Mask Maker, Mask Maker, Make Me A Mask!

I’ve been teased by my daughter Anna for years for saving things that, to her at least, had no real value. Old sheets and pillowcases from a former waterbed, or the old queen-sized ones I can’t use on my king-sized bed, have been accumulating around my house for years. Why? Well, you never know when you’ll need a drop cloth to use when painting, or to protect furniture from dust, or, now, to cut up and use to make homemade face masks. Why pay to buy something when you can just save another thing you already have until you need to use it later on? My grandmother lived through the depression, so I learned early on about saving good things while discarding the useless ones.

Try to buy cotton fabric at your local craft store – assuming it’s even open – and you’ll find that there are none in stock you’d be willing to wear on your face. I’ve placed an order on Amazon for a 70-piece bunch of quilting squares, just to make me feel less like I’m running a one-person assembly line in my kitchen. I’ve reached a point where I now must await a different Amazon delivery to complete most of the masks I’ve already made with elastic bands. I’m forced right now to use shoelaces, which I’ve also saved for years! My house is the place to be in the event of an apocalypse!

I started out intent on making just a few masks for me and my family and friends, so I knew that my mismatched assortment of solid-colored pillowcases would be more than enough material to cover those faces. My closest friends are all nurses, two of whom work in hospitals while the third works at an outpatient dialysis unit run by a national chain. My friend who works in the Pennsylvania hospital has so far reported having sufficient PPE; I don’t know if my friend who works in a New Jersey facility is having issues, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that no news is good news. The dialysis nurse, however, was working in a unit without N95 masks despite having at least five of their regular patients diagnosed with Covid-19; now that he’s agreed (for significantly higher hazard pay) to go to a Covid-19 positive facility. Although he’s now being provided with an N95 mask, he’s expected to use the same mask for an entire shift instead of changing the mask between patients, which is the standard of care for PPE.

It shouldn’t be necessary, in the richest country in the world, for random citizens to have to make cloth face masks for healthcare workers to use in place of appropriate PPE. The federal government’s purpose for being is to support us (the citizens who pay our taxes to that government) when the fecal matter hits the air moving device, and the Trump administration continues to let every one of us down. The whole point of having the federal government run point during any crisis is to simplify the work the states and local governments need to do to support us, their citizens. Having our federal government standing around with its proverbial thumb stuck up its butt is outrageous, and the administration’s lack of purpose and urgency is costing lives on a daily basis around the country!

Trump’s laziness, illiteracy and inability to care at all about anyone other than himself has been once again put on display for all to see. The PDB (Presidential Daily Briefing) from the intelligence community that previous presidents actually read every morning might as well be used as fire starter for all the good it does us now. Trump not only refuses to exert himself enough to actually read the PDB every day, he doesn’t even pay attention when he’s given an oral summary of the PDB just three times a week! How is it that we are forced to keep this man in the presidency when he has made it so clear that he doesn’t have any intention of doing the peoples’ work, or really anything resembling work at all? Why do the Republicans, who are so fucking on fire to push the citizenry back to work, remain silent as their president abrogates his duty to protect us while he wastes the majority of his time watching right-wing media and having Twitter tantrums?

Trump still refuses to use the DPA (Defense Production Act) to create the billions of tests we need throughout the country in order to safely return to something that resembles normal before a vaccine is widely available. Instead, he chose to use it to force meat-packing plants that have been huge Covid-19 hotspots to reopen and recall their employees, clearly because the product is what is valuable, not the welfare of the workers. Republican-led states are threatening their citizens with cutting off their unemployment if they don’t return to work because they fear catching the virus there. Reasonable people should wonder why they don’t require employers to follow guidelines for social distancing and PPE.

If there is anyone out there who still believes that Trump and the Republicans care about anything other than their donors and their own reelections, then I hope that those deluded individuals have the foresight to prepare themselves for the “American carnage” that is going to follow as these knuckleheads throw their most vulnerable citizens forward as fodder for the virus. If the federal government had done the right thing, we would have nation-wide, science-based orders that would avoid what is surely coming in the next couple of weeks, but we have the most incompetent leader in the free-world at this time of crisis, and the Republicans are fine with things going on the way they are. This must be seen for what it is – the negligent homicide of thousands upon thousands of our fellow citizens, with a disproportionate number of those most affected in communities of color, on the altar of capitalism and profit for the wealthy.

The total absence of empathy towards those most affected by this pandemic is painful to observe, as Trump continues to whine about his perceived grievances, offering just 4 ½ minutes of time since the ‘task force’ news briefings began to express something he thought was sympathy to the survivors of those who have died. His inability to recognize that he should not be forcing citizens to return to any workplace not prepared to keep them safe from this contagion is not surprising in this particular individual; his entire life has been spent in a narcissistic bubble, as he was raised by parents who never taught him that he’s not the center of the universe.

In order to give myself a feeling of control in an uncontrollable time, I keep making masks. It’s the only thing I can do to help those I love, besides staying home without human companionship. I haven’t seen my son or his wife since before this all started, and have no idea when I will. I occasionally see Anna and/or Joey, but only for a couple of minutes and usually I’m masked. I miss hugs.

I worry about my friend Rosie, a psychiatrist who preferred to be isolated even in non-Covid-19 times. I’d love to see her, but I couldn’t get her to make a plan without a pandemic, so I have no chance now. I hope she knows I’m here if she needs me.

I offer my sympathy to the thousands and thousands who have lost loved-ones to Covid-19, although I know it offers small comfort. I have to trust that the majority of us recognize that the threat from this pandemic is real, and that we will do everything possible to maintain physical distancing for the foreseeable future. That is really our best bet for avoiding magnitudes of death many times greater than we have already endured. I have to believe that because one party in our country is doing the exact opposite, and the deaths that ensue will be on their hands.

Mask the Republican’s responsibility for these deaths and you, too, become culpable. Is that really who you are?

The 28th Amendment – Or Telling an Old Friend He’s Been Made a Fool Of

It’s funny – since the advent of social media, particularly Facebook, I’ve been able to reconnect online with quite of few of the people I was friends with in grade school. Last week, my Facebook messenger pinged, and there was this long message from my old friend Louis about a proposed 28^th amendment. The amendment itself seems like a good idea in that it prevents the House and Senate from enacting laws that apply differently to them than they do to the rest of us. Lou’s message to me made multiple false claims about “benefits” that don’t exist, like student loan forgiveness, the ability to retire with full pay after serving only one two-year term, no requirement to pay into Social Security (true until 1984) and that they do not participate in the ACA. This proves yet again how easy it is for the uninformed to get all worked up about nothing out of laziness. It took under a minute for me to debunk the incendiary parts of his email, so why couldn’t he have taken the time to check the facts before sending that stupid message to me?

There is no “Congressional Reform Act”, although bogus emails and text messages have been circulating through the internet and social media since at least 2011. The newer versions include references to Trump, and the message my friend sent me specifically claimed that “Trump wants you to send this to twenty friends…” So now, I know that my friend is member of the right-wing disinformation bubble.

I was most disturbed by that fact that my friend Lou supports Trump despite the last three years of Trump in the White House. I have to assume that Lou’s been getting his ‘news’ from Fox, and I felt it was necessary to respond to my friend rather than just sever ties with him because he has been bamboozled by right-wing media. I hope that Lou realizes that I do not bear him any ill will for his views, and I hope that my response to him (which included a link to this blog!) gives him pause and leads him to enlarge his media intake to include outlets with more journalists and fewer sycophants. State tv may be a useful tool in a dictatorship, but it’s incredibly destructive to our democracy, and I hope that my friends who have continued to support outlets like Fox and OANN will go outside of their comfort zones and try a little fact-based reporting. Sure, the news is bad, and I’ll bet it seems even worse if you’ve been led to believe bullshit only to find out later that almost everything you’ve been told has been a lie.

Here are some facts for my friend, in case he’s still uncomfortable getting them from places like CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, The New York Times or even The Wall Street Journal, to name a few:

The Small Business Aid Program has already run out of money, and the Republicans in Congress refuse to negotiate with the Democrats on another aid bill.
- While telling the public that it wasn’t necessary for healthy individuals to wear facemasks in public, the National Security Council took 3,500 masks from a Taiwanese shipment intended to shore up the national stockpile for White House staffers.
- Trey Hollingsworth, an Indiana Republican representative, has said out loud that allowing more Americans to die of the coronavirus is “the lesser of two evils” compared to the economic impacts of quarantine.
- The CIA warned its employees that hydroxychloroquine could cause sudden death and told them not to try it to treat Covid-19. Trump has a financial stake in the company that makes the drug.
- Trump tariffs are contributing to shortages of hand sanitizer and disinfectant.
- Trump was told by intelligence agencies in NOVEMBER that a coronavirus outbreak could be cataclysmic.
- The Trump administration wasted 70 days in the Covid-19 battle, downplaying the threat, holding back payments, and denying we were at risk.
- A group of 74 journalism professors wrote an open letter to Fox ‘News’ that reads “The misinformation that reaches the Fox News audience is a danger to public health….Your misrepresenting endangers your own viewers.”
- ProPublica reported that Trump’s Justice Department blocked an indictment requested by Texas federal prosecutors against Walmart, after it was determined that they had filled hundreds of thousands of opioid prescriptions despite being warned by their own pharmacists that those prescriptions were coming from ‘pill mills’ and that those pharmacists did not want to fill the scripts. Texas federal prosecutors were told to drop the case by the Trump Justice Department.
- Noise from windmills does not cause cancer.
- There were not millions of votes from undocumented immigrants in the 2016 presidential election.

I hope that this list of facts, some or all of which may never have been broadcast on Fox, will help my Republican friends make a better decision in the upcoming presidential election. Perhaps, if they cannot find it within themselves to vote for Joe Biden, they won’t vote at all.

It should be obvious now, as the federal government decimated by years of Republican deconstruction and neglect and hampered by a complete lack of leadership and direction from the top down is failing to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic in any reasonable fashion, that the entire premise behind the conservative movement has been a lie. Of course we need a robust and functional federal government, staffed by civil servants who actually know what they’re doing and can put things in place to prevent something like this from ever happening again. We all pay for insurance for our cars and houses, not because we want to send insurance conglomerates our hard earned money, but because we all know that, should our homes burn down in a fire or our cars totaled in an accident, we won’t have to wonder how we’ll finance the replacements of these things. This is no different than having teams in place in the government so that, should a pandemic arise, we are prepared.

Trump and his administration deliberately removed the pandemics team put in place by the previous administration because Trump’s fixation on undoing anything Obama put in place is more important to him than any possibility that those Obama initiatives benefit the citizens of this country. Now Trump is threatening to illegally withhold funding for the WHO during a world-wide pandemic. He is doing this in large part as a diversion to his base, so they don’t realize that his own administration and its lack of foresight are the reason why we are now losing 100 Americans an hour to this virus.

So please, my conservative friends, understand that voting for lower taxes is equivalent to agreeing that there is no reason to prepare for pandemics, wildfires, hurricanes, tornadoes, and every other disaster sure to strike somewhere in this great nation in the future. And while the next catastrophe that strikes may not affect you personally, it is no less painful for the citizens who find themselves in the line of fire. Admit to yourselves that continuing to support a party that denies science while forcing their hypocritical religiosity down our throats is societal suicide. They may claim to believe that their god will prevent the planet from burning up, but facts are still facts, and when the oceans rise because they refuse to address the fossil fuel industry’s greed, their god won’t keep their homes dry. I cannot understand anyone supporting politicians who so clearly don’t give a shit about their constituents, voting against their own best interests because they’ve been brainwashed into believing that the ‘other’ is their enemy.

It is time to think not only about yourselves, but your fellow Americans as well. We need everyone to pull together and fight for what is right for the whole country, not just the privileged few. Republican politicians have succeeded in convincing you that they care about you, but the only thing they care about is getting your vote in order to give their donors tax breaks to maintain their own power, while the rest of us are taxed without the loopholes the wealthy are awarded. Election reform to publicly finance elections will give us back the power while taking the influence of the wealthy out of our politics. Only by putting Democrats in office throughout the country can we make sure that our government, at all levels, is chosen by the people and works for the people.

Please – take the time to verify the inflammatory stuff you’re forwarding to your friends. Doing so will help you maintain your dignity while you see what a fool you’ve been.

What the Hell, Dr. Phil???

My mom told me I should watch The Dr. Phil Show when it first came on the air, and I have been a faithful viewer ever since. In fact, I often use Dr. Philisms when I write and speak, with my favorite and most used one being “When you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences.” When Libby (my cat) and I took our cross-country trip in 2018, I was excited to go to the show in LA, where I sat about ten feet away from Dr. Phil’s wife Robin during the taping of two separate episodes. The studio has flat screen TV’s on the knee walls between sections of the audience, and I found myself watching the show on the TV in front of me instead of looking up at the stage where the show actually was. It was surreal. I’ve enjoyed watching him because he usually dispenses common-sense advice (given that common sense isn’t so common anymore) to people willing to air their dysfunctional lives and families on national television.

Dr. Phil has mostly managed to keep his political opinions and affiliation separate from the show, as he should. Honestly, knowing for sure that he’s a died-in-the-wool Republican who supports Trump will forever taint my view of him and make it harder for me to see past that knowledge. Yesterday, Dr. Phil went on Fox ‘News’ and said things that force me to re-evaluate my high opinion of this man from Texas.

Here’s the rub, though. If Dr. Phil, a 69-year-old male and a known diabetic who is a member of the demographic group most at risk of a fatal outcome from Covid-19, really believes that he’s being harmed by sheltering in his 5-bedroom, 6-bath, 6,170 square-foot home with an in-ground pool, more art than the Met, an entire wall of guns on a half-acre of property (my house is on more than an acre), then he should walk outside and mingle with the little people out in the rest of the world, sans PPE.

Phil McGraw is a psychologist, and, although given the title of ‘doctor’, he is not a physician. Psychologists do have to obtain a bachelor’s degree, followed by a master’s and doctoral programs, which Wikipedia shows Phil did, graduating in 1979, but he is not a medical doctor. In fact, he is no longer a licensed psychologist, having voluntarily surrendered his Texas license to practice in 2006. He has not hidden his unlicensed status from his viewers, and most of the guests on the show are offered actual mental health services with licensed personnel throughout the country paid for by the show.

His “I’m just an old Texas boy” character is a big part of his appeal, at least for me, and his show has occasionally aired subjects that seemed to reflect a right-wing perspective. He doesn’t hesitate to let us know that he’s a Christian, although I would prefer he keep his personal faith, well, personal. To those of us who have recovered from religion, there is no benefit to his talking about how he’s got a personal savior in Jesus. In fact, I find it offensive when celebrities like Phil McGraw think we care one way or the other about their religious choices. If he doesn’t want to hear about my atheism, then he shouldn’t tell me about his god.

All those things were of no significance to my devotion to his show. My DVR has been set to record every new episode for years – in fact, it’s the first show on my list – and I’ve watched them all, usually the same day they air. It’s been frustrating during this pandemic, because the Philadelphia station that carries his syndicated show has been pre-empting portions for local Covid-19 news conferences, so his filmed-from-his-house shows haven’t been available in their entirety. I find myself distracted by the stuff in the room behind him (what is that red thing in the corner of the counter over his shoulder???) and keep wondering how much countertop you have when you can cover so much counter with stuff. Then I think about how much time someone has to spend dusting all the stuff in the kitchen alone. Having seen photos of his eclectically decorated home, I also question his insistence that Robin is keeping that house clean. There’s no way in hell that Robin is the one cleaning that stuff – she’d never have the time to do anything else, and would never be able to leave the house. My mom used to tell me the way you know that a house is more than you can afford is when the first thing you think about is how long it will take you to keep it clean! Those with money don’t have to worry about cleaning – they just pay someone else to do the work for them. It must be nice.

Yesterday Dr. Phil revealed both his political ideology and his ignorance, two things that now force me to reconsider my devotion to his show. I saw a clip of his Fox appearance on MSNBC last night, and today my daughter Anna made sure I didn’t miss him making an ass of himself. At first, I tried to convince myself that maybe it was from a few months ago, before the fecal matter hit the air-moving device, but reality’s a bitch, so I was forced to acknowledge that Phil has revealed a part of himself by both appearing on Fox ‘News’ in the first place and then saying things that clearly have nothing to do with anything as it regards this highly contagious virus we are trying to keep from killing hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens.

For someone who purports to be wise and knowledgeable, his comparison of the Covid-19 pandemic to pool drownings, cancer or car accidents was beyond dangerous. I’m not sure how Phil concluded that the loss of life from Covid-19, which has taken more than 33,000 Americans to date, can be equated to those lost by non-contagious illness and accident. Surely, even though he never went to medical school, Phil McGraw can intellectually understand that a highly contagious virus with a significant mortality rate (especially among older men with comorbidities) that has no effective treatment or vaccine cannot be allowed to just spread unchecked throughout the population, overwhelming the healthcare system and leading to even more deaths because of a lack of ventilators and ICU beds in the interest of getting back to business as usual, right? RIGHT?

The financial problems facing the citizens of this country could be addressed by a functional federal government led by a president who gives a damn about someone other than himself. Instead of pointing out how destructive this ‘lockdown’ is on people’s mental health and finances, maybe Dr. Phil could have pointed out how the Trump administration is failing to help out the neediest among us while they give more tax breaks to people in his own income bracket. Or maybe he could use his significant wealth and platform to help those most in need, instead of giving Trump’s state tv another sound bite to support their anti-science platform. Even better, he could use his private plane to fly around the world, gathering PPE for the healthcare workers on the front lines and flying it back to the US for distribution.

Phil McGraw is not a doctor – he’s a retired psychologist without any relevant experience or knowledge about infectious diseases – and he has overstepped his bounds with this Fox appearance. Opinions are like assholes – everybody has one, and they should keep both of them out of the public eye! Phil can be unhappy about the situation in which we now find ourselves, but he should not be publicizing his opinions in this atmosphere of political polarization and the demonization of experts. His appearance last night on Fox has revealed that Phil McGraw’s common sense isn’t so common anymore. So go on out, Dr. Phil. Walk amongst the unclean, go to a homeless shelter or maybe an ICU full of Covid-19 patients, and breathe in the air, unmasked. Then go back home and share what you’ve acquired without washing your hands or changing your clothes with your wife, your sons, and your grandchildren. Which one of them will you sacrifice to restart the economy? If you’re unwilling to offer up one of your own on the altar of capitalism, shut the fuck up about getting everyone else back to work. You’ve lost a devoted fan by revealing your callous disregard for your fellow citizens.

I suspect I’m not alone.

When you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences.

When Did the Right Become the Party of Death?

It’s been clear for decades (outside of the Fox bubble) how little the Republicans really care about their own constituents, but never before has their distain been so blatant. What is most outrageous about the present crisis is their cold & callous disregard for the lives of those most at risk from the Covid-19 pandemic as they try to justify “opening up the country” and “returning to normal” in order to boost the stock market to where it was a few weeks ago, before Trump revealed yet again his total incompetence at everything other than acting like a successful businessman on reality TV.

A few weeks ago, I recognized that physical distancing would likely prove to be successful at flattening the curve of the sick and dying but that this success would prove to be anticlimactic in the view of some of our fellow citizens. I worried that preventing thousands from dying from Covid-19 by mass quarantine would sooner rather than later lead some to claim that the demands to stay at home were draconian and that we need to get back to ‘normal’ (whatever that’s going to be for the next year or two) so that businesses stop losing money. This has of course proven to be true with many conservatives on Fox ‘News’ and OANN (Trump’s new favorite state television network), Republicans in the administration, and the assorted wingnuts that Trump prefers to use as ‘advisers’ in place of the experts throughout his own administration he has no time for.

Every day, we have these outrageous campaign events Trump inaccurately labels as ‘coronavirus task force press briefings’, during which he makes unfounded pronouncements, recommends anecdotal, unproven and possibly harmful medical treatments that his own agencies don’t support and outright conspiracy theories that Drs. Fauci and Birx and even Mike Pence have to counter with actual facts. These ‘briefings’ are grievance-laden diatribes from Trump, whose malignant narcissism is on full display as he whines about how badly he’s been treated by the media while saying NOTHING about all our fellow Americans who are sick or have died under his watch. He spends hours at these ‘briefings’, something no previous president has ever done, because he does next to nothing on behalf of the American people. A full 60% of Trump’s time is unscheduled and he uses that time to watch right-wing media, send tweets and call his various non-expert friends to get their non-expert advice on all the things that matter to the rest of us. Trump is known to be easily influenced; going with whatever the last person he’s spoken with said regardless of their lack of expertise.

Trump’s most recent ‘briefings’ have been full-out temper tantrums, one of them including a taxpayer-funded campaign video to convince us that this unmitigated disaster has been handled perfectly by Trump and his lackeys despite what we can see with our eyes and hear with our ears. Trump’s inability to learn anything new is on full display as he attempts to refute how a contagion works by repeatedly telling the country that “we can’t let the cure be worse than the problem”, or “we have to open our country back up as soon as possible”, or even worse, “we don’t need no stinkin’ tests” (I’m paraphrasing on that last one!). Trump’s inability to fathom that the states that presently haven’t had as many confirmed cases of Covid-19 (although the inability to do massive testing of all the population on a regular basis makes it impossible to know how many Americans have contracted the virus) are at the bottom of the curve, not avoiding it altogether.

The more sparsely populated regions of the country took longer to start spreading the virus around because their citizens don’t run into as many of their neighbors as we on the coasts do on a regular basis. The lack of a federal stay-at-home order allowed the governors of Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota (why are there TWO Dakotas???), Iowa, Arkansas, Utah, & Wyoming to refuse to issue such orders while others waited weeks before doing so, often while still permitting large groups of people to meet for religious services.

The federal government is supposed to be there when the shit hits the fan – hurricanes, earthquakes, tornadoes, wildfires, pandemics – are all things that the federal government is supposed to help us with and are what we expect in return for the regressive federal taxes we pay. The Republicans’ efforts at tearing down the functional portions of our government to lower the taxes of the wealthiest in the country supporting their political campaigns had already done significant damage to the infrastructure supporting the agencies we most need to be able to function before Trump took office unprepared and clueless.

Trump’s lack of preparation for the job he now holds has continued to reverberate throughout the entire federal government since he took office, appointing rank partisans completely lacking in relevant experience throughout the federal government into only a small portion of the positions needed to staff our agencies to full capacity. Instead, he’s placed people with ill-intent towards the agencies they now inhabit into positions that have allowed them to destroy those very agencies. He has eliminated crucial positions because he has no capacity to understand that being prepared for an emergency includes keeping people whose expertise will be necessary in an emergency in positions that matter.

The Republicans in the House and the Senate, as well as all those working in his administration, remain silent while tens of thousands of our fellow Americans die because of Trump’s incompetence. After the citizens of the states that voted for Trump in 2016 have lost friends and family members to Covid-19 because of everything Trump did and didn’t do over the last several months, I hope they’ll begin to harass their Republican representatives and senators to do something for them instead of for big corporations. Better still, I hope they see the light and recognize that their faith in the Republicans has been misplaced; we on the left will welcome them into the fold! I want my Republican friends and family members (and you know who you are!) to see that their continued support of the Republican Party has brought us to brink of an economic and healthcare catastrophe and to agree that the only way to move forward as a country is to realign behind the Democratic Party.

There is no other option.

To Fix the Problem, You Must Acknowledge the Truth

For non-Fox news consumers, it has been clear for a long time that the problem with our government is the Republican Party. When a Democratic president is in office, the Republicans spend all their time complaining about the deficit, demanding that every program the Democrats put in place to help the population must be offset by taking benefits from somewhere else. When there’s a Republican in the White House, not only do the Republicans stop talking about the deficit, they actually do everything they can to make it worse, cheering when huge tax cuts for the wealthy are passed. They do everything possible to undo regulations that protect our environment and our health in order to appease their corporate sponsors while withholding money for the social safety net that helps the poorest and most at risk among us. Republican governors throughout the country, with a few notable exceptions, waited longer (some are still waiting!) than their Democratic counterparts to order their citizens to quarantine themselves at home to slow the spread of the virus. And then there’s Trump, whose rank incompetence and magical thinking has allowed this contagion to spread, resulting in the unnecessary deaths of thousands, with tens of thousands more expected in the near future. The Republicans knew for months how dangerous this pandemic was going to be yet did nothing to prepare for it, lying to the country about how bad things could get. State television on Fox and other right-wing outlets continue to lie to their viewers, which makes them culpable in the deaths of thousands of Americans who for reasons I fail to understand insisted on getting their “news” from these propagandists.

With the coronavirus now disrupting our primary elections, Republicans are now doing everything they can to use the pandemic to advance their main agenda – retaining their white, male, minority power under any and all circumstances. In order to achieve this, they have exposed their true intentions only recently by saying the quiet parts out loud. Sure, we’ve all known that their voter suppression efforts have been specifically directed at those who demographically are most likely to vote Democratic in order to prevent Democrats from winning elections, but the Republicans for years were thwarted in their efforts by the Voting Rights Act. Since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, however, it has become much easier for them to enact laws designed to prevent those voters most likely to vote Democrat from exercising their right to vote. Voter ID laws were enacted while gerrymandering allowed representatives to choose their voters. Now, when physical distancing is our only effective weapon to slow the spread of Covid-19, the Republicans are refusing to make it safer and easier for everyone to vote by mail because they believe Democrats will benefit electorally. Trump has admitted that allowing every eligible voter to vote means “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”.

How is it that paper ballots signed by each voter and mailed back to the counties where the signatures are verified are less secure than the computerized ones (some without any paper backup!) commonly used throughout the country? How exactly does Trump think “thousands of ballots” are fraudulently submitted? Who is getting the ballots together? Is there someone going house to house, stealing mail-in ballots out of every mailbox? How would this scale up to manage “thousands of ballots”? Seriously, this makes even less sense than “millions of illegal immigrants” voting in 2016, but the Republicans are completely fixated on doing everything they can to prevent people from voting, and this should make everyone furious. This is even more ridiculous when you recall that the only mass mail-in ballot fraud was in South Carolina by a Republican operative in 2018 that resulted in a redo of the election.

How is this okay with the citizens of this country? There is no legitimate reason for anyone who is legally eligible to vote to not be sent a mail-in ballot for every election from here on out. The Democrats have tried for years to have Election Day become a national holiday in order to make it easier for everyone to vote, and the Republicans have stood in the way. The Republicans believe that they are going to be disadvantaged if everyone eligible to vote could do so, but rather than change their platform and policies to attract more voters to their side they resort to cheating. This will eventually backfire on them despite the long game they’ve played for judges because of simple demographics. The Republican Party’s demise is inevitable and will only be hastened by their callous disregard for their own constituents when they do things like forcing voters to choose between a possible fatal virus and casting their vote.

I am waiting for my mail-in ballot for the New Jersey primary election to arrive in the near future. I signed up for mail-in voting in 2018, when I was on my cross-country trailer trip, and I decided then that having my ballot mailed to me for every election would guarantee my ability to vote from home for the rest of my life. I had no idea how much it would benefit me just two years later, and I’m encouraging everyone I know to do the same to make sure that they too can exercise their franchise without fear of Covid-19 or any other unforeseen future event.

In order to advance our society to a more egalitarian one, it is absolutely necessary that everyone who is legally eligible to vote be enabled to do so as easily and securely as possible. Providing each and every registered voter in the country with a postage-paid mail-in ballot is the very least we can do. Although I’ve always thought that voting should be mandatory rather than voluntary (it is one of the few things I think every citizen should be required to do as their civic duty), making it easier for all who can vote to vote is the closest we can get. If that results in Republicans being voted out of office, then so be it. However, Republican Senators Cory Gardner, Mitt Romney, Mike Lee would disagree with the premise that mail-in ballots favor Democrats, as they represent states with all mail-in ballots, along with members of the House from Colorado, Oregon, Washington and Utah.

Therefore, it is time for the Democrats to do everything they can to protect our health as well as our ability to vote in November, because Trump will do whatever he can to remain in office, including preventing the election from happening and regardless of the threat to the citizenry from the novel coronavirus. Laws are just norms that everyone agrees to follow that under normal circumstances are upheld by the Justice Department. Without an Attorney General who believes in upholding the law, there is a very high likelihood that Trump will do something illegal about which William Barr will do nothing. We have to do whatever is necessary to prevent this from happening.

Covid-19 Should Destroy Trump’s Presidency

The lack of a response from the Trump Administration to this pandemic is going to cost thousands of Americans their lives, and demographically this could disproportionately affect Trump’s base. Fox News has been completely in step with the disinformation and outright lies being disseminated by the right, and they too are culpable for lying to the most vulnerable of their viewers. Listening to numerous Republican senior citizens saying that they’re willing to sacrifice the lives of their fellow citizens in order to save their 401ks is unbelievable and beyond disturbing. Yet still none of their ranks will stand up and speak out.

We are in uncharted waters, and letting this incompetent president continue to pretend he’s in charge and doing a good job by the American people is unacceptable. I don’t know how we can put someone with a functioning brain in charge of things before November, but we have to come up with something.

Our hospitals cannot handle the anticipated number of patients that an unchecked pandemic will bring to their doors, and our healthcare providers will be overwhelmed by the stampede. We have to do everything we can to limit the spread, and it should be done world-wide. Since we can’t control the rest of the world, it’s imperative that there be a country-wide stay-at-home requirement for the immediate future. Before rescinding these policies, there must be measurable and reasonable requirements to meet regarding the rate of infection, number of ICU beds available, the number of infected healthcare providers and how to ensure those known to have recovered are both immune and noninfectious.

We will forever have the “before” and “after” of this pandemic, and I hope we are able to remember this long enough to make sure we’re better prepared when it happens again.

Trump’s Ineptitude is on Full Display

How can the people who are supposed to be leading the fight against Covid-19 make the ridiculous statements about how wonderful Trump has been during this crisis out loud and in public? Have these idiots really gotten so far into the cult of Trump that they think that their bullshit won’t be called out as this virus does what viruses do – spreads to as many human hosts as it can no matter how many lies this administration disseminates to the contrary? Trump is so fixated on keeping the number of reported cases as low as possible as a means of protecting his re-election that the truth of what is going on is being kept from the rest of us. The inability of anyone within the executive branch to make Trump understand the reality of the situation as it is right now is stunning, yet there is no interest from the Republicans to do anything that could prevent the unmitigated catastrophe that is looming over the country because of the unprecedented incompetence of the Trump administration from top to bottom.

If there was anyone in the Republican Party that hasn’t drunk the Kool aid, they’re too intimidated by Trump’s bullying to do the right thing during a real crisis that will have lasting repercussions for a significant portion of our population. Trump lacks any ability to acknowledge that his refusal to listen to the experts about Covid-19 prevented us from preparing for this pandemic, and he never interests himself in learning anything. Somehow, he has been allowed to think that knows all he needs to know about everything there is, period. This may be acceptable behavior when you own your own company, but it really sucks for the rest of us when it’s our president who is never able to admit his ignorance about any subject.

“Who knew healthcare could be so complicated?”

“Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

Seriously???

The frightening thing is that I’m afraid he believes it when he says things like that, which is what makes him so much more dangerous, especially with the Republicans choosing Dear Leader Trump over their oath to uphold the constitution. We have never had an entire political party make the decision that supporting their president no matter what he does was their number one priority, and the founders never even considered this a possibility. I suspect, however, they would have been vehemently opposed to the power that the office has accumulated since WWII in no small part by the legislative branch’s acquiescence to having its powers eroded by presidents of both parties. Now, the federal government is under the direction of the most incompetent person ever to win the presidency and we are being put at significant risk by the lack of anyone capable of knowing the right action right now. Trump’s fragile ego has somehow become the most important thing to Trump’s appointees in charge of our federal government.

It is of no benefit to the country for us to have to hear these lackeys while they sing their obligatory praise of the Donald. Unfortunately for all of them, we will not forget these repeated scenes of their fealty to this idiot in chief they continue to protect. I can only hope that the Republican Party as a politically influential organization ceases to exist.

We expect our federal government to step in to protect us in times of crisis like the current Covid-19 pandemic, but Trump and his administration have so severely gutted our preparedness out of a mistaken belief that the experts fired earlier in his term would be happy to return immediately in the event of a problem. There is no reasonable expectation that this lack of foresight will ever be acknowledged, as Trump has already said he “has no responsibility” for any of the failures of his administration’s handling of the coronavirus. Trump is clearly incapable of empathy because he fails at it every time he’s been called on to offer comfort to the country. He keeps giving speeches that include multiple easily-verifiable errors because his insistence on placing total loyalty at the top of the job requirements for every position in his administration could not have resulted in anything else.

But none of this has caused anyone in the Republican Party to stand up and say the quiet part out loud – that Trump’s refusal to employ experts in numerous vital areas in the federal government has resulted in the most bungled response to a highly contagious disease since 1918. Their continued silence will be directly responsible for many of their own followers contracting the disease because they think it’s a “democrat hoax”. The thing is that the virus is apolitical, and it’s going to infect people regardless of whether or not they ‘believe’ it’s really a problem. This is where the Fox ‘News’ bubble becomes downright dangerous. It’s time for all the right-wing media, particularly Rupert Murdoch, to insist that that all their media outlets immediately cease spreading disinformation and outright lies about the pandemic while simultaneously providing actionable facts to their viewers. The viewers who think they are being informed actual facts by these and similar outlets believe these fools, and are the people most likely to discount the facts and ignore recommendations to limit public interactions that can ‘flatten the curve’ & keep our healthcare system from being overloaded by the very sick.

I’ve never seen my local Wegmans or Whole Foods stores with empty shelves and produce bins. Apparently people in Cherry Hill buy tons of root vegetables during a crisis, and I wonder if there’s an underground spinach thing I haven’t heard about yet??? I don’t understand the stocking up of fresh dairy products, either, since by virtue of its freshness it has a limited shelf life. I have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday before I head to a different Whole Foods and Wegmans to locate the rest of my weekly groceries. That’s the problem when people are uncertain about what to do – they do what they can think of to do instead of doing what would be most useful for the times.

Why it’s going to take a pandemic to finally burst the Fox ‘News” bubble.

Prior to 2016, I don’t think I donated to any political campaign; since then, I’ve sent money to several, with the majority of my contributions going to Elizabeth Warren’s presidential run. I was so hopeful that she could get the nomination – she had real plans to address issues that matter to lots of people and she didn’t have the baggage that plagued Hillary Clinton’s last attempt – that I let myself really hope it could happen. I’ve once again been reminded that here, in America, women still have to be twice as good as men to get half the credit the men do, and it makes me so frustrated that things are still like this in what I used to think was one of the more advanced countries in the world. I cried when Senator Warren suspended her campaign, the second time in my life that the results of an election have reduced me to tears of frustration and fear.

I don’t doubt that Senator Warren’s poor showing on Super Tuesday was driven by the older voters, those in my own age group who were raised by stay-at-home moms and working dads who reinforced the accepted gender stereotypes of their day in their children. Little boys were taught from an early age that they had to hide their feelings and be tough, while little girls were encouraged to be nurturing and submissive. Boys were encouraged to pursue careers, while girls were expected to get married, have babies, and perform domestic duties to support their working husbands. Women were not seen as competent to be in charge of anything more involved than the household budget, and their opinions were often not even considered when decisions were made. Any expressions of dissent were attributed to “hormones” and dismissed or blatantly ignored altogether. Women who exhibited any interest in pursuing positions of power were patted on the hand and discouraged from stepping out of their predetermined lanes.

So these voters are the demographic largely responsible for the position we now find ourselves in – two old white men running for the Democratic nomination while a highly capable woman had to step away from the race. Of course there are a large number of young people who support Senator Sanders’ campaign, while the boomers are leaning heavily towards Joe Biden, making it impossible for Senator Warren to earn enough delegates to keep her campaign viable. Many of those boomers believed that a woman couldn’t beat Trump (largely, I feel, because Hillary lost to him in 2016) based on “electability”, which is often used against female candidates as a not-so-hidden form of sex discrimination. Our party has become so laser-focused on choosing a candidate they think can get Trump out of office that I think we are in danger of forgetting the lessons from 2016.

Now the Trump administration is facing a crisis not created by Trump himself that they cannot make go away by lying about it repeatedly on Fox ‘News’. The Covid-19 virus pandemic isn’t going to be stopped by Trump’s claiming it’s a hoax, and his inability to deal with the facts won’t make the facts any less real. Trump’s lack of capacity to understand how vaccines are developed and tested before being available to the public, coupled with his public statements that directly contradict the professionals at the CDC and NIH, are putting his own supporters at significant risk of contracting and spreading the virus. There have been reports of a significant portion of Fox ‘News’ viewers who believe that this virus is no worse than the flu despite the most recent WHO report that the mortality rate of Covid-19 may be as high as 3.5%. Sure, that’s not too high – unless you or one of your loved ones happens to be one of those 3.5 people out of a hundred who dies from it.

Trump even had the gall to blame the lack of sufficient tests on the Obama administration, despite the fact that the virus hadn’t even been identified until last year. Trump repeatedly makes up the number of people currently known to have the virus within the country, while claiming that the virus will miraculously disappear when the weather gets warmer in April. He has no interest in learning anything that does not comport with his preconceived, illogical and uninformed opinions, and his complete ignorance is putting all of us in danger.

The cult of Trump will continue to cover for his incompetence until they are forced by circumstances to change their behavior. I guess that the only thing we can hope for is that Trump or someone in his administration or family will be diagnosed with the virus and be forced to acknowledge that they have no idea what they’re doing. His inability to focus on anything except the stock market, which continues to lose huge amounts of value because of the uncertainty generated by his failure to do the right thing to address the issue, is related to the only thing he cares about – his re-election.

It’s frightening that the thing that is putting so many of us at risk is what may finally break through the Fox ‘News’ bubble to take Trump down, and it’s sad that this is what it’s going to take to convince his followers how awful he is for the country. Whatever else happens, I hope that the people responsible for the propaganda machine propping Trump up are caught up in the pandemic, because the incompetence of the Trump loyalists running the agencies mandated to protect us are why we’re here in the first place. Their complicity in his deconstruction of the federal government cannot be forgotten or forgiven.

We must agree to unite under the nominee….

I’ve been busy living life the last week or so, watching while the Trump administration shows the world further proof of its ineptitude as it faces a crisis of monumental proportions – the coronavirus and the pandemic now in progress.

Trump has made it clear that his number one concern, as always, is himself. He’s so worried about how this will affect his re-election that he cannot see past himself. The fact that he’s spent more time worrying about the status of the stock market than about how many people already in the country are carrying and transmitting the virus should be all the proof needed for all citizens to rise up and demand his removal from office.

Trump’s inability to absorb basic facts about anything not directly affecting him personally are on stark display when he repeatedly insists that vaccines will be available “rapidly”, that there won’t be more cases of the virus here over time, or that belatedly trying to restrict travel to and from countries that have reported the highest number of Covid-19 can make a difference in the worsening spread already happening here. Anonymous sources within his administration have been quoted saying they can’t figure out “what the fuck is going on.”

Trump has designated his lackey Mike Pence, who as governor of Indiana refused to consider needle-exchange programs to reduce the spread of HIV, to head the government’s charge to address the pandemic instead of choosing a healthcare professional because, after all, Pence will keep the election uppermost in his mind. This is a recipe for disaster, and Pence’s requirement that all information released to the public by the CDC and NIH must be funneled through him only serves to further delegitimize anything that the administration says about the pandemic.

The public needs to be able to believe the things that officials say regarding this crisis, and no one who has paid attention to the Trump administration has any reason to expect that they will provide us with real, actionable information or even basic facts. Why would anyone believe they have the ability to put steps in place that will lead to a resolution before thousands have sickened or died as a result? Both Trump and Mick Mulvaney have claimed that there is nothing to worry about, blaming the media for inciting panic or trying to say that it’s a “Democrat hoax”, that Democrats want millions to die to damage Trump’s re-election. Somehow, this is now acceptable political speech in America, at least for Republicans, and it reveals yet again that, for Trump and his minions, nothing matters if it helps keep them in power.

Trump has put Richard Grenell, an unqualified political sycophant in place as his “acting” DNI while nominating another incompetent and (hard to fathom) even less qualified fool, Representative John Ratcliffe again as the official DNI. This is likely a ploy by Trump exploit a loophole in the law governing Cabinet vacancies that would have required Grenell to leave as acting DNI by March 11^th, allowing him to keep Grenell as acting DNI for up to seven extra months while Ratcliffe’s nomination flounders in the Senate. Trump’s previous attempt in 2019 to put this clown in the position was opposed by Senate Democrats and Republicans because he’s not only unqualified for the position, he’s also lied about his prior record. Trump doesn’t find him unqualified, because the only qualification that matters is loyalty to Trump on Fox. That law governing Cabinet vacancies now forces the Senate to choose between two idiots for a position that was created to keep us safe. There is nothing about either of these men that should make any of us feel safe.

I do not know how we as a democracy are going to survive the Trump presidency. The damage done in the first three years of his time in the White House has been so overwhelming that it’s been impossible to keep up with it all. He’s put bad actors in positions of power to successfully roll back wide-ranging regulations to benefit corporate benefactors going back fifty years. His administration’s corruption is truly unprecedented, and the Republican Party is all in on the continued abuse of a system never designed to have someone so totally unethical in the seat of power.

The primaries now underway are concerning, too. Senator Sanders, an Independent who is now running for the second time for the Democratic nomination, has garnered massive numbers of supporters who seem willing once again to throw the presidential election to Trump if Bernie doesn’t win the nomination. If ever there were a time for all of us who recognize the existential threat to both our democracy and the planet of a second Trump term that time is now. Vote with your heart in the primary, but for the sake of the future of all of us and our children and grandchildren, once a nominee has been named, it is imperative that we all get behind whoever that nominee is and vote the ticket.

If we cannot hold the house while taking both the presidency and the Senate to send Mitch McConnell back to Kentucky, the country we will be left with will be unrecognizable. Continuing to leave the Republicans in any position of power will ensure that a generation will be adversely affected by their racist, misogynistic and reprehensible policies designed to keep them in charge while preventing the rest of us from moving forward with policies that the majority of citizens believe should be enacted. No one who really wants things to change for the better should be willing to do anything except vote for the Democratic nominee for president, because the changes that will occur during another four years of Trump include the very real possibility of autocratic rule overtaking democracy completely. The likelihood of the positive changes we all hope for would be none, at least for our lifetimes. That’s something I cannot bear to consider.

So talk to your friends and family, and tell them how important it is for them to do what’s best for our democracy for the long-term. I don’t plan to vote for Bernie in the primary, but I will throw my support behind him one hundred percent if he wins the nomination, because that is what we have to do to take our country back from the Republicans who have gerrymandered and voter suppressed their way into power. We must vote for Democrats up and down the ticket in order to undo their minority grip on the system; only by doing that do we stand a chance at implementing the fundamental changes that we all want to truly make our democracy live up to the “One person, one vote” standard we all want it to be. Minority control was baked into the Constitution to manage the slave population on whose suffering our country was built, the original sin of America. It is past time to make foundational changes that ensure we are no longer forced by that minority to be held down by their repressive and backwards policies.