Thank you for your service, Jared Kushner

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/30/opinions/jared-kushner-coronavirus-opinion-bergen/index.html

 What is most galling as the nation faces its worse crisis since World War II is how the Trump family keeps demanding recognition for their brilliant work and also our thanks for the catastrophic mess they have helped land us all in.

Case in point is Jared Kushner, who has fallen upwards throughout his life, inheriting a vast real estate empire and then making one of the worst purchases in the history of Manhattan, which was buying the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue for a then-record $1.8 billion in 2007, a lemon which was only finally taken off his hands after his father-in-law became president. 

 

 

And now, Kushner comes to Fox News, the Pravda of the Trump administration, to marvel on Wednesday that the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus is "a great success story," claiming that that "we have all the testing we need to start opening the country" and state his hope that "by July, the country's really rocking again."

This is as more than 60,000 Americans lie dead -- more than the death toll of the Vietnam War -- and more than 1 million have been confirmed to have been infected with the virus, with no end in sight. There is widespread agreement among experts that we don't have the testing capabilities to return to any semblance of normal life, and also that a second wave of infections could hit the country badly later in the year.

Republicans, It’s Too Late to Back Away From Trump

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/opinion/coronavirus-trump-republicans.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

The National Republican Senatorial Committee recently distributed a memo with guidance on how to split this political baby: When discussing the coronavirus, candidates should fully embrace the president’s efforts to shift the blame fully onto China. But — and here’s the part that caught Team Trump’s eye — “Don’t defend Trump.”

Prepared by a top party strategist, the bulk of the 57-page memo provides tips, talking points, timelines and background data geared toward making this crisis All About China. The “Short Version” summary suggests condemning China not only for causing the pandemic but also for stealing jobs, tossing religious minorities in concentration camps and flooding the United States with fentanyl. Democratic opponents are to be tarred as “soft on China” and unwilling to “stand up to the Chinese Communist Party,” they recommend, while Republicans vow to “bring our manufacturing jobs back home” and to work to punish China with sanctions.

Trump Told America’s Governors They Were On Their Own. So Maryland’s Larry Hogan Is Taking Charge

https://time.com/5829777/governors-reopening-coronavirus/

The cooperation has been crucial. Governors will tell you they’re always the officials whose leadership most directly affects people’s lives. But that’s been truer than ever in the current crisis, as Trump has been more occupied with defending his performance and casting blame than with mounting the kind of coordinated national effort that other countries’ leaders have orchestrated. While the White House has funneled some supplies to the states, Trump has disavowed responsibility for testing and equipment shortfalls and passed the buck to the governors. The result has been a kind of federalist free-for-all, with state leaders pitted against one another in bidding wars for scarce equipment, and against the President, whose very office was created to avoid such anarchy.

New York City police break up another ultra-Orthodox funeral as crowds gather

https://www.timesofisrael.com/new-york-city-police-break-up-another-ultra-orthodox-funeral-as-crowds-gather/

1 arrested; 2 days after mayor’s warning to community, NYPD issues 10 summonses at 2 synagogues in South Williamsburg for chaining doors from the inside, social distancing rules

Michael Flynn's lawyers seize on note showing how FBI official approached key interview in White House

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/29/politics/flynn-note-fbi-interview/index.html

Within hours of its release, the note sent the President and his supporters into a furor on Twitter, while criminal defense lawyers and FBI alumni said they were making too much of the agency's preparation for the Flynn interview, in which the national security adviser lied to the FBI, a crime he later admitted to in court multiple times.

In short, the snapshot of blunt wording from Priestap allowed Trump and Flynn's lawyers to revive their claims that the FBI set Flynn up. Some of Flynn's supporters called it a smoking gun. But to others familiar with the case and law enforcement, it was a Rorschach test.

But previously, the President has said he had to fire Flynn because he had also lied to Vice President Mike Pence, prompting Pence to share the lie in a TV interview.

President Trump’s testing claims fact-checked

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52493073

President Trump says the US has carried out more tests than every other country in the world combined.

The latest data shows that a total of 6,026,170 tests have been carried out in the US.

This is more than any other single country.

However, it's nowhere near as many as the rest of the world combined.

 

British Doctors Say Ventilators Purchased From China Could Kill Coronavirus Patients

https://www.newsweek.com/british-doctors-say-ventilators-purchased-china-could-kill-coronavirus-patients-1501286

Senior British doctors and medical managers have raised concerns over 250 ventilators the United Kingdom purchased from China.

If these ventilators are used in hospital, the group warns "significant patient harm, including death," according to a letter seen by NBC News.

 

Why 2020 Could Be Another False Equivalence Election

https://time.com/5826469/2020-false-equivalence-election/

President Donald Trump has an uncanny ability to project his own weaknesses onto his opponent: He’s rubber, you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off him and sticks to you. It’s a strategy that worked remarkably well against Hillary Clinton. He nicknamed her “Crooked Hillary” while his campaign was under federal investigation for ties to Russia. He reignited the debate over her husband’s sexual misconduct after multiple women came forward to accuse Trump of sexual assault, which he denies. He even accused Clinton of fomenting the ‘birther’ conspiracy theory about Barack Obama. Reminder: it was Trump who did that.

 

That doesn’t worry Republicans much. “Whether it’s a false equivalence is by nature kind of moot,” says Brown. “The way people consume information, it kind of nullifies whether it’s false or not. It becomes less a values question and more of a volume question.”

These are not exactly complicated campaign maneuvers. Trump is skilled at the age-old political trick of blowing enough smoke at his opponents so that voters assume there’s a fire there, even when he’s being consumed in his own conflagration. One Republican strategist called it “the ultimate whataboutism.” It also reflects the political rule that the best defense is a good offense. “It’s a tendency of most people in politics when they take fire to freeze and bunker,” says Brad Todd, Republican strategist and author of The Great Revolt. “President Trump understands that when you take fire you fire through it.”

Biden backers say he may be less vulnerable than Clinton was to the fog of false equivalence coming his way. Biden is a known quantity with consistently high favorability ratings since he left the Vice Presidency. Clinton had been tarred with right-wing vitriol for decades, which softened the ground for many of the attacks against her. “It cemented in voters minds a skepticism and an undercurrent and dislike towards her that Joe Biden just doesn’t have,” says Sams. “That allowed Trump’s attacks to catch on with voters in a way that I don’t think they will with Biden.”

After One Tweet To President Trump, This Man Got $69 Million From New York For Ventilators

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/after-one-tweet-to-president-trump-this-man-got-69-million

On March 27, as emergency rooms in New York and across the country began filling with coronavirus patients struggling to breathe, President Donald Trump posted on Twitter to urge Ford and General Motors to “START MAKING VENTILATORS, NOW!”

One of the thousands of replies that the tweet attracted struck an equally urgent tone: “We can supply ICU Ventilators, invasive and noninvasive. Have someone call me URGENT.”

Its author was Yaron Oren-Pines, an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley. A specialist in mobile phone technology, he currently has just 75 followers on Twitter and no apparent experience in government contracting or medical devices.

 But three days later, New York state paid Oren-Pines $69.1 million. The payment was for 1,450 ventilators — at an astonishing $47,656 per ventilator, at least triple the standard retail price of high-end models.

 

Not a single ventilator ever arrived.

Gov. Cuomo hits back at McConnell's bailout rhetoric

Fox's firing of Diamond & Silk isn't the problem. Fox's hiring of them is.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/28/politics/diamond-silk-fox-news-donald-trump/index.html

Remember that Fox News -- and Fox Nation -- are, at root, news services. They provide news -- often, yes, tinged (or more) with opinion. But news is at the heart of what Fox does.

That is not what Diamond and Silk do -- or ever have done. What they do is entertain -- and they make money off it, with a helping hand from the President. As The New York Times noted in a profile of the two women in 2018: "They also sell Trump merchandise on their website and have embarked on a speaking tour that offers fans the chance to see them live for $50 a ticket (or $150 if you would like to take a picture with them and eat hors d'oeuvres)."

 

NYC mayor sorry for Jewish funeral criticism

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52478414

In response to reports of the mass gathering of mourners, Mr de Blasio warned "the Jewish community" that police would make arrests.

The city leader was accused of anti-Semitism for his comments.

The Hasidic Jews were mourning a late rabbi at the service in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighbourhood.

"If in my passion and in my emotion I said something that was hurtful, I'm sorry about that," Mr de Blasio said.

"I have no regrets about calling out this danger and saying we're going to deal with it very, very aggressively."

Images shared online by journalists show a large gathering of people attending the funeral on Tuesday night.

 

Why so many US nurses are out of work

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52476128

And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay.

That is because American healthcare companies are looking to cut costs as they struggle to generate revenue during the coronavirus crisis.

"Nurses are being called heroes," Mariya Buxton says, clearly upset. "But I just really don't feel like a hero right now because I'm not doing my part."

Ms Buxton is a paediatric nurse in St Paul, Minnesota, but has been asked to stay at home.

At the unit at which Ms Buxton worked, and at hospitals across most of the country, medical procedures that are not deemed to be urgent have been stopped. That has meant a massive loss of income.

Trump says he won’t extend social distancing guidelines, plans to restart travel

https://www.timesofisrael.com/trump-says-he-wont-extend-social-distancing-guidelines-plans-to-restart-travel/

Kushner hails US efforts to contain pandemic as ‘a great success story,’ predicts that by July country will be ‘really rocking again;’ death toll nears 60,000