Crooked Media - What A Day: Council to Re-joken America

The U.S. has overtaken Italy as the country with the highest coronavirus death toll in the world, and all 50 states are under a disaster declaration for the first time in history, a fact that President Trump actually bragged about. That’s the thing about historic milestones: All of them are good!
 

• Dr. Anthony Fauci is once again the target of a conservative pitchfork mob, after the New York Times published an investigation of the litany of warnings and advice that Trump ignored as the coronavirus crisis began. On CNN Sunday, Fauci seemed to confirm the article’s finding that he and other officials advocated for social-distancing guidelines in February, but were met with political pushback, and acknowledged that if mitigation efforts had started sooner, more lives could have been saved. The article pissed off Trump, who spent the weekend asking associates what they thought of Fauci, and on Sunday night retweeted a post calling for him to be fired. The White House said today that Trump will not fire Fauci, and that we are all crazy for speculating so based purely on Trump’s own words and actions.
   
• Trump remains bent on reopening the economy at the end of the month, and falsely claimed today that he is the ultimate arbiter of when that happens, not governors and mayors across the country. While Trump doesn’t have the authority to actually overrule state- or city-wide stay-at-home orders, Trump wouldn't hesitate to punish citizens of states whose governors didn't comply, and prematurely lifting federal isolation guidelines would be disastrous, since some GOP governors will inevitably respond by flinging open their water parks. The good news is, Trump has unveiled his “Council to Re-open America,” and it is a real who’s-who of “people you aren’t positive would know when to reopen a microwave.” Joe Biden has written his own plan for how to reopen the country, which we can only hope Jared Kushner decides to plagiarize. 
   
• Kushner’s original ideas haven’t gotten us very far, if you can believe it. A senior government official involved in the coronavirus response told NBC News, “Jared and his friends decided they were going to do their thing. It cost weeks.” The frat-boy task force brushed aside federal emergency management response teams who knew what they were doing, and reached out to their own contacts instead. Throughout, the administration has made decisions about medical supply contracts that favor big corporations over smaller vendors with proven track records of delivering in emergencies. 

The administration’s distribution of emergency funding has been just as messy.
 

• The CARES Act gave the Department of Health and Human Services wide rein to distribute $100 billion in grants to hospitals and doctors, and HHS promptly fucked it up. Rather than target the funds geographically to places where caseloads have skyrocketed, HHS allocated the first $30 billion to hospitals based on their past Medicare billings. As a result, states like Minnesota, Nebraska, and Montana have received more than $300,000 per reported COVID-19 case, while New York has received only $12,000.
   
• On the hopeful front, Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) said today that he believes “the worst is over, if we continue to be smart.” Cuomo, along with the governors of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Delaware, said they would work together on a plan for reopening the area’s economy. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are standing their ground on the administration’s plan to expand of small business loans, and won’t approve it without additional funding for hospitals, state and local governments, and food-stamp recipients.

Trump has threatened to withhold critical aid to states whose governors criticize his response, and he now responds to any whiff of criticism from one of his top public-health experts with signals that he may be purged. Trump is an ouroboros destroying the next phase of his response by throwing a tantrum about his failed last phase, which is exactly what you want to see in a public-health crisis that will threaten lives for months to come.

Now that we have a Democratic nominee, it’s the perfect time to revisit The Wilderness. Jon Favreau interviewed voters, strategists, organizers, and candidates in battleground states to find out what it will take to beat Donald Trump. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts → 

Nearly 30 percent of Americans believe a conspiracy theory about where the coronavirus came from. A recent Pew study found that almost a third of Americans falsely believe COVID-19 was invented by humans in a laboratory, and almost a quarter of respondents thought humans had created COVID-19 intentionally. At the moment, experts believe that the virus came to humans from bats, through an unknown intermediary animal. The widespread, false belief seems to stem from a conspiracy theory, promoted aggressively by right-wing media figures, that the virus spread to humans in a Chinese lab, and may or may not have been created there. Around 70 percent of the people Pew surveyed said they felt the media had been covering the coronavirus “very well” or “somewhat well”; that sentiment, combined with the prevalence of this false belief, suggests the media isn’t doing enough to deliver accurate information about the pandemic.

• Jill Karofsky, the liberal candidate for the Wisconsin supreme court, has defeated GOP-appointed Justice Dan Kelly, despite a concerted GOP effort to suppress turnout by forcing people to vote in person amid plague conditions. Her victory most likely means that there won’t be enough votes on the court to uphold a right-wing effort to purge 200,000 Wisconsin voters from the rolls before the presidential election.
   
• Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden for president, in a split-screen livestream appearance this morning: “We need you in the White House, and I will do all that I can to make that happen.”
   
• British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested negative for the coronavirus after leaving the hospital. Johnson continues to recover at home. 
   
• A sailor from the USS Theodore Roosevelt who was admitted to the ICU last week has died of coronavirus-related complications. That marks the first coronavirus-related death among the crew of the carrier, after Capt. Brett Crozier was fired for pleading for help.
   
• OPEC+ reached an agreement to cut global oil production by nearly a tenth. President Deals got Mexico to agree by saying the U.S. will make up the financial difference, because ultimately making Mexico pay for the wall is less important than a deal that benefits oil executives and makes your gas more expensive.
   
• The New York Times examined Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden and did not find corroborating details from former Biden staff members. Two former Senate office interns did recall that Reade had abruptly stopped supervising them—Reade said her supervising duties were taken away after she filed a written complaint. 
   
• Amazon has implemented a waitlist for new grocery-delivery customers, due to steep demand. Amazon will hire 75,000 more workers to keep up, in addition to the 100,000 employees it’s hired in recent weeks. 
   
• A growing list of shutdowns at meat-producing plants is threatening the country’s meat supply. Another big step forward for the “eat the rich” lobby.
   
• A series of tornadoes in the south killed 21 people and knocked out power to 1.3 million on Sunday. Gov. Tate Reeves (R-MS) said the storms in his state were the worst to strike in a decade. 
   
• If you’ve been feeling (understandably) stressed, take comfort in the fact that you are not this 64-year-old man who got peer-pressured into taking a flight on a military jet, and accidentally ejected himself. (If you are this man, take comfort that you are on the ground now?)

The Supreme Court will hear several important cases over the phone next month, including the case that will determine the validity of subpoenas directed to third parties for President Trump’s financial documents. The Court will also hear telephoned oral arguments in major cases concerning the Trump administration’s attempt to weaken the “contraceptive mandate” in the Affordable Care Act, and “faithless electors” in the Electoral College. For the first time, those oral arguments will be available for live audio broadcast. About half of the cases the Court was scheduled to hear in March or April have been postponed until the fall term.

Los Angeles County has launched a large-scale antibody testing study.

When We All Vote, a voter initiative led by Michelle Obama, has backed the expansion of vote-by-mail and early voting, and will encourage Americans to lobby for those measures.

Gov. Ralph Northam (D-VA) has signed legislation that establishes Election Day as a holiday. The law also strikes down a voter-ID requirement and expands early voting.

The VA hospital system in Los Angeles, CA, has implemented new PPE policies after employees told Buzzfeed they had been instructed to re-use surgical masks. 

Bill Simmons has pledged to donate $100,000 to World Central Kitchen, and is using The Ringer to fundraise an additional $250,000.

Pitbull has released a new song to raise money for coronavirus relief efforts. Mr. Worldwide, rising to meet this global moment.