With his poll numbers dropping, President Trump says he’ll restrict immigration to battle the coronavirus, creating confusion about his plan.
— Read on www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-21/trump-restrict-immigration-coronavirus
All posts by nedhamson
Wisconsin Republicans file lawsuit challenging coronavirus stay-at-home order
Don’t even care if they get blood on their hands! They are criminals.
Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against Democratic Governor Tony Evers, challenging his stay-at-home order to contain the coronavirus outbreak as the issue of when to re-open state economies has become increasingly political.
U.S. attorney general won’t rule out legal action over state coronavirus measures
Shut it and stay at home. Not even the Supremes will stand behind harassing states!
U.S. Attorney General William Barr waded further into a debate over governors’ stay-at-home orders meant to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, saying he would not rule out legal action against states if he thought their actions infringed civil liberties.
Netanyahu finally gets the annexation government he’s been waiting for
Sad day for Palestine and Israel.

After a year of political deadlock, Netanyahu forms a new governing coalition that prioritizes annexing of the West Bank above all else — including the fight against the coronavirus.
The post Netanyahu finally gets the annexation government he’s been waiting for appeared first on +972 Magazine.
F.D.A. Authorizes First In-Home Test for Coronavirus – The New York Times
The test, sold by LabCorp, would first be made available to health care and other front-line workers, the company said.
Opinion | Gretchen Whitmer: My Gut-Wrenching Coronavirus Choices – The New York Times
The actions Republican and Democratic governors have taken have been done to protect families from the spread of the coronavirus.
Maryland obtains 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea | World news | The Guardian
“The administration is trying to ramp up testing,” the governor said in an earlier CNN interview. “But to try to push this off, to say the governors have plenty of testing and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren’t doing our jobs, is just absolutely false.”
Source: Maryland obtains 500,000 coronavirus tests from South Korea | World news | The Guardian
IVF and low-risk elective surgery to begin again as National Cabinet ditches coronavirus ban – ABC News
Scott Morrison says elective surgeries, including IVF, joint replacement, cataracts, breast reconstruction and dental procedures, can begin again after the Anzac Day long weekend.
— Read on mobile.abc.net.au/news/2020-04-21/coroanvirus-national-cabinet-elective-surgery-ivf-to-resume/12168770
And if new spikes in infections and deaths result, what then?
Trump Extorting Governors to Kill Their Own Citizens

Democrats have been trying to get money for state and local governments in the next round of relief spending. Trump (like congressional Republicans) is opposed because he wants to coerce states into engaging in the same kind of homicidal mania Brian Kemp is engaging in:
President Trump’s current pandemic strategy — emphasize current; like the cliché about the weather, if you don’t like it, wait a few hours — is a baffling knot of contradictions. He is hurling all responsibility to state governments, leaving it to them to devise effective tests and to decide when to relax social distancing.
At the same time, he is starving them of the resources to handle the job. And even as Trump hides behind a policy of deference to governors, he is goading right-wing protesters to force their hand. Trump is “saying things that seem contradictory,” as the New York Times puts it, “like pledging to work with governors and then urging people to ‘liberate’ their states, and leaving it to his audiences to hear what they want to hear in his words.”
Yet there does appear to be a strategy here. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday afternoon that Trump has “asked White House aides for economic response plans that would allow him to take credit for successes while offering enough flexibility to assign fault for any failures to others.” Trump’s seemingly paradoxical stance is an attempt to hoard credit and shirk risk, straddling the demands of his business allies with the pleas of his public-health advisers. On the surface, he is deferring responsibility and blame to the governors. Just below the surface, he is coercing them to resume economic activity as fast as possible, regardless of what public-health officials say.
Trump’s plan to coerce the states into reopening has at least three discernible elements. The first is, or was, the formation of a task force to reopen the country. The purpose of the council was to give Trump cover. The council would prod governors to reopen businesses, and because it would be seen as coming from the business community, Trump himself would not bear the blame for future outbreaks that might result. As the Washington Post reported last week, “Trump’s advisers are trying to shield the president from political accountability should his move to reopen the economy prove premature and result in lost lives, and so they are trying to mobilize business executives, economists and other prominent figures to buy into the eventual White House plan, so that if it does not work, the blame can be shared broadly, according to two former administration officials familiar with the efforts.” (In part because its purpose was so naked, the task force seems to have collapsed.)
The second element is the mobilization of protests. The appearance of flag-waving and sometimes gun-toting demonstrators in a handful of state capitols this weekend seems to have come as a shock to the news media, but Trump’s allies signaled this was coming. Last Monday, Stephen Moore, a right-wing pseudo-economist and close Trump ally who has spent weeks pushing back on public-health guidelines, was quoted in the press saying, “In the next two weeks, you’ll see protests in the streets of conservatives; you’ll see a big pushback against the lockdown in some states.”
Even on its own terms, this isn’t going to work — there aren’t enough people willing to risk horrible death so they can see X Men v. Jar Jar Binks IV on the big screen for this to actually save the economy, and the inevitable death spikes will hang on Trump. But when you have a president whose time horizon doesn’t stretch beyond the next segment of Fox and Friends on the DVR this is what happens.
Coronavirus latest: Trump says ‘WHO tried to cover up for China’
Flat out lie! US President Donald Trump lashed out at WHO and said top Democrats “should have been looking into China” instead of his impeachment during the early stages of the coronavirus outbreak. Follow DW for the latest.
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