They certainly aren’t acting like they want people to stay alive.

Michigan got snow last night. It looked pretty this morning. It didn’t stick to the street or driveways. It’s gone already.

Michigan’s Gov. Whitmer announced more restrictions on being out and about: Grocery store, pharmacy, job, walk your dog, go home. This afternoon the COVID-19 case count for Michigan, as tracked by Michigan Radio hit 1,328. Home sounds like a good idea.

The Metropolitan Opera is streaming for free a different opera each evening and leaving it up through most of the next day. This is the second week they are doing it. And this week is Wagner week with streaming of Tristan und Isolde (which I’m listening to as I write this), all four operas of the Ring cycle, Die Meistersinger, and Tannhäuser. Next week’s schedule hasn’t been announced yet.

Now that I’m listening and somewhat watching Tristan I realize I haven’t seen the whole thing before. I’m quite familiar with the plot and the first 10 minutes (the Prelude) – I even presented it in class when I taught – and the last 10 minutes (the Liebestodt), but not the 4½ hours in between.



Some of today’s coronavirus news.

Laura Clawson of Daily Kos reports that the Senate’s next bill to lessen the impact of the virus includes a half trillion dollar slush fund that the Treasury department can dole out to corporations as it wishes. A procedural vote on it failed yesterday. Moscow Mitch forced it back again today and it failed again.

Stephen Wolfe of Kos reports Speaker Nancy Pelosi has countered with a Democratic bill. It has all kinds of actually useful stuff, including a provision for national vote by mail in emergencies. Such as now. At the moment the Dems have the leverage.



In another post Wolfe reported that the GOP in Kentucky is heading in the other direction. They are passing a voter ID law – as the primary was postponed to June and drivers license offices are closed by the virus. Dem Gov. Andy Beshear will veto, but the legislature can easily override.



Eri Umansky of ProPublica, tweeted a thread about the Defense Production Act, which could increase production of needed medical supplies and which the nasty guy has pretended to invoke. He quotes a New York Times article that says the heads of major corporations lobbied against it, saying it imposed red tape precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories. And the real reason:

Industry executives say companies are reluctant to crank up production lines without purchasing guarantees from the government.

Commenters note the DPA prevents price gouging and profiteering. So corporations choose money over saving lives.

Another commenter notes these corporations get requests from around the world and from governors and mayors in the US. How should the orders be prioritized? The nasty guy isn’t saying.

Carol Livingston tweeted that a friend, an ICU nurse, is quite upset over the lack of tests, adequate protection gear, and ventilators.

If this administration had invoked the Defense Production Act when it should have, factories would already be geared up and pumping out more protective gear.

Johns Hopkins University and Medicine has a Coronavirus Resource Center. It shows worldwide confirmed cases – 378K, up about 30K since I checked earlier today, and currently 43K in the US. OF that total 101K have recovered.



annieli of the Kos community shares a variety of stories and tweets about the nasty guy along with rebuttals. One of those is a report from the Washington Post that he is being pressured by GOP lawmakers to scale back steps to contain the virus. Conservatives say the impact on the economy has become too severe (and the impact of millions dead wouldn’t be? Hmm.)

Tim Duy, an economist with the Oregon Economic Forum, tweeted:

Suspect this sudden pressure to reopen the economy before we control the virus is a reaction to the realization that the economy as structured cannot survive a month and the necessary restructuring will be in the direction of everything the GOP has fought against for decades.

Jared Yates Sexton tweeted:

This isn't about helping people. It's about helping the wealthy and corporations and furthering social inequality. It is literally the picking of the bones of an economy they created knowing full and well it was inherently cruel and predictably unstable.

A tweet from Leah McElrath sums it up well:

I’m not saying Trump and Republican lawmakers want people to die, but they certainly aren’t acting like they want people to stay alive.

Dartagnan of Kos talks about GoFundMe. It is a crowdfunding platform, founded in 2010, that allows people to ask for money for projects of various kinds. While Kickstarter is used for such things as a band trying to fund a new album. GoFundMe is used by people who have suffered a calamity, such as huge medical bills, a lost job, or a natural disaster. Some people are able to raise large sums of money, but most requests fall well short of goals.

The problem is this has become an acceptable substitute for adequate health care coverage, a type of coverage for inequalities in a dysfunctional system. This allows the current system to be maintained and allows The Onion to satirize that GoFundMe is the bedrock of the American health care system. But between COVID-19 medical bills and the massive loss of jobs, Dartagnan says, “We’re not going to be able to ‘GoFundMe’ our way out of that. Not in a million years.”