monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was supposed to be facing trial this week on bribery, fraud and breach of trust charges.

Instead, he was shutting down the courts and ordering Israel’s internal security service to identify people who should be quarantined using data harvested from their phones.

Both of those extraordinary moves, announced in the dead of night on Sunday and Tuesday, were made in the name of combating the coronavirus. The court shutdown also had the effect of delaying Mr. Netanyahu’s corruption trial by two months.

Many Israelis have expressed admiration for the celerity and aggressiveness of Mr. Netanyahu’s response to the pandemic: Israel was ahead of the curve in shutting down travel to hot spots, ordering new arrivals into quarantine and closing down the public schools.

But others are asking whether Mr. Netanyahu, who is battling to keep his job after three inconclusive elections, is exploiting the health crisis for self-serving ends. And whether, as he moves to protect the nation’s health, he may also be endangering its democracy.

Former U.S. congressman Duncan D. Hunter — the California Republican who won reelection while under federal ­indictment, only to later admit wrongdoing in the case and resign — was sentenced Tuesday to 11 months in federal prison, authorities said.

The penalty brings to a close a dramatic case that saw prosecutors air publicly how the congressman used hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds to pay for family vacations, theater tickets and even to facilitate extramarital affairs, while Hunter countered that he was being unfairly targeted by a politicized Justice Department.

While Hunter ultimately pleaded guilty to misusing campaign funds late last year, the move came after he had successfully sought reelection. He resigned early this year.

Newsmax host Wayne Allyn Root endorses scammy silver product which can supposedly “kill” coronavirus and “save your life”

On Sunday, Fox News aired dangerous misinformation from Steven Hotze, a disreputable doctor who has a history of pushing “methods [that] are not supported by science and are potentially harmful” and sells bogus colloidal silver. Hotze used his Fox News platform to dismiss concerns about the coronavirus as people going “totally crazy” and told viewers to “conduct your life normally.”

Hotze is the founder and CEO of the Texas-based Hotze Health & Wellness Center, Hotze Vitamins, and Hotze Pharmacy.

Stuart Stevens is a writer and Republican political consultant who has advised a pro-Bill Weld super PAC in the 2020 election. His book about the Republican Party, “It Was All A Lie,” will be published next month.

Don’t just blame President Trump. Blame me — and all the other Republicans who aided and abetted and, yes, benefited from protecting a political party that has become dangerous to America. Some of us knew better.

But we built this moment. And then we looked the other way.
Many of us heard a warning sound we chose to ignore, like that rattle in your car you hear but figure will go away. Now we’re broken down, with plenty of time to think about what should have been done.

The failures of the government’s response to the coronavirus crisis can be traced directly to some of the toxic fantasies now dear to the Republican Party. Here are a few: Government is bad. Establishment experts are overrated or just plain wrong. Science is suspect. And we can go it alone, the world be damned.

All of these are wrong, of course. But we didn’t get here overnight. It took practice.

Long before Trump, the Republican Party adopted as a key article of faith that more government was bad. We worked overtime to squeeze it and shrink it, to drown it in the bathtub, as anti-tax activist Grover Norquist liked to say. But somewhere along the way, it became, “all government is bad.” Now we are in a crisis that can be solved only by massive government intervention. That’s awkward.

Next, somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise. We began to distrust the experts and put faith in, well, quackery. It was 2013 when former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal said the Republican Party “must stop being the stupid party.” By 2016, the party had embraced as its nominee a reality-TV host who later suggested that perhaps the noise from windmills causes cancer.

The Republican Party has gone from admiring William F. Buckley Jr., an Ivy League intellectual, to viewing higher education as a left-wing conspiracy to indoctrinate the young. In retribution, we started defunding education. Never mind that Republican leaders are among the most highly educated on the planet; it’s just that they now feel compelled to embrace ignorance as a cost of doing business. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, as an example, denounces “coastal elites” while holding degrees from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and having served as a Supreme Court clerk.

The GOP’s relationship with science has resembled some kind of Frankenstein experiment: Let’s see what happens when we play with the chemistry set! Conservatives have spent years trying to cut funds for basic science and research, lamenting government seed money for nearly every budding technology and then hoping for the best. In the weeks ahead, it’s not some fiery, anti-Washington populist with an XM radio gig who is going to save folks’ lives; it is more likely to be someone who has been studying this stuff for decades, almost certainly at some point with federal help or outright patronage.

Finally, there is the populist GOP distrust and dislike of the other, the foreign.
Yes, it is annoying that the Chinese didn’t come clean and explain everything to us from the start. But it appears that a Swiss company is helping to jump-start us in testing; and it is a German company that American officials reportedly tried to lure to the United States recently to help develop a vaccine for the virus. We talk about how we need to be independent even as we do all kinds of things that prove we aren’t.

What is happening now is the inevitable result of a party that embraced fear, weaponized xenophobia and regarded facts as dangerous, left-wing landmines that must be avoided.

Over the past few years, when ramming through conservative judges, Republicans have crowed, “Elections have consequences.” That’s true.

It’s something to think about when sitting at home not watching sports and wondering how long it will be until you can find out if that nasty cold you have is something more.

Yes, elections have consequences. Those of us in the Republican Party built this moment. Now the nation must live with those consequences.

Next, somehow, the party of idealistic Teddy Roosevelt, pragmatic Bob Dole and heroic John McCain became anti-intellectual, by which I mean, almost reflexively opposed to knowledge and expertise.

party that embraced fear, weaponized xenophobia and regarded facts as dangerous,

An effective treatment for #Coronavirus #COVID-19 has been found in a common anti-malarial drug

Encouraging news: three new medical studies show a commonly available anti-malaria drug known as chloroquine aka chloroquine phosphate is showing strong results against COVID-19 infections in both China and South Korea. Excerpts from three studies, including one published in Nature are below.

Biden Should Take The Cognitive Test Trump Aced

And Victor David Hansen, writing at National Review, observes:

The problem is that we have never before witnessed a major party’s likely candidate who so early in the race seems unable to meet the grueling demands of the spring, summer, and fall campaign trail, much less the anticipated duties of president — especially from the party who insisted so loudly that Trump was non compos mentis that it apparently prompted the president to take the Montreal Cognitive Assessment screening test, which he aced, but which a current Joe Biden might well not be able to ace if similarly accused of being mentally unfit and removable via the 25th Amendment.

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