Reade it and weep

Chris Hayes got plenty of bad attention Thursday following his segment on Joe Biden's accuser.
Liberals being unhappy is a good feeling.

Georgia on my mind

In a few weeks, people will forget Georgia led the way out of the coronavirus lockdowns.
Now, too many are hoping for death and destruction of those trying to restart their lives.
These writers forget

• The weather's getting warmer.
• We're learned a lot in the past six weeks.
• We have more medical equipment and masks.
• We have a good idea where the trouble spots will pop up.

May will be better.

If we ignore what these writers produce in the future.

Tired of being alone

Powerline is tired of people complaining about the people who have quarantine fatigue.
Trump’s support for protesters in Minnesota and Michigan was not an attack on social distancing. Rather, given what Trump has said about Georgia, it is best understood as an expression of sympathy for residents in those states who have been subjected to arbitrary shutdown policies.

Saturday Coronavirus song

The Lovin' Spoonful asks the question we all have for governors struggling with the decision to open up the economy.

Relax, don't do it

Trump critics have erupted about him talking about possibly injecting disinfectants to stem coronavirus.
Did he recommend or mandate it?
No.
He's doing what he does, talking out loud.
Asking why and why not.
Maybe not his best idea, but we need to relax.
Trump's leadership has the number of hospital admissions dropping across the country.
That's what matters.

Ready to help the people

Hospitals in Virginia said Thursday they are ready and able to treat patients they've been prohibited from seeing for 30 days.
Governor Northam said no for seven more days.
Is he following the data and the science with this decision?

Let us out or we'll be back

Protesters visited Richmond Wednesday afternoon, seeking to ease restrictions that closed many businesses.
Will they convince the state's leadership?
“We’re calling this the American spirit parade because the American spirit is based on freedom and we’re asking the governor to open churches and businesses to allow adults to take personal responsibility for their health and well being,” said Diana Shores, executive director of the Virginia First Foundation, as she helped coordinate protesters staging at Willow Lawn Shopping Center.
If not, they'll be back.

Take a deep breath

Rich Lowry looks at how the ventilator crisis eased.
Another important realization was that FEMA could do just-in-time delivery. It could get states and hospitals ventilators within 24 or 48 hours. This created a lot of flexibility. The administration could wait to see how things really played out rather than making decisions based on models that forecast what the demand might be two weeks in the future. “When you started looking at it like that,” the official says, “the numbers went down dramatically.”
And this is the key thing: The strategy was based on not sending states what they requested on their say-so. That was the opposite of the normal FEMA operating procedure. Usually, state and counties ask for things in a natural disaster, and FEMA sends them along as a matter of course. With an epidemic threatening the entire country, that way of doing things would have exhausted the federal resources immediately.
Step back.
Things are better than the media make them appear.

United - against the governor

Of the governors who seem to have let power to go their heads, Virginia's Ralph Northam leads the way.
He's wanted Virginia closed longer - June 10 - when others are waiting to see how things go May 1 or May 15.
Now he's drawn the attention of President Trump.
And trying to say Trump's politicized things, not him.
“You know, our president obviously has been unable to deliver on tests. Now, he has chosen to focus on protests. And this is not the time for protests, this is not the time for divisiveness. This is time for leadership that will stand up and provide empathy, that will understand what’s going on in this country of ours with this pandemic. It’s the time for truth. And it’s the time to bring people together. And that’s what I’ve done as the governor of Virginia."
People in Virginia are together - wondering how long these orders will last.
While watching most of the death and illness happen either in nursing homes or New York City.
We have masks and we have not gotten sick over the last month. We want to start the path back to post-pandemic life.

Saturday song

Have you reached the Lionel Richie stage of lockdown? Dancing on the Ceiling.

Let my people go

Powerline plans to be at Minnesota's capital Friday at noon to protest the continuing shutdown of the economy.
Pressure to stop devastating the lives of hundreds of millions of people will grow inexorably. Minnesota is a classic instance: our governor shut down the state on the basis of an alleged model that claimed 74,000 people would otherwise die–but only 50,000 with a shutdown! In fact, there have been fewer than 100 deaths, more than two-thirds in nursing homes and assisted living facilities. If our government had shut down access to nursing homes and assisted living facilities–which it didn’t effectively do, apparently–it would have saved more lives than the absurd cessation of economic and social activity that our feckless governor implemented. One more time: that’s noon tomorrow, at the governor’s mansion in St. Paul.

Give Michigan a hand

Good job by Michigan residents protesting their governor today.
Unfortunately, I just watched the governor on MSNBC.
She claimed - people were giving out candy with their bare hands.
The horror.
Way to pour gasoline on this fire.
All she had to do was let them get seeds to plant their gardens.
Instead, with nothing else to do, they visited Lansing.
And empowered their fellow citizens.

We've learned so much

Powerline turns a skeptical eye toward those who assume the worst will happen when shutdowns are lifted.
I think many of us will want to proceed somewhat cautiously with our daily lives even after the government restores our full freedom to move and congregate. We will not behave like coronavirus fatalists.
I think we will be wise not to.

Who do you trust?

After articles casting doubt on President Trump's early response to the coronavirus, he came out blazing in Monday's press conference.
"The media minimized the risk from the start,” the text of the video read, prior to featuring a series of flashback clips to prominent media professionals downplaying the threat posed by the virus.
As the country begins to open up, it's a matter of who you trust.
By emphasizing what they see as Trump's failures, it makes it harder for him to lead the country back.
As Trump shows the media failures, it's a reminder not to trust them completely.
We're going to need to trust Trump to successfully open the country.
Trump's doing the best he can to build that trust - and keep the media from tearing it down.

Eyes on Texas

While the government starts planning to reopen the economy, Texas will be taking the lead this week.
“Next week, I will be providing an executive order talking about what will be done in Texas about reopening Texas businesses,” Abbott said Friday, saying economic activity can resume “in a way that will be safe for that economic revitalization.”
“We will focus on protecting lives while restoring livelihoods. We can and we must do this,” said Abbott.
The rest of the country wishes you well - and wishes our leaders were like you.

Easter Sunday in a Holy Saturday world

It's a totally different Easter Sunday throughout the world.
Instead of gathering together, Christians are hunkered down at home.
Watching services via computer instead of praising from the pew.
We're locked away from our hope.
Just like Holy Saturday.
That day, the disciples were locked down - hoping to avoid the authorities who had just killed Jesus.
What terrible fate awaited them?
From almost 2000 years in the future, we know.
Resurrection and revival were their future.
May it be our future as well.

Easter song

For my blogging Easter tradition, Keith Green's Easter Song.

Saturday song

Jim Stafford fights off the spiders and snakes.

Target date

When should the country's revival hit full stride?
Obvious isn't it?

How many anecdotes make data?

Should we use hydroxychloroquine?
It's helped some people.
How many people need to get off their death beds for the drug to be appreciated?

Better than Eeyore thought it would be

Victor Davis Hanson sees how pessimists can claim victory even when better news happens.
If the Eeyores are proven right, then, they are seen as not only prescient but sanctified — the voices in the wilderness who spoke the inconvenient truths that saved lives.
The sunnier prognosticators suffer a lose-lose dilemma rather than the pessimist’s win-win chances. If one doubts these original nightmarish Imperial College worst-case predications of 2 million-plus deaths in the United States, and is proven correct, it matters little. The pessimist argues that it was only his bleak forecasts that changed behaviors and that, without such changes, the optimist’s obviously faulty data and poor reasoning would have led policymakers over a cliff.

He should have gone with Barbie pink

Governor Northam modeled a facemask today.
A black one.
He stood in front of the cameras in blackface.
That's the man who wants Virginians to shelter in place for 65 more days.

How long do you want to wait?

Yahoo has another Trump-bashing article on hydroxychloroquine.
It's unproven, they say.
There haven't been months-old clinical trials to fight a virus we just discovered a few months ago.
How many people should die while awaiting trials be done?
How many should die while being given placebos during correct studies?
Several doctors have had success with the treatment. Let's continue and see how it works.

Don't be dense

Coronavirus warnings about social distancing may kill - government plans for dense development.
The holy grail for the Met Council’s urban planners, and their allies at the Minneapolis City Council, is “densification.” They seek to engineer a world in which we increasingly abandon our single-family homes for stack-and-pack, multifamily apartments, and our private automobiles for jampacked mass transit.

Check out this crap

Need a better way to check for Coronavirus?
How about wastewater treatment plants?
Analysing wastewater—used water that goes through the drainage system to a treatment facility—is one way that researchers can track infectious diseases that are excreted in urine or faeces, such as SARS-CoV-2.
One treatment plant can capture wastewater from more than one million people, says Gertjan Medema, a microbiologist at KWR Water Research Institute in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands. Monitoring effluent at this scale could provide better estimates for how widespread the coronavirus is than testing, because wastewater surveillance can account for those who have not been tested and have only mild or no symptoms, says Medema, who has detected SARS-CoV-2 genetic material—viral RNA—in several treatment plants in the Netherlands. “Health authorities are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

Briefly speaking

The daily presidential briefings on Coronavirus have become a topic - based on your opinion of the president.
Viewers are relying on that stream of news; they are communing with their president and the federal government in a way we rarely see. It is not clear how this virus will progress, when we can get back to work or how bad the economy will be over the next several months. But Americans see Trump fighting for them, every day, as hard as humanly possible.
Democrats know that will help him win four more years.

Why June 10?

Governor Northam pushed out the date of June 10 as the length of time the current stay-at-home order could last.
Why June 10?
It's a weird date.
It's a Wednesday. Middle of the week.
Deadlines end on a weekend, so you start the week fresh on a Monday.
A full week of work.
It's one day after the next set of primary elections are scheduled.
That makes the timing even weirder. 
I doubt we'll go that far - we'll see the worst in April and open May with brighter horizons.

Idea for inventors

We have need for masks and ventilators.
Inventors are searching for new ways to increase supply.
Can you make a ventilator using empty toilet paper rolls?
We seem to have a large supply of that..