You can't close Easter!

At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can't go anywhere, but you can talk about anything.

Re-enjoy the sunrise, this time with coots. The photo was taken at 6:33 a.m. — 7 minutes after the other photo I put up today.

Here's the live stream of “At Home With Farm Aid." It was Dave Matthews last I looked. Others who will be playing from home: Willie Nelson, Neil Young, and John Mellencamp. You may enjoy that. I like the home setting.

And one last extra, just to show you I got out on my mountain bike today, in a pretty place with plenty of social distancing:

"There has never been an American president as spiritually impoverished as Donald Trump...."

"... Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer.... He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.... In his daily coronavirus briefings, Trump lumbers to the podium and pulls us into his world: detached from reality, unable to feel any emotions but anger and paranoia. Each time we watch, Trump’s spiritual poverty increases our own, because for the duration of these performances, we are forced to live in the same agitated, immediate state that envelops him.... Each of these presidential therapy sessions corrodes us until the moment when the president finally shambles away in a fog of muttered slogans and paranoid sentence fragments.... We are all living with him in the moment and neglecting the thing that makes us human beings instead of mindless fish swimming in circles."

Such are the entirely subjective ruminations of Tom Nichols (author of "The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters")(in The Atlantic).

I watch the briefings every day, and my subjective experience is nothing like that. I don't feel myself dragged into soullessness or losing touch with reality.

So who's crazy here?

Trump, Nichols, and Althouse

Trump and Althouse

Trump and Nichols

Just Nichols

None of them. All 3 are sane humans, expressing themselves in their own way.

pollcode.com free polls

AND: The poll results are very clear:

"It's not racist to point out that eating bats is batshit crazy."

Says Bill Maher:



And just to put it another way...

"Scooter sharing companies like Lime and Bird, which were booming, have suffered potentially fatal blows."

From "How the Virus Transformed the Way Americans Spend Their Money" (NYT).

And health care spending is down  — because "those who conduct elective procedures, dentists and specialists not working on the coronavirus response are doing less business. Some hospitals, faced with lower revenues from canceled nonemergency work, have furloughed or cut the pay of doctors, nurses and other staff members."

"The FBI was warned sections of the controversial Steele dossier could have been part of a 'Russian disinformation campaign to denigrate U.S. foreign relations'..."

"... according to newly declassified footnotes from a government watchdog report. The December report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz examined the FBI's investigation into alleged coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia as well as the FBI's four surveillance warrants for former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.... Several footnotes in Horowitz's report were redacted, and Republican Senators Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson pushed for the declassification of four footnotes related to the Steele dossier... Footnote 350 in the IG report addresses the FBI's knowledge of Russian contacts with Steele and the potential for disinformation. Steele had 'frequent contacts with representatives for multiple Russian oligarchs, we identified reporting the Crossfire Hurricane team received from (redacted) indicating the potential for Russian disinformation influencing Steele's election reporting.'..."

Writes Catherine Herridge at CBS News.

"Why did Gov. Tony Evers, a Wisconsin Democrat, change his mind by trying to postpone the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election this week..."

"... when both he and Vice President Joe Biden had just recently said that the voting could proceed? It's really simple. Republican areas in the state had turned in many more absentee ballots than Democratic areas. This was shocking, because most people had assumed the race between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders would give Democrats a huge turnout edge. That's when Evers panicked. To cancel an election the day before the vote — after your state party realizes it might be getting outvoted in absentees — is a pretty cynical move... If Evers had canceled the voting earlier, before seeing how many absentee ballots came in from Republican areas, this would not be an issue. But he wanted to wait until the eleventh hour...."

Writes John Pudner in The Washington Examiner. By posting this, I'm not saying I agree. It's just a point of view that I would like to be seen. I really don't know why Evers did what he did.

Sunrise, 6:26.

"Seizing on new estimates of a lower-than-projected death toll, the president signaled that he wanted to start resuming business on some basis..."

"... after his current stay-at-home guidelines expire on April 30, and he announced that he would name a task force next week to develop a plan. But he also promised to listen to public health officials cautioning against a premature move to relax limits. In actuality, the decision on when and how to reopen is not entirely Mr. Trump’s to make because he never ordered it closed. The stay-at-home edicts that have kept the vast bulk of Americans indoors were issued by governors state by state. But the president did issue nonbinding guidelines urging a pause in daily life through the end of the month. And if he were to issue new guidance saying it was safe to reopen or outlining a path toward reopening, many states would most likely follow or feel pressure from their businesses and constituents to ease up on restrictions....  Lobbying groups have become more vocal about the need for the administration to create a plan for the reopening of the economy... Some business leaders have been particularly frustrated that the government is not being realistic about the economic consequences of the fight against the coronavirus.... Many experts caution that growth will be slow when it returns because people will be wary of resuming normal activities before the country has far more extensive testing. Without widespread confidence in returning to work or other public activities, any economic recovery could be tepid....  If the government tells Americans to return to normal life and infections rise again, that could wipe out consumer optimism and lead to a longer, more damaging recession...."

From "Torn Over Reopening Economy, Trump Says He Faces ‘Biggest Decision I’ve Ever Had to Make’/The president suggested he wanted to move soon, but he also promised to listen to public health officials cautioning against relaxing restrictions prematurely" (NYT).

ADDED: Here's the sentence that strikes me as terribly thought out: "And if he were to issue new guidance saying it was safe to reopen or outlining a path toward reopening, many states would most likely follow or feel pressure from their businesses and constituents to ease up on restrictions." I don't think Trump is talking about saying the whole country is "safe" and ready to "reopen." The article just got done saying that the decisions on how closed things need to be have been done by governors.

I've seen some pressure on Trump to take more one-size-fits-all, top-down actions, and he has resisted because it's a big country and conditions are different in different places. Similarly, when Trump moves toward reopening, he is, I presume, going to continue with this approach, supporting opening the places where the conditions are most amenable to returning to work. We'll ease into it, watching as we go, and proceeding with caution.

The Times says "people will be wary of resuming normal activities before the country has far more extensive testing," meaning testing to see who has the virus (or the antibodies). But another kind of testing is experimenting with opening the country back up in a gradual way, where conditions are best, observing how well it works, and moving forward learning from experience. This is the experimentation characteristic of American federalism.

"Amid a Pandemic, Voice of America Spends Your Money to Promote Foreign Propaganda."

A statement from the White House. Excerpt:

This week, VOA called China’s Wuhan lockdown a successful “model” copied by much of the world—and then tweeted out video of the Communist government’s celebratory light show marking the quarantine’s alleged end.

Even worse, while much of the U.S. media takes its lead from China, VOA went one step further: It created graphics with Communist government statistics to compare China’s Coronavirus death toll to America’s. As intelligence experts point out, there is simply no way to verify the accuracy of China’s numbers.

The Coronavirus story is just one example of this pattern. Last year, VOA helped highlight the Twitter feed of Iran Foreign Minister Javad Zarif while he was issuing threats against the U.S. and sharing Russian anti-U.S. propaganda videos.

“VOA will represent America,” its guiding Charter reads. And for years after its founding during World War II, VOA served that mission by promoting freedom and democracy across the world for audiences who longed for both.

Here's the WaPo article about it: "White House attacks Voice of America, claiming it promoted Chinese propaganda."

At the Morning Moon Café...

... talk about whatever you like.

“The safety is the rarest, most difficult scoring play in the game. So why is it worth only 2 points?”

Yes, that’s what I want to know!

The argument that a safety should score 11 points, here, at FiveThirtyEight.

If he's American, why are you calling him "an Asian man."

You know, it's so dumb to accuse Trump of political crimes like this and to fail to make sure you're not committing the same damned crime you want us to be so outraged about it. The genius here is Greg Sargent at WaPo:

President Trump’s new campaign ad attacking Joe Biden as soft on China and coronavirus is drawing attention for its ugly xenophobia. As many have noted, in order to portray Biden as weak and overly deferential toward China — and, by extension, toward coronavirus — the ad shows Biden bowing to an Asian man with Chinese flags in the background.

The man turns out to be American.

Asian man!! He's American!

I've already talked about that ad — here, in a post that went up at 6:00 a.m. — so I'm not going into any more detail. I just wanted to laugh at Greg Sargent.

"In over a dozen states, marijuana dispensaries and pot shops have been deemed essential services and remain open through lockdowns..."

"... and illegal deliveries are also on the rise. This worries medical experts, who say smoking and vaping damage the lungs, worsening symptoms and helping to spread the virus.... 'Our business doubled: Every day is a Friday,' said the owner of Jack Flash, a[n illegal] cannabis delivery service in New York City... Buyers must retrieve their product and complete the transaction in the car, the owner said. 'Some people now don’t want to get in the car,' he said. 'Obviously we don’t want to do a hand to hand out the window, it just looks crazy.'... 'Well, I don’t want to touch anything, I don’t want to come out,' the owner of Jack Flash said, mimicking his customers. 'Then I say, "Well, then you don’t want pot."'... 'I have done a couple where I’ve left it in their mailbox and they’ve left money in the mailbox,' the owner said. 'I’ve done two or three like that.' Some deliveries have been made using the 'hand out the window' method, but Jack Flash’s owner has warned his staff not to get arrested.... 'That’s kind of a death sentence right now,' he said."

From "Staying Safe While Delivering Weed in the Pandemic/Legal and illegal cannabis sales have spiked, even though doctors warn that smoking and vaping worsen symptoms and spread. These businesses face a new problem: keeping employees safe" (NYT).

Weeping willow sunrise.

Photo take at 6:42 a.m. — "actual" sunrise time, 6:24.

"America has a history of settler colonization and capitalism that ruthlessly exploited natural resources and people, typically the poor, the migratory, the black and the brown...."

"What this crisis has revealed is that, while almost all of us can become vulnerable — even corporations and the wealthy — our government prioritizes the protection of the least vulnerable. If this was a classic Hollywood narrative, the exceptionally American superhero, reluctant and wavering in the first act, would make the right choice at this turning point. The evil Covid-19 would be conquered, and order would be restored to a society that would look just as it did before the villain emerged. But if our society looks the same after the defeat of Covid-19, it will be a Pyrrhic victory. We can expect a sequel, and not just one sequel, but many, until we reach the finale: climate catastrophe. If our fumbling of the coronavirus is a preview of how the United States will handle that disaster, then we are doomed."

Writes Viet Thanh Nguyen in "The Ideas That Won’t Survive the Coronavirus/Covid-19 is killing off the myth that we are the greatest country on earth" (NYT).