iNow

A pretty interesting PhD thesis in the years ahead would be to compare infection and death rates by party affiliation and/or news source

Sadly, yes

https://abcn.ws/3go1xMy

We're all mad here...

Before the 2016 election... before we fell into this bizarro world parallel universe when everyone thought Hillary Clinton would win the election... all of the "informed" commentators said Trump would be building his own network to present material farther to the right than Fox News. That was his plan... get attention and notoriety in the election campaign, then use that to refocus attention on to their new propaganda network and drive ratings. Throughout his presidency, small media outlets have been building up to compete with Fox and he regularly interacts with them to bolster their visibility and reach. My guess is he will still proceed this way and create the network when his presidency is over, whenever that may be, and that what he's doing now is laying the ground work to by badmouthing Fox so they can enter the market as a legitimate competitor and steal their viewers.

I think he’s trying to move press attention away from his failed response to the pandemic. From the link above:

Whether he actually is or he’s actually lying, neither possibility strikes me as a good message to be sent out to the world from the POTUS https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/5/18/21262889/trump-taking-hydroxychloroquine-coronavirus Every day, for about a week and a half now, he says he’s been taking it. I mean... What harm could come from hallucinations in the man controlling the nuclear stockpile and who can move markets with a tweet or errant comment? This brief 15 minute CBS podcast called Debriefing the Briefing lays it out fairly clearly

Agreed. My 5 month ago self thanks you

Just so we’re clear: I wasn’t setting up a strawman of your position to easily knock down, but was instead referencing your consistent focus on mental health and suicide during hard economic times to set the context for the comment I chose to share.

And his base support won’t shake or recede one bit. His floor is 40-45% support among the voting populace. For them, his grift and lies and corruption is a feature, not a bug.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/us/politics/rick-bright-coronavirus-whistleblower.html

Obama isn’t going to be the blame talking point. You watch. These next weeks and months... ANY time ANY republican gets challenged on the pandemic response... the IMMEDIATE pivot will be China. They will be the scapegoat du jour now through the election... with a sprinkle of immigration hate and talk of border walls. China, not Obama. Ask not what you can do for your country, ask who you can blame for grifting so hard and failing it so miserably.

Perhaps, and perhaps his administration should’ve done better. I can get on board with that. However, Trump is claiming the current problems with testing right now during the current covid pandemic are Obama’s fault... the pandemic which began 5 months ago due to a virus which didn’t exist while Obama was President. Surely we can agree that’s horseshit.

How do you know your management of the spread is or is not working if you fail to measure net new daily cases?

Why not both? They’re not mutually exclusive.

Meanwhile: https://www.yahoo.com/news/japanese-island-suffering-avoidable-second-100937097.html

They’re not mutually exclusive, I reckon

For now, at least, institutional investors, asset allocators and managers appear to agree with me about keeping the lockdowns in place (some handy charts at the link): https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1ldfxffpnl8yz/The-II-Fear-Index-Investors-Expect-Long-Lockdown

FYI: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_Iowa#Statistics

I was always a fan of the sticky mats we had to walk across before going in. Made me feel like I was on human flypaper.

It does, indeed

Yes and our county is the hardest hit in the state. The meat packing plants, however, are a close second (especially now that Trump has ordered them to stay open despite their strings of mass infection and lack of worker protection). On another note, it seems the costs of staying locked down are actually lower than opening rapidly https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/the-value-of-lives-saved-by-social-distancing-outweighs-the-costs/

The governor in my state is re-opening most things on Friday, but many of the local businesses I love and frequent have already responded and posted things on their various social pages that can be paraphrased as... "Uhh... yeah, we're really glad the government is so optimistic and that's all well and good, but we're most decidedly NOT re-opening until we see more reductions in cases for a few weeks in a row. Absent that, we're not willing to put our staff and customers at risk... Hope shouldn't be Plan A and for now we'll stick to limited online ordering and curbside pickup." Meanwhile, the POTUS wants to re-open schools for May before summer starts, too. So tired of being led by incompetent grifters.