County Supervisors Say No to Trumpanistas 'Let’s Reopen' Ploy
On Tuesday, the sane members of the San Diego County Board of Supervisors voted down a motion by Kristin Gaspar and Jim Desmond to reopen businesses by May 1st.
Supervisors Nathan Fletcher, Greg Cox and Dianne Jacob all turned thumbs down to the proposal, which would have tasked county staff to prepare guidelines for beaches, parks, golf courses, gyms, hair salons, and restaurants, allowing a May 1st start date.
Following the vote Supervisor Fletcher issued a statement saying:
“We all want to open things back up, but we have to exercise caution and ensure our actions are guided by the facts presented to us and advice from public health experts not arbitrary dates decided by Supervisors Desmond and Gaspar.”
KUSI and the local GOP faux news organ both publicized a website effort by Desmond to get business owners to agitate for reopening.
https://twitter.com/TrumpGrill/status/1252691643779579904?s=20
It’s no small coincidence that this political push comes in tandem with guns rights, anti-vaxxers, and Trump cultists efforts at staging demonstrations around the country.
Faced with increasing evidence of his inability to run a government during a crisis, the President of the United States has taken to suggesting those calling for more testing are part of a plot against him.
Many Republican leaders have heard and are heeding president Trump’s call to reopen the country. Attorney General Bill Barr let it be known today that the DOJ will look into taking action against the Governors of states they deem to be slow in dropping restriction limits on activity.
The $484 billion legislation moving through congress this week does not include funding for states and cities.
President Trump hasn’t been shy about admitting he wants to use any potential bailout as leverage to get states to relax coronavirus measures.
While no state has met the federal guideline of 14 days of declining cases before reopening could be considered, that hasn’t stopped Governors in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Texas from walking back social distancing restrictions in place because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Here's Dana Milbank via the Washington Post:
Whether you’re going to heaven or hell, the old joke goes, you’ll have to change planes in Atlanta.
But Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is proposing to offer a new nonstop service to the Great Beyond: He has a bold plan to turn his state into the place to die.
Kemp, a Republican and an ally of President Trump, just called for the reopening within days of his state’s gyms, fitness centers, bowling alleys, body-art studios, barbers, nail salons, cosmetologists, aestheticians, beauty schools, massage therapists, theaters, private social clubs and dine-in restaurants.
Nearly 60% of American voters are worried that lifting restrictions on public behavior too soon will lead to a spike in coronavirus cases and deaths.
According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 58% of registered voters expressed concern about a loosening of restrictions, compared with 32% who worried that restrictions would stay in place for too long. Three percent said they were concerned about both scenarios.
Older Americans, typically a group that votes more conservatively, have broken sharply with President Donald Trump on his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Morning Consult tracked surveys showing that people older than 65 strongly believe — by a 6-to-1 margin — that the government should focus more on addressing the spread of coronavirus than on restarting the economy.
The problem for Republican is simple; the longer it takes to “get back to normal,” the more people are going to realize that the old normal wasn’t that great. An economy based on worship of the marketplace is failing, and they’d prefer voters didn’t think too hard about what that really means.
The message here is that Republicans are willing to kill to win an election in November, and they are trying to convince the American people that their lives aren’t as important as Trump winning a second term.
Then there’s also the not-so-little problem of President Trump’s miracle COVID-19 cure, namely the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, failing to deliver results. You may have noticed he’s stopped promoting the drug during his afternoon tantrums.
Veterans hospitals, who jumped on board with using the drug, are now reporting more deaths among coronavirus patients given hydroxychloroquine than those in standard care. Brazilian researchers recently halted a study on the drug’s effectiveness after 11 of 81 patients died from side effects induced by the medicine.
As I was writing this, news broke about a panel of experts convened by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases recommending against doctors using a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin for the treatment of COVID-19 patients because of potential toxicities.
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Does anybody think it’s coincidence that the President announced a (still being drafted) policy stopping virtually all immigration on Hitler’s birthday?
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Finally, some words about reopening from a much longer (and terrific) piece by George Packer at the Atlantic:
The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.
We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices.
We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.
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Lead image: National Guard