Now that Doug Ford has been replaced with a sensible duplicate, Jason Kenney takes the lead as the top Canadian Republican.
I doubt he’ll be able to resist also using this to monitor environmental groups, the greatest threat facing Petroberta in his mind. When COVID-19 is no longer a threat, prying these tools out of the hands of authoritarians will be quite a chore.
The New Normal
Panic gets replaced by normality very quickly. A lot of “we’ll just turn the machines back on soon and everything will go back to normal.”
There were 6.6M new UI claims, bringing the 3 week total to around 17M.
These are staggering numbers.
But for many of these workers, jobs are on a pause, not destroyed. And we are providing recipients with much more generous UI benefits during this pause, which is good.
44 people are talking about this
The numbers aren’t precisely comparable, but there have been 16 million new jobless claims in the past 3 weeks and the total net job losses during The Great Recession were… 8.7 million. If we’re gonna just take a little break and then go back to our old lives, how come it took 6 years to get back to the beginning during the Great Recession? It is true that, contrary to the myths made by the people who did it, the policy response was sadistic and disastrous. Solving the Great Recession should have been easy (if not painless), but some people needed to suffer for the sins of bankers, and so they did. It was actually an easy problem and they failed spectacularly.
This is a hard problem. A much harder problem. And I do not think the people currently in charge are likely to be either smarter or more well-intentioned.
A few weeks away from blaming unemployment on the unemployed. It’ll start on Fox and in the WSJ but spread everywhere.
p.s. All seven of these states saw a “Trump bump” during the initial weeks of the coronavirus outbreak, but it’s gone in all of them. Two examples:
Wisconsin:
Florida:
And we haven’t even seen the worst of it yet.
But we also haven’t seen the worst of press coverage yet either. The “liberal” press is already shrieking about the Democrats for having the temerity to try and secure funding for healthcare workers in the next “stimulus” round, and when they realize that their celebrity/reality trash tv/professional wrestling garbage meal ticket is in danger their attacks on Democrats and Biden will be ferocious.
It’s off-topic, but I feel about Daily Kos the way I feel about pizza and pornography - it’s okay while I’m involved with it; afterwards I feel unfulfilled and vaguely ashamed.
I basically put Kos himself in my feed for the polling and statistics, and the occasional nugget of inside baseball, but otherwise ignore it. TPM pretty much covers me for national political news with a less conservative slant, too much of which is definitely a bad thing.
So yeah, kind of the opposite of pizza and porn for me. Digging in to that stuff (even here) feels more like dealing with a broken diaper bag: probably necessary, no fun, won’t be capable of having fun for hours afterward.
Gavin Newsom Declares California a ‘Nation-State’
By Francis Wilkinson
I’m including the full text, because there’s a paywall:
California this week declared its independence from the federal government’s feeble efforts to fight Covid-19 — and perhaps from a bit more. The consequences for the fight against the pandemic are almost certainly positive. The implications for the brewing civil war between Trumpism and America’s budding 21st-century majority, embodied by California’s multiracial liberal electorate, are less clear.
Speaking on MSNBC, Governor Gavin Newsom said that he would use the bulk purchasing power of California “as a nation-state” to acquire the hospital supplies that the federal government has failed to provide. If all goes according to plan, Newsom said, California might even “export some of those supplies to states in need.”
“Nation-state.” “Export.”
Newsom is accomplishing a few things here, with what can only be a deliberate lack of subtlety. First and foremost, he is trying to relieve the shortage of personal protective equipment — a crisis the White House has proved incapable of remedying. Details are a little fuzzy, but Newsom, according to news reports, has organized multiple suppliers to deliver roughly 200 million masks monthly.
Second, Newsom is kicking sand in the face of President Donald Trump after Newsom’s previous flattery — the coin of the White House realm — failed to produce results. If Trump can’t manage to deliver supplies, there’s no point in Newsom continuing the charade.
Third, and this may be the most enduring effect, Newsom is sending a powerful message to both political parties. So far, the Republican Party’s war on democratic values, institutions and laws has been a largely one-sided affair, with the GOP assaulting and the Democratic Party defending. The lethal ruling this week by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Republican bloc, which required Wisconsin residents to vote in person during a pandemic that shut down polling stations, is a preview of the fall campaign. The GOP intends to restrict vote-by-mail and other legitimate enfranchisement to suppress turnout amid fear, uncertainty and disease.
At some point this civil war by other means, with the goal of enshrining GOP minority rule, will provoke a Democratic counteroffensive. Newsom, leader of the nation’s largest state, is perhaps accelerating that response, shaking Democrats out of denial and putting Republicans on notice. California, an economic behemoth whose taxpayers account for 15% of individual contributions to the U.S. Treasury, is now toning up at muscle beach.
What that means, of course, is left to the imagination. But not much is required to envision what might evolve.
Newsom, a former lieutenant governor who won the top job in 2018, has used the “nation-state” phrase before. It’s a very odd thing to say. California, like its 49 smaller siblings, qualifies only as the second half. But it’s obviously no slip of the tongue. Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, a leader in California’s cumbersome efforts to produce more housing, said soon after Newsom took office in 2019 that reorienting the state’s relationship to Washington is a necessity, not a choice.
“The federal government is no longer a reliable partner in delivering health care, in supporting immigrants, supporting LGBT people, in protecting the environment, so we need to forge our own path,” Wiener said. “We can do everything in our power to protect our state, but we need a reliable federal partner. And right now we don’t have that.”
The statement appears prescient in light of the Trump administration’s failure to protect against a pandemic. Newsom was the first governor to issue a stay-at-home order, on March 19. Though his state is chock-full of cosmopolitan centers, and rural threats loom as well, California is weathering the virus in far better shape than New York, which has many fewer people and many more deaths.
Federalism has always had rough spots, but conflict is rising and resolutions are not. California is a sanctuary state while the Trump administration is fond of immigration dragnets. Marijuana is grown, marketed and used in abundance in the state while the White House conjures more restrictions. The Trump administration endorses extreme gun rights; California has other ideas. Most of all, Trump’s failure to act, or even take responsibility for acting, in the face of pandemic has required California, like other states, to look out for itself.
One conflict, however, encompasses all others, and could galvanize Californians into new ways of thinking about their state and its relationship to Washington. The GOP war on democracy is inspired by a drive for racial and cultural supremacy that jeopardizes the democratic aspirations and human rights of California’s multiracial citizenry.
From Fort Sumter to Little Rock to Montgomery, the blueprint for states opposing federal control has a recurring theme. But there is no reason that states can’t adopt a racist playbook for other ends. If California and other 21st-century polities withhold revenue, or otherwise distance themselves from Washington’s control, legal and political battles will escalate. Republicans will have a legitimate constitutional argument — but it will be a morally tainted and politically illegitimate one so long as they continue to subvert majority rule.
The experience of states battling Covid-19 while the White House devotes its energy to winning the news cycle may be instructive. What is the difference, conceptually, between a state deploying its power to protect its population’s health and a state using it to protect its population’s democratic rights?
John C. Calhoun, who used the theory of states’ rights to defend the institution of slavery, is not generally a philosophical lodestar for liberal Democrats such as Newsom. But if Republicans (or foreign friends) succeed in sabotaging democracy in November, Calhoun’s theory of nullification, which posited that states have the power to defy federal law, could be ripe for a comeback on the left coast. With the heirs of the Confederacy now reigning in Washington, turnabout might be very fair play.
I will be really sad if this comes to pass. I mean, it’ll be necessary if Trump wins in November, but I feel like it’d be making official what we all knew to be true, but hoped could be resolved by other means. Like a divorce, but 400 million times worse.
Thanks for the repost, that’s extremely interesting.
He’s been saying that for years
In the civil war against Donald Trump, Newsom casts himself as Abe Lincoln. He says that California’s gubernatorial election will anoint “the next head of the resistance.” Much of Newsom’s Twitter feed, which has 1.4 million followers, is devoted to calling out the President, disputing him on issues and labelling him “a small, scared bully” and “a pathetic disgrace.” On the stump, Newsom points out that the “nation-state” of California is larger than a hundred and thirty-seven countries and has the fifth-largest economy on the planet. “The world is looking to us for leadership,” he often says.
Gavin Newsom, the Next Head of the California Resistance | The New Yorker
Is he wrong? is our president being maligned by some upstart governor?
Kenney is out of his element, and Dr. Hinshaw has all of them.
The new job gives Navarro immense power to order supplies like ventilators and masks, block exports, and even commandeer products made overseas by US companies to ensure delivery to American hospitals.
I think that many of us had hoped that a silver lining for this awful situation would be that it could help create the push to get MFA or other universal health coverage passed in the U.S., and that may yet come to happen at some point. But something unexpected seems to be happening right now: on a per-capita mortality basis, the U.S. is actually doing better than most of our Western peer countries, including those with universal health care:
At this point we’re trending for less than half the deaths per capita of countries like France and the U.K.
Obviously this is in spite of Trump and not because of anything his administration did or did not do. And our response could have and should have been much better. But it does raise the question of how all this will be spun politically if we end up out performing a lot of other countries.
