monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Governor Mike Parson
@GovParsonMO
· 20h
Missouri specific:
• ZERO confirmed cases
• Nearly 17 people have been tested
• Testing CAN be done in Missouri
• Prisons, nursing homes & mental health facilities are a concern
• Schools are always a concern, but young people to not appear to be as prone #COVID19

Dr. Rex Archer, director of the Kansas City Health Department, says his office currently has just five kits to test for possible cases of the new coronavirus.

That’s despite an announcement Tuesday evening from Vice President Mike Pence, who said “any American can be tested” for the virus.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each kit can test approximately 700 to 800 specimens. Due to the limited testing capability, the threshold for choosing whom to test will be extremely high.

“Probably 95% of folks that we might think should be tested won’t be allowed to be tested,” Archer said.

So I've pledged to myself

Andy G. B.
@andrewbloomberg
If Biden wins the nom (or even if he doesn't!), the DSA people should all go read the parts in
@rickperlstein's "Before the Storm" about the Goldwater people spending the 4 years up to 64 figuring out all the delegate rules, and taking over local GOP orgs.

Rick Perlstein
@rickperlstein
36m
Replying to
@andrewbloomberg
Maybe if Bernie Sanders bows out could give Goldwater's speech to his young supporters: “Let's grow up conservatives. If we want to take this party back — and I think we can someday — let's get to work.”

Michael Youhana
@Michael_Youhana
34m
The part of Before the Storm that stuck with me is Buckley’s speech acknowledging that Goldwater is going to lose. Think the left could learn a lot from that

Rick Perlstein
@rickperlstein
24m
He also pointed out that a Goldwater presidency might not be a good thing at that point because there weren't the personnel resources yet to staff his kind of White House. Those were disciplined cats.

Museum Director on Super Tuesday: 'I Hope Every Single One ... That Votes Republican Dies Today'

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Americans who now find themselves politically divided over seemingly everything are now forming two very different views of another major issue: the dangers of the new coronavirus.

Democrats are about twice as likely as Republicans to say the coronavirus poses an imminent threat to the United States, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this week.

And more Democrats than Republicans say they are taking steps to be prepared, including washing their hands more often or limiting their travel plans.

Poll respondents who described themselves as Republicans and did not see the coronavirus as a threat said it still felt remote because cases had not been detected close to home and their friends and neighbors did not seem to be worried, either.

“I haven’t changed a single thing,” Cindi Hogue, who lives outside Little Rock, Arkansas, told Reuters. “It’s not a reality to me yet. It hasn’t become a threat enough yet in my world.”

Many of the U.S. cases that have been reported so far have been in Washington state and California, more than 1,000 miles away from Arkansas.

Politics was not a factor in her view of the seriousness of the virus, Hogue said. Other Republican respondents interviewed echoed that sentiment.

But the political divide is nonetheless significant: About four of every 10 Democrats said they thought the new coronavirus poses an imminent threat, compared to about two of every 10 Republicans.

Part of the explanation, said Robert Talisse, a Vanderbilt University philosophy professor who studies political polarization, is that political divisiveness often works in subtle ways.

Americans increasingly surround themselves with people who share the same political views, so partisan perceptions echo not just through the television channels people watch and websites and social media they consume, but through their friends and neighbors, too.

“This partisan-sort stuff is real; it just doesn’t feel like that’s what’s going on because our partisan selves just feel like ourselves,” Talisse said.

A `FALSE NUMBER’
Americans, who often consume news based on their political preferences, have received two different views of the virus’s potential impact.

Amid tumbling stock markets, President Donald Trump has sought to portray himself as on top of the health crisis, but he has been criticized for being overly optimistic about its potential impact and for sometimes incorrect statements on the science of the virus.

Trump has accused the media and his political adversaries of trying to derail his re-election campaign by amping up alarm over the dangers posed by the virus. He has largely sought to cast it as a comparatively minor threat, comparing its risk to the less deadly seasonal flu.

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh told listeners last week that, “The coronavirus is the common cold” and was merely being “weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump.”

Trump told Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on Wednesday that he thought World Health Organization estimates of the virus’ death rate were a “false number,” that he had a hunch the rate was much lower, “a fraction of 1 percent.” The WHO said this week that the coronavirus killed about 3.4% of the people who contracted it worldwide.

House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused Trump on Thursday of spreading misinformation about coronavirus’ death rate, saying the “reality is in the public domain.”

The outbreak has killed more than 3,400 people and spread across more than 90 nations. Eleven people in the United States have died from the coronavirus, the CDC said Friday.

National media and other cable news channels have been filled with accounts of a spreading sickness and the U.S. deaths. Public health authorities have sent increasingly urgent warnings about the need to be ready for quarantines and school closures.

Exactly how big a role these divergent messages have driven Americans’ perception of the danger they face is difficult to measure, but experts said they could only fuel the political divisions that are so vast that they long ago started having an impact on everything from how Americans vote to where they buy coffee.

“Our hyper-polarization is so strong that we don’t even assess a potential health crisis in the same way. And so it impedes our ability to address it,” said Jennifer McCoy, a Georgia State political science professor who studies polarization.

About half of Democrats said they are washing their hands more often now because of the virus, compared to about four in 10 Republicans, according to the poll. About 8% of Democrats said they had changed their travel plans, compared to about 3% of Republicans.

More than half of Republicans, about 54%, said they had not altered their daily routines because of the virus, compared to about 40% of Democrats.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, from March 2-3 in the United States. It gathered responses from 1,115 American adults, including 527 Democrats and 396 Republicans. The poll has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 3 percentage points.

“This partisan-sort stuff is real; it just doesn’t feel like that’s what’s going on because our partisan selves just feel like ourselves,” Talisse said.

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@brianbeutler

This ends with thousands of MAGA and Q Anon cultists passing coronavirus from one to another to own the libs, doesn't it...

The Illinois congressman received a reprimand for violating House rules prohibiting hats in the chamber.

"The chair must remind members that clause 5 of rule 17 prohibits the wearing of hats in the chamber when the House is in session."

Fact Checker
Analysis
Trump’s bogus effort to blame Obama for sluggish coronavirus testing
Details, a bit complicated, here
...The Pinocchio Test
Trump is looking for scapegoats to excuse his administration’s sluggish efforts to expand testing. But he cannot blame Obama. There was no “Obama rule,” just draft guidance that never took effect and was withdrawn before Trump took office. If there was confusion by labs, the administration could have easily taken the action on EUAs sooner than it did. The Trump administration’s efforts to work with Congress on draft legislation on LDTs certainly made clear how it viewed the issue.

Trump earns Four Pinocchios.

Daniel Dale
@ddale8
Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, director of Harvard's Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics: “In the US it is the opposite of contained."

President Trump Questions Joe Biden’s Competence During Fox News Town Hall

What the hell would he know?

Awfully sensitive about race aren't you???