7/13/20: The rising death toll and rising number of Americans hospitalized with
COVID-19 are bad enough.
High unemployment expected
to persist until 2022.
Even if you don’t get sick, the pressing
question is what kind of economic damage you and your family might suffer. In
the last reporting period another 1.3 million workers applied for unemployment.
Damage can be found on every hand. Brooks
Brothers, founded in 1818, and famous for dressing every president
since Abraham Lincoln, has filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Barring some miracle, United
Airlines will lay off 36,000 workers in October. AMC, the largest theater chain
in the country, is trying to restructure debt, as fear of catching COVID-19 in a dark
theater strangles business. The company lost $2.2 billion in the first quarter
of this year. The college football season is in jeopardy, with each lost game
meaning lost revenue from TV rights, ticket sales and concessions. The Ivy
League has canceled all games. The Big Ten is eliminating all but contests
against conference opponents. In other pandemic-related news, 2.3 million pounds of peanuts, usually consumed by fans during
baseball season, are sitting, unnibbled in warehouses.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development warned this week that high unemployment will likely persist in the U.S. and among its other 37 members, until
2022. If the United States has a second wave of cases (and, so far, we can’t even
swim back from the first) we could be looking at an unemployment rate of 12% at the end of this year.
*
AT LEAST one American is happy today. Roger Stone is
relaxing at home, having a commutation in his pocket. He served exactly zero
days in jail, with only seven felony counts to mar his resumé.
____________________
“Unprecedented, historic corruption.”
Sen.
Mitt Romney
____________________
Sen. Mitt Romney has been one of the few Republicans to
have the courage to call Trump’s pardon for Stone what it is. “An American president commutes the sentence of
a person convicted by a jury of lying to shield that very president,’ he
tweeted. He described Trump’s
decision to keep his pal out of the slammer as “unprecedented, historic
corruption.”
Robert Mueller, whose investigation helped
bring Stone to justice, broke his silence in an editorial, explaining,
I feel compelled to respond both to broad claims that our
investigation was illegitimate and our motives were improper, and to specific
claims that Roger Stone was a victim of our office.
[When a witness lies repeatedly]…it strikes at the core of the
government’s efforts to find the truth and hold wrongdoers accountable [emphasis
added].
Attorney General Bill Barr, who has
carried water for the president through thick and thin, decided even he didn’t
want to take credit for this move. He let it be known that he had recommended the president not step in for Stone, and Stone
should go to jail. (See: 7/10/20.)
*
THE DAMAGE from the spread of the coronavirus continues to show in a multiplicity of ways. A new report finds that 5.4 million Americans have lost healthcare coverage in the last four months.
That’s more than the 3.9 million who lost coverage during the entire 2008-2009 Great Recession.
Assuming he were capable of introspection, you’d expect Trump to be feeling foolish about now. In reality, he’s incapable of anything remotely like honest self-examination. Back in June he got mad because he wanted to hold the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Trump was angry because the Democratic governor refused to assure him that he could have the huge, mask-less, non-social-distancing crowds he hankered after – just because the governor wasn’t sure that the coronavirus would be under control in August, when the convention was scheduled.
Trump kicked over the game board, like a sulky child. He’d go play in Florida, he grumbled.
Now Florida is one of the hottest hotspots in the world for disease. Suddenly, plans to hold the GOP convention in Jacksonville aren’t looking so good.
 |
Florida cases exploding. |
Whose fault is it that the coronavirus is running rampant? According to anonymous White House aides, Dr. Anthony Fauci!
A little free press digging reveals the truth. The anonymous source is Press Secretary “Birther” McEnany, who compiled a list of Fauci’s “mistakes” and supplied it to the Washington Post.
Even her list was botched. Dr. Fauci was quoted as downplaying the threat of the disease. On February 29, in an interview, she had him saying: “At this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.”
He did say that.
Only, those words were taken out of context, making it seem the doctor had led poor “Drink Bleach” Don astray. “Right now, the risk is still low, but this could change,” Dr. Fauci went on to add in an NBC News interview. “When you start to see community spread, this could change and force you to become much more attentive [emphasis added] to doing things that would protect you from spread.”
Apparently, the president stoppered his ears when Fauci said that.
McEnany denied that there was a rift between the president and the expert. Then she tried to play dumb. (She’s had a lot of practice.) She told reporters the Post had asked a specific question, and all she did was provide “a direct answer to what was a direct question.” And if that answer made Dr. Fauci look bad?
Go figure.
If you want to know how screwed up this White House and this administration and this president are, consider who now decides if Dr. Fauci can give an interview on TV. If any network should ask him to appear, requests are handled by Michael Caputo, a top spokesman at the Department of Health and Human Services. Caputo is the guy who helped Roger Stone set up a meeting with some Russian dude in May 2016, at which the dude said he had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Yeah. Caputo. Guardian of truth. (See: 7/10/20.)
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REPORTED CASES of COVID-19, July 13:
58,858.
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