18 March 20
Who could do a better job of illustrating the importance of what we do than the corporate media? Not ready to make a donation? Watch MSNBC or CNN break down the Trump “presidency” for you for a few minutes. The straight story may seem more worth supporting.
Support RSN, it’s a “high-yield” investment.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
Founder, Reader Supported News
If you would prefer to send a check:
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
Reader Supported News
PO Box 2043
Citrus Hts
CA 95611
18 March 20
Andy Borowitz | Dr. Fauci Says He Has No Idea Who Locked Jared Kushner in Bathroom
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday that he had 'no idea' who locked Jared Kushner in a White House bathroom."
READ MORE
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Dr. Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday that he had 'no idea' who locked Jared Kushner in a White House bathroom."
READ MORE
Patients given the medicine in Shenzhen turned negative in a median of four days. (photo: John Minchillo/AP)
Japanese Flu Drug 'Clearly Effective' in Treating Coronavirus, Says China
Justin McCurry, Guardian UK
McCurry writes: "Medical authorities in China have said a drug used in Japan to treat new strains of influenza appeared to be effective in coronavirus patients, Japanese media said on Wednesday."
READ MORE
Justin McCurry, Guardian UK
McCurry writes: "Medical authorities in China have said a drug used in Japan to treat new strains of influenza appeared to be effective in coronavirus patients, Japanese media said on Wednesday."
READ MORE
Duncan Hunter. (photo: Sean M. Haffey/Getty)
GOP Fanatic, Trump Loyalist Duncan Hunter Sentenced to 11 Months in Prison
Jeremy B. White, POLITICO
White writes: "Former Rep. Duncan Hunter was sentenced on Tuesday morning to 11 months in prison for violating campaign finance law."
Jeremy B. White, POLITICO
White writes: "Former Rep. Duncan Hunter was sentenced on Tuesday morning to 11 months in prison for violating campaign finance law."
EXCERPT:
He added that “Duncan Hunter came to embody the very notion that politicians thought they were above the law.”
Hunter’s departure has opened up one of California’s few remaining solidly conservative seats. Voters will choose in November between filling the seat with former GOP Rep. Darrell Issa or Democrat Ammar Campa-Najjar.
While Campa-Najjar came within striking distance of unseating Hunter in 2018, that may have been more a function of the legal clouds surrounding the embattled incumbent. Issa is viewed as the frontrunner to succeed Hunter given the district’s solidly conservative tilt.
Rep. Ilhan Omar. (photo: Getty)
Ilhan Omar: "Real Change Is Possible"
Daniel Denvir, Jacobin
Excerpt: "You might be feeling down about how the primaries are going. But the socialist left is stronger than ever. We spoke with Ilhan Omar for some words of inspiration."
READ MORE
Daniel Denvir, Jacobin
Excerpt: "You might be feeling down about how the primaries are going. But the socialist left is stronger than ever. We spoke with Ilhan Omar for some words of inspiration."
READ MORE
Trump and conservative media influencers. (photo: The Daily Beast/Getty)
White House Privately Backchannels Its Coronavirus Messaging to Conservative Social-Media Influencers
Asawin Suebsaeng and Erin Banco, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "As the coronavirus has worsened, members of the task force President Donald Trump has assigned to combat the pandemic have reached out to prominent conservative social-media 'influencers' and right-wing TV and radio stars to offer them private briefings and information sessions with Vice President Mike Pence and other top administration officials."
Asawin Suebsaeng and Erin Banco, The Daily Beast
Excerpt: "As the coronavirus has worsened, members of the task force President Donald Trump has assigned to combat the pandemic have reached out to prominent conservative social-media 'influencers' and right-wing TV and radio stars to offer them private briefings and information sessions with Vice President Mike Pence and other top administration officials."
Dan Bongino, Sean Spicer, and Boris Epshteyn are among those who have had sessions with Mike Pence and his team in recent weeks.
s the coronavirus has worsened, members of the task force President Donald Trump has assigned to combat the pandemic have reached out to prominent conservative social-media “influencers” and right-wing TV and radio stars to offer them private briefings and information sessions with Vice President Mike Pence and other top administration officials, The Daily Beast has learned.
The communications strategy began backstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual gathering that takes place just outside of Washington, D.C., and which happened to have an attendee diagnosed with coronavirus this year. The direct outreach occurred on Feb. 27—the day after Trump tapped Pence to lead the task force. There, the vice president hosted an informal briefing on COVID-19 and the administration’s latest efforts, with several right-leaning personalities with large followings on Twitter and other social-media platforms, according to a source with direct knowledge of the gathering.
The following Wednesday, Pence hosted another closed-door meeting with conservative “influencers,” with this one lasting for roughly an hour in the vice president’s office on White House grounds. The meeting was helmed by senior Trump administration officials such as Pence and Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff who previously served as Trump’s legislative-affairs director.
According to three people with knowledge of the meeting, attendees included Fox News fixture and prolific MAGA tweeter Dan Bongino; former Trump adviser and current War Room: 2020 podcast host Jason Miller; Newsmax TV host and Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer; former White House official and Sinclair “must-run” commentator Boris Epshteyn; Sinclair anchor and ex-Fox News host Eric Bolling; and former Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA), a Trump surrogate.
During the meeting, attendees discussed how their collective Twitter following—estimated at “tens of millions”—could be used as a bullhorn for the administration, these sources said. Pence discussed the difficulties the administration was confronting related to producing coronavirus test kits, as well as airline cleaning protocols, nursing-home cleaning measures, and the number of masks the administration hopes are produced by the company 3M. At one point, Pence mentioned how he’d recently had what he thought was a very productive conversation with Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and then expressed frustration to the room about how she subsequently went before the press to bash him as anti-science, sources recounted.
The outreach from Pence illustrates the lengths that the White House is going to push its message on the coronavirus as well as the distinctive challenges it is confronting in the modern media landscape. All administrations backchannel to like-minded surrogates. But with respect to the pandemic, conservative media has been a hotbed for skepticism about the virus and its lethality.
The TV-ready allies and social-media influencers the Trump administration convened have mostly not gone off the deep end of conspiracy theory. Instead, these surrogates have generally towed the line, singing the praises of the president and lashing out at his media critics.
On the podcast he co-hosts with Trump’s former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, Miller likened Trump to a wartime president, in a time when the American “way of life is under attack from this foreign virus.”
Epshteyn, for his part, has accused CNN of continuing “to do everything possible to attack @realDonaldTrump and cause panic.”
Bongino has focused his commentary on coronavirus on China and the government’s response and transparency. On a recent Fox News segment with Sean Hannity, he accused Geraldo Rivera, who was criticizing White House senior adviser Stephen Miller and describing a relative panicking over the president’s Oval Office speech, of propagating “Chinese propaganda.”
“The Wuhan virus… is a foreign virus,” Bongino said. “Blaming it on Stephen Miller is outrageously stupid.” (Senior Trump officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, have made a point of trying to rebrand the illness as the “Wuhan virus” or “Wuhan coronavirus” as frequently as possible.)
The effusive praise for Trump has become intrinsic to the administration’s communications strategy in recent weeks, even when Trump has clearly fumbled.
For weeks the Trump administration’s coronavirus task force has struggled to maintain continuity in messaging, with different departments seemingly operating off different scripts and with different ideas about how to disseminate information to the public. Part of that tension is internal, with a White House and a president having been desperate to calm the markets at a time when state governments are calling for help amid rising death tolls.
Through it all, the vice president’s office and communications teams on the task force have tried to minimize the noise, calm Americans, and relentlessly laud the president’s response to the outbreak in the U.S. The efforts to loop in conservative influencers has been seen as a way to maneuver beyond the regular briefings to the White House press corps and reach a different and more sympathetic media cohort.
Reached for comment Monday, Short said that “from the start, the vice president has said that he wants to get as much information out to the American people as possible… There are a lot of different channels of communication. It’s not just press briefings every day, it’s not just TV interviews… There’s a whole lot of different streams of information. And one of those is surrogates.”
Short said that his office had asked White House communications official Julia Hahn “to put this [meeting] together for us. We’ll probably continue to do that… There’s one more in development now, but I hope we continue to do these regularly, either in person or via teleconference. It’s all part of a larger strategy.”
Spicer returned a request for comment, acknowledging the meeting, saying “the vice president and Ambassador Brix did a great job ensuring we had a clear understanding of the whole-of-government approach being utilized to address and contain the coronavirus.”
In addition to the efforts to get the administration’s message out through sympathetic channels, the outreach also underscores the degree to which the vice president has asserted his power over the White House’s efforts to respond to the virus. Late last month, Trump tapped Pence as the leader of the coronavirus task force—a team of scientists, academics, and other federal officials focusing on ensuring the safety of Americans through the pandemic.
Two officials inside the White House told The Daily Beast that Trump appointed Pence to the position as a way to streamline communications and messaging to the American public on what the administration was doing to contain and prevent the spreading virus. But in the first few days of the transition, the move seemed to cause more problems internally than was expected. Up until Pence’s appointment, Health and Human Services Director Alex Azar had led the coronavirus effort. And even after Pence stepped into the leadership role, Azar was claiming top authority.
“I’m still chairman of the task force,” he told reporters.
Meanwhile, officials on the task force disagreed on what kind of information to relay to the public and at what speed. The scientists and academics, for example, argued that the vice president should clearly communicate the worst-case scenario so that Americans could prepare themselves. But other members of the task force pushed back against that idea, saying it would cause panic and spook the markets.
Pence had largely prevailed in that battle. Though Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the task force, appeared to try to publicly push out information that the White House had yet to acknowledge in a congressional hearing last week, when he told lawmakers that the worst was yet to come,.
Not only is the vice president’s office briefing and meeting with social-media influencers, it is also meeting with Republicans on Capitol Hill. Two officials told The Daily Beast on Monday that staffers from Pence’s office had spoken with communications officers in GOP offices, providing information about the spread of the virus and the administration’s efforts to adjust to the changing demands.
In an effort to promote the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, officials inside the building are sending emails to reporters and others highlighting the work. In one email sent the night of Trump’s Oval Office address, titled “What They Are Saying,” Pence’s office sent out a list of tweets from lawmakers, officials and media, including from Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge, Rep. Mark Green (R-TN), Rep. Mark Walker (R-NC), and Mark Siegel, a Fox News guest.
Rep. Green posted a tweet with a video of himself on Fox News.
“President @realDonaldTrump has taken bold action to prevent the transmission of #coronavirus despite constant politicization from the left. This blame game has to stop. Thanks for having me on to discuss this morning @heatherChilders @FoxFriendsFirst”
A woman mourns during a funeral held at Beheshte Masoumeh Cemetery for the victims of the new coronavirus in Qom, Iran, on March 17, 2020. (photo: Fatemah Bahrami/Getty)
The Coronavirus Is Killing Iranians. So Are Trump's Brutal Sanctions.
Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept
Hasan writes: "The U.S. government is run by sociopaths. How else to explain the Trump administration's callous disregard for the lives of ordinary Iranians in the midst of this global coronavirus crisis?"
READ MORE
Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept
Hasan writes: "The U.S. government is run by sociopaths. How else to explain the Trump administration's callous disregard for the lives of ordinary Iranians in the midst of this global coronavirus crisis?"
READ MORE
People ride their bicycles in front of the Empire State Building in New York City at sunset as seen from Hoboken, New Jersey (photo: Gary Hershorn/Getty)
Coronavirus Has Caused a Bicycling Boom in New York City
L.V. Anderson, Grist
Anderson writes: "If there's a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic - and let's be real: we could all really use a win right now - it's that there's probably never been a better time to ride a bike in the Big Apple."
L.V. Anderson, Grist
Anderson writes: "If there's a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic - and let's be real: we could all really use a win right now - it's that there's probably never been a better time to ride a bike in the Big Apple."
On Sunday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled a new set of guidelines for citizens hoping to help contain the burgeoning outbreak. They included working from home, if possible, avoiding subways during rush hour (a breeding ground for respiratory viruses), and walking or biking to work if possible to avoid crowding on public transportation.
At first, it was uncertain whether New Yorkers who aren’t used to cycling on the city’s inconsistent network of bike lanes —which are frequently clogged by parked or idling cars and trucks — would take the mayor’s advice. De Blasio himself admitted he felt like he would need to brush up on his cycling skills before trying to navigate the city on two wheels, prompting some cycling advocates to ask why the mayor isn’t trying more urgently to build bike lanes that are smooth and protected enough to accommodate even inexperienced cyclists.
Now, less than a week later, it’s clear that inexperience and physical impediments weren’t enough to keep New Yorkers from adopting a more hygienic, climate-friendly, people-powered form of transportation. The city’s Department of Transportation announced on Wednesday that it’s seen a 50 percent increase in bike traffic on bridges connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens compared to last March. New York City’s bike share program, Citi Bike, has also seen an enormous upswing in demand. Citi Bike announced on Thursday that rides are up 67 percent compared to a year ago.
While it’s clear that coronavirus precautions are driving a huge part of the uptick in cycling, some of New York’s current biking boom can probably be attributed to unseasonably warm weather this year. (We also can’t discount the possibility that some of these new cyclists are just looking for a way to work out their coronavirus anxieties without having to go to the gym.)
Though you might expect an influx of (presumably) inexperienced riders to make the city’s streets less safe, the opposite is more likely to be true due to the well-established safety-in-numbers effect: The more cyclists there are on the road, the safer they’ll be, because motorists are forced to become more attentive. And right now, there are a lot fewer motorists on New York City streets; the coronavirus pandemic has also caused a 15 percent drop in rush-hour traffic this week compared to the same time last year. That means less pollution for cyclists to choke on and fewer chances of dangerous collisions.
There’s no telling whether New York’s cycling boom will outlast this coronavirus outbreak, but for now, the combination of more bikes and fewer cars is creating safer, greener streets in the country’s biggest city.
And that’s something to smile about — even if it’s behind a face mask.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.