Obama Praises Who? Mass Media Baits Trump, Trump Barks Back. Bill Maher Got It Right For Once.

Obama endorsed Jo today and used words that have no connection.  He praised him for his smarts integrity etc..  Need I say more.?
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More Mass Media Mania:

Targeting Tony Fauci

The press baits Trump to fire his most visible coronavirus adviser. 

The Editorial Board

The U.S. may be fighting through a public health and economic emergency, but for the media resistance the most important story is always Donald Trump. Monday was again dominated by breathless reports about Mr. Trump’s relationship with Anthony Fauci after the President retweeted something that included a #FireFauci hashtag. While Mr. Trump’s antagonists feign protectiveness of Dr. Fauci and horror that Mr. Trump might question expert judgment, the truth is they are eager for a public brawl that will hurt the President politically.

Monday’s dust-up was prompted by an interview Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, gave Sunday on CNN. Host Jake Tapper, fishing for criticism of the Trump Administration, compared the U.S. to South Korea and pressed Dr. Fauci on whether “lives could have been saved” if the U.S. started shutting down in February.

Dr. Fauci was reluctant to take the bait, saying it was “little bit unfair” to compare the U.S. to South Korea but said that of course earlier shutdowns could have made a difference. CNN ran with the headline “Fauci admits earlier Covid-19 mitigation efforts would have saved more American lives.”

The media have been seeking for weeks to create a narrative that Mr. Trump and Dr. Fauci are at odds. In a March 22 interview, Science magazine asked Dr. Fauci “How are you managing to not get fired?” He answered that the President listens to his counsel. The reporter pressed with questions like, “You’ve been in press conferences where things are happening that you disagree with, is that fair to say?” Dr. Fauci replied that “I don’t disagree in the substance” and eventually ended the interview early.

Dr. Fauci said later that week that he wished efforts to pit him against the President would stop and added that “there are not differences. The President has listened to what I have said.” The media bait continued with a March 26 Washington Post story titled, “As Trump signals readiness to break with experts, his online base assails Fauci.” The Post also tweeted that “Trump trails Fauci by 26 percent in public approval of coronavirus response,” as if the two are running a campaign against each other.

Mr. Trump can overrule his public health experts on the extent of mitigation the country can sustain, and no doubt the two disagree from time to time. With food lines forming across the U.S., the virus is not the only public health threat to the American people.

Yet Dr. Fauci doesn’t strike us as the sort to bail out easily even if his advice isn’t taken, as long as he thinks he can air his views honestly. At Monday’s virus task force briefing, Dr. Fauci pushed back at the press for its insinuations, and when a reporter asked if he was doing it “voluntarily,” he snapped “don’t even imply that.”

Dr. Fauci is a valuable communicator and has improved public confidence in the Administration’s coronavirus response. Many in the press can’t stomach that. Their favorite frame about Mr. Trump is that he is rejecting advice from his expert and bureaucratic betters. The White House said Monday that Mr. Trump has no intention of firing Dr. Fauci, which is wise. No one would be more delighted if Dr. Fauci got the boot than the media resistance.
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I detest Bill Maher but on this he got it right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEfDwc2G2_8
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I received this from a long time friend and fellow memo reader.  Very clever :

Trump should:

1. Announce a $ 100,000,000,000.00 tariff on any country delivering nuclear or biological weapons into any part of the USA.

2. Require a warning label on Chinese made goods similar to the one on cigarettes.

3.  Have a daily press conference on world trade showing how countries make regulations which restrict and discourage imports from the US

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I received this from my Louisville daughter because she is friends of the author's father who practiced in Birmingham, married a woman from Louisville and is now there .  His son is lives in New York and is a scientist,.

April 12, 2020 Update Harry Saag Apr 12 Dear All, Here is today’s update. Have we flattened the curve in New York? It appears so. Emergency room visits and hospital admissions seem to have decreased for several days. This is welcomed relief given the capacity issues we were facing in the city. As we discussed in the last blog, NYU Langone Health converted its entire hospital to treating COVID. Per NYU’s website, we’re a 450 bed hospital. At our peak, we had more than 450 COVID positive patients in the hospital. We did this by re-opening dormant wings of the hospital and converting operating recover rooms and recovery rooms to accommodate additional patients. Suffice to say, we were stretched. Fortunately our hospital, like others in the state, started seeing decreases in new patients arriving and have flattened the total number of patients in the hospital. If we’d had another week of new patients like the week before, there’s no question we’d have run out of beds and ventilators. This chart shows the change in hospitalized patients per day for the state of NY and shows how we’ve been steadily declining over the past week: Changes in hospitalizations is a good leading indicator of where your community is heading whereas deaths will be a lagging indicator and trail hospitalization numbers in seeing them decline. We’ll discuss this further below. How did we flatten the curve in New York? Lockdowns and social distancing. Since we still have no reliable treatments, the only way to lower the number of new admissions is to slow disease transmission through distancing and lockdowns. New York state went into lockdown around March 22nd and you can see from the chart above it took ~7-10 days after that intervention to see the peak in hospitalizations before downtrending. This may be helpful to other communities in understanding when to see the effect of locking down in the future. If we had not locked down, it is almost certain the graph above would have continued increasing at a steady (and perhaps faster) rate. Given almost every hospital had no remaining capacity, a steady increase in volume would’ve been catastrophic.  Below are some pictures that show how locked down the city was. This is a picture of Park Avenue at 9am on a Tuesday morning when this street would typically have bumper-to-bumper traffic and pedestrians lining the sidewalk. And this is 5th Avenue in the middle of the day completely devoid of activity. Strange times to say the least, but as you saw on the graph above, doing their job in helping bend the curve. What about death rates? While it’s encouraging that hospitalizations are down, it is too early to calculate or predict the ultimate mortality rate from COVID. Deaths will be a lagging indicator that will keep rising even after hospitalizations fall. Below is the daily death toll for NY run at the same time as the hospitalization chart above: As you can see, it is too early to know whether deaths have peaked. The death peak will lag significantly behind the new hospitalization peak by, at minimum, a week. Hopefully others can learn from New York’s trends to predict where their community is headed and how to estimate when you’ll start seeing trajectory changes based on actions such as locking down. Speaking of deaths, below is the average number of deaths per month in New York City over the past 20 years. You’ll note the usual number of deaths per month averages 4,000-5,500 while this past month was nearly double that at 9,780. Many of these folks died at the hospital. Thus, the one thing that every hospital ran out of was morgue space for dead bodies. Today’s hospital care is pretty good and we’re not used to seeing large numbers of people dying every day in the hospital like we’re seeing with COVID. With the surge in number of daily deaths, almost every hospital has run out of space for dead bodies. The solution has been parking refrigerator trucks outside the hospital to store additional bodies. See below of trucks that are parked outside almost every hospital in the city: I don’t know of a single hospital that hasn’t had to turn to refrigerator trucks to handle the additional volume. At a national level, the number of COVID deaths per day is now the #1 killer in America as of April 8. You can click here to watch how COVID started at the bottom of this graph on 3/2/2020 and steadily climbed day by day until now where it’s #1. Since death is a lagging indicator as discussed above, I don’t anticipate this changing imminently. To recap, it seems we’re past the peak for new hospitalizations in New York but are still waiting for the daily death count to decrease. Later this week, I’ll give an update on testing and what I’m hearing on re-opening New York City. Thanks and be safe, Harry

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  China's government reminds me of fishermen - the truth just isn't in them when it comes to the one that got away.

China Still Misleads the World on the Coronavirus

A truthful account of the virus’s progress there would help us know what to expect.

By Walter Russell Mead

 As the world struggles to contain the coronavirus outbreak without triggering a new Great Depression, China is withholding vital information that would save lives and significantly alleviate the economic catastrophe that now threatens to immiserate hundreds of millions of people around the world.

This isn’t the old coverup, when Communist Party bumbling and deceit allowed a local outbreak to turn into the worst global disaster in decades. The new coverup is even more brazen. China continues to falsify vital information about the epidemic on a massive scale.

The evidence comes from many sources. In a classified report to the White House, the U.S. intelligence community has concluded that China underreports both deaths and the total number of cases. The Economist magazine compared China’s reported statistics with those from other countries and found that numbers changed dramatically in response to political events, such as the firing and replacement of local officials. Using conservative figures and assumptions, a report by Derek Scissors of the American Enterprise Institute estimates 2.9 million total cases in China, rather than the total of about 82,000 Beijing reports. If Mr. Scissors is right, the number of cases that China has concealed is greater than the total number of cases reported in the rest of the world.

These data matter. Without accurate information about the number and location of cases, including asymptomatic cases from China, it is much harder for the rest of the world to understand basic facts about the disease and its spread. And the absence of accurate information from China makes it much more difficult to know when it is safe to lift lockdowns.

The near-total shutdown and gradual restarting of a complex modern economy is something that has never been done before. No one could reasonably expect Beijing or any other government to get everything or even most things right on a first effort, but access to real information about what is happening in China could save many other countries from making costly mistakes. Just as in December and January China’s official culture of secrecy unleashed a terror on the world, so now that same culture weighs down the world’s efforts to cope.

Encouragingly, cooperation between U.S. and Chinese scientists studying the coronavirus is in better shape. Doctors everywhere are working to understand and treat this mysterious illness as part of an unprecedented global effort toward a singular goal. Earlier this month, leading Chinese scholars called for the U.S. and China to work together to fight the disease. A group of leading American scholars and former policy makers called for the same.

But even as some scientists and scholars work together, Beijing continues to withhold vital information from its own people and the rest of the world. China’s doctors, scientists and independent journalists are earning a global reputation for competence, honesty and courage; the government’s actions will damage China’s global standing for years to come.

What worries Beijing most is public opinion at home. The two sources of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy—its technocratic skill and its ability to increase China’s prestige abroad—are challenged both by the epidemic and the government’s flailing response to it.

After seven decades in power, the party still depends on a governance system that combines arbitrary rule, brutal repression, eye-popping corruption and massive levels of deception, fraud and abuse. The coronavirus outbreak, concealed as long as possible from the higher-ups by the usual self-dealing cliques of local officials, cruelly exposed the gap between the imposing image Beijing seeks to project and the gritty, unsavory realities of one-party rule.

To divert public attention, China’s rulers reverted to their standard playbook: concealing information, squelching discussion of the disaster, and whipping up nationalist sentiment. The trouble is that the steps Beijing saw as necessary to shore up its power at home have dramatically worsened China’s economic prospects and its international reputation.

China, which became a major world power by using and sometimes abusing free-trade rules and global supply chains, has now taken an ax to the roots of its own business model. If the cost of doing business in China includes increased exposure to ruinous shocks like the pandemic, “Made in China” doesn’t pay. And if Beijing can lie so vociferously and implausibly about the pandemic, can private investors or foreign governments ever rely on its promises?

The world doesn’t need propaganda shipments of often unusable Chinese medical equipment; the world needs Beijing to tell the truth. Unfortunately, China can’t level with the world without leveling with its own people. That is the one thing the party can never do.
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