Linked List: July 18, 2020

Saturday, 18 July 2020

‘The Plan Is to Have No Plan’ Redux 

Jay Rosen, back in early May:

“The plan is to have no plan” is not a strategy, really. Nor would I call it a policy. It has a kind of logic to it, but this is different from saying it has a design — or a designer. Meaning: I do not want to be too conspiratorial about this. To wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do, given who heads the table. The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives.

I linked to this back when Rosen wrote it. What’s happening today was obvious months ago to anyone willing to look at it with open eyes, but yet it still takes your breath away.

Trump Regime Opposes New Funds for Testing, Tracing, and CDC in Virus Relief Bill 

Erica Werner and Jeff Stein, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Trump administration is trying to block billions of dollars for states to conduct testing and contact tracing in the upcoming coronavirus relief bill, people involved in the talks said Saturday.

The administration is also trying to block billions of dollars that GOP senators want to allocate for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and billions more for the Pentagon and State Department to address the pandemic at home and abroad, the people said.

The administration’s posture has angered some GOP senators, the officials said, and some lawmakers are trying to push back and ensure that the money stays in the bill. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to reveal confidential deliberations, cautioned that the talks were fluid and the numbers were in flux.

Even Republicans are getting it through their thick skulls that Trump and his regime really do only care about the optics — they care only about the reported number of positive test results, not the actual number of infections.

I wrote this on April 10:

Any feasible plan starts with massive testing, completely subsidized by the government. And yet just yesterday the president claimed we don’t need mass testing. The one thing that everyone who knows what they’re talking about agrees on is that we need mass testing — and the president is arguing we don’t need it.

We needed massive federalized testing months ago. And here we are in July, with daily records for cases nationwide and several states raging out of control, and the Trump regime is pushing to block spending for what’s needed. The house is ablaze and the fire department is calling for the water to be shut off. They’re not just a little off course, they’re insane.

We’ve elected a mad king and he’s surrounded himself with enablers.

‘Inside Trump’s Failure: The Rush to Abandon Leadership Role on the Virus’ 

Michael D. Shear, Noah Weiland, Eric Lipton, Maggie Haberman, and David E. Sanger, reporting for The New York Times:

Each morning at 8 as the coronavirus crisis was raging in April, Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, convened a small group of aides to steer the administration through what had become a public health, economic and political disaster.

Seated around Mr. Meadows’s conference table and on a couch in his office down the hall from the Oval Office, they saw their immediate role as practical problem solvers. Produce more ventilators. Find more personal protective equipment. Provide more testing.

But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.

Absolutely riveting — and infuriating, and terrifying — account of how the U.S. response went so terribly wrong. Devastating assessment of Jared Kushner (no surprise) and Dr. Deborah Birx (a bit surprising).

Civil Rights Hero and Icon John Lewis, ‘Conscience of the Congress’, Dies at 80 

Katharine Q. Seelye, The New York Times:

On the front lines of the bloody campaign to end Jim Crow laws, with blows to his body and a fractured skull to prove it, Mr. Lewis was a valiant stalwart of the civil rights movement and the last surviving speaker at the historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.

More than a half-century later, after the killing in May of George Floyd, a Black man in police custody in Minneapolis, Mr. Lewis welcomed the resulting global demonstrations against systemic racism and the police killings of Black people. He saw those demonstrations, the largest protest movement in American history, as a continuation of his life’s work, though his illness had left him to watch from the sideline.

The arc of Lewis’s career is simply hard to conceive.

Lewis: “My philosophy is very simple: When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to stand up and just say something. You have to do something. I got into good trouble, necessary trouble. Even today, I tell people, ‘We need to get in good trouble.’”