Trump spent the day attacking political opponents and defending convicted felon Michael Flynn.

The Fed slashes rates to near zero, announces purchase of $700 billion of debt.  This is a correct move, IMHO.

Cuomo announces cut by half for NY restaurants and bars.

Italy’s death rate explodes, 368 yesterday.

Harris County working to expand testing.

Okay, so we’re trying to get groceries and wonder what we’re going to do with grandma if she gets sick.  We are looking at our retirement disappear with the stock market.  We are trying to get tested for this crap and wondering if we’ll be left in the hallway to die because a younger or healthier person comes to the hospital sick and needs a ventilator.

And our president this morning?

Benghazi! 

He’s rejoicing over the remote possibility of more Benghazi investigations.

Our president.

I had to put this here because you wouldn’t have believed me if I just told you.  You’d have said, “Nobody is that disconnected.”

Trump’s stream of lies from the beginning of the crisis.

France and Spain announce severe restrictions on citizens, close all stores but groceries and pharmacies.

Trump tests negative (supposedly) for the Coronavirus, halts travel from the UK and Ireland.

Italian Coronavirus cases jump by 20%.

The Alley Theatre has cancelled all performances with audiences and events through March 31.  However, they are going to livestream the new production of 1984.  Pretty cool.

The House passed a sweeping relief bill to help Americans cope with the crisis.  Trump careens from ditch to ditch like a drunk on Saturday night demonstrating he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s doing.

Customer Ralph sent me a very nice shopping story today.  I want him to tell it to you in the comments and we’d all like to hear from you, too.

Are the shelves bare? Is your community kicking in to make sure the kids off from school are being fed?  Did you get into a fight at the Walgreens over the last package of handy wipes?  Share your situation.

You knew it would happen.  Trump’s incompetent response to the COVID-19 outbreak is one of the few crises in the last three years that is not of his own making, and his sycophants have come to realize that he can’t lie or tweet his way out of this one.  The response?  Gen up the Noise Machine, WhatAbout Version.  One of the loudest blowhards in the Machine is PJ Media formerly called Pajamas Media, one of the biggest manure shovelers on the web.

The WhatAbout target this time?  Barack Obama, of course, and this time it was his response to the H1N1 flu outbreak in 2009, days after he had taken office.  H1N1 became apparent in January 2009 and being researched by the WHO then.  The first case of H1N1 was discovered on April 15, 2009, the WHO declared a medical emergency on April 25, and the CDC began releasing anti-viral drugs to fight the disease. Obama declared a US medical emergency on April 30.  He requested $1.9 billion then and as the pandemic grew, requested another $9 billion for response and vaccines.  In October of 2009 Obama did declare a national emergency, but only after multiple efforts to control the virus.  Today, H1N1 continues as a recurring flu virus and has killed an estimated 75,000 Americans since 2009.  It’s part of the annual flu vaccine today that many Americans still refuse to receive.

Let’s talk about how Republicans responded to the virus back in 2009 versus what they are saying now.  During the funding debates of 2009, Republicans opposed Obama’s request because, well, they’re Republicans.  Also, the noise machine cranked up led by Gleen Beck, Lou Dobbs, and Rush Limbaugh.  Glenn Beck, who at that time had a big show on Fox Noise said, “…you don’t know if this is going to cause neurological damage like it did in the 1970s,” adding that he would do “the exact opposite” of what the federal government recommended and might even attend a swine flu party to deliberately infect himself before the virus could mutate.  Rush Limbaugh said, “I am not going to take it [the H1N1 vaccine], precisely because you are now telling me I must. . . . I don’t want to take your vaccine. I don’t get flu shots.” He added that if “you have some idiot government official demanding, telling me I must take this vaccine, I’ll never take it.”  In Congress Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA) commented, “We can’t let all of our spending and our reaction be media-driven in responding to a panic so that we don’t get Katrina-ed. . . . It’s important because what we are talking about as we discuss the appropriateness of spending $2 billion to produce a vaccine that may never be used—that is a very important decision that our country has to make.”  Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) added, “I don’t think we need to spend $1.5 billion on flu vaccine when . . . the research shows that it’s not going to be very virulent. . . . We are stealing our grandchildren’s future by borrowing and spending. . . . This hysteria over the flu is driving the media, and it’s driving the administration, driving the leadership here. We’ve got to stop that.”

The funding was passed, but after intense anti-vaxxer misinformation and loud Republican opposition, the distribution of the vaccine was greatly suppressed and even THAT was affected by party.  Democrats outnumbered Republicans by almost 50% in saying they would take the vaccine.

The Repubs are singing the same song this time, too, calling the outbreak of COVID-19 a hoax and supporting Trump’s idiotic and incoherent blabbering and tweeting about it.  Even as they try to cover for Trump, they’re attacking Obama for doing exactly the opposite of what he actually did.

Same song, different pandemic.

A good weekend read, Slate has published the resignation letter to John Roberts from James Dannenberg, retired Hawaii state judge, law professor, and member of the elite Supreme Court Bar.  His reasons are the radical partisanship that now pervades the majority of the court has made it impossible for him to remain on the bar.  Here’s his letter in full:

The Chief Justice of the United States

One First Street, N.E.

Washington, D.C. 20543

March 11, 2020

Dear Chief Justice Roberts:

I hereby resign my membership in the Supreme Court Bar.

This was not an easy decision. I have been a member of the Supreme Court Bar since 1972, far longer than you have, and appeared before the Court, both in person and on briefs, on several occasions as Deputy and First Deputy Attorney General of Hawaii before being appointed as a Hawaii District Court judge in 1986. I have a high regard for the work of the Federal Judiciary and taught the Federal Courts course at the University of Hawaii Richardson School of Law for a decade in the 1980s and 1990s. This due regard spanned the tenures of Chief Justices Warren, Burger, and Rehnquist before your appointment and confirmation in 2005. I have not always agreed with the Court’s decisions, but until recently I have generally seen them as products of mainstream legal reasoning, whether liberal or conservative. The legal conservatism I have respected– that of, for example, Justice Lewis Powell, Alexander Bickel or Paul Bator– at a minimum enshrined the idea of stare decisis and eschewed the idea of radical change in legal doctrine for political ends.

I can no longer say that with any confidence. You are doing far more— and far worse– than “calling balls and strikes.” You are allowing the Court to become an “errand boy” for an administration that has little respect for the rule of law.

The Court, under your leadership and with your votes, has wantonly flouted established precedent. Your “conservative” majority has cynically undermined basic freedoms by hypocritically weaponizing others. The ideas of free speech and religious liberty have been transmogrified to allow officially sanctioned bigotry and discrimination, as well as to elevate the grossest forms of political bribery beyond the ability of the federal government or states to rationally regulate it. More than a score of decisions during your tenure have overturned established precedents—some more than forty years old– and you voted with the majority in most. There is nothing “conservative” about this trend. This is radical “legal activism” at its worst.

Without trying to write a law review article, I believe that the Court majority, under your leadership, has become little more than a result-oriented extension of the right wing of the Republican Party, as vetted by the Federalist Society. Yes, politics has always been a factor in the Court’s history, but not to today’s extent. Even routine rules of statutory construction get subverted or ignored to achieve transparently political goals. The rationales of “textualism” and “originalism” are mere fig leaves masking right wing political goals; sheer casuistry.

Your public pronouncements suggest that you seem concerned about the legitimacy of the Court in today’s polarized environment. We all should be. Yet your actions, despite a few bromides about objectivity, say otherwise.

It is clear to me that your Court is willfully hurtling back to the cruel days of Lochner and even Plessy. The only constitutional freedoms ultimately recognized may soon be limited to those useful to wealthy, Republican, White, straight, Christian, and armed males— and the corporations they control. This is wrong. Period. This is not America.

I predict that your legacy will ultimately be as diminished as that of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who presided over both Plessy and Lochner. It still could become that of his revered fellow Justice John Harlan the elder, an honest conservative, but I doubt that it will. Feel free to prove me wrong.

The Supreme Court of the United States is respected when it wields authority and not mere power. As has often been said, you are infallible because you are final, but not the other way around.

I no longer have respect for you or your majority, and I have little hope for change. I can’t vote you out of office because you have life tenure, but I can withdraw whatever insignificant support my Bar membership might seem to provide.

Please remove my name from the rolls.

With deepest regret,

James Dannenberg