COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden volunteers to prepare food boxes for homeless and vulnerable people amid concerns as the country takes the least restrictive approach in Europe to fighting COVID-19

• Princess Victoria of Sweden, 42, helped with food for vulnerable populations
• Royal worked with charity Stockholms Stadsmission as lost elderly volunteers
• Sweden has not introduced lockdown on population to curb COVID-19 spread
• Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, has urged Swedes to be responsible  

By CLAIRE TOUREILLE FOR MAILONLINE 2 April 2020

Meghan Markle has 'always dreamt of living the Hollywood lifestyle' and 'star-struck' Prince Harry's arm 'didn't need to be twisted', source claims

• Meghan Markle always had dreams of living the Hollywood lifestyle, an insider claiming to be a lifelong friend has said
• The Duchess of Sussex, 38,  has relocated to LA with Prince Harry, 35, and their son Archie, 11 months, 
• Actress reportedly always keen on living among the A-listers and earn herself
• Harry was reportedly so 'smitten' he was open to relocating, having his own 'fascination' with movie stars 

 By MAIL ONLINE REPORTER PUBLISHED:  2 April 2020

Trump’s new reporter-foe says he’s backtracking to save himself after downplaying the worst crisis in recent history

April 2, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


During an MSNBC panel discussion, President Donald Trump’s latest reporter-foe, Yamiche Alcindor of PBS, explained that it’s clear he’s backtracking after he downplayed the coronavirus crisis.

The president’s greatest foe in the press room was once CNN’s Jim Acosta, but as the PBS reporter quotes Trump’s own words back to him, he’s twice singled her out, calling her question “nasty” and referring to her and a fellow African American reporter “you people.”

MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace said that referring back to Trump’s words downplaying the crisis have become his latest emotional triggers.

“I think the president in some ways is having to backtrack on some of the misleading information that was put out there,” Alcindor said.

Trump has lately decided to blame healthcare workers for the coronavirus crisis, alleging that they are somehow selling masks and ventilators “out the back door.” Or questioning their need for protective equipment.

“Dr. Wen made a great point, which is that we can’t build new doctors and nurses and health care professionals,” continued Alcindor. “But what the president was doing was openly questioning whether or not what they said they needed they actually needed. That goes for a tweet today where you point out, Nicolle, that he’s talking about insatiable appetites and some are complainers when the people we’re hearing from are emergency room doctors, nurses.”

Trump is likely getting this information from son-in-law Jared Kushner, who said in one meeting that he knows better about what hospitals need than the doctors on the ground do because he’s doing the math from his White House office, Vanity Fair reported.

“I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,” Kushner said, according to a person present at the meeting.

“The president has to deal with the fact that very early on he was saying this was like the flu and then yesterday and a few days ago decided to say, ‘it’s worse than the flu, it’s vicious,'” Alcindor recalled. “I think what the president is really dealing with is the fact that he was trying to downplay this virus and hope for the best and he said he was trying to be positive in his description. But at the end of the day he downplayed the worst health care and economic crisis Americans have faced and he has to deal with that every day as he tries to now get people to really believe that he’s telling them the truth this time around.”

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GOP’s separatist movement exposed

April 2, 2020 By John Stoehr, The Editorial Board- Commentary

COMMENTARY IS A CONSERVATIVE JEWISH RIGHT WING MONTHLY

I said during Donald Trump’s impeachment trial that the Republicans were acting less like a party and more like a separatist movement. A Republican president who breaks the law, as Trump did when he blocked congressionally appropriated aid to Ukraine, is not only above it; he is it. A law-breaking Democratic president, on the other hand, “deserves the full-force of Congressional investigation, prosecution and removal.”

The common view is that the Republicans are so partisan they are willing to follow Trump to hell. But that explanation is unsatisfying. Partisanship is one thing. Surrendering to the enemy is another. That, to me, explains why Ted Cruz said, “If we call John Bolton, I promise you, we are calling Hunter Biden.” Cruz isn’t voicing ordinary partisanship so much as the political desperation of a suicide bomber.

I said yesterday the Republican Party is best understood as an insurrection. Perhaps “separatist movement” is a better phrase. That would communicate the binary thinking of the Republican value system. There are two, separate but not equal.

I think that theory holds up now that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Many Republicans still behave as if the virus that has now killed 5,000 Americans is part of a secret conspiracy to bring down Trump. Some GOP governors behave as if doing the right thing (shutting down state economies) is a sign of disloyalty. The president himself still behaves as if now’s a good time to reward friends and punish enemies

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board

One thousand Americans died Wednesday. One thousand more could die today. Six and a half million filed for unemployment insurance benefits in one week, on top of 3.3 million last week. Yet leading Republicans, like Senator Ron Johnson, are urging people to go back to work. Yet leading Republicans, like Senator Tom Cotton, are calling for revenge on China. All the while, Trump appears poised to divvy up the spoils of last week’s passage of the $2 trillion economic stimulus so friendly states like Florida get all the help they need while unfriendly states like New York get jack.

The legislation, called the CARES Act, sets aside half a trillion dollars in corporate loans. (That’s on top of $4 trillion in unlimited “quantitative easing” and direct borrowing by and from the Fed.) A provision requires the president to designate an inspector general to oversee accountability of the fund. But in a signing statement, the president said he will do no such thing. After all, acquittal means a president is no longer constitutionally bound to take care that the law is faithfully executed. Well, a GOP president, anyway. Separate but not equal means Democrats go to the wall.

The GOP is acting like a separatist movement.

The rich get richer. The rest get whatever’s coming to them.

Too much? I don’t see why. This state of affairs has been crescendoing for some time. I had occasion recently to reread Sam Tanenhaus’s canonical piece in The New Republic. Published more than a decade ago, parts of “Conservatism Is Dead” read like they were written last month. Here’s how the former New York Times Book Review editor characterized the debate among conservatives in the years after World War II:

On one side are those who have upheld the Burkean ideal of replenishing civil society by adjusting to changing conditions. On the other are those committed to a revanchist counterrevolution, the restoration of America’s pre-welfare state ancien regime. And, time and again, the counterrevolutionaries have won. The result is that modern American conservatism has dedicated itself not to fortifying and replenishing civil society but rather to weakening it through a politics of civil warfare (my stress).

What has been the target of such a strategy? Well, everything these “revanchist counterrevolutionaries” were against, Tanenhaus said in plain English: “Many have observed that movement politics most clearly defines itself not by what it yearns to conserve but by what it longs to destroy—‘statist’ social programs; ‘socialized medicine’; ‘big labor’; ‘activist’ Supreme Court justices, the ‘media elite’; “tenured radicals” on university faculties; “experts” in and out of government (again, my stress).

What did they stand for? Tanenhaus said “movement conservatives” always struggled with that question. But if Trump’s election is any indication—if Trump’s acquittal is any indication—conservatives, such as they are, no longer struggle. Why bother? To be against “the enemy” is enough, even if the enemy is American civil society itself.

To be sure, as Michael Harriot reminds us, that enemy has been Americans on the margins of civil society, specifically Americans of color. The margins are growing, though. Unemployment numbers are worse than they were in the Great Depression. Americans might die from the novel coronavirus in greater numbers than all the men who died fighting in World War II. In normal times, white Americans might not have noticed the Republican Party’s separatist movement. Normal times are history now.


Here’s how Christian Nationalists have shaped the federal government’s response to coronavirus

April 2, 2020 By Matthew Chapman


On Thursday, appearing on the Slate radio show “The Gist” with Mike Pesca, journalist Catherine Stewart outlined some of the ways the Christian Right is responsible for the federal government’s disastrous response to coronavirus.

“The coronavirus pandemic is real wrath-of-God type stuff, isn’t it?” said Pesca. “Well, there are some people who are waiting for this, who are ready for this, and who, quite scarily, have been tasked with the response.”

“It’s a complex question, and I think that Christian Nationalism, which is what we’re dealing with here, is not a religion,” said Stewart. “Many evangelicals are doing very positive things, many religious people are doing a lot of positive things in this situation with the coronavirus. But Christian Nationalism is not a religion, it’s a political ideology that cloaks itself in religious rhetoric. And it’s a movement that put Trump in power.”

“So there are a number of ways in which the movement bears some responsibility for the current incompetence in our national response,” continued Stewart. “First and foremost, the movement promotes an anti-science culture that rejects the evidence of science and rejects expertise and rejects critical thinking, and that has obviously contributed to our inability collectively to address this crisis in an evidence-based fashion. Misinformation is rife in those hyper-conservative and highly politicized religious communities that were all in for Trump.”

“I think another really important point that’s become incredibly obvious right now is that we have in our society a poorly developed collective infrastructure, and that’s a consequence of decades of right-wing economic policy,” said Stewart. “Remember, its representatives are constantly bashing government, demonizing it, some are even saying, you know, they call food stamps un-Biblical, things like that. So that really makes it hard to have a really strong, solid collective response.”

You can listen to the whole show here.

BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL

 A president unfit for a pandemic
Much of the suffering and death coming was preventable. The president has blood on his hands.
By The Editorial Board,Updated March 30, 2020

The president has made grave errors in addressing the coronavirus outbreak. Come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost and the suffering endured.

ALEX BRANDON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

“Things fall apart; the center cannot hold,” wrote W.B. Yeats in 1919. A century later, it’s clear: The epicenter cannot hold. Catastrophic decisions in the White House have doomed the world’s richest country to a season of untold suffering.

The United States, long a beacon of scientific progress and medical innovation with its world-class research institutions and hospitals, is now the hub of a global pandemic that has infected at least 745,000 people and already claimed more than 35,000 lives worldwide. Now that the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the United States — more than 140,000 — has surpassed that of any other nation, Americans are consigned for the coming weeks to watching the illness fell family members and friends, and to fearing for their own fate as they watch death tolls rise.

While the spread of the novel coronavirus has been aggressive around the world, much of the profound impact it will have here in the United States was preventable. As the American public braces itself for the worst of this crisis, it’s worth remembering that the reach of the virus here is not attributable to an act of God or a foreign invasion, but a colossal failure of leadership.

RELATED: The US now has more confirmed cases of coronavirus than any other country. Here’s how we got there

The outbreak that began in China demanded a White House that could act swiftly and competently to protect public health, informed by science and guided by compassion and public service. It required an administration that could quickly deploy reliable tests around the nation to isolate cases and trace and contain the virus’s spread, as South Korea effectively did, as well as to manufacture and distribute scarce medical supplies around the country. It begged for a president of the United States to deliver clear, consistent, scientifically sound messages on the state of the epidemic and its solutions, to reassure the public amid their fear, and to provide steady guidance to cities and states. And it demanded a leader who would put the country’s well-being first, above near-term stock market returns and his own reelection prospects, and who would work with other nations to stem the tide of COVID-19 cases around the world.

What we have instead is a president epically outmatched by a global pandemic. A president who in late January, when the first confirmed coronavirus case was announced in the United States, downplayed the risk and insisted all was under control. A president who, rather than aggressively test all those exposed to the virus, said he’d prefer not to bring ashore passengers on a contaminated cruise ship so as to keep national case numbers (artificially) low. A president who, consistent with his mistrust and undermining of scientific fact, has misled the public about unproven cures for COVID-19, and who baited-and-switched last week about whether the country ought to end social distancing to open up by Easter, and then, on Saturday, about whether he’d impose a quarantine on New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A president who has pledged to oversee the doling out of the $500 billion in corporate bailout money in the latest stimulus package, some of which will go to the travel industry in which his family is invested. A president who spent a good chunk of a recent press conference complaining about how hard it is for a rich man to serve in the White House even as Americans had already begun to lose their jobs, their health care, and their lives. A president who has reinforced racial stigma by calling the contagion a “Chinese virus” and failed to collaborate adequately with other countries to contain their outbreaks and study the disease. A president who evades responsibility and refuses to acknowledge, let alone own, the bitter truth of National Institutes of Health scientist Dr. Anthony Fauci’s testimony: that the country’s testing rollout was “a failing.”

Timing is everything in pandemic response: It can make the difference between a contained local outbreak that endures a few weeks and an uncontrollable contagion that afflicts millions. The Trump administration has made critical errors over the past two months, choosing early on to develop its own diagnostic test, which failed, instead of adopting the World Health Organization’s test — a move that kneecapped the US coronavirus response and, by most public health experts’ estimation, will cost thousands if not hundreds of thousands of American lives. Rather than making the expected federal effort to mobilize rapidly to distribute needed gowns, masks, and ventilators to ill-equipped hospitals and to the doctors and nurses around the country who are left unprotected treating a burgeoning number of patients, the administration has instead been caught outbidding individual states (including Massachusetts) trying to purchase medical supplies. It has dragged its heels on invoking the Defense Production Act to get scarce, sorely needed ventilators and masks into production so that they can be distributed to hospitals nationwide as they hit their peaks in the cycle of the epidemic. It has left governors and mayors in the lurch, begging for help. The months the administration wasted with prevarication about the threat and its subsequent missteps will amount to exponentially more COVID-19 cases than were necessary. In other words, the president has blood on his hands.

It’s not too much for Americans to ask of their leaders that they be competent and informed when responding to a crisis of historic proportions. Instead, they have a White House marred by corruption and incompetence, whose mixed messages roil the markets and rock their sense of security. Instead of compassion and clarity, the president, in his near-daily addresses to the nation, embodies callousness, self-concern, and a lack of compass. Dangling unverified cures and possible quarantines in front of the public like reality TV cliffhangers, he unsettles rather than reassures. The pandemic reveals that the worst features of this presidency are not merely late-night comedy fodder; they come at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and our collective psyche.

Many pivotal decision points in this crisis are past us, but more are still to come. For our own sake, every American should be hoping for a miraculous turnaround — and that the too-little, too-late strategy of the White House task force will henceforth at least prevent contagion and economic ruin of the grandest scale. But come November, there must be a reckoning for the lives lost, and for the vast, avoidable suffering about to ensue under the president’s watch.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion.

Trump blasted as ‘commander of confusion’ in Washington Post review of his coronavirus failures

April 2, 2020 By Bob Brigham

President Donald Trump’s response to the COVID-19 coronavirus was detailed in a new Washington Post story.

“In the three weeks since declaring the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, President Trump has delivered a dizzying array of rhetorical contortions, sowed confusion and repeatedly sought to cast blame on others,” the newspaper reported.

The Fake News Media and their partner, the Democrat Party, is doing everything within its semi-considerable power (it used to be greater!) to inflame the CoronaVirus situation, far beyond what the facts would warrant. Surgeon General, “The risk is low to the average American.”

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

“History has never known a crisis response as strong as his own, Trump says — yet the self-described wartime president claims he is merely backup,” The Post reported. “America is winning its war with the coronavirus, the president says — yet the death toll rises still, and in the best-case scenario more Americans will die than in the wars in Vietnam, Korea, Afghanistan and Iraq combined.”

The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 24, 2020

“As Trump has sought to remake his public image from that of a skeptic of the pandemic’s danger to a savior forestalling catastrophe and protecting hundreds of thousands of people from a vicious contagion, he also has distorted the truth, making edits and creating illusions at many turns,” the newspaper noted. “Trump’s machinations have a dogged showman’s quality, using his omnipresence at daily White House news conferences — which sometimes stretch two hours or more and are broadcast to millions — to try to erase memories from his two months of playing down the crisis, sometimes scolding reporters who question his version of events.”

Our CoronaVirus Team has been doing a great job. Even Democrat governors have been VERY complimentary!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 10, 2020

“Message inconsistency has been a feature throughout Trump’s presidency, from his zigzagging positions on foreign and domestic policies to his up-and-down personal relationships and rivalries,” the newspaper noted. “It also is attributable to his lack of ideological conviction, which makes him susceptible to being persuaded by advisers both inside and outside the government, often on the basis of self-interest.”

So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!
Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 9, 2020

Conservative columnist stunned by Trump’s perpetual display of coronavirus ignorance

April 2, 2020 By Sarah K. Burris


Conservative Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin can’t understand why President Donald Trump is always the last one to know or understand something. With so many experts at his fingertips, one would assume that the president of the United States would be the most informed American on any issue facing the country. Yet, somehow Trump is always the last to know and the last to understand.

Rubin compared Trump to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY), along with almost every other governor, “except the bumbling Ron DeSantis of Florida,” and arguably Govs. Brian Kemp (R-GA), Tate Reeves (R-MS) and Kevin Stitt (R-OK).

“At his or her daily news conference, you will see someone in command of the facts,” Rubin wrote of Cuomo, noting he knows the number of infections, patients, beds, ventilators and discharged people. She explained it’s clear he has a sense of his mission.

Meanwhile, Vanity Fair reported Wednesday that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner claimed he knows more than the experts.

“‘I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators,’ Kushner said, according to a person present.”

Even RealClearPolitics explained that as of March 18, one out of every four people with a confirmed cases of coronavirus has been hospitalized, and 44 percent of those people need a ventilator. It’s unclear why Kushner can’t do the math, but it translated into the president suggesting a conspiracy is afoot.

“In one way or another, governors are trying to expand the capacities of their health-care systems and use social distancing to slow the progress of infection,” Rubin explained. “Many are begging the feds to be the purchaser of scarce equipment so the 50 states and the Federal Emergency Management Agency aren’t bidding against one another.”

The contrast between the likes of Cuomo and Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) with Trump is stark, and it should “shock and appall us,” Rubin said.

This week, Trump said that his thinking had changed because of the severity of the issue.

“I think also in looking at the way that the contagion is so contagious, nobody’s ever seen anything like this where large groups of people all of a sudden have it just by being in the presence of somebody who has it. The flu has never been like that. . . . Also the violence of it if it hits the right person,” Trump told the press during Wednesday’s briefing.

“The contagion is so contagious. That’s the president of the United States,” Rubin mocked.

This isn’t the first time Trump is hearing this information. Feb. 16, Dr. Anthony Fauci was on “Face The Nation” explaining how contagious the disease was and calling it a pandemic before even the World Health Organization.

“He was warned by experts for weeks that this was highly contagious and that this was not the ordinary flu,” Rubin recalled. “Apparently, he was either not listening or did not understand that “just by being in the presence of somebody who has it” the contagion can, well, be contagious. The mind reels.”

Even Vice President Mike Pence is only slightly better.

"I think that's one of the greatest answers I've ever heard. Because Mike was able to speak for 5 minutes and not even touch your question" — Pence was so evasive in response to a question about health care for uninsured people that even Trump teased him about it pic.twitter.com/ckmoN6EMuX
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 1, 2020

During Wednesday’s press conference, Pence clearly didn’t know or understand that there are Americans without health insurance. As 6.6 million Americans file unemployment claims, those people also lost their health insurance, if they had it to begin with.

“You would think the president and vice president’s abject ignorance would be a source of embarrassment,” Rubin closed. “Nope. They are locked in the right-wing media disinformation bubble. They find out details under duress. Only when things go very badly and their experts are forced to confess bad news do they grudgingly move into the real world. The change in ‘tone’ that too many gullible reporters coo about is the point at which Trump’s lies, disinformation and self-delusion can no longer be sustained. No wonder he looks deflated.”

Read the full column at the Washington Post.

HIS PERSONAL GESTAPO
Leaked memo reveals Trump’s Border Patrol telling agents to simply ignore federal law during coronavirus crisis

April 2, 2020 By Pro Publica

LOOK A BUNCH OF WHITE SUPREMACISTS

HOW COULD THEY NOT BE
by Dara Lind

For the first time since the enactment of the Refugee Act in 1980, people who come to the U.S. saying they fear persecution in their home countries are being turned away by Border Patrol agents with no chance to make a legal case for asylum.

The shift, confirmed in internal Border Patrol guidance obtained by ProPublica, is the upshot of the Trump administration’s hasty emergency action to largely shut down the U.S.-Mexico border over coronavirus fears. It’s the biggest step the administration has taken to limit humanitarian protection for people entering the U.S. without papers.

The Trump administration has created numerous obstacles over recent years for migrants to claim asylum and stay in the United States. But it had not — until now — allowed Border Patrol agents to simply expel migrants with no process whatsoever for hearing their claims.

The administration gave the Border Patrol unchallengeable authority over migrants seeking asylum by invoking a little-known power given to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. public health agency, to ban the entry of people or things that might spread “infectious disease” in the U.S. The CDC on March 20 barred entry of people without proper documentation, on the logic that they could be unexamined carriers of the disease and out of concern about the effects if the novel coronavirus swept through Customs and Border Protection holding facilities.

U.S. immigration law requires the government to allow people expressing a “well-founded” fear of persecution or torture to be allowed to pursue legal status in the United States. The law also requires the government to grant status to anyone who shows they likely face persecution if returned to their homeland.

“The Trump administration’s new rule and CDC order do not trump U.S. laws passed by Congress and U.S. legal obligations under refugee and human rights treaties,” Eleanor Acer, of the legal advocacy group Human Rights First, told ProPublica. “But the Trump administration is wielding them as the ultimate tool to shut the border to people seeking refuge.”

Two weeks ago, the Trump administration hastily put in place a policy, which the internal guidance calls Operation Capio, to push the overwhelming majority of unauthorized migrants into Mexico within hours of their apprehension in the U.S.

The Trump administration has been publicly vague on what happens under the new policy to migrants expressing a fear of persecution or torture, the grounds for asylum. But the guidance provided to Border Patrol agents makes clear that asylum-seekers are being turned away unless they can persuade both a Border Patrol agent — as well as a higher-ranking Border Patrol official — that they will be tortured if sent home. There is no exception for those who seek protection on the basis of their identities, such as race or religion.

Over 7,000 people have been expelled to Mexico under the order, according to sources briefed by Customs and Border Protection officials.

The guidance, shared with ProPublica by a source within the Border Patrol, instructs agents that any migrant caught entering without documentation must be processed for “expulsion,” citing the CDC order. When possible, migrants are to be driven to the nearest official border crossing and “expelled” into Mexico or Canada. (The Mexican government has agreed to allow the U.S. to push back not only Mexican migrants, but also those from Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador; the four countries account for about 85% of all unauthorized border crossings.)

Under the Refugee Convention, which the U.S. signed onto in 1968, countries are barred from sending someone back to a country in which they could be persecuted based on their identity (specifically, their race, nationality, religion, political opinion or membership in a “particular social group”).

The Trump administration has taken several steps to restrict the ability of migrants to seek asylum, a form of legal status that allows someone to eventually become a permanent U.S. resident. Until now, however, it has acknowledged that U.S. and international law prevents the U.S. from sending people back to a place where they will be harmed. And it has still allowed people who claim a fear of persecution to seek a less permanent form of legal status in the U.S. (In the last two weeks of February, 2,915 people were screened for humanitarian protection, according to the most recent statistics provided by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.)

The Border Patrol guidance provided to ProPublica shows that the U.S. is acting as if that obligation no longer applies.

Customs and Border Protection, the agency that oversees the Border Patrol, said it would not comment on the document provided to ProPublica. Asked whether any guidance had been provided regarding people who expressed a fear of persecution of torture, an agency spokesperson said in a statement, “The order does not apply where a CBP officer determines, based on consideration of significant law enforcement, officer and public safety, humanitarian, or public health interests, that the order should not be applied to a particular person.”

That language does not appear in the guidance ProPublica received. Instead, it specifies that any exception must be approved by the chief patrol agent of a given Border Patrol sector. One former senior CBP official, who reviewed the guidance at ProPublica’s request, said that because there are so many levels of hierarchy between a chief patrol agent and a line agent, agents would be unlikely to ask for an exemption to be made.

The guidance offers some details of exceptions that Border Patrol should make on public-safety grounds — people with felony convictions, for example, are to be held in detention rather than being sent back — but none on health grounds.

In fact, the guidance provides no instructions on medical screening or care for migrants, making it impossible to know how such an exception would be made. (One source briefed by CBP on the policy said the agency said migrants would not be expelled if they showed symptoms of illness or claimed a medical issue, but there is no mention of this in the guidance ProPublica received.)

The guidance makes a single humanitarian exception: If a migrant, before expulsion, tells the Border Patrol agent that they fear torture in their home country, they can be kept in the U.S. and referred to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which evaluates claims for humanitarian protection, to see if they qualify for protection under the Convention Against Torture. But agents are not instructed to ask; the migrant has to volunteer the information “spontaneously.” Then, the Border Patrol agent is instructed to analyze whether the claim is “reasonably believable” — something they haven’t been trained to do.

As recently as last fall, the Trump administration acknowledged in court filings that it’s bound both to protect victims of torture under the Convention Against Torture and to protect victims of persecution under the Refugee Convention.


Even as it has erected bars to asylum — most notably, preventing anyone who crosses through Mexico from receiving asylum in the U.S. — it has continued to allow anyone entering the U.S. to seek a lesser form of legal status called “withholding of removal,” which allows an immigrant to stay in the U.S. but does not allow them to become a permanent resident. (Since the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, federal law requires the executive branch to grant this status to anyone who can show it’s more likely than not they’ll be persecuted.)

The Operation Capio guidance does not mention the possibility that someone could be eligible for lesser protections instead of expulsion. Two sources briefed on the new policy confirmed that neither asylum nor withholding of removal is available to anyone subject to the CDC order.

In that briefing, CBP officials claimed that a migrant expressing any sort of fear is referred for screening to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, but that migrants will only pass that screening if they claim torture. However, the guidance doesn’t instruct Border Patrol agents to refer other types of claims to USCIS (and instructs them only to refer torture claims when they are “reasonably believable”).

In lawsuits challenging the administration’s asylum policies, Department of Justice lawyers have described withholding of removal as a “mandatory” form of protection — something it’s required to provide — while asylum is “discretionary.” In a brief filed last fall with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the government wrote that “The United States has implemented its non-refoulement obligations” — the obligation not to send people back to danger — “by providing withholding of removal and CAT (Convention Against Torture) protection.”

Now, the U.S. is only providing one of the two — and only at the discretion of Border Patrol.

“If you read between the lines,” one congressional staff member briefed on the operation told ProPublica, “they’re saying that Title 42 (the chapter of the U.S. Code that includes the CDC’s quarantine power) supersedes Title 8 (which covers immigration law).” Title 42 doesn’t clearly state that the administration may suspend its obligations under immigration law, and the Trump administration hasn’t published any legal opinions or memos that make its case.

No legal challenges have yet been filed against the new policy. Lawyers told ProPublica that the secrecy of the policy has made it harder to compile a case against it.

The administration has argued that the risk of coronavirus spreading through Customs and Border Protection holding facilities — which aren’t equipped to deal with medical needs — justifies the mass-expulsion policy. Since putting the policy in place, the number of people crossing into the U.S. has dropped drastically, according to official CBP statistics circulated internally and provided to ProPublica, and there are only 330 people in CBP custody at last count, down from over 1,300 as of March 25.

The new guidance instructs agents to wear personal protective equipment at all times and not to use any Border Patrol vehicle to transport migrants that isn’t specifically designated for Operation Capio.

However, because the Operation Capio process doesn’t include medical screening, it will be impossible to know whether any migrants who are being expelled just in case they have the novel coronavirus are actually infected.

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‘A nuclear bomb dropped on the economy’: John Harwood shocked by new unemployment numbers  

April 2, 2020

CNN’s John Harwood on Thursday was shocked by the record number of jobless claims filed in the last week — and he said that the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be worse than expected.

During a CNN panel discussion, Harwood didn’t even try to sugarcoat the news about 6.6 million Americans filing for unemployment benefits last week, or double the 3.3 million Americans who had filed for benefits the week before.

“We have pulled the plug out from the American economy, and the result is an economic catastrophe,” he said. “How long is it going to last? That depends on the public health answer to this situation. You know, we talked about in the past, in the last few days, certainly when we had last week’s numbers that the federal — both in terms of the Federal Reserve and the fiscal response from Congress — is like relief efforts during hurricane. This is a nuclear bomb that has been dropped on the American economy.”

Harwood then predicted that these “shocking” jobless numbers would change the conversation and force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to back off his opposition to further emergency relief measures.

Why ‘mind-blowing’ new unemployment numbers are worse than they look — and the Trump administration could bungle the recovery

April 2, 2020 By Cody Fenwick, AlterNet

Last week, the United States reported an unprecedented and chart-breaking 3.3 million new unemployment claims as a result of the expanding coronavirus crisis and requisite social distancing. Now, those numbers have jumped once again, as officials announced on Thursday that 6.6 million people filed for unemployment in the week ending on March 28.

These gargantuan levels of need outpace any other economic downturn on record in U.S. history, and horrifyingly, they understate the problem because of all the people out of work who aren’t applying for unemployment. Worse yet, while Congress has passed a massive 2.2 trillion package, known as the CARES Act, meant to soften the blow for families and businesses, it appears the Trump administration may not be up to the challenge of distributing these funds efficiently enough to avoid much of the coming financial pain.


To understand how significant the new unemployment claims are, you need only look at them plotted on graphs (the first shows over 50 years, while the second shows over the past year): 

This chart is a portrait of disaster. I have spent the last twenty years studying the labor market and have never seen anything like it. Unemployment insurance claims for the last two weeks are mind-blowing. 1/ pic.twitter.com/IoRYyraW0V

— Heidi Shierholz (@hshierholz) April 2, 2020

This chart shows initial unemployment insurance claims over the last year. The increase in the last two weeks boggles the mind. 3/ pic.twitter.com/z34xorSbTB
— Heidi Shierholz (@hshierholz) April 2, 2020

Note: these numbers are cumulative, meaning that counting over the past two weeks, 10 million Americans have newly applied for unemployment benefits. And we expect this number to grow still.

Shierholz, the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute, noted that this metric doesn’t even cover the entire scale of the damage.

“Today’s UI claims, as extraordinary as they are, leave out many who are out of work due to the virus, including independent contractors, those who don’t have long enough work histories, those who had to quit work to care for a child whose school closed, and on and on,” she explained in a tweet.

Of course, shocking as these figures are, they haven’t exactly caught us off-guard. We knew this was coming and, to some extent, we did it to ourselves via social distancing measures (though these likely reduce the economic damage in the long run, since stopping the virus is key to saving the economy). And Congress passed three phases of coronavirus relief bills, including the 2.2 trillion package meant to stabilize (though not, as has often been misleadingly reported, stimulate) the economy.

But these laws were passed quite quickly. This was arguably justified given the impending nature of the crisis, but it has a cost. Many of the wrinkles and quirks of the legislation haven’t been uncovered or worked out. This problem is compounded by the astounding fact that Congress has gone on vacation until late April after passing the final bill, which will make it harder to pass quick fixes if needed.

And administering the provision of aid at this scale is no easy feat, even when we’re not staring down a world-historical crisis. Unfortunately, not only is the task inherently challenging, it must be handled by the Trump administration, which often fails at the most basic tasks of governance. There’s little reason for confidence in its ability to quickly stanch the economic fallout.

Initially, it looked like the U.S. Treasury Department was making a huge mistake by requiring Social Security beneficiaries who don’t usually file tax returns to submit paperwork in order to obtain the $1,200 check that most Americans will receive as part of the relief bills. Thankfully, it has reversed itself and will send out the money without placing further burdens on this group.

But there are still major apparent flaws in the administration’s plan to hand out the cash. According to a new NBC News report, Americans who get tax refunds from the IRS via direct deposit into their bank accounts can expect to get the $1,200 starting around April 13. But other Americans without their records on file could wait up to almost five months to get their checks in the mail, the report found — which may be long after the money was needed most.

Meanwhile, there’s another major stumbling block that could delay a key line of aid to the country. According to a new Politico report, the administration is not prepared to distribute the funds allocated for small businesses meant to keep employees on the payroll, even if all revenue dries up.

The report explained:

Banks are warning that a $350 billion lending program for struggling small businesses won’t be ready when it launches Friday because the Trump administration has failed to provide them with the necessary guidelines and has set requirements for the loans that are unworkable.

The lenders complain that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin boxed them in with an unrealistic deadline and that the ground rules they’ve been given for the program, which is intended to deliver rapid aid to a huge number of ailing businesses, could delay the assistance for weeks or longer.

The banks, which will be responsible for processing loan applications and doling out money, are expecting millions of applications from businesses. Some fear a disaster that could dwarf the failed kickoff of the Obamacare enrollment web site in 2013.

There is another key form of aid that hopefully should be able get out to people: unemployment insurance. Congress boosted the weekly allotment paid out by state’s uninsurance programs by $600 and it extended the period of time unemployed people will be eligible to receive benefits. The biggest stumbling block here is that states’ systems might become overwhelmed by applications for unemployment, which, as we’ve seen, are coming in at record-breaking rates.

“So, as I understand it, the two key disaster-relief provisions of the CARES Act — enhanced unemployment benefits and small-business loans — aren’t likely to be operational for weeks, due to lack of administrative capacity, even though we’ve already lost 10 million jobs,” said economist Paul Krugman on Twitter. “This cries out for a crash effort, led by experts, to clear up the bottlenecks — sort of like the effort that rescued healthcare.gov when Obamacare launched. But while I’d like to be proved wrong, hard to see Trump admin doing this.”

He added: “After all, even if it did create such a task force, Trump would surely put Jared Kushner in charge.”

Krugman also warned that, despite the fact that many are hoping the economy will bounce back once the coronavirus subsides, there’s good reason to be doubtful on this scenario. Most notable is the impact state budgets are facing without substantial support from the federal government.

“First, the checks sent out by the CARES Act are one-time only, and expanded unemployment benefits expire after four months,” he said. “Second, state and local governments are under severe financial strain. They’ll have to keep spending during the medical crisis, but will have to raise taxes and/or slash spending to make up that later unless they get a lot more federal aid.”

“So we’re going to be experiencing a major fiscal contraction just as the direct hit from the coronavirus diminishes. This could really slow the recovery,” he concluded.

BOOM GO CRASH
FIRST THE MARKET CRASHED LIKE 1987,1998, 2008 
IN MARCH
THEN IT CRASHED AND BOOMED LIKE IT WAS THE 1930'S
1933, 1938
TRUMP IS THE HOOVER OF HIS DAY 

THERE WILL BE AN INVESTIGATION

House Intelligence chairman calls for 9/11-style commission to investigate Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic

April 2, 2020 By Alex Henderson, AlterNet

Although President Donald Trump is finally acknowledging how deadly the coronavirus is, he continues to draw a great deal of criticism from Democrats for all the weeks he spend downplaying its severity and insisting that it didn’t pose a major threat to the United States. And House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, according to CNN reporters Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb, is now calling for a 9/11-style commission that would investigate Trump’s coronavirus response.

Schiff has said that he has started to work on legislation to establish such a commission. However, the California Democrat told Washington Post columnist David Ignatius that the investigation he has in mind would need to wait “until the crisis is abated to ensure that it does not interfere with the agencies that are leading the response.”

Schiff isn’t the only prominent Democrat who believes that Congress should investigate Trump’s coronavirus response at some point. Appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, March 29, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told host Jake Tapper, “I don’t know what the scientists said to him, when did this president know about this, and what did he know? What did he know and when did he know it? That’s for an after-action review.”

When Tapper asked Pelosi if she believed that Trump’s slow response to coronavirus had caused Americans to die unnecessarily, the House speaker responded, “Yes, I am. I’m saying that….. Because we weren’t prepared, we now have 2,000 deaths and 100,000 cases.”

The figure that Pelosi quoted came from John Hopkins University in Baltimore. According to Hopkins, the U.S. death toll from coronavirus had reached 2000 when Tapper interviewed Pelosi. But on late Thursday morning, April 2, that number had more than doubled — and CNN was reporting that according to Hopkins, at least 5148 people in the U.S. had died from coronavirus. Worldwide, Hopkins was reporting a staggering death toll of more than 49,100 the morning of April 2.

Pelosi also voiced concerns over the Trump Administration complying with the oversight requirements in the $2 trillion stimulus bill that the president recently signed into law.

“We will have our oversight in the Congress,” Pelosi told Tapper. “We have a panel that we’ve established.”

‘This is not the time for politics’: Trump whines about congressional investigations into his coronavirus failures
April 2, 2020 By Bob Brigham

President Donald Trump complained about congressional investigations during his Thursday Coronavirus Task Force briefing.

“I want to remind everyone here in our nation’s capital — especially in Congress — that this is not the time for politics,” Trump claimed.

“Endless partisan investigations — here we go again — have already done extraordinary damage to our country in recent years,” he continued.

Trump argued that Congress should not investigate the multiple failures of Trump’s response to the pandemic that have been the focus of shocking reporting in recent months.

“You see what happens, it is witch hunt after witch hunt, and in the end, the people doing the witch hunts have been losing,” he argued. “And they’ve been losing by a lot.”

"It’s not any time for witch hunts, it’s time to get this enemy defeated,” he said.

Trump argued that the investigations help him politically, but he does not want his poll numbers to rise.

“Conducting these partisan investigations in the middle of a pandemic is a really big waste of vital resources, time, attention and we want to fight for American lives, not waste time and build up my poll numbers — cause that’s all they’re doing, because everyone knows it’s ridiculous,” the argued.

The President goes on a rant about “partisan investigations” and “witch hunts” pic.twitter.com/2wObxo2UnF
— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) April 2, 2020


Trump slammed for begging Congress to not investigate his coronavirus response failures

April 2, 2020 By Matthew Chapman

At Thursday’s coronavirus press briefing, President Donald Trump pre-emptively tried to complain about the upcoming congressional commission into the federal government’s handling of the pandemic, proclaiming that “this is not the time for politics” and demanding the “witch hunts” against him end.

Commenters on social media immediately slammed the president’s attempt to hide from responsibility:

Moments after saying "this is not the time for politics," Trump denounces "witch hunts" and says the perpetrators are only improving his poll numbers.
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) April 2, 2020

Trump earlier in the briefing: "This is not the time for politics." https://t.co/DurZjZBPTk
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 2, 2020
Trump: Now is not the time for politics

Proceeds to reference his own impeachment, condemning those who held him accountable. If you mention your opponents to criticize them, that IS political.
Classic spin. Our masks don't filter gaslighting.#TrumpPressBriefing
— Six feet away, not under (@pseuze) April 2, 2020


Trump [reading]: “I want to remind everyone that this is not the time for politics."
[3 seconds later] “It’s witch hunt after witch hunt after witch hunt. And the people doing the hunting have been losing. And losing by a lot.”
Jesus H. Christ (I try to say this sparingly.)
— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) April 2, 2020

Trump says it is not the time for politics. Then attacks Democrats. Can’t make this stuff up. Trump lies every time he tweets or opens his mouth. #TrumpPressConf #TrumpPressConference #COVID19 #COVID #CoronaVirusUpdates
— Ron Waxman

(@RonWaxman) April 2, 2020


*45 this morning: pic.twitter.com/w8w371X8jc

— D Villella (@dvillella) April 2, 2020


He is going to be so upset when he reads his own tweets
— Jaynie's Got a Bun (@FreeGirlNowNYC) April 2, 2020

Actually that one commercial that Trump is suing to have taken off the air says it all.
— George Thomas (@FordPrefect747) April 2, 2020

Trump would like to remind everyone that this is "not the time for politics, endless investigations" which seems convenient for someone who is unilaterally responsible for exacerbating the current pandemic, which will lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) April 2, 2020

Officials in two states issue cease-and-desist letters after Hobby Lobby defies coronavirus lockdowns

April 2, 2020 Matthew Chapman


On Thursday, The New York Times reported that officials in two states have sent cease-and-desist orders to Hobby Lobby, the Oklahoma-based crafts store, accusing them of defying stay at home orders imposed to fight the spread of coronavirus.

“W. Eric Kuhn, the senior assistant state attorney general of Colorado, where there are 10 stores, sent a cease-and-desist letter to the company after it had reopened its stores in the state this week,” wrote Neil Vigdor. “The letter said the company’s actions violated a March 25 executive order signed by Gov. Jared Polis directing Coloradans to stay at home and requiring all businesses to close that were not designated by state health officials as critical.”

“Ohio’s attorney general, Dave Yost, wrote on Twitter on Wednesday that he had sent a similar cease-and-desist letter to Hobby Lobby and that the company had agreed to close stores in his state, where there are 10,” the report continued.

In addition to Colorado and Ohio, Hobby Lobby has also violated orders in at least two other states, with public health officials in Clark County, Indiana and West Allis, Wisconsin taking action to shut down stores that reopened.

Hobby Lobby, which has famously sued the federal government over laws guaranteeing contraceptive coverage to their employees, declined comment on the story.

Trump Labor Department accused of quietly ‘twisting the law’ to slash paid sick leave amid pandemic

April 2, 2020 By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams


“The Trump administration is robbing workers of the paid sick days and paid leave Congress passed into law for them. That is unconscionable.”

Two Democratic members of Congress on Thursday accused the Department of Labor of quietly “twisting the law” to limit the scope of already inadequate paid sick leave provisions contained in a coronavirus stimulus package that President Donald Trump signed into law last month.

Over the weekend, the Labor Department—headed by former corporate lawyer Eugene Scalia—published policy guidance on the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) that Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said creates several “gratuitous loopholes” allowing corporations to limit the number of employees eligible for paid leave.
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“This simply can’t stand. This guidance needs to be rewritten so workers get the leave they are guaranteed under the law.”
—Sen. Patty Murray

“The Trump administration is twisting the law to allow employers to shirk their responsibility and is significantly narrowing which workers are eligible for paid leave,” Murray said in a statement. “This simply can’t stand. This guidance needs to be rewritten so workers get the leave they are guaranteed under the law.”

The FFCRA, which Trump signed into law on March 18, provides two weeks of paid sick leave to eligible workers who fall ill and 12 weeks of leave to workers caring for children whose schools have closed due to the COVID-19 outbreak. The bill excludes workers at companies with more than 500 employees.

In a detailed letter (pdf) to Scalia on Wednesday, Murray and DeLauro said the Labor Department’s guidance blatantly “contradict[s] the plain language of the FFCRA and violate congressional intent.”

One example Murray and DeLauro highlighted is the Labor Department’s definition of “unable to work.”

“You are unable to work if your employer has work for you and one of the COVID-19 qualifying reasons set forth in the FFCRA prevents you from being able to perform that work, either under normal circumstances at your normal worksite or by means of telework,” the Labor Department wrote in its guidance.

Murray and DeLauro said that definition would “allow all employers to evade the requirements of the Act at any point during this pandemic by informing employees that it does not have work for them to perform at the moment—thereby fully depriving them of a day, a week, or 12 weeks of paid leave.”

“Nothing in the text of the FFCRA indicates the employer must have work for an employee to perform on any particular day for that employee to be able to qualify for paid leave on that day—nor does it give employers the authority to refuse their employees their statutory right to paid leave by not assigning them work, furloughing them, or closing a particular worksite,” Murray and DeLauro wrote in their letter.

In a press release, Murray and DeLauro summarized their concerns with the Labor Department guidance, warning that it would:

Require certification in order for workers to qualify for paid leave. DOL states that employers can require certification for employees to qualify for paid leave, even though the FFCRA does not require for any such certification from employees.

Restrict what qualifies as being “unable to work.” DOL states that employees only qualify for paid sick or family leave if they are unable to work and their employer has work for them, allowing employers to cut off employees’ rights to paid sick or family leave by claiming they have nothing for the employee to do. This guidance is in direct contradiction with the FFCRA, which does not allow employers to use those tactics to prevent employees from receiving paid leave.

Restrict worker’s ability to take leave intermittently. DOL states that an employee may only take their leave intermittently “if your employer allows it.” This conclusion is found nowhere in the text and gives the employer, rather than the employee who has the need for leave, the ability to decide how to use the employee’s leave.

Exempt employees from paid leave. FFCRA exempts narrowly defined “health care providers” from the paid leave provisions due to the nature of the current crisis. But without authority, DOL redefined a “health care provider” to include nearly any employee who happens to work for an employer who also employs a health care provider, works at any type of quasi-medical facility, works as an employee contracted for non-healthcare services in a facility that houses a health care provider, or merely works in the medical supply chain.

Not guaranteeing paid leave during a “shelter in place” order. DOL does not clarify that a government directive to stay at home qualifies for paid leave. In fact, DOL even indicates that employees lose their right to paid leave if their employer closes the employee’s worksite in the event of a government directive. This clearly defies the FFCRA which grants paid leave to employees who are subject to quarantine or isolation orders from government officials.

“In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration is robbing workers of the paid sick days and paid leave Congress passed into law for them. That is unconscionable,” DeLauro said in a statement. “People across the country are struggling to make ends meet, and essential workers who are still able to work need to know that if they or a loved one falls ill that they can take time off.”

“Keeping workers from getting other workers sick is good for employees, employers, and our broader public health,” said DeLauro. “Secretary Scalia needs to immediately rescind this guidance and put workers’ needs first.”