MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The coronavirus has killed hundreds, but is China giving us the full picture?
Archive for 2020
February 10, 2020
TRUMP RALLIES IN NEW HAMPSHIRE: MAGA Faithful See Strengthening Trump at New Hampshire Rally.
Related: Joe Battenfeld: President Trump Crashes Democrats’ Granite State Party. “The closest the Dems came to star power was the Bernie Sanders rally Monday night featuring the rock band The Strokes, who haven’t had a hit in more than a decade. Just what Sanders needs — a reminder of his heart problems.”
OPEN THREAD: Like Shaefer beer, it’s there, it’s there for you. It’s what you want.
POLITICIANS LIKE IT BECAUSE YOU CAN EXTRACT SO MUCH GRAFT OVER WHERE THE LINES GO AND WHERE THE STOPS ARE: Light Rail Is a Crime-Ridden Disaster. Then there are all the contracts you can let to cronies . . .
RICHARD FERNANDEZ ON SECRECY: “Imagine if you could see a bullet coming for hours but never noticed in time to dodge it.”
‘THIS IS NOT A MODERATE POSITION:’ Joe Biden tells boy we should eliminate the use of plastics.
Flashbacks:
● Joe Biden Just Lost Any Claim to Being a Moderate With His Embrace of the Green New Deal. As Brandon Morse warned at Red State, “At this point, America has two options in 2020. It’s either Donald Trump or socialism. There doesn’t seem to be an option outside of these two.”
● Biden ‘100 percent’ supports nationwide plastic bag ban.
● Biden Obliviously Tells Press that Fossil Fuel Execs Should Be Jailed.
And of course: AOC Says Joe Biden Is Too ‘Conservative’, Would ‘Not Be in Same Party’ Outside of America.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The Ratings Are in for the Oscars—and They’re Not Pretty.
If Hollywood really cared about the things they claim to care about, they wouldn’t hold these decadent, wasteful, planet-ruining awards ceremonies anyway. All of this could be handled with a group email. But then they wouldn’t get all the glory. Their narcissistic supply ain’t just gonna replenish itself!
Hollywood could significantly lower California’s carbon footprint by exiting the movie business entirely. Save the planet, movie industry!
POUNCE! Actual Headline at the Politico: Republicans vow ‘revenge’ at ballot box after volunteers nearly hit by van.
As Jim Treacher noted last week:
CORONAVIRUS UPDATE: Coronavirus Updates: A Grim Landmark as Official Death Toll in China Tops 1,000.
No coronavirus detected among first Americans evacuated from China.
Cruise Ship Coronavirus Infections Double, Exceeding The Total For Any Country But China. “The number of people with coronavirus on a cruise ship in the port of Yokohama nearly doubled to 135 Monday, prompting imperiled crew members to plead for help and setting off debate among experts over whether the more than 3,700 people quarantined aboard should be taken ashore or left on the ship. ‘Very soon we will all be infected,’ said Binay Kumar Sarkar, an Indian national and one of about 1,000 crew members aboard the ship. Sarkar posted a video on Facebook imploring Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for assistance. Everyone, he said in an interview, is ‘scared who will be next.’ Unlike passengers, crew members are not housed in individual staterooms, but are living as many as four to a room. They also are traversing the ship delivering meals, which increases their contact with other people and raises the chances of becoming infected.”
UK ‘superspreader’ may have passed coronavirus to nearly a dozen people in 3 countries.
China Coronavirus Update: Death Toll Now At 1,013, Could Evolve To Deadlier Disease.
Workers at coronavirus quarantine base accosted amid unfounded fears of spreading virus. “Workers at California’s March Air Reserve Base and their families have been verbally attacked in person and on social media by people fearing their proximity to the 195 Americans under quarantine at the base after fleeing China amid the coronavirus outbreak, Riverside County officials said Monday.”
Supply chain delay from coronavirus outbreak a big issue.
Why the bond market looks so worried about the coronavirus outbreak.
Import pickup is quite slow in Chinese ports amid coronavirus outbreak, says CEO.
Amid Virus Outbreak, Funeral Home Officials in Wuhan Reveal Sharp Increase in Cremations.
Amazon pulls out of major tech conference over coronavirus risk.
CBP Officers at VA. Airport Intercept Dead Birds in Passenger Baggage from China.
Related, seen on Facebook:
UPDATE: From the comments: “Much of Biden’s campaign can be best explained if you assume that he is being forced to run against his will and is trying to sabotage the operation. This attempt to emulate the biggest missteps of Beto and Swalwell’s failed campaigns adds compelling evidence to that theory.” That would make a great movie plot, except, of course, that in the movie he’d just keep polling better the crazier he got. In real life, not so much.
CORONAVIRUS: “Full-front disinfection work has started in #Wuhan, an effort to contain the spread of #coronavirus,” the People’s Daily, China, tweets. The state-run media outlet bills itself as “The largest newspaper in China,” atop a video that looks like something out of Blade Runner, with massive trucks spraying chemicals high into the air at night in Wuhan:
Of course, as Business Insider notes, it’s largely a PR exercise: China is sending trucks to spray bleach on entire cities as the country struggles to contain the Wuhan coronavirus.
Joe Drake, president and founder of the US-based Decon Seven, said he’s seen such disinfecting sprayer trucks dispatched in cities including Shanghai, Beijing, and Wuhan even before the current coronavirus outbreak.
But health experts say these public displays of germ-busting are probably not doing much to help stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, and that the disinfection should instead target specific spots, like emergency rooms, and communal surfaces in hospitals, where more coronavirus germs are likely to get swapped around.
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“The truth is that coronaviruses have really poor survivability on surfaces,” Saskia Popescu, a senior infection prevention epidemiologist who works at a Phoenix-based healthcare system, told Insider. “This is an organism that is generally spread through respiratory droplets. So that cough, that sneeze, and yes, your hands can get contaminated and then you touch your eyes, your mouth, and things like that.”
She said the widespread use of disinfectants like bleach — which is what was being used in truck sprayers in at least one Chinese city, Yichang, according to a local report — is “a little over the top.”
“I would rather see better efforts to make sure people are disinfecting emergency rooms and high-touch surfaces in hospitals and schools more than I would want to see bleach being sprayed on streets,” she said. “Honestly, think about how often do your hands or your mouth come into contact with a street?”
The bleach is not just for the streets. Patients and doctors are also being disinfected after they’re released from hospitals or finish a shift.
UPDATE: The coronavirus has killed hundreds, but is China giving us the full picture?, Glenn asks at USA Today.
SO MY PROBLEM WITH DAVID FRENCH’S CLAIM that Christians shouldn’t vote for Trump is that if you take it seriously, Christians shouldn’t vote for anyone because no president in my lifetime was Christ-like enough to meet French’s standard. (No, not even Jimmy Carter, whose public piety is merely cover for a poisonous personality). Now if you want to argue for monastic exclusion from politics, that’s fine (though to my mind stupid). But if you want to argue for it only when Trump is president, then I question your sincerity, and French’s rather pharasaical tone doesn’t help.
But despite his argument, I think even a serious pro-life Christian might conclude that, given a choice between an un-Christ-like politician who is loudly and vigorously in favor of abortion (i.e. any Democrat these days), and an un-Christ-like politician who is without doubt the most pro-life president we’ve ever had, it’s okay to support the latter. French attempts to engage this argument but to my mind he is not successful. I doubt many will find the piece all that persuasive but I think that French’s main intended audience was David French, whose faith in neverTrumpism may need bolstering at this point. And I’m not sure it’s impossible to love your enemies while still trying to kick their ass.
On a broader note, so long as we’re talking about sin, I’ll note that pride and envy seem to play a major role in the NeverTrump movement in general: Pride in (self-proclaimed) moral superiority, and envy of Trump’s accomplishments, which make him by any reasonable measure the most conservative president of my lifetime. I’d suggest some self-reflection on this point.
Related: Christian Just Voting For Whichever Political Party Less Likely To Make His Faith Illegal One Day. Yeah, this second piece is satire, but is it really?
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Oscar Ratings Collapse 20 Percent to All-Time Low.
Update (From Ed): “Twenty NFL games this season drew a larger audience than last night’s Oscars,” Michael Mulvihill of Fox Sports tweets.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The coronavirus has killed hundreds, but is China giving us the full picture?
‘NOT UP TO US:’ New MSNBC Anchor Begs Colleagues Not to Whip Dem Votes.
During Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, newly hired MSNBC anchor Joshua Johnson (formerly with NPR) had a candid moment when he admitted the media took part in helping the DNC whip votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016, and implored his colleagues not to lobby for certain candidates in the 2020 Democratic primary.
Johnson’s truth bomb was dropped after moderator and NBC political director Chuck Todd lamented how each of the Democratic candidates had a “fatal flaw.” The first point Johnson sought to make was to recall how the Democratic National Committee threw their institutional bulk behind Clinton early in the process:
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Going further, Johnson shifted to discussing what the media’s role was in 2016. “So, one of the things I’m interested in seeing in 2020 is, how much we will allow Democrats to make their own choice? The story of who the party is supposed to support is not up to us, it’s up to Democrats.” In the midst of saying that, he gestured to the people sitting around the table.
Todd, who often fights the losing battle of claiming there’s no such thing as media bias in favor of Democrats, didn’t seem pleased. He gave an annoyed sounding “yeah” to Johnson’s comments and a quick glimpse of his face seemed to confirm the tone.
Former and current Democratic Party operative with a byline Chuck Todd hates to be reminded that he is indeed a Democratic Party operative with a byline.
Flashback: Reporter: The head of NBC News’s political coverage tried to bully me out of a scoop — on behalf of the DNC. “Since when does the head of an allegedly independent news organization do a favor for a political party?” Early and often, if you’re NBC.