000 views-- all paid campaign ads. Almost all of his YouTubes are campaign clips and not many people have watched any of them. Cisneros-- the self-funding lottery winner-- is even worse, with no YouTubes more than just a handful of people have watched and, like Rouda, almost all just about campaigning.

Congress Needs New Leadership-- Replacing Steny Hoyer With Progressive Democrat McKayla Wilkes Would Be A Great Start

There are still 8 crackpot Republican governors who deserve to be removed from office for jeopardizing the lives of their states' citizens. None of these jerks will follow the Surgeon General and White House guidelines asking governors to impose stay-at-home orders. Other than swing state Iowa, this is the deranged Trumpist heartland

• Arkansas-- Asa Hutchinson
• Iowa-- Kim Reynolds
• Nebraska-- Pete Ricketts
• North Dakota-- Doug Burgum
• Oklahoma-- Kevin Stitt
• South Dakota-- Kristi Noem
• Utah-- Gary Herbert
• Wyoming-- Mark Gordon

Leadership matters-- and while Trump was celebrating the Dow Jones' bull trap yesterday, the NY Times revealed a government study Trump has suppressed which show projections that find stay-at-home orders, school closures and social distancing greatly reduce infections of the coronavirus, but lifting those restrictions after just 30 days will lead to a dramatic infection spike this summer and death tolls that would rival doing nothing. The risk they show of easing shelter-in-place orders currently in effect in most of the country undercut recent statements by President Trump that the United States could be ready to reopen 'very, very soon.'"

I wish I could say all the bad leadership comes from Republicans and all the Democrats represent the good leadership. But I can't. That's why that new McKayla Wilkes video is up top. If you haven't watched it yet, please watch it now. McKayla is running for a southern Maryland congressional seat occupied by Steny Hoyer and the video is very compelling, very powerful. McKayla is running on a largely Bernie platform-- from the Green New Deal to Medicare for All and free state colleges.

This morning, former Florida Congressman Alan Grayson reminded me that "One of the things that the Left used to be good at was setting the agenda-- from 1930 until around 1975. From then on, it was tax cuts for the rich, 'deregulation,' anti-abortion zealotry, whatever the NRA wanted, benefits cuts, military spending increases, and more tax cuts for the rich. What Bernie Sanders has tried to do, very patiently, is to try to take back the agenda from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, and replace it with a new utilitarian agenda: the greatest good for the greatest number. He gives regular pols something to talk about. That a very influential position to have." And Bernie has influenced a large number of young men and women with values like his own-- AOC, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib as well as candidates like Shan Chowdhury (NY), Audrey Denney (CA), Harper Morgan (OH), Tomas Ramos (NY), Shahid Buttar and, of course, McKayla.

Hoyer represents K Street, not the people living in Prince George's, Charles, St. Mary's and Calvert counties. Here he is, one of the most powerful member of Congress but without having ever addressed the housing crisis in his own district-- nor anywhere else. He has no plan and no interest and it isn't even mentioned on his website. McKayla, on the other hand, is campaigning loudly and clearly on affordable housing, promoting the national Housing Guarantee which includes a national cap on rent increases; federal loans and grants to municipalities and counties for the construction of twelve million new units of publicly- or communally-owned social housing over the next decade; renewing the nation’s commitment to public housing as a critical source of housing for our lowest-income communities reversing decades of disinvestment and privatization and fully funding the backlog of maintenance and repair needs; providing assistance to vulnerable communities and communities impacted by housing discrimination and unjust federal policies such as "redlining."

McKayla is also a proponent of providing meaningful foreclosure relief for homeowners impacted by predatory financing practices, unforeseen personal circumstances and environmental or economic disaster; providing federal rewards for localities that lift zoning restrictions in areas zoned exclusively for single-family housing; promoting Community Land Trusts, limited-equity co-operatives and other alternative, community-based ownership models as vehicles for developing affordable housing.

Yesterday, she told me she has been going even further, advocating measure to seriously tackle homelessness-- like instituting a Renters Bill of Rights to protect all renters from unfair eviction and sharp price increases. She would like to introduce a federal Right to Shelter, whereby the state is legally required to provide shelter for all, regardless of cost. She also supports increasing the accessibility of Universal Housing Vouchers by simplifying eligibility requirements, eliminating red tape and increasing funding for outreach and case support services ." So how about Steny? Crickets. He supports what the lobbyists tell him/pay him to support-- always has, always will.

Please consider hitting the 2020 Blue America congressional thermometer above and contributing what you can to McKayla's campaign. She's needs to get that video out widely and whatever you can afford will be completely appreciated.

Leadership?

-by Dan Levitin

I am a neuroscientist and a musician. An odd combination, perhaps, but one I come by honestly. I played in a series of punk and new wave bands, including The Mortals, which is how I met Howie Klein in 1981, when he came to see us perform at The Mabuhay Gardens, the On Broadway, and other clubs.

When I produced our first record, Deserted Eyes, he enthusiastically played it on his radio show at KUSF.

I had always been interested in science, and when I started working for the great producer Sandy Pearlman (Blue Oyster Cult, The Clash) I found a kindred spirit. We drove over to Berkeley and down to Stanford whenever we could and sat in on neuroscience lectures. When the music business started to implode, I decided to actually enroll in college and eventually earned my doctorate.

In my music and my science, I have tried to avoid being political. I believe science exists as a public trust and should be politically neutral, providing a reliable source of information from which people should draw their own conclusions. And I always wanted my music to be a source of emotional expression that would potentially reach everyone (although I have occasionally written and recorded some political songs). My efforts to remain politically neutral occasionally collide with firmly held beliefs. This is one such moment.

Around the world, I am stunned by the stark disparity in how different leaders are responding to the corona virus crisis. The largest chasm is between President Trump and Queen Elizabeth. Think about that: the man who wishes he were a monarch or dictator (he has made a number of assertions to prove this point, previously documented in DownWithTyranny) is being completely outclassed by an actual monarch. If you haven't seen it, I urge you to watch the Queen's address to the nation. It was so moving, my wife and I cried while watching it.

Her majesty begins by applauding health care workers, workers in the food delivery chain, and calls upon all Britons to face the challenges together, and to help one another through this. She references a similar radio address she made 80 years ago, in 1940.

This reminded me of Jimmy Carter's "sweater" speech from 1977 during the energy crisis, when he called upon Americans to help their neighbors, and to make sacrifices for the common good. And he set an example: rather than wearing the suit that all presidents before him had worn for presidential addresses, he wore a cardigan, while asking us to work together through the energy crisis. "Simply by keeping our thermostats at 65 degrees in the daytime, and 55 degrees at night."

The visual image of the president setting an example is a powerful one.

And it's not just Democratic presidents who have set a positive example for us. After the Challenger explosion in 1986, Ronald Reagan postponed his state of the union address to bring the country together to honor not just the seven astronauts who died then, but to honor the wonders of science, of exploration, "the process of discovery, of expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the faint-hearted." [If he were making the speech in 2020, he would certainly replace "man's horizons" with "humans' horizons.")





I'm contrasting that with Trump's selfish, and outlandish refusal to wear a mask. Rather than setting an example for the country, he is concerned about his image, about what other people will think of him. This is the opposite of leadership. A leader puts the interests of everyone else ahead of them. My friend Stan McChrystal, when he was a four-star general and head of the Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and Afghanistan went out with his troops kicking down doors and capturing terrorists. He was among them, setting an example, not hiding behind a desk. "That beautiful, Resolute desk" as Trump describes it, in the oval office, a desk that official diaries show he rarely actually uses (insiders say he spends most of his time watching television). He goes on to say, in this remarkable video, "I think wearing a face mask as I greet presidents, prime ministers, dictators, kings, queens... I don't see if for myself, I just don't." What he's saying in essence is that he is more concerned about vanity than about the 330 million people he supposedly leads.

(Did he really say that he welcomes dictators into the Oval Office? I had to watch this twice because I couldn't believe what I was hearing. But of course he does—he is trying to learn from them. Can you imagine any other president bragging about meeting with dictators?)

The Queen offers reassurance and a steady hand. Trump provokes uncertainty, he wavers, and he contradicts his own experts, ultimately firing them if they don't become the sycophantic yes men he craves. This approach has tanked the stock market, of course, and this is not just an issue for the wealthy: many working class Americans-- government workers, truckers, teachers-- have their pensions and retirements funds managed by large organizations that have invested in the stock market. I was curious to know if the last major disaster to hit the U.S. had a similar effect on the market. After 9/11, the market took a hit, but rebounded completely within a month. I, and most presidential biographers and historians I know, do not consider George W. Bush to have been a particularly good president. But in his address to the nation on 9/11, Bush offered a steadying message in a defining moment when Americans may have turned on many of our own.





Rather than looking to blame others as Trump always does, Bush called for us to work together and not to blame.

"The American people were appalled and outraged at last Tuesday's attacks. And so were Muslims all across the world... When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made brothers and sisters out of every race-- out of every race... This is a great country... because we share the same values of respect and dignity and human worth. And it is my honor to be meeting with leaders who feel just the same way I do. They're outraged, they're sad. They love America just as much as I do. I want to thank you all for giving me a chance to come by. And may God bless us all."

There is a humility to Bush (I never thought I'd be writing those words) and a graciousness that we never see in Trump. And he emphasizes meeting with leaders who feel the same way he does, in embracing liberty, compassion, peace, and rationality.

As a musician, I always tried to take the stage with a sense of gratitude and humility. I knew that people had paid money to be there, that they had planned an evening around the performance, and that I had to do the best job I could in order to help them to get the most out of their interactions with me. I was in a great band once with a fantastic songwriter who somehow sabotaged every concert by insulting the audience. He was not there for them, he was there for himself. The band did not last long. Not nearly as long as the Trump presidency. But we can all come together as a nation in November and say "this is not good enough. This is not leadership. This is not the country we love." 

 --30--

 Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist, musician, and best-selling author of a number of books including This Is Your Brain on Music and his anti-Trump, pro-rationality book, A Field Guide to Lies. His newest album is available free on most streaming platforms and his anti-Trump song, "Turnaround." is here:

Trump-- Incompetent And Unfit By Nature

How many times have you seen columns called The Worst President Ever? A conservative historian, Max Boot did a good one yesterday, noting that he's been reluctant to label Señor Trumpanzee the worst president in U.S. history. "Some presidents who seemed awful to contemporaries (Harry S. Truman) or simply lackluster (Dwight D. Eisenhower, George H.W. Bush) look much better in retrospect," he wrote. "Others, such as Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson, don’t look as good as they once did. So I have written, as I did on March 12, that Trump is the worst president in modern times-- not of all time. That left open the possibility that James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding or some other nonentity would be judged more harshly. But in the past month, we have seen enough to take away the qualifier 'in modern times.' With his catastrophic mishandling of the coronavirus, Trump has established himself as the worst president in U.S. history."

The Trump Regime has managed to screw up the massive $2 trillion bailout bill Congress passed last month. Americans without savings and small businesses are in hot water. Jeff Stein wrote Sunday that "Small-business owners have reported delays in getting approved for loans without which they will close their doors, while others say they have been denied altogether by their lenders and do not understand why. The law’s provision to boost unemployment benefits has become tangled in dated and overwhelmed state bureaucracies, as an unprecedented avalanche of jobless Americans seeks aid." Republicans ideologically hate government. Expecting them to be able to handle an emergency in unrealistic, especially when jobs are filled based on ideology and personal loyalty to the leader-- and never based on competence.

Stein continued that "Officials at the Internal Revenue Service have warned that $1,200 relief checks may not reach many Americans until August or September if they haven’t already given their direct-deposit information to the government. Taxpayers in need of answers from the IRS amid a rapidly changing job market are encountering dysfunctional government websites and unresponsive call centers that have become understaffed as federal workers stay home."

Dan Balz also focused on Trumpist incompetence and dysfunction and their inability to adequaltely respond to the pandemic. He pointed out that Trump "downplayed the coronavirus threat, was slow to move and has delivered mixed messages to the nation. The federal bureaucracy bungled rapid production of tests for the virus. Stockpiles of crucial medical materials were limited and supply lines cumbersome. States and hospitals were plunged into life-and-death competition with one another. When the public looked to government for help, government sometimes looked helpless or frozen or contradictory-- and not for the first time." Republicans, as I said, are incapable of making government work. They hate government and have put all their efforts into... drowning it in a bathtub.

Drown Him In A Bathtub by Chip Proser

The country and its [Republican] leaders were caught off guard when terrorists on hijacked airplanes attacked the homeland on Sept. 11, 2001. The financial crisis of 2008, which turned into a deep recession, forced drastic, unprecedented action by a government struggling to keep pace with the economic wreckage. The devastation from Hurricane Andrew in Florida in 1992 and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005 exposed serious gaps in the government’s disaster response and emergency management systems.

“We always wait for the crisis to happen,” said Leon Panetta, who served in government as secretary of defense, director of the CIA, White House chief of staff, director of the Office of Management and Budget and a member of the House. “I know the human failings we’re dealing with, but the responsibility of people elected to these jobs is to make sure we are not caught unawares.”

...Repeated crises have shown that government is rarely, if ever, fully prepared. Nor is government as flexible as it needs to be to respond as quickly or creatively as conditions often demand. Many factors contribute to what appear to be chronic weaknesses that can compound problems and reduce public confidence. Lessons learned after the fact solve past problems without necessarily anticipating future ones.

Leadership is important, and President Trump will have on his record what he did and didn’t do in the early stages of this particular crisis. But the problems go far broader and deeper than what a president does. Lack of planning and preparation contribute, but so too does bureaucratic inertia as well as fear among career officials of taking risks. Turnover in personnel robs government of historical knowledge and expertise. The process of policymaking-on-the-fly is less robust than it once was. Politics, too, gets in the way.

Mike Pence, Coronavirus Czar by Nancy Ohanian

Long ago, this was far less the case, a time when the United States projected competence and confidence around the globe, said Philip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia who served in five administrations and was executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

“America had the reputation of being non-ideological, super pragmatic, problem solvers, par excellence,” he said. “This image of the United States was an earned image, of people seeing America do almost a wondrous series of things... We became known as the can-do country. If you contrast that with the image of the U.S. today, it’s kind of depressing.”

Government officials have worried about the threat of a pandemic like the coronavirus for many years. In the fall of 2005, President George W. Bush tasked Fran Townsend, his homeland security adviser, to develop a national pandemic strategy. What prompted the directive was not an imminent threat to which he had been alerted by advisers; it was because he had read John Barry’s book, The Great Influenza, about the flu pandemic of 1918.

Townsend recalled that when she convened an interagency meeting to launch the project, she met significant resistance from Cabinet officials who said they had far more urgent problems to deal with. Only with prodding and presidential insistence did the pandemic strategy get put together, and it was part of the Bush team’s handoff to the administration of Barack Obama during that transition.

The Obama administration ended up dealing with a series of virus threats, and that experience shaped the transition handoff to the Trump administration three years ago.

On Jan. 13, 2017, Lisa Monaco, who was White House homeland security and counterterrorism adviser in the Obama administration, convened a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The session brought together the members of the outgoing Obama Cabinet with the Cabinet designees in the incoming Trump administration.

Attendees included the outgoing and incoming secretaries of homeland security, Jeh Johnson and John Kelly, who later became White House chief of staff. Tom Bossert, who was to be Monaco’s successor as White House homeland security adviser and who has since left the Trump administration, acted as co-chair.

The session dealt with terrorism and cyber and various other threats, but because the Obama administration had been through H1N1, the Ebola crisis and the Zika virus, Monaco included a discussion of what she regarded as the nightmare scenario: a new strain of flu that was a respiratory illness for which there was no vaccine and that because of globalization and travel patterns would be nearly impossible to contain.

“I don’t want to give an impression that we bestowed the answer key for dealing with such a challenging and unprecedented crisis,” Monaco said. “But the idea was to identify issues that would say these are the kinds of things you need to be planning for and thinking about now.”

What does it mean for the federal government to be prepared? “Oftentimes, the gauge is no mistakes, no criticism, just complete smooth sailing,” Monaco said. “That to me is not the definition of what it means to be prepared.”

She argued that preparation means planning ahead of a crisis, and having structures and organizations that can move quickly and principles that guide decision-making. “I think it’s about trying as best to minimize the chaos, particularly at the beginning,” she said.

Almost by definition, a crisis is something no one has or can prepare for fully. As Zelikow put it, what government is least prepared for is to do things “different from what it did yesterday.” Then the question becomes whether government is agile enough to figure out what to do next. On that measure, the record is not encouraging either.

Joshua Bolten, who served as White House chief of staff in the administration of George W. Bush, said, “It’s especially hard for government to be prepared for the unexpected or the unpredicted. That was certainly true in 9/11. When you think back to 2001, if you had said that, while it looks like there’s enhanced risk of terrorist activity in the United States, I don’t know that you necessarily would have checked on who was enrolling in flight schools.”

It isn’t that government doesn’t do planning. The Pentagon has contingency plans for wars, conflicts and disasters-- “for anything everywhere... for everything,” as Panetta put it. But federal domestic agencies don’t have the same culture as the Pentagon.

“The Pentagon bureaucracy has the resources to do that. There’s a deputy secretary for everything,” said Johnson, who served as general counsel at the Pentagon before going to DHS. “Homeland security is a relatively new concept. The headquarters bureaucracy at DHS is still a work in progress.”

But plans by themselves are not a measure of preparedness. When Stephen Goldsmith, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, was deputy mayor of New York, his portfolio included emergency management. When he would ask about potential disasters, “They’d take out a black three-ring notebook and they’d say, ‘We have a three-ring notebook for that.’ ” That was only partially reassuring, he added, “because the chances of something happening not in a three-ring notebook is really high.”

Goldsmith assesses the situation this way: “I think we’ve gotten relatively good as a country-- local, state and federal government-- at the professional performance of routines. Our ability to accomplish the important routines of government on a daily basis is very high.”

But there are limitations, he said. “One is, are they conducive to imagination? Second, do they value the exercise of discretion throughout the system? And third, are they good at calculating the risk across agencies? What are the trade-offs of closing a country?”

The culture of plans on shelves can carry government officials only so far when disaster strikes. What then becomes more important are the systems in place that allow for quick action, improvisation and the rapid creation of systems to deal with the unexpected.

...Lack of integration-- public health with emergency management with economic assistance-- across the government creates other obstacles. So too does turnover in personnel or vacancies in key positions, which has been a continuing problem particularly in this administration.

“If you do not have people who do not remember the lessons learned and you don’t have people who have navigated these enough to have relationships across the government, you can be hampered,” said Mark Harvey, former senior director for resilience policy at the National Security Council. “You never want to be exchanging business cards at a disaster scene.”

...The Trump administration has been particularly weak in that regard, with scores of long-standing vacancies in critical positions, hostility toward career officials who are vitally important in times like these and with an indifference to the importance of selecting competent political appointees, rather than presidential favorites, that began during the transition and has plagued the government ever since.

Success goes beyond a president’s capacity to engage and move the bureaucracy. A top-down system inhibits quick action when needed. Experts in disaster management suggest that a functional system empowers officials farther down in the government to act without having been ordered to do so. Coordination must be at higher levels of government; response should be at a much lower level.

...Zelikow pointed to an earlier era when the world looked at the United States as being capable of almost anything. He cited the Marshall Plan that helped save Europe after World War II and creation of the Berlin Airlift in 1948 when the Soviet Union shut off ground access to Berlin, which threatened the well-being of residents there. In that case, improvisation quickly turned into a system that eventually forced the Soviets to relent and reopen the city.





...The Obama administration earned generally good marks for the way officials dealt with the Ebola crisis in 2014, consolidating decision-making under one person, Ron Klain, who had previously served as vice presidential chief of staff. He later recommended that he be the last disease-specific czar, that government needed a permanent expertise within the White House.

Improvisation in the midst of a crisis requires one set of skills, both in terms of leadership and the capacity for creative policymaking. “It’s really hard for government to understand every different collateral consequence that will occur until you start to experience it,” said former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, whose state was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

...The absence of capacity for real planning could be especially damaging in the context of a threat farther out on the horizon. Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, looks at what has happened with the coronavirus pandemic to speculate about how the government might deal with threats from climate change.

“In the United States, as you know, we had a solid two months’ warning and did nothing. And even now, in terms of getting testing and masks set up and the like, there are incredible delays,” he said. “So we might finally overcome those problems. But, you know, with climate change, you need a 20-to-30-year ramping up for it to work.”

Cowen said it’s inexplicable why the federal government, given all the warnings and evidence from China of a spreading pandemic, did not move more rapidly.

“You know, Trump was terrible, but you can’t just pin it on him. It’s far more systemic than that. The NBA [which suspended its season on March 11] really gets so much credit. I would put the NBA in charge of fighting climate change at this point.”

“The question for me is, does government retain a certain baseline level of preparedness... and then whether government is nimble and agile enough to take a baseline and put it on steroids when something occurs,” said Janet Napolitano, former secretary of homeland security in the Obama administration.

The performance by the Trump administration and the government as a whole in responding to the coronavirus pandemic will be thoroughly examined. The president’s handling already is a focus of criticism, and his reelection could hinge on how the public assesses his leadership next November. A national commission similar to that which was created after 9/11 could follow with a thorough exploration of what has happened.

Lessons will be learned and changes will be made, as they have after other disasters. Anyone looking for a few simple fixes-- a fuller stockpile of material, more funding for public health, a designated agency to deal with the next new virus-- will quickly find themselves disappointed. Those changes alone, however needed, will not have solved the underlying problems of a governing and political culture that, for all the good they can do when called upon, have limits, especially when officials are caught unawares and forced to act in new and unfamiliar ways.

“I’ve often wondered if democracy writ large is designed to be responsive rather than preemptive,” said Tom Ridge, the nation’s first secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. “One of the lessons perhaps as a result of this is we’ll be a little more inclined to be preemptive. With election cycles every two years, there is not a lot of credence given to people who take a longer view.”

Die For Me by Nancy Ohanian

Instead we get a severely sick narcissist. Yesterday he decided to spend his time on the national stage attacking Democratic Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker for "allegedly 'complaining all the time' during Sunday's coronavirus White House press briefing, adding that he "hasn't performed well" amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 'There is a governor, I hear him complaining all the time, Pritzker. He is always complaining,' Trump said during Sunday's White House Coronavirus Task Force press briefing. 'I just said, Give me a list of a couple of the things we've done in Illinois. We're building a 2,500-bed hospital in McCormick Place, that's a big convention center in Chicago. We're helping to staff it and probably will end up staffing it because he's not able to do what he's supposed to be able to do as the governor. He has not performed well,' the president added."

Remember, There Are Innocent People In Red States Who Do NOT Deserve To Die

The extreme-right moron governors of Georgia and Florida finally-- way too late to save their citizens-- ordered statewide lockdowns Wednesday. Last time I looked there were still a dozen states where governors have refused to order lockdowns-- all red Trump states led by extremely cowardly politicians:

• Alabama-- Kay Ivey (R)
• Arkansas-- Asa Hutchinson (R)
• Iowa-- Kim Reynolds (R)
• Missouri-- Mike Parson (R)
• Nebraska-- Pete Ricketts (R)
• North Dakota-- Doug Burgum (R)
• Oklahoma-- Kevin Stitt (R)
• South Carolina-- Henry McMaster (R)
• South Dakota-- Kristi Noem (R)
• Texas-- Greg Abbott (R)
• Utah-- Gary Herbert (R)
• Wyoming-- Mark Gordon (R)

The U.S. can't start counting the 8 weeks it takes to flatten the curve until all these dozen states are also in lockdown. These right-wing baboons are threatening all of our lives. Before you start wishing that all their citizens die, please remember that though they all voted for Trump and all still support Trump, there are several million people in these dozen states who voted against Trump. They don't deserve to die. Is there enough lamb's blood to save them all when the Angel of Death comes for a visit? Hillary voters by state:

• Alabama-- 729,547 (34.36%)
• Arkansas-- 380,494 (33.65%)
• Iowa-- 653,669 (41.74%)
• Missouri-- 1,071,068 (38.14%)
• Nebraska-- 284,494 (33.70%)
• North Dakota-- 93,758 (27.23%)
• Oklahoma-- 420,375 (28.93%)
• South Carolina-- 855,373 (40.67%)
• South Dakota-- 117,458 (31.74%)
• Texas-- 3,877,868 (43.24%)
• Utah-- 310,676 (27.46%) + 243,690 (21.54%) for Evan McMullin)
• Wyoming-- 55,973 (21.63%)

The April Fool's Day issue of Politico magazine ranked the best and worst governors based on their pandemic leadership roles. I agree that both the best and worst were both Republicans--Ohio's Mike DeWine as most courageous and Trump Florida ass-licker Ron DeSantis as the one most deserving a prison sentence. Bill Scher wrote that with Señor Trumpanzee "unable or unwilling to play the part of a national unifier or to take decisive action to curb the spread of the coronavirus, the leadership we normally expect from the Oval Office has instead come from state executives throughout the nation-- or not." He framed the question he set out the answer: "Which governors have done a better job at meeting the moment, by acting decisively and boosting morale? And which have missed the moment, dragged their feet and succumbed to petty squabbling?" And, unlike any of the TV talking heads, he nailed it on TV-actor-playing-a hero Andrew Cuomo:

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has received the lion’s share of attention, as his informative and emotive press conferences have made him an overnight national political star, albeit halfway through his third term. But his record in responding to the crisis is more complicated than the sheen lets on: his coronavirus containment policies were not the most aggressive in the country, and did not prevent catastrophe. He hesitated to close all schools statewide even as other states began to do so, and resisted a statewide stay-at-home order for a few days before relenting.

Here's his list of the best. He's wrong about Newsom, who also dragged his feet except in the superficial areas Cuomo also looked good in. The 6 Bay Area counties did great while Newsom and Garcetti hid under their beds shivering that if they made the wrong move, they'd never be a presidential contenders. From most best to less best:

• Mike DeWine (R-OH)- "[N]o single governor has done more to put the nation on a war footing in the fight against coronavirus than DeWine, whose actions have contributed to Ohio’s relatively modest number of cases... On March 12, even though Ohio had yet to suffer a major outbreak of Covid-19, DeWine called for the statewide closure of public schools-- the first governor in the nation to do so, forcing most of his fellow governors to recognize they had to follow suit, and fast.
• Gavin Newsom (D-CA)
• Jay Inslee (D-WA)
• Larry Hogan (R-MD)- another mistake by Scher-- he was needlessly slow and doesn't deserve to be on this list.
• Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI)
• Wanda Vazquez (NPP-Puerto Rico)

And now the half dozen worst, although Scher left off some real doozies-- like for example, illegitimate Georgia Republican Brian Kemp who claimed stupidity for his weeks of inaction. "[H]e reversed course Wednesday as a growing number of other Republican governors, including the leaders of Florida, South Carolina and Texas, instituted broader limits on mobility and shuttered more businesses to try to counter the disease. He said his decision was triggered by "game-changing” new projections on the disease’s spread in Georgia. He also said he was informed of new data that this virus 'is now transmitting before people see signs. Those individuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt' symptoms, he said. 'We didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.'" Maybe he didn't, but everyone else on planet earth did. So here's Scher's list from worst to not as terrible:

• Ron DeSantis (R-FL)- "DeSantis is one of Trump’s favorite governors and a potential 2024 presidential prospect. But he has made a bad first impression on the rest of the country by failing to fully shut down Florida’s beaches before or after they were overrun with partiers on spring break, many of whom then traveled home to locations throughout the United States. He also resisted making a statewide stay-at-home order until finally relenting on Wednesday-- in the wake of intense pressure from Florida Democrats, and televised comments Wednesday morning by the surgeon general urging all governors to get their residents to stay at home. Before that point, his seemingly toughest measure was issuing a quarantine for travelers coming from the New York City tri-state area or Louisiana, but the focus on hot spots ignores all the community spread inside Florida and in other states. Florida already has nearly 7,000 confirmed cases, ranking it 17th among the states on a per capita basis. Earlier, DeSantis justified eschewing broader measures. 'We’re also in a situation where we have counties who have no community spread,' he said on March 19. 'We have some counties that don’t have a single positive test yet.' But everything we have experienced strongly suggests you don't want to wait until you have community spread before taking strong action. DeSantis may still be helped by Trump, who may be giving Florida preferential treatment. According to the Washington Post, other governors have had difficulty getting supplies from the Strategic National Stockpile, but not DeSantis. And Trump has been influenced by DeSantis’ argument that some social distancing measures are too harmful to the economy. The Post quoted an anonymous White House official, who explained, 'The president knows Florida is so important for his reelection, so when DeSantis says that, it means a lot. He pays close attention to what Florida wants.'" I would just like to add that DeSantis is still working actively to kill Florida seniors. He is absolutely the worst governor in America.

• Tate Reeves (R-MS)- "Aside from its next-door neighbor Louisiana, Mississippi is the Southern state with the most confirmed Covid-19 cases on a per capita basis. Yet Reeves has made a hash out of the response. As Mississippi’s localities began issuing stay-at-home edicts, Reeves issued his own order on March 24, broadly defining what business and social activity is 'essential'-- including religious services-- and declared any order from any other 'governing body' which conflicts with the state order to be 'suspended and unenforceable.'"





• Kevin Stitt (R-OK)- "On March 14, Stitt tweeted a picture of his family eating at a restaurant, as if he deserved an award for defying the coronavirus panic. 'It’s packed tonight!' he enthusiastically shared, but facing blowback, later deleted the post... Oklahoma’s rate of infection is intensifying, and testing is minimal. Stitt is not the only governor who has hesitated to implement stiff restrictions, but he may become a case study of the pitfalls of glib social media use in a time of crisis."

• David Ige (D-HI)- "Ige tapped his Lieutenant Governor Josh Green to play a key role in the state’s response to coronavirus. Green is an emergency room doctor, so his calls for strict travel restrictions and quarantines on arrivals carried great weight. But once Green publicly pushed for strong measures, Ige cut him out of the loop, instructing Cabinet officials not to consult with Green, and keeping Green out of his press conferences."

• Kay Ivey (R-AL)- "Ivey sounded a completely different note at a press conference, when she dismissed the idea of a statewide stay-at-home order. 'Y’all, we are not Louisiana, we are not New York state, we are not California,' she said. (Washington Post data journalist Philip Bump warned Ivey that Alabama’s caseload was growing faster than California’s.)"

• Jim Justice (R-WV)- "His lack of experience in crisis management has been glaringly obvious from his discordant statements and actions. On March 16, he was preaching defiance. 'For crying out loud, go to the grocery stores,' Jutice said. 'If you want to go to Bob Evans and eat, go to Bob Evans and eat.' Then, the very next day, he shut down dine-in eating at the state’s restaurants."

Yesterday a 7-person team of NY Times reporters filed a report on the geography of the pandemic response in America. The maps showing citizens ignoring social distancing look eerily-- or predictably-- like the maps of the counties where Trump won in 2016. "Stay-at-home orders," they wrote, "have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely, potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates." Most Americans "in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home. Disease experts who reviewed the results say those reductions in travel-- to less than a mile a day, on average, from about five miles-- may be enough to sharply curb the spread of the coronavirus in those regions, at least for now... In areas where public officials have resisted or delayed stay-at-home orders, people changed their habits far less. Though travel distances in those places have fallen drastically, last week they were still typically more than three times those in areas that had imposed lockdown orders, the analysis shows." They offered a list of big population counties across the country where people are spreading COVID-19 willy-nilly. I added the 2016 election results. From worst to less horrible:

• Greenville County, South Carolina- Trump 59.4% to Hillary 34.7%
• Jefferson County, Alabama- Hillary 52.2% to Trump 45.0%
• Duval County, Florida- Trump 49.0% to Hillary 47.5%
• Guilford County, North Carolina- Hillary 58.7% to Trump 38.7%
• Montgomery County, Texas- Trump 74.0% to Hillary 22.5%
• Polk County, Florida- Trump 55.4% to Hillary 41.3%
• Tulsa County, Oklahoma- Trump 58.4% to Hillary 35.6%
• Volusia County, Florida- Trump 54.8% to Hillary 41.8%
• Oklahoma County, Oklahoma- Trump 51.7% to Hillary 41.2%
• Sedgwick County, Kansas- Trump 56.1% to Hillary 36.9%
• Gwinnett County, Georgia- Hillary 51.0% to Trump 45.2%
• Shelby County, Tennessee- Hillary 62.3% to Trump 34.6%
• Brevard County, Florida- Trump 57.8% to Hillary 38.0%
• Salt Lake County, Utah- Hillary 42.8% to Trump 32.6%
• Fresno County, California- Hillary 49.4% to Trump 45.5%
• Utah County, Utah- Trump 51.3% to Hillary 14.0%
• Pasco County, Florida- Trump 58.9% to Hillary 37.4%
• San Bernardino County, California- Hillary 52.2% to Trump 42.4%
• Douglas County, Nebraska- Hillary 47.9% to Trump 46.5%
• Hillsborough County, Florida- Hillary 51.5% to Trump 44.7%

Dr. Fauci has recommended that all 50 states do mandatory lockdowns-- something Trump and his goonish governors don't accept. Last night Trump lied again, this time that airplane and train passengers are being given "very strong tests" for coronavirus both before departure and after arrival. "They’re doing tests on airlines-- very strong tests-- for getting on, getting off. They’re doing tests on trains-- getting on, getting off." He's just flat-out lying-- and endangering the general public.