Latest I’ve got, but it’s coming hard and fast:

Tom Hanks and his wife test positive for COVID-19

NBA has suspended the NBA season.

Trump bans travel to the US from Europe, except the UK.

Trump’s effort to play down the pandemic has worked…on Republicans.

Brazilian official (accused of corruption, of course) has tested positive for COVID-19 after spending the weekend at Mara Lago.

Trump loyalists test positive for COVID-19, including Matt Gaetz, who stupidly wore a gas mask in Congress last week to mock the threat.  He wins Dumbass of the Week award.

Italy shuts down ALL stores except for pharmacies and grocery stores.

WHO declares the Coronavirus outbreak a global pandemic while calling out “alarming levels of inaction.”

Stocks fall into bear territory for the first time in 11 years in the face of Trump’s incoherent response to COVID-19 and Saudi-Russian oil price war.

Other than that, not a goddam thing happening right now.

So, let’s recap the week:

1. Trump, against all advice, unilaterally had the second most powerful person in the Iranian government killed by drone in Baghdad.  Seven others were killed along with him.
2. Trump informed Lindsey Graham before the attack, but apparently no one else.  After the attack he spoke only to Republicans and only now is congressional leadership being briefed.
3. Evidence to justify the killings has been described by congressional sources has been described as “razor thin”.
4. Trump has continued to threaten Iran with acts of massive destruction if they retaliate (via Twitter).
5. The Iraqi Parliament has voted to expel all US troops from the country.  The vote was taken at the request of Iraqi prime minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi.  He’s sure to sign it.
6. Today, Iran announced that it is now withdrawing from the nuclear treaty of 2015 and will begin enriching uranium immediately.
7. Pompeo was on all the news programs this morning freely lying and defending the indefensible.
8. Pence lied on Twitter yesterday that Soleimani was involved in 9/11, trying to give cover to Trump.
9. Trump played golf today.

Our government is run by an incompetent, totally corrupt moron who’s being enabled by lying radicals.  It will take decades to recover from this cancer on our republic.

Michael Lewis of Moneyball and The Big Short fame has a new book called The Fifth Risk.  This book describes the corruption/incompetency in the US government since Trump ascended to office in early 2017.  The main character in Lewis’s book is a guy named John MacWilliams, who joined DOE under Obama as chief risk officer.  For Lewis, MacWilliams identified five big risks to the US that he observed.  The first four are pretty obvious:

• Broken Arrows (loose nukes)
• North Korea
• Iran (keeping them from building nukes)
• Protecting the electric grid from cyberterrorism

The fifth risk, though, is the scariest – Program Management.  That doesn’t sound scary, but it is.  Lewis puts it this way:

“The risk a society runs when it falls into the habit of responding to long-term risks with short-term solutions. … ‘Program management’ is the existential threat that you never really even imagine as a risk. … It is the innovation that never occurs and the knowledge that is never created, because you have ceased to lay the groundwork for it. It is what you never learned that might have saved you.”

In other words, the biggest risk to the US is likely something you’ve never even thought about thinking about.  Lewis outlines a number of issues that the US government assesses used to assess that could be cataclysmic if it occurred.  However, when Trump took over the government, he didn’t give a hoot about those threats, or, more tragic, was too stupid to even recognize those threats; since then he has stripped funding and slashed key staff positions that manage those risks.  One typical example of this negligence is the Office of Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture. This office manages $3 billion a year in research grants for important programs such as how to grow food in a changing climate, which seems sort of important.  The person holding that job was a distinguished research scientist in agriculture named Cathie Woteki.  Trump fired her and named a climate denying talk radio host, Sam Clovis, who had ZERO science background to be chief scientist.  Ol’ Sam, though, withdrew suddenly from the nomination when he became embroiled in the Mueller investigation.  Trump has since named a Dow Chemical pesticide executive as chief scientist.  Swell.

Another glaring example of Trump’s incompetence is naming our own Rootin’ Tootin’ Rick Perry to be Secretary of Energy.  Perry famously announced during the 2012 primary that he wanted to shut down Energy, Education, and, er… that other one (oops), so Trump thought he would be the perfect pick to protect our power grid, nuclear arsenal, and fossil fuel industries.  Perry clearly has no idea what he’s doing, so our energy security is in the hands of devoted public employees who are not morons like him.  He didn’t even take a briefing from staff, and has left day to day management to lieutenants, who are more interested in promoting the oil and coal industries and couldn’t care less about nuclear security or resilience of the power grid.

Even worse, budgets for data collection have been slashed.  That includes everything from weather data at NOAA to climate science and food safety and the USDA.  Essentially, the federal bureaucracy has been set adrift with slashed funding and no appointed leadership.  Career employees have been either ignored or fired, and so the US is essentially blind to threats against everything from our power grid to pharmaceuticals to nuclear weapons.

This bungling of management of the government is certainly incompetence on the part of Trump and his cronies; but that is not the only problem.  There is the profit motive.  If Trump succeeds in cutting off weather data from the public, then private providers of that data are then free to sell it for a profit.  And since that data is critical to state and local governments, farmers, ranchers, distribution companies, then the value of their monopoly of critical data is virtually limitless.

The Trump administration is nothing but a gigantic robber baron scheme.  The rich get richer, government services crumble and private companies receive soaring profits.  Lewis’s book should be a wakeup call, but I fear no one who can do anything is paying attention.  And that is when the threat you’ve never even thought about thinking about strikes with tragic consequences.

Don’t say I didn’t tell you so.

Just hours after Trump caved to overwhelming pressure on his idiotic separation scheme, word started leaking out of the White House that, characteristically, after causing chaos with some cruel, pointless tactic, the Trump White House has no clue how to reunite over 2,400 kids with their over almost 5,000 parents.  Anyone with common sense can divine the reason because everything Trump does is half-assed, and intended to inflict the most damage, either by design or, more likely, by gross incompetence.  From slashing taxes, to efforts to destroy the ACA, to attempts to reverse education reforms, undo environmental policies, sell off protected lands, everything Trump touches – well I’ll quote Tony Soprano on this one – “I’m the reverse Midas; everything I touch turns to sh*t.”  That old quote is certainly apropos here.  Trump thoughtlessly ripped families apart, and to keep all those people out of sight, immediately shipped them off to seemingly random cities all over he country.  It’s easily conceivable that a family of 4 could have members in different Trump Big Box Prisons in four different states.

Trump thinks that him signing yet another executive order (which reverses his last executive order) will make all the furor go away without doing anything else.  It’s up to us to not let that happen.  There are almost 7,500 people scattered to the 4 winds with no plan to reunite them and to treat them humanely.  It’s time for us to keep the pressure on to fix this catastrophe that is completely of Trump’s own making.

There is a place for anger, and this is it.

Stay with me here…I’ve been reading with great glee all of the excerpts of Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury, Inside the Trump White House, and have so far read nothing that didn’t ring true to me.  I mean, come on – Trump is a heavily made-up, feeble minded, thin skinned, narcissistic caricature of what we all understand to be “presidential”.  Trump has none of the characteristics of a successful politician (or successful businessman for that matter); he’s volatile; he’s taken to repeating his repetitions; he lies when it’s easier to tell the truth.  He’s fake to the core.

I’ve found the firestorm around this book to be highly entertaining and some of the editorial content of the talking heads is just as much fun.  One of those is this morning’s piece in the New York Times by Michelle Goldberg titled…wait for it…Everyone in Trumpland Knows He’s an Idiot.  She writes of several anecdotes in the book about how Trump went around his handlers and unilaterally fired James Comey over the Russia investigation.  She quotes Wolff about that decision, “In presidential annals, the firing of F.B.I. director James Comey may be the most consequential move ever made by a modern president acting entirely on his own.”

But more importantly, she makes the point that Trump is wholly and totally incapable of executing the job of the presidency, and EVERYONE knows it.  His failing mind, his obsession with striking back at every perceived slight, no matter how small, and his erratic decision making are all clear evidence of his incompetence.  Dozens of staffers have enabled him, assuring themselves and each other that they can manage him, when, in fact, no one can manage him, including himself.

Best line of the piece, though, came in the summation – Goldberg says,

“Trump, Wolff’s reporting shows, has no executive function, no ability to process information or weigh consequences. Expecting him to act in the country’s interest is like demanding that your cat do the dishes.”

Now, THAT is a great bit of wordsmithing, I must say.  Oh, and I’m trying to put my hands on a copy of the book today.  It should make for great fireside reading this weekend.

Our readers who are Hillary loyalists don’t like when I write about the disaster of her campaign last year and the mess that is the Democratic Party.  Like it or not, though, the criticism is true, and I’m not the only one.  Tim Dickinson wrote a lengthy piece in Rolling Stone this last week that talks about how the party got hollowed out during the Obama years especially during Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s term which set a low watermark for corruption and plain ol’ incompetence.  Even Tim Kaine, Hillary’s running mate and former DNC chair, got into the act and was quoted in the piece saying, “That congresswoman had no idea what she was doing.”  And that was the polite criticism.  Rather than grow the party, she actually used her position for self promotion to launch a campaign to land her in House leadership.  That blew up and she dug in when even Obama tried to oust her from the job.  We all know how that story ended.

It gets worse, especially for Hillary’s campaign.  An unnamed Democratic strategist described her candidacy in blunt terms:

“And she was really surprised by how strong Trump was – and part of it was she just sucked. At a really fundamental level we gotta get people to acknowledge what a f*****g piece of sh*t her campaign was, because Donald Trump should not have won this election.”

Well, OK, then.  That’s about as blunt as it gets (even more blunt than me).  The rest of the article speaks of how Tom Perez is trying to un-fossilize the party, recruit new candidates, and resurrect the money machine that it became under Howard Dean and Barack Obama during the very successful 50 state strategy in 2006 and 2008.

However, the job is not a simple one.  During the Obama administration, Democrats lost all over the country in state and federal elections due to simple neglect (and DWS’s incompetence).  No one, including Obama, was in charge during that time, and his staff had no national plan except to get him re-elected in 2012.  There’s now a huge deficit to make up for all that neglect, and Trump is certainly leaving a huge opportunity for the Dems to hoover up if only they don’t blow it…again.

This Rolling Stone article is a sobering read, and will certainly piss off loyalists.  But truth is truth, and facts is facts. This chapter is long from over, and the sooner progressives recognize what a complete disaster 2008 to 2016 actually was, the sooner they can fix it.