Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

A lot of our focus will be on the response/ lack thereof to the coronavirus crisis. We begin with the Washington Post's detailed account of the chaos and ineptitude of Dolt in Chief Donald "I Alone Can Fix It" Trump's flailing right out of the box:

Since Trump touched down from a two-day trip to India early Wednesday morning, the administration struggled to cope with the fallout from the crisis — shaking up and centralizing its coronavirus response team under the leadership of Vice President Pence, floating plans to stabilize the markets and publicly seeking to minimize the threat posed by the potential pandemic.

Interviews with nearly two dozen administration officials, former White House aides, public health experts and lawmakers — many speaking on the condition of anonymity to share candid assessments and details — portray a White House scrambling to gain control of a rudderless response defined by bureaucratic infighting, confusion and misinformation.

“It’s complete chaos,” a senior administration official said. “Everyone is just trying to get a handle on what the [expletive] is going on.”

If anyone is surprised by that, they haven't been paying attention for 3- plus years.

The regime's thinning out of expertise and funding has taken a toll on preparedness:

What is clear is that the government’s response so far has been haphazard and inadequate. Earlier in February, Trump officials dismissed warnings from the CDC and allowed infected Americans in Japan to fly back to the U.S. on a plane with uninfected passengers, potentially aiding the virus’s spread.

Meanwhile, the rollout of coronavirus testing in the U.S. has been a “fiasco,” in the words of the respected journal Science, due to a faulty component in the approved test and bureaucratic hang-ups ― the CDC had conducted only 459 tests nationwide as of Friday. At least one potential case has been reported, in Brooklyn, New York, where the CDC refused to test a symptomatic person who had just traveled to Japan, even after the hospital requested it. (It is still not known whether the person actually has the virus.)

Perhaps most disturbing is a government whistleblower who alleged on Thursday that Health and Human Services staffers interacted with Americans who were quarantined for potential exposure to the virus without protective gear or proper medical training.

Historian John Barry says the lessons of the Spanish Influenza pandemic in 1918 have not been learned by the fact- and science- averse Trump regime:

[A]t least one historian is worried the Trump administration is failing to heed the lesson of one of the world’s worst pandemics: Don’t hide the truth.

“They [the Trump administration] are clearly trying to put the best possible gloss on things, and are trying to control information,” said John M. Barry, author of “The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History,” in a phone interview with The Washington Post. [snip]

Now, with coronavirus, Barry said he’s “a little bit worried” about the plan being followed. He doesn’t think the Trump administration is “outright lying, but they’re definitely giving you interpretations that seem to be the best-case scenarios.” [Ed.: no, they're outright lying.]

He’s particularly concerned about President Trump’s decision to have Vice President Pence oversee the response, instead of an expert such as Anthony Fauci, the doctor who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health.

Given the credibility crisis that happened with the 1918 pandemic, Barry said that was “the exact wrong thing to do.”

Have these clowns ever NOT done the exact wrong thing?

Balloon Juice has periodic coronavirus updates should you not want to wait for sanitized happy talk from the Trump regime.

But, never fear, the Red Hat cult has lots of bonkers conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, most of which they pulled directly out of their fat asses.

On the climate change front, the Trump regime continues its "strategy" of lies and denial:

An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times.

The misleading language appears in at least nine reports, including environmental studies and impact statements on major watersheds in the American West that could be used to justify allocating increasingly scarce water to farmers at the expense of wildlife conservation and fisheries.

The effort was led by Indur M. Goklany, a longtime Interior Department employee who, in 2017 near the start of the Trump administration, was promoted to the office of the deputy secretary with responsibility for reviewing the agency’s climate policies. [snip]

The wording, known internally as the “Goks uncertainty language” based on Mr. Goklany’s nickname, inaccurately claims that there is a lack of consensus among scientists that the earth is warming. In Interior Department emails to scientists, Mr. Goklany pushed misleading interpretations of climate science, saying it “may be overestimating the rate of global warming, for whatever reason;” climate modeling has largely predicted global warming accurately. The final language states inaccurately that some studies have found the earth to be warming, while others have not.

We say again, without fear of contradiction, it was an epic failure of American democracy that these lying sociopaths were granted the power to alter our future in such a catastrophic way.

We close by referring you to our blogging brother Infidel 753's link round-up to give you a broader array of topics of interest (including more on the coronavirus if you're so inclined).  Always a pleasure to visit.