Friday, March 20, 2020

Josh Hawley to Senate GOP: Poor people need the same stimulus checks as everyone else

 
 Article by AllahPundit in "HotAir":

To repeat a point I made last night: Does anyone outside the Senate GOP itself think $600 to poor people versus $1,200 to everyone else (up to $75,000 in income) is a good or fair idea? It’s terrible policy and terrible politics, especially while they’re weighing the precise number of billions to shower on airlines and maybe cruise lines.

This isn’t a farking tax rebate. We’re not returning a little prosperity dividend from the federal coffers to taxpayers, a circumstance that would justify bigger sums for people who paid more. This is money to keep your family from starving while local governments choke off every last means of earning a living. Poor people aren’t less likely to starve under those circumstances. On the contrary.

How can their political instincts be this bad?

Even apart from the coronavirus crisis, as a pure mechanism for economic stimulus it doesn’t make sense. Odds are that the poor will spend this money instead of sitting on it. (Realistically they won’t have a choice.) If you want money circulating in the economy, they’re more likely to circulate it than a higher earner who doesn’t need to make purchases immediately and might pocket the check.

Hawley knows an obvious political opportunity when he sees one.


Josh Hawley ✔ @HawleyMO
Replying to @HawleyMO
Here’s what I propose to fix this bill: don’t penalize lower-income families. Make direct relief available to all individuals and families from middle class down

Josh Hawley ✔ @HawleyMO
I’ve introduced an amendment to remove the exclusions on lower-income families and individuals for direct relief
 View image on Twitter

Bear in mind that Goldman Sachs is projecting a 24 percent contraction in GDP in the second quarter, nearly two and a half times the biggest contraction in modern U.S. history. Next month’s unemployment numbers will shatter the current record several times over. The UK announced today that it would pay 80 percent of wages for workers, up to roughly $3,000 per month, if their employers will keep them on the payroll in the name of job continuity. Everyone from progressives to Steve Mnuchin thinks the Senate GOP proposal is too meager.

So why did they even offer it? Without support from the White House for the plan, McConnell has little leverage with which to drive a hard bargain with Pelosi once she inevitably proposes a more robust stimulus. They’re going to end up being attacked for not caring about the poor and get nothing meaningful for it in return. And they’ll deserve that.

Do they not grasp the situation here, asks Ramesh Ponnuru?

We should not be worrying about preserving the incentive to work; in a lot of cases, we have sought to keep people from working for public-health reasons. Nor should the current goal be reducing tax burdens that we think are too onerous. It’s offering relief for hardship, some of it caused by a virus and some of it caused by the government’s justified response to that virus — and very little of it the fault of the tax code…
Varying the rebate by income makes even less sense because of our time constraints…The reason the Senate Republicans are using income from two years ago to determine the size of the rebate is that it’s the most recent information that the Internal Revenue Service has, and they want to get the money moving before it has the 2019 tax returns, let alone the 2020 ones. The price of opting rightly for speed and wrongly for an income-based rebate is that even more Americans won’t get the needed help. According to one estimate, roughly 10% of households go through a 50% plunge in income over two years. A lot of people who were doing well in 2018 might not be today.

I still like the idea of phasing out the check at the top of the income scale and fattening it up at the bottom, partly because it’s a more effective stimulus and partly because the people at the bottom need it more. But the argument that we just don’t have time to mess around with fine-tuned calculations is getting stronger. Bloomberg reported today that it could take at least a month for the IRS to get all of this money out the door because “there isn’t a centralized, up-to-date list of every household, number of children, income and address or direct deposit bank information.” The last time Treasury cut checks to people, it took two months to work out the logistics; Americans will have rent to pay 11 days from now. How does that problem get solved? Maybe some arrangement in which everyone who has an account at a bank somewhere immediately has $1,000 added to it, with the feds to reimburse the banks later? Is that even feasible?

Just push the money out the door. The near-term future of this country will be defined by death, the medium term by exploding social pathologies caused by economic decline, and the long term by a grueling fiscal crisis driven by accumulating too much debt for too long. The future’s going to be horrendous on every level. Might as well get people a little cash to prepare.

https://hotair.com/archives/allahpundit/2020/03/20/josh-hawley-senate-gop-poor-people-need-stimulus-checks-everyone-else/ 

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Weekend Open Thread: On Time Social Distancing (normal day for introverts) Very Super Long and Absurd Title Edition- Plus Ultra






So here we are after a weird week. Life is cancelled, Earth is closed, and while it all burns we're posting on the interweb. This seems to be the norm these days ... something bad happens and everyone memes about it. These are strange times we live in.

After a few days of things kind of getting normal here in Bama after Monday's rush on everything made out of paper, things are out of hand again today. The Governor made a few proclamations closing on site eating and whatnot and the city closed a lot of parks and city services. How that relates to the copious amounts of toilet paper folks think they need is quite beyond my understanding. But it is what it is.

I find it odd that they want to do this "social distancing" and they enact these rules, but everyone crowds in the store, uses their card, and then types their PIN on the pad that everyone else has been touching all day. It just seems all for naught, if you ask me. I'll be going to church on the internet this Sunday and next Sunday ... so that will be different. I've watched our livestreams before when out of town, but it's always better in person.

So, let's ignore what's going on and get into what we're all here for ... memes and music. You know, the important stuff that keeps us sane while the world loses its mind.




Here's a few memes I picked from my meme garden this morning ... an assortment of homegrown organic memes from reddit, instagram and twitter. Enjoy.










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y'all know what's up
 memes, gifs, music, pics, random thoughts ...
 post 'em if you got 'em


and don't forget to recommend
 and invite someone new to join in
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Trump On Wuhan Virus Preparation: Only Thing We Weren’t Prepared For Was...



When President Donald Trump was pressed by reporters on the administration’s preparation for the pandemic on Thursday, he slammed the media for concentrating coverage on calling the president racist rather than reporting on the success of early measures.

“We were very prepared,” Trump said. “The only thing we weren’t prepared for was the media. The media has not treated it fairly.”

Video Player


The president referenced the media’s reaction to the White House travel ban on China implemented earlier this year at the onset of the outbreak. Pundits labelled Trump a racist for cutting out travel to the disease-ridden nation.

“I’ll tell you how prepared I was. I called for a ban from people coming in from China, long before anybody,” Trump said, going on to gesture at those in the press briefing room noting that the president was called racist for the decision. “It was many of people in the room. They called me racist and other words because I did that.”

The media has been quick to repeat accusations of racism all week during daily White House briefing updates on the novel Wuhan coronavirus. During Tuesday’s press briefing, Trump was asked to defend referring to the virus as the “Chinese virus” on Twitter the night before.

“I have to call it where it came from. It came from China,” Trump said.

On Wednesday, the president was asked about using the term several more times by reporters.

“Because it comes from China,” Trump said plainly. “It’s not racist at all… It comes from China. That’s why. It comes from China. I want it to be accurate.”

In fact, as the president pointed out, China has been peddling propaganda accusing the president of stigmatizing Chinese people by using the term, and has now begun perpetuating a conspiracy theory without evident that the virus actually came from an American military visit to Wuhan.

“We condemn the despicable practice of U.S. politicians eagerly stigmatizing China and Wuhan by association with the novel [Wuhan] coronavirus, disrespecting science and WHO,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang last week.

The woke American media elites have bought into Chinese talking points, and are now attempting to paint the president as a racist, despite the fact that dozens of American journalists connected the virus with China themselves.



It’s common practice to match a new virus with a particular population or location where it came from. Some examples include German Measles, West Nile Virus, Guinea Worm, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme Disease, Ross River Fever, Omsk Hemorrhagic Fever, Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Valley Fever, Marburg Virus Disease, Norovirus, Zika Fever, Japanese Encephalitis, Spanish Flu, Lassa Fever, and Legionnaire’s Disease.

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CNN Downplayed Swine Flu Under Obama, Went Gonzo On Wuhan Flu Under Trump


In 2009, CNN casually covered the Swine flu pandemic under Obama. In 2020, CNN started lambasting Trump in its coronavirus coverage.



In 2009, at the height of the H1N1 pandemic commonly referred to as “swine flu,” the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) suggested Americans should shut down schools, begin working from home, and quarantine themselves. Americans made minimal changes to their routines. Eleven years later, a new pandemic arose with similar CDC suggestions, but an entirely different reaction.

Americans are stockpiling toilet paper and many are taking extreme precautions to self-quarantine in these so-called unprecedented times. In the new age of “fake news,” the question must be asked whether the media has any effect on the American people’s and government’s response to a Chinese virus.

Flashback to 2009, when CNN took a casual approach to the swine flu pandemic. They published an article saying the regular flu and the swine flu were essentially the same. Instead of focusing on the pandemic, they focused on other news. The American people’s response: relaxed.

Flash forward to 2020: CNN is lambasting the Trump administration and covering the coronavirus at all hours of the day. The American people’s response: panicked.

Here’s a comparison timeline of CNN’s coverage of the 2009 Swine flu pandemic. Hat tip to this Twitter account for first investigating the differences:
THREAD: 
Time travel edition. Let's go back to April 29, 2009 read the CNN website front page news coverage of H1N1 / SwineFlu pandemic. I'll post the highlights of their coverage from the day WHO elevated pandemic threat level to 5 (out of 6) to day Obama declared nat'l emgy.
— ⭐️⭐️⭐️Indictments Now. (@BodiazRising) March 17, 2020

April 28, 2009

CNN’s front page compared the swine flu to the regular flu, pointing out the amount of deaths per year of the regular flu.

“An outbreak of swine flu that is suspected in more than 150 deaths in Mexico and has sickened dozens in the U.S. and elsewhere has grabbed the attention of a nervous public and medical officials worried the strain will continue to spread,” CNN wrote. “But even if there are swine-flu deaths outside Mexico, the virus would have a long way to go to match the 36,000 seasonal flu deaths in the U.S. each year.”

April 29, 2009

The very next day, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised the pandemic level to a five out of six.

CNN posted a basic write-up on the WHO elevating the pandemic threat level.

May 5, 2009

Two Americans passed away from the swine flu, including one young child and a 33-year-old pregnant teacher who gave birth via C-section while in a coma. The first cases were detected in the U.S. Navy and the CDC issued a new recomendation for schools to close.

Instead of covering this news, CNN’s featured story was Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke saying the U.S. economy is stabilizing and “U.S. face transplant recipient offers thanks.” The the only related article on CNN’s home page was how the Swine flu could put a damper on Cinco de Mayo.

May 8, 2009

The United States experienced a third Swine flu death and surpassed Mexico with the number of confirmed cases. CNN’s coverage focused on a pastry chef who received a double hand transplant. Its headlines list contained positive economic news and one mention of the growth of U.S. swine flu cases to 1,600.

October 16, 2009

A vaccine for the Swine flu was created, but the BBC reported shortages in the vaccine.
“US officials have warned of delays in the delivery of swine flu vaccines just as deaths from the H1N1 virus climb above epidemic level in some states,” the BCC reported.

On CNN.com, there was not a single critique of President Barack Obama for his inability to roll out the vaccine broadly to concerned Americans. It included one article listed under “latest news” stating H1N1 is infecting children at an alarming rate. The featured story was a 6-year-old child who chased after his Mylar balloon.

October 24, 2009

Obama signed a National Emergency Declaration in response to the swine flu. CNN did report on Obama’s declaration, yet put coverage second to an opinion piece giving Obama suggestions for his oh-so successful presidency. “Opinion: 5 lessons for Obama” was a priority headline for CNN, in comparison to Obama declaring H1N1 a national emergency, which was again relegated to a list of tiny one-line links.


Now compare CNN’s 2009 coverage of the swine flu to their 2020 coverage on coronavirus and  President Trump’s handling of the situation.

January 31, 2020

After coronavirus reached the United States and the White House announced a coronavirus task force, Trump attempted to mitigate its spread by shutting down travel to and from China.

CNN covered the Trump administration’s announcement extensively and conflated Trump’s “Muslim bans” with travel restrictions he implemented due to coronavirus.

“The Trump administration has announced an expansion of the travel ban — one of the President’s signature policies, which has been derided by critics as an attempt to ban Muslims from the US — to include six new countries,” CNN wrote.

Their homepage had a large focus on the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, but left room for news about the coronavirus and travel bans from China.

February 26, 2020

Vice President Mike Pence was tapped to head the coronavirus task force. Rep. Debbie Dingell took to CNN to spout off her worries about President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus.

“I’m worried about the discrepancies between what the President says and his team says,” Dingell said.



Their homepage included an optimum spot for coronavirus coverage and four other analysis pieces on the subject.

February 29, 2020

On this day, the first United States death by coronavirus took place. CNN pushed out tips for staying healthy during the coronavirus pandemic.

Their opinion section focused on President Trump’s supposed inability to govern during the pandemic.

“Like all President before him, his ability to govern (and in Trump’s case, be reelected) will be judged by his performance during crisis in the next weeks and months,” CNN’s Joe Lockhart wrote.

CNN’s homepage included extensive coronavirus coverage, Lockhart’s opinion piece, as well as CNN anchor Don Lemon slamming Trump’s “classic gaslighting” over coronavirus’s impact.

CNN spend so much time covering coronavirus, they even reported on a dog who tested a “weak positive” for the disease in Hong Kong.

March 11, 2020

The WHO declared coronavirus a pandemic. CNN reported this fact, but highlighted an article fact checking President Trump and his “dishonesty” amid coronavirus.

“President Trump has been misinforming the public about the coronavirus. Here’s a chronological of 28 different way the President and his team have been inaccurate,” CNN wrote.

In case the American public wasn’t worried enough, CNN’s Zach Wolf wrote an article titled, “Coronavirus is about the change your life.” This article was the headline of the website.

March 13, 2020

President Trump declared a national emergency amid the panic of coronavirus. The new outlet’s main headline read: “America is on hold.” CNN also published an analysis of the “struggling administration’s” failures amid the virus spread.

“But the administration’s public health experts have no idea how bad the US coronavirus outbreak will get, since bottlenecks in lab testing and faults with diagnosis kits mean they can’t know how many infections there really are,” CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote. He continued to blame President Trump for failures over coronavirus testing kits.

They extensively covered the outbreak as well as the impact the virus was having on global stocks.

CNN’s narrative about disease is clear: a Democratic President can handle a pandemic, therefore the world can relax, whereas a Republican President cannot handle a pandemic, therefore the world should panic.

CNN’s hyper-partisan and hyperbolic narrative is dangerous to the sanity and health of the world in times of global pandemic.


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OANN Reporter Asks Barnburner of a Question at WH Briefing, Causes a CNN Meltdown



We reported earlier that President Donald Trump was in good form at the press briefing today on the Wuhan coronavirus, doing some fun dropping of the media. 

But he wasn’t the only one who apparently came loaded for bear to the briefing.

Chanel Rion, a reporter for OANN, asked a question that caused folks over at CNN to have a meltdown. Rion asked Trump if he considered the term “Chinese food” racist. Trump said “no,” of course not.

Rion then said “Left wing media has teamed up with the Chinese communists” to raise objections to Trump’s use of the term “Chinese virus.” “Does it alarm you?” Rion asked the president.



Trump said some of the things that media wrote does “amaze me.” 


So that apparently flipped some of the liberal folks in the media out. Or at the least CNN. 


Here’s what Rion found left for her on her desk there.


Who was the passive aggressive person? Can we take a guess? 


Let’s hear from CNN’s Oliver Darcy. Notice how he disrespects Rion by calling her a “personality”



Can we say complete lack of self-awareness? This from the network who is pretty much always focused on the attack narrative on the president. 

Brian Stelter also lost it as well.


There, there Brian. 

Perhaps CNN who has habitually abysmal ratings might not want to talk about anyone else being “tiny?” 

Apparently the question from Rion hit CNN close to home. 

But Rion had a great response to the “anonymous” note dropper.
You can click on this one to see it better:



Rion says she doesn’t “give a damn” about the delicate sensibilities of the Chinese Communists and she suspects Trump doesn’t either. “It’s the Chinese virus forever.” 

Poor Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcey. Looks like she hit a nerve. 

But perhaps while we’re looking at decoupling from China in terms of things like pharmaceuticals we should be looking at decoupling in media as well. A deep dive and a little light shone on the connections is long overdue for some in media.

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Six Critical Coronavirus Questions...


Canceled Election? 
Six Critical Coronavirus Questions Answered

Americans have asked unanswerable questions this week.

Who will win March Madness 2020? What is it like to participate in my college graduation? Why toilet paper of all things?

There are other questions that we can answer. The hard reality of history has thrown the world, unwilling, right into the deep end of the pool.

Of course, none of this is new. It’s the one thing you can always count on – history never ends, and civilization is never an accident. Let’s confront some of the more answerable questions.

Will the November election be canceled?
No. The United States conducted a federal election in the middle of an undecided Civil War. And make no mistake, the outcome of the war still hung in the balance in the fall of 1864. There will be an election this year. The bigger danger is what it looks like.

The left never allows a crisis to go to waste. That’s why you will hear a steady drumbeat from election-process radicals like the ACLU and Hillary’s lawyer, Marc Elias, to impose federal mandates to conduct an all-mail federal election.

We have to resist all-mail elections with the same zeal we are fighting the coronavirus. Mail balloting is the single biggest invitation to voter fraud. Plus, who wants all those licked envelopes being picked up by the mailman before he delivers your mail?

Mail ballots combine the very worst forms of elections. They combine human-marked paper ballots with a total lack of election oversight. Democrats love mail ballots because it empowers vote harvesters.

When I was at the Justice Department, I litigated and won the case United States v. Ike Brown. The case was noteworthy for many reasons, not the least of which was the role paper mail ballots played in advancing a voter fraud scheme. Go ahead and read the opinion if you dare. I doubt anyone who does will come away thinking all-mail ballots are a good thing.

Mail ballots were the tool that wrongdoers used to manipulate the elections in Noxubee County, Mississippi. The vulnerable lost the right to vote their ballots themselves. Of course, this goes a long way to explain the frenzy toward all-mail balloting by the left and some congressional Democrats and their lawyers.

Some just want to flex federal power over state elections. They lust for centralization and central control over elections. Now isn’t the time. Republicans should not be tricked. Senate Leader Mitch McConnell understands process and will most surely guard against a federal takeover of the method of state elections.

Concerned about coronavirus on Election Day? Instead of vote-by-mail, fund Lysol wipes, masks, and hand sanitizer for every polling place. Don’t grab state power over elections.

Is coronavirus a Chinese bioweapon gone haywire?
Admit it, you’ve wondered the same thing. Who can ignore the fact the virus first exploded in the shadow of China’s bioweapons research lab in Wuhan. The Zerohedge website has been on this for some time in great detail, opining that the Coronavirus is either a spontaneous mutation that jumped to humans from animals, or:
Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain 2019-nCov – into their population, and now the world.
This isn’t a conspiracy theory. There is no conspiracy. The Chinese communist government is potentially the single actor. Our best bio-weapons scientists at Ft. Detrick in Maryland need to bore into this question. If the virus was manipulated to attain the bizarre characteristics it has, we need to know.

How the hell did the United States allow our pharmaceutical manufacturing to move to China?
If the coronavirus did anything, it validated the premise of the entire Trump presidency, namely, America is weaker with lax borders and with American manufacturing moved overseas.

Just look at this headline in the UK Independent: Beijing threatens to halt supply of medicine amid coronavirus crisis. Read it again. And again.

Why did American drug manufacturing go to China? The same can be said for all medical devices, and I’ll throw in computer technology for good measure.

Almost all active pharmaceutical ingredient production is now done in communist China and India.

Environmental laws contributed to the exodus of American pharmaceutical manufacturing jobs. They do things differently in China. Chinese factories aren’t like American factories, and sometimes it blows up. Consider heparin, a key ingredient in a number of critical drugs. Sourced from pig parts, the Chinese produced contaminated heparin and then tried to hide the mess.

When the United States was negotiating with the Communist regime to place FDA inspectors inside China, Zheng Xiaoyu, the head of the Chinese version of the FDA, was tried and executed for taking bribes. That should have reminded us who was across the negotiating table.

Until Trump, four straight American presidents were happy to cozy up to China, all in the name of cheap products. Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama and their pals at the United States Chamber all sang from the same songbook when it came to China.

Read that headline from the Independent again. Shame on you all.

If the coronavirus teaches us anything it is that sometimes low prices aren’t all that matter. Free trade is great, until it means funerals by livestream and not enough room for the bodies.

Now do you understand why we have guns?
Like the majority of Americans, I own firearms. Sometimes I even carry them concealed. Over the years, too many have said they aren’t comfortable owning guns. I wouldn’t be comfortable not owning them now, especially if I lived in Philadelphia.

Philadelphia isn’t going to enforce laws against many crimes. Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw – yes, that’s really her name – announced that criminals and gangsters are going to get a pass in a city already deep the battle between civilization and lawlessness. On Outlaw's exempt list: theft from persons (also known as robbery), burglary (breaking into someone’s home by force), car theft, and vandalism all get a pass.

There’s no better place to be a criminal right now than the City of Brotherly Love. There is no worse place to be a law-abiding citizen without a firearm than Philadelphia. If that’s you, sleep with one eye open and a kitchen knife by the bed these next few months.

Is this the end of millennial snowflake-ism?
The Founders knew, as do most gun owners, history doesn’t stop. Civilization is always a few clicks away from not-civilization. Millennials especially lack this awareness. They don’t even remember 9-11, our last brush with this inescapable axiom of human experience. They’ve been told the future is always brighter, bigger and safer. They give away their personal data and photos without care, and safety and comfort poll highest on their list of priorities.

They are the snowflake generation.

I visited a grocery store recently and saw older people buying bags of pasta and rice, flour and oil and salt. They were bulking up to survive. I watched twenty-somethings buying premade salads and yogurt. Sure, maybe they were really preppers and were just in the mood for salad. But I doubt it.

What will they do now that they can’t get weekend brunch?

We’ve seen things we thought we’d never see in America. Meat departments look like Warsaw in 1966. Who wouldn’t remember the Communist era’s runs on toilet paper, except perhaps millennials buying salad.

Polls show millennials aren’t that into God, patriotism or having kids. It’s not like those three things had anything to do with preserving civilization for the last 6,000 years, so chill. It’s pandemic party time in the Bahamas.

Is this the end of beards?
It is no accident that Benjamin Harrison was the last American president to sport a beard. The reason beards lost popularity is because they transmitted disease and the public health service engaged in a nationwide campaign against beards to stop the spread of tuberculosis. As Leyla Mei blogged in “Your Beard is Full of Tuberculosis:”
In 1903, an editorial in Harper’s Weekly commented on the “passing of the beard,” noting that “the theory of science is that the beard is infected with the germs of tuberculosis.” Writing in the same magazine four years later, an observer remarked upon the “revolt against the whisker” that “has run like wild-fire over the land.” By the 1920s, the elaborate fashions of the Victorian era were nowhere in evidence.
The mechanics are simple. Beards capture germs when someone sneezes or coughs. Those germs move more easily from person to person from beards. It’s why a nationwide campaign to fight influenza and tuberculosis targeted beards and other fashions, including long skirts that captured spit on sidewalks.

Like President James Garfield’s beard, coronavirus is likely to render many things obsolete. Regular elections run by states are never obsolete. That is part of our American system. Here’s hoping, like long floor-length dresses, the pandemic brings the end of relying on the Chinese communist regime for our good health.


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