Crooked Media - What A Day: The Age of Flynnocence

One of President Trump’s personal valets has tested positive for coronavirus, leading Trump to announce that the White House will begin testing himself and high-level officials daily, rather than weekly. That change comes a day after White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany called the idea that all Americans need to be tested “nonsensical,” because we’d all just need to be tested...daily. Got it.
 

• Tump will listen to science if it keeps him personally safe, but when it starts slowing down his agenda, science can hit the road. The Trump administration has shelved a set of guidelines drawn up by CDC experts, which contained detailed advice for public authorities on how and when to reopen businesses and public places during the outbreak. The guidelines were supposed to be published last Friday, but the White House rejected them as too prescriptive, and told the CDC to revise them. 
   
• When Trump isn’t burying advice from experts in a hastily dug hole on the South Lawn, he’s simply ignoring it. One key study the administration has consulted, as it pushes workers into meatpacking plants and customers back into shopping districts, projects that individual counties could see hundreds, if not over a thousand, new coronavirus cases each day by August 1 if officials move too aggressively to reopen mid-May. That’s the case in both rural and urban communities. According to the study, waiting to ease social distancing restrictions until June 1 could reduce infections by hundreds of thousands nationwide. Trump would prefer to call Americans “warriors” and let the bodies pile up. 
   
• Predictably, some Republican governors are following Trump’s lead. On Monday night, just hours after Gov. Doug Ducey (R-AZ) announced plans to reopen Arizona’s economy, his administration shut down the work of a team of academic experts who projected that the peak of Arizona’s outbreak is still two weeks away, undermining Ducey’s claim that the state was “headed in the right direction.” Rather than incorporate their data into political decision-making, the Arizona health department abruptly suspended the modeling work entirely. To make the timing even more suspicious, this went down the night before Trump visited the state.

Then there are the governors who acknowledge the troubling projections, and announce that they don’t care.
 

• Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) told lawmakers on a Friday conference call that reopening the state will indeed lead to a spike in coronavirus cases, but that the goal was never "to get transmission of COVID-19 down to zero." And at the end of the day, what’s the difference between a few cases and tens of thousands? It’s all just numbers! Abbott has changed his mind about waiting for preliminary data before allowing more businesses to reopen, ignoring warnings about Texas’s rising caseload and woefully inadequate testing capacity.
   
• A new analysis of smartphone data highlights why early, uncoordinated reopenings are so dangerous. One week after Georgia allowed restaurants, hair salons, and other businesses to reopen, an additional 62,440 visitors flocked in daily, mostly from nearby states where those businesses were still closed. By giving people a reason to travel, Georgia both further exposed its own residents, and increased the risk of fueling outbreaks in neighboring states. This was extremely predictable. 
   

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A Trump ally and top Republican fundraiser has been named to serve as the new postmaster general. That hands Trump a new level of influence at the Postal Service, which he’s been railing against to dramatically raise its fees for package deliveries (primarily to stick it to Amazon, which he hates because he hates Jeff Bezos because Bezos also owns the Washington Post). Louis DeJoy was confirmed by the Postal Service’s board of governors, which is composed of three Republicans and one Democrat, after another Democrat resigned last week over Treasury Department meddling in the agency. DeJoy will head into the job with zero experience at the Postal Service, but with tons of experience donating gobs of money to Trump and Republican causes.

On the other side of the fight, a coalition of online retailers (including Amazon) plans to spend $2 million on ads opposing Trump’s demand for price hikes at USPS, in an effort to drum up Republican resistance, and get GOP lawmakers on board with a $25 billion rescue package.

• The Justice Department has moved to drop charges against former national security advisor Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents during the Russia investigation. Remember when Attorney General Bill Barr went on TV and claimed to be sick and tired of Trump tweeting about politically sensitive cases, because it created the ~appearance~ of political interference? Hahahaha.
   
• The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to block the release of grand jury material from the Russia investigation, which the House has been seeking since before the formal start of the impeachment proceedings. Makes you wonder if they let Flynn off because he’s “innocent” and the victim of a “hoax” or if they’re just trying to “buy” his continued “silence.” 
   
• Another 3.2 million workers filed for jobless benefits last week, bringing the known unemployment total over the last seven weeks to 33.5 million. 
   
• Trump has vetoed the Iran War Powers resolution, a bipartisan effort to prevent Trump from using military force against Iran without congressional approval. Trump called it a “very insulting resolution” and said the measure was (are you ready) “based on misunderstandings of facts and law.” 
   
• The Supreme Court overturned the convictions of two of Chris Christie’s political allies in the “Bridgegate” case, finding that because their vengeful plot to back up traffic on the George Washington Bridge wasn’t to obtain money or property, they couldn’t have violated the federal statute in question.
   
• The State Department has continued to turn over thousands of pages of records to Republican senators investigating the Bidens and Ukraine, while ignoring document requests from Democrats, according to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
   
• Three workers at an Oklahoma City McDonald’s were injured when a customer opened fire on the staff, after being told to leave because the dining area was closed due to coronavirus restrictions.
   
• The IRS erroneously sent some stimulus checks to dead people, and would like them back, please.
   
• JetBlue did a flyover of New York City to honor health-care workers this evening, because if there’s one thing stressed New Yorkers love, it’s the sound of low-flying passenger jets.
   
• Melania Trump’s “Be Best” initiative marked its second anniversary today, having accomplished few of the goals announced at its first anniversary. Even the Be Best-laid plans, etc.

New research indicates that travel from New York City seeded a wave of outbreaks across the country. Early analysis of genetic samples suggests that more infections across the country came from a mutation of the virus associated with New York City’s outbreak than the mutation associated with Washington state’s. That data, combined with travel histories of infected people and modeling by infectious disease experts, has produced the finding that a wave of infections from New York swept across much of the country before the city implemented social distancing restrictions.

The data is pretty preliminary: Geneticists have only sequenced a tiny fraction of infections, and some of the infections attributed to the “New York” line could have been seeded by international travelers. But scientists seem to agree that the spread from New York City looks to have started in early March, and could have been blunted if New York’s political leaders had taken aggressive action earlier.

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A new study found that nearly everyone who recovers from the coronavirus carries antibodies, which typically confer some level of immunity.

Apple has pledged to give $10 million to COPAN Diagnostics, to help vastly scale up its production of COVID-19 testing kits.

The FDA has granted emergency use authorization to a new CRISPR-based test that delivers results in just one hour.

High schools across the country are finding creative ways to celebrate their graduating seniors.